Maralinga

Hello subscribers (and welcome new ones)!
  

I’ve uploaded a new Post to the DT Blog. It follows up from what I indicated in the previous general Blog Post about Australia, namely that one of the places mentioned in that post would deserve a Blog Post all of its own. That’s because it was – for me – a top highlight of the entire trip in terms of dark tourism: the tour of the Maralinga nuclear test site in the remote Outback of South Australia.
  

This is where Britain tested several atomic bombs in the 1950s … far away from the British homeland. A New Zealander friend called it “the ultimate British Nimby” (“Nimby” standing for ‘not in my back yard’). It was only due to a very pro-British government in Australia at the time that the permission to use Australian land for such tests was granted. Maralinga was the largest and most significant of those locations.
  

I went on an all-day tour of the former nuclear test site and the new Blog Post about Maralinga features 22 photos taken during that very special trip. Do go and take a look!
  

The photo above is one of those included in the new Blog Post and shows a piece of trinitite that I held against the light so you can see its semi-translucent green-glass-like characteristics. In case you don’t know: trinitite is a substance named after Trinity, the very first nuclear test ever conducted (namely to test the type of bomb later dropped on Nagasaki). It formed when the intense heat of the fireball melted the surface layer of the desert sand. The same happened at Maralinga in the test code-named “Breakaway” (which was very similar in nature to Trinity). And before you ask: it is deemed quite safe to handle such pieces of trinitite at that site, as the residual radioactive contamination of the material has so diminished since the 1950s that it is pretty negligible (though you shouldn’t ingest any of it).

On the tour we saw three of the ground zeros of the tests at Maralinga as well as various other related locations. It was “nuclear tourism” at its best, and since that is one of the subcategories of dark tourism I am most interested in, it was right up my street. Even if you have only the slightest passing interest in such things, do go and take a look at the new Blog Post!
  

Best wishes,

Peter