Toxic legacy

One veterans story:

Although the Montebello Islands were uninhabited, the tests spread radioactivity across large parts of the Australian mainland.

A royal commission established by the Federal government in 1984 to study the impact of the testing concluded that the Montebello Islands were an unsafe and inappropriate location and that the "presence of Aborigines on the mainland near Montebello Islands and their extra vulnerability to the effect of fallout was not recognised".

During the 1990s, Australia received $US45 million compensation from Britain to rehabilitate the test sites and to compensate indigenous people.

And in 2010, the Federal Government announced extra health funds to help victims of the nuclear tests in their battles against cancer and other radiation-induced illnesses.

Merriwa resident Max Kimber, now 78, is one such victim who is still fighting for appropriate compensation. Much of his body is covered in skin cancers.

Some of those removed have been malignant.

Mr Kimber was a minesweeper yeoman on HMAS Fremantle, which was about 30km from the Montebello Islands when the 1952 bomb was detonated.

"We were on the deck and told to turn our backs to the explosion," he recalled this week.

"We were only allowed to turn around again when we felt the rush of wind from the blast. That's what we did. And we watched the mushroom cloud rise up into the air and the cloud creep across the sky for several hours.

"There is no doubt we suffered radiation poisoning that affected most of us for the rest of our lives."

A few months later, Mr Kimber was back in the area as Fremantle took a team of British scientists to study the effect of the blast on Trimouille Island.

But as they approached the island, Mr Kimber was accidentally knocked into the water.

"I swam around a bit, got back on the buoy, the ship came again and I tied it up," he said. "When I got back on board, I was so radioactive that all my clothes were destroyed and I was hosed down on the after-deck with seawater."

On another occasion, Mr Kimber arrived on the island to a scene of devastation.

"There were hundreds of thousands of dead turtles on the beach," he said. "They had come up the beach and been killed - obviously by the radiation. It was just littered with turtles from one end of the place to the other."

Today, Mr Kimber visits a skin specialist every three months. On average, he has 30 to 40 skin cancers removed each time."

The man I referred to in my first post was a shipmate with Mr Kimber and he gave exactly the same description.

https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/15019060/dark-cloud-hangs-over-atomic-test/