The Crow Eaters Page 5
As we walk over the rubble of the Taranaki blast site I’m reminded of John Hersey’s Hiroshima – the first piece of journalism from an American about the fallout of the bomb in Japan, through the eyes of the Japanese people. Hersey writes, ‘at exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6th, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima …’ Hersey then captures what different groups of normal Japanese people were doing: sitting to read a newspaper, washing dishes in an apartment, unloading medical supplies, and even resting in the morning with a slight head cold before the day began.
Hersey scrapes through the everyday lives of people in the city before and after the bomb, where regular people, like Mr Tanimoto, who was a pastor at a local Methodist church, would have to row through ponds full of radioactive debris and swarms of dead bodies to rescue people who would otherwise drown, ‘He reached down and took a woman by the hands, but her skin slipped off in huge, glove-like pieces. He was so sickened that he had to sit down for a moment,’ but he continued dragging these people to safety until it was dark and he couldn’t move. What makes me think of Hersey’s hor-rific portrait of the impact of the bomb now, is that he was there as a witness in Hiroshima. For the estimated 400 Indigenous people who were travelling along their Dreaming road through the Maralinga country at the time of the first blast, away from the protection of the village or hiding from the mamu, there was no-one to ever hear their stories, to share their suffering or to lend a hand, as Mr Tanimoto did in Hiroshima. At 7.30 am on 27 September 1956, they would have seen a similar white flash in the sky above them as Mr Tanimoto and the others did, though we’ll never know what happened next.
Robin tells me the story of his wife’s family in the lead-up to the tests, ‘Different mobs would see this brown Land Rover and wouldn’t know what it was, so they’d run off.’ There were 117 cases of MacDougall encountering people and sending them towards Yalata on the Nullarbor Plain, ‘They would have ignored him,’ Robin says, adding that ‘Della thinks there were hundreds of people from different tribes traversing the land when the first bomb went off … all killed in the blast or the fallout.’
This is also partly why the Anangu people think it is cursed here – none of the people who died were given a proper burial and farewelled as is their custom, so their spirits are still out there on the land.
The red earth around the Marcoo site looks like a recently tilled garden bed. The soil is soft and bereft of any plant life. It stretches out for hundreds of metres, nearly in a perfect circle, before shrubs of any real size begin growing again. This is no market garden reimagining, though. There are twists of metal the length of a toddler’s arm on the ground and two unopened steel boxes rusting on the red earth next to a plinth marking this as the site of the Buffalo 2 atomic bomb.
‘To be honest, we still don’t know everything that’s out here,’ says Robin.
I notice four camels loping through the under-growth in the distance, looking for the sweet flowers from Sturt’s desert peas, as Robin tells us the story of his wife, Della’s family around the Marcoo blast site. Della’s father was born 10 kilometres north of the Taranaki blast site and her grandmother was born in 1901 near the barrier to the village. This had been their land for generations.
In early 1957, Mrs Edie Millpuddie and her family were traversing the plains of the Great Victoria Desert months after the bomb went off; they hadn’t been rounded up in the days before the blast by MacDougall or told of the other Anangu people being forcibly relocated south to Yalata.
On 4 October 1956 at Marcoo, a 1.5-kilotonne bomb had been exploded at ground level. The bomb tore a crater 44 metres wide and 21 metres deep into land that was part of a significant Dreaming highway for the Indigenous people who had ranged across here for thousands of years. It was touted as a ‘nuclear landmine’ and, while it didn’t have the spectacular mushroom explosion of the others before it, the radioactive cloud was still carried on the wind towards New South Wales as the early evening breezes picked up and the scattered rain settled the radioactivity across the earth.
The Millpuddies needed shelter for the night and when they came across this enormous hole, which would keep them out of the wind, they traversed the soft earth to the bottom of the crater, where the ground was still warm. It had been raining, so they scooped rainwater from the bottom to drink and lit a fire on the red sand flecked with melted glass. On their approach Charlie Millpuddie had noticed that all the rabbits in the area seemed blind and disoriented; they were easy pickings for dinner. Charlie lit a fire and cooked the rabbits, before the entire family went to sleep at the bottom of an atomic bomb crater completely unaware. They stayed in the shelter of the Buffalo 2 bombsite for three days, until scientists noticed smoke billowing from the crater. They rushed in to see what had happened.
The Millpuddie family were on their way to visit relatives at Ooldea, not knowing about the evacuations that had taken place earlier. They were sleeping on the warm earth, drinking water from the bottom of the blast hole and eating radiated animals. Immediately the scientists and military personnel took them back to the village and Robin says that to decontaminate them they were given ‘five showers and told that the reading was clear. They were then driven to Yalata and dumped there.’
The British washed their hands of the Millpuddies, or so they thought. Two weeks later Edie had a stillborn baby in Yalata; many thought it was from the radiation, though Robin believes it was something else. As part of their ‘evacuation’ the Maralinga officers shot their four dogs in front of them, they were forcibly washed by the mamu white people, who then moved them off their land to an unfamiliar place with tribes they didn’t know; and their dogs, seen as family members, were killed without remorse and dumped in the crater. The Royal Commission in the 1980s awarded Edie $75 000, though more tragic is the fact that the family’s grandchildren ‘all have physical and mental deformities now’, Robin says. ‘This all happened right where we’re standing,’ he adds, to reinforce the tragedy of the situation and to highlight that this is not an event that has ended for the Anangu people.
While it’s impossible to know everything the British covered up, Robin does know that directly underneath us now are five London buses repurposed as mobile cleaning and testing centres, six jets, two Centurion tanks, Jeeps, Land Rovers and multiple weapons. The clean-up here only finished in 2000 – at the same time we were celebrating the Olympics in Sydney – and the land was handed back to the Maralinga Tjarutja people in 2009.
The effects of the nuclear experiments were not just felt by the Indigenous community. After the Marcoo blast, 283 men, the ‘Maralinga guinea pigs’ of the ‘Indoctrinee Force’ were deliberately placed in the forward areas so they could experience the effects of the nuclear blast. These men were in separate living quarters from the rest of the Maralinga citizens. They would help the scientists lay out the objects to be tested postblast: from guns, cars and dummies, to jets and Centurion tanks without protective gear. Their eyewitness accounts were deemed necessary by the British, as they would provide data on what to expect in the likely escalation of a worldwide nuclear war in the near future.
The ‘Maralinga guinea pigs’ were then dressed in ‘goon suits’ of a gas mask, boots and clothing and taken into the highly radioactive areas, and they were the first to notice that the sand had melted into white and green glass in a 1 kilometre radius around the blast because of the intense heat. The health issues for these guinea pigs were severe: cataracts, blood diseases, arthritic conditions, stomach cancers and, more tragically, ongoing health conditions and deformities for the offspring of the survivors.
There was no overt political pressure or media scrutiny of the tests until the 1970s, when some of those injured by the tests came forward and a small group of journalists and politicians cast a more critical eye over the tests and the secrecy surrounding them.
Driving back along the straight roads to camp, the bus is quiet. It seems appropriate. Th
ere’s no room for idle chat. The air is too heavy with what we’ve seen today. This is the most isolated spot I’ve ever been to in Australia, though it’s not one empty of stories or history. I understand better now how loaded this place has become with sorrow, anger and, as Robin suggests, maybe a little bit of hope for the future.
The stars are out when we return. The smear of the Milky Way is vivid in the sky and it is easier to see the beauty and the significance of this place beyond the atomic past.
‘We now bring our kids and our grandchildren here to explain what happened. This is their land and their ancestors,’ Robin says. He would love it if the Indigenous people would become guides here to continue the process of the Anangu people taking back their land, though he understands why they never will.
‘I wouldn’t want to live in Centennial Park in Adelaide and do tours of the cemetery where my parents are buried,’ he says, to highlight the point.
The sun is shining across the village the next morning and Robin busies himself with preparations for a charter plane of tourists arriving from Ceduna. Despite spending a large part of his life here in Maralinga, I get the impression that he’s not done with it yet. ‘When I come down to the village and walk around by myself, I feel like I’m in a time warp. I’ve been coming here since 1972 and you can imagine what was going on here in the 1950s and ’60s,’ he says, puffing on another smoke. It is a time warp – the devastation of the tests, the echoes of the Indigenous stories here when it was a Dreaming road, and the green shoots of the future led by Robin and the Maralinga Tjarutja people.
CHAPTER 4
WHAT LIES BENEATH
The fields are dotted with extinct volcanoes. Below the surface here the Kanawinka fault line – which the Buandig people call ‘The Land of Tomorrow’ – tilts the earth’s crust upwards like a ramp so fresh water can flow down gradually through the caves, caverns and limestone grottos hidden underground.
The south-east region of South Australia is dramatically different from the rest of the state. Here the ground is lush, the beaches are wild and rocky and it is Australia’s largest volcanic region. There are caves full of the fossils of giant megafauna: marsupial lions and giant kangaroo skeletons hidden in pitfall traps dotted throughout the hills, there is a sinkhole next to the library of the area’s biggest town, and the mouth of Australia’s biggest river empties into the ocean in a place where people still use boats rather than bridges to cross the Murray.
My journey to the south-east begins at the place the Ngarrindjeri people call ‘The Elbow’, where the Murray River twists and coils at sharp angles, like an elbow, before purging into the sea. Strangely it is not the river that has brought me here, but the stories of Mark Twain I have heard. The self-named ‘most famous man in the United States’ during the late 19th century and the author of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) among many other books, bizarrely found himself on the south-east coast of South Australia in 1895 to pay off an investment debt. Along with Twain’s position as America’s greatest writer of the era came enormous wealth. His eccentricities led him to invest in things that satisfied his imagination, including a typesetting machine that was supposed to change the future of the printing business. The invention failed and as a result Twain’s fortune dwindled. ‘I’ve got to mount the platform again or starve’ Twain wrote of his decision to travel to Australia in 1895 on a speaking tour to pay off his debts, despite the fact that he was ‘ageing, tired and in pain’. Twain would give speeches at 150 events on his year-long world tour – devoting approximately six weeks to the entire Australian continent, where he would perform in Adelaide, Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart and even Wagga Wagga. According to Don Watson in his foreword of Twain’s Australian memoir The Wayward Tourist, he ‘glided around the colonies like a man on roller skates’, such was the speed of his trip.
Twain found the Murray River around the South Australian town of Goolwa to be akin to the Mississippi River back in the US, though, like many things on his voyage to Australia, he skated over the details as to why; presumably it was because of the line-up of paddle steamers which used to run along the wharf here.
My interest in Twain brings me to Goolwa now. It is a pretty town dating back to the mid 19th century, where the fresh water of the river flows out to the wide Murray mouth and into the Southern Ocean. The streets are lined with sturdy sandstone buildings, fish shops and bakeries; there are fishing boats and old paddle steamers on the water, giving tourists a taste of what travel would have been like during Twain’s visit. The Cockle Train spouts plumes of steam as it pulls into the siding next to the water – it’s another Sunday activity reserved only for tourists now.
I have long been a fan of Mark Twain’s travel writing, and this began with The Innocents Abroad about his voyage on the Quaker City steam ship in 1867 from New York to Europe and the Holy Land with a boatload of American tourists. It was a ‘picnic on a gigantic scale’ according to Twain, and he intended to lampoon anything and everything on this trip to ‘hobnob with nobility and hold friendly converse with kings and princes, grand moguls, and the anointed lords of mighty empires!’. The Innocents Abroad was Twain’s most popular book and the best-selling travel book of the century. It sold more than 70 000 copies in its first year alone.
To my surprise, while I was researching this book I first found out about the Goolwa and Mark Twain connection in the corridor of my office in Adelaide. My colleague, Ian Richards, heard of my enthusiasm for Twain and told me that when his grandfather Howard died, the family discovered in his possession a collection of letters from one Samuel Clemens (Twain’s real name) to Howard’s father.
Ian’s grandfather’s grandfather and his son (both named Mahershallalhashbaz, but the son was known as Marc, as that would have been quite a mouthful when giving introductions no doubt) travelled from Cornwall to California in the 1800s seeking their fortunes. They were from Porthtowan and – according to Ian’s late father – were contracted to build steam pumps for the gold diggings.
Young Marc became friendly with Samuel Clemens in Silver City, Nevada, and he eventually settled in Goolwa, South Australia, where he built steam engines for the paddle steamers that plied the Murray, transporting wool and grain from as far inland as Echuca in Victoria and Wilcannia and Bourke in New South Wales.
According to Ian, Samuel and Marc wrote to one another in the intervening years, and Clemens visited Marc during his speaking tour of Australia and gave a public talk in Goolwa at the time.
Clemens wrote of his time in the south-east, ‘South Australia deserves much, for apparently she is a hospitable home for every alien who chooses to come’, and it makes me smile as I drive through the holiday town of Goolwa nearly 150 years later that my friend Ian’s great-grandfather might have prompted that remark from one of my literary idols.
Next to the railway siding I pass by the enormous concrete bridge, which arches over the water to Hindmarsh Island like a cocked eyebrow. The island is now a haven for retirees and holidaymakers, though it was once an important site for the local Ngarrindjeri people and highlighted for the ‘secret women’s business’ which occurred there before white settlement. Despite the protests of the quiet locals who lived there and wanted their sanctuary maintained and the Aboriginal people looking to preserve a site of constant habitation and important history, like many places in Australia, progress won out and the bridge connecting Hindmarsh Island to Goolwa was built in the late 1990s. The controversy around the bridge made international headlines and journalist Margret Simons declared the debate, the subsequent Royal Commission and the mistrust of Ngarrindjeri women during the process as a key moment in the beginning of ‘the culture wars’ within Australian society.
From Goolwa the road is surrounded by flat farmland and rows upon rows of crops, laid out in earthy patterns of brown dirt, golden wheat, deep green grass and the glossy leaves of vegetable crops. I take a meandering route towards the hamlet of Wellington, where the road stops alongside the stone pub and t
he edge of the Murray laps up onto the bitumen. As with many small towns in this part of South Australia, there are no bridges across the Murray, so the town relies on the small ferry that crosses back and forth across the river 24 hours a day. The drive is quiet and unremarkable: cows, fields, fences and dry salt lakes until the inland sea of Lake Alexandrina flashes into view on the right and then the Coorong beyond it. This 140-kilometre-long saline lagoon is Ngarrindjeri land and was once an abundant wetland ‘supermarket’ for the people here, with waterbirds, mussels, cockles, salt- and freshwater fish, possums, kangaroos and many native fruits and vegetables available that enabled the inhabitants to live well without the need to travel too far afield. While the significance of the Coorong has changed with European settlement, there are still many middens with shells, remnants of cooking ovens and tool-making debris in the dunes, highlighting how important an area this was and is for many Indigenous people. Another enduring presence here is the birdlife. There are more than 230 species in the Coorong that migrate to the calm, dune-fringed lagoon from Siberia, Japan, China and Alaska.
The area is vacant and beautiful, as I roll through with my windows down. Salt fills my nostrils and a squadron of pelicans floating in a tight ‘V’ towards Goolwa reminds me why the Coorong has a strong connection to my youth.
Storm Boy lived between the Coorong and the sea. His home was the long, long snout of sandhill and scrub that curves away south-eastwards from the Murray mouth. A wild strip it is, windswept and tussocky, with the flat shallow water of the South Australian Coorong on one side and the endless slam of the Southern Ocean on the other.
Colin Thiele’s 1963 book Storm Boy, about a young boy who befriends a family of orphaned pelicans on a windy stretch of the Coorong has received more recent attention because of the film remake. The sense of place in Thiele’s writing, of the enormous isolation, the wildness of the beach through the storms and different seasons, and his capturing of the emotion of Storm Boy nurturing and later mourning his pelican friend, Mr Percival, reminds me of why I began to read and to like writing in the first place.