The Crow Eaters Read online

Nuclear testing started on the Monte Bello Islands 80 kilometres off the coast of Western Australia, before moving to Emu Field in the scrub 180 kilometres north of Maralinga. The British wanted a larger, more open tract of land where they could conduct their experiments in secret and Len Beadell, the famous Australian bushman and surveyor who opened up the land for the Woomera rocket range in 1946, decided on the area in the west of the state as the most appropriate site for nuclear tests in South Australia. As Beadell knew, there were no towns there, but it was a significant Indigenous ‘highway’ and Dreaming road that passed between sacred sites from Ooldea and the paths that led people from the south to Central Australia. During his survey, Beadell even discovered what he called ‘Aboriginal Stonehenge’ on the track between Emu Field and Maralinga, though there was no time to investigate properly as the pressures of the Cold War mounted.

  A village was built at Maralinga, with London Road, Belfast Street, Tenth Avenue and East Street among the addresses where the personnel lived during the operation. There was a permanent airstrip, which at the time was the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, roads, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, accommodation and railway access.

  The first test was set for September 1956, only two months before the rest of the country would be celebrating the Olympics in Melbourne. The Buffalo 1 bomb was detonated at the One Tree site from a 30-metre-high steel tower and it had a yield of 15 kilotonnes (equivalent to 15 000 tonnes of TNT) – the same force as the Hiroshima bomb. It was the first of seven atomic bombs exploded over seven years at Maralinga. During the test years a total of 35 000 military personnel spent time at the base. Most were from the UK, though there were also arrivals (all male) from Australia, Canada, the US and New Zealand living in the Maralinga village.

  In all the hours of driving, the only sign of life we see once turning off the main road are two young Indigenous men resting by the Red Lake tank – hundreds of kilometres from anywhere else. They shoot up a wave and a smile, and I wave back, though my response is lost in the red dust and our taillights. More than likely they’re on their way to Oak Valley, the Indigenous community 120 kilometres from Maralinga.

  We arrive at the locked gates, where the guide is waiting. Robin Matthews is a grizzled-looking man in his sixties with the tanned skin of a life lived outdoors, a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes and a cigarette hanging from his dry lips. Robin is from an era that doesn’t exist anymore – his skin is blotched with a narrative of faded tattoos, inked long before it was fashionable. He wears a singlet with an unfurled dragon on the front and he smokes and swears while he’s talking without worrying about appearances. Robin lives for this place and it’s part of him. He unlocks the gates and takes us through to the bones of the former village – a place he calls home and where we’ll camp for the next few nights. Maralinga only opened for tourism in the last few years and there are still fewer than 2000 visitors who have seen Maralinga since the clean-up finished, Robin says.

  We’re joined by a couple of grey nomads in their decked-out retirement van, though Peter and Anne do have an interesting connection to this place, ‘My dad worked here in 1955,’ Peter says in his English accent. ‘It was on the air-conditioning systems I think. We’re not really sure.’ I don’t ask what happened to his father, though Peter adds that this has extra significance for him, ‘because I can’t ask him how it was here anymore, unfortunately’.

  Robin has been coming to Maralinga on and off since 1972, so he knows more about its modern story than most. He first came here on an odd job to help pull the village buildings down – he was a tuna fisherman in Port Lincoln at the time. For four weeks, he drove trucks carrying out the old materials and, ‘it piqued my interest’, he says of an initial curiosity that has led to his nearly 50-year association with the place.

  ‘In 1973 I got a job on the railway at Watson and I saw some old records of the tests and the people who lived here and I began piecing together the story.’ He then came back again in 1984 to run the store in Oak Valley with his wife Della, who is Anangu. ‘Della wasn’t brought up the same way culturally as many of the Indigenous people – she doesn’t get frightened by the mamu spirits,’ he says, referring to the evil spirits the Anangu believe still reside here. The land here was handed back to the Indigenous people in 2009, though, as Robin says, ‘So many people’s descendants died as a result of the blasts. It’s a bit like a graveyard for them.’

  Robin continued to do contracts in the area and when the land was handed back to the Indigenous people, he and Della were asked to be the first caretakers. While the people who live at Oak Valley don’t want to live in, or even pass through, the Maralinga land, they’re happy for it to be open to tourism, so the story of Maralinga can be told.

  The impact on the Indigenous people is still something I can’t quite wrap my head around. As Elizabeth Tynan writes: ‘The damage done to the Indigenous populations was perhaps the most contested and tragic of all issues relating to the British nuclear tests in Australia. It was colonialism in microcosm and speeded up.’

  Dad and I set up camp on a patch of hard red earth near the old Olympic swimming pool. There is a strange aura to this place. The ghost town feel of the old buildings and half-buried foundations contrasts with the newness of this tourism enterprise – complete with hot water and wi-fi. We’re free to wander around the compound in the afternoon – past old water tanks, army barracks with open doors flapping in the wind and a flagpole that hasn’t hoisted anything for years. It wouldn’t look out of place as a location for The Walking Dead, and I know that the mamu evil spirits of the atomic blasts are part of the reason why the Indigenous people won’t return.

  Steel-blue clouds sweep closer to Maralinga and it rains during the night, turning the red dust to mud and rattling through the she-oak trees surrounding us. A mother dingo and her pups pad through the camp in the early morning before sunrise, though they’re long gone by the time I poke my head out of the tent.

  At 9 am, as the rain is soaked up by the warm morning wind, Robin arrives in a repurposed minibus to take us out to the test sites. He speaks with fondness of the projects he’s responsible for here – he’s the tourism operator, former caretaker and maintenance man; and he knows every stretch – from the oleanders planted by the British around the dam, to the hiding places for the crimson flowers of the Sturt’s desert peas along the track.

  Our first stop is the airport – it is more than 3 kilometres long and still without a crack on its surface. It was once selected as an emergency landing strip for the American space shuttle because of its size and durability. Once upon a time up to 30 planes would land here every day and the air force was based here for 11 years. We cross a cement viaduct and walk over a small bridge into the abandoned airport.

  ‘It’s called the “bridge of sighs”,’ Robin says as we walk over it. ‘It echoes the sentiment of those boarding planes home, leaving behind the heat, the flies and the isolation.’

  It’s also named after the Bridge of Sighs in Venice, I learn later, where executions would take place. I imagine thoughts of mortality would have been contained in the sighs of many of the men here, wondering if they would survive another month posted in the testing zone.

  Inside the airport there are piles of early-model LED lights for the runway and old photos of planes landing here carrying dignitaries and scientists. The air hostesses would walk to the last step of the gangway, but were never allowed to touch the ground as the scientists were worried about the effects of radiation on the female reproductive system – so this was as close as many men got to female company during the test years. Robin wonders aloud whether this was another reason for the sighing from the men here.

  We continue on, driving past hand-sized thorny dragons sunning themselves on the black bitumen. We stop to take a look at a small and shivering lizard, ‘Local girls use these to comb their hair,’ Robin says as he picks up the spiky dragon and moves it out of harm’s way.

  Len Beadell’s roads
take us into the Great Victoria Desert to the testing sites. It’s a 19 kilometre dead straight track up onto a limestone plain scattered with stunted mulga scrub. The colour of the earth changes from red to sandy yellow in an instant.

  Because of the tour we’re on, it’s easy to forget the scale of Maralinga – now 3500 square kilometres of vacant country. Robin and the caretaker have been given the responsibility of patrolling the roads and the access to the bombsites every two weeks across this vast expanse.

  Poking out of the scrub are early telephone lines strung up by the British, built so that in the event of a nuclear emergency, even in the 1950s and ’60s, they could stay connected. Now the lines are decaying and there’s not even a bar of mobile coverage.

  Robin pulls in at the roadside village, 30 kilometres from where we camped. This is where the ‘guinea pigs’ lived in a tent city before they were ferried across to the test sites.

  ‘Rabbits still dig things up,’ Robin says, though as part of his job he continually digs burial pits with a backhoe to bury non-radiated junk out of the way. As we move closer to the first ground-zero site, he says that there still is radiation here, though not what you might expect.

  After the clean-up from 1994 to 2000, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) found that someone living at Maralinga full-time – Robin – would receive no more than 5 millisieverts (mSv) of radiation in a year, even in the most contaminated sites around Taranaki. Tourists who do not disturb the soil, or ‘eat mouthfuls of dust’ as Robin puts it, would receive less than 1 mSv. As a comparison, most people are exposed to about 1.5 to 2 mSv each year from natural background radiation. ‘There was a 0.2 reading at ground zero, to give you an idea of the clean-up,’ Robin says.

  The biggest problem with the clean-up here was not the major atomic blasts, but the 700 minor trials using toxic chemicals and compounds, including plutonium 239 – which has a half-life of 24 000 years before it begins to decay.

  We stop at Tietkens Well, where the explorers William Tietkens and Ernest Giles came through in 1874. Back then it was land that no white man had ever been through. Tietkens and Giles were on an expedition north to open pastoral leases. They decided to dig a well for future journeys, as access to water was key for the approval of the leases and for them getting paid. The well was 26 metres deep and I can still see the wooden ballasts leading down into the dark. It took Tietkens nine months to dig this by hand and, unfortunately, when he reached the bottom he gulped a mouthful of water four times saltier than the ocean. However, this didn’t deter him and the next well, at 27 metres deep, took him only eight months to dig. He’d learned his lesson and gave the first mouthful to his camel – who promptly spat out the water. Many years later when Len Beadell was opening up Maralinga he sunk a bore 5 kilometres from this spot and found torrents of pure artesian water for the camp to use.

  At the intersection we see a sign memorialising what happened here. It commemorates the 1967 clean-up by the British – a claim that was later exposed as false. The wind is hot and, despite the flies and the spiders in the clumpy trees, it is silent and empty. The tours here only run from April until October as the 50°C days of summer are too oppressive and even Robin gets his maintenance done in the early morning before the sun bakes the ground.

  As we approach the Taranaki site, we can see where the vegetation vanishes nearly to the centimetre, an invisible line where the soil is poisoned. There is nothing except for small shrubs that have shallow roots scattered around the blast site. As soon as they grow to about 20 centimetres high, they wilt and die.

  ‘Kangaroos have started coming back here,’ Robin says and, aside from the herds of camels, there are emus, dingoes and ‘lots of king brown snakes’ starting to reappear as well. Taranaki got its name from the Second World War battle in Papua New Guinea. Around this one site there are 22 major pits, all at least 15 metres deep and cased in reinforced concrete to bury the plutonium from the blasts. Another interesting technique used during the clean-up was in situ vitrification – where enormous electrodes were buried in the radioactive waste before 8.4 megawatts of electricity was pumped into the soil. It turned the waste into glass, encasing it before it was broken up and buried. In all, there were 400 000 square metres of plutonium dirt buried here in a granite-sided coffin, along with every bit of heavy machinery used in the operations – 71 Land-Cruisers, bulldozers, scrapers, excavators and D-11s – all tipped into the pit. It seems thorough, though I’m still not entirely comfortable walking across the nuclear waste site – as exposed, in my shorts and socks, as those early guinea pigs. One thing I do notice are the red flowers popping up on the edge of the clearing, ‘They’re Afghan hops,’ Robin tells me. These were brought here by Afghan and Pakistani men in the 19th century, to be dried and used as feed for their camels on the long interior expeditions that would have passed through here.

  Throughout the afternoon we drive to the different ground-zero sites, hearing stories of the explosions and their after-effects – of atomic bombs being detonated mid-air, held aloft by giant balloons, and of the wind that carried radioactive dust into the Northern Territory and as far away as Newcastle on the NSW coast after the blasts.

  Despite the enormity of the ‘big’ blasts, the names Kittens, Tims, Rats and Vixen are the most harrowing from the atomic era here. These were the names of the ‘minor’ trials that ended up being some of the most damaging experiments on Australian soil during the latter stages of the British occupation of Maralinga. These tests were carried out in secret and were not disclosed to the Australian people. The tests examined how toxic substances would react when burned or blown up, including uranium and plutonium 239 which was heated up and fired through a chimney – before being left on the open and exposed ground for more than 30 years. They wondered what would happen if a truck carrying plutonium caught on fire, or if a plane with nuclear war-heads crashed. Chief scientist William Penney remarked that these tests must be done in Australia because ‘the short-lived radioactive material used in the initiating of the nuclear explosion would not pose a hazard’. Not if you lived more than 24 000 years later, anyway.

  The tests stopped in 1963, though there was a junkyard of radioactive carnage left behind – said to be up to 50 000 plutonium-contaminated fragments initially, though this number was later revised to three million before the Royal Commission and eventual clean-up operation, which took six years and cost more than $100 million.

  ‘All this plutonium sat out here until 1984 on the ground like a salt lick,’ Robin says as we pull in adjacent to the Taranaki ground-zero site for sandwiches. He still thinks there are bits of plutonium hidden in the scrub and considering Maralinga is three times larger than the area of Hong Kong, it’s not unreasonable to assume a few bits and pieces were missed.

  To ensure our safety in the clean-up zones, radiation scientists from Melbourne have checked that the path we are taking is completely safe. Despite the sureties of our safety now, this wasn’t always the case. There were countless deaths and health complications for the nuclear personnel here in the 1950s and ’60s, cases from workers during the clean-ups in the intervening years, and the continued disregard shown to the Indigenous people here. ‘They had not felt its age-old rocks and its forgiving sand beneath their feet. They had not slept and dreamed under its stars or seen the moon rise,’ Christobel Mattingley writes in Maralinga’s Long Shadow, of the lack of understanding shown by the British and the Australian governments. There were many shocking elements to all that happened here, though none more so than the secret tests carried out on nearly 22 000 dead bodies and separate body parts from the deceased, mostly babies’ femurs weighing no more than 50 grams, pilfered from Australian and Papua New Guinean medical facilities without parental consent, to examine the effects of radioactive fallout.

  In the lead-up to the establishment of Maralinga, Supply Minister Howard Beale stated that Indigenous people hadn’t been there for many years and the removal of a reserve
wouldn’t be overly problematic. This was not true.

  The Maralinga site was 3500 square kilometres in area, yet the job of finding and moving along the Anangu people before the tests began fell to just one man in a Land Rover: Walter MacDougall, a Native Patrol Officer responsible for the welfare of all Indigenous people who might be affected by the bomb blasts. In reports on investigations made before the site was chosen, the area was said to be ‘so arid and waterless’ that Indigenous people did not use the land. This was another lie.

  In an era where concern for the welfare of, and respect for, Indigenous people was largely absent, MacDougall – though still working for the government – was given access to all Indigenous reserves in the region affected by the tests, an area that grew to 800 000 square kilometres. He did the best he could from 1947 to 1954 despite the British ‘juggernaut’.

  In 1953, ahead of the first tests, MacDougall found 400 Indigenous people who made their homes in the protected area. They lived largely traditional lives and MacDougall noted that their ceremonial life was still very active. He set out with a Land Rover, diesel, tools, rations, a gun, camera and compass to cover thousands of kilometres in a little more than a month in the lead-up to the Totem test at Emu Field to the north of Maralinga.

  As MacDougall continued to Ooldea and Tietkens Well, he worried that there would be unavoidable consequences for the Indigenous people in the area as the Maralinga blasts drew closer. He set out again in 1954 with the mistaken belief that if he removed sacred items from the bush that would be affected by the blasts, then the sites would lose their significance and the people would move out of harm’s way. But the sites remained important locations for birth, death and Dreaming. As Elizabeth Tynan writes, ‘With the stroke of a pen, the lives of thousands were changed forever.’ The South Australian Aborigines Department wrote on 14 January 1955 that the entire ‘Reserve for aborigines, being section 263 … has been abolished.’ And that was that.