Woomera dream turns to dust (article)

[Published in the Advertiser Saturday Review, 24 December 1988. Nurrungar lasted until 1999, when the Americans all went home. The permanent population of Woomera has since collapsed to 200 or so, and some areas of the Village have been demolished down to some broken foundations and abandoned. There followed the brief unhappy period of the Immigration Detention Centre at Woomera West, which lasted for only 36 months, until early 2003. That area is now operated by the ADF as 'Camp Rapier'. Some of the Range area has been opened for mining exploration and it is likely that more will follow. The future of the Village itself is as unsure as ever.]

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The Anglo-Australian Joint Project was one of the most colourful and costly enterprises undertaken in Australia. The story began in England in 1946. The experience of the Blitz and the country's coming nuclear vulnerability caused British defence planners to devise a scheme for dispersing armaments production and stores overseas.

In such a scheme, each country of the Empire had its role. Australia's was to test, in the isolation of the Outback, ever more powerful and sophisticated guided weapons, weapons to be developed by our domestic industries seeded with talent and know-how from Britain. In the hyperbole of the time, Australia was to become the 'arsenal of Empire'.

In pursuit of this goal, the two Labour governments of Ben Chifley and Clement Atlee, working as joint partners, pledged to share the knowledge that their scientists produced.

Throughout the 50s and 60s Woomera (the civilian support Village and the Range) grew and grew. At the peak there were radar tracking stations at Mirikata far downrange; there was another far to the north at Gove in Arnhem Land; there was a telemetry station in northern Queensland. At Island Lagoon, near Woomera, was the great dish of a radio telescope, receiving signals from NASA's planetary probes. At its peak Woomera Range virtually encompassed the whole continent.

About 11,000 separate trials were conducted at the Range, of all sizes and functions. The rockets ran the gamut from the primitive 'flying drainpipe' RTV1 through the big liquid fuelled Black Knight and Black Arrow to the huge three-stage Europa 1. The guided weapons tested ranged from small anti-tank missiles to the cruise missile Blue Steel. About 3500 bombs were dropped on a range specially set aside for them, including some nuclear and poison-gas dummies.

More benign projects were the 500-plus sounding rockets - Skylark, Long Tom, HAD, HAT, Falstaff - which probed the upper atmosphere. Six experimental satellites were boosted aloft, of which two achieved orbit. One of them was the all-Australian WRESAT, designed and built at Salisbury in just 11 months and launched on a spare US Redstone rocket.

Here too the pilotless target plane, Jindivik, was perfected and flown on hundreds of sorties from the adjacent Evetts Field. The cost of all this in Australia alone (never mind the development costs in Britain) was, in 1988 dollars, more than $3.25 billion.

From our share of this expenditure we gained some benefits, although nearly all of them were of an indirect kind. Our participation in the Joint Project persuaded Britain to inject funds equivalent to almost $1 billion into our economy and so provided, directly and indirectly, thousands of jobs over the years. It did cause a small flow of scientific and technical brainpower into this State, some of which settled permanently and enriched the community as a result.

Although the Project did not lead to any wholesale transfer of industry to Australia. It did induce several firms to establish subsidiaries or branches here, of which four remain: Fairey, British Aerospace, Hawker and Thorn EMI.

Then again, good scientific research into the ionosphere was done from Woomera which could not have been done otherwise; but it had to be done in the cracks, as it were, of approved Project work. The government refused funds to the Academy of Science more than once for a separate sounding rocket program.

More importantly, the Joint Project work created the nucleus of the present Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) Salisbury. The expertise acquired in rocket and gun propulsion, aeroballistics, data reduction, fine mechanisms, advanced optics and electronics developed at Salisbury did not evaporate. It has flowed, to some degree, into most of the present all-Australian projects, such as the Jindalee radar and the expendable decoy rocket Winnin and Mulloka sonar.

The military benefits of the Project, however, were few. Did it bring Australia new, effective, thoroughly-tested weapons which matched its political and geographical circumstances? Apart from the Ikara guided missile, which is still in service, it did not. Not one of the weapons which Australia has in service now, or has ever had in service, required a desert range on the scale of Woomera.

Almost none of the British weapons over which the technicians and engineers sweated for years were ever favoured by our Services. The RAAF did not buy even one of the small air-to-air guided weapons perfected at Woomera for the RAF.

When the RAAF wanted a small missile for its Avon Sabre plane it looked at the Firestreak missile but chose the American Sidewinder. The RAAF wasn't interested in the nuclear-tipped cruise missile Blue Steel, any more than the RAN wanted the Seaslug, Sea Dart or Seawolf weapons.

The Army did not need the ground-to-air Thunderbird, and it even rejected the locally-designed Malkara anti-tank weapon, which the British Army did take. Then, instead of the British infantry weapon Blowpipe, it bought the American Redeye. To be sure, the Army did buy the British mobile anti-aircraft missile system Rapier, after that excellent weapon had been developed and tested at Woomera. But Rapier has been a straight commercial success; many countries have bought it off the shelf without finding it necessary to host the development trials first.

Britain's independent deterrent, Blue Streak, was by far the most costly of the shared enterprises, yet it was quite irrelevant to Australian defence. Indeed, one could argue that even Australia's hosting of the atomic bomb tests made more sense. For, in the mid-1950s, it was conceivable that one day we might have wished to possess nuclear bombs, which we could have manufactured and for which we could have built or bought the delivery aircraft. Blue Streak, an intermediate range ballistic missile intended for a European theatre of war, offered us nothing.

After its military cancellation, Blue Streak was reborn as the first stage of the Europa satellite launcher. A superb endowment of the Project would have been the success and continuance of the big space projects of the 1960s.

But the British cancelled their own Black Arrow and, despite Canberra making a spirited case and generous financial offer to relocate the whole enterprise at Darwin, ELDO took Europa off to South America, where its successor, Arianespace, operates successfully to this day. With it went Australia's last hope of acquiring an international spaceport on its own soil. In retrospect, this is probably the biggest lost technological opportunity this country has ever suffered.

What remains, physically, of the joint project? Of the Range, almost nothing. It has shrunk to less than a 20th of its former size and has been denuded of most of its plant. At the rangehead itself only the right-hand launching lobe, LA2, was retained; the other is now derelict.

Teams from Salisbury still go up a few times a year for small services and scientific trials of one kind or another. But the whole delicate web of instrumentation, communications systems, trained staff and all their support facilities which constituted the Range in its heyday was pulled to pieces and thrown to the winds.

The bitter truth was that Woomera, for all the rhetoric about the town becoming the 'Cape Canaveral of the Commonwealth', was essentially a parasitical growth, drawing its support and nutriment from elsewhere. Once detached from its host - British defence work - it withered and shrank at once.

Woomera Village escaped the fate of the Range, though it is sadly shrunken now and showing its age; a spartan hangover from the '50s. Many of the landmarks of the joint project days have gone, such as the messes and much of the original housing. That was inevitable given the great contraction in the population, which fell from 6000 residents in the great ELDO days to about 1800 now. And one in three of these is a transient American citizen. For the salvation of Woomera was the arrival in 1970 of the Nurrungar space communications base nearby.

Woomera's chief and, since 1980, almost its only role has been as the residential centre for the 'joint facility' at Nurrungar. The decision to use Woomera for this purpose must have been a political one, for technically there was nothing special about the site.

The American requirement called only for a position inland, to provide some protection from the risk of enemy seaborne jamming transmissions.

If Woomera had not existed, an equivalent would not have been built from scratch. Almost any Outback town could have served as host, and probably more cheaply too, because such a town would have been an economically viable entity in its own right, and not one requiring a constant transfusion of funds to keep it alive.

How long can Woomera last? At the moment the presence of Nurrungar guarantees its survival. But how long will Nurrungar last? Officially, that is secret; but the answer seems to be not as long, perhaps, as the anti-base lobby seems to assume.

In 1986 a Joint Parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence reviewed the data, took expert advice and concluded that within 10 years Nurrungar may have only a back-up role and may no longer be crucial to the US satellite monitoring network.

Thought should be given now, urged the committee, to 'alternative uses' for Woomera. Such pleas date back 20 years to the thorough review made in 1968, when it first became apparent that the British were pulling out and the Range was winding down.

Putting aside the more fanciful suggestions (a Professor Bockris from Flinders University once proposed that the whole place should be turned into a solar power station), the only permanent saviour of Woomera is likely to be our own defence forces.

For years the services seemed unwilling to say what, if anything, they wanted from Woomera. It is now known that the Army wants to develop some small artillery sighting rockets and it needs a desert exercise ground for its Leopard tanks, but simple space and comfortable base facilities are the main requirements.

The RAAF wants a place for bombing practice and some weapons trials, and may need to garner some information by telemetry and tracking from short-range surface-to-air missiles. The small remaining Prohibited Area will suffice for all these needs.

If the Services do become a permanent presence at Woomera, no doubt servicemen would need to live in the Village. The number would be small, though, and it is hard to see how they could compensate for the withdrawal of Nurrungar, which in 1985 (the latest figures obtainable, was supporting 1056 of the 1800 inhabitants.

Could the Village stay viable if the population fell very much more? It might be more economical to close it and base the personnel in the spanking new Roxby Downs township, which is only 80km away.

In such as case the legend might be tested that Woomera Village was inadvertently built over the biggest opal deposit in the world.