At primary school in Melbourne in the mid 1950s I used to get annoyed when we were told to pour our third pints of morning recess milk down the gully trap. When I went home for lunch the ABC Country Hour was usually on the radio and on those no-milk days farmers would be warned that radioactive clouds were drifting eastward from the atomic test sites in Monte Bello and then Emu Field and then Maralinga. My dad—an ex US Navy officer—would be in to lunch too and, although the mildest of men most of the time, would swear (he had mastered the local vernacular) ‘Bloody drongoes. Why do they let the bastards nuke them in their own back yard?’ Decades later I found photos of anti-fallout drills onboard the ships in which he had served in the mid-forties.

It came to pass, perhaps not unrelatedly, that in the 1990s I began to study the long-term health effects on the men (no women were at the tests) who had served at British atomic and hydrogen bomb tests in Australia and then Christmas Island. I began by interviewing Sir Mark Oliphant in Canberra in 1993 when he was a deaf but sprightly 92-year old.