The atomic years
Dread defines Australia’s nuclear enthusiasm
THE LONG SHADOW OF MENZIES
Menzies’ attitude to foreign relations, said Donald Horne in his famous 1964 analysis, The Lucky Country, was to a large extent nostalgic, for he was nostalgic for the past and regretted the direction Australia took in the 1960s. Menzies failed to have a massive impact on Australia’s foreign relations, though he served for two years, 1960–61, while prime minister, as Minister for External Affairs.
The development of the Department of External Affairs from the late 1930s, and the growing importance of Australia’s relationship with the United States and therefore of the Washington embassy after 1939, combined to shift the centre of gravity in Australian foreign policy away from Menzies, who was so frankly and intensely a statesman of Empire. Horne, Bulletin editor and writer of the massively successful classic, The Lucky Country, argued that Menzies was more a witness than a participant in his long-running government’s decisions in foreign and defence policy—from the commitment of troops to Korea to the formulation and development of the Colombo Plan, under which Asian students, as a means of winning them over to the West rather than Communism, were brought to White Australia to study. Surprisingly, at first Menzies saw the invasion of South Korea by the North as a sideshow, and Australia’s commitment of troops to Korea was engineered by External Affairs minister Percy Spender after he learned that the United Kingdom was about to announce its own military commitment. Menzies was on a ship in the Atlantic at the time and learned of the decision when he arrived in the United States. He quickly recognised the political and diplomatic advantages flowing from Spender’s initiative.
In June 1950, Menzies had sent a squadron of Canberra bombers to Singapore because Chinese Communist guerrillas were operating in Malaya, and he saw this as another wing of Communist advance in Asia, one affecting Britain’s place in Malaya, which he considered crucial to Australia’s security. But he was not enthusiastic for the ANZUS Treaty. He believed that the United States was most unlikely to allow itself to become entangled in such a pact, and commented in a cable to Artie Fadden from Washington in 1950: ‘Tell Percy Spender that the Pacific Pact is not at present on the map because the Americans are uneasy about the stability of most Asiatic countries. We do not need a pact with America. They are already overwhelmingly friendly to us.’ Menzies was surprised at Spender’s ultimate success in getting the Americans to sign.
Britain’s collaboration on nuclear matters with the United States in 1957 brought an end to the sharing of British and Australian nuclear ambitions. Britain’s attempt to enter the European Economic Community in 1961–63 raised questions about the future of the Commonwealth and sparked a debate in Australia about relations with Britain and about national identity generally. Menzies adopted a very disgruntled attitude towards Britain’s attempt to enter Europe. He was also disturbed at the speed with which Britain was relinquishing its imperial responsibilities. He did not like a new Commonwealth that included both republics and dark faces. Menzies was appalled and offended when British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan asked India’s Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, rather than Menzies to occupy the chair at the 1961 Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference.
It was at this conference that South Africa was forced to resign from the Commonwealth, a process that Menzies opposed. The formal question asked at the conference was now that South Africa had at referendum voted to become a republic, was its application to stay in the Commonwealth acceptable? But the sub-question was whether the nation could stay in the Commonwealth while pursuing its racial policy of apartheid. Menzies worked with Macmillan on a series of drafts to find the acceptable formula that would keep the Commonwealth intact. The final statement expressed ‘deep concern’ about the effect of South Africa’s racist policies on the Commonwealth, ‘which is itself a multi-racial association of peoples’. South Africa in any case withdrew its application to stay and Menzies regretted that South Africa had been, in his opinion, ‘pushed out’. He began to feel that the balance of power had changed so much that his own views were becoming irrelevant.
A year later, though, he sanctioned the commitment of troops to Vietnam, a conflict in which Britain was not involved, and in 1965 appointed an Australian, his former Minister for External Affairs, Richard Casey, as Governor-General. He purchased the American F-111A jet on the grounds that although he was British ‘to the bootheels’ his main duty was to ‘the safety of my country’.
So it seems true that Menzies was emotionally uncertain about where the world was now, and the questions of world power, and anxious that it should remain in the hands of the British Empire. In the Australian Parliament in 1948 he said, ‘If we can in some ways—not, of course, in all ways—learn to think of the British Empire as a unit, and plan its development so that there will be the maximum encouragement and use of all its resources, the possibilities are still enormous.’ He opposed both Indian independence (achieved in 1947) and its membership of the Commonwealth as a republic. George VI seemed more willing to accommodate the Indian arrangement than Menzies, and the King complained to the Canadian External Affairs minister, Lester Pearson, about the then Australian Opposition leader’s criticisms of the independence of India. What Menzies professed to find offensive about the so-called London Declaration by the prime ministers of the Commonwealth in 1949, which had permitted non-dominion members to remain in the Commonwealth, was the idea that membership of the Commonwealth required no personal allegiance to the King. Menzies had been a harsh critic, too, of the Chifley government’s sympathy with the Indonesian nationalists, arguing that to support their war against the Dutch was suicidal behaviour on Australia’s part.
He was not embarrassed to be frank about race. Broken Hill-born Sir Walter Crocker, who served as High Commissioner and ambassador to countries as diverse as India, Indonesia, Italy, Uganda and Kenya, wrote in 1955, ‘Menzies is anti-Asian; particularly anti-Indian . . . he just can’t help it.’ In that same year, the External Affairs minister, Casey, entertained the idea of Australian participation in the Bandung Conference of African and Asian nations. Of Egyptians, who would give the British Empire some trouble, Menzies asserted that they were ‘a dangerous lot of backward adolescents’. After a clash with Nehru in the United Nations in 1960, Menzies wrote to his wife that, ‘All the primitive came out in him [Nehru].’ Deakin’s mental and spiritual openness to Asia was far removed from Menzies’ dismissiveness. Many members of his Cabinet, however, were aware of the need to foster a productive relationship with Asia, even though they saw Asian–Australian relationships almost exclusively within the parameters of the Cold War.
Throughout the 1950s, Spender and Casey, not Menzies, were the architects of the diplomatic engagement in Asia. Menzies was more interested in planning for World War III, and he consequently focused in the early 1950s on the military commitment that Australia might make to the Middle East in the event of a global conflict with the Soviet Union. For he believed that the war with the USSR would be won or lost in Europe and the Middle East, not in Asia.
It was Liberals such as Casey and Spender (the latter was the son of an itinerant Paddington locksmith, and was a brilliant lawyer and a surfer and married to a crime writer) who, as well as recognising the geopolitical reality of where Australia was located, led the process to the signing of the ANZUS Treaty. Meanwhile Black Jack McEwen, leader of the Country Party, a successful soldier settler who had worked on the wharves to raise money for his farm, and a future prime minister for a little over a month after the drowning of Harold Holt, was the champion of the 1957 trade agreement with Japan. Sydney lawyer Garfield Barwick and his Department of External Affairs were the drivers of Australia’s restrained and successful response to Indonesia’s ‘confrontation’ of Malaysia in 1963–66, when Indonesian troops captured and were then driven out of Brunei by Australian and New Zealand forces.
Perhaps Menzies’ most important contribution to Australian foreign policy was to allow ministers such as Spender, McEwen and Barwick, as well as Casey and Hasluck, to exercise their own talents while he remained open to reasonable argument. In 1948, writing in the British journal The Listener, he had complained that ‘of recent years there has grown up a queer anxiety to avoid any suggestion of an Empire bloc. As somebody recently said to me, “We must not act too much in concert at these conferences, because we shall be accused of ‘ganging up’ and of Imperialism.” My comment is, “Imperialism indeed, and what of it? Are we to give up causes and associations and the superb family instinct which seems to us to be vital to our progress and the development of our common assets just because some propagandist chooses to say, ‘Yah! Imperialism!’ ”’
Accordingly, Menzies’ greatest influence was in the British relationship, which became less important to Australia in the last years of his prime ministership, 1963–66. ‘All I need say,’ Menzies had said in 1949, delineating the twin and in some cases divided loyalties of Australia, ‘is that Australia is British. It has a great and tried and common family allegiance under the Crown. But Australia knows, and so do the Communists, that the closest concert between the United States and the Commonwealth is vital to the common defence. We will work incessantly to strengthen this great association, just as the Communist powers and their overseas friends will work incessantly to divide and destroy us.’
Through his prime ministerships and afterwards, Menzies remained what one writer called ‘an important figure in Labor demonology’. He was seen as appeaser of Mussolini and of Hitler, of both of whose early regimes he was on record as being an admirer, and left-wing complaints continued with the ‘Pig Iron Bob’ affair in 1938 that delivered ore to Japan. His enemies depicted him as being the likely head of a Vichy-style regime in the event of a Japanese occupation of Australia. Again—according to this depiction of Menzies—he had neglected Japanese threats to Australia by sending Australian forces to the northern hemisphere to defend British interests. About World War II, the historian John McCarthy says that Menzies was ‘the leader of a government which was steadily denuding the state of its power to resist an attacker’.
In the 1950s, runs the argument of those who abhorred him, he sought to turn Australia into a police state by attempting to ban the Communist Party. Though he avoided World War I service, he was a warmonger during the Cold War. In 1954 he engineered the defection of the Soviet spy Vladimir Petrov, and thus stole the subsequent federal election. He allowed the British government to drop atomic bombs in Australia, an expression of his subservience to the Empire, and a peril to Australian servicemen, desert Aboriginal people, and even to the Australian populace.
While continuing to profess loyalty to Britain, he hypocritically signed the ANZUS Treaty, framed in late 1951, coming into force in 1952. Then—to glide into another decade—in 1965 he lied about having received a request from South Vietnam for support, and committed troops to Vietnam to appease his American masters. Yet when the new monarch, Elizabeth II, had visited Australia in 1954 she had shed some of her own glamour and augustness on Menzies as well, and he stood praising her as a subject should, the very incarnation of British Australianness.
THE CANAL
Menzies’ engagement in the Suez Crisis in 1956 would be condemned by diplomat Owen Harries on the usual terms ‘that Menzies was not seeing things in terms of Australian interests and policy’. According to Harries, Menzies was seized by the notion popular in his youth, but discarded for over thirty years, of an Empire-wide foreign policy, with himself as one of its statesmen. But in connection with his apparently blundering intervention in the Suez Crisis, when Colonel Gamal Nasser, President of Egypt, ‘seized’ the Suez Canal in 1956, some would argue that Menzies’ reaction had to do with Australia’s nuclear ambitions, which could only be pursued in partnership with the United Kingdom, and that it was thus not blind loyalty on the part of the Anglophile Menzies, but the ambitions of a Cold War patriot. The Menzies government was focused on China, not Suez. The British Joint Planning Committee Paper submitted to the British Cabinet in 1956 a paper called ‘The Strategic Basis of Australian Defence Policy’, describing the Australian dilemma: ‘a geologically isolated small power with limited manpower and resources . . . she must relate her defence policy and planning to the global strategy of the Western powers and must be prepared to contribute to the implementation of this strategy’.
The Australians had received news of the plan for a British nuclear capability in the Far East two days before Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal and took control of it away from France and Britain. But Nasser did not close the Canal to shipping, rather waiting for a resolution by way of an international London Conference. Menzies was summoned to London and asked by the British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, to go to Egypt as chairman of a five-nation committee, and to talk sense into Nasser. The invitation appealed not only to Menzies’ vanity as a statesman but also as a mission of global importance. He declared before leaving for Egypt that Colonel Nasser’s actions had created the most serious crisis since World War II, exacerbated by the fact that the Soviet Union was ready to align itself with Egypt. When he arrived in Egypt, Menzies told a young journalist that military action against Nasser would split the Western world, and the journalist, Keith Kyle, thought the observation very sensible. But before he left for Egypt, Menzies had made a speech about ultimate military force being deployed, and Eden, to the great resentment of the BBC, had forced the broadcaster to transmit the interview as part of his own campaign for a British invasion of Egypt. The speech made Menzies’ Minister for External Affairs, Casey, who had some knowledge of Arab countries, very unhappy, as it did another leading Liberal, Billy McMahon. McMahon declared he could not see why it was wrong for Egypt to take the Canal back as long as Nasser didn’t close it. In a telephone hook-up, Menzies’ ministers advised him not to lead the mission. Their dissent was leaked to the media and embarrassed British Prime Minister Eden.
Menzies’ mission landed at Cairo airport late on 2 September. He was greeted at the bottom of the plane’s stairs by a scrum of press, foreign and Egyptian. As he landed and made his press statement, throughout Cairo there had been demonstrations against the British. Houses were burned and a Canadian trade commissioner had been killed, and the cry that raged through the streets was ‘Get out, British!’ Western attitudes such as Menzies’ earlier statement that the Egyptians were not capable of running their own country fed into the sense of grievance. Again, Menzies himself wrote, ‘These Gyppos are a dangerous lot of backward adolescents, mouthing the slogans of democracy.’ In that atmosphere, he and his commission were driven to Nasser’s headquarters.
Nasser was a charismatic leader with visionary plans for Egypt. His idea of the Allied success at El Alamein in 1942 (not that he wanted Rommel in Egypt either) was diametrically opposed to that of Menzies and Churchill, since in his view it had enabled Britain to impose its will on the weak King Farouk and to maintain control of the Canal. Israel’s military victory in 1948 over encircling Arab nations in the Sinai angered Nasser and other military men in Egypt because they had fought with gimcrack weaponry underprovided by Farouk’s corrupt family. Nasser had overthrown Farouk in 1952.
On the evening of their first meeting, Nasser impressed Menzies, but when Menzies asked that the canal be placed in the hands of an international body, Nasser ultimately refused, seeing such a body as continuing ‘collective imperialism’. He referred to Menzies privately as ‘that Australian mule’, and over the next few days would often leave Menzies confused as to his manners and intentions. He did not guess anything regarding Menzies’ desire for nuclear weaponry.
Even though Casey had warned Menzies his mission to Cairo would fail, Menzies always felt President Dwight D. Eisenhower undermined him during the meetings by saying the United States would not go to war over the issue, thus making it easier for Nasser to reject him and then give his urbane apologies and depart for Alexandria to visit his family. Eisenhower, said Menzies, had undermined British prestige. ‘It’s apparently not fashionable to speak of prestige,’ he declared with what by later standards would seem a leap of logic, ‘but the fact remains that peace in the world and the whole authority of the charter of the United Nations alike require that the British Commonwealth and in particular its greatest and most experienced member, the United Kingdom, should retain power, prestige and moral influence.’
There is some evidence that Nasser’s refusal was the result Eden wanted, for that made it possible for France, Britain and Israel to invade Egypt—in late October in Israel’s case, followed by France and Britain in early November, supposedly as peacekeepers but in fact as canal reacquirers. Under torrents of international outrage, including from America, an armistice was signed within days, despite the success of the Israelis, French and the British. This was a sign that Britain could use its force only conditionally, that what Menzies called the ‘prestige’ had passed to the United States. By overreaching, Eden had helped make this happen.
So, was Menzies a statesman or a stooge? Was he driven by a hard-headed concern about national security or by reflex imperial sentiment? Many historians argue that Australia’s regional interests depended on the Middle East. The sea route through the Suez Canal had long been a lifeline of the Empire and thus of Australia. So was there really a ‘Britain first’/‘Australia first’ polarity in Menzies?
Menzies acknowledged the geopolitical reality of Australia’s situation with visits to Asia, particularly one in 1957 that involved six days in Japan with Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, a three-day visit to Thailand where he spoke about Australia’s South-east Asia Treaty Organization ties, and an address to the Philippine Congress in Manila.
In the early 1950s Menzies pursued Australian economic policies that were detrimental to British and Commonwealth interests. He took his party to the polls in 1949 on a policy of abolishing petrol rationing, against the wishes of the British government, who wanted to preserve the scarce US dollar supplies of the sterling bloc, an alliance of Commonwealth countries including Australia that merged in a sort of currency fortress to protect the value of the pound sterling against all other currencies. The Menzies government came to see Australia’s economic interests as ‘irreconcilable with membership of a discriminatory sterling area’, and he favoured the incorporation of the sterling countries into a multilateral economic order led by the United States.
And when the risk of global war diminished and the Asian region became an arena of Communist advances, Australia paid more attention to that, and even Menzies retreated from the idea that the Middle East would be a region of Australian military endeavour. Even in the case of Malaya, he sent troops in 1955 to battle Chinese Communists, but only after he became alarmed by the French defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese Communists in Indochina.
Menzies had no doubt that Armageddon was coming, but Australia’s spending on national security (as by governments before World War II and in more modern times) was nowhere near as fulsome as the rhetoric. Despite the introduction of compulsory national service, there was no mobilisation of the economy for the imminence of war. Curtin and Chifley had mobilised the economy in a way that left the electorate ultimately disgruntled, and had—in Chifley’s case in particular—affronted Menzies’ ‘forgotten people’, his constituency. Such mobilisation and the dourness it introduced into life was what Menzies had promised to put an end to when elected in 1949. The desires of manufacturers and the public were not to be dragged away from the purchase of goods into the building of a large army, air force or navy.
Despite that, Menzies was haunted by Australia’s lack of preparation for World War II. As a result, from 1951, nearly all eighteen-year-old males were required to register for national service training of fourteen weeks and to serve a further forty-two days in the citizen military forces over three years. It was a universal scheme but there were exemptions. University students were expected to serve during a designated period between the first and second years of their study, but ministers of religion, priests and theological students and the medically unfit were entitled to exemption.
The problems with national service in the 1950s foreshadowed some of the issues that would arise from conscription for Vietnam. There were, for example, many other claims for exemption. In 1953, a Tasmanian widow pleaded, ‘My husband died in 1948, and this boy is my only son. He has had a call to enter camp January 4 1954 with no further deferment. We have twenty-five acres of potatoes to work and some soon to dig, also twenty-two cows to milk and harvest to attend to, besides other stock and work. I have one other man working at present but it’s almost impossible to get labour . . . will you please help me?’
Harold Holt, the Minister for Defence, initially brushed aside concerns about rural labour shortages, but in late December 1954, deferral criteria were broadened to include rural workers. The Victorian Anti-Conscription Council pointed out the problems young men had trying to put a case in front of a magistrates court and the injustice ‘that youths who cannot help being eighteen years old should be denied a right allowed to convicted criminals’.
In 1952, a South Australian conscientious objector named Brian Mason galvanised those supporting the right of appeal. His situation encapsulated the problems generated by the government’s rigid approach. A magistrate denied Mason’s application to be recognised as a conscientious objector, and as a result of his remaining so, he was imprisoned in Holsworthy army base in Sydney where he refused to wear a uniform. Two other unsuccessful conscientious objectors followed Mason to imprisonment in Holsworthy. The claim ‘that his forcible removal from home is causing great hardship to his widowed mother’ resulted in Mason’s case becoming a cause célèbre.
A principle was put in place that there would be no naturalisation of those immigrants of an age appropriate for national service unless they fulfilled National Service. This involved a complicated negotiation with overseas governments on the issue of call-up, and international problems continued to hamper efforts to conscript aliens. Meanwhile, Aborigines exempted included full Aborigines, half-castes, and persons of Aboriginal extraction living as Aborigines. Chinese Australians were eligible for call-up, an explicit contradiction of the White Australia Policy. The navy was quite definite though in its unwillingness to recruit naturalised Australians of non-European descent. Similar caution was exercised with Maltese immigrants.
In 1964, Menzies decided to block the efforts of his Immigration minister, Hubert Opperman, legendary cycling champion, and Department of Immigration Secretary Peter Heydon to bring about a moderate liberalisation of the White Australia Policy by admitting a few ‘distinguished non-Europeans’. Menzies answered Opperman’s complaint that the existing policy was racially discriminatory by saying, ‘Good thing too—right sort of discrimination.’
The imperial baubles that Menzies received at the end of his career, with their arcane references to the Order of the Thistles and Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports (an honorary remnant of the medieval job of looking after the crucial English ports of Dover, New Romney, Sandwich, Hastings and Hythe), seemed a reward and culmination for this last great imperial loyalist, and seemed also to some to show the irrelevance of his convictions to the sort of pragmatic politics pursued by Sir Percy Spender. Menzies’ grudging acceptance of the end of the old Empire and his attachment to old-fashioned Britishness allowed Labor, despite the work of Spender, Casey and Barwick, in creating Asian and American contacts, to be seen as the party best suited to place Australia in a post-colonial world.
King George VI died in 1952, bringing in a handsome young queen with whom Sir Robert Menzies would be platonically enamoured. To most people, the fresh-faced young monarch seemed preferable to Stalin’s saturnine features, and the Queen’s visit in 1954 created unprecedented excitement. Thousands of schoolchildren rallied at public grounds to welcome the monarch, the Catholic kids—whose parents were generally now onside and equally scared of Communism as the majority—as enthusiastically as the rest. If a few thought the monarchy anachronistic, they might have been more exercised to hear that high-grade uranium ore was also discovered that year, upping the politics of nuclear tests.
Menzies’ electoral success in 1957 was again resounding. On 22 November he was returned with a nineteen-seat majority in the House of Representatives, helped by Democratic Labor Party preferences, the emerged anti-Labor party in the Australian polity. It was the largest majority any government had commanded since Federation.
AGAIN, OUR ICE
The issue of Antarctica surfaced with the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, which, with three further treaties and subsidiary agreements, constituted the Antarctic Treaty System, and would ensure that the polar continent and surrounding ocean remained a demilitarised space largely free of squabbling over resources. There had been, unnoticed by most Australians until later in the century, tensions involving fishing and potential military use, and the minerals and other bounties Antarctica might offer. Griffith Taylor, a member of Scott’s last expedition, had called Antarctica the ‘gigantic inheritance’, but it did not enter the minds of twentieth-century Australians as such. These matters did not have the same impact on the Australian emotions as the issues of Communism in Asia and nuclear power.
Post-war, Australia established stations on its two subantarctic islands, Heard Island in 1947, and Macquarie Island in 1948. Australia had revived its interest in the Antarctic and the Southern Ocean by secretly commissioning the ship Wyatt Earp to visit the Antarctic coastline and to put parties ashore, because they feared if they did not the Americans would claim them. A 1948 visit by ship to various areas in the Australian claim was frustrated by thick pack ice and weather that prevented reconnaissance by air. The Australian government created an Antarctic Division and also placed two permanent scientific stations on the long coastline of Australian Antarctica: Mawson (near Mawson’s original hut) in 1952; and in 1957, Davis, named after the famous Antarctic navigator, further to the east, in a location Mawson had visited on his 1931 expedition. Wilkes Station, initiated in 1957 by the Americans, was taken over in 1959 by the Australians, and in 1969 Australia would replace Wilkes with the purpose-built Casey, further east still from Davis—as if they were asserting the claim.
For the Antarctic Division director, Phillip Law, recognised in 1949: ‘No nation can hope to rope off a section of the earth as its property unless it sustains its claim by actively occupying a portion of that area and carrying out useful work there.’ The new Antarctic Division operated under the aegis of the Department of External Affairs. The Cold War had its impact on Australia’s relationship to Antarctica. The establishment of the first Australian station, Mawson, in 1952, occurred because at that time the extent of Australian Antarctic Territory was under direct challenge as the United States and the Soviet Union refused to recognise it as Australian space.
Both superpowers had shown they would not recognise any existing claims to the region and reserved the right to make further claims of their own. The US navy had by now initiated a series of expeditions to the Antarctic under the name of ‘cold weather training’, and in return, in 1949, the All-Soviet Geographical Society reiterated its commitment to pursuing studies of the Antarctic.
The announcement of an International Geophysical Year for 1957–58 led to the emergence of the Soviet Union as a direct challenger to Australian polar sovereignty; Russian stations such as Mirny, within a short ride of Davis, were founded. Had the Australian public noticed developments on the ice it would have stoked their fears of the advance of Communism. As it was, some noticed and expressed anxiety that the presence of Soviet scientists in Australian Antarctica would lead to their secretly establishing submarine bases and missile stations to threaten cities such as Perth and Adelaide. It did not seem such a fantastic claim in that period. Hundreds of Russians at Mirny base could be seen as foreshadowing that. Antarctica, therefore, became the southernmost frontier of a Cold War.
AUSTRALIAN ART AND ITS FRIENDS
In 1937, Menzies, then Attorney-General, had declared he found ‘nothing but absurdity in much so-called modern art with its evasion of real problems and its cross-eyed drawing’. Labor politicians probably harboured the same attitudes, if indeed they had any—perhaps ‘Doc’ Evatt was the Parliament’s sole aficionado.
Menzies’ views were expressed during the much-publicised disputes generated by his proposal to establish an Australian Academy of Art, an Australian version of London’s Royal Academy. Its purpose was hard to define, but Menzies wanted it to ward off decadent modern trends. Its declared aim—in addition to art education—was to ‘champion the rights of individual and associated artists’. A number of painters associated with George Lambert joined by invitation, and so did many of those influenced by the Impressionists, including Thea Proctor, Margaret Preston, Grace Cossington Smith and Roland Wakelin, who were considered ‘sane modernists’. The fifty foundation members came from the various art societies around Australia. They included W.B. McGuinness, the doctrinaire Max Meldrum and John Longstaff, who were personal friends of Menzies. The academy did not contain even leading conservative artists like Arthur Streeton and Norman Lindsay. Rupert Bunny was one of five invitees who declined to join. Modernists were not welcome.
The academy’s inaugural exhibition was in Sydney in 1937, and a year later a second was held at the State Gallery of Victoria. In opening an exhibition of the Victorian Artists’ Society, Menzies declared with all the confidence of his ignorance that he noted that the Victorian Artists’ Society was encouraging a range of painting. ‘Experiment is necessary in establishing an Academy,’ said Menzies, ‘but certain principles must apply to this business of art as will any other business which affects the artistic sense of the community. Great art speaks a language which every intelligent person can understand. The people who call themselves modernists today talk in different language.’ In the exhibition there was a wall devoted to modernist painting—surrealism, for example, and post-cubism, futurism, those influenced by Picasso. These artists, members of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS), raised eyebrows at each other. James Quinn, curator of the exhibition, though not a modernist himself, immediately distanced himself from Menzies’ statement. George Bell, founder of the CAS, a respected Melbourne artist and teacher who had nurtured Russell Drysdale and the immigrant Sali Herman, amongst others, though he would later himself denigrate artists such as Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker, nonetheless sought to set Menzies right over his remarks and his intention for the academy. ‘Just as it would be ludicrous for an artist to argue a knotty point of law, so it is ludicrous for Mr Menzies to lay down what is good drawing and what good art is . . . Academies have been, throughout history, reactionary influences.’ Meldrum lined up on Menzies’ side, Herman (and Evatt, who knew something of modern art) on Bell’s.
The Australian Academy reinforced the position of the late nineteenth century, Melbourne-based Heidelberg landscape tradition, with shearers and bushrangers and other iconic figures, as the national art form. From the 1920s to the 1940s, Arthur Streeton’s works were promoted as perfect examples of fine art, and as somehow an encapsulation of the Australian nation.
Modernism was attacked on moral grounds, and as a suspect foreign influence. Art critic and personal friend of Menzies’, Lionel Lindsay, wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald: ‘The Australian public is perhaps yet unaware that modernism was organised in Paris by the Jew dealers, whose first care was to corrupt criticism, originate propaganda and undermine accepted standards.’ In his 1942 book Addled Art, Lindsay argued that the pure tradition of Australian painting, represented by ‘Streeton, [Tom] Roberts, Lambert and [Hans] Heysen, was vulnerable to attack from ‘the same aliens, the same corrupting influences that undermine French art, both supported by powerful propaganda . . . forced on a defenceless public’. Matisse could not draw, said Lindsay, and so he needed to mess around with surfaces. Chagall was plagued by morbid passions. Klee was mad from meningitis. Miró and Dalí were sexual obsessives (an interesting label for the brother of lusty Norman Lindsay to apply to others) and sadists. Modigliani’s figures were negroid and arose from his alcoholism. And so on. The book’s cover could be argued to have an anti-Semitic image of an ape-like figure in an Orthodox Jewish hat slouching away after having thrown muck at the Venus de Milo. Like many art conservatives, and like his friend Menzies himself, Lindsay did not see modern art as just bad art but as viral. And behind the virus lay the Jews. In 1946, Menzies wrote that he had just reread the book and was ‘convulsed with mirth . . . I would regard ninety per cent of the artists as rank imposters: some of the refugees who have discovered the art racket since their arrival in Australia and who have become executants without first becoming students’. He criticised ‘a Portrait of the Artist’s Mother, [which has been] done by some victim of oppression from Middle Europe. What an astonishing old dame she must be, with one eye distended like that of Cyclops and the other scarcely fitting on the same plane.’ (Menzies was referring to the artist Sali Herman’s portrait of his mother. Herman was Swiss-born, yet had joined the AIF in 1941 and served as an official war artist. He had won the Sulman Prize for his striking painting of an Australian soldier being carried by New Guinean stretcher-bearers.)
The modern-art defenders were from CAS, founded in Victoria in 1938, with Evatt and his American wife significant allies of the society and its founder. Evatt encouraged CAS’s endeavour to make international connections and to show work from overseas within Australia and to export Australian works overseas. He commented at an art launch in 1936 that ‘our national galleries are controlled by men who suffer from an intense abhorrence of anything that has been done since 1880’.
Evatt’s interest in Australia’s place in all international affairs, including art, was consolidated when he became president of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1948. He and a fellow Australian, Peter Bellew, were instrumental in organising Nolan’s first overseas exhibition, held at UNESCO in Paris in 1948. He supported radical painters such as Tucker, who argued that Australian painting should not be restricted by the pastoral landscape tradition. Artists who drew upon European modernist ideas, said Tucker—and proved it with much of his work—produced art that was uniquely Australian but also engaged with the rest of the world.
It was a debate that would not soon be finished. Historians have argued that once the Australian Academy collapsed in 1946, the conservative old guard of which Menzies was part lost their power and influence in the arts. However, since the government had a monopoly over artwork selection for official overseas exhibitions, Menzies’ view on art continued to have a profound impact on Australia’s modernist artists after his return as prime minister in 1949, and remained eloquent as a sign that politics and the arts are not as separate as they have tended to be interpreted to be in Australian history.
In 1958, the issue of Australia’s first official representation at the Venice Biennale caused a second split between modernists and conservatives. A few Australians, including Sidney Nolan and Russell Drysdale, had been seen already at the Biennale, but this was the first time Australia as a country and an artistic community had been asked to exhibit. What was to be chosen for Venice proved so inappropriate that in a sort of embarrassment, Australia rejected an invitation to exhibit at the 1960 Biennale and would not show in Venice again until 1978. Australia thus would begin, from 1958, a twenty-year absence from the world’s premier exhibition of international artists.
The Commonwealth Arts Advisory Board still existed, after being formed in 1911 to advise on what artists should be allotted to paint which prominent Australians. Gradually, the board took on the responsibility of choosing artworks for the national collection, and from 1955 was responsible for choosing works for embassies, as well as for official exhibitions of Australian art overseas. Now they became the selectors for the work to be sent to Venice in 1958. The board’s members included the highly sympathetic and popular portraitist William Dargie, former Victorian schoolteacher and multiple winner of the Archibald Prize; watercolourist, Douglas Pratt; Daryl Lindsay, artist and director of the National Gallery of Victoria; watercolourist Robert Campbell; and the chairman of the board, Sir William (Will) Ashton, a Sydney painter.
The Biennale was designed to show new, contemporary art. However, the prime minister, whom the board advised and could be overruled by, was still set against modernist painting. So were many Australian artists, and one of them, H.R. Krohl, said: ‘The bright young things of the studios boast that their works reflect their minds. By God they do! They blaspheme the Olympians—the Streetons and the Lamberts—and sacrifice filth upon the altars of the new gods they serve.’ In any case, Menzies believed his middle class, his ‘forgotten people’, had the right to see the Heidelberg vision presented to the world as an expression of the true Australia and its real values. On the other hand, Bernard Smith, Sydney art critic and historian, considered the Biennale as ‘the most important international exhibition in the world’, where artists exhibited had the chance to enter the new pantheon. New art should be sent.
The CAS was profoundly distressed by the conservatism of the ultimate choice. The dispute was made bitter by the fact that it was the society that had negotiated to have Australia invited to exhibit at the Biennale in the first place. In a presidential speech at a CAS meeting in 1957, the Parisian–Australian artist Georges Mora argued that ‘we must break down this prejudice in the world that Australia is an artistically backward country. There is only one solution: that is the pushing of Australian artistic achievements into the world and to bring the world’s artistic achievements into this country.’ He was backed by his wife, Mirka Mora, and at a distance by the Italian Gino Nibbi. Nibbi had emigrated from Italy to Melbourne, and in his print shop in Bourke Street, opened in 1928, prints of works by Modigliani, Cézanne, Picasso, Rouault, Chagall and Dufy could be bought. By the time of the Biennale he had gone back to live in Rome because the lease on his Melbourne store had been cancelled. There he organised Italian exhibitions of Nolan’s work. Nibbi had fought hard for Australia to be represented at the Biennale, writing to Casey, Minister for External Affairs, visiting the general secretary of the Biennale on CAS’s behalf and so on. But now that his wish regarding the Biennale was met, Nibbi had been unable to give CAS the right to select artworks—Biennale rules required that nations represented be officially supported by their respective governments, not by art bodies.
The Australian ambassador in Rome, Paul McGuire, a cultivated South Australian writer and diplomat, and the secretary of the Biennale, Rodolfo Pallucchini, also assumed that CAS would be primarily responsible for selection (subject to Menzies’ veto). Georges Mora wrote to the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board, ‘Nothing would be more fatal, we feel, for the prestige of an advancing Australia in the field of culture than to send a mediocre and conventional show to Venice.’
In the end, however, the board chose fourteen Streeton landscapes and eight early Arthur Boyd landscapes, one of them—The Hot Road, painted in 1896—belonging to R.G. Menzies. None of Boyd’s works of the 1940s or early 1950s were chosen. The inclusion of contemporary figurative painter Robert Dickerson was successfully opposed because, as one of the board said, ‘his figures looked like moronic monsters . . . and I can imagine people saying Australians are like these’.
America’s pavilion at the 1958 Biennale exhibited Mark Rothko alongside the works of thirty-four other artists. Seen against that background, the Australian selection was mocked as contrary to the very meaning of the Biennale. McGuire, the Australian ambassador, concluded sadly that ‘it was felt that the exclusion of avant-garde artists gave an impression of backwardness, and unflattering comparisons were made between Australia and the Soviet pavilions’, which were also stuck in traditional though more propaganda-based art of booming industrial and agricultural scenes.
The board did consider the possibility of Australia’s representation at the Venice Biennale of 1960, but decided that by now even the newly popular Drysdales, Nolans, Bracks and Dobells would be flayed as the last offering had been. Foreign minister Casey was warned in these terms by a new ambassador in Rome, E.J. Bunting. This denied a chance for new artists such as John Howley, John Passmore and John Olsen, who had already been exhibited overseas and would benefit further from the Biennale. But Menzies still argued ‘against the sending out abroad of modernistic stuff that meant nothing and was, in many cases, painted by New Australians like Michael Kmit. This is not Australian art. It could have been painted anywhere.’
Ironically, Kmit, born in Ukraine, had become, through World War II’s mercy, a stateless person and then an Australian, and he had won the Sulman Prize in 1957. His experience as someone without a community and his training under Fernand Léger were factors that made him incapable of painting in the traditions of Australian landscape. And the idea that someone whose soul had been formed anywhere outside Britain or Australia was fit to represent Australia overseas was felt to be deeply undesirable. In reply, CAS pointed out that the Americans were proud of Rothko even though Rothko’s work was not in any way identifiably American.
Yet another Australian ambassador to Italy, H.A. McClure-Smith, was horrified at the board’s rejection of the Biennale invitation in 1960. He wrote to them that Australia would be ‘probably the only country with a vigorous contemporary school of artists that will be absent from the Biennale . . . in Italy, particularly, where countries are perhaps judged more by their cultural standards than is the case in other parts of the world, the effect upon our prestige can hardly be other than deplorable’.
FISSION, FUSION AND AUSTRALIA
Australia’s participation in the struggle against Communist guerrillas in Southeast Asia was based on Canberra’s belief in future atomic conflict. Australian planning provided for professional RAAF personnel to fly missions with high-technology weaponry in a war that would be over in hours.
In June 1946, British Prime Minister Clement Attlee said he was most anxious to have the ‘fullest possible cooperation’ between Commonwealth members on the construction of large-scale plants for the production of fissile material. Attlee recommended that dominion scientists should work at Britain’s first experimental reactor at Harwell in Oxfordshire, which was to begin research and development in atomic energy in 1947. An Anglo–Australian Joint Project began developing rockets at Woomera in South Australia in 1946. The problem with the Empire atomic program was that the United States was not prepared to lend its support. The US Atomic Energy Act of 1946 (known as the McMahon Act) banned American assistance of the British atomic effort.
When the US State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee considered proposals for giving classified information to Australia, it decided that there was no overriding military reason that justified release of top-secret information to Australia and New Zealand. The committee graded countries according to their capacity to serve the United States’ national interest. Group 1 was those nations most closely allied with US national interest and included Canada and Great Britain. Group 2 was composed of ‘potential allies’. Australia and New Zealand were listed in Group 3, along with fifteen other nations, including Afghanistan, Yemen, Estonia, Burma and Liberia. So when in July 1947 the Australians requested information from Britain about an experimental reactor, the Americans strongly resisted the idea that Australia should be allowed into the nuclear club.
Indeed, on 18 May 1948, as the Australians were about to send the first of a number of scientists to Britain, the Americans banned the supply of intelligence information to Australia. The ban was extended towards nations of the British Commonwealth in general. Menzies was confident that he could alter this arrangement once he was elected, but Attlee made it clear that Britain ‘had difficulties’ as a result of the ‘tripartite agreement’, that is, its agreement with the United States and Canada that progress in the field of atomic energy could be patented only in those three countries; hence if an Australian scientist made a discovery in nuclear energy, it would have to be patented in the United Kingdom.
Now Australia desired a Pacific equivalent of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) that would protect it from both Communism and Japan. Percy Spender, a perceptive Minister for External Affairs, informed the US Assistant Secretary of State, John D. Hickerson, of this ambition for a SouthEast Asian Treaty Organisation. Menzies was more realistic and ultimately dismissed the envisaged but never realised Pacific pact as ‘an attempt to erect a super structure on a foundation of jelly’. For the Americans did not want the ANZUS Treaty of 1951 to resemble NATO. According to Australian Embassy advice in September 1953, the Americans decided there would be ‘minimum’ defence production based in Australia. The focus was still on northern Europe.
In March 1954, the Australians secured an exchange of notes that would allow scientists to work in British atomic establishments with a view to subsequent possible operation in Australia, especially with regard to work on plutonium, heavy water and fission products. Menzies was scared that the elimination of nuclear weapons in Asia would leave the West exposed to the Chinese: ‘Preoccupation of the major powers with Europe and the defence of the American continent may cause less than due attention to be given to the growing significance of Chinese manpower in the strategic balance of forces.’
Australia had wanted to have its own nuclear arsenal to use in its defence of Malaya ‘in the event of nuclear weapons being employed’ by China, which was supporting the Chinese guerrillas in Malaya. Canberra wished to produce these bombs in Australia with the idea they could be used against Communist China, even by the planes of the ANZAM (Anglo, New Zealand, Australia and Malaya) forces, including the Australian Lincoln bombers, and by the United States against the same enemy. Canberra’s desire for the bomb showed its conviction that the Chinese Communist insurgents encamped in the Malayan forests were the forerunners of renewed Communist advances south of Bangkok. It believed that the Americans would take action and send troops too.
There was an assumption too that Australian forces would be equipped with nuclear weapons in Malaya. The campaign in that peninsula, now nearly forgotten, took on a massive importance in Australia’s planning throughout the 1950s. But the problem was to enlist American support for Australia’s nuclear ambitions. After they were rebuffed by the Americans, the Australians, including the Joint Intelligence Committee, came to believe that they would get more help from their Empire partners, deciding on 1 March 1956 that the US would not commit land forces to the Far East and that ‘we are wasting our time trying to find out from the Americans their inner secret plans’.
Mark Oliphant, the suburban South Australian prodigy, a sensitive agnostic, had just finished his Cambridge PhD in 1929 on the impact of positive ions on metal surfaces as Ernest Rutherford and other nuclear pioneers at the Cavendish Laboratory, also at Cambridge, were achieving a great deal of notability for their experiments with uranium. Oliphant himself became involved in nuclear experiments, but at Birmingham, another research powerhouse. Even as a brilliant young scientist working in Cambridge, Oliphant had noticed the release of energy from the reaction between hydrogen and tritium particles. Then, sitting as a member of a British organisation named the MAUD (Military Application of Uranium Detonation) Committee, which had declared an atomic bomb feasible by 1943, he promoted the concept to the United States and was one of the midwives of the Trinity test, which led to the first explosion of an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert.
Oliphant knew of the possibility of nuclear fission, and it had long been known that Uranium 238 was the element that produced the surplus neutrons needed to start off the chain reaction. Yet though British scientists and Oliphant were nominally allowed to participate in the Manhattan Project, the overall US operation to develop the bombs ultimately dropped on Japan, it was a very one-sided agreement.
In 1950, about to take up a chair at the Australian National University, established by legislation introduced by the Chifley government, Oliphant suggested to the Labor government the possibility of building an atomic reactor in Australia to pursue atomic nuclear energy for domestic power. The government agreed, but also saw the proposal in somewhat broader terms, as possibly being used to produce plutonium for some future Commonwealth defence program. The idea was taken up by the Menzies Liberal government, with the proposed Australian atomic reactor to be fuelled by Australian uranium. By early 1951, uranium deposits had been discovered at Radium Hill in South Australia and at Rum Jungle in the Northern Territory.
In August 1949, the Russians exploded their first atomic bomb, and fear, urgency and abomination gripped Australians. Attlee asked Menzies if Australia would agree in principle to a British test being held in the Montebello Islands, 80 kilometres off the north-west coast of Australia. The British had originally wanted to use Nevada, but by now the United States was sharing less and less with the British. The Americans did not want the British in the nuclear club, and had frozen British scientists out of collaboration on atomic weapons. The British, however, believed they were entitled to nuclear power status because of, among other things, their key role in the bomb’s invention. The Australians were excited at the prospect of this atomic collaboration, and hoped they would get the nuclear recipe from the British in return for their acting as host to the tests. In the end, though, Australia’s chief contribution was to provide the testing ground.
Meanwhile, the Americans themselves were interested in the uranium deposits at Rum Jungle, south of Darwin. They preferred to deal with the Australians than buy in the general uranium market from places such as Congo. The US government put pressure on Menzies in June 1952 in the hope that Rum Jungle would be developed quickly and all its output made available to the Combined Development Agency, the British and American governments’ Nuclear Weapons Development group, a shopfront that implied the United States and Britain were still working together.
It was not even certain that Australia owned the islands named Montebello, since no one had ever laid direct claim to them. Attlee asked for Australian help in preparing the site and with logistics, but he warned that the area around the islands was likely to be contaminated with radioactivity for at least three years afterwards, during which it could not even be visited by pearl fishermen. In early 1951, Menzies said that because of an impending election he could not give a final decision, but in May, once his government was safely returned, he cabled the agreement.
The announcement of the test was made in Britain and Australia in February 1952, but the site was not mentioned and the Australian press was not invited to attend the test. The weapon to be detonated was a plutonium bomb, in which two masses of plutonium would be imploded to detonate the device. Ordinary high explosives would bring the two masses of plutonium together. This triggering method had been developed by the British during the development of the American bombs at Los Alamos in New Mexico.
The British scientist in charge of the test on Montebello, William Penney, son of a sergeant-major in the Royal Ordnance Corps, was anxious to simulate the effects of a weapon carried up the Thames on a ship and detonated in the city. This first test, named Hurricane, occurred in October 1952 in a Montebello lagoon, with the plutonium bomb (slightly stronger than each of the bombs that had fallen on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) located inside the hull of an expendable frigate, HMS Plym. The ship was vaporised. Seven RAAF Lincoln bombers, stationed at Broome, took off to take samples of airborne radioactivity. Contamination did drift over the Australian mainland in areas occupied by the Aborigines, but the bomb cloud was not properly monitored. The Australian air and ground crews of the Lincolns involved in tracking the bomb cloud were also given no dosimeters to record contamination inside their aircraft.
After the explosion, Penney got news that he was knighted, and Australians heard a broadcast in which he assured them that he backed Mr Churchill’s opinion that ‘the results of our atomic weapons program should be beneficial to public safety’. Now Penney wanted to examine a range of detonations at various heights above the ground, at ground level, and beneath the ground. As chief scientist, he was under great pressure from Whitehall to advance such tests, and like other scientists (whether under government urgings or out of their own powers of denial), he was willing to expose the bodies of young servicemen and others to irradiation. He took an optimistic attitude towards issues such as where the wind would spread radiation. None of the generals involved in the tests were scientists, but they were under pressure too—the pressure of their conviction that nuclear war would occur, and relatively soon. This conviction was shared by the Australian nuclear scientists appointed by Menzies to work with Penney. In his mind and in those of his colleagues was an urgency to get on with the task. For these were virtually war times, a war with a long fuse that had already been lit. Penney had been asked by the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, how many nuclear bombs Russia would need to destroy Britain. He had answered, ‘Five, I would say, Prime Minister. Just to be on the safe side, let’s say eight.’ Such a sense of the flimsiness of British defences drove Penney. ‘I thought we were going to have a nuclear war,’ he would later tell an Australian inquiry into the tests in Australia. ‘The only hope I saw was that there should be a balance between East and West.’
After the first explosion at Montebello in October 1952, arguments were made for nuclear tests on the Australian mainland. Menzies declared that no ‘conceivable injury to life, limb or property could emerge’. When asked by a backbencher about the spread of radioactivity, Menzies replied, ‘I should like to say that it would be unfortunate if we in Australia began to display some unreal nervousness at this point. The tests are conducted in the vast spaces in the centre of Australia, and if it is said, however groundlessly, that there are risks, what will be said in other countries?’ He meant, of course, countries of more restricted geography.
For the first two mainland plutonium tests (Operation Totem), in October 1953, Emu Field in the Great Victoria Desert of South Australia had been used, chiefly for its remoteness. Allowed to participate in the American explosion at Bikini Atoll in 1946, Penney had placed petrol drums full of water around the island to register the impact of the bomb at various distances from the point where it fell. He used a variation on that for the tests at Emu Field, setting up in special frames thousands of empty toothpaste tubes which had been flown out from England.
During the search for yet another site, even Somalia was assessed, but it was decided that the winds were not right, and the nomadic population was far denser than the population of Central Australia. Cape Barren Island in Bass Strait was suggested by Churchill’s aide, the intractable Lord Cherwell, an alleged model for Dr Strangelove (Cherwell was a German-born scientist who was, if anything, even more determined and ruthless). Cherwell flew to Australia to offer a technological-knowledge-in-return-for-uranium agreement by which he wanted Australia to give Britain an option for up to thirty years over two-thirds of the Australian uranium not already committed to the marketing body set up by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Britain would use the Australian uranium for its atomic energy industrial program. The remaining third was for Australia to keep for any domestic atomic program of its own. In return Britain would seek an arrangement with the Americans by which Britain could give Australia classified technical information without needing US consent.
Although Cherwell was able to observe the firings at Emu Field, Menzies and his ministers rejected his proposition. They were willing to treat the United Kingdom as a preferred customer to whom they would give first offer of any surplus of uranium at current prices. The collapse of his plans made Cherwell very vengeful. The Daily Mirror newspaper in Sydney reported: ‘This newspaper and most Australian people are satisfied that His Lordship left this country in a huff after having failed to pull what the Americans would call a “very fast deal”.’ Cherwell would claim that before the Emu Field test Menzies and his ministers did not want any technological information because they knew Australia could not find the finance to build its own bomb. Even Cherwell doubted this claim, advising Churchill that surely the Australians would seek some technical detail.
One thing the British did not tell Menzies was that the Australians at Montebello would not in any case be allowed close enough to the actual trial to be able to draw any scientific conclusions from it. The British explained that given that certain weapons information was almost totally of American origin they were under a very strict promise not to let others get too close to it. Doubts the Americans had on Australian security were also a brake on Britain’s willingness to share the nuclear experience.
Len Beadell, famous bushman and surveyor of the Gunbarrel, a dirt track running 1400 kilometres from south of Alice Springs, skirting the Gibson Desert, and ending at another road near Carnegie Station in Western Australia, was sent out to reconnoitre the country south of Emu Field and find a place closer to the Transcontinental Railway than Emu Field for new tests. Beadell’s party came upon sites where native totems were stored, an indication that Aborigines considered this country unlikely to be visited by whites. But, ‘I am given to understand that this area is no longer used by Aborigines,’ wrote the scientist Alan Butement of the Australian safety committee. Having decided that the plains around Maralinga were suitable, Beadell and his men built a runway for Penney, who was flown in in a Bristol air freighter.
Looking at the apparent desolation around him, Penney said when he landed at Maralinga, ‘It’s the cat’s whiskers.’ The local Aborigines would use a different metaphor. They would call Maralinga ‘Field of Thunder’. Over the next three years, from 1953 to 1956, a township grew up in Maralinga to accommodate thousands of troops and other personnel. Water was pumped up from the ground and desalinated, or else brought in by train.
Menzies had an intense relationship with Ernest Titterton, an eminent English nuclear physicist, a student and disciple of Mark Oliphant, and the first professor of nuclear physics at the Australian National University. Together, Titterton and Oliphant were respected—Oliphant could have received a chair from any university he chose and yet had chosen to work in Australia—and were seen as heroes and authoritative figures by the public, as well as Menzies. Oliphant saw atomic energy as a chance for Australia to become an industrial powerhouse. He also hoped atomic power would address the ‘dead heart’ problem by driving desalination plants in the Australian interior. The relationship and debates between Titterton and Menzies, meanwhile, were important determinants of the Australian part in the tests.
There was no opposition to the tests from the Labor Party. Evatt was interested in atomic energy. He had been appointed first chairman of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission in 1946 as part of the United Nations’ plan to try to control the spread of atomic weapons, and would not utter any criticism of British nuclear testing for some time. Menzies’ Minister for Supply and Development Howard Beale, nicknamed ‘Paddles’, son of a clergyman, and himself a Sydney barrister, would be involved enthusiastically in Australia’s role in the British atomic tests over the entire period they ran. He had a calm air of self-possession and inspired confidence in people. Menzies, who had the same magisterial demeanour, did not like him and so kept important information from him. (Thus Beale had been betrayed into assuring Parliament in June 1951 that reports that Britain was to use Australia as a testing ground for atomic weapons were ‘utterly without foundation’.)
Much later it would be judged that the Australian scientists at the original Hurricane trial at Montebello lacked sufficient information to advise the Australian government whether there would be any fallout on the Australian mainland from the tets. The Australian government, whether at Montebello or elsewhere, was forced to accept the United Kingdom’s assurances on the safety aspects of the trial. It was enough guarantee of safety for all parties that Montebello and Emu Field were very remote.
Yet there was enough pressure on the matter for the government to create the Atomic Weapons Test Safety Committee, commonly called the Australian Safety Committee, which was designed to give the Australian government the opportunity to obtain independent scientific advice on the tests’ safety. This committee was set up in July 1955, and was made up of Ernest Titterton, New Zealand-born Alan Butement and Leslie Martin, all respected enthusiastic advocates of the nuclear proposition. A British scientist named Ronald Siddons later declared that the interaction was one of a rather formal briefing: ‘The meteorologists stood up and said, “This is the meteorological information”, and I stood up and said, “These are our fallout predictions”.’
A much later royal commission into British nuclear tests in Australia, sitting in the 1980s, would decide that sometimes the safety committee was deceitful, and failed in its own protocols and allowed unsafe firing to occur. Professor Titterton was accused by the royal commission of being prepared to conceal information from the Australian government and his fellow committee members if he believed that to do so would suit the interests of the British government and the testing schedule. In his sincere worldview, however, Australian interests were best served by British interests, so that if he were at fault it was for the sake of both countries. If he lied, it was as children are lied to for their own good.
In fact, the protection of military and civilian people against exposure would be found to be inadequate, since the limits of safe radiation would be more strictly drawn, on good evidence, in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The Royal Commission of the 1980s would assert, ‘By reasons of the detonation of the major trials and the deposition of fallout across Australia, it is probable that cancers which would not otherwise have occurred have been caused in the Australian population.’
The impact of the Montebello tests in 1952 on Aborigines on the Western Australian mainland is hard to estimate, since no radiation tests occurred at the time. Fallout reached the mainland thirty hours after the burst. At Emu Field in 1953 Totem One was fired in the teeth of a wind that would have spread fallout eastwards and north-eastwards. Measured fallout from Totem One on inhabited regions exceeded the levels proposed in the official British report on the tests, High Explosives Report A32.
The firing of Totem One also failed to notice the existence of Aboriginal people at Wallatinna and Welbourn Hill Station downwind of the test site. The later royal commission would decide that there was no reason to disbelieve Aboriginal accounts that the Black Mist occurred and that it made some people sick. An outbreak of vomiting amongst the Aborigines at Wallatinna may have resulted from radiation, or it could have been a physical reaction to an overwhelming and a towering explosion they saw and felt. James Yami Lester was an Aborigine of that area who believed that the Black Mist had caused or contributed to his blindness. In one affidavit to the royal commission he described how Aborigines drank milk from the goats at Wallatinna which had been rendered unsafe by the dust cloud on the prevailing wind from the direction of Emu Field.
When that notorious first atomic test at Emu Field was held, a couple named the Landers were living in a caravan at a place named Never Never, about 200 kilometres to the north-east of the detonation site, near Welbourn Hill Station. The Landers had a job building a windmill and a yard in this desert country. The Landers looked up to see a cloud coming towards them from the south-west, the direction of Emu Field. Mrs Almerta Lander remembered that although ‘it was the colour of a rain cloud, darkish, it did not have the compact, rolling look that a rain cloud would have. It was just a sort of mass . . . there were not any other clouds in the sky. None whatsoever.’ As it got closer to the Landers, it seemed to stretch from horizon to horizon and down to the top of the low mulga trees. It passed directly over the caravan, and by lunchtime it was gone. Dark trails of dust trickled down from the cloud. The dust was very fine and sticky, said Almerta. It deposited itself in the pots and billies on the outside stove. The Giles family at Welbourn Hill Station said they had experienced the same cloud, the same dust.
Yami Lester said he had heard an explosion away to the south, and everyone in the camp began talking about it. He saw the cloud later in the day. Lester remembered the old people in the camp being frightened: ‘They reckoned it was Mamu—something that could be a bad spirit or evil spirit. Some people brandished their woomeras to try to make the cloud change direction. Others dug a hole for people to climb into.’ Lester’s mother heard two noises and believed the cloud was the work of Wanambi, the water serpent, making a noise as it created waterholes. She would say that one thousand people died after the Black Mist, although an interpreter at the ultimate royal commission declared that the word ‘thousand’ was not to be taken literally but as meaning ‘many people’.
The camp was moved twice, Lester remembered, as always happened after a death. Soon after the event he became blind. Later in his life, Lester and his wife travelled to London on behalf of the Pitjantjatjara Council to campaign for a hearing into the results of the Black Mist.
Robert Dash, a young Australian leading aircraftsman, declared in later evidence that he had serviced at the Woomera airfield the Lincoln aircraft and their equipment after they had fulfilled a mission chasing and flying through the atomic cloud. One of the tasks was to remove the radioactive-dust-collector containers on the planes, but no protective clothing was provided to him, not even gloves. Dash noticed that the scientists who then picked up the dust collectors wore protective clothing, since they knew they were radioactive. According to Dash’s evidence, when the aircraftsmen were given a Geiger counter test, the device flew at once to the maximum scale. They were told to burn their overalls, and were given new white ones, and white gloves. They were never given the film badges which were issued to British crews and which changed colour to indicate radiation danger.
William Bovill was a young Australian navigator in a Lincoln aircraft whose job was to find and track the fast-moving Totem One cloud from Emu Field. He had already been involved in the same task after the Montebello explosion. He was aware of a dust canister under each wing, but he and the bomber crew were not issued with protective clothing, film badges or dosimeters. Bovill sat in his normal position in the nose of the plane during the operation; as well as flying into the cloud, he was on the cleaning parties which, either at Woomera or at Amberley in Queensland, washed down the Lincolns after their dangerous flights. He could not remember if it was after the first or second test that his crew were given film badges, and all men were required to shower—but then donned their contaminated uniforms again.
By contrast, a British Canberra bomber, totally sealed off from the dust cloud, and its three-man aircrew wearing protective suits and using oxygen masks, also flew through the cloud, encountering darkness and turbulence. On landing the Canberra was parked to allow radioactivity to disperse, and the crews were decontaminated. Their gear was taken away and monitored. The question was whether the difference demonstrated greater care of its crews on the part of a wise RAF leadership or a form of discrimination against the RAAF. Much later, the royal commission would decide it was the latter.
Bovill’s Lincoln crew tracked the Totem Two cloud to west of Charleville in Queensland. Landing at Williamtown in New South Wales, they were required to remain in the plane for two hours and guards were placed around it. When they went back to the plane the next day it was with an American airman from one of the two B29s sent to Australia to observe the test. The American walked around the aircraft with his Geiger counter, saying periodically, ‘Oh, shit . . . oh, shit.’ Bovill’s crew asked the American as they boarded if he wanted to catch a lift with them back to Richmond near Sydney. ‘Christ no!’ he told them. ‘That bloody machine is hot.’
The Australian bomber crews were anxious enough to approach the Americans to find out the degree of contamination they had suffered. Ultimately the shock of the truth penetrated the RAAF and bureaucratic circles, and the Australian authorities insisted that two members of the British radiation hazard teams from Emu Field go to Amberley, which was the Lincolns’ home base, to check out all their planes. The worst-affected plane was the one that had so horrified the American airman.
There was one small mercy: although live troops had been deployed in American atomic tests, the British and Australians at Emu Field used dummies in army uniforms and placed Centurion tanks, jet aircraft, aircraft frames, concrete shelters, specially built girder bridges and railway tracks, mines, food, jerry cans filled with water, sacks filled with earth and even live animals, near the explosion site.
Generally the Sydney Morning Herald and Age supported the tests, but the Daily Mirror in Sydney frequently raised questions of safety. By 1956, trade unionists in Adelaide and Brisbane were holding protests against further British tests, and nine scientists in Adelaide wrote to the Advertiser challenging Titterton’s assurances that there was no risk to public health. Perhaps the majority of Australians were, even by 1956, opposed to the tests.
In 1956, at the height of the Maralinga tests, public attention was taken by other matters. In July, President Nasser of Egypt announced that he was going to nationalise the Suez Canal. The RAF bombed Egyptian airfields, and Britain and France sent troops into Egypt. The Suez crisis occupied the second half of the year, until Britain and France, as a result of a United Nations call on them to withdraw their forces, did so.
In November, the Soviet Union invaded Hungary in a bid to put down growing numbers of dissidents in one of its main European satellites. This produced the feeling that World War III was inevitable. And yet there were high expectations of and pride in the Olympic Games to be held late in the year in Melbourne. Athletic fervour had been induced over the past two years by the competition to run a sub-four-minute mile, a seemingly unbreakable barrier that Englishman Roger Bannister had smashed in 1954. Bannister and John Landy both broke it at the Commonwealth Games in Vancouver, also in 1954.
By the mid-1950s, hydrogen bomb tests had occurred in the United States. These involved the fusion of lighter hydrogen isotopes into heavier ones, and thus released energy classified as thermonuclear. There was growing public opposition in Australia to the testing of hydrogen bombs on Australian territory. When challenged in Parliament Menzies and Beale insisted that there would be no hydrogen bombs exploded in Australia.
Professor Titterton wrote a series of articles to bolster faith in the tests, and the headline on the final instalment read, ‘Our A bomb tests are a MUST. They can’t harm us.’ But many Australians, despite other distractions, believed they could. The Australian Atomic Energy Commission plant was opened at Lucas Heights in New South Wales in that year of horrors and glories, 1956, and Menzies was aware there was even public alarm over that.
British Prime Minister Eden suddenly declared that he wanted to experiment with a hydrogen bomb at the Montebellos in April 1956 since Maralinga would not be ready until September. The two Mosaic tests in the Montebellos were therefore to be in the nature of a thermonuclear explosion. One Australian interdepartmental cable in June 1955 warned: ‘Any mention of thermo-nuclear is political dynamite (in Australia) and must be avoided in announcements of trials.’
Five weeks after Eden’s request, Menzies replied that Australia agreed in principle to the proposed test but said that Australia might not be able to provide all the logistical help Britain would like because the Australian army was stretched by being in Malaya, at Woomera and at preparations for tests at Maralinga itself. In April 1956, the Montebello tests were announced as imminent.
The British authorities drew up a list of likely questions that would arise and the answers that should be given to them. ‘Question: Have any of these tests any connection with the H-bomb? A: There will be no explosion of an H-bomb nor any explosion of the character of magnitude of that bomb . . .’ This was of course utterly misleading to the point of being a heinous lie. Perhaps those who told it believed it could be justified at this stage of the Cold War.
On 16 May 1956, a fifteen-kiloton thermonuclear weapon attached to a specially constructed steel tower was fired just before midday. The Australian Safety Committee was on board the HMS Narvik, the headquarters’ ship stationed offshore for the firing. The Safety Committee’s chairman, Melbourne physicist Leslie Martin, had built the particle accelerators at Melbourne University, and clashed with the biochemist Hedley Marston, who believed radiation levels from the tests were much higher and more dangerous than Martin did. Alan Butement suggested that the tests might have to be restricted to relatively small atomic devices in the air or on high towers in low wind conditions. Butement also suggested that restrictions might have to be imposed so that winds blew the cloud to the north-west, even though there were only a limited number of days in the year when such winds blew.
On the day of the explosion, Martin sent a message to Menzies that there had been no danger whatsoever to life on the mainland, ships at sea or to aircraft, since the cloud had drifted harmlessly out over the ocean. In fact, however, parts of it swung back and dropped radioactive fallout in northern Australia.
Even though the fallout on the mainland might be low, there were a number of British and Australian safety officers who were surprised by how high in fact the reading was. One such safety officer, James Hole, packed a laundry basket full of radiation detection equipment and two boiler suits and took a helicopter across from the Montebellos to Onslow on the Western Australian coast. He deliberately avoided wearing formal contamination gear for fear of causing alarm. Hole himself ended up receiving a bigger dose of radiation than anyone in Onslow because he had gone into the bomb crater soon after the explosion. He described it as looking like a skating rink—the sands in the crater had become as smooth as glass. ‘There were lots of colours in it. One of the problems in standing in this crater was you could get fascinated and forget you were receiving a dose.’
The second firing on Montebello was to occur on Sunday, 10 June, but when that was announced, Beale, a Methodist minister’s son, objected strongly on religious grounds and asked that it be postponed. The British test director, Hugh Martell, was very angry, but his masters knew that it was politically necessary to satisfy Beale and his churchgoing constituency. After 10 June the weather was bad, but at last, on 19 June, the second Mosaic firing occurred. The yield of the bomb was 60 kilotons, a fact that was kept secret for decades. Immediately after the detonation, a mushroom cloud rose 1600 metres into the air. Buildings at Onslow, 100 kilometres across the sea, were jolted. Windows and roofs rattled at Marble Bar, 400 kilometres inland, where radioactive rain was later reported. Throughout Australia, there were rumours that the G2 Mosaic bomb had created serious problems and had somehow gone wrong. Beale, visiting Woomera at the time, had earlier made a statement between the two bombs, saying that the second one would be smaller than the first. The British tried to correct that, but it had been believed by the public. After the test Beale was pursued on the matter, but one of his officials, with or without his orders, closed the Woomera telephone exchange so that reports could not be phoned through. The minister in any case assured the press that from a cloud at a height of 1600 to 3300 metres all significant particles would have gone into the sea. The Australian Safety Committee had already assured Beale that the cloud was 160 kilometres out to sea.
This test came to be seen by the public and press as one too many and support began to fade even further. That Beale’s statement about the second explosion had turned out to be totally unreliable, had not helped. It was decided by the government that the yield from the two bombs should be kept secret. Meteorological data should have shown from the beginning that the Montebello Islands were an unreliable site for thermonuclear explosions—the weather was erratic, cyclones could hit it. In every case, radioactive fallout had occurred on the mainland in some instances as far away as Charleville in Queensland.
Neither the atomic weapons research establishment at Aldermaston in England nor the Australian Safety Committee took any account of the Aboriginal presence on the mainland a little east of the Montebellos. The question of acceptable dose levels for Aborigines was stated as a problem at the Buffalo tests at Maralinga in September–October 1956 but had been ignored in the Mosaic tests three to four months earlier.
It turned out that the first of the two Buffalo series at Maralinga, and especially the first firing, One Tree, occurred in weather conditions that would violate standards laid down by the Australian Safety Committee itself. The fallout exceeded acceptable limits at Coober Pedy and for Aboriginal people in surrounding country. The second series, Antler, in 1957, violated the rule that there should be no forecast of rain in the detonation period except in areas more than 800 kilometres from Ground Zero.
At the time of Mosaic, some seventeen hundred Aborigines were recorded as being in the Pilbara region, the closest stretch of Australian land to the Montebellos. When asked later about these Aborigines, the British scientist Penney said, ‘All right, but let me tell you the other end of the story. The top priority job was thermonuclear.’ It had to be done, the implication was, whatever the cost, and he had mentioned that if they had waited until Maralinga was ready, the Australians would probably have refused to allow a bomb of 50 kilotons to be exploded there.
Penney was back in Australia in August 1956 to direct the first bomb trials to be held at the new Maralinga testing ground—the Buffalo series, beginning in September. These tests really had to be not only a scientific but a public-relations exercise as well. By now Evatt and Calwell were attacking Menzies for not telling the British to go away. Evatt’s plan was that Australia should take the lead in persuading the three major powers to abandon all future tests.
Everyone involved in the program was aware that if something went wrong at Maralinga it would be disastrous in terms of public opinion and would bring an end to the tests. That was why at the last moment Penney delayed the firing of the first device: ‘Difficult for me here,’ he cabled London, ‘because I cannot fully assess political strength of troublemakers raising scares by rainwater counts.’ The many technical delays before the firing increased speculation about potential dangers. Beale blamed the press for spreading such rumours. But Labor’s Eddie Ward, Curtin’s old nemesis, called for the abandoning of the tests.
At last the first bomb in the Buffalo series at Maralinga, the one codenamed One Tree, set in a tower, was exploded on 27 September. A group of officers, Australian, New Zealand and British, intended to become vocal champions of the bomb, were distributed around the site. Four were put inside a Centurion tank one and a half kilometres from the blast, twenty-four watched from a series of covered trenches in the ground nearby, and the rest stood in the open, three kilometres from Ground Zero. At the end of the test they all declared they were more ready in purely military terms to accept a nuclear missile as a tactical weapon than they had been before. They were despatched back to their various units in Britain, Australia and New Zealand to ginger up their fellow officers on the matter.
Meanwhile, the fallout from One Tree drifted east directly across Coober Pedy. This was predicted and had been allowed for as safe for whites—a much higher level of radiation than that considered safe for any tribal Aborigines in the area. Now that the tests had moved back to Maralinga, some attention was given by the Australian Safety Committee about fallout from atomic bombs on Aborigines, moving naked and with bare feet across the fallout area. The report the British and Australians came up with indicated that Aborigines should not be closer than 240 miles (386 kilometres) from the blast site, but a number of sites where Aborigines lived were well within this distance of Maralinga, including Ernabella, Commonwealth Hill, Coober Pedy and Granite Downs. The Australian Safety Committee conscientiously tried to fix contamination levels at a lower level for Aborigines who lacked clothing, would be likely to sleep on contaminated ground and eat contaminated food, and were unlikely to wash contamination from their bodies. Thus acceptable Aboriginal levels of contamination were made one-fifth of that for whites, who did wear clothing and who did have showers.
The second Buffalo bomb, Marcoo, was exploded on the ground a week later with the lowest yield so far, one and a half kilotons. The third bomb, Kite, was released from a RAF Valiant bomber. It exploded 165 metres above the ground, with a yield of three kilotons. It was believed that this bomb would suck up less material from the ground and that the cloud would drift north-east into the desert. Instead, it travelled south-east and low-level contamination occurred on the edges of Adelaide.
Twenty-five politicians, including Beale and deputy Labor leader Calwell, and a corps of journalists visited Maralinga in 1956. Beale presented Penney with an inscribed cigarette case on behalf of the Australian government. Calwell said that he and his party were in full agreement with what was going on at the range. He had always been far more in favour than Evatt and Ward. Calwell and John Armstrong, a Labor senator and former Chifley minister, said that they were both sure the tests must continue. This put them at a pole removed from their leader, Evatt’s position.
When in September 1956 a request had arrived in Canberra for Australia to agree to a further program of nuclear trials for 1957, codenamed Antler, the Menzies government refused to give its assent straight off and Australia asked for more details. The British High Commissioner argued as well as he could in favour of the tests. When Britain finally responded to Australia’s request for more information, in April 1957, it came in the form of a personal message to Menzies from the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations. It revealed that Britain was preparing to explode six bombs at the new trials and that the maximum likely yields would range from three to 80 kilotons, the latter larger even than the biggest bomb in the Mosaic program.
The delay in approving Antler was based on the fact that Menzies knew that Britain had not been frank in the past about the nature of earlier trials. One clause of the memorandum of arrangements between Britain and Australia for setting up the Maralinga range stated that no thermonuclear or hydrogen weapons should be tested on the site. The question was now asked whether Britain was violating this clause. Professor Leslie Martin of the Safety Committee also proposed that the committee’s functions be divided into two bodies—one in charge of weapons safety at Maralinga itself, another to assess the radiological dangers and fallout on a national level. He felt an imperative akin to Penney’s to keep the tests going, but at the same time was aware that public unease must be addressed.
Events, rather than a specific decision, however, would bring a close to the Australian bomb tests.
EXPOSURE
The most remarkable case of Aborigines wandering into the bomb zones involved a family called the Milpuddies. They lived near the Ernabella Mission Station in the north of South Australia and were what the Aborigines themselves called spinifex people—nomadic bush natives, the father a spear-bearing hunter. In May 1957, about midway between Buffalo and the start of the Antler trials in September, the Milpuddies had gone south of Maralinga, following the waterholes towards Ooldea to visit relatives. They had not seen their relatives for so long that they did not know that Ooldea had already been closed down as a settlement, because of the tests, in 1952. The family consisted of Charlie Milpuddie, his wife Edie, a little boy, Henry, and Rosie, a girl of four. Charlie also carried twelve dingo pelts which he had intended to sell in Ooldea. Their journey took them directly into the path of a crater at Marcoo near Maralinga where seven months earlier, on 4 October 1956, an atomic bomb had been exploded at ground level, the only one set off on the Australian continent as a ground-burst, and designed so that the scientists could observe radioactive fallout should a street-level bomb explode in a city.
The Milpuddies camped near Marcoo crater, where they lit a fire and dined on a kangaroo Charlie had killed. The next morning, a military officer leading a patrol from Maralinga was surprised to see the Milpuddies wandering towards a site near Pom Pom, where a caravan was stationed for the health physics team, the experts monitoring radiation exposures. Frank Smith, then a member of the Radiation Detection Unit at Maralinga, got an urgent call to rush to Pom Pom and assess the Milpuddies. When he got there he persuaded the family to go to the health physics caravan, but kindly decided not to put on his white protective clothing and head gear because the sight might frighten them. Edie Milpuddie would tell an Australian royal commission in Maralinga that her family were naked when the soldiers picked them up at Marcoo. She had never seen a motor car or a shower before. The showers were necessary because the boy proved to have a high reading. When Edie went to the shower in the caravan she thought there was another Aboriginal woman there too, but then realised it was herself in a mirror. After the shower, the soldiers held something near Charlie and his son that made a clicking noise. Crazily, Edie and her daughter had not been checked with the radiation counter. Smith the radiation officer would say, ‘The elderly English pilot officer did not mind us washing the son or the father. But he had some sense of indignity that we would get too close to the female members of the tribe. I don’t know why, but he insisted that [there was] no hanky-panky, etcetera, etcetera, and that is why we did not go on with that.’
The whole family was now loaded with their four hunting dogs into a Land Rover and driven to Yalata, 320 kilometres south. Edie Milpuddie had been pregnant when they camped at Marcoo crater. She would give birth out in the bush to a stillborn child. She buried the child there. Her next child died of a brain tumour at two years old. Sarah, her next child, weighed under a kilogram at birth. The Edie Milpuddie story is not necessarily conclusive of a connection with radiation, but the succession of natal problems and the fact that her daughter Rosie and her grandchildren were plagued by illness is indicative. The royal commission would declare, ‘Her family and indeed, her grandchildren since that time seemed to have suffered extraordinary ill health and numerous deaths.’
John Hutton, a nineteen-year-old soldier in the Australian army at the time, recalled the men being mustered together and addressed by a colonel who told them they had not seen the Milpuddie incident, because the British and Australian governments had poured a lot of money into managing the press and if the story got into the newspapers that money would be wasted. The colonel reminded them that they were bound by the Official Secrets Act.
So imminent did the threat of war seem at the time that not only was the potential harm caused to outback whites and Aborigines considered an irrelevance, but so was the impact on the environment and on animal species, native and introduced. Rabbits killed by radiation were eaten by eagles, who then began to suffer the symptoms. There was no evident impact yet on kangaroos and dingoes.
In the end, Britain decided to limit the 1957 Antler trials to three bombs: two mounted on towers and a third suspended from balloons. The first two, fired on 14 and 25 September that year, yielded one and six kilotons respectively. The final bomb, Taranaki, was fired a fortnight later from balloons suspended 300 metres above the ground and yielded 25 kilotons.
A number of workers were employed to go into the Ground Zero areas in Maralinga and retrieve battle dress and boots from experimental dummies. The workers wore no protective clothing themselves. The bombs had not been hydrogen devices, but the Australian Safety Committee did not tell Menzies that a highly radioactive component, Cobalt 60, had been secretly included in the first Antler test. The information emerged a year later when Doug Rickard, a young Australian member of a health physics team at Maralinga, came across radiation levels so high that his instruments could not measure them. He collected metallic particles, put them in a tobacco tin and drove them 48 kilometres back to the health physics laboratory at Maralinga. As he approached the laboratory, the instruments there became confused by the radioactive levels.
Rickard was interviewed by a British security officer who ordered him not to speak to anyone, particularly any Australians, no matter what their position at Maralinga. ‘I was under the distinct impression that the British authorities did not want the Australian Government to know anything at all about what happened.’ Over the next four months, similar segments were found; these were put in lead cases that were buried in concrete pits near the Maralinga airfield. Some of the cobalt fragments were however too dangerous to handle and were left lying at the site. Rickard himself received higher radiation doses during the time he spent at Maralinga from October 1957 to June 1959 than any other member of the health physics team. He suffered permanent bone marrow damage and other physical disabilities that doctors told him were consistent with high exposure. Rickard would ultimately launch a claim for compensation from the Australian government, and his right to compensation would be acknowledged.
Rickard’s team leader at Maralinga, Harry Turner, a physicist trained at the University of Western Australia, complained to the Australian Safety Committee about the dangers his team faced: ‘For about nine months we had walked in that area where the Cobalt 60 pellets were, not knowing that they were there.’ Titterton came and spoke to Turner and tried to resolve the issue. ‘It left us a little bit unhappy as to why the British did this without informing us,’ Turner said about the use of Cobalt 60. Much later Titterton would say that the safety committee had not been told because their work was boring and the presence of cobalt would ‘give Harry and his workers a bit of a test, quite a small test because the radioactivity of the Cobalt was quite trivial compared to the radioactivity in the weapon’. He added, ‘It was interesting to us, who were responsible for this operation, to see how quickly they found it. They came out of it with flying colours, actually.’
Britain continued to test hydrogen weapons in the Pacific during 1958, but the Antler trials at Maralinga turned out to be the last of the most notable series of bomb tests conducted in Australia. The moratorium on nuclear tests between Britain, America and the Soviet Union came into operation in late 1958. It ended in 1961, but by then Britain’s nuclear estrangement from the United States was no more. Australia was dealt out of the game. After 1961, Britain conducted her nuclear tests jointly with the United States underground in Nevada. Minor trials at Maralinga continued until 1963. Technically, Britain considered these not a breach of the nuclear-testing ban it had entered into.
MEETING SOVIET MAN
In modern times, particularly for most of the twentieth century, conflicting perceptions of the Soviet Union dominated Australian intellectual life. Manning Clark’s Meeting Soviet Man, a record of his first visit to the USSR in 1958, has been pronounced ‘silly’ and ‘foolish’ for its romantic reaction to Russia. Clark was a disciple of Dostoevsky more than of Marx; the Melbourne Communist writer Judah Waten, who travelled with him, complained of the fact. Indeed, an Australian Soviet expert, Harry Rigby, who worked for the British Embassy, met Clark and said the same thing in different terms: ‘Manning regarded our particular variant of Western society as fatally flawed but he could not make up his mind about a remedy: was it to be found in Rome or in Moscow?’ Clark himself wrote that the Soviets wanted to ‘prune away all the inwardness and sobbing souls and stress hope and strength’. Clark recognised that apart from members of the Communist Party and a dwindling band of fellow travellers in Australia, Australian people had stopped ‘taking Soviet Man seriously—they were no longer bothered to study his solution to the problem of equality, his contributions to culture, his solutions to the problems of the life of man without God’.
To its most recent critics, Meeting Soviet Man is too perfunctory in its condemnation of Stalin, too circumspect in its comments on the invasion of Hungary and too equivocal in its account of the Boris Pasternak affair, the refusal of Soviet authorities to permit the publication of Doctor Zhivago. Clark’s condemnation of Bolshevik crimes exonerated Lenin.
Australian literature on the Soviet Union had a long pedigree. Lincoln Steffens, an American visitor to Soviet Russia, had famously declared, ‘I have been over into the future and it works.’ Before and after Clark, this is the tone of many of the travel journals published by prominent cultural figures not only in Australia but also elsewhere. Tom Wright, an official of the Sheet Metal Workers’ Union of New South Wales and of the Communist Party of Australia, wrote a 1928 account after spending the previous autumn as a guest of the All-Russian Council of Trade Unions in what he says is the end of ‘the first decade of working-class dictatorship’. Wright travelled from Moscow to Donetsk in the south, to Baku, and back to Leningrad and Moscow, inspecting factories, mines, sanitoria and creches and recording inspiring statistics of socialist construction. He admits that much remains to be achieved—there is still unemployment, poverty, crime and prostitution ‘in but little diminished intensity’. Religion and superstition remain, and the countryside displays its face of ‘age long poverty’, but he was sure that soon the agricultural system would achieve a level of the industrial success. He could not foresee the fierce results of Stalin’s Five-Year Plan or look forward to the famine of the 1930s. So his idea was that the Communist Party could have brought a similar transformation to Australia. In the decade following the adoption of Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan in 1928, visits and accounts like Wright’s became increasingly numerous.
All these texts chronicled uniform progress in industrial productivity, living standards and social services, particularly notable in this period of the Depression. There’s no lack of optimism in these works, but in many cases also a surprising level of acknowledgement of collectivisation, assassination and other Stalinist ills. Katharine Susannah Prichard’s The Real Russia (1934), is a more literary production. People like her were looked after in Russia by VOKS, the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, and MORP, the International Union of Revolutionary Writers, founded in 1930. The difference between Prichard and MORP was that they were considered by the regime to be apparatchiks of the state, something every fibre of Prichard’s soul cried out against. The Real Russia is characteristic of accounts of such writer-travellers as Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, André Gide, Romain Rolland and others.
Prichard, a member of the Communist Party of Australia since 1920, was the only Australian writer at all well known in Russia. She declared, ‘I did not want to be a tourist in Russia; to have it said that I made a “conducted tour” . . . saw only what the Soviet government wanted me to see.’ Yet she does mention how much information is available from the guides. She writes, ‘Whether you approve or whether you don’t approve of the politics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, philosophical minds cannot fail to recognise its achievement as historically one of the greatest performances of the human race.’ She even approves of the purges as they are portrayed by those she meets—the 1933 purge was ‘drastic and searching, clearing out of the Party all members whose light does not shine by their work’. She met a number of Russian writers such as Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita) and Mikhail Sholokhov (And Quiet Flows the Don), and called the followers of Maxim Gorky ‘the shock brigades of the world’. She saw Soviet theatres as supplanting churches as ‘temples of a living faith in humanity’.
Travelling with her were the young playwright Betty Roland (not as yet a Communist) and Roland’s lover, one of the founders of Australian Communism, Guido Baracchi. Roland’s memoir Caviar for Breakfast is questioning and ironic. She describes Prichard, returning from Siberia, as ‘sadly disillusioned. None of her former optimism remained. During the weeks she spent there she had seen so much and learned so much she had never dreamt of, and her heart was sick.’ Roland declares that Prichard pursued Communism as a reaction to her husband’s suicide in 1933. Hugo Throssell had not recovered from the pressure of his service in World War I or his financial problems in the Depression.
Roland’s Caviar for Breakfast is an enlightening counterpoint to The Real Russia because she experienced living as a favoured guest with Baracchi at the Hotel Lux, where there really was caviar for breakfast, only to be decanted to squalid flats once they decided to stay on, and thus her awareness of housing shortage, bread queues (which she joined), and her sightings of pauperised peasants and homeless children and of the prostitutes swarming around the international hotels, while Prichard declares in her book, ‘Prostitution no longer exists in the Soviet Union.’ All this coexisting with elegant and abundantly supplied shops reserved for foreigners and the Party elite. Roland also speaks of the shortcomings of gynaecological care. Her consciousness of ‘the universally feared OGPU’, the Soviet secret police, later to become the UVD, and her distaste for the purges is intense. Despite her misgivings, Roland saw Russia as struggling towards the light, and joined the Communist Party on her return from the Soviet Union.
The Russian impressions of Jessie Street from her 1938 journey to Moscow, undertaken in a spirit of scepticism about the claims regarding the status of women in the USSR, led to her being convinced that Soviet society would put an end to the exploitation of women forever.
The first travel account published by an Australian in the early years of the Iron Curtain was Jack Lindsay’s A World Ahead (1950), which was written for a British readership. And then a few years later was Frank Hardy’s Journey into the Future. Like Lindsay, Hardy emphasised the significance of the cultural situation by contrast with the decadence of British intellectual life.
Arriving in Russia from the Soviet-inspired World Youth Festival of Peace in Berlin, Hardy and his wife spent five weeks in the autumn of 1951 as guests of the international section of the Union of Soviet Writers, the successor to MORP. ‘The Soviet worker,’ he wrote, ‘has the highest standard of living in the world.’ He spoke of educational standards. The Soviet atom bomb had secured world peace. The Moscow Metro was an underground fairyland. The ballet and the opera, which were preserves of the rich in the capitalist world, had become mass entertainment, and public entertainment far excelled in quality ‘the decadent culture of the American ruling class’. Shostakovich and Prokofiev were cherished and ground-breaking composers. But he did not take account of the stultifying art of Stalinist Russia.
The threats to the Soviet Union, Hardy claimed, were the capitalist press, ‘the gangster Truman’, ‘the quisling Menzies’ and ‘wealthy men of Toorak, Park Lane and Long Island’. Talk of alleged purges and ‘accusations of dictatorship, totalitarianism, police state etc’ are a ‘gross and obviously deliberate misunderstanding’. The outrageous accusations about forced labour camps were in the first place the invention of none other than Dr Goebbels. Hardy, an energetic punter, says he found an outlet for his interest in sport and beer amongst the ordinary Russians. And with considerable accuracy he says, ‘All in all, you’d like Russians.’
Hardy saw a socialist Australia arising naturally out of mateship and out of the angry fraternal and socialist poems of Henry Lawson, and that ‘a mighty socialist state’ would be ‘stamped with the features of our grand Australian tradition’. An Australian Communist state would thus have an added inheritance to draw on.
Geoffrey Blainey in Across a Red World (1968) would in part agree with Hardy: ‘One dislikes the Russian system . . . but likes the people.’ By the time of the Soviet intervention in the Prague uprising, ‘the Prague spring’ of 1968, for many Communist members and supporters of the principles of the Russian version of Marxism, Communism ceased to be the force for genuine freedom. The repression the Russians brought down on the Czechs was a final disenchantment, and ended the idea that the Soviets were reaching towards the equality and rights of the species.