Ground Zero (movie review)

On the Hoyts circuit last month (1987) was Ground Zero, a thriller set at the time of the McClelland Royal Commission in 1985, with flashbacks to the atomic bomb test Totem 1 at Emu Field in October 1953. Most of the critics liked it for its message more than its art. Anna-Maria Dell'Oso told us approvingly in The Times on Sunday that it 'explodes the myth of Maralinga'; she meant, presumably, by telling us more of the truth about it. Actually it does nothing of the kind. It is, however, a fascinating document for the social historian, for we see it contributing to a myth in the very process of formation.

Ground Zero is a strange hybrid of a film. Its creaky plot involves Harvey Denton (Colin Friels), a youngish cinematographer who finds ASIO taking an unusual interest in some old home movies inherited from his father. Denton senior, long missing, was an Army cameraman at Emu. Did he see something he shouldn't have? (Harvey is such an ingenue that one wonders why the ASIO men, instead of assaulting him, didn't just ask politely to inspect them. But these are simplicities beyond the reach of art.)

Now ASIO themselves are being outsmarted, possibly by a splinter group from MI6. They murdered Harvey's father, but didn't get his film; now they are after his son before he can front up at the Commission hearings with the missing footage, proof positive that Aboriginals died of radiation poisoning after Totem. (Denton senior was clearly a man of parts, for his home movies appear to show Maralinga Village, which wasn't built until three years after his murder.) Perhaps MI6 does have a dirty tricks department. But the case of Peter Wright a candidate for a neat 'termination with extreme prejudice', if there was ever one seems to show that the British solution to security lapses is to try to bury them underneath quantities of taxpayers' money, not to riddle them from a helicopter gunship.

Harvey's only ally in his quest is Donald Pleasance, well cast as Prosper, a Yorkshireman crazed by the guilt of what he helped to do 30 years before and now holed up in a Coober Pedy dugout. His is the Dalek voice on the answering machine, hinting that he knows the whereabouts of the critical film. Prosper is a Deep Throaty who has lost his larynx from cancer and can only talk through a gadget. This saddles him with a most unfortunate prop, for he has to spend the the rest of his time onscreen massaging his jawbone with what looks like an outsize vibrator. We surmise that Pleasance's wild stare isn't due to ionising radiation; he's probably wondering how he managed to get mixed up in all this malarkey.

The events at Emu and Maralinga, for so long the subject of inflamed imaginings, have now been minutely documented. We have two official histories, one from each government. The McClelland Royal Commission minutely examined every rumour, and its Report is a masterpiece of judicial analysis. In addition, and far up the readability scale, there is Robert Milliken's excellent measured Penguin, No Conceivable Injury. What remains unknown about the trials, chiefly the very long term health effects, is probably irrecoverable now. Ground Zero has a teasing relationship with this material. It is not 'faction' in the usual sense, for it does not dramatise historical events. The inquiry to which Harvey takes his damning film, only to have it destroyed, is not THE Royal Commission; merely one like it, taking place at the same time, just as the presiding judge is a glance at McClelland but is just a knockdown bully with none of Diamond Jim's rapier wit; and so on.

Ground Zero is fiction, we repeat; but with pretensions to be more than fiction. It flirts with reality. It ends starkly and silently with a list of several dozen 'nuclear veterans' who have died of cancer since the trials. The implication is that the truth is probably even dirtier than the fiction. It does not remind us that cancer is after all a major cause of death in an aging population. About 20,000 personnel took part in all the trials; medical statisticians tell us up to four thousand names may eventually figure on that list, from natural causes alone. There are obvious dangers in trying to patch a colourful tale on to real public events, and Ground Zero ignores all of them.

Less than a documentary, but in its own eyes more than a story: what is this film, then? The genre which best describes it is the 'alternative history'; the sort of thing where the Germans invaded Britain after Dunkirk and Churchill is shot making a last stand outside 10 Downing St. 'What if' history is a variety of fairy story, whose material is power and anxiety fantasies, and so it is here.

Because the Royal Commission dealt so soberly and dismissively with the wilder claims -- Aboriginal corpses in a bomb crater, mental defectives used as guinea pigs, etc -- it also did little to soothe the feelings of guilt in the national psyche. Ground Zero is the daydream version of what the Royal Commission 'should' have found: namely, evidence of the enormous misdeeds of our erstwhile imperial masters. The dishonesty of Ground Zero is that it moulds history into a mythical shape more soothing to our sensibilities.

What is the essence of this myth? It is that into the country came the swaggering, imperial masters, and had their way with us artless, welcoming colonial lads. Concern for what they had done only came later, and over the last 30 years they have succeeded well in suppressing the facts. Thus, if we can see the Brits as slick lawyers and assassins we can stop worrying about what was done in our name. Such is the dream logic of Ground Zero.

The truth is more galling. Australian officialdom, far from being the duped and innocent party was either an enthusiastic participant or kept itself in a condition of deliberate ignorance. The British weren't welcome in the Nevada desert; they needed a test range badly and Menzies was more than happy to give them one. That wily populist knew very well that there was lots of political mileage in it. The tests were received in this country with mindless adulation and minimal protest from either the people or the Opposition. For 1950s middle Australia, it was a question of metaphorically putting Australia on the global map, not participating in events which might one day obliterate it. As that clever documentary The Atomic Cafe showed, nuclear bangs were sexy.

The so-called 'minor trials' tell us something about apportioning the responsibility. In some of these trials, which produced much more contamination than any of the bombs, plutonium was burnt in petrol in the open air to simulate an accident to a nuclear device. This later work probably formed no part of the original plans for Maralinga. What apparently happened was that the British scientific bureaucrats, confronted every day with the evidence of their nominal partner's vast indifference to what they were up to, displayed a progressive recklessness of behaviour. They responded like house guests in the home of an utterly nonchalant host; they started by asking politely to use the toilet, and ended by crapping on the carpets.

Other matters are more clear-cut. The British were not responsible for security in the Outback. It was not they who decided that just one patrol officer was enough to survey a risk zone around Emu five times larger than the United Kingdom. It was not British negligence that allowed the Milpuddie family to wander across the firing zone shortly after a trial, so that they had to be ineffectually decontaminated and their hunting dogs shot. It was not William Penney's visiting scientists who precipitated the most appalling incident of the trials, when the Stevens family, found in an inconvenient place were instructed to make their to Cunderlee Mission -- 650km -- on foot. The three who died in the desert were victims of Australian regulations (enforced with "good intentions"), which forbade motor transport to healthy tribal Aborigines.

The scriptwriters of Ground Zero show themselves willfully blind to these facts. Their film manifests a very common and most unfortunate aspect of the post-colonial mentality: a reluctance to take moral responsibility for one's own acts.