Chapter Four

The Bomb in the Outback

The first British nuclear tests in Australia took place on the Montebello Islands, 70 kilometres off the Pilbara coast in Western Australia. Nobody lived there until scientists, engineers, politicians, and sailors turned up, creating a temporary village that would monitor, test, and record the fallout. It was 1952, in the middle of the Korean War, where Australian troops were defending South Korea from Soviet- and Chinese-backed communist forces to the north. No one in the Australian government — or, indeed, the general public — showed any great concern about the British tests. If anything, there was a scent of national pride that the United Kingdom had chosen Australia for the ‘honour’ of testing its bombs. The prevailing view was that these explosions were miles away from where most Australians lived, and they were probably harmless.

On 16 May 1956 the first of a new set of tests — called Mosaic — started in the Montebello Islands. It was the fourth British test, after the first in 1952 and a pair of Totem tests at South Australia’s Emu Field a year later. Australian radio journalist Norman Banks was on HMAS Fremantle, about 12 miles from the blast site, and described the explosion ‘as the most exciting thing I’ve seen in my life’. ‘This is a purely defensive weapon,’ he stressed. ‘The potential enemy, the Reds, have been engaged in a cold war and it’s up to us to make certain they don’t get away from us. We must keep abreast with their atomic development … it is part of the price of preserving the democratic way of life.’

Banks described a clear day with wispy cloud and a strong wind. Everyone aboard was told to close their eyes at the moment of explosion, and Banks described feeling heat on the back of his neck. Then he saw the massive mushroom cloud that travelled from 10,000 to almost 15,000 feet, changing shape to become more like a toadstool, thick at the top, and then more conical in the minutes that followed. The crew of the Australian aircraft that flew into the radioactive cloud to take scientific measurements were quarantined once they landed. No one was to touch the plane’s fuselage, and the air crew had a special exit plan to ensure they made no contact with the outside of the plane. As far as Banks was concerned, he had witnessed something memorable and vitally important.1

There was an official clamouring to declare the test a success. A monitoring station in Canberra did not record any radioactivity from the blast, and the minister responsible for supervising the tests, Howard Beale, gave it his stamp of approval. He declared that there had been no risk to anyone on the Australian mainland, to ships at sea, or to the aircraft used in the tests. And he promised there would be another test in several weeks.

Beale’s confidence was misplaced. Within days, there were reports of increased radioactivity in places as far apart as Cloncurry, in Queensland, and Sydney. A fortnight after the test, a laboratory in New Zealand picked up radioactive particles that were undoubtedly from the Montebello explosion.

A second test was held at the Montebello Islands on 19 June, and this time, after the radioactivity reports from the earlier test, an effort was made to convince Australians that there was no danger. With Menzies overseas, Sir Arthur Fadden was acting prime minister and had the job of reassuring the nation. ‘Both the United Kingdom and Australian governments insist that in all weapons tests the emphasis must be on safety, and the Australian people may therefore be fully assured on this point, not only in relation to past tests, but to any others which may take place,’ he said.2

Unofficially, Fadden had been far less sanguine. ‘What the bloody hell is going on, the cloud is drifting over the mainland?’ he cabled London.3 One other important fact wasn’t revealed at the time: the second bomb was at least 60 kilotons, four times the size of the first, and the biggest atomic device ever exploded in Australia.4 The cloud was seen on the mainland, at mining town Port Hedland, 320 kilometres away, as it rose to 46,000 feet, well above the predicted level of 36,000 feet. The spread of the cloud above the mainland made the government’s reassurances look hollow, especially after rumours started circulating that a miner in the Pilbara, in Western Australia, had picked up high radioactivity readings on his Geiger counter.

Beale was in Maralinga, in central South Australia, to announce a new set of tests, and had to scramble to quell the rumour, which was becoming a story that visiting journalists were keen to report. The official line was that most of the radioactive material had fallen harmlessly into the sea, and the rest was drifting at such a high altitude that it posed no threat. The lessons for the government and the scientists about providing a basic level of assurance to Australians about the size of the tests and their cloud’s likely path were never heeded. Beale and his atomic-minded friends had already moved on. Beale was already lauding the efforts of those who had built a scientific village at Maralinga to accommodate the experts and equipment that would be required to monitor the tests on the proving ground later in 1956. He added that although there was a railhead only 50 miles from the range itself, the place was still so remote that there would be no risk to ‘life and property’. Nothing living would be exposed to the effects of radiation, Beale promised.5 There was no mention of the Indigenous Australian communities in the area. As far as Beale and the government were concerned, they were not part of the plan and not even part of the area.

West Australian author Tom Hungerford offered his own reassurance after a visit to the Maralinga camp, claiming the bombs would harm no one because no one lived there. ‘[T]he aborigines … have long since departed either to a happier hunting ground or to more congenial regions nearer to the sea coast,’ he wrote. ‘As a further precaution, a close contact is kept with missionaries so that no natives on “walk-about” will penetrate the dangerous areas.’6 A camp official or one of Beale’s staff had apparently briefed Hungerford on this misapprehension. The reality was radically different.

What no one was mentioning was what had happened three years earlier, during the first atomic test on the Australian mainland, at Emu Field, about 200 kilometres north of Maralinga, in the western area of South Australia. At Wallatinna, a remote cattle station homestead where many of the Yankunytjatjara community camped, the real story of Indigenous exposure to the atomic explosions could be heard.

Yami Lester was only 11 when he heard a deep and profound rumble through the depths of the ground. Perhaps it was three or four explosions. No one sitting around the morning campfire could be certain. The next day, Yami Lester saw a black cloud low over the horizon, appearing like a mist but moving without wind. It moved slowly, blocking out the sun, blanketing the bush and the ground in an eerie silence. Yami Lester and the family around him were frightened. They had seen nothing like it. Some dug holes to hide in, and Yami Lester jumped in one before the mist rolled over them, rich with the smell of metal and burning, leaving a black oily coating on the bushes.

Several days later, some of the community became violently ill. Yami Lester was sick, and his eyes were sore. It wasn’t certain how many of the community died following the black mist because they kept moving on, as was their way. Yami Lester lost the sight in his right eye. Some time later, his left eye went too. At other places, other communities were exposed. Some became ill. Others later gave birth to children who had significant physical problems. No one seemed to notice.

Prime Minister Menzies told parliament:

If the experiments are not to be conducted in Australia with all our natural advantages for this purpose we are contracting out of the common defence of the free world. No risk is involved in the matter. The greatest risk is that we may become inferior in potential military strength to the potential of the enemy.7

Three years later after the Emu Field test, fewer people were prepared to accept such thin reassurances. Hedley Marston, a celebrated biochemist based in Adelaide, was determined to highlight the risks associated with the tests. Cantankerous, egotistical, fractious, but often right, Marston wrote to his friend Mark Oliphant, one of the physicists who had pioneered nuclear fusion, after the Montebello tests: ‘I am more worried than I can convey about the expensive, quasi-scientific pantomime that is being enacted at Maralinga under the cloak of security: and even more so about the evasive lying that is being indulged [by the] public authorities about the hazard of fall-out …’8

The trade union movement — and some of its more militant members, through the columns of the newspaper Tribune — had become increasingly agitated by the tests. The ACTU’s policy was to oppose nuclear explosions anywhere in the world. The Labor Party’s deputy leader, Arthur Calwell, pledged that the party in government would not allocate any money for nuclear tests.

For those who had followed the federal parliamentary debates about Indigenous Australians, none of this would have been surprising. Paul Hasluck, initially as a Liberal backbencher and then as minister for territories, drew on his experience as a journalist travelling extensively through Western Australia to attempt a different approach to Indigenous issues. He not only focused on their plight but also offered an alternative perspective. ‘When we enter into international discussions, and raise our voice, as we should raise it, our very words are mocked by the thousands of degraded and depressed people who crouch on rubbish heaps throughout the whole of the continent,’ he said six years before the Maralinga tests.9 Finding solutions to this problem was to be debated at a ‘native welfare conference’ in September 1951. Giving Indigenous Australians the vote was one proposal that never got up. Hasluck told parliament later that the contact between whites and Indigenous Australians was so far advanced that ‘two thirds of the Aborigines were de-tribalised’, so segregation was not an option. Instead, the philosophy would be assimilation, which would, in time, mean that all those of mixed or Indigenous Australian blood ‘would live like white Australians’.10 The premise was that Indigenous Australians would come to share in the country’s prosperity and overcome disadvantage and discrimination.

It might have been somewhat of a change from the paternalism of the past, but it did little for human rights and didn’t eliminate the notion of ‘protection’, which would remain for years as part of the system of administering the affairs of Indigenous Australians. Central to ‘protection’ was that each state (and the missions) retained responsibility for administering their local Indigenous Australian communities, which included Aboriginal protection boards. Inevitably, assimilation, let alone Indigenous rights, became a lower-order priority among the states.

Just a year after Hasluck’s announcement, the Australian Council for Civil Liberties released a confronting pamphlet that documented the health and housing challenges faced by Indigenous Australians in the outback. These were not idle issues that could be solved with a handout: leprosy, tuberculosis, and venereal disease were rife. Housing conditions and nutrition were so poor that diseases that had been common in the nineteenth century, such as scurvy and beri-beri, were prevalent.11 The evidence was real, but the discussion was muted. Other than a vigorous exchange of letters in the West Australian press, the pamphlet received little coverage.

Although the federal government decided in 1953 to fund the missions so they could take responsibility for improving Indigenous health and education, there was still no measurable improvement in their quality of life. And when the United Kingdom came calling on Prime Minister Menzies to host the nuclear tests, there was no equivocation — even when the tests were to be held on Indigenous Australians’ reserves. No one asked those communities if they wanted a nuclear bomb exploded on their homelands.

The vast, apparently uninhabited areas of the outback were considered safe and appropriate for such tests. Britain was so keen on Maralinga that it asked Menzies in 1954 to make it the permanent testing site, and Menzies agreed. Maralinga was considered a place far beyond the boundaries of any kind of settlement. It seemed to be days away from anywhere, a hot, dry, inhospitable place that was unable to sustain a settled population. In short, it was an ideal atomic testing ground. Or it was if you believed that the movements of radioactive clouds were predictable and no one lived anywhere nearby.

Maralinga was 1,000 kilometres north of Adelaide, a long drive on some difficult tracks but not completely isolated. And as some scientists soon started to work out, the winds that blew through the area could move the atomic cloud a lot closer to where people lived than they had originally thought. What no one really considered was the way Indigenous Australians moved through the area, crisscrossing the region in search of food and shelter, as they had always done. The Indigenous Australians were the only people most likely to be directly affected by any atomic fallout. No one — not the British scientists, not the politicians, and no one on the ground — had any idea how many communities were out there in that flat, red place where the bombs were going to go off.

There was one man at the start of the tests who had the job of keeping an eye on the Indigenous Australian communities. He was Walter MacDougall, a former missionary from Melbourne, and he had been given the role of patrol officer in the region. MacDougall had been educated at Scotch College in Launceston and then its equivalent in Melbourne, but he was anything but a privileged young man. He worked on a mission in the Kimberley in Western Australia, where he honed his outdoor skills and began to develop an affinity with the local Indigenous communities.

MacDougall could be crotchety and combative, but he was also shrewd and resourceful. He started to pick up some language in 1940 when he moved to the Ernabella mission, in the north-west corner of South Australia, where he was dealing with the Pitjantjatjara people. MacDougall was keen to enlist for World War II but was ruled out by a rifle accident that badly damaged his right hand. He went back to Melbourne and worked with army transport, driving trucks between Alice Springs and Darwin. After the war and a stint back at Ernabella, MacDougall was employed by the Weapons Research Establishment at Woomera, South Australia, where guided missile testing was being conducted, with the brief of controlling any impact the testing had on the ‘habits of Aborigines and any areas of special interest to them’.12

MacDougall was also given the grand and patrician title of Protector of South Australian Aborigines, which meant he had two bosses: the Aborigines Protection Board and the Woomera superintendent. The implied scale of his job title was only exceeded by the distance he had to travel to do it. Yet MacDougall had to wait three years before he was given a vehicle to cover his patch. Frustrated, he told his bosses that a camel might be the only solution.

His lack of mobility failed to dampen MacDougall’s willingness to work with local communities and to try to understand how and where they lived. One particular site, at Ooldea, illustrated just how hard it was to know how many Indigenous Australians there were and where they were. In 1919 Daisy Bates had begun working with local groups there, but in 1933 the United Aboriginal Missions set up a mission that provided rations for visiting communities. It also offered dormitories where local children were unsuccessfully encouraged to abandon their language and culture.13 The location was important: Ooldea was on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain and the Great Victoria Desert. Ooldea’s fresh water made it an important place both for Indigenous Australians — it was a meeting place, lying at the intersection of a number of communities, including the Pila Nguru people to the north and north-west — and for whites, who established a station nearby for the Trans-Australian Railway that ran from Port Augusta to Perth.

The railway and the missions, including Ooldea, changed the patterns of Indigenous Australians’ migration. Populations shifted and moved. Old migration paths were altered. By 1952, when the mission closed, the Indigenous Australians had dispersed. Some went 140 kilometres south, to Yalata station, closer to the coast, but it was impossible to know if the lands that were left — and which became the nuclear testing grounds — were in fact ‘uninhabited wastelands’.14 This was now ostensibly MacDougall’s job: to find out just how many Indigenous Australians might be in the vicinity of the Woomera rocket range and, later, the test sites.

After undertaking a patrol in 1952 that covered 3,485 kilometres and took him into an area in the southern part of the Central Reserve that was a vast 155,399 square kilometres, MacDougall admitted he was mystified about how many Indigenous Australians were in the huge area. ‘Owing to the gradual drift South, which I believe has been going on for hundreds of years almost imperceptibly, but has accelerated when white contacts occur, it is difficult to determine the boundaries of tribal country,’ he wrote in his official report.15 By any measure, it was an impossible task. His job inevitably became something more practical: trying to keep Indigenous Australians safe, however many there were and wherever they were.

MacDougall had no doubt that the nuclear tests were making an important contribution to world security. And he saw the best way of achieving his task of keeping the Indigenous Australians safe from the tests as threefold: reconnaissance, census, and vigilance. His approach was to try to find out where the Indigenous Australians were, and — if they were in potential danger — to find incentives to lure them away from risks. If that didn’t work, MacDougall would intervene directly — by withholding rations, manipulating Indigenous Australians’ beliefs, and directly intercepting their movements.16

The rations were a strong incentive for Indigenous Australians to turn up at some central locations, such as Ooldea, where food was part of the mission’s regular offering. Finding ways to end rationing would remove an incentive for the communities to move in and around danger zones, MacDougall believed. He thought some local communities had given him a special place in their community, a nominal membership that afforded him some special insights in to their thinking and culture. MacDougall wanted to use those insights to help move the Indigenous Australians out of danger. He described it as using ‘their own beliefs and fears of invisible spirits and invisible avengers … [to] convince them that the area is no safe place for them’.17 The power of this approach grew once the stories started to circulate about the first tests at Emu Field in 1953, and what would become known among the locals as the ‘poison’.

The final element of MacDougall’s strategy was to prevent the former Ooldean community from reconnecting with their former lands. He had tried to recover the old spiritual elements from the site and create some new elements at Yalata, but members of the community drifted back there, risking exposure to any bomb. MacDougall decided to establish a series of ration points around Yalata, which enabled the communities to continue their migratory existence and have access to some rations, while remaining connected to the land.18 This didn’t happen until 1955, however, when the first of the Maralinga bombs was not that far away. And MacDougall was just one man.

A.P. Elkin was an Anglican minister and the first chair of anthropology at the University of Sydney. He studied in London and did extensive fieldwork among the Kimberley communities in Western Australia. Elkin considered himself a campaigner for Indigenous Australians’ social justice, and shared Hasluck’s faith in assimilation. But his views, by modern standards, were painfully short-sighted. In 1939 he had advised the then interior minister, Jack McEwen, about Indigenous issues, and was well connected to the Canberra mandarins. When The Sydney Morning Herald was searching for someone to write a long article on the history of Indigenous Australians for its royal tour souvenir in 1954, it chose Elkin. Australia, he wrote, had moved on from:

… protesting against this atrocity or that injustice, or against some outrageous treatment of aborigines … about assimilation and citizenship and about the best methods of attaining these and other objectives … Indeed, today, as far as legislation goes, there is not much to be done: the problem is mainly one of personal relations and adjustment. This includes a two-way process between the aborigines and ourselves.

When discussions started about someone to help MacDougall, Elkin was approached and nominated one of his former Sydney University students, Robert Macaulay. While the appointment was recognition that MacDougall could not do the job alone, it looked suspiciously like window-dressing. It seemed implausible that one other man could make a significant difference to either determining Indigenous Australians’ numbers or keeping them safe. That suspicion only grew when Macaulay’s inexperience was revealed.

Macaulay was only 23. He had gone to the University of Sydney on a Commonwealth scholarship, and had studied two years of ancient history before switching to anthropology. The anthropology course was still in its early phase — third-year undergraduates could study a term of what was called ‘Aboriginal language structure’, but it was of little practical use for those working in the field. And Macaulay hadn’t enrolled in that subject. In fact, Macaulay wasn’t even certain what he would do with his degree.

Elkin’s intervention changed all that. Macaulay would be employed by the Department of Supply, which had overall government control of the tests. He understood that part of his brief was ‘to take measures as you deem practicable and necessary to prevent any natives suffering physical harm from scientific tests’.19 Macaulay would leave his fiancée, Jean, behind in Sydney. He had a driver’s licence but had never owned a car. Macaulay was uncertain if the official policy for dealing with Indigenous Australians was ‘assimilation’ or ‘integration’ — both words were bandied about, yet they appeared to mean different things to different people.

Macaulay was interested in Indigenous Australians’ extended kinship systems, their mythology, and their ability to survive in the desert.20 But he had had no previous contact with traditional communities, and he was about to work with a man he had never met, thrown into an inhospitable tract of 1 million square kilometres to try to protect communities of people whose language he couldn’t speak.

Macaulay was appointed as a native patrol officer and given the same salary at MacDougall. He arrived at the Giles Weather Station on 31 August 1956, ten days before the first scheduled blast at Maralinga. Whatever MacDougall knew about the looming nuclear tests was not communicated to his new colleague. And Macaulay’s employment contract contained no mention of the Maralinga tests.

*

Frank Beaurepaire’s regular barber was at the stately Windsor Hotel, in Spring Street, Melbourne. He walked there around lunchtime on Tuesday 29 May 1956, for his usual trim. Sir Frank had invited a long-time friend, Sir George Holland, who was president of the Returned Sailors’ Soldiers’ and Airmen’s Imperial League of Australia, to have lunch with him at the Windsor.

Sir Frank’s star was in the ascendant — again. In August he was set to return to the lord mayoralty he had held 14 years earlier, and to become the first former Olympian to be the host city mayor of the Games. There couldn’t have been a finer way for Sir Frank to cap off his stellar career as a sportsman, as a businessman, and as an agitator for change in the city he called home. The two other men who had been part of that winning bid in Rome seven years earlier — Raymond Connelly and James Disney (both of them knighted and former lord mayors) — had both passed away. Sir Frank had also seen off some of his rivals, men who had taken a conventional, even staid approach to Melbourne’s evolution. They hadn’t shared Sir Frank’s vision for an energetic, modern city, nor for his grand obsession with Melbourne hosting the Games. This had been, in many ways, his purpose in life. One report enthusiastically described Sir Frank as a ‘friendly little man who shuns the limelight [and] sidesteps publicity’, which was only partly true — he was indeed a friendly little man.21

Sir Frank settled into the chair and started joking with the barber. It was just another appointment — and then something went wrong. Sir Frank slumped forward in the chair. The barber tried to help, a passing doctor excused himself because he was a surgeon and claimed he couldn’t be of any use, and then an ambulance was called. But it was all too late. Moments later Sir George Holland walked through the barber’s door and saw his old friend stricken by a cardiac arrest. Sir Frank Beaurepaire was dead, aged 65.

Sir Frank, whose health had steadily deteriorated in the previous few years, had one final gesture in store: a donation of £15,000 to build change rooms and showers at Albert Park, as part of a memorial to athletes who had died in World War II and the Korean War. Work had already started on the building, and Sir Frank was due to lay the foundation stone on 10 June.22 He had also pledged £200,000 to improve the University of Melbourne’s sporting facilities, the biggest donation in the institution’s history. The largesse was impressive, but it put a significant strain on his family’s finances and forced his son Ian to sell a big parcel of shares in Olympic Tyre & Rubber.23

The responses to Sir Frank’s death came from across the political spectrum, and expressed widespread admiration for his achievements. Acting prime minister Sir Arthur Fadden crystallised the sense of loss at such an important time. ‘The tragedy is that the culmination of his dreams of seeing Australia as host to the Olympics will not be realised,’ Fadden said.24 For a city about to host the Games to lose its greatest champion was a sombre moment indeed.

*

In 1956 the standard dinner for most Australian families was meat and vegetables. Cutlets, chops, sausages, and stews were the proteins on the plate. It was all very well for Melbourne to think of itself as a ‘cosmopolitan’ city, but the reality, when it came to food, fell some way short. How would the Olympic host families cater for their international visitors when their tastes were expected to be so different? Should hostesses offer something uniquely Australian? One cooking expert suggested damper, another creamed crayfish with mushrooms, another a traditional but improved roast lamb, and another a meringue shell filled with homemade ice cream, passionfruit, and cream.25 These offerings used some distinctive local ingredients, to be sure, but what if visitors really didn’t like them?

This crisis of kitchen confidence was addressed on the day after Sir Frank’s death, when the principal of Melbourne’s prestigious culinary training college, the William Angliss Food Trades School, spoke to the Travel League of Victoria. Mr H.E. West wanted to reassure his audience that Australia had such a bounty of produce that no one, neither hostess nor continental visitor, should have any fear about what to put on the table. European immigrants had already made a significant contribution to the range of vegetables and the variety of herbs on the national dinner plate. This great food was complemented by a natural bounty of fruit, fish, cheese, and meat. ‘Truly we have a land which is running over with milk and honey,’ Mr West gushed. ‘Just as important, at no time in the recorded history of man has the ordinary fellow on the street or the land had more of the means of exchange to partake of this abundance of nutritional wealth.’ He urged families who were hosting Olympic visitors to ‘not be ashamed of your Australian garnered processed foods’.

There were traps to be avoided: Mr West suggested Olympic hosts avoid cooking vegetables in the morning to be served hot at the evening meal, or expect ‘browned up boiled meat’ to taste like a roast. William Angliss would also help potential hosts with a series of demonstrations in September of dishes that were popular in Europe and the ‘Near East’. ‘The purpose is to help prepare for the visitor who because of language difficulties may become a little homesick,’ Mr West explained.26

When the time came, 90 ‘hostesses’ — including three men — turned up to the first class to find out what they should offer their guests. The courses were run by an accredited chef over several weeks, and showed the hostesses how to prepare, cook, and serve the kind of exotic fare that was far removed from what they were used to. There were instructions on how to plan a buffet to take the strain out of hostessing, how to prepare and decorate a turkey and ham, and then a menu that included a consommé with marrow dumplings, the ‘king of savouries’, oyster cream, followed by Queensland barramundi with a piquant sauce ravigote and then a Viennese puff pastry.27 This was continental fare with flair, and superior to what was on offer in many Melbourne restaurants. It sounded more appetising than what the Olympic athletes were going to get.

The Olympic Organising Committee had its own catering committee, which was supposed to finding international cooks for the athletes’ village — and ideally who would then take jobs in Melbourne restaurants. The committee convened in August 1954, just a little more than two years before the Games. As it turned out, this wasn’t enough time to get the knives, forks, chopsticks, and spoons in order.

There was a flurry of anxiety in the committee’s first few meetings about how it was going to find cooks with the required skills. Early attempts at solving the problem involved a complicated process whereby the Department of Immigration vetted potential cooks in their country of origin. The strategy failed to deliver: nine months out from the Games, the committee admitted that the cooks who had arrived from overseas were ‘not satisfactory’.28

The scale of the problem wasn’t just about the shortage of cooks — the cuisine they cooked was also an issue. The plan for the athletes’ village dining was based on 11 distinct dietary groups across 18,000 daily meals. That translated into a range of offerings, from prawn fritters, to curry, to kangaroo tail soup. The actual daily amounts were calculated to the nearest ounce — 9 pounds and 5 ounces, to be precise, of food (and apparently drink) for every athlete, every day. And although no one in Victoria could get an alcoholic drink without a meal after 6 pm, athletes in the village would get a beer or wine, as long as it was part of their national diet.29

This highly detailed analysis of athletes’ dietary needs was an understated attempt at fairness after the Americans had sent 15,000 chocolate bars to their athletes and flew fresh bread daily to London for the 1948 Olympics.30 London had been subject to post-war rationing, but, even so, this was not an example Melbourne wanted to emulate.

As organised as the menus were, they still needed someone to cook them. After the initial strategy failed, the committee decided to send Melbourne hotelier Tom Carlyon to interview cooks in England, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Austria, France, and Greece. The department of immigration’s role was to help smooth over any hurdles. Carlyon left Melbourne with a shopping list of 110 cooks.

The early reports were promising. Carlyon’s trip cost a whopping £1,866, but he did find some decent recruits. The committee did the maths, dividing the cost of the trip by Carlyon’s number of cooks, and found that the recruitment of each cook cost £15. This was ‘less than the cost of the return fare of a cook from Brisbane to Melbourne but th[e] quality of the cooks is infinitely greater than could have been gained elsewhere in Australia’, the committee was told.31

The arithmetic might have been correct, but it represented only a partial solution, because there were still significant shortfalls. There were plenty of European cooks, but what about everyone else? The Games were expected to have the highest percentage of Asian athletes of any Olympics to date, and no one had yet been hired to cook Asian food. There was a palpable sense of what was either overconfidence or the catering equivalent of whistling in the dark.

Plans to engage overseas visitors were progressing with more certainty, even when the initiative came from the community rather than an Olympic bureaucrat. A local schoolteacher and his wife had gone on holiday to Denmark in 1955 and seen a tourist program called ‘Meet the Danes’. It became the inspiration for Melbourne’s ‘Meet the Australian’, which aimed to serve any tourist who was interested in meeting a local family, or visiting a local business, or spending time in a nearby tourist destinations. Farmers, students, artists, and professional men and women were all matched with a local volunteer who could help them. Some 8,000 posters with ‘Meet the Australian’ across a background of two hands clasped together circulated across the city, and 5,000 car stickers were handed out. There were another 5,000 ‘courtesy badges’ that carried the word ‘visitor’ to alert locals to the strangers in their midst, to whom they could offer help.32 It was a reminder that it might be Melbourne’s Olympics, but the nation’s hospitality was on display too.