Maralinga: Australia’s Dark Nuclear Legacy.

Between 1956 and 1963, in the remote deserts of South Australia, Britain conducted a series of nuclear weapons tests at a site called Maralinga. To much of the wider world, these tests were framed as part of the Cold War arms race, with promises of technological progress and military strength. But on the ground, the human and environmental toll was devastating — and continues to reverberate today.

At least seven major nuclear explosions and hundreds of so-called “minor trials” were carried out on the lands of the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara peoples, whose Country stretches across the Maralinga region. These communities were neither consulted nor warned. Many were forcibly displaced, while others unknowingly remained on contaminated land. Traditional hunting grounds, water sources, and sacred sites were blanketed in radioactive fallout.

Survivors have recounted the confusion of seeing what they described as a “black mist” roll across the desert after the blasts. Illness soon followed: respiratory problems, blindness, cancers, and birth defects. Generations later, families still speak of the health consequences and cultural dislocation that stemmed from the tests.

The Maralinga program also left a scar on the land itself. Radioactive contamination remained long after the last detonation, with plutonium and other toxic materials buried haphazardly in shallow pits. It took decades of campaigning by Aboriginal elders, health advocates, and whistleblowers before the full extent of the contamination — and the British and Australian governments’ negligence — became public.

In the 1990s, a partial clean-up of Maralinga was carried out, but many experts questioned its adequacy. For the Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara peoples, the damage was more than environmental. It represented yet another dispossession — their land desecrated, their health compromised, and their sovereignty ignored in the name of empire and science.

Today, Maralinga stands as one of the starkest reminders of the hidden costs of the nuclear age in Australia. It is a story not just of Cold War politics, but of Aboriginal communities forced to bear the price of decisions made in distant corridors of power.