Have you been watching Operation Buffalo on the ABC? What about the documentary Maralinga Tjarutja? Operation Buffalo might be a dramatization, but Maralinga’s history as a real-life site for nuclear bomb tests is exactly that – real life.
It’s an important and dark chapter in Australia’s history that has been relatively unknown but following the clean-up of the area completed in 2000 you can now visit the site which was off-limits for so many years following the tests.
Its only accessible via tour – Maralinga Tours in fact – to which you need to pre-arrange an entry permit with your choice of tour.
Maralinga is situated roughly 400km north-west of Ceduna on the far west coast of the Eyre Peninsula, reached by sealed and unsealed roads.
Choose to camp or take advantage of provided accommodation on their one-day-two-night tours and learn the history of the people that have lived in the area for hundreds of thousands of years, their displacement and reclamation of their lands, and of course the testing itself.
Maralinga is a very unique piece of Australia’s history, albeit one we shouldn’t be proud of.
But learning all our history – even the uncomfortable parts – is incredibly important, and Maralinga offers a hands-on way to experience this history for ourselves.
We’ve already said the Eyre Peninsula is full of unique places: this certainly is one of them!