Brian Toohey set in motion years of media scrutiny of the legacy of Maralinga. He maintained an interest in the story well into the term of Bob Hawke’s Labor government that came to power in March 1983. By then Toohey had moved to the National Times. Several months before the McClelland Royal Commission into the British nuclear tests began, Toohey wrote a feature based on another leak titled ‘Plutonium on the wind: the terrible legacy of Maralinga’, which contained a detailed examination of the Vixen B issue. Toohey had obtained the full, uncensored Pearce Report, still classified at that time and available publicly only in what he called a ‘sanitised’ form. He was unable to reveal his source but said, ‘The backdrop was a concern that a proper clean-up occur’.
The National Times feature had much more to say about the nature of Vixen B than his earlier stories: ‘The experiments were usually described as point safety tests, despite the obvious irony in the use of the word “safety” for operations that left plutonium scattered across the countryside’. The feature was an indictment of the Maralinga plutonium legacy. ‘It would seem that what the British and Australian authorities described as minor experiments in fact involved the cavalier dispersal of plutonium and have created a far greater health hazard at Maralinga than the full-scale atomic tests.’
Most mainstream news media began reporting the Maralinga story after Toohey’s articles in the Australian Financial Review. One political casualty of the tumult was soon apparent when Cabinet moved responsibility for Maralinga from Killen’s Defence portfolio to the minister for National Development Kevin Newman. ‘This follows a row which highly embarrassed the government over the deposits of plutonium at the toxic waste site at Maralinga in South Australia’, The Australian reported on 10 November 1978.
The removal of Jim Killen did not slow the story down. The Australian kept up pressure on the federal government with a front page story featuring the huge headline ‘“Take it back” requests ignored: British snub on plutonium plea’. This story highlighted a problem that dated back to the time of the tests themselves – that the British were slow to answer an Australian request.
The Government realises that it must take some action over the ‘recoverable’ plutonium because of its obligations under international nuclear safeguard agreements which have a strong bearing on the future development of the Australian uranium industry. It is understood that the government decision that the plutonium should be removed has received a sympathetic response from bureaucrats in England but this has not been matched by the response of the politicians.
This story prompted more activity in federal parliament. Labor senator Gareth Evans drafted a question to the leader of the government in the Senate John Carrick, a rough draft of which, with short-hand forms of expression, remains on the official Maralinga file:
Is it true as reported in this morning’s Australian that the British govt has snubbed Ausn requests to remove waste plutonium buried at Maralinga… in that it has failed to respond to Ausn requests to this effect by the required deadline of 7 November? If this is so, and if the British govt continues to remain unbeguiled by the subtleties of Ausn diplomacy, what other plans does the Ausn Govt have in mind for the safeguarding of this material?
Senator Carrick prepared a reply claiming he hadn’t read the story and had no knowledge of any breakdown in discussions between the Australian and British governments. The reply belied the activity behind the scenes. The Department of Foreign Affairs sent a cablegram to its London officials summarising the substance of The Australian story. This followed up a cablegram five days earlier, in which the growing crisis was spelled out:
Ministers remain under considerable pressure on this issue from press and parliamentary questioning… In addition to questions without notice, some fourteen questions on Maralinga and the visit of the British technical team are on notice to be answered. There is also press speculation that we have to rely on Britain on the alleged ground that AAEC [Australian Atomic Energy Commission] is not capable of dealing with the problem.
Finally the pressure was relieved when the federal government extracted an undertaking from the UK to remove the airfield plutonium. It was a win. Malcolm Fraser wrote to Premier Dunstan in February 1979, saying, ‘I am glad that a result so satisfactory to both our Governments has been achieved’. Fraser also became more comfortable about Maralinga information being released to the public. He said in this letter that ‘as much information on Maralinga as possible should be made public’. He even recommended the release of most of the discredited Pearce Report, minus details about the locations of buried contaminated materials. It was months after Brian Toohey had made the main information in the report public.
The Advertiser began a high-profile campaign seeking justice for the nuclear veterans, resulting in a series of stories run over a week in April 1980. The stories, by reporters David English and Peter De Ionno, presented case studies backing the calls for compensation for service personnel said to have been harmed by their service at Maralinga. The stories were bolstered by an editorial on 17 April 1980:
The testing of British atomic weapons at Maralinga… ended many years ago, but the consequences linger on. There was a brief flurry in 1978 when it was revealed that potentially radioactive waste material, since removed to the UK, had been left at the test site. Now there is further, and more serious, concern at the disclosure of the possible effects of radiation contamination of people exposed to the fall-out from those tests.
These stories began putting names and faces to the statistics of service personnel who had been at Maralinga. The Irish immigrant James Barry had died of cancer in 1966 at the age of 50 after working as a builder at the test site. His photo appeared under the heading ‘A victim of Maralinga?’ alongside a picture of his widow. The story claimed that about 20 ex-service personnel had died of cancer or had contracted it. It quoted Barry’s widow, Mary Jane Barry: ‘He wasn’t supposed to tell me anything, because of the Secrets Act and all, but he told me bits and pieces. He said that things were very lax up there; they didn’t take enough precautions’.
The Advertiser series gave a forum to prominent aggrieved ex-Maralinga hands such as Avon Hudson in more detail than ever before. In one article, Hudson addressed the possible breaching of international agreements: ‘Mr Hudson believes that nuclear bomb tests were conducted by the British on the range after the [official] bomb-tests. Atomic weapons tests after 1958 would have been in breach of an informal moratorium on bomb experiments made between the UK, US and USSR in 1958’. The same article mentioned Maralinga veteran Richard (Ric) Johnstone, one of the first (in 1973) to receive a Commonwealth pension when unable to work because of symptoms, he said, that were due to his six months of service at Maralinga during the 1956 Buffalo series. In 1988, he was the first person to be awarded damages by the courts, after a long battle, winning $679 500 in compensation.
In April 1984, the Australian magazine New Journalist ran a critique of the test era journalism. In ‘Buffalo Bill and the Maralingers’, Lindy Woodward was scathing of their role. Journalists had, as now, an important role in deciphering pronouncements on the safety of atomic technology, she wrote, but instead took ‘the experts’ at their word that the tests were totally safe and crucial to peace. ‘It was a national suspension of disbelief, indulged in and encouraged by the media.’ Even British journalist Chapman Pincher, seen as a trouble-maker and ‘scoop journalist’ by the Australian and UK governments at the time, fell short in this account: ‘Chapman Pincher, the science writer from the London Daily Express, was the Advertiser’s own “expert” on the tests, but his reports were short on scientific analysis, and big on British enthusiasm for what was going on in the Australian desert’.