Elizabeth Tynan - Atomic Thunder - The Maralinga Story

Titterton told the Royal Commission that he had been charged specifically with ensuring the welfare of the Aboriginal people near Monte Bello. He testified that Menzies had asked him to ‘stick your oar in to make as certain as it is humanly possible… that there will be no adverse effects on the Australian people, flora and fauna, and in particular the Aborigines. From the first five minutes I was involved a major concern of the Australian Prime Minister was Aborigines’. Yet Titterton did not apparently stick his oar in very deep, and his evidence on exactly how he did this was vague. He seemed to be under the impression that the federal government held such records, when it was only state governments who kept data on Aboriginal people during this period.

Perhaps his overall approach was summed up in this comment: ‘The overriding condition was that there would be no significant fallout on the continent. Now, if there was no significant fallout on the continent that can do anyone any damage, you do not have to differentiate between Aboriginals and Europeans’. As the Royal Commission concluded, this failed to ‘consider the distinctive lifestyles of Aboriginal people’. And since ‘no record was made of any contamination of the mainland it is impossible to determine whether Aborigines were exposed to any significant short or long-term hazards’. Aborigines leading traditional lifestyles have far greater connection to the land upon which they walk and the water, plants and animals in their vicinity. Aborigines and Europeans did indeed need to be differentiated.

When the Mosaic tests were held at Monte Bello in 1956, again the welfare of Aboriginal people on the adjacent mainland did not figure in planning. Commodore Hugh Martell, director of Mosaic, dismissed the idea: ‘Aborigines are nothing to do with Mosaic… The question does not arise. There are no Aborigines on the Monte Bello Islands’. But Aboriginal people on the Pilbara coast and inland would certainly have been affected. At no time during Mosaic were they properly taken into account.

For the 1953 tests at Emu Field, there could be no denying that Aboriginal people were in the vicinity. They were there for all to see, if they cared to look. Emu and, later, Maralinga were chosen as locations despite what would these days be considered challenging, if not insurmountable, barriers. Notions such as land rights, informed consent or occupational health simply did not arise for local Aborigines. The land was not uninhabited, but terra nullius (‘nobody’s land’, deeming there were no property rights in the continent when the British took it) was accepted in law. The lands were not settled in the Western sense of the term. Rather, people traversed them for hunting, water gathering and ceremonial purposes, as they had for tens of thousands of years. Before the major mainland tests began, the area had to be cleared. Most Indigenous people found in various sweeps by military personnel were directed to a mission at Yalata, far to the south on the Great Australian Bight (a community later ravaged by social problems). Ample evidence suggests, however, that individuals and small groups walked across the lands after the tests began. Those found from time to time in contaminated areas were given showers and driven away in trucks or cars, often suffering severe car sickness since they had never before travelled in a vehicle. In most cases, however, official ground patrols of the Maralinga range and adjacent areas simply turned Aboriginal people away, directing them to leave the test site. The locals who had lived around the Maralinga lands were scattered north and south, some never to return, others eventually to find their way to a small settlement at Oak Valley, 160 kilometres northwest of Maralinga.

Social problems have dogged the people of the Maralinga lands since the time of the tests. Three decades passed before they were compensated with a $13.5 million settlement from the Australian Government in November 1994. The people now hold the title to these lands under the Maralinga Tjarutja Land Rights Act 1984 . After a partial handover in 1984, the final part of the Maralinga lands was officially handed back to the Maralinga Tjarutja people on 18 December 2009. These days, the only permanent settlement is Oak Valley, where about 90 people live.

The Maralinga Tjarutja people own the area that encompasses the Maralinga test site as well as Oak Valley, Ooldea and Emu Field; together these are now the Maralinga Tjarutja lands. These lands cover 105 667 square kilometres (or approximately 11 per cent of the land area of South Australia). The Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands directly to the north encompass many of the Indigenous settlements affected by the British tests, including Wallatinna, Marla and Ernabella. The Western Desert peoples inhabit these lands, and the language usually spoken there is Pitjantjatjara. All these peoples have shocking family tales to tell of what happened when the men arrived with their planes and tanks and atomic weapons.

Ooldea Soak, 40 kilometres south of Maralinga, is one of the focal points of the Maralinga Indigenous saga. Ooldea was also known as Yuldi, Yutulynga and Yooldool in the various dialects of the diverse people who congregated there. According to scholar Odette Mazel, the name Ooldea means ‘the meeting place where there is much water’. The Ooldea Reserve covered about 1500 square kilometres. The plentiful water supply made it an important meeting place and ceremonial ground for Western Desert people. When the transcontinental railway was built between 1912 and 1917, the influx of Aboriginal people to the area accelerated, as they were attracted by the capacity to trade with railway workers. Among the items traded were dingo scalps. The advent of the railway did much to change the old patterns of life.

The area is strongly associated with the Irishwoman Daisy Bates, an extraordinary character who established herself at Ooldea in 1918 and communed with the Aboriginal people there for 16 years. Her settlement was not strictly a mission, but she did provide the locals with food and clothes, while she studied their culture and made copious notes of her observations. During her time at Ooldea she was awarded the CBE and welcomed visits by royalty three times. She also befriended the writer Ernestine Hill, who made her famous by helping her to write a series of autobiographical features that appeared in several newspapers, some later published in The Passing of the Aborigines . Bates was a strict segregationist who opposed intermarrying and was profoundly pessimistic about the future of the Aboriginal people. She was never really accepted by the anthropological community, and her work fell into disrepute. The Australian Dictionary of Biography quotes a secretary who knew her briefly at the end of her life describing her as ‘an imperialist, an awful snob… a grand old lady’.

After Bates left Ooldea in the mid-1930s, the settlement was taken over by an evangelical missionary group called the United Aborigines Mission. This group, dedicated to converting Aboriginal people to its particular brand of Christianity and attempting to eliminate traditional customs and beliefs, maintained the Ooldea Mission until 1952 when they chose to close it down. The water in the soak was drying up and soon there would be none left. Mazel stated that the activities of the mission represented the ‘first active measures taken to interfere with aboriginal social orders’, an on-going process that led to considerable sorrow. Quite a bit more disruption and sorrow was to come.

In 1952, the order came from Minister for Supply Howard Beale that all Aboriginal people based at Ooldea would have to move to Yalata, about 120 kilometres south, in preparation for the start of British nuclear tests at Emu Field. Yalata was part of an old sheep station purchased by the South Australian government. It became a Lutheran-run mission for Aborigines forced to leave Ooldea. Many people from the Maralinga lands are there still. The 1984 Kerr Report found that