Maralinga

The British government notoriously conducted a series of atomic bomb tests in South Australia’s Maralinga lands during the 1950s and 1960s. The traditional owners, the Anangu, were moved to Yalata, within a kilometre or so of the main highway from Adelaide to Perth. Fifty years later, in 1980, a legal battle began to enable the Anangu to return. This is a story of the fight to return the Maralinga lands to their original owners, helping them gain an inalienable freehold title to some 76,000 square kilometres of land. Explore divided loyalties, political controversy, voting rights, and of a mining company finding itself the meat in the sandwich in a battle of wills as to who should be permitted to explore and mine the lands on which the customs and beliefs of Anangu were based.