Land of Thunder

This rocket was used to launch satellites into orbit

 

A large police van rolls up in front of your door. Several uniformed men jump out of the vehicle and hang around the front yard. One of the men opens the gate and  knocks on your front door. Apprehensive and a little nervy you open the door and stare at the man in your porch and say “how can I help you, officer?”

 

“You have to come with me” the man said urgently in an imperial British accent. “It will be no longer safe to live in this area” he continues. "Please, gather your family and all your possessions and come with me now. Do not worry sir! You will be allowed to return home after a period of 54 years”.

This scenario seems unlikely to have ever occurred anywhere in a civilized world, but it happened in South Australia. It took 54 years for the Indigenous Arangu people to be returned to their land after many of them were forcibly removed.
 

A rest spot up the Sturt highway

Jules and I travelled up the Sturt highway to find out more about Woomera. The town has that typical outback style with broad access roads and red dust everywhere. In the centre we found a collection of rockets in front of a church. After entering the old church, now serving as a museum, it felt like stepping back in to the 50's. We strolled through the exhibition looking at all the old artifacts. There are dusty radios, school photos of proper looking children, local cricket paraphernalia and many uniforms of a bygone era.

 

A couple of  questions were bugging me whilst meandering over those creaky floorboards. Wasn’t Woomera where the nuclear tests were held? Yes it was! Did I miss the info? Yes I did! Surely they would have that displayed here at the edge of ground zero? Around I went again, paying close attention to the items on show. Finally, I found 'one' manila folder, laying between a pile of other files, with articles about our sinister past and started taking photographs of each page.
 

One of the newspaper clippings of the manila folder





Maralinga means ‘land of thunder’ in the local dialect and ‘boy’ did the Brits create some thunder. Between 1955 and 1963 the British, with assistance of the Australian government, ran seven series of  nuclear tests at Maralinga, just down the road of Woomera - the village that housed all the living staff and families involved.

 

Many soldiers and their families were exposed to radio active material

 

An effort was made to remove the Indigenous population from  their 3000 square km homeland. A total of 100kg of toxic and radioactive substances were exploded in this area. 1200 Indigenous people were exposed. It's only more recent decades that stories have emerged about what happened to the people living near the site. One of those stories is Yami Lester's, a Yankunytjatjara man, who was only 10 years old when the testing began.

 

"I was a kid.

"I got up early in the morning, about 7 o'clock, playing with a homemade toy.

"We heard the big bomb went off that morning, a loud noise and the ground shook.

"I don't know how long after we seen this quiet black smoke - oily and shiny - coming across from the south.

 

Cloud formations over the field of thunder

 

"Next time we had sore eyes, skin rash, diarrhea and vomiting everybody, old people too.

"Some of the old people, I don't know how many died."

Mr. Lester was unable to open his eyes for several weeks, and when he did, he couldn't see.

By 1957 he was completely blind.

"When I was in Alice Springs in 1984 I heard Sir Ernest Titterton, who was saying blackfellas were all looked after.

"That it was all clear where [the] Maralinga testing occurred.

"I thought to myself 'he talking the wrong way.'

"He doesn't know what happened on our end.

"So I picked up the telephone and that's where it all started."
 

Mr Lester began telling his story, and his actions eventually

led to the McClelland Royal Commission in 1985.

 

Mr Yami Lester

 

Alan Parkinson became the key person on the Maralinga clean-up project, representing the then federal government. By 1997, however, there was much cost-cutting involved in the project, and differences of opinion about how the project should proceed, which led to the sacking of Parkinson by the Government of that time. Parkinson states that:

"What was done at Maralinga was a cheap and nasty solution that wouldn't be adopted on white-fellas land”

Source: Wikipedia 

 

The Totem 1 used at Maralinga to carry nuclear warheads

 

Let’s make that leap to 2009 where the Australian government gives the land back to their rightful owners..

Would ‘you’ go back there? To live?

  

The insides of a Rolls Roys engine used to launch rockets

Grey Bits

September 27, 2016 marks the 60 year anniversary of the start of nuclear testing at Woomera. Information of an art exhibition to commemorate this occasion can be found on the following link
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-09-21/exhibition-to-mark-60th-anniversary-of-nuclear-testing/7865192

Photo courtesy of Google

In this blog I have focussed on the Indigenous population of the Maralinga area. Many of the soldiers and their families suffered terrible consequences of their exposure to toxic material at Maralinga. Read more at
http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/new-generations-of-australian-families-suffering-deformities-and-early-deaths-because-of-genetic-transfer/news-story/5a74b7eab2f433402aa00bc2fcbcbea4

This is where I read Yami Lester's speech.
http://www.abc.net.au/site-archive/rural/content/2011/s3326601.htm

Looking across Lake Hart to the Land of Thunder

Here is a link if you would like to read more about Maralinga and Woomera
https://www.creativespirits.info/aboriginalculture/history/maralinga-how-british-nuclear-tests-changed-history-forever#toc0