From test site to tourist spot
Maralinga, a barren stretch of land in South Australia’s remote western desert, is the country’s only former nuclear test site open to tourists. And Robin Matthews is Australia’s only nuclear tour guide.
Visitors to Maralinga, a deserted military installation the size of Manhattan, who expect to find their tour guide dressed in a yellow jumpsuit and ventilator mask are bound to be disappointed. Instead, Matthews, 65, can be found wearing a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes and a cigarette hanging from chapped lips.
“Yes, there is still radiation here,” Matthews said as he drove to the sites where the Australian and British governments dropped seven bombs between 1956 and 1963, which dotted the earth with craters and poisoned Indigenous people and their descendants.
Back then, the government placed hundreds of human guinea pigs — wearing only shorts and long socks — in the front areas of the test zones. The effects of large doses of radiation were devastating.
Nowadays, after a multimillion-dollar cleanup, radiation poses little danger to visitors, Matthews said, unless they choose to “eat mouthfuls of dust.”
Maralinga, which means “thunder” in the extinct Aboriginal language Garik, is an unlikely tourist destination. It is hot and arid, and at 1,126 kilometres west of Adelaide it is difficult to reach. When tours started in 2016, the village was accessible by only two flights a week from Ceduna, the closest “large” city, which itself has a population of fewer than 3,000 people.
But the Maralinga Tjarutja people hope to increase the number of visitors to the site this year. The Maralinga Tjarutja Administration is increasing the number of regular flights to the village, increasing the length of the tour and working with the South Australian government on a business plan, said Sharon Yendall, the group’s general manager.
In the 1950s and ’60s, at the height of the Cold War, 35,000 military personnel lived here. Today, just four people live full-time in Maralinga village, a veritable ghost town. Amid the old buildings are new lodgings built for tourists, complete with hot water and Wi-Fi.
To ensure tourists’ safety in the area, a zone was cleaned up by scientists at the cost of more than $100 million (Australian) — about $97 million (Canadian).
There was no overt pressure or media scrutiny over what happened at Maralinga until the 1970s, when those injured by the tests came forward and a small group of journalists and politicians cast a more critical eye on the tests and the secrecy surrounding them.
Matthews first visited Maralinga in 1972. His wife, Della, is a member of the Anangu people, and when the land was decontaminated, the couple were asked to be Maralinga’s first caretakers.
He would love it, he said, if Indigenous people replaced him as the guides at Maralinga, though he also understands why they would choose not to.
“We now bring our kids and our grandchildren here to explain what happened,” he said. “This is their land and their ancestors’ land.”