The glow of his campfire framed a simple tableau of pioneer life. Across this ‘untenanted land’, Edwin Brady mused, ‘little companies’, such as his own, sat by their ‘solitary fires’. ‘They smoked pipes and talked, or watched the coals reflectively’. Around them, the ‘shadowy outlines’ of the bush merged into the dark northern night, and ‘the whispers’ of this ‘unknown’ land gathered about. It seemed to Brady that this camp, this night, represented the ‘actual life’ of the Northern Territory as he had known it. But the future weighed heavily upon that quiet, nostalgic scene. The moment would soon fade, Brady reflected, as the ‘cinematograph of Time’ rolled on. It was 1912, and something new was coming.

Staring into the flames of the campfire, Brady imagined he heard ‘the whistle of the Trans-continental Express’. The ‘rumble of freight trains’ followed, and the sound of water churning in the wake of ‘fast coastal steamers’. The night was filled with movement as Brady perceived an end to the north’s crippling isolation, the conquest of its ‘lonesome distances’. New industries too! The ‘chug-chug’ of sugar mills, ‘the buzzing of cotton jinnys’, ‘the clinking of harvesters’, ‘the hissing of refrigerators’—as Brady listened, ‘the thousand homely sounds of human progress’ joined in a triumphant ‘hymn of the Future’. The night’s subtle whispers were lost amidst the clamour of technology on the move. Not mere campfires, but ‘young cities’, electric lit and alive with enterprise’, would soon arise to defeat the darkness. This was Brady’s dream. This was progress.

Edwin James Brady, poet and journalist, visited the Northern Territory in September 1912, gathering material for his ambitious compendium of Australian developmental opportunities, Australia Unlimited. Brady was travelling the country, charting the outlines of Australia’s future with his typical optimistic zeal. His trip north was drawing to a close and, as he relaxed by his last campfire, he began to ponder the transformation of the Territory. The sounds and images conjured from the night reveal much about the spirit that invigorated his work. He imagined an end to isolation and emptiness, the growth of both population and production. The future was rising like a flood, lapping at the frontiers of settlement, ready to redeem Australia’s waste lands with the regenerative flow of human ingenuity and enthusiasm. Australia’s unlimited prospects lay both in the conquest of space and the fulfillment of time. Plotted against these two axes, the upward course of progress was clear.

The ‘cinematograph of Time’ was an apt metaphor. It portrayed the unfolding story of Australia’s national progress as a product of the latest technology, presented with an assured sense of inevitability – frame follows frame follows frame. In the early years of the century, confidence in the transforming power of science and technology was high. ‘The wealth of today’, Brady argued, ‘is but a beggar’s moiety of the unlimited wealth of the future which will be won by the application of modern knowledge to local conditions’. His optimism is echoed still in the slogans of ‘knowledge nation’ and ‘new economy’. Science and technology remain as engines for change, cascading revolution upon revolution. The weight of inevitability that threatened to extinguish Brady’s isolated campfire continues to press upon our visions of the future –invigorating our hopes and intensifying our fears. We are all familiar with the story of progress, a compelling tale of growth and improvement that entwines national ambition with individual longing. But how are our journeys through life framed within this unrolling narrative? What choices do we have, and how do we make them?

For Brady, progress was measured in miles and acres, a story of continental conquest. Land figures less prominently in contemporary calculations of achievement, nonetheless, we continue to imagine progress in terms of distance travelled, as a journey, ever onwards through time. In a landscape of metaphors, amidst metaphors of landscape, the meaning of progress eludes easy analysis. Our future is constructed within the shifting space of time. This essay imagines an alternate journey, one that explores the terrain that separates the life of an individual from the destiny of Australia Unlimited; a journey that carries us from science, to nation, to citizen, venturing unsteadily along the boundary between hope and fear. If the topography remains unclear, the scale awry, we might at least hope to chart a few reference points along the frontiers of the future.

all this paraphernalia

In July 1909, the Minister for External Affairs, Littleton Groom, introduced legislation for the Commonwealth takeover of the Northern Territory. Groom, a methodical and well-educated liberal MP from Queensland, briefly surveyed the history of the Territory and presented to the House ‘a few opinions of practical men’, all of whom were optimistic about the region’s potential. ‘[W]e have there’, Groom concluded, ‘some of the finest land in Australia’. Nonetheless, it was clear that the Territory’s ‘latent resources’ would not be extracted without effort. The investment of capital and a dramatic increase in population were essential, but so too was an increase in knowledge. ‘We are every year acquiring a better knowledge of our natural conditions and a better understanding of the laws of production’, Groom argued. It was through such an understanding, he continued, that ‘much of the land which is now despised will ultimately become very productive’. Where would this knowledge come from? Groom looked to a scientific agency whose establishment he had advocated since his entry into politics—a Federal Bureau of Agriculture.

Littleton Groom embodied much of the spirit of ‘new liberalism’, or ‘progressive liberalism’ as he termed it. By the late 19th century, traditional laissez faire policies seemed increasingly impotent in the face of growing threats to social cohesion and unparalleled opportunities for accelerated development. Responding to this challenge, new liberals sought to wield the power of the state to claim progress as their own, to enrich the character of their citizens, and to ensure the prosperity of their nation. ‘I want to see the individual and individuality developed to the full’, Groom argued, and wherever the state ‘can be used for the purpose of doing good for the people as a whole, then I believe in the State exercising its powers accordingly’. It was a creed carried into the first federal parliament under the banner of protectionism, defended most eloquently by Groom’s friend and colleague, Alfred Deakin.

The idea of a federal bureau to foster agricultural improvement was emblematic of the new liberals’ cause, a clear example of how government could employ ‘direct agencies’ in the manufacture of progress. Fashioned after the US Department of Agriculture, the proposed Australian bureau was expected to coordinate scientific investigations and collect ‘the very best and latest information’ for dissemination to primary producers. Such ‘intelligent legislation’, Groom maintained, brought ‘greater liberty’ to the farmer, while also boosting the country’s productive capacity. Both individual and nation would grow. Deakin, who himself had made a special study of irrigation, was a keen supporter of the measure, as were a number of other prominent protectionists. Isaac Isaacs argued passionately: ‘All this paraphernalia … is only the gold lace of the Constitution, unless we can make of it an engine for the promotion of the material, moral, and social welfare of the people’.

The Bureau of Agriculture was invested with many of the attributes of an ideal, progressive society. Scientist and farmer would work together, melding knowledge and practice, intellect and endeavour. Their cooperative efforts promised both an enlightened citizenry and a wealthy nation. This presumed interdependence and its implicit sense of balance was at the core of Groom’s liberalism. He quoted approvingly the Victorian Director of Education’s assessment that an ‘ideal education’ concerned itself with ‘physical fitness’, ‘mental fitness’ and ‘moral fitness’. ‘So it was with national life’, Groom added, ‘Industrial and intellectual capacity must be developed’. The nation’s greatest resources, he argued, lay in ‘the hand power, the brain power and the heart power of our manhood and womanhood’. There was no simple formula for progress. It was a property both of individuals and of nations. In a good society the two were closely linked, proceeding apace. But this could be achieved only through a complex set of balancing acts, by constantly tweaking the levels of authority and freedom, duty and reward, ideals and practice, knowledge and control.

the modern hayseed

The life and work of Littleton Groom was memorialised by his widow Jessie, in a biography she compiled under the title, Nation Building in Australia. A tad grandiose, but the title perhaps speaks more of Groom’s compelling sense of duty than it does of posthumous puffery. ‘Nation building’ was a commitment, an act of service, a life to be lived, not a victory to be won. However, the title also makes reference to one of the most significant periods in Groom’s political life. From 1905–8, he served as a minister in Alfred Deakin’s protectionist government. Although they were a parliamentary minority with a fragile hold on power, Deakin’s protectionists nonetheless embarked upon an ambitious legislative program that did much to define the nature of Australian federalism. The achievements of this administration were eulogised by Groom himself in a pamphlet also entitled ‘Nation Building in Australia’. It was a phrase that linked the personal and the political, a citizen’s duty and a country’s destiny.

As Minister for Home Affairs, and later Attorney-General, Groom contributed significantly to the government’s tally of ‘practical legislation’. But his achievements in areas such as meteorology, statistics and bounties were intended as part of a broader system of institutions and legislation, designed to manage Australia’s productive resources through the rational application of scientific knowledge. At the heart of this system he imagined his Bureau of Agriculture. With Australia’s economy heavily dependent upon primary industry, Groom argued that the establishment of such a bureau could ‘be justified on financial considerations alone’. Not only would existing farms be made more efficient, the frontiers of land settlement would be advanced. Immigrants would be rallied to Australia’s great nation-building crusade, inspired by the government’s support for small landholders.

But there was also a moral dimension to the promise of agricultural improvement. ‘We may trust the cupidity of mankind to develop our mineral resources’, Deakin remarked pointedly, ‘but agricultural, pastoral, and kindred pursuits need the superintending and assisting help of the States and of the Commonwealth’. Agriculture was not just about profit. Isaac Isaacs had argued for the need to ‘liberalise’ agriculture, ‘to raise it to a level higher than it has ever occupied before, to give it a dignity, a worth and a profit which may raise the Australian nation in the whole scale of civilization’. The application of science promised to ‘elevate’ agriculture and its practitioners. No more would the farmer be figure of ridicule, a ‘clodhopper’, a ‘hayseed’. On the contrary, Deakin argued, ‘The modern “Hayseed” is an up-to-date, keenly alive businessman, whose study is how to make the best of a small area with limited means but unlimited intelligence’.

Science was a potent addition to the regenerative elixir of frontier life. The idea that a new ‘type’ of man was being created at the nexus of European civilisation and Australian environment had gained considerable currency, infused by progressive assumptions about the benefits of rural living and the role of the frontier in the formation of national character. Edwin Brady warned that the land’s ‘ancient lineage forbids the familiarity of the unworthy’, and welcomed its ‘paradoxes and difficulties’ as a test of Australia’s physical and mental prowess. The establishment of a Bureau of Agriculture was a response to this continental challenge, offering further improvement of the Australian type through a reinvigorated assault on the vicissitudes of frontier existence. Groom quoted approvingly US President Roosevelt’s assessment, that as well as creating wealth, his own department must aim ‘to foster agriculture for its social results … to assist in bringing about the best kind of life on the farm for the sake of producing the best kind of men’.

But in the transfigurative furnace of frontier life, both man and land were forged anew. Just as Groom had looked to a future when the ‘despised’ lands of the Northern Territory would be revealed in their true productive glory, so other supporters of the Bureau of Agriculture believed that the accumulation of knowledge would ultimately redeem lands now defamed as ‘desert’. Deakin described the transformation wrought upon the desert plains of the United States, arguing that the answer was not simply irrigation, but intelligence: ‘Brains pay better than water, and brains are making farming pay to-day’. Australia’s ‘hope’, he continued, ‘lies in those enormous tracts which have yet to be brought into the service of man and made productive of wealth for the whole community’. Australia’s ‘Dead Heart’, Brady proclaimed memorably, was in fact a ‘Red Heart’ destined to ‘pulsate with life’. Brain and heart, mind and matter, man and nature – the golem of progress would arise, moulded from the continent’s red soil, in the image of the ‘modern hayseed’.

Groom imagined a nation made strong through the accumulation of knowledge and the occupation of land. The frontiers of science and of settlement would be brought into alignment by his Bureau of Agriculture, thence to move forward in their inexorable conquest of the continent. Australia’s ‘emptiness’ was no longer simply a location for scientific research, it was itself an object for study and transformation. ‘Altogether, a great realm of exploration lies open to us’, proclaimed Prime Minister Joseph Cook, introducing legislation for the Bureau in 1913: ‘A whole vista of duties and potentialities opens up when inquiry is made as to what there is to be done in Australia’. A new wave of discovery and possession was gathering momentum. ‘Little now remains for the geographical explorer to do’, Brady argued, ‘but for the scientific investigator there is still an almost limitless field in Australia’. Time and space were traded along the frontiers of the future. Science gained space, a ‘vista of potentialities’ to explore and conquer. The land, in return, won a sense of inevitable fulfilment – the gift of time, the power of destiny.

the battle of Australia

The campfire was slowly dying, as was the dream. Edwin Brady continued to ponder the Northern Territory’s future, but the sounds of progress filling his thoughts gradually yielded to the insistent ‘tramp of young Australian feet at drill’. Instead of ‘clinking’ harvesters, he now heard ‘the wireless keeping watch by night and day’; instead of rumbling freight trains there was the sound of ‘scouting aeroplanes coming home to their military hangars’. As the embers crumbled to ash, Brady concluded his campfire devotions, looking up at the stars ‘glittering like bayonet points’ and offering a prayer to the ‘God of Nations and of Battles’ that ‘this Northern State-to-be might put her young feet upon the paths of Destiny … in peace’. Brady’s hymn of the future was scored to a martial beat; Australia’s unlimited future could be assured only through determined vigilance and resolute defence.

Australia Unlimited was a ‘Book with a Mission’, not merely to sell Australia, but to save it. ‘A mere handful of White People’, perched uncomfortably near Asia’s ‘teeming centres of population’, could not expect to maintain unchallenged ownership of the continent and its potential riches, the book’s prospectus warned. Even as Australia was beginning to enjoy the first fruits of nationhood, its legitimacy, its very existence, seemed imperilled. Australia’s ‘empty north’ was widely perceived as an open door to potential Asian aggressors. The Deakin government was keen to remedy this vulnerability, and its move to assume control of the Northern Territory was justified both in terms of development and security. ‘We have in the north a rich, fertile country’, Groom argued, introducing the legislation, ‘and … that Territory, as it is to-day, especially in relation to other nations, is a menace to the Commonwealth’.

Offering both the promise of riches and the threat of invasion, northern Australia revealed the complexities of nation building – development and defence were closely entwined. The problem with the Northern Territory, Groom explained, was that it remained ‘unmanned’. But ‘manning’ the country was not simply a matter of numbers. What was required was ‘effective’ occupation, ‘by a people who are applying their energies and industry to developing the resources of the country’. Only when settled by sturdy, hardworking landholders would the north be made both productive and secure. With its promise to improve the quality and efficiency of rural life, science appeared ready and able to bulwark the nation’s defensive frontiers. The Bureau of Agriculture was an essential part of a system aimed at developing a strong, self-contained nation. Moreover, as part of a well-balanced civic education, science rounded out the armoury of Australia’s ‘citizen soldiery’. The nation’s best defence, Groom argued, lay in ‘the ideal of the intelligent proprietor of the land defending his own country’.

But defence meant more than just preparedness. Australia’s progress had to be won in an ongoing contest of legitimacy, with battles raging along the frontiers of race, land, identity and occupation. Groom’s 1901 election campaign was energised by his detailed and passionate advocacy of the principle of ‘White Australia’. Quoting C. H. Pearson on the dangers of Asian immigration and the threat of racial degeneracy, he warned his electors ‘we are not fighting the battle of Australia alone, …we are fighting the battle of civilised Europe’. Australia was seeking to defend, not only its land, but its integrity as a civilised nation. Fears of infiltration, contamination and degeneration constantly pricked at the confidence of White Australia, reflected in Commonwealth action to enforce quarantine and eradicate topical diseases. Groom’s Bureau of Agriculture was justified as a means of defence against the pests and diseases, which ‘have no respect for the border lines marked on our maps’. It was in the denial of borders, the negation of boundaries, that Australia’s dissolution threatened. The battle for racial integrity was both personal and national, moral and martial. ‘Can you allow your children to blend their blood with that of the alien races?’, Groom asked, ‘Can you imagine anything more pathetic than sad-looking almond eyes peeping out of the Caucasian faces?’

But the very notion of integrity, the fearfully imagined borders of White Australia, were themselves a denial of Aboriginal presence. The ‘waste’ and the ‘emptiness’ that Groom hoped to dispel through the application of science, were constructed out of a lingering sense of unease and illegitimacy. With its offer of life and renewal, science helped to legitimate possession, demonstrating the inevitability of civilised conquest. There was a place for Aboriginal people in this modern world, but it was not on the land. Opening the science section of the Austral Festival in Toowoomba, Groom noted that while the region’s ‘native tribes’ were virtually extinct, some of their weapons remained. He suggested that ‘out of love and respect for the black races that were passing away’ such implements should be preserved ‘as an historical lesson … as to the weapons of those who preceded civilisation’ and as a ‘permanent memorial’. With Aboriginal people apparently consigned to the museum showcase, it was the land itself that had to be subdued. Brady imagined the coming breed of farmers, ‘with library and laboratory behind them’, as a ‘silent conquering army’: ‘Led by the shining spirit of William Farrer, this Army of Invasion is preparing its assaults upon the outstanding citadels of Nature’.

Frontiers are uneasy places, juxtaposing the known and the unknown, civilisation and nature, us and them. Around and through the markers of geography, the imagined borders of knowledge and possession create place from race, gender and time. The splendour of nation is revealed against the dark, looming shadow of otherness. Unthinkingly we talk about the future in terms of our fears and our hopes, rarely pausing to consider how the two are related. Groom’s vision of progress, his mission to create a prosperous and fulfilling future through the application of science, encompassed both development and denial. Progress was both a triumphant quest for improvement and a fearful battle against the spectre of degeneration and dissolution. It is this tension that gives progress its power. The oppositions and dichotomies of frontier imagining energised the process of nation building, expanding the bubble of time to create a space into which the future could unfold. But this act of creation proceeds by destruction, obliterating alternatives. For Groom and Deakin the development of the north was both a fulfillment of destiny, and a vital necessity. There was no choice. Progress uses its own internal tensions to make itself seem natural, necessary, inevitable.

blast the bush

Len Beadell was leading a survey party through the mulga scrub of central South Australia, when he came across something unusual, even unnerving. ‘It was almost like a picket fence’, he described, with posts made from ‘slivers of shale’. Being in such an isolated location, he decided ‘it was obviously an ancient Aboriginal ceremonial ground built by those primitive, stone-age nomads in some distant dreamtime’ – an Aboriginal ‘Stonehenge’. As he scrabbled in the dust, searching for a piece of charcoal that might be used to fix this eerie structure in time, Beadell pondered the ‘ironic clash of old and new’: ‘only a few short miles away the first mighty atomic bomb ever to be brought to the mainland of Australia was to be blasted into immediate oblivion … and it was by-products of this very weapon which could be used for determining the age of the charcoal from these prehistoric fires’. Beadell’s expedition had set out from the British atomic test site at Emu Field, searching for a permanent testing range – one that would become known as ‘Maralinga’. It was 1953, and something new was coming.

The ‘clash of old and new’, the sense of disjunction, was a familiar characteristic of frontier experience. But with the coming of the atomic bomb, the sense of ‘newness’ seemed to have become more acute. The destruction of Hiroshima was revealed unto a shocked world as the harbinger of a new age – the ‘atomic age’. Media reports talked about ‘new vistas’, a ‘new era’ in world affairs, a ‘revolution’ in daily life. The atomic bomb, Clem Christesen wrote in Meanjin, had ‘severed the old world from the new with guillotine-like decisiveness’. Most importantly, the world faced new challenges, for the atomic age carried grave implications for the future of humanity. It was a ‘turning point’, ‘perhaps the most solemn turning point of all history’, Rev. Dr C. N. Button warned his Ballarat congregation: ‘Humanity is at the crossroads’.

The Sydney Morning Herald relayed the news from Hiroshima under a pair of significant subheadings: ‘Terrifying New Weapon’ and ‘Big Possibilities In Peace’. The ‘good’ atom/‘bad’ atom routine dominated much public understanding of this mysterious technology. It was a formula popularly represented in the image of the atomic crossroads, placing humanity at a fork in the road of destiny, with a signpost pointing one way to destruction and the other to progress. Which was it to be, apocalypse or utopia? There was no escaping; it was time to choose. The assumed imminence of the crossroads, the disjunctive dynamic of the atomic age, obscured much of its familiarity. Like the frontier, the crossroads gained its metaphorical power from the conjunction of opposites. The wonders of a techno-utopia shone invitingly amidst the menacing gloom of atomic obliteration. But there was no choice. The signpost to destruction was a warning, a lesson to be learnt. Just as it had in Groom’s plans for northern development, progress in the atomic age used the threat of dissolution to charge itself with the force of destiny. Both imagined a future fulfilled through the accumulation of space, whether by the inexorable expansion of Australia’s frontiers, or by a continuing march along the road to atomic nirvana. Both offered a journey from which there was no turning back.

In the glare of an atomic explosion, Len Beadell imagined, the mulga scrub around him would instantly ‘come to life’. At the dawn of this ‘new’ age, the image of vast expanses of idle and wasted land, silently awaiting the transforming power of science, continued to evoke enthusiasm. As Britain’s readied its big bang at Emu Field, the Sunday Herald keenly anticipated the moment when the ‘inland silence that remained unbroken for ages’ would be ‘shattered’ by the bomb. Australia’s desert lands had found a new destiny, for ‘the very poverty of these areas in surface resources made them valuable in the atomic field, either as a storehouse of uranium riches or as the kind of waste land where experiments can be most safely conducted’. Ivan Southall described the Woomera rocket range, established some years earlier, as an ‘open-air laboratory’: ‘one of the greatest stretches of uninhabited wasteland on earth, created by God specifically for rockets’.

Even as rockets were being propelled into ‘space’ (the final frontier), science presented the land with yet another chance for renewal. Woomera and the atomic tests brought science and land together with a familiar mix of imperial loyalties and national self-interest, development and defence. The Minister for Supply, Howard Beale, sought to justify the establishment of the Maralinga range by portraying it as ‘a challenge to Australian men to show that the pioneering spirit of their forefathers who developed our country is still the driving force of achievement’. These new pioneers had the opportunity to contribute to the deterrent power of the free world, while possibly winning Australia access to the secrets of the atomic age. Distorted echoes of Deakin’s ‘citizen soldiery’ rang down the years, charged with imminence of the crossroads challenge.

Australia Unlimited Ltd

In June 1957, the Sydney Morning Herald published the first in an annual series of supplements surveying ‘the great endeavours and achievement of Australian commerce and industry in the postwar years and the fabulous promise of future national development’. The supplements were titled Australia Unlimited. Edwin Brady would have been pleased by the overwhelming sense of optimism that suffused every page. ‘Confidence’, the supplement declared, was the ‘theme for the future’. It was a confidence born of postwar reconstruction, economic expansion, and a rise in the standard of living, but it was nourished also by a belief in the generative power of science and technology. The Chairman of CSIRO, Ian Clunies Ross, provided something of a keynote in his observation that ‘there are no problems so great that they cannot be solved once we marshal our resources for a resolute and sustained attack on them’. Clunies Ross’s ‘faith’, the supplement concluded, ‘articulates the endeavours of the planners and makers of Australia’s future’.

The Minister for Primary Industry, Billy McMahon, praised the work of Australia’s ‘modern explorers’, the ‘scientists and scientifically minded farmers’, who were ‘rolling back our farm horizons’ and revealing our ‘unlimited’ opportunities. He invoked a familiar catalogue of hopes, but one that was charged with an increasingly powerful sense of expectation. Attempting to define the ‘newness’ of the atomic age, the nuclear physicist Ernest Titterton suggested that ‘the funeral pyre of Hiroshima’ was ‘the symbol of an era in which science has become so important in our lives that all decisions, including political ones, must be made with scientific considerations in mind’. No nation, it seemed, could afford to ignore the implications of science. The power of science was the power of the bomb, the ability to change the world, to bring down the guillotine on the past, to erect the signposts at the crossroads of destiny. Progress, science and atomic energy were virtual analogues, each brought the promise of a future transformed.

Old dreams were invested with new hope. Atomic energy would power the reclamation of Australia’s ‘great spaces’. The Chairman of the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, J. P. Baxter, described the possibility of ‘package power stations’ to serve ‘the remoter parts of the continent’, particularly those whose mineral wealth ‘will demand exploitation’. Uranium offered a solution at last to Australia’s ‘empty north’, propelling the nation into a new phase of ‘pioneering’. The mining and processing of this mysterious metal, it was argued, would give ‘the economic life of the Territory the transfusion of new blood it needs’. Progress was represented not only by the Rum Jungle uranium mine, but by the modern town of Batchelor, created specifically for miners and their families. Opening the project, Prime Minister Menzies declared it ‘something of a miracle’. ‘Not long ago’, he continued, the Northern Territory had seemed ‘almost worthless’: ‘But the history of Australia is the history of converting people from despair to hope and from hope to achievement’. With the discovery of uranium, the north seemed destined to host ‘one of the great communities of Australia’.

Edwin Brady always intended to write a sequel to Australia Unlimited, and if he had lived a few years longer, one could imagine him poring over accounts of the Rum Jungle project, thinking back to that campfire and his dreams of progress. But there was something rather different about this new style of pioneering. The town of Batchelor, with its individually styled family homes and its remarkable range of ‘comforts and amenities’, had brought suburban living to the frontier. More importantly, its inhabitants were not sturdy landholders working their properties, but wage earners, employees of Consolidated Zinc Pty Ltd. The Sydney Morning Herald’s version of Australia Unlimited was not the story of hardworking individuals creating national progress out of their own instinctive drive for improvement. In the wake of the Manhattan Project, the scale of progress had changed dramatically, represented now by huge developmental projects that married government-supplied infrastructure with foreign investment and expertise. Progress was measured not in the sweat of the yeoman farmer, but in the profits of large multinational companies.

The Liberal Party went before the electors in 1958 emphasising its achievements in national development and its success in attracting foreign capital. ‘Our slogan is “Australia Unlimited”’, Menzies asserted, ‘and we pronounce it with confidence’. The campaign theme was highlighted by a tour of key projects and facilities, including the opening of Australia’s first nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights. But behind the confidence of ‘Australia Unlimited’ lurked a new fear. Electors were urged, not to make, but ‘to conserve the forces of progress’. As the security enclosures at Rum Jungle and Lucas Heights demonstrated, while individuals had seemingly lost the power to create progress, they had somehow gained the ability to threaten it.

a change of heart

The war, when it came, only lasted for a month, but that was long enough. All life was quickly extinguished in the northern hemisphere, and the clouds of deadly radioactive fallout gradually diffused to shroud the whole globe. For the people of Australia, it was a lingering, drawn out journey to oblivion. Nevil Shute’s apocalyptic novel On the Beach was published the same year as the first Australia Unlimited supplement. Its theme was not confidence, but fear, resignation and confusion. There was a new threat from the north, invisible and unstoppable. ‘It’s going to go on spreading down here, southwards, till it gets to us?’, Moira asks, ‘And they can’t do anything about it?’ ‘Not a thing’, replies Commander Dwight Towers, ‘It’s just too big a matter for mankind to tackle. We’ve just got to take it’. All they can do is wait helplessly for their own death. In this final act of surrender the people of Australia are united with the rest of humanity: one world or none.

Just as atomic power promised to conquer Australia’s vast spaces, so the bomb seemed poised to obliterate national boundaries. There would be no winners in an atomic war. G. V. Portus from the University of Adelaide argued that the ‘only defence of the world against the threat of atomic warfare is political defence’, and called for the ‘abandonment’ of the ‘out-of-date’ concept of national sovereignty. Some looked with hope to the newly formed United Nations and its attempts to negotiate a system of control, but the UN Atomic Energy Commission soon descended into deadlock. Others sought more radical solutions, inspired by Einstein and his declaration in favour of world government. But the political fallout from our atom-bombed world soon settled, and the divisions became clear again. In this new age of oxymorons, war was cold, and the bomb was a weapon of peace.

The Cold War pushed Australia’s defensive frontiers ever northward, as the concept of ‘forward defence’ emerged to contain the threat of communism. ‘We must, by peaceful means extend the frontiers of the human spirit’, Menzies proclaimed, ‘We must, by armed strength, defend the geographical frontiers of those nations whose self-government is based upon the freedom of the spirit’. Menzies invoked the prospect of a looming third world war to justify his government’s defence preparation program, but increasingly Australia sought security in treaties and alliances, rather than men and guns. The nation’s defence was to be assured through the graces of its powerful friends, rather than the character of its citizen soldiery. Just like the characters in On the Beach, Australians were left to ponder a threat that they barely understood, and against which they could do very little.

But even as the frontiers of Australian security expanded, so they rebounded inwards, enclosing hearts and minds in an ever tighter grip. Long-held fears of infiltration were revived, with communism identified as a domestic as well as an international threat. Agents of the enemy were amongst us. The circumstances of the bomb’s creation and use focused much of this anxiety on the myth of the ‘atomic secret’. The CSIR, with its modest atomic energy program, proved a favourite target for political opportunists. Not only was it believed to be harbouring communists, its Chairman, David Rivett, had the temerity to suggest that good science entailed the free and open interchange of information. To prove their security credentials at home and abroad, both Labor and Liberal governments cranked up the legislative apparatus, providing new levels of protection for defence ‘secrets’, and creating new agencies to monitor the threat within. The common citizen was no longer the nation’s guarantee of security, but a potential weak link in its defensive perimeter.

It was, perhaps, human weakness that was most glaringly exposed by the bomb blast over Hiroshima. Even as the world marvelled at this new conquest of the forces of nature, they wondered if humanity had the maturity and wisdom to control it. ‘It is a challenge to the conscience of man’, the Argus considered, ‘to ponder gravely whether his intellectual achievements have not outrun his moral perceptions’. The ‘crossroads of destiny’ had brought a ‘moral test’ upon the world; science demanded ‘a change of heart’. And there was no time to get your breath back. Bomb tests followed bomb tests, and then the Russians had it, and so the Americans built the H-bomb, and there were more tests … The frontiers of science were running ahead, pushing ever deeper into unknown territory, leaving the world gasping, trying to catch up. In April 1954 a distinguished panel of speakers considered the latest menace under the title ‘The H-Bomb – A Challenge to Humanity’. Canon E. J. Davidson proclaimed: ‘Our civilisation stands at the point of decision … It must conform to the moral order of the universe or perish’.

Each new challenge brought its own sense of urgency, its own restatement of the crossroads choice – change or die. There was no ‘turning point’, no critical juncture on the road to progress, only constant reminders of our own fallibility and the apparent disconnection of science from the ethical life of humanity. The crossroads offered not the chance to change the future, but to conform to it. We were the ‘other’, able to occupy the future only through the courtesy of science. The destructive sense of inevitability that the frontier wreaked upon the land and its original inhabitants was turned upon us all. It was humanity itself that threatened progress.

a hapless mess of wreckage and misunderstanding

In May 1999, The Australian invited a range of ‘well-informed and influential’ speakers to examine the question: ‘How can we continue to build an open, competitive international economy while ensuring we develop a progressive society?’ The resulting conference was entitled – yes, you guessed it –‘Australia Unlimited’, and focused on the dangers and opportunities wrought by the latest in revolutionary forces – globalisation. Something new was here. The forum’s major sponsors provided a convenient summary of its themes in their half-page advertisements. Ansett offered ‘a world of destinations’, Foxtel brought the news of the world to you 24 hours a day, while IBM described the ‘treasure trove of products’ available on the Web. ‘Now it really is a small world’, they told us. But globalisation is simply progress rebadged, measured still in the conquest of distance, the colonisation of space. Science and technology continue to bolster its imagined momentum, pushing time beyond its limits, creating the fault-lines of the new.

Within each Australia Unlimited, there was an attempt to articulate the balance of forces that will ensure continued progress: the interplay of nation and citizen, knowledge and capital, freedom and control. In the latest version it was the balance between the ‘two competing imperatives’ of ‘economic growth and social harmony’ that most concerned the movers and shakers. Stuart Macintyre was the only contributor to comment on the link to Brady and Deakin, noting that ‘the principal object of Australian policy in the early years of the century was not the economy or social justice but the nation’. It was a point lost on most forum participants, who imagined progress to be found in the maintenance of a healthy, global economy. Nations are not built; they grow in the rich and fertile environment of globalisation – just keep piling on the manure. But all is not well in this garden of plenty, for the disintegration of social cohesion threatens continued reform. ‘Even at a terrible cost to themselves’, Dennis Shanahan wrote in his summary of the forum, ‘individuals and single nations have the potential to turn the advantages and underpinnings of globalisation against globalisation itself’. Unless governments and corporations can persuade individuals of the benefits of this new age, their ‘resistance … has the potential to … set off a chain reaction threat to general progress’. The danger is not ideological, resistance derives not from political commitment, but from ‘a sense of alienation, envy and resentment’. The problem is in being human.

In traversing these three versions of Australia Unlimited, it is tempting to imagine a linear narrative, to trace the progress of progress. That is the lie at the heart of this paper. Concepts such as the individual, the nation, even science, are never simple, and are always contested. There is no single stream of progress meandering through time, there are many countercurrents, eddies, backwaters and divergences. The point is not what progress has become, but that it has become, and is becoming still. Progress is not a belief, a hope, a naïve aspiration; one that we can in our supposed sophistication simply reject or deny. Within the meaning of progress there are many balances to be negotiated and boundaries to be drawn: a continuing process of accumulation and disjunction that shapes our perceptions of time and our awareness of change.

The process of future-making leaves its traces, and this brief, inconclusive sortie has tried to find the chisel marks in the smooth, worked surface of the new. Who makes the future? Groom’s idealised citizen seems to have been overtaken by the scientist, and both by the forces of global change, but all are fictions drawn from the battlefields of identity and authority. Where is the future made? Spatial metaphors are commonly invoked to illuminate the meaning of time, and so it is that progress is seen to be forged at the frontier, the crossroads, or in the networks of globalisation. Movement is taken for granted, we are on a journey, ever onwards. Is there a choice? Images of a future under threat, of a menacing otherness, of the imminent danger of annihilation, all work to deny alternatives. We are warned to keep to the main road for our own safety, for the safety of the future. But to understand our options, we have to explore the meaning of our journey, to chart its origins, to look again at the signposts. We have to find the frontiers of our future in our past.

In one of his last journal entries, Alfred Deakin struggled to stay within time: ‘Why babble more … I have shed, once and for all, my past as a whole – my present fruitless – my future a hapless mess of wreckage and misunderstanding’. His memory was almost gone, so too his words, his life. Groom lived on, but also battled to keep pace with progress. So thoroughly modern in his nation-building enthusiasm, he suffered the ultimate humiliation of being remembered by Robert Menzies as ‘old fashioned’. And Brady? Edwin Brady died in 1952, just short of his 83rd birthday. He spent most of his later years at his camp in Mallacoota, sandwiched between the bush and the sea. He was, he reflected ‘perhaps the most successful failure in literary history’. Barely able to make a living, he nonetheless persisted ‘in asserting that Australia is the best country in the world’. Most of his plans had come to nothing. There was no sequel to Australia Unlimited, no film version, his hopes for the economic development of East Gippsland had been thwarted, his utopian farming community had failed. ‘Should I end up, therefore, on a melancholy note?’, he asked. Brady’s journey along ‘Life’s Highway’ was coming to an end, but he would not submit to the inevitable, he would not surrender to time. ‘I decline to become mournful’, he answered, ‘I refuse to grow old’. There is no turning back. Is there?

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The development and use of the atomic bomb was a turning point in history. It seems so obvious—the world was changed, a new age dawned. But this was not the first turning point, nor the last. History is littered with critical moments, crossroads, watersheds and points of decision. Each brings a new sense of urgency, each draws renewed attention to the fate of humankind, but the moment soon passes and the urgency fades…until next time.

This thesis uses the dawn of the atomic age in Australia as the inspiration for an examination, not of key moments, but of the journey that sweeps through them—this thing we call progress. It is a journey that carries us from past to future, from old to new; a journey where space and time exchange metaphors and meanings. But where do individual hopes fit within the march of civilisation? How are our ambitions and achievements measured alongside the growth of nations or the development of science? Progress imagines a steady passage onwards, but we know that our own journeys are circuitous and intermittent. We stop, we go back, we think ahead, we live in the past.

This thesis shifts between individual and nation, from the dreams of a disappointed poet, to the terrifying power of the atom. Traversing much of twentieth century Australia, it examines the interactions between science and the state, between knowledge and power. Where have we sought the key to progress and who has been granted authority to speak in its name? What dangers have emerged to threaten our destiny, and where have we sought protection? Answers are to be found by charting the shifting boundaries of trust and authority, participation and control, that separate science and public, citizen and state.

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In the 1950s, CSIRO biochemist, Hedley Marston, became embroiled in what Roger Cross describes as ‘the single most important crisis’ of his professional life. Research into fallout from the British atomic tests in Australia brought Marston into bitter conflict with the government appointed Safety Committee. It was a dispute that involved many of the major players in the Australian scientific community, and one that culminated in ‘perhaps the most unseemly episode in twentieth-century Australian science’. This is a fascinating story of ‘jealousy, hate and power’ that takes us behind the facade of scientific detachment and adds to our knowledge of the politics and personalities involved in Australia’s atomic adventures.

Hedley Marston, Chief of CSIR/O’s Division of Biochemistry and General Nutrition, was approached by British authorities in 1955 to assist in studying the effects of radiation on animals. After initial firings in 1952-3, the British atomic testing program was about to recommence in the Monte Bello Islands, and at the newly-established mainland test site known as Maralinga. Marston decided to examine the take up of radioactive fallout in grazing animals by measuring the concentration of radioactive iodine in their thyroid glands. His research indicated that fallout was being deposited over a much wider area than the physicists on the Atomic Weapons Test Safety Committee (AWTSC) had publicly admitted. Either they were fools or charlatans and Marston became increasingly determined to bring them down.

Roger Cross provides a detailed account of Marston’s anger and frustration as he tried to force the AWTSC, led by Leslie Martin and Ernest Titterton, to admit their errors. Attempts at mediation by Fred White, CSIRO’s Chief Executive Officer, and Mark Oliphant, Marston’s close friend, failed. Rancour and recrimination escalated as Marston strove to publish his findings, only to meet obstruction and delay. Even when his work was finally made public, the controversy continued, as the AWTSC sought to have a rebuttal accepted for publication. An unpleasant battle over who would have the last word was finally brought to a halt by Oliphant. In the end, Marston’s revelations seem to have had little immediate impact, but as Cross demonstrates, public opinion was already on the turn, as opposition to atmospheric nuclear testing, both in Australia and overseas, mounted.

Marston imagined himself a champion of science, a defender of truth, but Cross reveals a much more complex figure. Marston was egotistical and belligerent, ready to take the credit for his colleagues’ research into coast disease, and prepared to bully anyone who stood in the way of his ambitions. His high-standing within the agricultural community, and his carefully cultivated circle of influential friends, gave him a sense of power that he clearly relished. He was no anxious whistleblower. As Cross shows, most clearly in Marston’s correspondence with Oliphant, his attacks on the AWTSC were driven as much by anger and revenge, as by a desire to protect the public and defend the standards of science.

Roger Cross has given us a picture of a flawed man, a would-be hero barely able to rise above his own pettiness and insecurities. Our understanding of Marston and his bitter crusade is greatly enriched by Cross’s efforts to examine the personality of the man and not just the persona of the scientist. Unfortunately, we don’t gain as much insight into his opponents. Titterton clearly had an ego to match Marston’s, but Les Martin seems a much more enigmatic figure. From Cross’s account and other sources, it appears that Martin was uncomfortable with the public role assigned him as first chairman of the AWTSC. What doubts and torments might Marston’s provocations have engendered? Oliphant, as always, is difficult to pin down. At times he tries to soothe Marston, but on other occasions he carelessly fuels his friend’s burning rage. Might he have done more to help? It is a measure of the book’s success that such questions emerge. There can be no easy answers once we try to explore the human dimensions of scientific controversy.

The book provides a good read, even though the complex chronology of events makes it difficult to keep track of who said what to whom and when. It makes excellent use of oral and archival sources and is thoroughly documented. Of course, you end up wishing for a full biography of Marston, but that hardly detracts from the current volume. If only other attempts at scientific biography showed the same willingness to deal with their subject’s flaws and complexities.

Was this the most unseemly episode in twentieth century Australian science? Who knows? So little has been written about the feuds and conflicts. So much lies hidden behind euphemisms such as ‘a difficult man’, or ‘a controversial figure’. Roger Cross hopes that his story will aid our understanding of ‘the tensions that lurk behind the bland face of “science rhetoric” here in Australia’. Here’s hoping that others will follow his lead.

It’s rare for a book relating to the history of Australian science to draw the attention of the national media. But Australia’s Bid for the Atomic Bomb made the front page with its claims that the origins of major institutions such as the Snowy Scheme and the ANU could be found in the government’s frustrated longing for nuclear weaponry. Wayne Reynolds’ ‘controversial’ book, it was reported, made use of ‘recently declassified documents’ to ‘debunk’ conventional assessments of Australian government policy in areas such as defence, foreign policy, education and science. Exciting stuff… I just wish I liked the book more.

Reynolds weaves an intricate tale of a small nation with big ambitions. Imagining that the bomb would strengthen Australia both militarily and industrially, governments of both persuasions set out upon a doomed quest for atomic enlightenment. Hopes of a major role in an atomic-powered revival of the British empire were thwarted by Britain’s desire to renew its partnership with the United States. Disappointed, exploited and ultimately betrayed, Australian policymakers were nonetheless reluctant to give up on their dream. Reynolds tracks Australia’s hopes through a detailed web of negotiations, reports, and policy manoeuvres. The influence of the bomb, he argues, was felt across a wide range of government activities, from increased support for higher education to military involvement in Vietnam. Australia’s bid for the atomic bomb did much to shape its postwar priorities.

Detailed archival research in Australia, South Africa, Canada, the USA, and the UK, has armed Reynolds with an impressive array of sources, which he uses to demonstrate Australia’s active and continuing interest in joining the atomic club. The ultimate failure of this quest, he suggests, has encouraged historians to overlook its significance. By starting with the bomb, and looking again at many postwar initiatives, this book offers an interesting perspective on the motivations of successive Australian governments, and the machinations of super-power politics. Anyone interested in topics such as Australian defence and foreign policy, Cold War spy scares, and the organisation of science for defence, might profitably peruse its pages.

But Reynolds wants to do more than merely draw attention to a previously ignored strand of Australia’s postwar history. The bomb’s influence was decisive, he argues. ‘Behind the great reconstruction schemes of the Curtin-Chifley Labor government, and later the conservative Menzies government’, the book begins, ‘lay the nuclear deterrent weapons program’: ‘Many of the great national projects, such as the Snowy Mountains Scheme, the Woomera Rocket Range and the Australian National University, were in large measure based on the assumption that Australia would one day be a nuclear weapons state’ (p. 1). While book’s focus on the bomb provides most of its strength, originality and narrative drive, Reynold’s expansive claims demonstrate that there are dangers in relying on such a narrow framework.

The ‘origins’ of the Snowy Scheme, Reynolds argues, lay not in the desire for electricity or irrigation. Such features merely ‘describe what the scheme became’ (p. 54). Instead he stresses its role in defence planning, and as a possible location for nuclear power plants. No doubt such possibilities were canvassed, but how do you balance them against the range of alternative influences? Reynolds doesn’t try. His history apparently begins in 1945, and so the Snowy’s expression of long-standing nation building ideals is ignored, as is the growing desire to promote industrialisation, and the fondly-held dream of bringing life to Australia’s arid lands. All these are peripheral, the bomb is central.

Moreover, despite a brief nod towards ‘the problem of the states’, Reynolds ignores the constitutional hurdles that faced the Commonwealth in pushing ahead with the Snowy scheme. Water and power were under the control of the states, so emphasising the defence aspects of the project offered a means of bolstering Commonwealth authority. Reynolds does little to help us understand the balance between the rhetoric and the reality.

The ANU is similarly cast as a product of the government’s bomb-consciousness. Reynold’s highlights the involvement of Mark Oliphant and Ernest Titterton in the development of the bomb, and provides evidence of Oliphant’s continuing interest in the military significance of nuclear physics. But Oliphant was a complex and contradictory character, and missing from Reynold’s account are Oliphant’s moral anguish over the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, his frequent statements in favour of nuclear disarmament, his involvement in the Pugwash Movement, and his decision to have nothing more to do with the development of the bomb. The influence of the bomb it seems, it to reduce everything to black and white.

Underlying such assessments, however, is a more fundamental problem. The book fails to address the relationship between the destructive power of the bomb and the promise of cheap and abundant energy, foreseen in the industrial application of atomic energy. Reynolds assumes that interest was primarily focused on the bomb, as ‘power reactors were seen to be a distant possibility at the end of the war’. It all rather depends on your definition of ‘distant’. Certainly there is much to indicate, in both published and unpublished sources, that Australian governments were excited by the prospects for industrial development offered by the atomic age. The payoffs might not have been immediate, but they were assumed to be inevitable. Australia’s desire for atomic information, and all the machinations that ensued, cannot simply be explained as a ‘bid for the bomb’.

Of course, government interest may have swayed between the peaceful and the military applications of the atom, and it would be interesting to chart such changes across the postwar period. But this book only gives us the bomb’s side of the story. Emphasis would also have differed across government agencies, and it seems significant that Reynold’s research has focused on defence and foreign policy records. Greater use of CSIRO and AAEC material might have balanced the picture.

Apparently, the original manuscript of the book ran to nearly a quarter of a million words, so perhaps much contextual material has been lost in the trimming. It’s also fair to recognise that works which dare to offer ‘new perspectives’ can often overstate their case in the struggle to be heard amidst the babble of academic orthodoxy. If Reynolds had simply moderated his claims, it would be a better, though less provocative, book. I must admit, too, that I would have found the book considerably less annoying if Reynolds wasn’t so keen to portray himself as the raider of the lost archives.

When I saw press reports describing the book’s use of ‘recently declassified’ files, I assumed the publisher’s publicity machine had been at work. But Reynolds apparent struggle to wrest the truth from secretive government bureaucracies provides a continuing theme throughout the book. Records are hardly worth a mention unless they are ‘declassified’. The procedures of access clearance and the thirty-year rule are made to seem mysterious and arbitrary, while missing files and supposed silences are merely grist to the mill of this determined secrets hunter. One bizarre example relates to David Rivett’s attempts to negotiate the placement of Australian scientists at the Chalk River nuclear facility in Canada. ‘Rivett’s biographer is silent about the attempts to send CSIR scientists to work at Chalk River’, Reynolds notes, ‘but Canadian records reveal that he entered into an involved correspondence with his counterparts in Ottawa at the beginning of 1946′. Are we meant to assume that there is something significant, sinister even, in this supposed ‘silence’. Rohan Rivett’s biography of his father is far from being a detailed account of his scientific career, why would we even expect this particular episode to be included? And why ‘Canadian records’? I’m pretty sure Reynolds could have saved himself an international airfare if he had looked in CSIRO archives.

Why does any of this matter? Maybe it doesn’t. Perhaps other readers will enjoy the added sense of drama. But it bothers me because much of the cultural power of the atomic bomb resides in this thing ‘the secret’. If we merely play to its mysterious allure, we risk reinforcing the barriers it has helped erect around knowledge and authority. The greatest failing of this book, I believe, is that instead of trying to unravel the power and fascination of the bomb, it has fallen victim to it. Just as Hiroshima brought fancies of a future dominated by the atom, so Reynolds finds the bomb behind every door, hiding at the back of every cupboard. Just as the atomic secret divided the postwar world, so Reynolds deploys his mastery of ‘secret’ files to carry his argument and deny alternatives.

Secrets are seductive. They offer knowledge, power, belonging – initiation into a world neatly divided into the knowing and the unknowing, us and them. The atomic bomb was revealed to an unsuspecting public as evidence of humankind’s increasing knowledge of the ‘secrets of nature’, but such secrets were not for sharing, they were a ‘sacred trust’ to be protected against misuse. Protected from whom? The idea of the ‘atomic secret’ gained its potency from the Cold War’s vision of warring ideologies – the good and the evil, the knowing and the unknowing, us and them. The ‘atomic secret’ was a lesson in global politics.

As holders of the ‘secret’, scientists enjoyed new authority and prestige, but a nagging concern remained – could scientists themselves be trusted with such knowledge? Elevation to the scientific ‘priesthood’ came at the cost of increasing political controls and a residue of public suspicion. Into this atmosphere of inflated hopes and exaggerated fears the Australian Atomic Energy Commission was born. It is perhaps not surprising then, that in his scorecard of the AAEC’s successes and failures, Clarence Hardy lists its first failure as ‘excessive secrecy’ (Atomic… p.230).

Hardy is a former employee of the AAEC, and his two books might be seen as an attempt to lessen this failure by offering some posthumous redress (the AAEC was replaced in 1987 by ANSTO). In his Foreword to Enriching Experiences, D.W. George (Chairman of the AAEC, 1976-1983) comments that ‘secrecy, no matter how necessary or worthily based, breeds both suspicion and resentment in those outside the inner circle of those “in the know”‘ (Enriching… p. v). He commends the book for ‘breaking down some of the secrecy’ surrounding the AAEC’s work on enrichment, and notes that one of his own objectives as Chairman was ‘to assure the Australian public that the Lucas Heights Establishment had no ulterior motives, no secret agenda’ (Enriching…p. vi).

However, there is fundamental irony at the heart of Hardy’s noble crusade, for even as he lifts the veil of secrecy, he invokes the authority of ‘inside’ knowledge. Hardy downplays his narrative presence throughout Atomic Rise and Fall, but in the Preface he differentiates his work from that of historians ‘with no personal knowledge of the AAEC’. Rather than opening the workings of the AAEC to scrutiny, he is establishing a rearguard defence against such writers as Ann Moyal and Alice Cawte, who, as D.W. George comments, were viewed by AAEC staff ‘as unfairly biased against the Commission and not impartial’ (Atomic… p. xi). While secrecy might have hampered the AAEC’s operations, it also renders the knowledge of participants as somehow more valuable, as more ‘true’. This is stated explicitly by Keith Alder, another AAEC old-boy, in his book Australia’s Uranium Opportunities, quoted extensively by Hardy. Alder decries the tendency of historians to rely on ‘old journalistic opinions and stories…They reflect peoples’ views on what they thought should happen, and this includes also archival material such as politicians’ correspondence and Cabinet papers. In many instances what actually happened is quite different – a difficult matter for historians’. Alder is a self-confessed ‘insider’ determined to counter ‘popular and false versions’ of the AAEC’s history by telling it how it ‘actually happened’.

Secrecy adds another layer to the boundary-setting activities that occupy any institution. We all claim privileged knowledge through our membership of social and institutional groupings. Scientists, in particular, wage periodic battles to bulwark their epistemological authority against the forces of anti-science, superstition or even emotion. AAEC insiders muster all three – the institutional, the scientific and the secret – to brew a potent, mythological rendering of an organisation abused by politicians, misunderstood by the public, and wrongly condemned by history.

Hardy begins both books with a summary of atomic energy research prior to the establishment of the AAEC in 1953. An understanding of the ‘world situation on atomic energy’, he claims, helps us to understand the ‘conception’ of the AAEC. The dual meaning of ‘conception’, incidentally, is deliberately invoked as Atomic Rise and Fall is structured according to Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man – the AAEC is anthropomorphised, cast as a player in a Shakespearean tragedy. But while a précis of postwar attempts to control atomic energy is obviously relevant to the formation of the AAEC, it is less clear why we are dragged through the relatively well-known stories of Hahn, Strassman, Frisch, Peierls, the MAUD Committee and the Manhattan Project. Moreover, these international inclusions emphasise some domestic absences. Given Hardy’s concern with the effects of secrecy, you might think that some political context would be useful. But the US embargo on defence secrets, the reformation of CSIR, and US suspicions of Mark Oliphant are barely mentioned if at all, with the reader merely referred to other sources (Atomic…p. 19).

Of course, it is easy to criticise a work for what it fails to include, however, the emphasis here is significant. The AAEC is presented as a footstep in the onward march of science, heir to a grand, progressive tradition. Hardy’s whiggish overture introduces the AAEC as a child born of science, not of politics. Government policies for postwar reconstruction and national development, within which atomic energy featured prominently, barely rate a mention. We are offered instead a succession of scientists, a catalogue of committees, and a growing sense of inevitability. Perhaps symbolic of the treatment of domestic politics, Doc Evatt, Minister for External Affairs in the Chifley government and first chairman of the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission, appears in disguise as ‘Dr Herbert Evans’ (Atomic… p.18).

When politicians do appear within the AAEC story, it is generally to thwart the hopes and plans of the well-meaning scientists. The AAEC is a victim, not a player in the world of politics. And so Billy McMahon cancels plans for a nuclear power station at Jervis Bay, Rex Connor implicates an unwilling AAEC in his ill-fated schemes for national development, Bob Hawke ends promising research on uranium enrichment, and Gareth Evans, suspicious of the AAEC’s secrecy, delivers the organisation its deathblow. Both Hardy and Alder are particularly critical of the Hawke government’s decision to close down work on enrichment, one of the AAEC’s largest and most successful research programs. They regard this as a ‘missed opportunity’, where political pressures steamrolled scientists and damaged the national interest. Just in case you miss the point, Alder’s book, Australia’s Uranium Opportunities, is subtitled – ‘How Her Scientists and Engineers Tried to Bring Her into the Nuclear Age but were Stymied by Politics’.

AAEC work on enrichment and separation is continuing, it seems, as the organisation itself emerges from the historical centrifuge free of political contaminants. This process is revealed in discussion of the military uses of atomic energy (i.e. bombs). Hardy and Alder reject suggestions by Moyal and Cawte that the AAEC Chairman, J.P. Baxter, advised against signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and encouraged consideration of a nuclear weapons program. Alder recollects that Baxter was opposed to the AAEC being involved in weapons-related work, but that surely is not the point. In the late 1960s the government was actively considering both the development of nuclear weapons and the establishment of a nuclear power plant. Baxter ‘took the lead’ in arguing for a reactor at Jervis Bay, and can hardly have failed to make the connection with the government’s interest in bombs. On the one hand, Hardy quotes approvingly Ann Moyal’s description of Baxter as having an interest in ‘the politics of science’ and a capacity ‘for simplifying complex technological questions and presenting them in a positive and sanguine light’ (Atomic… p. 113). And yet, on the other hand, he suggests Baxter was so politically naïve, or scientifically pure, as to not play the weapons card when seeking to garner support for the Jervis Bay project.

The secrecy surrounding the AAEC has not been dispelled – many silences remain. Hardy complains of the restrictions placed on him by the mythical ‘Official Secrets Act’ (‘Official Secrets’ are actually dealt with under the Crimes Act), and draws most of his references from the Commission’s Annual Reports. That, coupled with clumsy organisation, makes for a very dry and repetitive read. There are few of the anecdotes or the workplace legends that can make an insider’s history enjoyable and illuminating. Indeed, other than the senior management, the staff are virtually invisible. We learn that staff were ‘shocked’ by the government’s decision, in 1981, to divert some of the AAEC’s resources to non-nuclear energy research under the purview of CSIRO (Atomic… p. 160), and there are references at times to the staff’s ‘low morale’. But no feeling for the culture of the place is conveyed. D.W. George notes that ‘secrecy had a negative effect even on some of Lucas Heights’ staff’, and Hardy explains that the ‘excessive secrecy’ from which the AAEC suffered was as much a product of management policy as legislation. And yet we are given no glimpse of how this culture of secrecy operated, how it was maintained, or how it affected working conditions.

Hardy, Alder and George all offer a similar parting vision – one where a future Australia might finally recognise the contribution of the AAEC and take up some of the nuclear opportunities lost through political chicanery or public ignorance. In 1975, as the Commissioners became concerned about their possible involvement in the ‘Loans Affair’, they were careful to document proposals as being ‘at the direction of the Minister’. It strikes me that these books serve a similar function, labelling the history of the AAEC with the words ‘It wasn’t our fault!’, in the hope that future generations might treat the Commission more sympathetically.

ATOMIC TESTING was undertaken in Australia between 1952 and 1963 as Britain sought to develop its own nuclear weapons. The Australian government readily supplied test sites and logistical support, mistakenly believing that greater access to nuclear technology would result.

Twelve full-scale nuclear devices were exploded in Australia at three sites, the Monte Bello Islands (1952, 1956), Emu Field (1953) and Maralinga (1956-8), with radioactively-dirty ‘minor’ trials continuing at Maralinga until 1963.

Opposition to the testing program grew throughout the 1950s with increased awareness of the dangers of radioactive fallout. This was heightened in the 1970s when the French began atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in the Pacific. Lingering concern over health effects led eventually to the establishment of a Royal Commission into the British tests in 1984. The Commission examined safety precautions, and the ‘black mist’ that had reportedly engulfed aboriginal communities. It also questioned the role of Australian scientific observers, particularly the physicist Ernest Titterton.

The Royal Commission recommended easier access to compensation for serviceman and civilians, and that the test sites should be cleaned up at British cost, and returned to their aboriginal owners. After a long political and legal struggle, the clean-up proceeded and the land was returned to its owners, but some parts will never be safe for long-term occupation.

Robert Milliken’s No Conceivable Injury (1986) provides a readable account of the tests and aftermath, while Lorna Arnold’s official history of the tests, A Very Special Relationship (1987), plays down their health effects.

The clouds of radioactive fallout are descending and humanity is doomed to extinction. In Nevil Shute’s book, On the Beach, the inhabitants of Melbourne await their end – the final victims of a 37 day nuclear war that has destroyed the northern hemisphere. John Osborne, played by Fred Astaire in the film version, decides to die in the embrace of the one he loves. So donning his crash helmet and goggles, he pops his suicide pills while sitting behind the wheel of the Ferrari that has recently won him the Australian Grand Prix: ‘The car had won him the race that was the climax of his life. Why trouble to go further?’ For John, as for all, it was the end of the road.

With the onset of the Atomic Age, Australia set out optimistically along the yellow-brick road to peace and prosperity, but 50 years later, the Emerald City seems as far away as ever. Australia’s involvement with nuclear energy has been largely limited to the provision of raw materials – uranium to power other countries’ reactors, and test sites for Britain’s bomb program. To understand Australia’s nuclear history you need to focus not on the journey’s end, but on the journey itself. How was the road mapped? Where were the markers? And who was doing the driving?

the bulldozer

In 1944, a new road was rapidly taking shape in the Northern Flinders Ranges. A team of geologists and miners watched as the first bulldozer most of them had ever seen tore through the scrub, opening access to an isolated mine site. All this urgency was at the behest of the British government, who were keen to know the extent of Australia’s uranium supplies. The geologist and Antarctic explorer, Douglas Mawson, had discovered radioactive minerals in the Flinders Ranges many years before. Although some attempts had been made to take commercial advantage of them, such as through promoting the health-giving effects of the radioactive Paralana Hot Springs, the deposits were apparently of little value. All this seemed about to change. This was a road to the future.

The British government was, of course, cooperating with the USA in the development of the atomic bomb. All the uranium for the Manhattan Project had thus far come from the Belgian Congo, so it seemed wise to identify other potential sources. Mark Oliphant, the Australian-born physicist who was one of the leaders of the Manhattan Project’s British contingent, suggested the Flinders Ranges.

Oliphant always had an eye on Australian interests, and had alerted the Australian government to the wartime work on atomic energy as early as 1941. Oliphant’s ‘leak’ came via Richard Casey, then Ambassador to Washington. Casey asked Oliphant to prepare a memo outlining the developments, which was then forwarded to Sir David Rivett, the Chairman of Australia’s peak science organisation, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). Rivett began to seek more information through his scientific contacts, and tried to arrange for increased Australian involvement in the work. He was, however, unsuccessful. This quest for information continued for the next decade and more, shaping much government policy. Uranium gave Australia a foot in the door, but no invitation to step inside was forthcoming. The atomic club was for members only.

This was all the more frustrating for it seemed that Australia was ideally placed to take advantage of all that this new technology might have to offer. Looking forward to the postwar world, Australia’s planners envisaged rapid industrial growth – the development of the manufacturing sector. But this could not occur without power, and traditional fuel sources appeared too limited. Add to this a large land mass, a growing population, uranium deposits, and a strong scientific base, and atomic power was a very attractive prospect indeed. Follow that bulldozer!

But just as Australia was about to set out along the road to atomic utopia, the landscape shuddered and changed. In the tracks of the bulldozer a signpost suddenly appeared. The way forward was no longer so clear.

the crossroads of destiny

At 8.00 am on the 1 July 1946 the inhabitants of eastern Australia tuned in to the atomic age. In a live radio broadcast from Bikini Atoll, they listened as the world’s fourth atomic bomb was exploded – ‘Bomb’s away! Bombs away!’ came the excited radio announcer’s call. Some weeks later, a fifth atomic bomb was detonated, again at Bikini. The blue waters of the atoll’s idyllic lagoon erupted skyward with the force of the explosion, signalling a dramatic end to the USA’s first peacetime atomic ‘test’ programme. The ‘target’ for these tests was a fleet of retired American and captured enemy warships, ‘manned’ by pigs, goats and other animals – some in uniform. By blowing up this junkyard menagerie the USA confirmed its status as the world’s only atomic power. In another attempt to win the favour of the bouncers guarding the doors of the atomic club, Australia offered up one of its own disused battleships for the honour of irradiation. The offer was refused, but Australia was allowed an official observer.

While the first three atomic explosions were planned and executed in secret, the Bikini atomic tests were conducted amidst well-organised publicity. The responsible authority, Joint Task Force One, arranged for extensive media coverage, aiming to make the test programme ‘the best-reported as well as the most-reported technical experiment of all time’. An Australian press representative fed a steady stream of stories back to the local media, heightening the sense of anticipation and causing some unexpected side effects. On 27 June, an evening lecture on cosmic rays by Melbourne University’s professor of physics, L.H. Martin, drew an unexpectedly large crowd of 500 people, overwhelming the 200 seat lecture theatre. This sudden interest in nuclear physics, it was claimed, was a result of the forthcoming bomb test.

The Bikini tests refocussed attention on the implications of atomic energy. Stunned by the news from Hiroshima, there had been little time to reflect on the meaning of this new, atomic age. But Bikini offered not only the chance for reflection, but a conceptual structure within which to contain it. Imagine again the radio broadcast on the morning of the first atomic test at Bikini, relayed nationally from the National Broadcasting Company of America. The technical distortions add a sense of otherwordliness as the commentators set the scene. The dramatic tension is heightened by the ticking of a metronome that continues right up until the point of the explosion. Finally the call comes through, ‘Bombs away!’, but then another voice cuts across the broadcast with a chilling warning: ‘Listen world, this is the crossroads’.

therefore choose life

At some point marked vaguely by the destruction of Hiroshima, atomic energy was assumed to have split the future of the world into two. Humankind was suddenly confronted by a ‘choice’, for atomic energy offered it the chance to pursue the well-worn path of war to its inevitable apocalyptic end, or to strike out anew towards a miraculous vision of peace and prosperity. The world was standing at a ‘turning-point’ where these two roads could be seen leading off into the future, the alternatives made clear by a signpost pointing one way to ‘Destruction’ and the other way to ‘Progress’ – this was the ‘crossroads’.

The message from Bikini was hardly subtle, the whole undertaking was code-named ‘Operation Crossroads’. It was a formula repeated ad nauseam in the local press. The atomic crossroads was a hackneyed image, recycled, reworked and re-emphasised many times following its original formulation. It became one of the favourite clichés of authors, speechmakers, commentators and journalists grasping for a pithy summation of the implications of atomic energy – a representation of the fundamental dualism that characterised reactions to this new technology.

But this sort of choice was a familiar one, appearing in many cultural guises. On the first Sunday after the destruction of Hiroshima, the Rev. C.N. Button of St Andrews Kirk, Ballarat, warned his congregation: ‘Humanity is at the cross-roads’. Button drew a parallel between the coming of the atomic bomb, and the choice laid down by God in Deuteronomy, ‘I have set before you life and death, cursing and blessing. Therefore choose life, that thou and thy seed may live.’ This was a theme elaborated by many religious commentators – in bestowing the gift of atomic energy on the world God was repeating the offer made to Israel, to either accept His purpose or be destroyed, it was a challenge, a choice. However, it was a loaded choice. The options were not equally weighted, for in presenting them God commanded His people to ‘choose life’. God is not suggesting to the people of Israel that they might like to consider idolatry, he is seeking to make his will known by imposing a particular conceptual structure upon options that already exist. What is offered is no real choice, but rather an affirmation of a pre-established order.

It is this type of ‘choice’ which is central to the crossroads image. The options it presents are not real alternatives, for it is assumed that you will want to travel along the positive route. The whole structure is organised around this assumption: the negative route is not given as a reasonable alternative, rather it is the threat, the punishment, which enforces the ‘correct’ choice. The crossroads were not invoked so that humankind could choose to go to hell or to be annihilated by atomic bombs – this could only happen if something went wrong with the whole set-up. The question with which the crossroads image confronted humankind was not which path to choose, but how to avoid straying down the wrong one. It did not offer the opportunity to make a decision about the priorities of human existence, instead it set the limits of what was assumed to be possible. A discussion about the social impact of a new technology was transformed through the language of the crossroads into an imperative to develop that technology. Humankind was called upon to follow the path sanctioned and defined by its presence in the crossroads structure as the only reasonable vision of the future – progress. The bulldozer offered us the only way ahead, but to where?

participating in progress

In 1948, the Australian public was given the chance to fall into line when the ‘Atomic Age Exhibition’ rolled into town. Sponsored by the major newspapers, the exhibition toured Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne. Although it had been originally designed and built in the UK, the exhibition was modified for Australian audiences, even including a sample of local uranium. In Sydney, the exhibition formed part of the Royal Easter Show, though popular demand forced it to continue beyond the Show’s usual closing. In Melbourne, where it was considerably expanded and renamed the ‘Atomic Age and Industrial Exhibition’, many thousands attended.

The exhibition’s pin-up boy was the atomic genie, who made his appearance in a diorama depicting the first atomic explosion at Almagordo, New Mexico. Emerging from the atomic cloud, electrons whizzing around his head like bush flies, the atomic genie was another manifestation of the ‘choice’. Having been released from his prison within the atom, the genie awaited our command, would it be for good or evil?

In case even this symbolism was too abstract, a signpost was positioned in the middle of the exhibition, pointing one way to ‘Destruction’ and the other to ‘Progress’. Destruction in this instance was represented by a scale model of the bombing of Hiroshima, complete with flashing lights and sound effects for that authentic atomic annihilation experience. The path to progress, however, led through the commercial exhibits, where all manner of consumer and industrial goods were arrayed as icons of the coming atomic utopia.

Such visions of progress abounded in the fifties, promulgated by advertisers, encouraged by governments. Progress in the Atomic Age meant a modern household, full of the latest appliances, inhabited by a nuclear family (a term first used in 1945). It meant economic growth, industrial development, the investment of overseas dollars, and the growing dominance of multinational companies. Atomic energy, through the image of the crossroads, helped to confirm this route as necessary, as inevitable, even though atomic energy itself failed to live up to expectations.

recurring dreams

Mark Oliphant, who returned to Australia to establish the Research School of Physical Sciences at the Australian National University, was but one of the many atomic prophets who believed that the technology would help propel Australia forward into the ranks of the world’s leading industrialised nations. As well as cheap electricity, Oliphant envisaged atomic-powered desalination plants that would enable the irrigation of Australia’s desert regions. The Premier of South Australia, Thomas Playford, was particularly inspired by these sorts of possibilities. Undeterred that known uranium reserves were small and of low quality, Playford set out to see South Australia through an atom-led recovery.

Through persistence and good timing, Playford managed to extract a very generous deal from the USA for the development of the Radium Hill site. In 1950, the USA had just entered a new war, and their atomic weapons production program was in full swing – they wanted all the uranium they could get their hands on. Another deal between the USA and the Federal Government followed for work at the newly-discovered Rum Jungle deposits in the Northern Territory. The British, although they had knocked back Playford’s early offers, began to worry that they might be missing out. In 1956, an agreement was finalised to supply them with uranium from the Mary Kathleen mine, near Mount Isa. By the time these agreements had run their course, the USA and Britain were thankful to be relieved of their obligations. The Australian ore was low-yielding, and world uranium prices were steadily dropping. By the early sixties all the mines had closed. Uranium had not brought the economic windfall expected of it.

However, the efforts of Playford and others were motivated not just by the anticipated monetary returns. They wanted information. It was hoped that these sorts of cooperative arrangements would lead to a greater flow of technical data about the use of atomic energy for industrial purposes. Certainly this carrot was regularly dangled, but Australia only ever managed the smallest of nibbles. The Americans were bound by their own domestic legislation, as well as their commercial ambitions, while the British were bound by their obligations to the Americans. Australia’s hopes figured very small in comparison.

Nonetheless, Australia had managed to institute a modest program of scientific collaboration. A number of Australian scientists were sent to the British atomic research establishment at Harwell, to work in non-classified areas. These scientists, it was reasoned, together with a small nuclear physics unit, established at the University of Melbourne by the CSIR, would at least have some experience in the field. If Australia was finally admitted to the atomic club, they would have a few people who would know their way around.

The Australian Atomic Energy Commission was established in 1952 to formalise Australia’s research effort. The indications were that Britain would be more likely to release information if Australia had its own research to exchange. So the AAEC embarked on a research program suggested by the British, built an experimental reactor designed by the British, and waited for the pay-off. It never came. By the time Australia’s one and only nuclear reactor went critical, Eisenhower’s ‘Atoms for Peace’ program had freed up access to atomic information. Why bother going through the expensive and complex business of designing and building your own reactor when you could buy one off the shelf from Westinghouse? In any case, it had become clear that Australia’s fossil fuel supplies were greater than had been imagined. Australia no longer needed atomic power.

The AAEC continued on as an organisation without a mission, although there was a flurry of excitement in the early 1970s when a reactor was planned for Jervis Bay. It seems the plans were motivated, at least in part, by the desire for Australia to develop its own nuclear weapons capability. The options were much studied, but nothing eventuated. The chosen site, I have heard, remains empty – waiting…

Atomic energy did not provide electricity too cheap to meter, cars or planes that never needed refuelling, nor the means to launch Australia’s economy into the superpower range. Yet, the Atomic Age was real. We were changed by example. The afterimage remained clear long after the blinding flash of atomic possibilities had faded. Although it never lived up to the dreams of its prophets, atomic energy shaped Australia’s history by helping to define the meaning of progress. Instead of a map and compass to chart our way in the postwar world, we were presented with a road. There was no choice but to follow in the bulldozer’s wake.

the dread secret

The verb ‘to bulldoze’ preceded the bulldozer by several decades, its meaning being ‘to coerce by violence’ or ‘intimidate’. The meaning became machine – the bulldozer so-named because it transforms its surroundings by violence. Our atomic bulldozer is an apt metaphor indeed, for in carving out its road to the future, the atomic bulldozer was also defining the limits of acceptable behaviour – threatening those who dared to depart from the ‘straight and narrow’. If the vision of progress wasn’t enough to keep us in its trail, there was the other half of the crossroads equation – destruction, alienation, dissolution, death. The bulldozer entreated us to stay on the road – for our own safety.

At about 11.30pm on 5 October 1948, a student walking through the grounds of Melbourne University noticed a fire in one of the ex-army huts used by the Physics Department. He raised the alarm, but little could be done to save the building or its contents. The results of two years research into cosmic rays was destroyed, along with much valuable equipment. The wiring in these huts was notoriously bad and it seemed that the fire had simply been caused by a fault in one of the electrically-driven recording instruments. Or had it?

In Canberra, twenty-four hours later, the Opposition member, W.J. Hutchinson was on his feet, bringing the fire to the urgent attention of the House. He quoted reports that described the labs as carrying out ‘vital defence experiments in nuclear physics’. This cast the fire in a rather more sinister light. After all, communist fifth columnists around the world were trying to infiltrate defence establishments, perhaps this was no accident, but an act of sabotage. Perhaps the fire was lit to cover the theft of secret documents.

J.J. Dedman, the responsible Minister, dismissed these speculations. The research was in fundamental physics, and of no defence significance. However, the battle was rejoined the following day as the Opposition conjured ever more elaborate conspiracies. It seemed more than coincidence that Australia’s only atomic research laboratory had gone ‘up in smoke’. An exasperated Dedman could do little but repeat his assertions of the previous night, but the damage was done. The invocation of ‘atomic secrets’ added an immense rhetorical weight to the Opposition’s otherwise bizarre allegations.

The news of the destruction of Hiroshima had provoked much earnest discussion about dabbling with the ‘secrets of nature’. The liberation of atomic energy was both a victory for scientists, and a source of anxiety. Allusions abounded to Prometheus, Pandora, Adam and Eve, Faust, and, of course, Frankenstein – this was dangerous knowledge. Having discovered one of the secrets of nature, it seemed that humanity might have loosed a force beyond its control. This ‘dread secret’, this ‘sacred trust’, as US President Truman described it, carried with it a heavy responsibility. The secret needed to be guarded, the knowledge controlled, lest it be used to bring about humankind’s destruction.

Guarded against whom? The idea that atomic energy had been given to the USA as a ‘sacred trust’, neatly divided the world into those who could be trusted, and those who could not. If the USA had been blessed (or cursed) with the dread secret, then it was because the USA, and not its enemies, could be depended upon to do all that was good and true. The USA would defend the secret from those who would turn it to evil purposes. In the developing Cold War atmosphere, it was not difficult to hang a name on this threat – communism. This was the dark force waiting to devour those who stepped from the road to progress.

freedom through control

The manufactured hysteria that surrounded the Melbourne University fire was far from an isolated incident. The Opposition had for some time been attempting to discredit the Labor Government and CSIR by pointing to communists in their midst. In mid-1948, reports appeared in the press suggesting that the USA was withholding ‘atom secrets’ from Australia because of concerns about the security of CSIR. This was denied at the time, but the Opposition used the Estimates debate in late September to resurrect the controversy, brandishing leaked documents that clearly ran counter to the official denials. In a brutal tirade of allegation and innuendo, Opposition members attacked CSIR, questioning a number of appointments and viciously smearing its Chairman, David Rivett. Dedman and Prime Minister Chifley struggled unsuccessfully to defend their Government against this ‘evidence’ that it was endangering the country’s security and standing by being ‘soft’ on communism. It was in the midst of this bitter conflict that the fire occurred, arming the Opposition’s parliamentary brawlers with yet another blunt instrument to bludgeon the beleaguered Chifley government.

US officials certainly were suspicious of Australian security, but ‘atom secrets’ were hardly the issue, as they had no intention of divulging this sort of information to anyone. It seems that the ‘secrets’ in question related to guided weapons development, necessary for the research Australia was undertaking in cooperation with the British at the Woomera Rocket Range. ‘Atom secrets’ was a big red warning label to slap on any defence-related information. It immediately placed this information in the most dangerous and most vital category – the sort of information that communist spies were most desperate to obtain. To prove oneself worthy of ‘atom secrets’, you had to be willing to deal with communism. To show itself capable of controlling atomic energy, a government had to be able to control its people.

The Chifley Labor government tried hard to establish its security credentials. When it seemed that work on the Woomera Rocket Range might be disrupted by unions concerned about its impact on an Aboriginal reserve, the government introduced the Approved Defence Projects Protection Act. Amongst other draconian provisions, this Act provided for up to 12 months jail for any person who advocated the obstruction of an ‘approved defence project’. Such an attack on free speech in peacetime was unprecedented. Significantly, this act formed the basis of legislation introduced later to establish the AAEC, and to clear the way for the British atomic tests. The government had previously argued that the Crimes Act contained all the provisions necessary to protect defence-related projects, but the new act signalled more effectively the seriousness of the government’s anti-communist intentions.

Continued attacks on security within CSIR forced the government to excise all defence-related research and to reconstitute the organisation, bringing it more closely under the provisions of the Public Service Act – CSIR became CSIRO. All employees were thenceforth required to take an oath of allegiance. Rivett could not agree to these changes, which he saw as attacks on the fundamental freedom of scientific research, and resigned. It was a bitter end to the career of a man who had contributed so much to the development of science in Australia. The consequences of the new order quickly became clear when in 1949, Tom Kaiser, a young CSIRO physicist studying in the UK, was identified at a ‘communist inspired’ demonstration outside Australia House. Although Kaiser was not involved in any ‘secret’ research, his interest in nuclear physics was enough to set the alarm bells ringing. The CSIRO Executive demanded that he return to Australia immediately. He refused and was sacked. The full story of Kaiser’s political crucifixion is yet to be told, but it is now clear that he was under surveillance before he even left Australia. Indeed, security officers had tried to have his request for a passport refused. This makes the manner of his ‘identification’ at the rally all the more intriguing.

Such legislative reforms were still not proof enough of Australia’s trustworthiness, however. To directly answer the concerns of the US about the handling of secret information, the Chifley government overhauled the country’s internal security apparatus, establishing the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) in 1949^. ‘Atom secrets’ figured prominently in any public discussion over the need for such measures. Dangerous knowledge needed special precautions. Atomic energy had helped redefine the nature of freedom.

Having campaigned hard on the anti-communist issue, the new conservative government, elected in December 1949, needed no encouragement to fire up the bulldozer and gouge deeper and more viciously than their predecessors. The image of ‘atom secrets’ fitted well within the environment of fear and threat engendered to support their program to outlaw communism. Even though Australia’s own atomic developments were, as we have seen, very limited, atomic energy remained a prime concern of the security establishment.

In 1954, George Briggs, a mild-mannered physicist who had eschewed all political involvement, was called before the Royal Commission on Espionage (the Petrov Commission). Briggs had acted as a scientific adviser to the Australian delegation to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission in 1946-7. His appearance before the Royal Commission was prompted by a reference in one of the documents handed over by Petrov upon his defection. The document identified ‘Don Woods’ as a person of possible value to Soviet intelligence, and described him as ‘Secretary of the adviser of Dr E on “Enormaz”‘. The reference seemed to point to Donald Woodward, Technical Secretary of CSIRO’s Division of Physics, headed by Briggs. But what was ‘Enormaz’? Petrov had failed to identify the code word, despite the insightful prompting of ASIO’s Deputy Director-General, who suggested ‘The nearest I can think of “Enormaz” is big’. Edvokia Petrov finally identified it as referring to Soviet interest in the atomic bomb.

Despite Briggs’s involvement in the UNAEC there was no way that Woodward could have had access to information relating to the atomic bomb. Nonetheless, Briggs was brought before the Commission, in closed session for security reasons, and questioned as to whether any of the secrets of the Western world in relation to atomic energy had happened to reside in his office safe. The grip of the atomic secret was strong indeed.

defending democracy

Not even ASIO’s best efforts were enough to convince the Americans and the British to start the flow of atomic information, but there were other ways to prove ourselves worthy of initiation into the atomic club. Selling uranium didn’t do the trick, even though it was often stressed that the uranium was being supplied for the defence of the Free World. So why not go that one step further? In 1950, the British were looking for somewhere to test their own atomic bomb. The Americans wanted to place too many conditions on the use of their test facilities, so the British Prime Minister asked his Australian counterpart, Menzies, if Australia could provide a site. With little hesitation or consultation, Menzies said yes.

The first test was held in 1952 in the Monte Bello Islands off the coast of Western Australia. The following year two more atomic devices were exploded at Emu Field, part of the Woomera Rocket Range in South Australia. The first of these, Totem I, is thought to have been responsible for the ‘black mist’ – a mysterious cloud that descended upon aboriginal communities to the north-east of the test site, causing vomiting, diarrhoea, skin rashes and sore eyes. The long-term health effects have never been determined.

Two more bombs were exploded in the Monte Bello Islands in 1956, before testing was transferred to a permanent site – Maralinga. Seven atomic tests were conducted at Maralinga between 1956 and 1958. So-called ‘minor trials’ continued on until the early sixties. While these trials did not involve the detonation of fission devices, they did result in the distribution of large amounts of radioactive material.

Ever optimistic, the Australian authorities looked upon the British atomic tests as another opportunity to gain access to information about atomic energy. However, for the first three tests they insisted on no formal scientific involvement. No doubt they realised that this would place the British in a difficult position, as any such arrangement would be frowned upon by the Americans. After much negotiation, three scientists were permitted to attend the tests on Australia’s behalf. Their background and connections made them politically acceptable, but they had no formal authority. Despite the grudging nature of Australia’s scientific involvement, the Australian government went to some lengths to stress the cooperative nature of the undertaking.

With the establishment of the Maralinga test range, it was decided to formalise arrangements somewhat, and an Atomic Weapons Test Safety Committee was established. This Committee comprised primarily the three scientists who had attended the previous tests. While the committee was supposed to ensure the safety of the tests, it was wholly dependent on information provided by the British. The Safety Committee’s main role seems to have been as a means of public reassurance. Concerns about fallout could be diffused by reference to these eminent scientists who were conscientiously protecting Australia’s interests.

But what of the interests of the Australian servicemen carelessly exposed to dangerous levels of radioactivity. Or of the aboriginal people, relocated, irradiated and ignored. Attempts to clean up the Maralinga range continue, but the stain can never be removed. Health and freedom were sacrificed for the protection of democracy, and in the name of progress. The images of the crossroads and the secret provided distorting lenses through which such perverse equations somehow seemed to make sense. The momentum of the atomic bulldozer carried us beyond reflection, beyond caring.

Nevil Shute’s cataclysmic war was, fortunately, never fought. But the atomic bomb has been deployed nonetheless. The main battleground was the future and the strike was quick and decisive. As the fallout cleared we found there was but one road left – our choices had been obliterated – and so we began our journey to the present, stumbling over the broken landscape.

A physicist would be best out of it

A tall, thin man in his early sixties was led into the recently remodelled Darlinghurst courtroom. Interest in the current proceedings was so great that extra seating had been provided to accommodate 200 members of the public, as well as 100 officials and 60 journalists. However, this session was to be heard in private, so the witness entered and was sworn before a strangely quiet and empty court.

‘What is your full name Doctor?’ asked W.J.V. Windeyer, the senior counsel, noted especially for his thorough but tedious manner.

‘George Henry Briggs‘ replied the witness.

‘And what is your doctorate?’

‘Physics.’

George Briggs was an unassuming and conservative man. His skills as an experimental physicist had been attested to by no-one less that Ernest Rutherford, yet he was inclined to keep ‘in the background’. Despite this natural reticence, Briggs had ably led the Physics Section of CSIR’s National Standards Laboratory since its establishment in 1938, helping it to establish a reputation ‘as one of the major standards organizations in the world’.

Briggs’s own research was aimed at obtaining precise measurements of some of the smallest physical quantities imaginable. His work on the determination of the energies of alpha particles emitted by radioactive substances was, according to Mark Oliphant, ‘of a different order of precision than any other’. His pursued this research with ‘real flair’ and was able to make precision measurements ‘really interesting and exciting’ to his colleagues. Nonetheless, this was hardly the sort of science that captured the public imagination. All the more strange then was this appearance – for here he was, George Briggs, physicist, about to give evidence in a spy trial.

It was December 1954 and the Royal Commission on Espionage (the Petrov Commission) was well advanced in its investigations. Gone were the days of high drama when the Leader of the Opposition, H.V. Evatt, had clashed heatedly with the Commissioners over his allegations of a right-wing conspiracy. The Commission had settled down to a methodical examination of the documents that Vladimir Petrov had handed over upon his defection to ASIO. These documents gave names and brief details of certain individuals whom Soviet intelligence (the MVD) believed to be of potential value. As the Commission itself recognized, to be included in these lists was no evidence of wrong-doing, but still it did not hesitate to call many of those named before the enquiry, opening their private beliefs and associations to public scrutiny.

Included amongst these scraps of information were two references to a ‘Don Woods’, described as ‘Secretary of the adviser of Doctor E. on “Enormaz”. One of the entries added the words ‘of BRIGGS’. ‘Woods’ was identified as Donald Woodward, technical secretary of CSIRO’s Division of Physics, headed by Briggs. But what was ‘Enormaz’? Petrov himself had failed to identify the code word, even after the insightful prompting of the deputy director-general of ASIO, G.R. Richards, who suggested: ‘The nearest I can think of ENORMAZ is big’. It was Edvokia Petrov who recognized ‘Enormaz’ as a special, top-secret code ‘used for the MVD interest in the matter of research and testing of the atom bomb in Australia’.

Woodward was called before the Commissioners in November and questioned, in camera, about his former, brief membership of the Communist Party. Windeyer, drawing on information obtained from Woodward’s divorce proceedings, also directed attention to his change of name from ‘Adams’, even though it had occurred some twenty years previously. The hapless Woodward could only offer what Windeyer arrogantly dismissed as a ‘silly’ motive – his desire to put behind him childhood taunts based on some popular rhyme.

There was no evidence that Woodward had ever had access to secret information on atomic energy, but the Commission decided to investigate further by calling Briggs to give evidence. Of particular interest was his stint as scientific adviser to the Australian delegation, originally led by Evatt (the mysterious ‘Doctor E.’), to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission in 1946 and 1947.

‘What was the title of it – the United Nations –?’ asked the Commission’s Chairman Mr Justice Owen.

‘Atomic Energy Commission’, answered Briggs.

‘Those conferences, I take it, were concerned with ways and means of international control of atomic energy?’

‘Yes.’

‘For both peace and war?’ piped up Mr Justice Ligertwood.

‘Yes…’

As George Briggs sat in the near-empty courtroom answering these facile questions he may well have wondered how different it could have been. If the mission that had taken him to New York had been successful – if some system for the international control had been hammered out – the course of the Cold War would have been radically different. Would there have been a Cold War at all? Where there had been hope for co-operation, plans for the free interchange of scientific information, there were now jealously guarded secrets, persecution and spy trials.

Briggs was not an enthusiastic air traveller, but with a little nembutal to help him sleep, he arrived in London feeling well and ready for work. Here he met up with Evatt and also Mark Oliphant, who, like Briggs, was to provide the Australian delegation with scientific advice. Oliphant had closely followed Briggs as a research student at the Cavendish Laboratory under the direction of Rutherford. Hardly the retiring type, Oliphant had become widely known through his research in atomic physics as one of Australia’s most prominent scientists.

Evatt swept Briggs along to a high-level meeting of Dominion ministers at which some aspects of the atomic energy question were discussed, though rather inconclusively. It was an exciting time for Australia in international affairs, with Evatt pursuing a vigorous and independent foreign policy. His important role in the establishment of the UN was well known, but now he had a new challenge. Australians were urged to take ‘justifiable pride’ in the fact that Evatt was to lead the UNAEC through its initial meetings as the inaugural chairman.

Everything was happening so quickly. It was barely three weeks since Fred White, CSIR’s Chief Executive, had told Briggs that he had been nominated as the Council’s first choice to assist the Australian delegation at the atomic energy talks. He had had so little time to reflect on the nature of the task that lay ahead. How could he contribute? Although he was present as a scientific adviser, he had little knowledge of the wartime developments in atomic energy. How could he? Australia had not been made privy to the secrets of the Manhattan Project. It was Oliphant who had leaked the first news of the atomic bomb to the Australian government. Atomic energy seemed likely to offer great benefits to Australia, and CSIR was keen to undertake some sort of research programme, but first it needed information.

By the end of May the Australian contingent had arrived in New York. There was no time to lose. The chairmanship, allocated alphabetically, provided the Australian delegation with a ‘special opportunity’ to set the UNAEC upon its urgent task. In the weeks before the first scheduled meeting, Briggs, Evatt and Oliphant set about developing their strategies.

‘Evatt wants to take a “strong line” – ie. no delay in arriving at decisions. Hence the need to get over here early’, Briggs wrote to Edna. He and Oliphant pored over the Acheson-Lilienthal report which, it was believed, would be the basis of US policy at the UNAEC. They found much to admire in the report, but were concerned about the effect that prolonging the US atomic monopoly might have on international relations. This point was emphasised in a statement the delegation prepared, outlining their policy towards the UNAEC. Any delay in the carrying out of the UNAEC’s work, it argued, would ‘aggravate existing tension between nations’ and ‘arouse the suspicions of the peoples of the world’. However, this was not simply a crusade to set the world to rights, for Australia was no disinterested do-gooder. The UNAEC provided both a ‘responsibility’ and an ‘opportunity’, for as soon as some system of control was established, Australia could expect to benefit from the free interchange of information on the peaceful uses of atomic energy. Both hope and fear propelled the Australians’ enthusiasm.

But not all nations saw the need for rapid progress. Briggs and Oliphant were dismayed by the attitude of the English physicist James Chadwick, a fellow Cavendish alumnus renowned as the discoverer of the neutron:

‘Chadwick in his usual lugubrious way said that the AEC business is very difficult & when O[liphant] said that if anyone was likely to get something done it was Evatt, C. said he was afraid that was so. Apparently their line is to delay things – not press US to indicate its policy. US policy may be to use AE as a bargaining power in discussions with Russia.’

The signs were not promising. The US had appointed elderly financier Bernard Baruch and his coterie of ‘Wall Street thugs’ as its representatives to the UNAEC. Russia was becoming increasingly suspicious of US intentions. What chance had Australia’s hopes for prompt action?

A month later, after the first round of UNAEC meetings, it was clear to Briggs that there could be no quick and easy answers:

There is little doubt that the AEC is faced with a problem which is probably insoluble unless the great powers can agree to give up war as a means of settling problems.

A deadlock had developed with the rival plans put forward by the USA and the USSR opposed on a number of fundamental points. Whereas the Baruch Plan sought the establishment of a wide-ranging system of inspection and control as a first step in the banning of atomic weapons, the Russian alternative proposed that such weapons be outlawed immediately. The Americans were unwilling to give up their atomic monopoly until sufficient safeguards had been formulated to prevent the secret development of atomic weapons. The USSR did not want to open its laboratories and mines to outside inspection while their super-power adversary maintained such a decisive advantage. There seemed little room for negotiation.

Briggs’s time was hardly wasted, however, for within those first few weeks, he had held discussions with such major atomic age figures as General Leslie Groves, James Chadwick, Ernest Lawrence and Robert Oppenheimer. He was also investigating the possibility of sending Australian scientists to Canada or Britain to work on atomic energy projects there. CSIR wanted information, and Briggs was in a position to gather it. With typical diligence he pursued this, his ‘CSIR work’, wholly to the satisfaction of his superiors, collecting ‘much valuable information’. Not that they had expected any less – Fred White had written to the Queensland physicist Hugh Webster on the eve of Briggs’s departure commenting, ‘it is a very good thing that we will have in Briggs someone who will return here and be able to tell us all that happened’.

This was no cloak-and-dagger operation. George Briggs was no spy, operating under diplomatic cover. Such pretence would have been impossible for this conscientious scientist. His presence at the UNAEC provided CSIR with a valuable opportunity, but this did not over-ride his responsibility as a scientific adviser. Why should it? There was no conflict of interest between his two roles, for they simply reflected the two sides of the one atomic coin. Managed properly, atomic energy offered not peace or development, but peace and development. This rationale underlay the policy development of the Australian delegation, and offered them some hope of progress even after the initial deadlock. Disagreement between the superpowers had centred on the banning of the atomic bomb, but this was only half of the picture. The Australians hoped that a way could be found through the political impasse by refocussing attention on the ‘dual obligation’ of the UNAEC, by treating the problem of atomic energy as ‘one integrated whole’. In attempting to reconcile the approaches of the USA and the USSR, Evatt stressed that any working plan for the control of atomic energy had to give ‘special consideration’ to the atom’s ‘beneficial uses as well as to its destructive power’. By accelerating the development of the peaceful uses of atomic energy the UNAEC could create the sort of trust that was necessary ‘to simultaneously remove the dangers and grasp the benefits presented by this new discovery’.

The logic seemed clear enough, but despite Evatt’s impatient, hard-driving efforts as chairman, it failed to draw out agreement. By the end of July, Australia’s term in the chair had passed and Evatt and Oliphant had left New York. Their best efforts having been thwarted, these two flamboyant idealists moved on to continue the struggle elsewhere. George Briggs, however, stayed on. His CSIR division was struggling to map out its postwar research priorities, and his family was being forced to deal with his extended absence, yet he remained, not just for a month or two, but until the end of the year. He continued to collect information of course, visiting various laboratories around North America, but this was only as his timetable at the UNAEC allowed. It was his work towards the control of atomic energy that consumed most of his time, energy and concern. He could not leave the job unfinished.

There are different kinds of idealism. George Briggs was not inclined towards the grand gesture or the public pronouncement. Not for him the role of a high-profile activist. He admired Evatt and the new life he had brought to Australian foreign policy, but was unsure about his methods. It seemed that it would ‘take considerable time’ to encourage the Russians to accept some form of international atomic agency. Evatt wanted immediate results, but this was impossible. Patience was required, and in this regard Briggs was extremely well qualified. He held no illusions about the rate of progress, but what was the alternative?:

If the powers will not at this stage agree to find some adequate solution then it is best to go on thrashing the thing out for if the powers agree to disagree then there is no hope of a solution.

A reconciliation between the opposing views was not likely, but nor was it impossible. Even though he was keen to return to Australia, he could not dismiss the continued importance of the discussions: ‘I think the work has got to continue and Australia play her part’. Despite the pleas of CSIR, the External Affairs Department were equally reluctant for Briggs to return, emphasizing ‘the importance of the work on which he is engaged’. Finally, in late November, Briggs was recalled, but even then he did not consider it possible to depart until there was a suitable break in the deliberations:

I am convinced the work now is at a more important stage than ever before and what I have to say in the Committee meetings does carry considerable weight.

It was not until 29 December that George Briggs flew out of New York.

Six months! Six months away from his family, away from his laboratory. Who would have believed that this steady, painstaking scientist could have become so caught up in the hurly-burly of international politics. Back in June, Briggs and Oliphant had met with Australian Defence Force representatives in Washington to discuss the atomic energy situation. Reporting to his superiors, the RAAF representative described Oliphant as a ‘brilliant man who has a great perception of the responsibilities of the scientists and the requirements of the Services’. This was in contrast to Briggs, who presented ‘a narrow view’. Yet it was Briggs who sacrificed his scientific work because he believed he could make a worthwhile contribution to the UNAEC. There are different kinds of idealism.

At various points during the year, Briggs had hoped that another scientist from Australia might be able to take his place. ‘They should be good committee men, able to present their views on the scientific aspect of the problem’, he recommended. Briggs’s ability to work as part of team was an important factor in his appointment to the National Standards Laboratory. It also proved valuable at the UNAEC, where political tensions made committee work frustrating at best. Briggs was particularly proud of his work on the Scientific and Technical Committee, which was set up, at Evatt’s suggestion, as a way of circumventing the initial deadlock. Its role was to report on the technical feasibility of control systems, steering away from any broader ‘political’ questions. By holding a number of informal working group meetings, the scientists were able to avoid much of the parochialism that had dogged the early stages of the UNAEC. As a result they succeeded in producing a report that was acceptable to all the member countries. ‘I can claim to have taken a considerable part in determining the form + a good part of the details of the report’, Briggs wrote, obviously chuffed. Of course, the report did little to overcome the fundamental conflict between the USA and the USSR, but it provided a solid basis for the discussions, and served as an example of what could be achieved by an impartial approach to the issues at hand. George Briggs never saw himself as a diplomat, nor a policy-maker. He was a scientist, and it was as a scientist that he believed he was able to make a useful contribution to the UNAEC’s work. The success of the Scientific and Technical Committee was testament to the important role that scientists could play if let off the political leash.

Even after he had returned to Australia, Briggs maintained an interest in developments at the UNAEC. He was concerned that no replacement for him had been arranged, and contacted the Department of External Affairs to brief them fully on the work of the scientific and technical advisers at the Commission. ‘Although the deadlock shows very little sign of being resolved’, he wrote to CSIR Chairman, David Rivett, ‘I am very strongly of the opinion that work at the technical level should continue’. He could hardly have been surprised by the result of this prodding. At the end of March 1947, the Department contacted CSIR asking if they would consider releasing Briggs to return to New York. At the behest of the Security Council, the UNAEC was attempting to develop specific proposals for the organization of an international control agency, and External Affairs felt that Briggs’s past experience ‘would be of tremendous value’. Briggs was pleased that the UNAEC was moving on to consider the details of the proposed control system, and could not shirk his responsibility as a scientist. Even though he admitted he would not have a lot of time to visit laboratories and gather information, he felt he must go. Rivett reluctantly concurred, adding, with a touch of his superb, dry wit, ‘I must confess that we do want you back with the Division as soon as the condition of the world permits’.

The George Briggs who arrived back in New York towards the end of May 1947, was much more confident and determined than he had been in 1946. With no Evatt or Oliphant to lead the way, Briggs knew that he would have to take on more responsibility in the UNAEC discussions. The UNAEC was no longer front page news, but there was still work to do – detailed technical work to discover just what sort of control system would be possible should the superpowers eventually come to some agreement. It was a challenge that appealed to the methodical physicist, for it offered clear-cut, practical results. Briggs wasted no time in getting down to business.

In an attempt to emulate the success of the Scientific and Technical Committee the previous year, the UNAEC had established a number of working groups to report on specific aspects of the proposed system of control. These groups held informal meetings to encourage free discussion among members, but Briggs was not impressed by the progress they had made. ‘I must say I feel there is a sense of unreality about the proceedings’, he remarked, there was much activity, but little of substance had been produced. The reports being prepared by the working groups were, in many cases, based on papers submitted by the US delegation which were often ‘very bad’ – ‘the old story of very superficial arguments’. But what shocked Briggs most of all was the way that such patent nonsense was being allowed to pass by the people who should know better:

Kaworski (France) told me today he thinks most of the technical people are behaving as if they are bewitched by the US people. I had come to the conclusion that many who have been on the job a long time are either stale, or the US propaganda has completely stopped impartial thinking. It is the same thing.

The Australian delegation received very little direction from Canberra, however, it was understood that they would generally follow the US line. Briggs interpreted this policy fairly broadly, using the informal discussion sessions to launch attacks on the faulty arguments contained within the working papers, much to the US delegation’s chagrin. The scientist whose working life was dedicated to precision measurement and the determination of standards railed against the imprecise posturings and low intellectual standards of the UNAEC deliberations. He cabled Canberra outlining the direction of his thoughts, expecting censure, but determined to stay true to his scientific ideals – ‘if I have to follow US blindly I shall jibe’. No censure came, but neither was there affirmation – the instructions from Canberra remained vague.

Perhaps the problem was that there were not enough physicists at the UNAEC, Briggs mused, for they currently made ‘a poor team’. The USA, in particular, lacked adequate representation, probably because the US physicists realized ‘that the whole business is not being played strictly on the level’. Although the USSR had given some indication that it was prepared to compromise, the attitude of the US delegation had hardened – they did not want an agreement.

Briggs became more and more pessimistic about the eventual outcome of the deliberations, but his dedication to the task at hand did not waver. As the UNAEC began to draw together the papers produced by the working groups into a comprehensive report, he continued to strive for accuracy – ‘the report I think should be technically sound when this is over’. Of the forty amendments to the report proposed, fifteen came from the Australian delegation. In most cases they had previously secured the agreement of the US, but some conflicts remained. One Polish amendment sought to change an occurrence of the word ‘decision’ to ‘consideration’. This was a matter that Briggs had already raised with the US delegation, and so when the moment came he voted with the Poles. Much to the surprise of all concerned the amendment was carried. The US representative, Osborne, was not impressed:

Out came a subdued damn… + he turned to me (we were side by side) and in a rather angry tone said You don’t know what you are doing! The vote was written up in the press as a Polish-Soviet victory.

For Briggs this was not a matter of politics, but of intellectual integrity. Despite all the pressures to the contrary he was attempting to maintain the impartiality that properly befitted his role as a syocientist. He knew he was fighting a losing battle. ‘Power politics’ were coming to dominate the UNAEC discussions, and the time was rapidly approaching when ‘a physicist would be best out of it’.

‘Did you, when you were at any of these conferences, learn any of the secrets of the Western world in relation to nuclear physics?’ Mr Justice Philp was attempting to discern what potentially dangerous material might have been lurking in Briggs’s office safe. Briggs’s evidence was being heard in camera, not to protect his reputation, but just in case a secret might be let slip.

‘Is nuclear fission still secret,’ asked Mr Justice Ligertwood, ‘or does the average scientist know about it these days?’ The preoccupation with secrets was overwhelming – but what were secrets to a scientist? Physical laws could not be locked in a safe. The UNAEC had stood momentarily against the tide of secrecy, but now all was awash.

The Royal Commissioners found Briggs to be ‘a man of high character and integrity’. No secrets had been lost, though Woodward was deemed an ‘unsatisfactory witness’. A few years later, 1n 1958, Briggs retired as head of CSIRO’s Division of Physics. For another decade he continued as an Honorary Research Fellow, attempting to finish up his work on the redetermination of the gyro-magnetic ratio of the proton. This research was seen as being so important that the new head of the Division arranged for Briggs to receive a regular honorarium.

Looking back in his eighties, Briggs marvelled at the way the world had changed within his lifetime:

When I was a boy there were no aeroplanes, radioactivity had not been discovered, we knew little about the nature of the Universe in which we live, and we are finding out more about this Universe at a greater rate than ever.

The world remained a source of wonder, and there were challenges still. In his later life he became concerned about damage to the natural environment. There was much work left to do.

George Briggs was a scientist. He made no stunning break-throughs, no discoveries. He did not seek controversy or fame. But for a time he was a player on the world stage, and was, in his own way, the most dangerous of revolutionaries. For George Briggs, physicist, dared to remain true to his calling. There are different kinds of idealism.

In the Riverview Observatory, Father O’Connell readied his seismographs – seven of them. The possibility of breakdown had to be considered, and now, with the coal miners out – a blackout at the wrong moment … So the clockwork instruments were oiled and tested, set up alongside their electric successors. Springs taut, whirring, they waited. No anomaly would escape the methodical priest.

But when the time came, when the Bomb was exploded, nary a flicker was registered on the caefully prepared charts. The shockwave from Bikini never arrived. No vibration was detected in Sydney. Yet it was there, that subtle tremor. A ripple moved across the earth, shifting the ground beneath our feet. A ripple formed as some massive bulk shifted, flexed, deep, deep down.

§§§

A winter morning in Melbourne, 1946. On the kitchen stove the porridge thickens and burps, solidifying. Attention is focused on the wireless set, as Phyllis watches her parents bicker.

‘I’m sure its the ABC’, insists her mother, hands on hips.

‘Yes … yes’, her father, oblivious, drives the tuner on through peaks of signal and wash.

‘You passed it’.

‘Wait … just wait. There, that’s it’.

‘See’.

‘I can’t hear’, protests Phyllis.

‘Come over’, her father draws her to him and the family stands gethered in the kitchen, listening.

Yes folks it’s live. Everyone can play their part without leaving home – witnesses to the atomic age. Settle back now and enjoy the extravagnza, just ‘No noise thanks’ and ‘Keep out of the way’. Extras on the set of the future.

‘We are now crossing to our reporter aboard the observation ship …’ The American commentary is being relayed around the world. No expense spared on this premier public performance. Breathlessly the scene takes shape. Dawn over Bikini Atoll and the doomed test fleet. In chains or cages, pigs, goats and rats eat, shit and be merry. A compelling experiment in metaphor. The seconds tick away.

Tick tick.

Over the radio a metronome is used to heighten the dramatic effect.

Tick tick tick.

Standing between her parents, Phyllis reaches up and takes their hands. Holding tight she closes her eyes.

‘Hrumphh!’ a pig snorts indignantly. But too late!

‘Bombs away!’ the broadcaster cries. Then in that moment before detonation another voice breaks in, slicing through time: ‘Listen world, this is the crossroads’.

§§§

The future is now, is 1948. Phyllis stands at the crossroads. Short for her thirteen years, the signpost looms above her, standing unmistakeably at the focus of the exhibition. It’s two arms exclaim a choice: ‘PROGRESS’ or ‘DESTRUCTION’. Two paths lay open, two roads ahead …

‘Funny’, thinks Phyllis looking at the map in the souvenir booklet, ‘the arrows only go one way.’

Brusquely a rack of suits bundles past Phyllis and takes up its position in front of one of the dioramas. It is hot again today and, in moving, the official party casts a wake of sweat that eddies around Phyllis. She wrinkles her nose and moves over to the gamma ray display – ‘EVERY CLICK IS AN ATOM EXPLODING’. Tick tick tick. Phyllis holds her breath.

Harold Giddy, the accountant made good, is ringmaster in Murdoch’s unexplained absence. ‘As you would understand Premier, the Herald’s aim in sponsoring this Atomic Age and Industrial Exhibition is to present atomic energy in terms that the average man-in-the-street can understand.’

Indeed the Promotions Department, for it was the Promotions Department that organised the exhibition, had gone to great lengths to ensure that this was so. Armed with R.I. Brightwater’s definitive volume, Product Recognition in the Advanced Physical Sciences, they had road-tested the atomic idiom to see how it weathered the harsh Australian linguistic conditions. PROGRESS and DESTRUCTION had scored well in all their tests. ‘Death rays’, ‘billiard balls’ and ‘a golden age of peace and prosperity’ had also demonstrated a high level of familiarity. The preferred unit of measurement, of course, was shown to the ‘teacupful’.

‘The exhibition’, continues Giddy, ‘displays the possibilities for good and evil, with an emphasis on the constructive uses of atomic energy.’ A man of capital and a frustrated engineer, Giddy feels desire rise as he surveys the industrial and technical displays that fill the bulk of the hall. Ah sweet progress.

‘A golden age of peace and prosperity, Premier, if …’, he stops, looking for unspoken understanding in Hollway’s distant gaze. If … The socialists are still in Canberra, communists in the unions – a firm line is needed.

Thomas Tuke Hollway stares through Giddy to the diorama. A young premier, a young party – his promise to deal with the unions only partially fulfilled. But at this moment Hollway sees that Giddy’s golden future will somehow never be his. His credentials are impeccable, yet he feels cursed, doomed to be eternally turned from the door of the club – ‘I’m sorry sir, we have our instructions’ – by a bouncer who looks just like…

Hollway is lost in the New Mexico desert. The diorama shows a group of stick-figure scientists looking to the horizon and a burst of light that signals birth – codename ‘Trinity’. And there amidst the dark and billowing clouds – CONGRATULATIONS ITS A BOY! – there the atomic genie stands. All bronzed red and muscles, hands with fingers spread, held as a wizard might in calling on mystic powers. Bohr electrons whizz around his head like bush flies. This is the exhibition’s pin-up boy.

‘Letters of blood or letters of gold?’ asks Hollway quietly.

‘Yes Premier, indeed’, insists Giddy, ‘and only a teacupful of uranium…’

‘EXCUSE ME’. The words are heard as a rumble that set the display boards rocking. Exhibition-goers nervously eye the exits.

‘A … a … teacupful of …’ Giddy stops, noticing Hollway, pale and reverent. Following his gaze, Giddy comes upon the genie, who speaks again.

‘If I can just..’ The genie painfully flexes his fingers and hands. ‘A bit stiff’, he explains. When finally relaxed, he sighs and steps from the cloud, right on to the stick-figures. CRUNCH! Poor little Oppenheimer. ‘Ooops’ says the genie as he scrapes the unfortunate physicist from the sole of his large, glowing foot.

There are screams and a rush for the doors. Flee flee the clumsy radioactive giant!

‘Oh’ he says, embarrassed, ‘I didn’t mean to …’

Phyllis, meanwhile, crouches hidden behind a partition and watches. The genie sits down on a scale model of the devastated Hiroshima, triggering a recorded commentary that describes the approach of the American bomber. KABOOM! Ending with suitable sound effects and a flash of light. Just like being there yourself. The genie giggles.

Giddy is calmly accommodating. ‘How … unexpected’, he says, approaching cautiously.

‘Really?’ the genie asks, suprised. ‘You mean you don’t recognise me?’

‘Oh well, of course’, soothes Giddy, ‘You are the embodiment of the inevitible progress of science, evidence of man’s increasing control over the forces of nature. At the same time you are a challenge to humankind’s moral and spiritual development. You present a choice …’

‘I bring you blessing and cursing, life and death’, says the genie in his most bored tone of voice. ‘Ho hum’.

‘On the one hand this’ continues Giddy, indicating the Hiroshima model, ‘On the other …’

‘On the other – rocket ships to the stars, ocean liners that never need refuelling, power too cheap to meter …’ Beckoning to Giddy, the genie leans over and whispers conspiratorially, ‘Is that what you really want?’

‘Yes,’ Giddy straightens, ‘we all do.’

‘Oh’ says the genie, bored again, ‘I just thought …’ Silently the genie examines the scaled-down ruins of Hiroshima. ‘Cheap special effects’, he mutters.

‘Pardon?’ queries Giddy.

‘Loud noises and flashing lights – Welcome to the show!’ The genie claps his hands. FLASH! The simulated bomb burst is triggered again. This time, however, two children hiding near the model are vapourised, and the backdrop bursts into flames. ‘Ooops’ says the genie.

‘Ah … I just have to make a telephone call.’ Giddy backs out of the hall, leaving only Hollway and Phyllis, still hidden, with the careless man of the future.

The genie begins a one-sided conversation with the awe-struck Premier:

‘I’m really a character player you know. I’m used to roles with a bit of depth. Horror yes, but character as well. Recently though there’s been more and more of this macho shit. Frankenstein’s monster, or saviour of the universe, or both… Ah sweet progress -I’ve got to get out of these trashy sci-fi extravaganzas.’

Hollway answers, vaguely nodding, ‘I know what you mean.’

Giddy slips back into the hall. Approaching slowly he whispers to Hollway, ‘It’s OK, they’ll be here soon.’ Then to the genie, boldly, ‘So, what do you intend to do now?’

‘Ummm … aren’t you supposed to tell me. I though that was the whole idea … Who are they anyway?’

‘They … ah … we … that is … you’, Giddy’s stammering is propitiously halted as the doors burst open to a determined phalanx of press officers. Striding at their head is the purple-robed figure of Rudolph Iscariot Brightwater himself, international discourse consultant and conceptual troubleshooter. This is PIRG (PURGE), the Public Image Response Group established by Brightwater at the request of the Australian Government. ‘Its lucky I was in the country’, he says, hurrying through the exhibition, golden ponytail streaming behind.

‘For the newspapers Mr Brightwater?’ an aide asks.

‘”We must be increasingly vigilant to guard against those pernicious forces that would endanger our Australian way of life” … Use a family shot.’

‘Yessir.’

Brightwater nods briefly to Giddy and comes to a halt in front of the genie. Without speaking, he snaps his fingers at the bronze giant and points to a large pair of white overalls held out by one of his aides. Meekly the genie dons the overalls and is led away by the PIRG team to a hastily contrived photo opportunity.

‘All under control’, pronounces a satisfied Brightwater. He shakes Giddy’s hand and pats Hollway on the back, ‘Courageous Premier – courageous and defiant.’ Annointed thus, Hollway follows Giddy silently from the hall.

Turning to leave, Brightwater stops. ‘Well, well … an observer.’ Phyllis had been spotted. ‘You saw everything – how lucky you are.’ He held out his hand to the nervous child, who hesitantly emerged from her concealment.

‘Lucky?’ she asked.

‘Very lucky, the luckiest girl in the world … to have been a part of this.’ A sweep of his arm looses a stream of sparkles that, glittering, flutter to the floor.

‘But those children … I thought … I was frightened.’

‘Let us have no irrational fears. Preparedness is our only defence. Our enemies do not place the same value on human life that we do. what is your name my dear?’

‘Phyllis.’

‘Come Phyllis, there’s no time to lose. let me show you wonderland.’ Brightwater grabs Phyllis by the hand and drags her around the exhibition. Through the industrial and manufacturing exhibits, past fly-spray, refrigerators, toys, radios, sewing machines, vacuum cleaners … Suddenly he stops, hands outstretched in revelation, ‘All this will be yours!’

‘F-flyspray?’

‘The FUTURE!’

Slowly Brightwater begins to turn on the spot. To pirouette. Faster and faster, soon a spiralling blur, a tornado. Phyllis feels herself being drawn in. She resists but cannot hold on. WHOOSH! She’s away.

§§§

Phyllis lands with a thud on the broken back of Old Father Time, or is that the Rosenbergs? I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore Ethel.

Crowds of Munchkins with dirty, smeared faces, freed briefly from their menial jobs, gather around Phyllis. They sing:

‘Flash! Bang! The Japs are dead. Evil Japs, wicked Japs. Flash! Bang! The wicked Japs are dead.’

‘Back to work!’ Brightwater, clad now in a gleaming white lab-coat, snarls and cracks his golden whip. The Munchkins scatter to the strains of ‘Flash! Bang! The Commos die’, while Brightwater floats towards Phyllis like a high-tech butterfly.

‘Welcome to the new age my dear. Everything you could ever desire is available here … and at an extremely reasonable price. Scientists have been working tirelessly to provide you with a happy and healthy life – a life of leisure. Look!’ Brightwater points his whip towards a strange object in the sky. Sickly, phosphorescent green it glows – a city, a suburb, a shopping centre.

‘Its not far Phyllis, just a little way beyond. Always keep to the freeway and remember’, laughs Fairy Brightwater, ‘There’s no place like ho-ome’.

Dazed, Phyllis takes a few faltering steps onto the desolate asphalt. Suddenly vast chasms open on either side. She hears a rumbling behind and turns to see the genie aboard some steamroller contraption, bearing grimly. There is no way but on, ever on, until at last she staggers and falls. Sticky, tarry hands reach up from the road and seize her. Sinking down they take her into darkness and forgetting.

§§§

Phyllis, now grown, wakes with a start on the couch in front of the TV. The baby is crying. She sits up and stares at the framed tapestry hanging on the lounge-room wall – ‘There’s no place like home’. She embroidered it herself, yet something rankles, biting at her memory.

Her child, fed, nursed and changed, is sleeping again. Phyllis hurriedly prepares her husband’s dinner – no time to lose. She listens to the radio while slicing vegetables. A news report – another series of atomic tests is to take place in Central Australia. What? Atomic tests? Where? The Prime Minister speaks, eyebrows audibly bristling, ‘Let us have no irrational fears…’ Phyllis drops the knife with a clatter. Stooping, elbows on the kitchen table, head in hands, she closes her mind. After a few minutes she stands again. THUD! Her head hits the ceiling. ‘How curious’, she thinks.

Crawling with difficulty through the tiny doorway, Phyllis makes her way into the lounge and switches on the television, seeking an explanation from the source.

The wrestling is on.

The good guy, the one in the clean, white singlet emblazoned with a golden ‘H’, is climbing up on the ropes. His opponent, the evil foreigner, lies prone in the centre of the ring. Lauching himself from the top rope, the man in white falls crushingly on the evildoer – the atomic drop! Arms raised, victorious, the genie flashes a Chesty-Bond smile at the camera. And winks.

Phyllis screams and the house collapses, leaving her amidst a pile of pasteboard and dust. Standing unsteadily she sees, in the distance, a purple-robed figure who waves. Yes, there is only one way now. Striding over houses, factories, onward to the precipice.

‘Welcome to the crossroads!’ calls Rudolph Iscariot Brightwater, ‘Glad you could make it!’

Phyllis waves back, but keeps on. The contained logic, the containing logic, offered only one choice – and that was freedom.

§§§

FREEDOM

Electroshock is used to bring unconsciousness. Then, with head tilted, the sharp, pointed leucotome is placed under the eyelid, on the occipital bone. WHACK! Splintered bone and into brain. Back and forth, the leucotome blindly severing. Ah sweet progress. Science at last grants Phyllis her freedom.

The genie, dressed now in a grey, three-piece suit, closes the file and replaces it in a pile on his desk. He turns slowly to the camera, smiles and says, ‘I am become death, shatterer of worlds’.

THE EXHIBITION IS OPEN DAILY

Then there was a great flash that reached the far horizon. Even Dr Penney, who had witnessed the first historic cataclysm in the desert at Almagordo and later seen a bomb burst over Japan, described the scene as ‘terrifying’ as he turned around to find the frigate Plym had vanished and to see a great greyish-black cloud shooting up thousands of feet into the air and ever-growing in size.

In the Monte Bello Islands off the coast of Western Australia on 3 October 1952, Dr William Penney watched as an atomic device for which he was largely responsible vaporised a test ship and sent thousands of tonnes of water erupting into the air. His programme had been successful; Britain was now a fully-fledged nuclear power.

Australia, meanwhile, had proved to be a convenient nuclear testing site; but the Monte Bello’s radioactive scars were not Australia’s first association with the atomic bomb, nor were they to be the last. Between 1952 and 1957 there were 12 full-scale nuclear weapons tests on Australian soil. The first, at Monte Bello, was followed by two at Emu Field in South Australia in 1953. A further two devices were exploded at Monte Bello in 1956 before testing was transferred to a permanent site in South Australia, the now infamous Maralinga.

The tests were primarily British undertakings, with Australia providing little more than logistic support. However, there were three Australian scientists who were present at each of the tests — E.W. Titterton, L.H. Martin and W.A.S. Butement. These men had no formally defined role in the first three tests, but in 1955, with the establishment of the Maralinga proving ground, they were incorporated into a Safety Committee, the task of which was to monitor future tests so as to ensure the safety of Australian people and property.

A full evaluation of the Safety Committee’s functioning is a task for the future. What must be grasped before such an evaluation can be meaningfully made is the political context of Australian involvement in the atomic tests. Why did Britain develop an atomic bomb? Why did Australia agree to its testing? The motivations underlying such decisions were part of a complex, global network of political desires and ambitions that determined the nature of Australian involvement in the British atomic tests. This paper is an attempt to show how the ‘informal’ involvement of Titterton, Martin and Butement in the early trials at Monte Bello and Emu Field was shaped by international politics. The ‘how’ and ‘why’ of this situation obviously raises some important questions about the role of the Safety Committee in the later tests and, indeed, about Australia’s place in world politics, then and now.

The atomic bomb was developed during the Second World War through the collaborative efforts of Allied scientists. The’ Manhattan Project’, as the developmental program was code-named, was largely dependent upon American resources and personnel, but a number of British scientists played a significant part in ensuring its completion. However, this successful partnership did not survive long in the post-war world, for the Americans soon sought to restrict the disclosure of information on atomic energy. This policy was given legal form in 1946 with the passing of the McMahon Act, which specifically prohibited the sort of mutually beneficial interchange on atomic matters that the British had hoped to cultivate. Not surprisingly, British scientists and politicians felt somewhat betrayed. McMahon, it is said, likened the situation to a stable boy seeking a share in the stable on account of all his hard work. Such an attitude hardly did justice to Britain’s (or France’s or Canada’s) role in early atomic energy research.

Britain’s status as a loyal ally was not in doubt, but the Americans were somewhat circumspect in their trust of British security arrangements. Their fears were reinforced as details of Britain’s spy scandals were periodically revealed. Gordon Dean, one-time chairman of the American Atomic Energy Commission (AAEC), wrote some years after the passing of the Act that

until British security methods are tightened, at least to the point where a Bruno Pontecorvo cannot merrily wing his way from Harwell to Russia without some kind of restriction we cannot afford to be full partners.

The passing of the McMahon Act represents the most precarious moment in the history of UK/US atomic relations. In the years that followed, there were many discussions and negotiations, and at times, some interchange of information did occur. Nevertheless, at all times the Americans maintained a firm hold over their potentially lucrative atomic technology, only dispensing scientific morsels according to their benevolent whims. Britain had no option but to bow to the American demands in the hope that compliance might have its rewards in the long run.

The McMahon Act did not wholly condemn Britain to the non-atomic wilderness, however, for by 1946, the British had already taken substantial steps towards the development of their own, independent atomic programme. At Harwell, a research station, albeit ‘in embryonic form’, already existed, and planning had begun for the necessary industrial complexes.

There seems to have been a certain amount of pride involved in the British decision to pursue their own programme. After all, much of the pioneering work in the field had been carried out in Britain. It seemed to some to be not so much a case of instituting an atomic energy programme as of allowing the continued unfolding of the brilliant work of Britain’s atomic scientists; to have ignored or restricted this work would have seemed somehow ‘unnatural ‘. However, whilst it may have appeared that ‘sheer momentum alone would have been enough to keep the programme going’, the generous funding and high priority accorded the project can hardly be said to have been due to its scientific challenges. The programme existed and continued to exist because of its practical aims. Atomic energy had attractive industrial possibilities, but more important still was the application which had given the science its war-time impetus – the Bomb.

In 1944, the British Tube Alloys Technical Committee recommended a course of action ‘which would shorten as much as possible the time required to produce in the United Kingdom after the war a militarily significant number of bombs, say ten’. Indeed, there was a notable consistency of thought on the necessity of Britain possessing an atomic bomb, the Chiefs of Staff being particularly insistent. Such opinions were not confined to the military or scientific mind. In November 1945, Winston Churchill stated in Parliament: ‘This I take is already agreed, we should make atomic bombs.’ There is no doubt that one of the firm objectives of British post-war atomic development was to provide the nation with an atomic weapons capability. This is evidenced by a top-secret memorandum distributed to Commonwealth Prime Ministers in 1946, which indicated that fissile materials would be produced in the United Kingdom ‘for military applications’. Similarly, one of the men who supervised the construction of the industrial facilities to service the programme has commented: ‘the remit given to the new organisation was the production of plutonium for military purposes.’

Many reasons were and are given as to why Britain needed the Bomb. Generally, they fall into three sometimes indistinct categories: military, political and nationalistic. On the military level, it was believed that Britain’s, indeed the Commonwealth’ s, security depended upon possession of the Bomb. In the early post-war years, a weakened Britain stood alone, facing the ‘threat’ of Communist expansion. Before the NATO agreement was formulated, there was no assurance that the United States would act to protect British interests if another conflict arose. Hence, it was argued, Britain required atomic weapons of its own, targeted on centres crucial to its own defence. Soon the likely consequences of extensive atomic conflict became evident, changing military strategy and the justification of atomic hardware. The Bomb was now too horrible to be used, but rather it was necessary as a deterrent to prevent deployment by the enemy – an argument we know all too well. The Bomb was also recognised as being chillingly economic. In the financially difficult post-war years, where a full-scale military force was difficult to maintain, the cost-effective A-bomb was an attractive proposition to British military planners.

Politically, the Bomb held many promises; with a handful in its arsenal, Britain became a credible participant in world affairs once more. The Bomb meant influence – particularly, the British hoped, in Washington where, it was feared, ‘isolationism’ might again paralyse American foreign policy. It was also thought that if Britain could sufficiently impress the United States authorities with its own atomic achievements, a steadier interchange of atomic information might be forthcoming.

The Bomb had a nationalistic appeal as well. Britain’s role as world leader had been usurped by the United States, yet its people still regarded their homeland as one of the ‘great powers’. The atomic bomb would reaffirm their membership of this elite and provide a new object of national pride. The British Empire could bask anew in the never-setting sun of atomic glory.

Such factors as these are seen reflected in statements surrounding the first British atomic test in 1952. Several months before the test, the United Kingdom High Commissioner wrote to an Australian official:

the test will have a considerable effect on the American attitude towards atomic co-operation with the United Kingdom and indeed on Anglo-American relationships in general.

The implications of Britain’s atomic bomb were also recognised by the media. As the American journal Newsweek reported after the explosion:

The British people reacted with a macabre surge of national pride. The tabloid London Daily Mirror exulted: ‘This bang has changed the world’. More seriously, Britain’s atomic test was regarded as a new deterrent to Communist attack and as a new incentive to restoring wartime atomic partnership among the U.S., Britain and Canada.

British correspondents were understandably less cynical. Under the title ‘A Bomb of One’s Own’, one wrote:

Britain this teeming womb of distinguished engineers and scientists can be frankly proud of the sheer technical and intellectual achievements displayed in the Monte Bello explosion.

Another suggested:

This A-bomb explosion will do far more than satisfy British national pride. It will give Britain:
– A stronger voice in Western military strategy. British prestige will go up in the U.S. as well as Western Europe.
– A certain amount of protection against possible Russian intimidation. There’s a good chance also, that it will lead to a renewal of close Anglo-American atomic co-operation.

It is to be noted that a major hope in the encouragement of an independent British atomic programme was the potential revitalisation of Anglo-American co-operation. Thus even in pursuing their own developments, the British had to be ever-mindful of the constraints of transatlantic appeasement. American attitudes were always an important consideration.

Shortly after the war, it seemed that a collaborative atomic project might be initiated within the British Commonwealth. Such countries as Australia and New Zealand hoped that, in return for personnel and resources, they might be made privy to atomic technology. However, the prospect of atomic proliferation, even within the Commonwealth, was viewed with horror by the Americans and thus the project was suppressed. The possibility of co-operation with the United States simply could not be endangered, even if this meant that broader Commonwealth interests had to be sacrificed.

Britain’s relations with her dominions were further circumscribed by a tripartite agreement formulated by Britain, the United States and Canada in 1948. Termed the Modus Vivendi, this document attempted to re-establish some limited grounds for atomic collaboration. Notably, Annex Two of the Modus Vivendi delineated possible ‘Areas of Cooperation between Members of the British Commonwealth’. Needless to say, the co-operation envisaged was of a very restricted nature, confined to such areas as health and safety, the discovery and processing of ores, the use of isotopes and the design of research reactors. But even these concessions were conditional:

Co-operation within the above classified fields will be subject to an understanding between governments to adopt common standards in holding information secure. Transmission would also be subject to the principle of current usability.

Thus atomic energy policy within the British Commonwealth was always dependent upon the more crucial relationship with the United States that Britain so assiduously sought to maintain and extend.

The decision to proceed with the British atomic bomb project was made officially in January 1947. However, by this time arrangements were well under way. The necessary plutonium was already on order, and in the Armaments Research Division of the Department of Supply, an Atomic Weapons Section was being organised around Dr William Penney, the Chief Superintendent of Armament Research. The project, code-named ‘High Explosives Research’, generally proceeded on schedule, and in 1950 it was realised that arrangements had to be made to test the first bomb, since it would be ready within two years.

At this time, atomic energy relations between the United States and Britain had reached a very low ebb with the arrest of the high-ranking British physicist, Klaus Fuchs, for espionage. The British hoped, however, that despite a virtual cessation of atomic negotiations, arrangements might still be made for the use of an American atomic test site, since such sites were a military concern and thus thought to be outside the provisions of the McMahon Act. An official request was made to the American Chiefs of Staff, but their reply was delayed.

Awaiting the outcome of the American deliberations, Penney investigated the feasibility of a test site in Canada. Meanwhile the British Chiefs of Staff suggested another possible site, the Monte Bello Islands, off the coast of Western Australia. Encouraged to pursue this Australian option, the British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, contacted his Australian counterpart, Robert Menzies, in September 1950. Attlee sought agreement, in principle, to the testing of an atomic device on Australian territory. If this were granted, he also hoped that a preliminary survey of the Monte Bellos might be arranged. Within three days, both proposals had been approved, the Australians offering every assistance. The survey, completed in December, was encouraging, and Penney urged that the site be chosen, commenting: ‘In fact we know of no other site in which this trial can take place on the planned date.’

The Americans had finally replied to the British request in October 1950, curtly refusing access to their atomic test facilities. However, the British remained hopeful; even as they were arranging a formal agreement with the Australians in early 1951, another approach was being made to the United States. Preparations for the test at Monte Bello were well under way when, in September, the Americans ventured to suggest a joint testing programme. The offer was attractive, but in December 1951, the re-e1ected Churchill decided to proceed with the Monte Bello test. Menzies, who had been tolerantly awaiting the outcome of these deliberations, was informed of the decision by the UK High Commissioner; the letter noted the British government’s ‘warm appreciation’ of the American offer, but went on:

the fact remains that under their proposed conditions the Americans could, if they so choose, at any time declare certain items to be restricted data and decline to share them with the United Kingdom.

The past record of Anglo-American atomic relations could hardly inspire British faith in the success of a joint testing programme. It seemed wiser to avoid placing their programme in American hands until a more satisfactory basis for atomic collaboration had been established. Furthermore, it was declared that such co-operation would be more likely ‘if we show that we are not entirely dependent upon them now’.

The British proposal to test an atomic device at the Monte Bello Islands in October 1952 was formally approved by the Australian government in May 1951; or at least, by certain members of the government – Menzies did not even consider it necessary to inform his Cabinet of the’ Operation Hurricane’ arrangements until the matter was a virtual fait accompli. However, even when the details were officially announced, Australia’s participation in the test gained widespread support. One Opposition senator stated that he did not object to the Monte Bello test because ‘This country needs all the sources of strength that are available to it’.

To bolster such support, the Australian authorities continually sought to ensure that the cooperative aspects of the test were highlighted. The official joint announcement of the atomic test, made on 18 February 1952, stated, in part:

In close co-operation with the Government of the Commonwealth of Australia the test will take place at a site in Australia.

The words ‘in close co-operation’ had been substituted for ‘by arrangement’ in the original draft at Australian instigation. Similarly, the Australians insisted that the sentence ‘The Australian Government and fighting services are also closely cooperating’ be added to the announcement of the site and organisational details of the test, made on 15 May. This addition was sought ‘to give emphasis to the part played by the Australian Government and Armed Services in the operation’. The Australians viewed the arrangements for the declaration of the test’s success with the same concern. It was thought that the release of just a short communique, as had been proposed,

would not do justice to what Australia has done in regard to the test and it would be expected that the press would look to the Government for some information on this.

Consequently the relevant authorities composed a supplementary statement detailing the Australian effort that, with British approval, was released to the press along with the communique.

It seems likely that the Australian government sought to emphasise its contribution to the Monte Bello test in order that it might share in the glory of Britain’s atomic success. Publicity arrangements were formulated with a concern ‘to extract the greatest prestige benefit’, encouraging media outlets such as the Sydney Morning Herald to proclaim: ‘Australia may well be proud to be associated with Britain in [such] a great enterprise’. Such a desire for prestige may have been one of the factors that prompted the Australians to agree to the British tests; further reasons are suggested by the defence and foreign relations policies of Menzies’ avowedly anti-Communist government.

On 20 September 1950, Menzies broadcast his first ‘Defence Call to the Nation’, in which he proclaimed:

Do you think that this Communist enemy would hesitate to overrun Western civilisation if the United States did not have the atomic bomb? Don’t let’s pretend about the bomb. It’s real. It is today keeping the world out of a tragic world-wide war. Horrible as it is (and I saw Hiroshima a few weeks ago), it is today not an instrument of war but of peace.

Menzies was exhorting Australians to support his plans for defence preparedness – preparedness for a third world war that would inevitably involve the use of atomic weapons. However, he did not expand Australia’s defence forces, nor seek to arm Australia with atomic bombs. Rather, he believed that Australia’s safety could best be maintained by cultivating ‘great and powerful friends’. The Minister for External Affairs, Percy Spender, described the aims of Australian foreign policy as being

essentially the preservation of peace and of our way of life. Inseparable from these aims is the closest possible cooperation within the British Commonwealth and with the United States of America and other nations friendly to the Commonwealth. Our purpose must be to determine in what ways we can co-operate in achieving our objectives.

Australia’s ties with the Commonwealth were particularly important – historically and emotionally, if not strategically. To Menzies, the Commonwealth was ‘an unquenchable sense of common destiny and common duty and common instinct ‘. But it was also ‘an instrument of our security and prosperity’ which involved ‘obligations as well as rights’:

The continuance of the world influence and the effectiveness of the British Commonwealth will continue to depend upon the readiness of every member to contribute to that Commonwealth’s welfare as a whole and to share with it in the great task of forwarding the welfare of mankind.

It was certainly thought that the atomic bomb would bolster Britain’s sagging ‘world influence and effectiveness’. Menzies may thus have felt that it was within Australia’s Commonwealth duties to allow the tests.

Equally, the Bomb was an important factor in the defence, not only of the Commonwealth, but of the Western World. The Communists would initiate a world war, said Menzies, ‘if they feel that in such a war the probabilities of success are heavily in their favour’. Australia, then, in contributing to the development of Britain’s atomic bomb, was aiding the development of the ‘free world’s’ deterrent power. Australia’s involvement in such a venture would also undoubtedly ensure the military beneficence of its ‘friends’ and hence the security of the country and its people. Howard Beale, Menzies’ Minister for Supply during the tests, summed up Australia’s position in his autobiography:

With some reason Britain felt that she had no option but to build up a retaliatory nuclear power of her own, which would also be a supplement to American deterrent power. As to Australia, it would, in this situation, have been against our own interest, and brutally ungenerous as well, to have refused the assistance requested.

Of course, the Australian authorities may have also foreseen other benefits in hosting the tests. After the war, attempts were made to formulate international controls over atomic energy. The United Nations hosted disarmament discussions, at which Australia was represented by the Minister for External Affairs, Herbert Evatt. Evatt was advised on technical matters by Mark Oliphant and George Briggs, Chief of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research’s (CSIR) Division of Physics. However, an official statement of Australia’s involvement in these activities indicates that the government was interested in the possibilities as well as the problems of this new power source:

the Australian Government is conscious both of the need for removing the danger of destruction which is threatened by the atomic bomb, and also of developing to the full great responsibilities which this discovery holds for the benefit of mankind. This second aspect is particularly important for Australia, whose development of new sources of power may show the way to great material progress and removal of substantial disabilities.

Clearly the atomic age held many promises for Australia.

Recognition that Australia should initiate atomic energy research dated back to 1941 when Mark Oliphant, who was himself playing an important role in atomic developments, raised the subject with Australia’s representative in Washington, R.G. Casey. Oliphant warned that the processes and techniques were being rapidly patented, so that

it may be desirable for Australia to do some work, when possible, on the energy machine, so that if and when she wished to exploit it, she will have something with which to bargain.

On a war-time visit to Australia, Oliphant again sought to encourage initiatives in this field. He particularly urged that extensive uranium prospecting be undertaken.

After the war, the Australian authorities began to show an active interest in such matters. CSIR’s Executive Officer, Fred White, wrote to Briggs in Washington: ‘I suppose you appreciate that we are extremely keen to get into this atomic energy work.’ Subsequently, an Atomic Energy Research Advisory Committee to CSIR was formed. Its members included Leslie Martin, the newly appointed professor of physics at the University of Melbourne, who was attempting to expand the study of nuclear physics within his department. At the same time, CSIR was negotiating to send some of its workers to Britain to gain experience at the developing research establishment at Harwell.

In response to Australian requests for information, British officials arranged for Oliphant to discuss ‘aspects of atomic energy development’ with relevant Australian authorities. Oliphant informed Cabinet members of Britain’s progress in atomic research and also held discussions with scientific bodies which, according to White, were ‘very stimulating and informative’.

In 1947, an atomic physics section was created within CSIR. Several officers were transferred to Harwell, while another group was established at the University of Melbourne to undertake

fundamental research into nuclear energy generally with the object of training sufficient men to develop an atomic or nuclear energy stockpile.

This group was under the direction of Les Martin who, in August 1947, visited England on behalf of CSIR to study recent developments in nuclear physics.

The following year, Oliphant returned to Australia and discussed the possibility of constructing an atomic pile somewhere in the Australian desert. As a result of these talks, the Defence Department’s New Weapons and Equipment Development Committee recommended that:

It be accepted as a general principle of policy that it is desirable that Australia take part in the development of atomic energy from the viewpoint of Defence, apart from the advantage to National Development.

In 1949, Oliphant, who had decided to take up a position at the newly established Australian National University (ANU), was appointed chairman of the Industrial Atomic Energy Policy Committee, one of the members of which was Les Martin. This committee was to advise the government on the future of Australian atomic research and development. In the same year, substantial deposits of uranium were discovered at Rum Jungle in the Northern Territory. Later, further discoveries were made at Radium Hill in South Australia.

The realisation that Australia possessed rich uranium reserves prompted the country’s leaders to consider much more seriously the prospect of atomic power generation. The South Australian government was particularly enthusiastic, and the Premier commented in 1952:

If I were asked to predict the location of the first atomic pile in the Southern Hemisphere I would name without hesitation the shores of the Spencer Gulf.

Finally, in March 1953, the Atomic Energy Bill was introduced into Parliament and passed without opposition. The resulting Act established the Australian Atomic Energy Commission, which was to be responsible for overseeing all future operations involving nuclear energy.

All of Australia’s plans for the development of its atomic resources were founded on the assumption that Britain would supply the necessary classified information. When Fred White wrote to George Briggs of the Australian ‘keenness’ to be involved in atomic research work, he added:

We hope to do so in collaboration with Great Britain and Canada. It is quite obvious we cannot start up an expensive developmental project here and the best arrangement would be to help Britain in the hope that we would receive a suitable return later.

Oliphant’s plan for constructing an atomic pile in Australia was envisaged as being part of a ‘joint United Kingdom! Australian programme of Atomic Development’ designed ‘to meet its [Australia’s] own and British Commonwealth requirements’. Similarly, in his role as chairman of the Industrial Atomic Energy Policy Committee, Oliphant sought an agreement between the two countries for joint development of atomic energy. Evatt and Menzies had, at different times, also requested information from the mother country.

However, the assistance envisaged was never likely to be forthcoming because of Britain’s curious, restrictive relationship with the United States. In the hope of re-establishing an interchange on atomic matters, Britain was anxious to abide by the American policy of non-proliferation of atomic information. Australia’s aspirations were particularly ill-fated as the Americans maintained an especial distrust of security measures ‘downunder’. Oliphant was told on one occasion that ‘no Australian, from the Prime Minister down can be trusted not to be careless or worse’. Moreover, Britain’s ability to accede to Australian requests was severely circumscribed by the conditions of the Modus Vivendi.

This enforced alienation of a Commonwealth partner became increasingly uncomfortable as Britain’s dependence on Australia for atomic testing grounds increased. Indeed, it may be that a recognition of this situation was one of the factors behind the Australian decision to host the tests. The Australians might have hoped that co-operation in the staging of the tests would result in a change of attitude – an indebted Britain might not refuse Australian requests so readily. Even if no such major shift in policy were to occur, the Australians might at least have hoped that suitably qualified representatives involved in the tests would gain some knowledge that would be applicable to their own research.

Certainly there were precedents for such mutually beneficial arrangements. The Long Range Weapons Establishment had been founded in 1946 as a joint operation between Australia and Britain. Australian input was considerable for a project largely designed to enrich Britain’s arsenals; nevertheless Beale, the Minister in charge of the operation after 1949, believed the many millions to be well spent when one considered

the technical and other knowledge learned from these experiments, the professional association of our scientists with their British counterparts, and. ..the close working together scientists, technicians, military men, public servants and politicians.

This partnership, said Beale, led to another which was ‘just as valuable’ – the atomic weapons tests.

In a similar way, Britain required skilled staff to aid the development of the atomic research establishment at Harwell. Australia was happy to supply these, hoping that the knowledge and experience they would gain would be useful in any comparable Australian project. The Australian authorities also hoped that their uranium reserves might provide some grounds for the provision of information or processed materials. Given such precedents, the Australian government may well have thought that atomic research and development in Australia would benefit from the tests.

Despite this, though, the government did not insist on any explicit guidelines for Australian technical and scientific participation. Some meteorological and radiochemical facilities were provided, but as Phillip McBride, the Minister for Defence, explained to Parliament:

The executive control of the project rests entirely with the United Kingdom authorities, and the policy on matters such as those relating to the presence at the test of observers, whether they be officials or representatives of the press, is entirely for the United Kingdom Authorities to determine.

There were in fact three Australian representatives at the first Monte Bello or ‘Hurricane’ test. They were Ernest Titterton, professor of nuclear physics at ANU, Leslie Martin, professor of physics at the University of Melbourne, and Alan Butement, Chief Scientist of the Australian Department of Supply. The actual extent and nature of their participation in the test is difficult to determine since their attendance was not covered by any formal agreement. The Australian Ionizing Radiation Advisory Council, in its report on the British nuclear tests, suggests that they may have made some contribution to deciding when to fire the device. But other evidence indicates that, at the Hurricane test, Titterton, Martin and Butement were simply observers, assigned nominal tasks just to facilitate the ‘accommodation position’. Certainly Beale seems to have had this impression when he wrote to Menzies in November 1953 concerning the establishment of a permanent testing ground:

I am sure you would also wish that any arrangements which were made would ensure that Australian scientists were active participants in the preparation for the tests and in the carrying out of them, and were not present merely as observers as hitherto.

Likewise, no formal agreement was made about the participation of Australian scientists in the Totem I and II tests conducted at Emu Field. The British had first sought agreement from Menzies about the possibility of a mainland test while he was visiting the United Kingdom in late 1952. Menzies felt that his Government would ‘certainly agree’ to the proposal and cabled the Minister for Defence for confirmation. This was sent within three days. In fact the test site had been chosen some months earlier while the British team was in Australia for the Hurricane test. Preparation of the site was a lengthy project in difficult conditions, undertaken by Australian service personnel. But despite some problems, all went according to plan, and two major atomic devices were exploded at Emu Field, on 15 and 27 October 1953.

Martin and Butement had both helped in the selection of this site, and it seemed that Australian scientists would play a much more significant role in these tests. Duncan Sandys, the UK Minister of Supply, announced that Australian scientists had ‘accepted responsibility for certain important tasks in connection with the observation and measurement of results’. However, besides some meteorological aid, Australia’s sole scientific ‘participants’ were Titterton and an assistant, who made some measurements of neutron flux at various distances from the blast. Martin and Butement were again simply observers.

Significantly, though, the British Aide-Memoire outlining proposals for the mainland tests suggested that Professors Martin and Titterton might ‘go through the calculations’ with Penney, so as to be sure of the safety of the arrangements. Indeed, technical data were provided, enabling the Australian scientists to make ‘their own independent evaluation of the hazards’.

However, while they acted in this advisory capacity, neither Titterton nor Martin seemed to have any formal authority or responsibility at the tests themselves. It was planned that Martin would attend the first explosion as one member of a party of officials, including Butement, who would ‘fly from Woomera to the site on the morning of the test and return to Woomera the next day’. Even when at the site they would ‘not have contact with senior members of the test organisation’.

Despite this lack of actual authority, it was stressed publicly that the Australian scientists would play an important role in advising the Government ‘as to the adequacy of. ..safeguards ‘. With some fears being expressed as to the safety of mainland testing, the authorities were able to make statements focussing on the involvement of Titterton, Martin and Butement as a means of public reassurance. In this regard it was noted of Titterton’s and Martin’s assessment of hazards that:

the Australian authorities will need to be armed with this evaluation before there is any possibility of an announcement or a leak about the tests.

Clearly there were no doubts as to the verdict of this assessment, nor of its value in public relations.

The three Australian scientists were thus given a public and political rather than a scientific role. One wonders, then, what criteria were used in the selection of Titterton, Martin and Butement as observers for the Monte Bello and Emu tests. While their scientific skills and training would have been important, they may not have been the only factors involved; after all, such skills were scarcely, if at all, utilised. The British, of course, had brought out their own highly specialised team; Australian involvement was no necessity as far as the technical operations were concerned. Other factors determining the extent and nature of Australian participation can be seen in an examination of the backgrounds of these three scientists.

Ernest Titterton played a significant role in the development of the atomic bomb. Indeed, by the time of the Monte Bello test, his association with the device stretched back more than ten years. It began in 1941 at the University of Birmingham when, as a 25-year-old research officer, he was asked to use his skills in electronics to assist the research being undertaken by Otto Frisch. A British committee had initiated research into the possibilities of atomic energy and, under its auspices, Frisch was investigating aspects of nuclear fission. The apparatus that Titterton developed enabled Frisch to gain a further understanding of the parameters of Bomb design.

Frisch and Titterton continued their research, initially at Liverpool and then, in 1943, at Los Alamos as part of the Manhattan Project. They were the first British team members to arrive at the top secret American establishment, and Titterton was the last to depart. Working with Frisch, he had developed the technology of measuring extremely small intervals of time. This expertise well qualified him for work with the fast electronics involved in the firing of a nuclear core. At the very first test of an atomic device, held at Almagordo, New Mexico, in 1945, Titterton was a senior member of the Timing Group. His responsibilities included the provision of time signals marking off the milliseconds prior to the explosion, and the sending of the signal to activate the detonators. Thus Titterton’s electronics fired the world’s first atomic ‘bomb’.

Titterton’s role in the development of the new weapon continued after the war when, by virtue of his ‘irreplaceability’, he was able to avoid the restrictions of the McMahon Act and remain at Los Alamos. As advisor on instrumentation and a principal assistant to the scientist in charge, Titterton made an important contribution to the Bikini atomic weapons tests in 1946. Finally, though, in 1947, he left the United States to take up a research position at Harwell. Here he was able to pursue more fundamental research, although his connections with the Bomb were not wholly severed. Penney’s attempts to lure him into ‘High Explosives Research’ failed, but he and other Los Alamos veterans contributed valuable advice to the British atomic bomb project.

In late 1950, Titterton accepted the invitation of Mark Oliphant and arrived in Australia to establish his own research team in nuclear physics at ANU. In less than two years he was standing in the shadow of the mushroom cloud once more.

Titterton’s involvement in the Hurricane trial seems to have been initiated by a personal request from Penney. This request was relayed through the UK High Commissioner and sought Titterton’s services ‘to help in the field work of telemetry in connection with the atomic test’. Allen Brown, Secretary of the Prime Minister’s Department, duly sought permission for such activity from the Vice-Chancellor of ANU, commenting:

I understand that Dr Titterton will be furnished with certain data which will be of interest and use to the Australian Authorities in relation to the weapon effects from the point of view of civil defence.
The United Kingdom Government has recalled that Dr Titterton is an outstanding expert on atomic explosions having been concerned with the first two bombs and having taken part in the first United States Tests at Eniwetok.

Titterton’s involvement thus seemed desirable both from British and Australian perspectives.

Ernest Titterton had seen the atomic bomb all the way through from an horrific idea to an horrific reality. He was somewhat of an ‘expert’ and it may have been that the British request was motivated by a desire to benefit from his knowledge. However, as already mentioned, Titterton did little more than observe the test; his intervention was minimal. Why then was he invited?

The invitation from Penney appeared to some to be part of a ‘private arrangement’. Perhaps it was an act of courtesy between scientific colleagues; but even if such were its origins, it clearly had other benefits. Titterton was a knowledgeable and articulate man who had a thorough understanding of atomic weapons. Although only a fairly recent arrival from Britain, he had been accepted as a senior Australian academic and scientist. In addition, he had worked on one of the world’s most highly secret projects and thus his reliability seemed assured. These factors, combined with the relationship he had developed with Allen Brown of the Prime Minister’s Department, made him an ideal representative. From an Australian point of view he was an ‘outstanding expert’ who would certainly add to the prestige accumulated by Australia’s involvement in the British venture. He would also be able to gather ‘data of interest and use to the Australian Authorities’. The British, on the other hand, would have been pleased to receive such a well respected scientist who already had such intimate ties to the project itself. Undoubtedly they realised that Titterton would provide a valuable avenue of educated liaison with the Australian government.

Les Martin was something of a contrast to Titterton. An X-ray physicist by training, Martin had spent the whole of his academic career, apart from a brief stint at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, in Australia. His contribution to the war effort had been in radar rather than nuclear physics. His importance lay not so much in his scientific experience, however, as in his connections with the Defence Department and his role in Australia’s plans for atomic energy development.

Martin’s contributions to atomic research in Australia have already been mentioned. Briefly, he sought to encourage nuclear physics within his own department at the University of Melbourne; he acted in an advisory capacity for the CSIR; he oversaw atomic physics research groups from the CSIR and the Department of Supply; and he was a member of the government’s Industrial Atomic Energy Policy Committee. While Martin himself may not have broken new ground in nuclear physics, clearly he provided an important organisational focus around which aspects of atomic energy could be developed. He gathered information from his connections in Australia and overseas and channelled it into appropriate Australian undertakings, providing some of the impetus for the Australian atomic project.

Martin was also an important figure in the administration of Australian defence science. In 1948, he was appointed Defence Scientific Adviser and chairman of the Defence Research and Development Policy Committee. This part-time appointment followed upon his two years of service on the Defence Scientific Advisory Committee, and included provision for his co-option by the Defence Committee and the Council of Defence when necessary. Martin, being a physicist, and having previously chaired the Atomic Developments Sub-Committee, was offered the position ‘in view of the great importance of developments in atomic warfare’. Clearly the authorities agreed that Martin would be well qualified to direct atomic energy research policy.

In his administrative and consultative capacities for the Defence Department, Martin was involved in some of the Australian planning for the Hurricane trial. When the authorities at Harwell sought laboratory facilities for radiochemical analyses associated with the test, Martin’s advice was sought. He arranged for facilities to be made available by the University of Melbourne. Similarly, Martin was consulted when the services of two junior scientists were requested for the test.

In mid-1952, Martin visited the United Kingdom ‘on matters of defence research policy’. He took the opportunity to have discussions with Penney and Cockroft, during which the matter of a mainland test site was raised. As a result of this meeting, Penney planned to visit one suggested location near Woomera while he was in Australia for the Hurricane test. He wrote to Martin in August, outlining his intentions and expressing the hope that he would meet him at Woomera. However, official arrangements did not move so swiftly nor so smoothly.

Martin had yet to receive an invitation from the British authorities to attend the Hurricane test when, on 22 August 1952, the Chief of the Naval Staff wrote to the Secretary of the Defence Department voicing his concern over the lack of official Australian scientific representation. The matter was referred to the Defence Committee which recommended that the UK government should be requested ‘to invite the Defence Scientific Adviser to be present in order that he might be fully acquainted with details of the tests’.

The British cannot have been wholly ignorant of these sentiments, for at about the same time they, too, were considering Martin’s involvement. On 1 September, Martin was approached informally by a British official. Later that same day, a formal request for his participation arrived at the Prime Minister’s Department from the office of the UK High Commissioner. This letter explained that Penney was going to investigate the suitability of a site near Woomera for mainland atomic tests, and sought the assistance of an Australian scientist with the relevant health safety studies. It suggested that ‘the best man would be Professor Martin of Melbourne University and Scientific Advisor to the Australian Department of Defence’. The letter continued:

The United Kingdom authorities would like to invite Professor Martin to join the Health Physics team at Monte Bello where he would be given full details of all weapon effects and the lay-out of the site. He would not be given any access to the weapon itself nor to the results of the measurements of the weapon’s functioning.

In recognition of Australian concerns it was noted that the arrangement ‘would give Australia additional participation in the Monte Bello trial’, and would enable Martin to offer ‘expert advice’ to the Australian government on the feasibility of the Woomera area for atomic tests.

Certainly these considerations promised important benefits from an Australian point of view. A.D. McKnight, the Assistant Secretary of the Prime Minister’s Department, commented in a memo to the Prime Minister:

participation by Martin in both the Woomera inspection and the Monte Bello tests, may put further information in his possession which will assist him in advising the Government later on.

However, the Australian authorities were concerned by the limits that the British had sought to impose upon Martin’s role. The Defence Committee considered that ‘such limited participation’ was not acceptable because of:

(i) the considerable Australian contribution in resources to the Monte Bello tests and their close proximity to Australia;
(ii) the important program of Defence Research and Development being undertaken by Australia in conjunction with the United Kingdom; and
(iii) the need for the Defence Scientific Advisor to acquire the fullest information to assist him in advising, from the Australian viewpoint, on the technical feasibility of the use of the Woomera region for future tests.

These Australian reservations caused the British some embarrassment, and they hastened to explain that they had expected Martin would be more closely interested in the weapon effects than actual details of the bomb’s performance. It was stressed that he would be given full details of the former, but added that:

The accommodation position, however, necessitates that all persons attending the test should be allotted definite tasks, and the health physics team was suggested as being related to the field in which Professor Martin is interested. This suggestion was not intended to limit in any way the undertaking that Professor Martin would be given full access to the information mentioned above.

The Australian authorities agreed that they were not interested in the weapon itself and so Martin’s involvement was finally confirmed.

Clearly, it was important to the Australians that Martin participate in the Monte Bello test. He was, after all, the highest-ranking scientist in the Defence Department, so his presence added some lustre to Australia’s role in the undertaking. Equally, his non-involvement would have damaged the image of ‘close co-operation’ that the Australian government was keen to convey.

Martin was also responsible for the formulation of defence research policy – an appointment made with due regard to the possible development of atomic energy. Similarly, he played an important part in Australia’s plans for atomic research. Obviously Martin’s association with the test could do nothing but enhance his ability to perform these roles. The British, on the other hand, obviously recognised that a well-informed government representative would be an invaluable means of liaison in future negotiations concerning the testing of atomic devices on the Australian mainland.

Alan Butement had a considerably lower profile than the other Australian representatives, due undoubtedly to the fact that he, unlike the academics Titterton and Martin, was a professional civil servant. Butement began work for the British War Office in 1928, remaining at the Woolwich out-station for 10 years and holding various ranks up to Senior Scientific Officer. He was then transferred to the Ministry of Supply’s Radar Research and Development Establishment, playing a significant part in the project’s success. In 1940, he was promoted to Principal Scientific Officer and Assistant Director of Scientific Research at the Ministry of Supply headquarters. Here he invented, among other devices, the radio proximity fuze which was used to devastating effect in the latter years of the war .

Butement arrived in Australia in 1947 as the Deputy Chief Scientific Officer of the party sent from Britain to establish the Woomera Rocket Range. He remained as Chief Superintendent of the Long Range Weapons Establishment until, in 1949, he was appointed Chief Scientist of the Australian Department of Supply, ‘in executive charge of Defence Scientific Research’.

Details of the proposed atomic test were made known to Butement in late 1950, as a consequence of his responsibilities for the administration of the Long Range Weapons Establishment. It had been hoped to disguise the activity in the Monte Bello Islands by encouraging a cover story that suggested that an extension of the Rocket Range was being surveyed. Butement, however, was reluctant to assist these plans unless he was informed of the real purpose of the undertakings. With the knowledge he had gained of the desert areas surrounding Woomera, Butement’s involvement was to prove particularly valuable when the British began to investigate the possibility of mainland atomic tests. Butement, on one of his regular visits to the United Kingdom, had been a party to Martin’s discussions on this matter with Penney and Cockroft. Later, he had accompanied Penney on his reconnaissance of a likely site in the Woomera prohibited area. A suitable setting for an atomic explosion was found there amidst the natural beauty of the South Australian desert. The site became known as Emu Field.

Butement’s attendance at the Monte Bello test was markedly uncontroversial. In September 1952, the UK High Commissioner informed the Prime Minister’s Department that:

In the course of his visit to Australia, Sir John Cockroft was asked by the Secretary for Supply whether it would be possible for Mr Butement to attend the weapon test. I have now been informed that the United Kingdom authorities for their part are quite agreeable to Mr Butement’s attendance.

The British reaction was hardly surprising. After all, Butement had been a high-ranking British civil servant until his recent secondment by the Australian government. Furthermore, it was clear that Butement and his department would playa vital role in any negotiations concerning mainland test sites. Thus it was important for Butement to gain experience of atomic weapons tests, from both British and Australian points of view. Equally, the Australians would have expected the participation of Butement, a senior Australian scientific official, to further consolidate the status of their effort.

It is notable that all three Australian scientific representatives at the Hurricane test had previously been involved in top secret projects relating to defence. One might assume, therefore, that each had an ideological commitment to this type of undertaking – an obvious but important point. Similarly, all three had connections with Australian government departments, making them official rather than independent scientific observers. However, a significant contrast emerges when one considers the arrangements concerning the attendance of each at Monte Bello. The invitations of Titterton and Butement were unproblematic, but Martin was the subject of protracted negotiations, torrid correspondence and apparent misunderstandings. The British sought to delineate the conditions of Martin’s attendance much more explicitly than for either of his fellow observers, and this seemed somehow at odds with Australian intentions. Indeed, it seems that the arrangements for Australian representation at the test resulted from a subtle counterplay of British and Australian interests.

The most influential factor in the determination of British atomic policy was the hope of re-establishing co-operation with the United States. Given the American distrust of Australian security, this hope was clearly threatened by the presence of Australians at the British atomic tests. Thus it was in Britain’s interests to limit severely the participation of Australian scientists. However, at the same time, Britain was dependent on Australian goodwill for the use of test sites. The exploitation of Australia’s vast spaces would hardly have been palatable to Australian authorities without at least a pretence of collaboration, and so the British were forced to concede some scientific representation. This representation also had the advantage of facilitating negotiations for further tests, particularly on the Australian mainland.

The Australians felt obligated by Commonwealth loyalties and defence strategy to allow the British atomic tests. Nevertheless, they envisaged particular benefits in terms of prestige and in the provision of atomic information. These hopes were obviously linked with a perceived need for Australian involvement in the tests, though tempered by a limited understanding of Britain’s relationships with the United States.

Thus Australian representation at the tests hinged on a mutually agreeable balance of these conflicting interests. Consequently, the suitability of the representatives depended as much on their background as their scientific training. Titterton and Butement were more readily acceptable than Martin because they had such close ties with this and other British and Allied defence projects. Martin’s credentials, on the other hand, were largely based on the development of Australian defence science, including atomic energy research. This made him a crucial observer to the Australians, and an uncomfortable necessity to the British, who sought to protect their own interests by imposing limits on his involvement. It is interesting to note that more than a year after the Monte Bello test, Martin had still not received the ‘full details of weapon effects’ that had been repeatedly promised.

An important criterion in the selection of Australian scientific representatives for the Hurricane test was their political suitability. Furthermore, in attending the test, these scientists were fulfilling a political role. Rather than contributing their scientific skills, they contributed their presence, their connections and their backgrounds to the reinforcement of a facade of scientific collaboration. This is more than adequately demonstrated by the non-involvement of the highly qualified but ideologically suspect Mark Oliphant.

Oliphant was probably Australia’s leading authority on atomic energy. During the war he had played an important part in the development of the atomic bomb, being one of the senior members of the British mission to the Manhattan Project. On completion of this work in America, Oliphant helped to establish the British atomic research centre at Harwell. In the years that followed, he continually advocated atomic development in his homeland, Australia. By the time of the first British atomic test, Oliphant had settled into his new position as director of the Research School of Physical Sciences at ANU. He was not invited to the test, nor was his invitation sought by the Australian authorities.

Oliphant’s absence from Monte Bello did not go unnoticed and Menzies was asked in Parliament for an explanation. His reply stated, in part:

The Monte Bello atomic test was a United Kingdom operation to which the Australian Government gave every assistance it could. ..Apart from service personnel, only scientists working directly on the test were present.

Menzies obviously had in mind a fairly liberal understanding of the phrase ‘working directly’. His answer made no attempt, however, to explain why Oliphant’s possible participation had been overlooked. Menzies did not want to admit that Oliphant was considered a security risk.

Whilst showing respect for the intentions of security measures, Oliphant often found the restrictions they placed on his scientific work frustrating and ridiculous. This attitude had brought him into conflict a number of times with the Manhattan Project’s security officers. The Americans took a dim view of this unco-operativeness. In 1951, he was refused a visa to attend a physics conference in Chicago, being smeared as a ‘fellow traveller’. Oliphant’s disturbing reputation reached Australia, where moves were made to keep him out of sensitive areas.

Thus Oliphant was not invited to the Monte Bello test because security problems made him politically unsuitable. The British authorities believed that his involvement in the test would raise ‘the possibility of unfortunate repercussions in Washington’, threatening the Anglo-American co-operation that they hoped to re-establish.

The lack of formal agreement on the extent and nature of Australian scientific participation in the test had certain advantages for Australia as well as for Britain. The Australian authorities were able to negotiate for considerable representation without having to insist on explicit guidelines that the British may have found difficult to accept. The Australians were conscious that, if they sought to drive too hard a bargain, the option of American test sites remained. Similarly, the vagaries of the situation enabled the Australians to avoid such issues as Oliphant’s non-involvement by misrepresenting the Australian presence at the tests. Shortly before the Totem trials, Menzies received a letter from the Acting Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sydney suggesting that their new physics professor, Harry Messel, should be invited to observe the test. Menzies’ reply was almost a word-for-word copy of his statement on Oliphant. Thus he avoided the sensitive issues of political suitability.

When the Maralinga atomic testing range was established in 1955, it was agreed between the British and Australian authorities that tests would only be carried out with the consent of the Australian government. To fulfil this requirement, the ‘Maralinga Safety Committee’, later renamed the’ Atomic Weapons Test Safety Committee’, was formed. Its members included Martin, Titterton and Butement, with Martin being appointed chairman. This committee’s responsibilities were:

(a) to examine information and other data supplied by the United Kingdom Government relating to atomic weapons tests. ..for the purpose of determining whether the safety measures proposed to be taken in relation to such tests were adequate…
(b) to advise the Prime Minister. ..of the conclusions arrived at by the Committee as a result of such examination and in particular as to whether and if so what additional, alternative or more extensive safety measures are considered necessary or desirable.

In short, the committee was to ensure that the tests were ‘safe’. However, by the time the committee was constituted, three atomic bombs had already been exploded in Australia. One wonders what measures had been taken to ensure their ‘safety’. At the first Monte Bello test, it was reported:

It was known that the blast would be staged this week if weather conditions allowed. Scientists apparently wanted to be sure the atomic cloud would not be wafted over the mainland. This was borne out by the movement of the cloud out to sea today.

However, such caution was apparently not sufficient, for at the second series of tests at Monte Bello in 1956, ‘special precautions’ were to be taken. Meteorologists had to predict when suitable weather conditions would occur and

satisfy the Australian Safety Committee and the scientific director that these conditions will persist for a long enough time to ensure that the ‘cloud’ formed by the explosion will drift out over the sea and diffuse harmlessly into the atmosphere.

In other words, the ‘special precautions’ consisted of transference of public responsibility from unknown British scientists to a group of readily identifiable Australian authorities. Given that it was assured from the start that there would be ‘no danger whatsoever from radioactivity to the health of people or animals in the Commonwealth’, it is difficult to believe that such a change was motivated by a need for increased scientific authority. Rather, it would seem to have been a response to burgeoning public fears about the tests and radioactivity in general.

Doubts about the safety of atomic weapons tests, and in particular of tests on mainland Australia, gained increasing coverage from 1953 onwards. These worries were linked with such incidents as the contamination of the Fukuryu Maru and an international recognition of the hazards of radioactivity. It was hardly an atmosphere conducive to the establishment of a permanent atomic testing ground. The government, however, was able, in the following years, to invoke the authority of the Safety Committee, ‘scientific men of high repute and of great patriotism, with a great sense of responsibility and a great scientific knowledge’. Before the first Maralinga test Beale dismissed any fears, stating:

The highest scientific authority in Australia assured us that when the decision had been taken, the firing will be completely safe.

The Safety Committee was thus used as a means of reassurance, to convince the public that any fears were groundless. Indeed, at a meeting in July 1956, the Committee itself ‘appreciated the need for indoctrination of the public’. As part of this ‘indoctrination’ Martin agreed to give a radio talk on the tests.

Clearly, then, the Safety Committee’s role was as much concerned with public relations as it was with scientific safeguards. It was expected both to protect Australian interests and to demonstrate the safety of the tests under its control. This duality of roles might be acceptable if the claims of absolute safety made were compatible with the actions and attitudes of the committee itself in seeking to secure such safety. However, as Australian representatives to these British tests, the members of the Safety Committee were subject to the sorts of political forces that determined the participation of Titterton, Martin and Butement in the earlier trials. How would these forces have affected the integrity of the Safety Committee? Would the British have supplied the committee with sufficient data to gain a complete understanding of the hazards associated with the tests? Butement and Titterton, although Australian representatives, both had close ties with the British project. Where would they have felt their first duties to lie? Would the commitment of these scientists to defence science and atomic energy have affected their assessment of the risks involved in the tests? The political tension that surrounded Australian involvement in the British atomic tests hardly seems compatible with the official role taken on by the members of the Safety Committee. Mark Oliphant understood this well:

I’d learned by the bitter path that to touch the pitch of secrecy was to be contaminated for a very long time, that governments and politicians wanted not men who believed in the integrity of natural knowledge but men who would tell them what they wanted to hear, and that the truth has no meaning for a Churchill, a Morrison, a Menzies or a Casey, if it is politically inconvenient.

In the post-war world, Britain desired to share in the might and glory of the atomic bomb. Unable to obtain American co-operation in these aspirations, Britain sought to develop an ‘independent deterrent’, though remaining ever-willing to forsake its ‘independence’ should American attitudes change. Australia surrendered its lands to the radioactive desolation of Britain’s Bomb through hopeful self-interest and imperial loyalties. However, British and Australian interests came into conflict over the issue of Australian participation in the tests. As a result, the representatives chosen had to meet certain political criteria. Even in hosting such an important and hazardous undertaking as atomic bomb tests, the Australian government was content with a meagre scientific representation, shaped by the workings of global politics. The issue of Australian participation was a ‘political inconvenience’ to the British, but nothing more. The tests were held; they were a success; Britain developed its very own bomb; and humankind increased its capacity for self-destruction – all with Australia’s diffident acquiescence.