Legacy of Maralinga lingers

During the height of the Cold War, Britain used two remote parts of Australia to test nuclear weapons: four bombs were tested on Montebello Island off the coast of Western Australia and seven more at Maralinga in the 'dead heart' of South Australia, about 50 km north of the Trans Australian Railway. Montebello was uninhabited and nobody knew or cared about it after the mushroom clouds dissipated. When the scientists and soldiers abandoned the islands, signs were merely erected to warn anyone landing on the shore of the radioactivity they had left behind. Maralinga gained more infamy when it was revealed that, 15 years after the bomb tests had ceased in 1957, the British had also been secretly conducting 700 so-called 'minor trials'. The area had been represented to the British as desolate and unpopulated, but it had been home territory to about 200 members of the Maralinga Tjarutja people. Andrew Collett, an Adelaide barrister who has been representing them for more than 15 years, says these people had been pushed out in 1955 and relocated at a Lutheran mission at Yalata, south of Maralinga, established expressly to take them before bomb tests began. The bombs were of devastating power- if used in anger on a city, they would have left tens of thousands of bodies but, at least, they seem not to have left concentrated hazards. Their radioactivity was blown away to settle over a wide region. More threatening to humans and the environment over the long-term, however, were experiments with simulated explosions of nuclear warheads to determine the safety of weapons and the spread of deadly plutonium. Tests were conducted until 1963, when the Partial Test Ban Treaty came into effect. General hazards at the site are now being reduced by filling in holes and tidying it up. The local people are helping to revegetate the area with native species while they are personally assessed for radiological dosage and health risk as, according to official papers, they live a 'semi traditional lifestyle'. About 90% of the former restricted area has become available to them. However, full-time occupation is excluded from the remaining 120 km2 of land that is lightly contaminated with fine particles of plutonium. A much larger program of soil removal would be needed that would involve 'major environmental damage', according to government statements, and costing $500 million