It was a quiet day in Sydney. But not so in Maralinga, South Australia, the ancestral home of the Maralinga Tjarutja, a southern Pitjantjatjara Aboriginal group, just under 1300km North-West of Adelaide. For the British decided to detonate a nuclear bomb here today.
It was to be the last large nuclear weapons test in a series of test blasts the British conducted on Australian soil. However, many more minor tests were still carried out in complete secrecy at Maralinga, up until 1963, leaving behind an awful mess of contamination, which some say still lingers on, despite the site having been officially declared "clean" more than 10 years ago.
A 1984/85 Royal Commission investigating claims of radiation poisoning amongst Aboriginals, who walked barefoot over contanimated soil because the shoes they had been given didn't fit, also found that both British and Australian servicemen were purposely exposed to fallout from the blasts to see what happened as well as the claim that the actual fallout was about three times more than originally forecast.
Elsewhere on the globe, 9 October is remembered as the birthday of John Winston Lennon (1940, Liverpool) as well as his son Sean Tara Ono Lennon (1975, New York City) - well timed, Yoko! ;-).
Pope Pius XII died in Rome (1958) and Oskar Schindler (the one with the famous list) died in Munich (1973). Louis XII of France married Mary Tudor (1514) and Carloman I and Charlemagne were crowned Frankish Kings (768), while Leif Ericsson discovered "Vinland", the present day Canadian province Newfoundland and Labrador (1000).
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