Presented at Sharing is Caring 2017, 20 November 2017, in Aarhus, Denmark.
You can also watch the video.

In 1946, Britain decided that Australia would be the perfect place to test missiles. The Australian government, keen to play its part in the defence of the Empire, readily agreed. Ignoring, yet again, the presence of Australia’s Indigenous peoples, defence planners thought Australia was attractive to because it was ‘empty’, flat, and far from ‘prying eyes’.

The town of Woomera was built in the South Australian desert to house scientists, workers, and military personnel. It was a town where no housewife could go to the shop without her security pass; where curiosity was ’the badge of the outsider’.

But while Australia’s land seemed ideal for secret military operations, its people remained suspect. Britain’s plans were threatened by concerns about Communist infiltration of the Australian government. Under pressure from the UK and USA, Australia sought to lift its spy game through the establishment of a new agency to monitor such threats — the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, or ASIO.

Legislation defined ASIO’s functions in very broad terms, ‘to obtain, correlate and evaluate intelligence relevant to security’. From the 1950s to the 1970s, this was used to justify surveillance of a wide range of potential ‘subversives’ — not just known Communists, but writers, artists, academics, scientists, Indigenous activists, and more. Many thousands of files were created to document their beliefs, activities, connections, and personal lives. Recordkeeping was critical to the practice of state surveillance.

We don’t know how many files were kept on ordinary Australians because ASIO is exempt from many of the key provisions of the government’s archives legislation. Unlike other agencies, ASIO does not routinely transfer records or indexes to the National Archives of Australia. Researchers have to go on a fishing expedition, asking the National Archives to ask ASIO whether they might have a file relating to a particular person or organisation. If ASIO admits it has a relevant file in the open period (more than twenty years old), the file goes through an ‘access examination’ process to determine whether it contains information that should be withheld for reasons of national security, or individual privacy. If anything is left, it is finally opened to public access.

Despite these hurdles, more than 12,000 ASIO surveillance files have been made public, though most include redactions — black boxes obscure words too sensitive to be read.

The files have been used in biographies, family histories, and studies of Australia’s literary community. One recent book invited the subjects of ASIO surveillance to reflect on the contents of their own files — to see their lives through a different set of eyes; to explore the intrusions and innuendo that passed for ‘intelligence’.

I’m currently working with a set of 60,000 photographs held by the State Library of New South Wales. These photos were taken for The Tribune, a Communist Party newspaper published in Sydney, and document protest and political activity in Australia from the 1960s to the 1990s. One of the things I’m interested in is finding overlaps between the Tribune photographs and ASIO surveillance files. For example, in February 1972 there was a demonstration on Indigenous rights held outside Parliament House. Because both sets of records have been digitised and made public, we can compare perspectives — spies versus ‘subversives’.

This is a reminder that the impact of digitisation is not simply easier, more immediate, access. We can also see the same things differently. We can interrogate the meaning of access itself.

RecordSearch, the National Archives of Australia’s online database, provides access to about 64,000 series descriptions, 11 million item descriptions, and 1.8 million digitised pages. There’s currently no API, or downloadable datasets at item level, so I make my own.

For six or seven years now I’ve relied on my own little library of screen scrapers to get data out of RecordSearch. They’re slow and they break easily, but they do the job.

Late last year I embarked upon what was probably my most ambitious data harvest. I gathered information about every series listed on RecordSearch and calculated, for each, the quantity of records (in linear metres), the number of individual items described, and the number of items digitised. I then aggregated the series by the top-level functions of agencies associated with them. Basically I grouped them by subject — defence, security, education etc.

Why?

Because digitisation shapes our perceptions of reality. The more we have in digital form, the easier cultural heritage collections are to find and use, the more likely we are to assume that everything (or at least everything important) is online. Ease of access bears an ontological weight — if we can’t find it online, does it exist?

Now that might not be a problem if what was digitised somehow provided a representative sample of the whole. But we all know how such decisions are shaped by political priorities, funding opportunities, user demand, public events, and happy accidents. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, it’s just the environment within which we work. There are never enough resources. We have to do what we can, when we can.

The problem is, we rarely expose the impact of these decisions to the users of our digital collections. We rarely give them the chance to reflect on how our decisions shape their assumptions.

The National Archives of Australia documents the workings of our democracy. If offers one important perspective on who we are as a nation. If we look at the quantity of records associated with each top-level function, we see a fairly even distribution. Nothing stands out.

But what happens when we view the activities of government through the number of files digitised in each subject area?

The prominence of defence is really no surprise. Service records are heavily used by family historians, and in 2007 the Australian government funded the digitisation of all 375,000 World War I service records in what was branded as ‘A Gift to the Nation’.

The National Archives is not alone. I often show people this graph of the number of digitised newspaper articles in Trove, pointing out the fairly dramatic peak around 1914. Did something happen in 1914? Were there more articles published, more newspapers? No, there’s just more money. In the lead up to the centenary of WWI, funding was directed towards the digitisation of newspapers from the wartime period.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with this. It’s just that these biases are not obvious to someone typing queries into a search box. In the context of Australian history, these decisions around digitisation help to reinforce the long-held belief that Australian national identity was somehow forged on the battlefields of WWI. It helps to put war at the centre of our history, at the centre of who we are.

But of course while digitisation can shape our assumptions, it also gives us new opportunities to critique them. I could only analyse the holdings of the National Archives because their collection data is online. We don’t have to take just what the search box delivers — we can ask our own questions. But this is only possible if people have the skills, the tools, and the confidence to poke around in the data. This too is access. Institutions should invite the public not to swoon at their digital delights, but to hack away at difficult questions — not to see collections, but to see them in unexpected and challenging ways.

I mentioned that ASIO files go through an process known as ‘access examination’ before they’re released to the public. This is the case for all records more than twenty years old, not just the super secret ones. The vast majority of files are simply opened without restriction. Some, including most of the ASIO files, are opened ‘with exceptions’ — pages can be withheld, and text redacted. A few are withheld from the public completely. They have entries in RecordSearch, but you can’t see them — their access status is officially ‘closed’.

But because the metadata about access decisions is available online, we can start to build a picture of what we’re not allowed to see.

At the start of 2016, I harvested the details of all files in the National Archives of Australia with the access status of ‘closed’. I’ve aggregated and sliced the data in a number of different ways, so you can explore the age of the files, what series they came from, and when decisions were made about their access status. At any point you can drill down to a list of the files you cannot see — making it perhaps the most frustrating search interface ever devised.

You can also examine the reasons why files have been withheld. Many of these exceptions are defined by the legislation that established the National Archives. Clause 33(1)(a), for example, relates to national security, 33(1)(g) is concerned with individual privacy. But the metadata reveals that files are withheld for a number of other reasons, such as ‘Pre Access Recorder’ and ‘Withheld Pending Advice’. There’s also, you might note, a category entitled ‘MAKE YOUR SELECTION’ — which reveals something about the limits of the data entry interface.

By poking around you in the data you can make some guesses as to how these additional categories are used. ‘Pre Access Recorder’ is used as a catch-all for records that were withheld from public access before the archives legislation was passed. ‘Withheld Pending Advice’ is used to label files that have been sent off to other government agencies for their assessment — they’re not yet finally closed, but as this process can take years, they’re sort of closed. Indeed, my interface shows that 1,467 files have been waiting more than three years for advice.

The point of this is not to embarrass the National Archives, nor the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade which holds the most files in limbo. The point is to examine the ways in which access itself is constructed. Legislation defines an ideal, but the reality is more messy and human. By tracking patterns in the way access decisions are made we can explore the historical processes at work. Access is not allowed, it is made.

Remember those 12,000 ASIO files publicly available through the National Archives? You might not be surprised to know that I’ve harvested them all — both the metadata and the 300,000 digitised pages. There’s about 70gb of images.

Using these files we can dig a little deeper into the nature of access. I wrote a computer vision script to find redactions. It took a lot of trial and error, and I’m about to start work on a smarter version that incorporates machine learning, but it did the job. From one series of ASIO files, about 230,000 pages, I extracted 239,000 redactions — lots and lots of little black boxes. You’ll be pleased to know that not only can you download the complete set of redactions from the research repository Figshare, you can browse them. All of them! Hours of fun for all the family!

The interesting thing about this interface is that if you click on a redaction you can view the page that it was extracted from. So it’s sort of an inside out discovery interface. Instead of the redactions being a brick wall or a dead end, they’re a starting point. A practice intended to remove information, to limit access, becomes a gateway for exploration. Indeed, the redactions themselves provide an identifiable data point — something that can be analysed to turn the gaze of government surveillance upon itself.

But something else was hiding in those ASIO files. As I was reviewing the collection of redactions for false positives I discovered that someone tasked with the removal of information, decided to add a little creative flair.

I discovered #redactionart.

I assure you that these creations really are sitting inside ASIO files held by the National Archives. But since I’ve discovered them, they’ve developed a life of their own. Not only can you browse through them online, you can wear them.

I gave away about 80 of these badges at an exhibition earlier this year. To create the badges, I simply traced around the original images and saved the results as SVG files. These files themselves are shared through GitHub for anyone wanting to create their own #redactionart.

This amazing #redactionart dress was made by Bonnie Wildie, a librarian in NSW. My SVG files have also been turned into a set of 3D printable cookie cutters, as well as a range of t-shirts and stickers on RedBubble.

This escape from the archives is not only creative and fun, it’s important.

It’s important because it emphasises that the practices through which government information is controlled and withheld are profoundly human. People make decisions and they leave their marks. There is nothing mysterious or otherworldly in the secret — it is an exercise of power.

Archives are not just made of documents — there are people inside.

‘Surveillance’ is not included in the National Archives’ official thesaurus of government functions, yet the movements and activities of individuals are recorded in many thousands of files across an assortment of agencies.

A simple query of my harvested data reveals that the phrase ‘alien registration’ appears in the titles of only 29 series. But these series contain more than half a million files. 4.7% of digitised files in the National Archives document the movements of so-called ‘aliens’. While these registration systems were created during wartime, they lingered beyond. And they were not the only means of keeping track of potential threats. Just as at Woomera, boundaries were drawn, and outsiders marked for attention.

When I was last in this part of the world, I talked a bit about some work that Kate Bagnall and I had done with records of the White Australia Policy held by the National Archives.

A quick recap — when the Australian colonies federated in 1901, it was generally assumed that the new nation’s future could only be assured through strict racial homogeneity. A ’white’ Australia was a strong Australia. Legislation was quickly passed to restrict immigration and set the foundations for what became known as the White Australia Policy.

However, in 1901 there were around 40,000 people living in Australia whose background was neither European nor Indigenous — they were Chinese, Japanese, Syrian, Indian, and Malay. Some had been born in Australia, or had lived there for many years — raising families, building businesses; just living their lives.

If any of these people wanted to travel overseas they had to carry special documents, or they might not be allowed to return home. Customs officials at Australian ports would ask anyone who seemed not to be ‘white’ for identification. The badge of the outsider was the colour of their skin.

Many thousands of these documents, the remnants of a racist bureaucratic system, are preserved in the National Archives.

Back in 2011, I downloaded about 12,000 of these documents from RecordSearch and ran them through a facial detection script to create a seemingly endless scrolling wall of faces. We called it ‘The Real Face of White Australia’. It’s another inside-out interface — instead of showing the files, you see the people inside.

That was then, this is now! In the last few months, I’ve been working with a group of my digital heritage students to develop a website for the collaborative transcription of these same records. We want to put names to the faces. We want to chart their journeys. We want to document their lives.

Our project has no funding, and was only possible because Zooniverse and the New York Public Library created and shared Scribe, a framework for the transcription of structured documents — an easy way to get usable data out of forms, ledgers, and certificates.

The site was launched at a ‘transcribe-a-thon’ held at the Museum of Australian Democracy in Canberra, which just happens to be located in Australia’s first parliament house. The building didn’t exist when the Immigration Restriction Act was passed in 1901, but it was where the White Australia Policy was elaborated and maintained.

Transcription continues. There’s still much work to do on the documents, but data is already flowing. I’m making regular dumps available for download through a GitHub repository.

But it was never just about the data. Many more people now know that these records, this history, exists. Through the process of transcription you are confronted by the disturbing reality of the records — you’re surprised, puzzled, shocked, and often moved. Creating a space for these sorts of experiences is important in itself.

The Museum of Australian Democracy not only gave us their building for a weekend, they let us play with their data projectors. In some ways, I would have been happy if all we had achieved was this — to put these faces in this space.

Once again the gaze of surveillance is reversed. In the home of Australian democracy, people who lives were monitored under a racist system of exclusion and control were looking at us, asking questions of us.

Amongst those Tribune photos at the State Library of NSW, I recently found this. Believe it or not, I’m the spy on the right. This compelling piece of street theatre was performed at the gates of Pine Gap, a US electronic surveillance facility right in the centre of Australia. Pine Gap’s lease was due for renewal in 1987, so hundreds of protestors converged on the site, hoping that the Australian government might withdraw it’s support. Needless to say, it didn’t. Pine Gap remains, and in recent times has been implicated in US drone strikes

I found another photo of myself amongst the Tribune archives. A group of us climbed over the outer perimeter fence in the middle of the night and took up positions on a rocky outcrop that overlooked the main gate. At a predetermined time, we leapt out of our hiding places and lit smoke flares. I was arrested soon after, charged with trespass, and fined $100.

Another group of Pine Gap protestors are currently on trial in Australia. They made it through the protective fences and dared to play music and pray. For this they have been charged under the Defence (Special Undertakings) Act which carries a maximum sentence of seven years in prison. This Act was passed in 1952 when Britain decided to expand its weapons testing program in Australia to include atomic bombs. It expanded upon earlier legislation that had been intended to protect Woomera from Communist interference. This is one of the very few times anyone has been charged under the Act, despite there being hundreds of arrests like mine in the past.

As security services gain new powers, and electronic surveillance expands, it’s hard not to see the Pine Gap proceedings as an attempt to discourage criticism of the government’s tough on terrorism stance.

At a recent symposium on collaboration between researchers and collecting institutions, Seb Chan described some of the advances that had taken place in opening up collections, but then asked ‘So what?’.

I suppose that’s the question we’re hear to discuss. Why do we put all this effort into digitising collections, building interfaces, and sharing data? Easier access is great, beautiful interfaces are cool, but… so what? For me, as a historian, hacker, and sometime heritage professional, the answer is straightforward — it’s all about bringing the past into conversation with the present. It’s about mobilising our collections as critical resources in debates about who we are, what matters, and why we should care.

Those inky, black handprints on the White Australia records moved one of my students to reflect on her experience as a recent immigrant from Canada, required by the Australian government to supply a set of her fingerprints. She wrote a beautiful talk and presented it during the transcribe-a-thon in the original House of Representatives chamber at Old Parliament House. Another student noted in her final essay that the documents made non-white residents seem like criminals, pointing to parallels with the current treatment of refugees. On the flip-side, our efforts attracted the attention of a few racist trolls, one of whom referred to the White Australia Policy as ‘the good old days’.

Once again ’outsiders’ are being targeted as threats to our security. Boundaries are being reinforced, and efforts being made to define who belongs. We know this. We’ve seen this before. Europeana’s new project on the history of migration is an important initiative — we need to tell our stories, share our resources, grapple with our difficult and painful pasts. I don’t think this is a time to reassert the authority of our cultural institutions as reservoirs of truth. We are implicated in all of this. Our collections are built upon systems of surveillance, on attempts to put humans into categories. They are products of power and privilege. We are not the guardians of enlightenment, we are the keepers of horrors.

Just like #redactionart, the value of our collections lies in their complexity and contradictions — in their very humanity and all the confusion that entails. Digital collections lend themselves to an exploration of complexity. We can shift scales and perspectives, we can manipulate contexts, we can set collections loose in public spaces, we can turn them inside out. We can see differently, but perhaps more importantly, we can feel differently.

When you think about it, ‘impact’ is a pretty violent sort of word. There are perhaps a few people around the world we’d like to ‘wallop’ with our digital collections. But I suspect most of the time we’re after something more subtle — to expand possibilities, to undermine assumed certainties, maybe even to expose a glitch in the Matrix.

Perhaps we can offer a glimpse of an alternative reality, where we recognise the outsider as us.

Maybe in the end we will be able to see the outsider as us. Hear hear! #ShareCare17 pic.twitter.com/TWWYqyvCDg

— Johanna Berg (@johannaberg) November 20, 2017

The image above is from Geoff Hinchcliffe’s awesome visualisation of more than 12,000 #fundTrove tweets.

This year I sadly left the wonderful team at Trove and took up a full-time academic post at the University of Canberra. But it was Trove that dominated the early part of the year, as the impact of continual funding cuts on the National Library of Australia became clear. Users of Trove shared their feelings on Twitter and Facebook, organisations posted statements of support, and numerous articles appeared in the media. In the lead up to the federal election, both the Greens and ALP made commitments to support Trove and our national cultural institutions.

In the last few days, we’ve learnt that the Government will provide $16.4 million over four years to the NLA ‘for digitisation of material and upgrade of critical infrastructure for its Trove digital information resource and to upgrade other critical infrastructure’. While we wait to hear exactly what this means for the future of Trove, it’s important to remember that it comes after many cuts and job losses across the cultural sector. The lesson of #fundTrove is that we cannot take the future of our collecting organisations for granted. We need to show why they matter and fight for the resources they need.

Access is important — both its politics and its practicalities. This year I’ve tried to be a bit more rigorous in the way I share information and document my projects. I created a Digital Heritage Handbook where I publish workshops, activities, and other bits and pieces. Much of it is in draft form, but I decided it was better just to push everything out in the hope that it might be useful. Similarly, I created an Open Research Notebook to share work in progress. The Handbook also includes details of the two undergraduate units I taught in second semester — Working with collections, and Exploring digital heritage. I think they went pretty well, but I’ve got a few improvements planned for 2017.

This year I accidentally built my own version of Historic Hansard, created an interface to National Archives files we’re not allowed to see, and mined ASIO surveillance files for redactions. As well as these major projects, there were lots of little hacks and harvests aimed at exploring the idea of ‘access’. You can follow my main research obsessions in my notebook:

• Closed Access
• Historic Hansard
• Immigration, Recordkeeping, and Surveillance
• LODBooks

Talking and making details follow…

2016 — the making:

• Locating Trove newspapers
  Updated code, data, and interface to geolocate and display Trove newspaper titles. Now with maps!
• Headline Roulette
  Much needed update for my old game. Now on it’s own domain and with better handling of Trove API errors.
• DFAT Documents
  Demonstration code to harvest the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s collection of historical documents and extract some metadata. The harvested documents are available in Markdown format and can be explored through a simple website.
• People of Australia
  @people_aus is a Twitter bot sharing random names drawn from late 19th and early 20th century naturalisation records held by the National Archives of Australia. Many names. Many cultures. These are the people of Australia.
• RecordSearch Series Harvests
  Code to harvest the metadata and digitised images of all items in a series from the National Archives of Australia. Data from an assortment of harvested series are available as CSV files.
• SRNSW indexes
  Code for harvesting indexes from the State Records of NSW website. Data from 59 harvested indexes is available as CSV files.
• Facial detection demo
  Code and website to demonstrate the principles of facial detection using OpenCV.
• Show Redactions userscript
  Code for inserting details of redacted files into RecordSearch results.
• ASIO Experiments
  Code used for the extraction of redactions and other experiments with digitised ASIO files.
• Redactions dataset
  Redactions extracted from ASIO surveillance records in National Archives of Australia Series A6119, <https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4101765.v1>
• Non redactions dataset
  False positives (non-redactions) extracted from ASIO surveillance records in National Archives of Australia Series A6119, <https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4104651.v1<
• Redacted
  Web interface for exploring redactions extracted from digitised ASIO files. Includes a collection of redaction art.
• Open with Exception browser
  Code and website providing an experimental browser for digitised ASIO files from the National Archives of Australia.
• Invisible Australians browser
  Updated code and website providing an experimental browser for digitised records from the National Archives of Australia relating to the administration of the White Australia Policy. Now includes a landscape view for exploring records by their orientation.
• Closed Access harvester
  Updated code for harvesting and analysing records from the National Archives of Australia with the access status of ‘closed’.
• Closed Access dataset
  Complete dataset of records held by the National Archives of Australia that had the access status of ‘closed’ (withheld from public access) on 1 January 2016.
• Closed Access website
  Public web interface for the exploration, analysis, and visualisation of ‘closed’ records in the National Archives of Australia.
• RecordSearch Functions
  Code and documentation for analysing the performance of functions by Commonwealth government agencies over time, using data from the National Archives of Australia.
• Commonwealth Hansard XML repository
  A repository of the (almost) complete proceedings of the Commonwealth House of Representatives and Senate from 1901–1980. This comprises several gigabytes of XML-formatted files harvested from the ParlInfo database.
• Historic Hansard
  A public website that presents the proceedings of the Commonwealth House of Representatives and Senate from 1901–1980 in a form that is optimised for browsing and reading. It includes additional features such as indexes to people and legislation, and the integration of tools for text analysis and annotation. Documentation is also provided.
• Trove Harvester
  Code and documentation to support the creation of large datasets for research and analysis from Trove’s digitised newspapers.
• Gadfly front pages
  Code and documentation to demonstrate how to harvest page images from Trove’s digitised newspapers.
• Trove Proxy
  Code and active proxy service that generates links to download PDFs from Trove’s digitised newspapers, and provides a https wrapper around the Trove API.
• DIY Headline Roulette
  Code and documentation that makes it easy for anyone to create their own simple game using Trove’s digitised newspapers.
• Radio National program data
  Updated dataset of programs broadcast on Radio National from 2000–2016 harvested from Trove.
• PMs Transcripts repository
  Repository of more than 20,000 XML transcripts of speeches by Australian Prime Ministers harvested from the PMs Transcripts site.
• UMA Ellis Photos
  Repository of data and images from a collection of political photos by John Ellis held by the University of Melbourne Archives. Harvested using the Trove API.

2016 — the talking

• 8 November 2016 – Digital research seminar and workshop at Griffith University.
• 10 November 2016 – Presentation as part of the ‘Access and innovation’ panel at Digital Directions 2016, National Film and Sound Archive, ‘Caring about access’, <https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4229402.v1>.
  Featured on dh+lib (digital humanities and libraries).
• 19 October 2016 – Keynote presentation at Forging Links, Australian Society of Archivists conference, Parramatta, ‘Turning the inside out’, <https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4055013.v2>.
• 8 September 2016 – Invited presentation to Data and libraries: harnessing the possibilities, ALIA URLs seminar, Canberra, ‘Slow data? Small data? Exploring human-sized alternatives in the big data deluge’.
• 26 August 2016 – Keynote presentation at Migrant (R)e-Collections, Lorenz Centre, Leiden, ‘A life reduced to data’.
  Featured as an ‘Editors’ choice’ by Digital Humanities Now.
• 19 August 2016 – Keynote presentation at Working History, Professional Historians’ Association conference, Melbourne, ‘Telling stories with data’.
• 29–31 July 2016 – GovHack Heritage Node, University of Canberra
• 18 July 2016 – Keynote presentation at internal staff conference, State Library of Victoria.
• 15 July 2016 – Invited presentation at DigitalGLAM Symposium, University of Melbourne, ‘Hacking heritage: power and participation in digital cultural collections’.
  Featured on dh+lib (digital humanities and libraries).
• 5 July 2016 – Interview on ABC 936 (Hobart) Evenings about Trove.
• 24 June 2016 – Interview on ABCRN afternoons, ‘The fight to save Trove’
• 22 June 2016 – Paper at DHA2016 Conference in Hobart, ‘Closed Access’
• 3 June 2016 – Invited contributor to the REMIX Sydney panel ‘Blurring the digital and the physical: How can we add new layers to history?’.
• 2 June 2016 – Invited presentation at the Digital Research Methodologies Forum, La Trobe University, ‘The revolution will not be digital’
• 31 May 2016 – Invited presentation on digital research methods to the Deakin Contemporary Histories Research Group.
• 10 May 2016 – Presented two workshops on ‘Digital Tools and Techniques for the Adventurous Historian’, organised by the History Council of South Australia for the SA History Festival 2016, Adelaide.
• 7 March 2016 – Interview on ABCRN Late Night Live, ‘Treasure Trove under threat’
• 6 March 2016 – Contributor to panel discussing the government’s Innovation Agenda, Electronic Visualisation and the Arts Australasia, University of Canberra.
• 1 March 2016 – Interview with ABC 666 (Canberra) Drive about #fundTrove.
• 1 March 2016 – Interview with RTRFM (Perth) on #fundTrove.
• 19 February 2016 – Invited presentation to symposium on Commonwealth Department of Immigration – Then and Now, La Trobe University, ‘Digital perspectives on the archives of immigration’
• 12 February 2016 – Keynote presentation to ANZREG 2016 (Ex Libris Australia and New Zealand Regional User’s Group), Melbourne, ‘Linked Open Data’.
• 10 February 2016 – Invited contributor to the Gale Cengage sponsored Digital Humanities Panel at VALA2016, Melbourne.

Contribution to a panel discussion on ‘Access and Innovation’ at Digital Directions 2016, Canberra, 10 November 2016.
View the slides.

Please cite as: Tim Sherratt, ‘Caring about access’, presented at the Digital Directions, 2016. <https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4229402.v1>

You might have seen that the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet has opened discussion on an Open Government National Action Plan. Last week I was watching the Twitter stream from a briefing event in Melbourne, when I saw this tweet from Asher Wolf quoting the PM&C spokesperson:

. @pmc_gov_au: we don’t want ppl to search for flaws or try to crack gvt datasets. #OGPAU

Now I’m not sure of the context of this statement, but it is a reminder that we can’t take the meaning of words like ‘open’ or ‘access’ for granted.

They are what we make of them.

I’m a historian and hacker. I don’t steal credit card details, I use digital tools to open cultural heritage collections – to see them differently, to feel differently.

Earlier this year I wrote a script to harvest many gigabytes of parliamentary proceedings – Hansard – from the ParlInfo database maintained by the Department of Parliamentary Services. I shared the files, covering the period from 1901 to 1980, through my GitHub repository. My plan was simply to make this rich source of political history easily available to anyone who wanted to explore new forms of digital analysis.

In the end I created my own version of Historic Hansard, one that privileges the experience of reading rather than searching. I also added a few nifty features such as indexes of legislation and people, and integration with text analysis and annotation tools.

But in the process of harvesting the data I noticed that around 100 sitting days were missing from ParlInfo. The files were empty – unable to be searched. Given an average of about 50 sitting days a year, that’s about two years worth that were simply invisible.

Thanks to the Parliamentary Library these problems have now been fixed. But this experience highlighted two issues. First, search interfaces lie. We have to develop our critical capacities to be more aware of what we are not being shown and why. And second, this problem only became visible because I was hacking their database, because I went beyond what was offered by their website, because I wanted more. Unlike the PM&C spokesperson I think one of strongest reasons for opening data is to encourage people to find its flaws. This is particularly the case for cultural heritage data where the processes of selection, representation, normalisation, control, and preservation all have an impact of the types of stories we can tell about ourselves.

Access is not something that cultural institutions bestow on a grateful public. It’s a struggle for understanding and meaning. Expect to be criticised, expect problems to be found, expect your prejudices to be exposed. That’s the point.

If cultural institutions want to celebrate their website hits, celebrity visits, or their latest glossy magazines – well that’s just fabulous. But I’d like them to celebrate every flaw that’s found in their data, every gap identified in their collection – that’s engagement, that’s access. We need to get beyond defensive posturing and embrace the risky, exciting possibilities that come from critical engagement with collection data – recognising hacking as a way of knowing.

In this new post-truth world it’s going to be more important than ever to challenge what is given, what is ‘natural’, what is ‘inevitable’. Our cultural heritage will be a crucially important resource to be mobilised in defence of complexity, nuance, and doubt – the rich and glorious reality of simply being human.

A few years ago Merete Sanderhoff, from the National Gallery of Denmark, compiled a collection of essays on opening cultural heritage collections for reuse online. It was called Sharing is Caring. I think it’s worth reflecting on the dual meanings of ‘caring’ – both looking after, and giving a shit. Sharing helps us foster communities and preserve collections. But it also matters, it has an impact, it can change the world.

Bethany Nowviskie, the Director of the Digital Library Federation, recently gave a talk on ‘speculative collections’ asking how we shift the temporal orientation of our libraries and archives away from a closed and linear past towards an exploration of what might be.

Seeing differently. Feeling differently.

This is a visualisation created by Geoff Hinchcliffe showing more than 12,000 tweets since February this year using the hashtag #fundTrove. Trove has radically changed our access to the past. It’s not perfect, it’s not everything, but it changes lives. And yet the government seems to think it can be left to wither, and nobody will really care. I care. Do you? Then what do we do about it?

I also care deeply about the collections of the National Archives – a love expressed through many painful hours spent hacking RecordSearch, their online database. Last year I harvested details of more than 12,000 publicly available ASIO files – you can grab the results from my GitHub site – and downloaded about 300,000 page images. These are mostly surveillance files, documenting the lives of writers, academics, unionists, Indigenous activists and others – identified as potential threats to the nation.

This year I wrote a script to search those images for redactions – sections of text blacked out for security reasons. If you’d like to explore the 239,000 redactions I’ve extracted, you can – marvel at their blackness, their very lack of information. But here the redactions are not dead ends, they’re starting points, ways of exploring the workings of ASIO. As the power and reach of state surveillance continues to expand, we can find creative ways to reverse the panoptic gaze.

We don’t have to accept what we’re given. We can take collections and turn them inside out.

The National Archives also preserves remnants of Australia’s racist past. There are many thousands of records documenting the workings of the White Australia Policy. They include special certificates, with portrait photos and handprints, which were needed if you were deemed non-white, travelled overseas, and simply wanted to come home.

About five years ago I harvested about 12,000 images of these certificates from RecordSearch and ran them through a facial detection script. In a little over a weekend I’d created the Real Face of White Australia – a seemingly endless scrolling wall of more than 7,000 faces. It’s compelling. It’s uncomfortable. But this is who we are.

As I saw the One Nation senators cracking open the champagne outside Parliament House yesterday, I thought again of how important its is the tell these stories, to share these collections. To give a shit.

Innovation can be measured in more than shiny apps, or cool new visualisations. By struggling with access to our past we can imagine new futures.

Keynote presented at Forging Links, the Annual Conference of the Australian Society of Archivists, Parramatta, 19 October 2016.

Please cite as: Tim Sherratt, ‘Turning the inside out’, presented at the Australian Society of Archivists Annual Conference, Parramatta, 2016, <https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.4055013.v1>.

This is RecordSearch, but not as you know it.

This is my hacked version of RecordSearch, the online collection database of the National Archives of Australia. Unlike the regular version it displays the number of pages in each file. But more interestingly, if you search in Series ST84/1 you see more than metadata – you see the people inside.

As Barbara Reed noted in her article ‘Reinventing access’, ‘records are imbued with people’. Series ST84/1 goes by the fairly benign title, ‘Certificates of Domicile and Certificates of Exemption from Dictation Test, chronological series’. But of course the Dictation Test was the administrative backbone of a racist system designed to exclude people who did not fit the widely-accepted vision of ‘White Australia’. ST84/1 is full of people just trying to live their lives under the weight of the White Australia Policy.

The certificates in ST84/1 allowed people, born or resident in Australia, to return home after travelling overseas. If your ‘whiteness’ was suspect and you had no certificate, you would be subjected to the Dictation Test, and you would fail. The certificates usually include photographs and handprints – they are compelling and confronting documents. But you have to dig through layers of metadata in RecordSearch to see that. Or do you?

About five years ago, Kate Bagnall, a historian of Chinese Australia, and I were thinking about ways of drawing attention to these records. In a little over a weekend, I harvested about 12,000 page images from ST84/1 and ran them through a facial detection script. The result was ‘The Real Face of White Australia’.

You may have seen it before. It’s had a remarkable life, travelling around the world as an example of how we can use digital tools to see records differently. But of course the power is in the faces themselves – in the connections we make through time. We cannot escape their discomfiting gaze.

You may think that the certificates in ST84/1 are merely a form of identity document. But remember than in the early years of the 20th century, passports were still evolving, and the use of photographs and fingerprints for identification were generally confined to prisoners and criminals.

The sociologist Richard Jenkins talks about identity not as an essence, a noun, but as ‘something that we do, a process of identification’.1 But self-identification is constrained by broader systems of categorisation, or ‘social sorting’, that decide who belongs, who is a threat, who needs to be watched.

The records in ST84/1 were embedded within a system of surveillance that extended outwards from Australia’s ports to the offices of shipping companies around the world, and inwards to anyone who seemed out of place in White Australia. Technologies of identification and surveillance do not simply enforce boundaries, they create them. Their existence demonstrates why they are needed. These records did not document identity, they defined it according to a set of racial categories.

Modern parallels are not hard to find. Last year in a bungled operation that became known as ‘#borderfarce’, immigration officials planned to prowl the streets of Melbourne on the hunt for illegal immigrants. The focus of border surveillance once again turned inwards, to those who seemed out of place. Watching in horror as events unfolded on social media, I helpfully pointed people in Melbourne to a convenient source of identity documents.

In Melbourne this weekend? Get your Border Force identity papers here: http://t.co/H3dlXHZy6q #borderfarce #wap pic.twitter.com/j2TrkKEPkR

— Tim Sherratt (@wragge) August 28, 2015

The link I tweeted was not to RecordSearch, but to an experimental interface where Kate and I are continuing to think about ways of exposing the bureaucratic remnants of White Australia.

So far I’ve harvested metadata from more than 20,000 files and downloaded around 150,000 page images. Amongst other things, I’m working on an updated wall of faces.

Most recently I created a way of sorting and viewing pages by their orientation – by the ratio of height to width. Why? Kate wanted an easy way of finding birth certificates which, in this period, tended to be short and wide. It was a simple little hack, but it revealed the records in a very different way.

There’s a big bunch of birth certificates, but there’s also envelopes, photographs, and an assortment of slips and notes. It makes you think about how we see the written world through the frame of ‘portrait’ orientation. It’s perhaps also worth noting that RecordSearch displays thumbnails as cropped squares – shape is subsumed to the regularity of the grid.

The records in our landscape view are no more accessible than they were before, but they can be accessed differently. In his contribution to the ASA’s 30th anniversary symposium, Eric Ketelaar described the relationship between archival access and human rights – highlighting the importance of access not only to democratic accountability, but also to our rights as ‘victims’ of official surveillance: ‘As human beings, subjected to the panoptic sort of governments and private enterprise, we have the right to know’.2 Ketelaar concludes by stating that ‘access is not the actual use of archives, access enables use’. I’d like to extend this a bit. What my own work reveals is the complex relationship between access and use. Not only does access enable use, use changes what we mean by ‘access’.

My bio nowadays describes me as a ‘historian and hacker’. ‘Historian’ describes my orientation to the world – I see the past in the present. ‘Hacker’ refers to the tools I use to make connections through time. Hacking is creative and positive, despite what the mainstream media might say – it’s about finding solutions, exploring alternatives, and pushing the limits of what’s possible.

My RecordSearch hack is just a little piece of Javascript code that you can install in your browser – it changes the pages as they load.

Userscripts, as they’re called, allow anyone to alter the way webpages look and behave within their own browser. They give users greater control over their online experience, but they also open opportunities for experimentation. A lot of my own research is guided by questions like: What would happen if I…? What would it look like? What would change? What would I feel? Userscripts are one way of playing with the complexities of access.

Surveillance too can be hacked. If you’re concerned about technologies such as facial detection you’ll be pleased to know that thanks to the work of artist Adam Harvey, not only can you confuse detection algorithms, you can make a dramatic fashion statement.

Gary Marx, a major figure in the field of surveillance studies, has catalogued the ways in which individuals can resist the growing encroachments of surveillance. Amongst possible tactics he identifies ‘discovery’ – the attempt to undercover the scope of surveillance.3 Access to records can empower such acts of everyday resistance, but in other ways surveillance and access are more alike than opposed. Both start from a place of concealment. Access cannot be given unless it is first restricted. Both depend on asymmetries of power. Decisions about what we can know are ultimately made by others. Access is as much a process of control, as it is an act of release.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. I think we can all agree there should be limits to access, particularly relating to individual privacy and cultural sensitivity. But just as ‘identity’ is defined through acts of ‘identification’, so access is elaborated through instances of deployment and use. Access is not a state of being, it’s a process to be negotiated. And so the question is, what can we know about what we can know?

On 1 January this year I harvested the metadata of all the files in RecordSearch with the access status of ‘closed’.

These are records that the access examination process has determined should be withheld from public scrutiny. While the files themselves can’t be seen, RecordSearch does tell us a fair bit about them, including when the decision was made and the reasons behind it. Unfortunately you can’t search or filter on this data, so it’s difficult to look for patterns within RecordSearch itself.

I’ve taken the data and loaded into a new site where you can examine it from a number of different angles. You can explore the reasons why files were closed, the series they came from, the age of their contents, and the dates when decisions were made. It’s more of a workbench than a discovery interface, and it’s likely to change as I ask different questions of the data.

Of course, the outlines of the examination process, including the grounds for exemption, are defined by the Archives Act. So what more is there to know?

Section 33 of the Archives Act does indeed spell out 17 reasons why records can be withheld from public access. But the data from RecordSearch includes an additional 11 categories. Some, like ‘Parliament Class A’, relate to other definitions under the Act. Others, like ‘MAKE YOUR SELECTION’, tell us something about the RecordSearch interface. But two of the most heavily cited reasons – ‘Pre-access recorder’ and ‘Withheld pending advice’ are not defined under the Act or anywhere that I could find on the Archives’ website.

Being an archivally-educated audience you can probably guess what these labels refer to, but if you need a little help you can look at when the access decisions in these categories were made.

The majority of decisions on ‘pre access recorder’ files were made before the introduction of the Archives Act in 1983. I checked this with the Archives and they confirmed that these records were examined before the existence of the Act. They explained that ‘pre access recorder’ was used when the original exemptions couldn’t be mapped to those later defined under Section 33.

Conversely, most decisions on ‘Withheld pending advice’ files were recorded in the last five or six years. If you look at the series that contain the most files citing this reason you can see that almost half come from A1838 – DFAT’s main correspondence series. As I’m sure you’ve realised, these are files that have been referred back to agencies for advice. And DFAT has been particularly slow in responding. They’re listed as ‘Closed’ on RecordSearch even though their access status has not been finalised. They’re not, however, included in the count of ‘closed’ files that the Archives reports in its annual summary of access outcomes.

This is probably fair enough, but if you search the closed files you can see that 1,467 of them files have been waiting for more than three years for a final decision. They might not be officially closed, but for a PhD student wanting to see them they are effectively closed.

My point here is not to be critical of the National Archives, or even of DFAT. What I’m interested in is the inevitable gap between legislation and practice. Access examination is subject to a range of influences and constraints, resourcing amongst them, and needs to be understood not as the application of a set of rules, but as a process that is historically contingent. A human process.

Earlier this year I harvested several gigabytes of parliamentary proceedings from the Australian Parliament’s ParlInfo database and created my own version of Historic Hansard.

As you do.

In the process of harvesting the files I discovered that data was missing for about 100 sitting days – most of them from the Senate between 1912 and 1919.

There’s no conspiracy at work here, it’s just some sort of processing error. However, Parliament staff weren’t aware of the problem, and it’s unlikely that anyone would’ve noticed using the web interface. You can’t find what you can’t find. Fortunately, Parliament staff are now working on a fix, but if you’ve been relying on ParlInfo for access to debates relating to World War I, you might want to do some more checking.

These things happen. Systems go wrong. Mistakes are made. Again what interests me is not finding who’s to blame, but exploring the gap between design and outcome, between ideal and reality. This is the gap where access is made and experienced. A gap that can only be understood through the complexities and contradictions of use. Access does not exist until its limits are tested. It’s not a process of opening, it’s a constant ongoing struggle over the very meaning of ‘open’.

And that’s a good thing.

We’re here at this conference to explore the possibilities of ‘forging links’. But of course collaborations don’t have to be comfortable to be constructive. The struggle over access may sometimes be tense, frustrating, and annoying, but it is also productive. Users of archives do not just consume access, they create it.

About a year ago I fired up my RecordSearch harvester and downloaded the metadata and page images for most of the ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation) files publicly available through the National Archives. I ended up with about 70gb of images. These are mostly dossiers on individuals and organisations – odd collections of gossip, published articles, and records of surveillance.

I’ve made this data available for anyone who wants it. Some of the images were recently used in the GovHack open data competition to create the ‘Cute Commies’ site.

To be honest, I didn’t have a clear purpose in mind when I harvested the data. It was another one of those ‘What would happen if?’ moments. I was, however, thinking generally about possible points of comparison between the ASIO files and the archival remnants of the White Australia Policy. Both built systems of identification, classification, and surveillance in which recordkeeping was crucial.

Kate and other historians of Chinese Australia have noted that the administration of the White Australia Policy was not uniform or consistent. Similar cases could result in quite different outcomes depending on the location and those involved. Understanding this is important, not only for documenting the workings of the system, but for recovering the agency of those subjected to it. Non-white residents were not mere victims, they found ways of negotiating, and even manipulating, the state’s racist bureaucracy. In her work on colonial archives, Ann Laura Stoller identifies this ‘disjuncture between prescription and practice, between state mandates and the manoeuvres people made in response to them’ as part of the ‘ethnographic space’ of the archive.4

How do we explore this space? One of the things I’ve found interesting in working with the closed files is the way we can use available metadata to show us what we can’t see. It’s like creating a negative image of access. Kate and I have been thinking for a number of years now about how we might use digital tools to mine the White Australia records for traces, gaps, and shadows that together build a picture of the policy in action. Who knew who? Who was where and when? What records remain and why?

The workings of ASIO, on the other hand, are deliberately obscured. Many of the files in the Archives include a note explaining why details have been withheld. Some warn that the ‘public disclosure of information concerning the procedures and techniques used by ASIO’ would enable people of interest to formulate counter-measures ‘based on an analysis of ASIO modus operandi’. David Horner’s recent history of ASIO notes that he was required to remove ASIO file references from his footnotes ‘because of the nature of ASIO’s filing system, which itself is classified’.5 We don’t even know how many files ASIO has on people and organisations, although David McKnight suggests that it’s somewhere in the hundreds of thousands.6 My harvest includes about 12,000 files.

Just like systems of racial classification, intelligence services exist within a circle of self-justification. The fact they exist proves they need to exist. We are denied information that might enable us to imagine alternatives. And yet as limited as the provisions under the Archives Act are, we do have access.

How can we use this narrow, shuttered window to reverse the gaze of state surveillance and rebuild a context that has been deliberately erased. Just as with Closed Access and the White Australia records can we give meaning to the gaps and the absences? Can we see what’s not there?

This is one of the questions being explored by Columbia University’s History Lab. They’ve created the Declassification Engine – a huge database of previously classified government documents that they’re using to analyse the nature of official secrecy. By identifying non-redacted copies of previously redacted documents, they’ve also been able to track the words, concepts and events most likely to censored.

The History Lab’s collection of documents on foreign policy and world events is rather different to ASIO’s archive of the lives, habits and beliefs of ordinary Australians. But I’m hoping that they too can tell us something about the culture that created them.

I’d intended to have a wonderfully compelling suite of examples and arguments to demonstrate today, but time has run short. Instead I have a set of half-baked experiments which sort of look a bit interesting. But perhaps that’s better. It’s important to me to try and be open about my own processes. I share my code and data, and I’ve started documenting most of what I’m up to in a open research notebook. If access is a struggle, then we should be sharing our stories of loss and frustration, and not merely celebrating our victories.

All of these experiments are online in some sort of form. So please explore.

Experiment A is nothing more than a browse interface to all the digitised records I’ve harvested. It’s just a clone of my work with the White Australia records, but I think there’s real conceptual power in the ability to browse.

Experiment B started with a problem. From RecordSearch I could harvest data on access status and find out how many ASIO files were in each of the three categories – Open, Open with Exception, and Closed. But how much of the ‘Open with Exception’ files are actually open?

Most of the files include a summary which tells you how many pages have been completely or partially exempted. That’s great, but did I really want to open up 12,000 files and manually scan for summaries? By playing around with the Tesseract OCR engine I’ve created a simple filter that extracts text from the images and searches for words like ‘exemption’, ‘archives’, and ‘folio’. I now have a good sized collection of summaries awaiting data entry…

Experiment C began as another attempt to quantify the scale of exemption. The summaries told me how many pages had redactions – bits of information like names and ids that are blacked out, or sometimes even cut out of the page. But if I could identify individual redactions I could both test the summaries and create a new measure of openness… or redactedness…

Looking for redactions in ASIO files — that looks hopeful… pic.twitter.com/heeWMAQiwe

— Tim Sherratt (@wragge) September 11, 2016

Through trial and error I developed a computer vision script that did a pretty good job of finding redactions – despite many variations in redaction style, paper colour, and print quality. It took a couple of days to work through the 300,000 page images, but in the end I had a collection of about 300,000 redactions. Unfortunately about 20 percent of these were false positives, so I spent a number of nights manually sorting the results.

But the false positives themselves are sort of wonderful… pic.twitter.com/Jn9l04bUaY

— Tim Sherratt (@wragge) September 29, 2016

My redaction finder still needs a lot of refinement, and plenty of errors have slipped through. But, within the files that are currently digitised, the scale of exemption seems about ten times greater than Margaret Kenna estimated when giving evidence to Parliamentary Joint Committee on ASIO in 2000. She thought every file contained about 10 exemptions ‘be it a word or a folio or a paragraph’. I’m seeing an average of about 100 redactions per file.

I’ve started adding information about the size and position of the redactions to my database and aggregating this data by page. When I left Canberra, the script was still running, but you can explore the current standings in my top 50 lists of the most redacted files and pages.

Once the data processing is completed you’ll be able to filter files by the amount of area blacked out, or the total number of redactions. Many more opportunities to see what you can’t see.

Experiment D was an attempt to build a composite image of all the redactions to visualise what parts of a page were most likely to be be removed – something like a heatmap. It sort of worked, but by the time I’d added all the redactions I had nothing but a very large black blob.

My composite of 170,000 #ASIO #redactions has opened a portal to another universe… pic.twitter.com/39iQewjst4

— Tim Sherratt (@wragge) October 8, 2016

A rethink is required…

Experiment E had two aims. First to highlight the visual character of the redactions themselves – there’s a strange sort of beauty in a massed collection of blobs. Secondly, just as with the Real Face of White Australia, I wanted to turn the files inside out. Instead of being dead ends, I wanted the redactions to be discovery points, signposts, ways of exploring the files.

It’s online now so play. You can view a random sample of redactions, or browse page by page through the entire collection.

Talking about her own ASIO file in the book Dirty Secrets, the politician and academic Meredith Burgmann noted that the ‘blacking out process seems totally arbitrary and for the reader terribly frustrating, like reading a detective novel with the last page torn out’.7 But in hunting for redactions I found they could also bring moments of unexpected joy. It seems that someone got a bit bored and has left us with a glorious collection of redaction art.

So what’s to come? I need to rework my redaction finder to improve its accuracy.

It’s interesting, and perhaps ironic, that the removal of information has given me an identifiable data point that I can potentially track against other characteristics of the files. Can I identify patterns by time or topic?

Apparently ASIO assessments have become less conservative over the years – I can test this by looking at changes in redaction rates over time.

I also want to explore the context of redactions. By expanding the window around redactions and OCRing the result, I hope to identify the words that occur most commonly appear near redactions.

Those of you coming to the workshop on Friday will hear more about some of the tools and technologies I’ve used in these experiments. But I wanted to give a brief overview today because this is access.

Digital tools and technologies give us the opportunity to use databases like RecordSearch as archaeological sites to sift through layers of metadata in search of new connections and meanings. This is access.

We can turn digitised collections inside out, revealing the people, the processes, the structures, the form. This is access.

We can reveal the processes through which records are controlled, concealed, and withheld. This is access.

Access is not a deliverable or a product. It’s a struggle for understanding and power – not just to see, but to see differently.

This is RecordSearch but not as you know it.

Experiment F is a userscript that puts the redactions back into RecordSearch. Access is an honest acknowledgement of its own limits, and an invitation to push beyond.

1. Richard Jenkins, ‘Identity, surveillance and modernity: Sorting out who’s who’, in Kristie Bell, Kevin D. Haggerty and David Lyon (eds), Routledge Companion of Surveillance Studies, Routledge, 2014, p. 159.
2. Eric Ketelaar, ‘Access, the democratic imperative’, Archives and Manuscripts, vol. 34, no. 2, November 2006, p. 73.
3. John Gilliom and Torin Monahan, ‘Everyday resistance’, in Kristie Bell, Kevin D. Haggerty and David Lyon (eds), Routledge Companion of Surveillance Studies, Routledge, 2014, p. 407.
4. Ann Laura Stoller, Along the Archival Gran: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense, Princeton University Press, Princton, 2009, p. 32.
5. David Horner, The Spy Catchers: The Official History of ASIO, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2014, p. 581.
6. David McKnight, ‘How to read your ASIO file’, in Meredith Burgmann (ed.), Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files, NewSouth, Sydney, 2014, p. 38.
7. Meredith Burgmann, ‘The secret life of B/77/26 (and friends)’, in Meredith Burgmann (ed.), Dirty Secrets: Our ASIO Files, NewSouth, Sydney, 2014, p. 454.

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.1

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.2

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’.3 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.4

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.5 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.6

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.7

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.8

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.9

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.10

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.11

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.12

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.13

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^.14 ‘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.15

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.16

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.

1. Reg C. Sprigg, Arkaroola – Mt Painter in the Northern Flinders Ranges, SA: The last billion years, Arkaroola, 1984, pp. 229-33.
2. For an overview of Australian government policy relating to atomic energy from 1944 to 1990 see Alice Cawte, Atomic Australia, NSW University Press, 1992.
3. From the official history of the test programme, Bombs at Bikini, quoted in, Stephen Hilgartner, Richard C. Bell & Rory O’Connor, Nukespeak, Penguin, 1983, p. 73. For information on the Bikini tests and their consequences, see : Neal O. Hines, Proving Ground – An account of the radiobiological studies in the Pacific, 1946-1961, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 1962; Robert C. Kiste, The Bikinians: A study in forced migration, Cummings Publishing Company, Menlo Park (California), 1974.
4. Argus, 28 June 1946, p. 1.
5. Rev. Dr. C.N. Button, God, Man, and the Bomb, St.Andrew’s Kirk, Ballarat, no date.
6. The Courier-Mail Atomic Age Exhibition, Royal National Show, Brisbane, August 1947, Brisbane, 1947; The Daily and Sunday Telegraph Atomic Age Exhibition, Royal Easter Show, March 1948, Sydney, 1948; The Herald Atomic Age and Industrial Exhibition, January-February 1948, Herald & Weekly Times Ltd, Melbourne, 1948. The relevant newspapers carried many articles about the exhibition while it was in town.
7. For information on the development of uranium mining see Cawte 1992, chapters 4 & 5.
8. Tim Sherratt, ‘”A political inconvenience”: Australian scientists at the British Atomic Weapons Tests’, Historical Records of Australian Science, 6, 2, 1985, p. 141.
9. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 198, 6 October 1948, pp. 1317-19; 7 October 1948, pp. 1332-34.
10. Rohan Rivett, David Rivett: Fighter for Australian science, self published, 1972, chapter 1.
11. Frank Cain, ‘An aspect of post-war Australian relations with the united Kingdom and the United States: Missiles, spies and disharmony’, Australian Historical Studies, 23, 92, April 1989, pp. 187-202.
12. Don Watson, Brian Fitzpatrick – A radical life, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1979, pp. 210-11.
13. Rivett, 1972; Boris Schedvin, Shaping science and industry – A history of Australia’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, 1926-49, Allen & Unwin, 1987, chapter 8.
14. Frank Cain, The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation: An unofficial history, Frank Cass, Ilford, 1994, chapters 2 & 3.
15. Tim Sherratt, ‘”A physicist would be best out of it”: George Briggs and the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission’, Voices, III, 1, Autumn 1993, pp. 17-30.
16. For more information on the British atomic tests see: Sherratt 1985, pp. 137-52; Robert Milliken, No conceivable injury – The story of Britain and Australia’s atomic cover-up, Penguin, Ringwood, 1986; Lorna Arnold, A very special relationship: British atomic weapon trials in Australia, HMSO, London, 1987.