nuclear-news

 British scientists came over in their white overcoats and the helmets and the oxygen tanks – the whole thing – while the RAAF blokes stood there in their regular flying gear wondering what the hell was going on…….

FRANK WALKER: The British scientists wouldn’t do a lot of things that they said the Australian servicemen had to do, such as drive the heavy vehicles into the red hot zone and pick up the scientific equipment and bring it back to them.

What the British wanted to know was could a nation survive an atomic war? In other words, if Britain was caught in an atomic war, they – obviously bombs would fall on London, Manchester, all the big industrial cities – but what would – could Britain survive? Could they grow food? Could the people survive? Would the children grow up to be adults?

This was what they wanted to know and this was why the instructions were to have men positioned at certain distances from the blast to see whether they could function afterwards.

MARK COLVIN: Now we’ve talked a bit about the servicemen, but we haven’t talked about the traditional owners of the land. What happened to them? FRANK WALKER: They were treated absolutely abominably. First of all, they were just totally disregarded. They had no knowledge of whether Aborigines used Maralinga as a traditional hunting area and when it turned out they did, that this was actually a – many songlines went through this territory, that they would walk through this territory from waterhole to waterhole. They knew this land very well. They were – they tried to keep them out.

They had one sort of patrol bloke who knew the outback very well. He was a bushman, a bloke by the name of MacDougall, very interesting character. He had a job of trying to keep Aborigines out of an area that’s about a million square kilometres.

MARK COLVIN: One bloke.

FRANK WALKER: One bloke.

MARK COLVIN: So, we will probably never know if any Aborigines were killed in the actual blast?

FRANK WALKER: I believe they were. I believe – there were several accounts that came up before the atomic royal commission in the 1980s where soldiers, where lower ranks described finding corpses in the Maralinga area. Certainly we know that some did come through the area and were found alive and they tried to decontaminate them and so on.

But the accounts of corpses being found in some of the craters and in trails near the test sites were – could not be proven. It ended up being the junior blokes, junior ranks would say, “We saw it. We saw them bulldoze the bodies.” The senior ranks would come along and say, “No, it never happened.”…..FRANK WALKER: I think both governments are extremely liable. The Australian Government at the time, at the very best, turned a blind eye to what was going on. The British Government was running the show and they were quite content in they treated Australia as though it were just do whatever they wanted and, under Menzies, the government did………