One Tree at Maralinga, 27 September 1956. Finally the winds have died down and the countdown begins. Tooke is less than a mile away from the forward area when the awe-inspiring explosion takes place, and eight hours later he enters the forward area with his crane. There are people everywhere, carrying out lots of different tasks. Tooke must recover vehicles deliberately placed there. The health physics people have given him bootees to wear, the only items of protective clothing he is ever given. His other garb is his RAAF overalls. He never receives a film badge or dosimeter. Most of the people sent to recover vehicles from the forward area are RAAF personnel. Some of the vehicles have been tipped over onto their sides. There are tanks, Land Rovers, Commer vans, artillery, anti-aircraft guns, Humber Scout cars and even Swift aircraft. After he comes back from work that day, a Geiger counter is run over him and it clicks slowly. The new, expensive, permanent nuclear test site in the South Australian desert is now fully functional. Tooke has a lot of work to do.
The atomic age arrived when the US dropped nuclear bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, heralding an era that seemed to be even more dangerous than the war just ending. When nuclear scientist spies wreaked havoc on postwar security, the British, sidelined by the Americans, were on their own. They embarked on their pigheaded, quixotic, ill-advised, careless but still rather remarkable quest to match the Americans and the Soviets in the nuclear club. In fact, they were not entirely alone, as they co-opted the Australian Government for the task. At all times, the relationship between the British and the Australians was unequal. The British were the masters, and the Australians were the servants. The Australians obediently provided the site and considerable financial and military resources, as well as staunch political backing. The atomic test authorities made the decisions and relayed them, often with inadequate technical detail, to the Australians. When the tests were over and the British were gone, the picture of what they had left behind was alarmingly incomplete. The Pearce Report was no help. What exactly the tests had wrought remained hidden to successive Australian governments and the Australian people for far too many years.
But, one by one, the jigsaw pieces fell into place and the Maralinga story started to take shape. The British authorities have still not given up all the missing pieces. No-one outside a small circle knows why the UK Ministry of Defence still retains some files relating to Vixen B and other issues (including information recently released by WikiLeaks). Whether those files will ever be released is currently unknown. Given Vixen B’s impact on Australian territory, the ongoing refusal to release all the information that relates to those experiments could reasonably be called outrageous. This saga tells us, though, that the British authorities charged with testing the nuclear deterrent did not factor in Australian feelings. The truth is unpalatable but must be faced: Australia in the 1950s and early 1960s was essentially an atomic banana republic, useful only for its resources, especially uranium and land.
Australia tried without the slightest success to have some status in the arrangements. It was not to be. When the world turned and Australia no longer had anything vital to offer, the British left without properly cleaning up their mess. Tellingly, the legendary official British historian Margaret Gowing rarely mentioned Australia throughout her magisterial accounts of the British nuclear enterprise. Australians were not a partner in any sense of the word, just lackeys and useful idiots for the most part. All the historical circumstances that converged after World War II made this inevitable, and it should not perhaps be surprising that this was the reality.
Other realities have to be faced too. Australia, not Britain, was left with severely contaminated territory requiring remediation that took several years to complete. Money was finally squeezed out of a resistant UK, but it covered less than half the cost of the most recent clean-up. And the controversies continue. The 1990s remediation plan was devised using guidelines provided by the IAEA and the International Commission on Radiological Protection. It was monitored by ARPANSA and agreed to by the Maralinga Tjarutja traditional owners. This plan involved securing 500 000 cubic metres of contaminated waste from the tests in 21 pits at the site. When it was completed in 2000, Australian prime minister John Howard called it the ‘world’s best practice clean up’. But nuclear engineer Alan Parkinson, sacked from the clean-up, and Jim Green, an anti-nuclear activist, among others, continue to criticise its inadequacies.
The clean-up project used the expensive electronic technique in situ vitrification, which involved placing electrodes in the pits and running an electric current of up to 4 megawatts through the buried debris, raising it to temperatures up to 2000 degrees Celsius and effectively turning it to glass. But it did not go as planned. The vitrification equipment exploded while in operation at pit 11 (the 13th ‘melt’ in the clean-up program) and sprayed molten material from the pit about 50 metres all around. Fortunately no workers at the site were injured. But the vitrification process was abandoned before all 21 pits were processed, and the remaining waste pits were capped with concrete. The glassy material that had been vitrified was excavated and reburied amid fears that it was too close to the surface. Recently, some media reports have claimed that the Maralinga pits are subsiding and eroding, creating fears that the contamination is not permanently secure. Nevertheless, in March 2003, minister for Science Peter McGowan triumphantly tabled the final MARTAC Report in parliament. MARTAC hailed the clean-up as successful.
Alan Parkinson vociferously disagreed, saying that ‘of the hundreds of square kilometres contaminated, only 2.1 square kilometres have been cleaned to the clean-up criterion and, of that, only 0.5 kilometres permits unlimited access. The only people who claim the [clean-up] project a success are paid by the government’. Stuart Woollett, an ARPANSA scientist involved in the clean-up, presented a different view: ‘The release of the MARTAC report marks the end of the considerable work of health physicists, radiation chemists, plant operators, security personnel, surveyors, camp staff, senior public servants, seed planters – the list goes on. Operations, beginning in 1996, have rehabilitated the Maralinga lands for their return to the Maralinga-Tjarutja’. Gregg Borshmann addressed the ongoing controversy in a Background Briefing documentary titled ‘Maralinga: the fall out continues’, that aired on ABC Radio National in April 2000. Every so often, public disquiet about Maralinga still bubbles to the surface.
The Maralinga story is filled with outrages. A story that began to appear in the Australian media in September 2001 described one particularly distasteful aspect of the saga, namely the analysis of (mostly) babies’ bones to detect radioactive fallout. At a meeting in Harwell on 24 May 1957 attended by Ernest Titterton, along with his confreres from the AERE and the AWRE, a variety of sampling tests was ordered, including soil, vegetation, milk and sheep bones. And babies’ bones.
As many samples as possible are to be obtained (the number available is expected to be small). The bones should be femurs. The required weight is 20–50 gm. Wet bone, subsequently ashed to provide samples of weight not less than 2 gm. The date of birth, age at death and locality of origin are to be reported.