Dan Snow's History Hit - Britain's Secret Atomic Tests in Australia

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

During the 1950s, in the remote expanses of Australia's outback, the British government conducted a series of clandestine nuclear tests. These were the early years of the Cold War, and Britain was determined to expand its atomic capabilities and shore up its great power status. But these tests came at a harrowing cost to Aboriginal communities and site personnel, who were not sufficiently protected from the deadly nuclear fallout. The full extent of the harm done by these detonations is still not known.We're joined by Elizabeth Tynan, author of 'The Secrets of Emu Field: Britain’s Forgotten Atomic Tests in Australia'. She explains the reasons for these tests, the damage they did, and what they tell us about the peculiar bonds of colonialism.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.For more episodes on the history of nuclear weapons:Oppenheimer - https://shows.acast.com/dansnowshistoryhit/episodes/oppenheimerHow to Prepare for Nuclear War - https://shows.acast.com/dansnowshistoryhit/episodes/how-to-prepare-for-nuclear-warThe Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb - https://shows.acast.com/dansnowshistoryhit/episodes/the-decision-to-use-the-atomic-bombEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. The Montebello Islands are a starkly beautiful archipelago of around 174 little islands. They lie about 80 miles, 130km or so, off the northwest coast of Australia. Today they're at the heart of a gigantic marine conservation reserve, nearly 150,000 acres given over to protection of wildlife. The vibe was very different on the 3rd of October 1952. A Second World War British frigate, the Plym, was moored up a couple of hundred metres west of one of the little islands. In the belly of that ship was a nuclear weapon.

Britain was about to join the nuclear age. A few seconds before eight in the morning on the 3rd of October, that device was detonated. The bomb was around two and a half meters below the waterline, deep in the hull of the ship. And as a result, it scoured out a great crater on the seabed, about six meters deep and 300 meters wide. The yield was estimated to be about 25 kilotons. That's nearly double that of the Hiroshima bomb. The plim, the ship on which the bomb had been detonated, had almost disappeared. A royal engineer said there was a gluey black substance that washed up on the shore of one of the islands.

He added that a few fist-sized bits of metal fell like rain, and you could see the shape of the frigate scorched on the seabed. The test had been carried out both to launch Britain into the nuclear age, but also to see what the effects of a ship-smuggled atomic bomb would be on a port. Britain was very worried that a hostile nation would send a cargo ship into one of our ports and there detonate a nuclear bomb. The findings of the test was that such a detonation would be absolutely catastrophic. But the British were pleased.

Britain was now the third nuclear power on Earth, after the Americans and the Soviet Union. They noticed that this test did not take place in Britain or the British Isles. It took place in Australia, on the other side of the world. Why and how that came to be and what happened is the subject of today's podcast. I'm very lucky to have Liz Tynan on the other side of the world. Why and how that came to be and what happened is the subject of today's podcast. I'm very lucky to have Liz Tynan on the pod. She is Professor at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia. She has made an intensive research of British atomic tests in Australia and she's written the book The Secret of Emu Field, Britain's Forgotten Atomic Tests in Australia.

It's a fascinating story about Britain entering the nuclear age, Australia's role within that, and the effect of those tests on Anglo-Australian relations. This is a podcast that we did because it was suggested by Joe Innes. So thank you very much, Joe, for suggesting it. Please keep your ideas coming in, and one of them might become an episode as well. The email address is ds.hh

at historyhit.com so send us a message in the meantime enjoy t-minus 10 atomic bombs dropped on hiroshima god save the king no black white unity till there is first and black unity never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Liz, why did the British nuclear testing project take place on the other side of the planet in Australia? You know, that's an excellent question, Dan.

And it doesn't have a simple, straightforward answer. We can track it back to before the Second World War, or actually just as the Second World War was starting, when there was a kind of an outpouring of physics research around fission, which some people know is splitting the atom. And this led to some speculations among physicists, and two in particular, some refugee physicists who escaped in Nazi Germany, who came to the United Kingdom and working at the University of Birmingham, speculations about the energy that could be unleashed by a fission reaction in uranium. that could be unleashed by a fission reaction in uranium.

This, of course, led through various ways, through a lot of research and development and wartime experimentation and theorising, to the idea of the atomic weapon. And that idea had to be brought to fruition in the United States because, of course, the United Kingdom was under attack. And Britain had been central to the research that made this possible. And not just British physicists, but as I mentioned, the refugee physicists who had come to work in Britain. So after a very painstakingly negotiated agreement between Roosevelt and Churchill to allow Britain to be involved in the Manhattan Project over the other side of the Atlantic, a British mission set forth

and went over to the Manhattan Project. Now, as it happened, in that British mission were some spies, and their uncovering cleaved the nuclear relationship between America and Britain. So the first one to be uncovered was in 1946, Alan Nunmay, who was a fairly minor player in the Manhattan Project. He'd been based in Montreal. He went to prison. And that was used, some people say cynically by the Americans, as an excuse to bring in what became known as the McMahon Act. And McMahon Act made it illegal for the United States to work with any other nation on nuclear weapons development. And so the UK was blindsided by that.

That was a huge shock to the government by then under Clement Attlee and also to the main British nuclear weapons designer and physicist, William Penny, who was working with the Americans in 1946 in the Pacific on their nuclear weapons testing. Suddenly, it was not possible for the UK to continue working with the Americans. And they had to make a series of decisions then rather quickly. They had to decide whether they even wanted a nuclear weapon. And that decision was formally taken in January of 1947, when it was decided in a secret cabinet committee that they would pursue their own nuclear weapon. So then,

of course, the question arose, where could they test it? Weapons must be tested. Now, there was some talk initially of testing it in Scotland and other parts of the British Isles. That was very quickly jumped on as politically unfeasible. Then they started with William Penny leading the charge, but they started to think about potentially Canada, for example, which had been a very strong participant in the Manhattan Project and a strong ally of Britain in their nuclear work. And so William Penny went to Churchill in Canada and surveyed it as a possible site for nuclear weapons testing.

But ultimately, the Canadians said no. So then, of course, Britain being a former colonial power, they just had a big long look through all the various colonies in the Caribbean, the Pacific, in Africa, in different places. And finally, they reluctantly, I would say, decided that maybe Australia might be the right place. They looked at several possible places in Australia, including Groote Eiland in the northern part of Australia, but then their gaze settled upon the Montebello Islands off the coast of Western Australia. So Clement Attlee, the Prime Minister, picked up the telephone

in September of 1950 to speak to the relatively new Australian Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, who was a well-known Anglophile, to see whether they could undertake a survey and whether indeed he was agreeable to them testing their first atomic weapon in Australia. And he immediately said yes. And he didn't even take it to his cabinet. So it was kind of undemocratic from the off.

It was also very much the case that Australia was way down the list. But it was a stable democracy. It had recently elected a conservative prime minister who had long standing ties to the UK and a great admiration of the UK. And it also had, of course, uranium resources. So that was another factor as well. And indeed, that was a factor in Robert Menzies saying yes. So there are a number of reasons, but certainly being halfway around the world from where the bomb was made, created extensive logistical problems for the bomb builders. So most of the engineering and stuff was done in Britain. It was just the testing would just be on this, well, to the British, very remote location. To many Australians, not particularly right. Well, Montebello Islands was very remote,

even to Australians. It had 8,000 years ago been part of the mainland, but it had long since been adrift from the mainland. The Monte Bello Islands were not at that time occupied. One of the reasons that particular site was chosen was that it was very remote. It was unlikely to be visited by many people. And also the British initially wanted to test a maritime weapon. Being a maritime nation, of course, their first priority was to test a weapon. The test itself would potentially mimic what might happen if an atomic weapon was detonated in a port, which at that time did seem a real possibility. And so the Montebello Islands were chosen as a maritime location. Does that mean the whole thing could be conducted in complete secrecy?

If it's that remote, would anyone even see the famous mushroom cloud? It was not conducted in complete secrecy. Probably about eight months before the test was due to take place, the Australian government finally did make it public that this was happening. It had been extremely secret before then. And indeed, a lot of the preparations had taken place in utmost secrecy, although there were rather heroic efforts by suspicious journalists in Western Australia to track what on earth was happening off the northwest coast. But ultimately, it was decided, and the British government were never a big fan of informing the

public, but the Australian government did finally allow some media information to go out. It was very, very tightly controlled, of course, and so very little information was actually made available. The various media representatives did lobby the authorities to be allowed to be present in the official party for the first test in 1952 and they were denied. However, they set up a post on the mainland about 90 kilometres or so away from the test site. They actually brought in the very latest technology so that they were able to capture imagery from the test. And it is very difficult to hide a mushroom cloud, particularly, you know, the first test, Operation Hurricane hurricane was a very large bomb it was 25 kilotons

which is 10 kilotons larger than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima so you can imagine it made for a very large mushroom cloud and because of the nature of it it was detonated in the hull of a ship it drew a great deal of seawater upwards as well. So it was a rather spectacular and rather odd-shaped mushroom cloud. It was not strictly mushroom-shaped. And as it broke up, it became sort of S-shaped. But yes, the media did capture the imagery. Now, by this time, by October of 1952, the Australian media were subject to what are known as D notices, defence notices, and these were brought in specifically and with huge pressure

from the British government on the Australian government to bring them in. These were a form of self-censorship that the media organisations became party to and they agreed not to pursue any investigation around the test program. And so really, they were only capturing imagery that could not really be kept hidden. So a mushroom cloud, and whatever scraps of information the British government was willing to share with them, which was actually very, very little. Despite the fact that they were on the mainland watching Operation Hurricane, they did not have access to a lot of real information and they did not pursue real

information because their owners, the media owners and their bosses, were part of a secret committee that imposed this censorship on them. Was it a success in purely scientific terms? Did it work? It did work, yes, it did. And there had been a lot of doubt about whether it would. William Penny, the designer of the British bomb, he had been a central player in the Manhattan Project and he was brilliant. He knew his stuff. He had a brilliant mind. However, the Americans had deliberately kept the British mission away from some of the central knowledge of the Manhattan Project. They had one eye on the future where they wanted to monopolise the technology. And so the British still had a lot of gaps in their knowledge. The correspondence that you see between Winston

Churchill, who by the time of Hurricane had come back to be British Prime Minister, and his atomic bulldog, Lindemann, Lord Cherwell, you can see that there was some doubt that it was actually going to work. It was not really a workable device, though, that could be deployed. It was more a proof of concept. It was a very large device. It was not really fit for loading into an aircraft. As I mentioned, it was intended as a maritime test and it was detonated in the hull of a frigate that was surplus to requirements after the Second World War. So it was really to test the Blue Danube design, which was the name of the design that William Penny had come up with. And in that sense, it was a success, but they knew that to make a deployable nuclear weapon,

they would have to refine the design. And they would also have to, because they had limited access to uranium, and also more particularly to the plutonium that has to be created in a reactor, created in a reactor, they had to make smaller weapons using less pure plutonium-239. So they were already working on a new design, even by the time they detonated Hurricane on the 3rd of October 1952. What was the effect in Australia? Was there anger or was there sort of pride? Was this seen as a British imperial project? There was overwhelming patriotic pride. That was the main emotion. There were very, very few dissenting voices in the early days. So 1952 and then the next series, Operation Totem in 1953,

both of them pre-Maralinga. The general feeling was that this was a very good thing for Australia to be involved in. Robert Menzies, of course, was very much on side. He had considerable motive for wishing to be involved. One of the compelling reasons was that he wanted to shore up Australia's defences in the wake of a devastating war. He wanted to ensure that Australia would have the backing of the United Kingdom if another war loomed. And he also wanted to turn Australia into a nuclear nation itself. Mind you, Britain and America certainly did not want that to happen. And I think Menzies was perhaps a little naive in thinking

that he could just nuclear arm Australia if he gave permission to Britain to test weapons in Australia. And also there were recent discoveries and increasing discoveries of uranium resources in Australia. And also there were recent discoveries and increasing discoveries of uranium resources in Australia. Australia was one of the few countries in the world that had large and accessible quantities of uranium. And uranium, of course, is the raw material for the plutonium that was making these fission weapons. And so initially there was a very large amount of very successful propaganda that positioned the British tests as Australia's contribution to the great Commonwealth of Nations security. And so initially that was how the tone was. And, of course, I mentioned the denotices before.

The media was very, very on side with this. And so a lot of the media coverage reinforced the patriotic tone. Now, that did change, and it's very interesting how it changed over time. So we had Hurricane in 1952, we had Operation Totem in 1953, in which two weapons were exploded in the South Australian desert, which were utterly devastating and caused untold damage to Aboriginal populations and to the countryside. Can I ask you, you say damage to the Aboriginal population, were they killed in the blast? Are we talking about the radioactive effects in the aftermath?

Okay, this is still a bit of an open question, if I can put it like that. There is some anecdotal evidence that some people may have been killed in the blast, but that is unproven. What is much clearer is that one of the effects of the first totem bomb, Totem 1, on the 15th of October 1953 was a phenomenon called the Black Mist. And the Black Mist is still rather mysterious. It wasn't investigated at the time and that makes it very difficult to investigate retrospectively. But the Black Mist is a known phenomenon.

It was a black cloud that detached itself from the main mushroom cloud, Totem 1, and rolled over the countryside. It was kind of a greasy black miasma that rolled towards Aboriginal settlements about 170 kilometres to the northeast of the test site. And there are a large number of Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal people too, but mostly Aboriginal people living in those areas. And they consistently reported the onset of illness, in some cases death, skin conditions, a whole range of health things that happened as a direct result of the black mist, including blindness and those kinds of things. So that is an established fact that was very,

very well established at the later Royal Commission. But the actual composition of the black mist is still open to conjecture. There's a possibility that it contained a radioactive isotope called cobalt-60, which may be the result of a reaction between the bomb and the tower that held it. And the tower that held the bomb assembly contained cobalt-59. And it's possible in the nuclear reaction from the bomb that cobalt-60, which is a very toxic radioactive substance, was created and possibly was a factor in the toxicity of the black mist, but that is not by any means certain. But the area became kind of tainted and people left. And then Maralinga started a couple of tainted and people left and then Maralinga started a couple of years later

and people were actually taken away in cattle trucks and unimaginable torment that was visited upon them. But in 1953, at the time of Operation Totem, the broader Australian population didn't know any of this had happened. The Black Mist did not become public until 1980. So it was a long time before the average Australian knew what was happening. What they also didn't know is that both Hurricane and Operation Totem sent fallout as far away as where I'm sitting now in Townsville on the tropical coast of Australia, thousands of kilometres away. All of the British bomb tests sent fallout in

unpredictable directions, in different directions according to the prevailing winds. And of course, in those days, there were no weather satellites. And so it was very difficult to track the winds and to really understand the weather conditions. And so I would say some were worse than others, but I'd say that every atomic weapons test in Australia reached a population area and probably increased the incidence of cancer and other illnesses as a result. But those early days, people were still very much on site. Listen to Dan Snow's history, talk about atomic tests in Australia. More coming up.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes.

Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. So the first test took place in this little archipelago, these islands. Why were they then taken to Emu Field and then Maralinga? What caused that move?

They wanted a terrestrial test site. They knew even before the Montebello test hurricane in 52, they knew that they wanted a very remote desert test site. In fact, William Penny had visited what later became Emufield on his way to the hurricane test. When he visited it, there was nothing there except a clay pan, a natural phenomenon in the desert, a very flat, straight clay pan. And that's really the reason it was chosen. It was otherwise completely unsuitable. There was no infrastructure. There were no roads.

The railway line was a long way to the south. And so the infrastructure for atomic testing had to be quickly built. Operation Totem were extremely secret tests. They were testing a new type of nuclear fuel, They were testing a new type of nuclear fuel and they were quite concerned that the fuel that they were testing, which had a larger than desirable proportion of plutonium-240, plutonium-239 is the isotope of choice for these weapons, but the British reactors were turning out plutonium fuel with a higher proportion of this other isotope. So they were not sure about the stability of the weapon.

And so they wanted a place that was a long way from human habitation. Now, what they didn't factor in, of course, is that these were the homelands of Aboriginal people. And Aboriginal people at that time, shamefully, in Australian society were not counted in the census, their births and deaths were not recorded, their homelands were unknown, where they stayed, where they travelled, all of those things were not known. And so when Robert Menzies agreed to Emu Field being the site for the terrestrial British tests, he was doing so in great ignorance of the fact that these homelands were filled with people

who were often on the move hunting and moving around, and particularly in October, which was the month of Operation Totem. And there is some reasonably strong, although not confirmed, anecdotal evidence that perhaps some of those people moving around hunting were caught by the Totem bombs and killed outright in the blast. That is a possibility, but as I say, I don't have the definitive proof of that. a possibility. But as I say, I don't have the definitive proof of that. But yeah, there was very little really known about the inhabitants of that area. And the Australian public and the

Australian government were blind to people who lived in that area. So this is what makes Operation Totem particularly tragic, I think. There was one Australian official, Walter McDougall, who was a so-called native patrol officer who had actually worked one of the missions in years past, who was charged with informing the Aboriginal people about the coming bomb test, but he himself did not fully understand and he couldn't understand the nature of these tests and how very dangerous they were going to be. Even the bomb makers themselves did not predict the black mist. And so Walter McDougall had no chance of warning the people to stay out of the way.

So, yeah, it was a sudden arrival of a very toxic and dangerous entity into Aboriginal homelands. So Operation Totem, I think, is still very secret. The British government still retains a lot of the files on this particular test series. And I think it was one of the most shameful events in the whole British test series, which lasted for 12 years. This series of tests in 1953 was absolutely shameful, but the Aboriginal people had no vote. So when did the story start to emerge about what was going on and how did the Australian public change its attitude? Yes.

So then we fast forward to 1956 and this is the year that Maralinga is to be commissioned and it's due to come online in September of 1956. But the British drop on the Australian government, the fact that they want to test sooner than Maralinga is going to be ready because they were working on a hydrogen bomb. Now, the Australian government had already made it clear that they would not countenance the testing of these megaton weapons, hydrogen weapons, on Australian territory. However, the British government wanted to test the fission components of a hydrogen weapon. As you're

probably aware, a certain type of hydrogen weapon anyway, not all of them, but this particular one the British were building, requires a fission detonation to set off the fusion reaction. And so to do that, their only choice really was to go back to Montebello, which they did with Operation Mosaic in May and June of 1956. And they were pretty coy about what they were doing. They didn't fully disclose to the Australian government that this was very linked to the hydrogen bomb program. The hydrogen bomb was ultimately tested in the Pacific

and this was kind of the initial technical work that had to be done to prepare for that test series, Operation Grapple, which happened a bit later in the 50s. So Mosaic G1 in May 1956 was a relatively modest sized weapon. However, in June of 1956, Mosaic G2 was by far the largest atomic weapon detonated by the British in Australia. And that set off alarm bells. Just after detonation, a mining prospector who was working in the Western Australian desert, and he had Geiger counters with him, he detected a sudden, inexplicable large amount of radiation coming up on his Geiger counters. There's a bit

of mystery about exactly what happened next, but somehow or other he rang through and he thought he was speaking to William Penny at Onslow, which is a little town on the Western Australian coast, the nearest port at that time to the Montebello Islands. William Penny wasn't at Mosaic, but anyway, this fellow, the prospector, he spoke to someone about what he detected and somehow or other that information got into the media. So there was quite a big panic because people thought

that the second Mosaic bomb was a nuclear accident. And so the Australian Minister responsible, Howard Beale, Minister for Supply, he had to do a lot of fancy footwork and he had to also behind the scenes demand assurances from the British authorities that G2 was not a nuclear accident. G2 was, it's disputed, it's between 60 and 98 kilotons. So if you can imagine Hiroshima is 15 kilotons, it's at least four times the size and possibly a lot bigger.

And finally, Howard Beale did get the assurances he was looking for and he released a very dramatic media release at midnight one night. He was with a group of journalists at Maralinga at the time. They were inspecting the new site. And people kind of calmed down a bit, but there was still an uneasiness about what was happening, especially as Maralinga was about to get started as well. So in 1956, 1956 was an important year for nuclear testing, but also public understanding and public fears around nuclear testing,

because the Americans were by then, of course, testing hydrogen weapons in the Pacific. And during one of their hydrogen weapons tests, a Japanese fishing boat had strayed into the area, and a Japanese fisherman had died a terrible death from radiation sickness. And this had been huge news around the world. And people started to get really worried. And, of course, you start at that time to see the rise of anti-nuclear protest movements and, you know, the campaign for nuclear disarmament, the Pugwash Conference, which was a group of concerned intellectuals who were worried

about what was happening. You start to see the tide turn after the initial kind of patriotic fervour that surrounded this. And, of course, by then there was an arms race going on as well. The Soviet Union, thanks to the Manhattan Project spies, had tested their own weapon in the late 1940s. And so there was a general sense of unease about what was happening and that certainly came through in Australia.

And so just on the eve of the first series of tests at Maralinga Operation Buffalo, the public was starting to turn and political bipartisan support in Australia collapsed as well. The Labor Party, which had been a supporter of what the British were doing, there was bipartisan support, they withdrew their support in 1956. And so the tide was certainly turning. The Menzies government was just as enthusiastic in its support, because it was doing deals on uranium at the time, and Menzies was getting the accolades

from the British government that he enjoyed. But it was very clear that by the time Maralinga started, people were worried. And then at Maralinga, so September, October of 56, you do start to see a little bit of some of this concern playing out. So an Australian scientist called Hedley Marston, who worked for a scientific organisation called CSIRO, he was an animal, a livestock scientist based in Adelaide. He was commissioned to do some tests on the thyroid of livestock to see if they were taking up this radiation, this fallout that was covering Australia.

And he exceeded his brief. He was only meant to test around Central Australia, but he tested in Adelaide and he tested in a few other places. He was the one who first sounded the alarm that fallout was getting into the school milk program and into the food chain more generally in Australia. Now, the Australian Atomic Weapons Test Safety Committee jumped on Hedley Marston like a ton of bricks, and they censored him and they prevented him from publishing the crucial data that showed that supported his fears. Now, it did turn out later that he may have over enthusiastically interpreted the data that he had received, and he had perhaps extrapolated a little bit too much from the data. However, I think it's

reasonably well understood that, of course, the fallout was getting into the school milk program. Of course it was getting into the meat and other products from rural Australia. So people were starting to get concerned. 1957, Operation Antler was actually the final series of mushroom cloud tests in Australia. And by then, I think the Australian public was becoming more negative and the Menzies government was getting

more concerned about public sentiment, particularly with elections coming up. And there was one election, I think it was probably 61, that they very nearly lost. And I think there was some sensitivity around public concern at that time. Now, although the mushroom clouds finished in 57, other forms of tests continued until 63. And the other forms of tests that continued at Maralinga until 63 were especially toxic, especially dangerous. There were radiological experiments. You might think of them as dirty bombs, suitcase bombs, where they were blowing up assemblies of atomic warheads with conventional explosives to see what would happen.

And as you could well imagine, this was sending toxic plumes for a fair distance from the test site at Maralinga. And a lot of plutonium settled back onto the ground in the form of dust particles or small pieces or was imbued into the towers that held the bomb assemblies. And the British walked away from that mess and left it there with only a cursory. In fact, their attempt at clean-up not only was cursory,

it actually made it worse because it churned a lot of the plutonium into the dust, and dust storms are a bit of a feature of that part of the world. But ultimately whistleblowers and investigative journalists turned up the fact that the British had left the site in this state. And much later, the Australian government had to do something about it. There was a radiological survey in 1984, which initially the guys went there. I've met some of the scientists who were involved in that survey. They were just in their shorts and their boots.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends.

Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. Vikings, Normans, kings and popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. With their Geiger counters, but they started to realise that they were kicking lumps of plutonium with their boots. They quickly had to get their hazmat gear out. And ultimately that survey turned up about 3 million pieces

of plutonium-239 at the site. And as a direct result of that, the Australian government was forced, rather reluctantly, but was forced to call a royal commission, a judicial inquiry into what had happened, not just at Maralinga but at Emu Field and at Montebello Islands. And that was the era of uncovering that had actually started in the 70s with really good investigative journalism and also the brave disclosures of a whistleblower called Avon Hudson

who had been a young airman at the site in the early 60s. And he'd been very worried about the site being handed back to the Indigenous owners without checking its safety. So he did an amazing thing. And that got picked up by journalists. And ultimately, a lot of it was uncovered it took a long time to uncover the whole story and in fact there's probably still more that we don't know but it was an extraordinary sequence of events and to think that it's possible that it might never have been uncovered and people would still be subject to the dangerous radiation from the plutonium at that site. The half-life is 24,000 years of plutonium-239. It's never going to leave the environment.

And we're pretty sure that at the time when Maralinga was not patrolled, when all the fences and signs were taken down, that people probably did collect beautiful rocks from the site. There was nothing to stop them. They're probably emitting their alpha waves right now from their mantelpieces. So that was a great dereliction of duty, certainly by the British, but also by the Australian government who believed the British undertakings at the site was safe without checking until 1984. On that final point, is there a legacy here? Is there a big, important strategic legacy about Australia, Britain, Australia's place within the British Empire, Commonwealth?

Did this help, do you think, to somehow loosen the bonds or was the direction of travel inevitable? It's a very interesting question. I think this story speaks a lot about the peculiar bonds of colonialism and how colonialism distorts the relationship between nations. And Australia, of course, had been part of the British Empire. And because of that, and from my own research in which I have seen

what people have said about the decision-making by both governments at this time was that the British believed that Australia would behave like a colony and therefore would do whatever it wanted them to do. and therefore would do whatever it wanted them to do. And Australia seemed to just accept that it would take whatever the British handed out. And initially the British did promise a lot of nuclear knowledge, research that was coming from these tests, and Australia wanted that. research that was coming from these tests and Australia wanted that. But in the event,

Britain never gave a single bit of nuclear knowledge to any Australian and never intended to. The Secretary of the Atomic Weapons Test Safety Committee, an Australian committee, said that it would not be gentlemanly to ask them for this information, even though they had promised it, but they didn't want to press the case because of the sense that they were the inferior country here. And that's what colonialism tends to do. And I'm not sure that it's completely gone. I mean, 1972, of course, was the advent of the spectacular reforming Whitlam government, the Labor government that came in, and for three years it burned bright, and then it was actually dismissed by the Governor-General, which is still a very sore point in this country. So there was a sense of starting to detach, you know, Australia starting to detach itself from the apron strings at that point,

the Royal Commission certainly was described as a spectacle of national revenge. There was a great deal of feeling against what the British had done at that time, and there still is. There still is a lot. But whether we've completely got rid of the yoke of colonialism, I'm not sure. I'm not sure that we have.

I think that it's still there in the undercurrents and in the way that Australia is perhaps a little bit too deferential to its great and powerful friends. Fascinating that Britain did to Australia what the US had effectively done to Britain in terms of nuclear knowledge and refusing to share and reneging on those agreements. Thank you very much, Liz, for coming on the podcast. Your book's called The Secret of Emu Field, Britain's Forgotten Atomic Tests in Australia. It's such a fascinating story. Thank you very much for coming on. It's a great pleasure, Dan. Thank you. you