Maralinga

One of several “Ground Zeros” - August 2025

I’ve said a bit previously on this site on the business of working with the Desert Stars and the unbeliveable environment I get drawn into as a result. This August, I was pulled back on deck to help out with their appearance at the Tjarutja Fesival held in Oak Valley, South Australia. The journey involved driving some 550km from Ceduna into the vastness of SA’s harsh interior, passing the fabled and troublesome former British Nuclaer Test facility and on to the community established to rehome many of the refugees of that particular colonial endeavour. An incredible opportunity from my point of view. Being a “science geek” of sorts, like many of my adolencent chums in the ‘80s, and having a fanciful hankering for a little of our own Dr. Strangelove, Maralinga was not exactly an unknown enitity. Young boys love that stuff. Then you learn what really went down out there: The shockingly cavalier attitude of the British top brass and the fallout that was detected in Adelaide and as far away as Townsville. Various parties were dragged kicking and screaming into the drawn-out cleanup process. A few decades worth. But across all this lies the damage that lingers deep within the lives of the those who still call Maralinga their home. Most of the affected lands were handed back a mere 11 years ago. It’s quite incredible.  >>>>  I had a partner in crime this time, Andy Rasheed of Wistow, SA. He’s mentioned elsewhere also in these blogs having built me a truly unique instrument last year. Andy is commercial photographer and this shows as I only saw him pick the device up a couple of times, much unlike myself, toying endlessly with a Leica happy-snapper my brother loaned me. And so out we went, having flown into Ceduna with our swags and luggage, straight into a mining-specced Hilux ute. Only 150 km in, I’d managed to top up the tank with AdBlue. It’s not what you want at all. I blame myself mostly, but some sub-continental management factors may have also played a small part. It created a set-back that introduced us to a member of the pseudo-covert big wave-riding (and Great White shark bait) community (that is, the tow truck driver and very interesting bloke) and sent us back to Ceduna for a cold swagging night amongst the grey nomads. We did arrive at Oak Valley by the end of the next day, having watched the lands shift abruptly from a lush coastal greens to some of the most parched and desolate country imaginable. It’s a wild transformation that I doubt I’ll ever tire of.  >>>>  Oak Valley seems money well spent, having been acquainted with several other communities over the years. It’s a quiet place. The festival site was ready, all we had to do was find ourselves in it. Coming out of a hiatus, the Desert Stars played rather well - lacking in stamina, but sounding correct regardless. There was a speech from a State Government minister and the audience seemed to collectively yawn. Another band was also on the bill, but no young talent presented. The night was capped off with a lengthy DJ set that kept Andy and I away from sleep for perhaps too long. But that’s how it is on these things. Ask anyone who knows.

Clockwise from top-left: one of the many surviving arrow-straight service roads, the skeleton of a cleanup shed circa mid-90s, a plinth on the site of the largest A-bomb test and the corpse of a high-speed camera enclosure that captured it.

The next day, after some house-keeping, so to speak, we sat poised about a camp fire and cooked lump of corned beef for the road. After leaving Oak Valley, we camped as the sun set, ate an exceptional steak with coal-fired root vegetables, let the profound silence build around us and watched a ring form around the moon. The front gate of the former test-site was only 20km away. Had one of those devices gone off that evening, we’d have been lit up beyond the brightest of days. >>>>  At the front gates, you can look back and see the elevation of the country, the site was chosen this way. Making a longer story a little shorter, we were treated to a special tour, given we were already guests of the Maralinga Tjarurtja people. Just four of us in a Landcruiser. As we drove along, it was like being shown a secret. The scale of it I did not expect. The village once accommodated 3000 personnel. The substantial airfield was once slated as an emergency site for the Space Shuttle had it gone wayward, the apron large enough to land a few cessnas in formation. Then, the road out to the test sites. Minutes passed by at 150 kmph with the die straight road disappearing to a pin-point. After a while, we slowed and several roads fanned out ahead. Nearby was a well, hand-excavated down some 30 meters deep to no avail by earlier prospectors. Man, they were hard. Taking the left fork, we arrived at two enormous skeletons of sheds that were used in the final cleanup of the mid-90s. Beyond and buried some 30 meters deep was the contaminated swarf from the tests - all the top soil , every machine used to do the deed, left over aircraft - every object that made a Geiger counter chirp a continual song. I’d say it could be seen from space. Whereever a device was unleashed, a plinth has been placed underneath. While the sands are a terracotta red, everywhere you look within the range of the blasts are small, faint green globular formations - blast glass, fused in the million degree plus fury of primeaval nuclear fission tech. There are bunkers, most still buried, and running away from them in various directions are miles upon miles of cable that once kept the personnel in communication, or controlled the experiments directly. Some of these bunkers, with forward-facing glass windows were within 200 to 300 meters of the unleashed fireballs. Just imagine it - “Get in there ole chap. I say. Queen and country dear boy….”  >>>>  The test equipment is literally lying about, still. Lead-lined camera boxes, rigging points, melted towers and other objects whose purpose can only be imagined. We were taken to another location where the exploded remnants of various experiments are lying about your feet, some of them looking like props straight out of sci-fi. Actual spent nuclear devices. Elsewhere we saw exploded experimental artillery shells, originally filled with enriched unranium - literally just seeing what would happen when this was fired into that. Nascent trials. Atomic alchemy with the desert-pommy-duck and cover-Jetsons. We learned about the initial test site some 200km further north at Emu. I’d heard of the location from my times working at the Ilkurlka Roadhouse, but I never knew that was what it was fot. It was, “too remote”, apparently. The sheer industry of what they managed to bring out to these lands was startling. And then you try rationalising the rest of the story. >>>> They relocated the locals to Yalata originally, but that didn’t stop said locals from returning. Who figured they’d just walk the 200km back out to their country? And so, after a short time, families were found camped about the test sites, some actually within the craters blasted into the land, drinking the water that had pooled there. It’s incredible to learn that some of these people survived into older age, whereas others were less fortunate. The disturbance was on an epic scale for them.  >>>>  Visting dignitaries, miltary top brass and so forth; they had little time to wait for the right weather conditions and simply ordered tests to proceed. This how fallout was carried away from Maralinga to the far ends of the continent. Playing with the most deadly of fires. This is why standing around out here felt completely out of whack. The blasted Atomic Age. Tally ho, chaps! Tally ho!

With Andy Rasheed, waking up and leaving Maralinga Tjatjura lands.

We left in the later afternoon and found the place Andy liked the look of as we travelled out. It was a gully with trees and a tank (one of the frequent installations on the desert roads, a sloping iron roof with a tank beneath - basic but vital), potentially serene, but unfortunately strewn with thre careless details of other campers, toilet paper, nappies, cans, plastic everywere. And some car wrecks… always the car wrecks. Fallen soldiers, gradually returning to the mineral earth. I prepared dinner that night - Andy had fallen a tad ill along the way and had to recuperate, lying on the red sand as the full moon rose across a dry salt lake. Again, the stillness took hold. Waking around 3am, I went wandering along the road, playing with the Leica again, figuring out time exposure settings with no tripod. Fast forward to Ceduna, we returned the Hilux and were subsequently billed extra for leaving it with an aroma of gidgee smoke. Neither of us had picked up on that.

Maralinga is an Indigenous word for “thunder”, not in the language of the locals, but from Garik, an extinct language from the Northern Territory.

Running - as recorded by The Desert Stars - words and music by Jay Minning

I thought I heard a thunder near Maralinga,
I thought I seen a serpent man,
Rising up in black and white,
I feel fear in the air,
Feel my spirit running.
Yeah, I’m running cos I heard it explode, I’m running cos I seen it explode
Yeah I been running.
I had to get away from the serpentine place,
To warn all my people,I been running In fear,
Running across the desert to survive.