We were treated as either lab rats or guinea pigs. No one ever briefed us on the dangers of radiation. We would be dressed in shorts and a shirt and that's it. Whether I got anything out of it or not, it was a moral question. How can you be quiet about something that was so devastating? It was all intense, that's the problem. It's hard to distinguish one from the other. Everybody was pretty much in the same situation. Back in the mid 50s there was no work. The Air Force looked attractive because, Primarily, I was only really interested in aeroplanes. I was only 17 and away I went. You signed stuff to say that you weren't divulge anything and all that. You must not reveal what you've seen, done, heard or participated in, all that. It's total secrecy. We were sent there to set up the new experiments and building the firing platforms. No one ever briefed us on the dangers of radiation. No explanation about how those risks would manifest themselves. Who could you speak to? If you did, you would come under suspect straightaway and you would be silenced. They were then sent back into the bombsite zone where the actual bombs exploded right back to Ground Zero, some as short as 20 minutes after the bomb exploded. But if you went back with poor protection. You signed your own death warrant by going back there. You are a contender for some form of cancer. The fallout from one of the bombs in 1956, the wind turned in the wrong direction It drifted SE. There was no radiation in Adelaide on the day the bomb was exploded, but overnight it rose 100 fold. So while Adelaide was sleeping, they received a massive dose of radiation, fell right across the half of South Australia. The fallout like strontium 90 and Iodine 131 that comes out of a nuclear explosion is highly dangerous. Well Strontium 90 is a terrible sinister thing because it mimics calcium. The body can't tell the difference whether it's inhaled or taken into the gut as food. And in this case what happened was the fallout went onto the grass. The cows eat the grass, they produced milk. We drink the milk and at the time the state government used to give the school children a little bottle of milk. At half time, milk flows freely. Little did they know they were feeding them highly radioactive... They were poisoning the children and of course it processed it, sent it straight to the bones and many of those finished up with Bone cancer. 320 miles northwest of Adelaide, SA is a place known to the world as well as any of the Commonwealth's capital cities. The town of Woomera. A community of 5 to 6000 people living with most of the advantages of city dwellers, and yet in the heart of one of the continent's harshest but most fascinating landscapes. I was at Woomera when all this happened. There's about 79 or 80 babies there dead in the Cemetery. There's a whole row with just babies and young children. I've been there before and I don't go back, I just can't hack it. My wife was a midwife at Woomera. She delivered many of them babies. Now their all at the Cemetery. What killed them is the question. As the little children, babies died, they then took bones from those children. Often, the femur, the hip bone from the knee to the hip here. That take them out of the little children without the permission of their parents. To study the bones, how much strontium 90 was in them. Suppose the more interesting thing was having ASIO having the phone bugged. Because we knew it, 'cause you'd hear the clicks on the line and stuff like that. So yeah, we knew the phone was bugged. ASIO was turned on to me and they followed me and opened your mail and they tapped your phone and generally made life a little less pleasant. No matter where you went, there was always somebody not too far away watching you or either photographing you. This is where I first blew the whistle in 72. I'd heard that they were going to hand back Maralinga to the black fellas in terrible condition. That just walked away and just left it... walked away. So I said there's got to be something done. Yes, they were nuclear bombs and they were stored there. This is not the first time Avon Hudson has spoken of his experiences at Maralinga. He broke his silence back in 1976. Then in an interview with TDT, the forerunner of nationwide, he spoke of the dangers of plutonium buried at Maralinga. He says 'failure of successive governments to act forced him to go public.' I knew about the plutonium that was buried there and what I really wanted to know and my concern was what was going to happen to the plutonium that was buried. And who would be responsible for it? I raised this and then of course the government. They denied it all. How will you regarded during this time? Many people looked upon me as a crank or a fool, or both and they didn't really believe what I had said. Of course, Mr. Hudson was vindicated when in 1979 the British went back to Maralinga and removed the plutonium he spoke of. They cannot bring themselves to admit that the dear old liberal government of the Menzies era back in the 50s, perpetrated these crimes against their own military personnel. Yes, they just started dying from their middle 20s and by the time most of them were in their 50s they were dead. I don't know whether it was worth it or not, although I do it all again. I'd say I hate injustice. It's the one thing that turns people into what they are not. Injustice.
