Mother’s Apron Strings OPERATION BUFFALO AND THE DISCOMFORT WITH AUSTRALIAN HISTORY
Major Leo Carmichael (Ewen Leslie) sits in a cafe in Adelaide, over 800 kilometres from the Maralinga nuclear-test site in a remote region of South Australia. At Maralinga, he is the boss, but he’s losing control: problems are spreading beyond the confines of the base as soldiers start getting sick and winds blow radiation from mushroom clouds across the state. According to the UK and Australian governments – as well as the scientists who conduct the tests for the greater good of the Commonwealth – however, what goes up in a nuclear blast comes straight down to the ground. And what’s on the ground? Nothing – or, for legal purposes, terra nullius. With all this on Carmichael’s mind, he turns to face a poster for a tobacco company with the slogan ‘will not affect your throat’, scoffs and lights a cigarette.
In Operation Buffalo, Australia is depicted as living in denial of its colonial history. The lies and cover-ups surrounding the nuclear tests are told for the sake of strengthening the British Empire in the atomic arms race, and Australia is shown to be necessarily compromised by its loyalty to the Crown.
The premise of the series is factual. After the collapse The British would go on to detonate seven atomic bombs there between 1956 and 1963, with significant consequences: it’s estimated that 30 per cent of the British and Australian servicemen exposed to the blasts died of cancer (although the results of a royal commission in the 1980s was not conclusive on the matter). The royal commission also uncovered that the fallout of the explosions was carried much farther than the radius the British promised, and that it reached as far as Townsville, Brisbane, Sydney and Adelaide. The tests were particularly devastating for the Indigenous population, especially the Maralinga Tjarutja people, who were driven off their land by the army (as were the neighbouring Yulparitja people). The Maralinga Tjarutja people would later receive only A$13 million in compensation for their displacement; while the land was eventually returned to them in 1984, the soil is said to be sterile and the community is still coming to terms with the long-term effects of radiation on its members.
