I will show you fear in a handful of dust. T S Eliot

The dusty plains of the Maralinga lands in outback South Australia held a secret for a long time before most Australians found out. Australian land had been contaminated by one of the most toxic materials known – a particular form of plutonium that takes tens of thousands of years to die away. Even now, few people know the story of Maralinga. The absence of media coverage and public debate created a gap in most people’s understanding of what happened there, making it a uniquely tangled national issue.

Democracy depends upon journalists who are capable of finding out the truth behind the governmental smokescreen, and whistle-blowers to reveal the secrets. In Australia, we had no contemporary investigative journalist or whistle-blower to tell the population about the aftermath of the tests in the South Australian desert, and the government of the day, unwatched, got away with it. Over time, the story finally emerged and a clean-up was carried out, but in doing so, raising many issues about democracy, Australian sovereignty, nuclear colonialism and the role of media in keeping governments accountable.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the nuclear arms race began. The US turned away from its erstwhile ally and refused to co-operate with Britain on nuclear weapons development. The British had to devise their own bomb development program, and they settled on Australia as a testing site. The Australian Prime Minister, Robert Menzies, was only too happy to agree.

The British nuclear test program was spread over 11 years, from 1952 to 1963, and took place at three locations: the Monte Bello Islands off the coast of Western Australia, and Emu Field and Maralinga in the South Australian desert. A total of 12 “mushroom cloud” bombs were exploded: three at Monte Bello, two at Emu Field and seven at Maralinga. The tests that had more far reaching significance than the major trials, however, were the radiological experiments known as Vixen B that were only held at Maralinga. Vixen B involved blowing up a long lasting form of plutonium using conventional explosives and leaving most of the residue on the open range.

In total, Vixen B scattered 22.2 kg of plutonium-239 around the test site. The extreme persistence of radiation and the threat of cancer by inhaling dust at the site made it especially dangerous. The Vixen B tests took place amid total secrecy in 1960, 1961 and 1963 and received no media coverage at all until the late-1970s. They were only fully uncovered in a landmark piece of scientific investigative journalism in 1993.

Australia was not a nuclear power. The country was in a highly ambiguous position – the staging ground for nuclear weapons testing carried out with great secrecy and control by another nation, the “mother country” herself. This made Australia, at least initially, curiously powerless and inept in dealing with the tests, particularly Vixen B. The mysteries of Maralinga continue to haunt Australia as the dust of Maralinga continues to swirl.

Ruthless Jabiru and Lara St. John perform Maralinga Lament at the Union Chapel, London at 19:30 on Monday 14 October. Tickets are £16 advance from the Union Chapel online store or £18 at the door.