The sensitivity of the exhibition’s themes, coupled with low lighting, seems to demand quiet in the space. In this silence, you hear the gentle chiming of hand-blown glass.
A concrete plinth marking ground zero of the first Totem atomic test in South Australia in 1953.
Photo: Andrew Burden
The British atomic tests at Emu Field in South Australia pre-dated Maralinga by three years. Largely forgotten, they remind us the costs of harmful political decisions are borne by the most powerless.
Two ABC television premieres – both about the mid-century British nuclear testing at Maralinga in regional South Australia – approach tricky territory in very different ways.
There is a growing sense that the British authorities would rather forget their weapons testing history.
Marcoo was a 1.4 kilotonne ground-level nuclear test carried out at Maralinga in 1956. The contaminated debris was buried at this site in the 1967 clean-up known as Operation Brumby.
Author provided
History is writ large in the remote areas around Woomera and the Nullarbor: from the fossils of microscopic, cell-like creatures to ancient stone tools to the deitrus of rocket tests and the painful legacy of the Maralinga atomic blasts.
Fifty years after the Maralinga atomic tests, an exhibition grapples with the pain and devastation left behind.
Karen Standke, Road to Maralinga II (detail). Supplied
The Maralinga atomic tests were devastating to life and land in Central Australia. Black Mist Burnt Country brings together dozens of artistic responses in a powerful, but somewhat incoherent memorial.
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne