IT HAS taken fifty years of waiting, but Australia says it has finally cleaned up the British nuclear test site at Maralinga and that the land is ready to be handed back to its traditional aboriginal owners, the Tjarutja people. The problem is that not everyone believes the government. And the local community is wary of taking responsibility for the site.
Between 1953 and 1957, Britain conducted seven atmospheric bomb tests over Maralinga, about 800 kilometres northwest of Adelaide. Several hundred square kilometres were contaminated with radioactive waste, mainly from bomb tests between 1955 and 1963 using plutonium-239.
Although the…
