Roadtrip to Australia's explosive history

We are a nation of travellers in Australia and there’s a place that’s well and truly off the beaten track and well worth making the effort to go and see.

It’s called Maralinga and it’s the location in outback western South Australia where the cold war made a real impact on Australian soil.

It was established at the height of the cold war in 1956 by the British defence department with the full co-operation of the Australian government to conduct a series of atomic explosions and military tests.

The British left in 1967, leaving behind a village, an international standard airport and a landscape poisoned by seven major atomic explosions and hundreds of smaller, yet equally dangerous radioactive experiments.

It took multiple clean-ups, millions of dollars and even a Royal Commission to sort out the mess and ensure the rightful owners, the Maralinga Tjarutja people, got their land back.

Now they have opened the place for tourism, which means if you’ve got the time and the right vehicle to make the trip then an important piece of Australian history is ready to be visited.

And that’s just what we are doing.

To find it we’ve turned north off the Nullarbor Plain west of the Nundroo roadhouse, crossed the trans-Australian railway line and headed into the desert in a vehicle just right for the purpose, Land Rover’s Discovery Sport.

It’s a return to its roots for the Disco Sport because the Maralinga site was developed by famed outback explorer Len Beadell using Land Rovers.

It’s a straight-forward trip to Maralinga on a combination of well-kept dirt roads and ageing bitumen that the British laid when the village was being built.

Driving around the village now is a pretty eery sensation because most of the buildings are gone. There are many concrete slabs and lots of streets, but not a lot left that captures the feeling of what it must have been like here in the 1950s and 1960s.

However, you certainly get a sense of the desolation.

If you want more obvious proof of just how important to the British war effort this place was then head across to the airport.

There you will find a 2.4km runway with five metres of concrete embedded in each end to make sure anything ever invented could land on here. The Space Shuttle could be safely put down here it is so well built.

But the main attraction – if that is the right word – at Maralinga is ground zero, 30km north of the village, where there were seven major detonations in the 1950s.

It is an eery and desolate place, where life still struggles to re-assert itself.

On the ground there are shards of glass, cooked from the sand by the infernal heat of the detonations. There are tangles of wire, mounds where planes, tanks and other structures were anchored, even a concrete blockhouse from where the explosions were photographed.

The centre of the massive clean-up is a desolate, windswept place codenamed Taranaki, where the last bomb was detonated. Here, contaminated rocks and soils collected from across the blast zones have been drowned under tonnes of soil in a huge pit.

The machinery and vehicles that conducted the clean-up were also driven into this massive hole, crushed and buried.

Showing us around is Maralinga site manager and tour leader Robin ‘Nobsy’ Matthews, who has been working in the vicinity since the 1970s.

“There is so much history here,” he enthuses. “But it’s not only British history -- this is where people get confused. It’s indigenous history, Australian history, British history and world history out here.

“I feel a sense of pride in what I do,” he adds. “As people are driving away I am thinking 'there goes another satisfied customer and they will go back and tell their friends and then they will come and visit this place’.”

And we’ll add our support to that. Maralinga may not be a fun family holiday, but it's a must-see for anyone with an interest in Australian history.