Minutes and Millennia: The Maralinga Souvenir Clock

Zoë Sadokierski, a designer and writer, has been commissioned by Powerhouse to write about objects in the Powerhouse Collection. In this work, a 1950s souvenir clock leads the author back to the toxic mushroom clouds of Maralinga and the more benign mushroom models of Louis Thomas Jérôme Auzoux.

In the 1950s, a village materialised in the Great Victoria Desert. It boasted an Olympic-size swimming pool, tennis and basketball courts, workshops, a beer garden, hospital, church, cinema and a dining room with a grand piano. For a decade, tens of thousands of fit young men – and only men, primarily British military personnel, with smaller contingents from Australia, Canada, the United States and New Zealand – rotated through this improbable settlement, paid handsomely for their stints in the desert. The village of men existed for a single purpose: to service Britain’s military ambitions.

In September 1950, British Prime Minister Clement Attlee telephoned his Australian counterpart, Robert Menzies, requesting permission to test atomic weapons on Australian soil. Attlee’s preferred testing sites – the United States and Canada – had already been declined. Menzies, an unashamed Anglophile, agreed immediately, without consulting his cabinet or the Australian public. With this gentleman’s handshake, Australia became a willing pawn in Britain’s nuclear program.

Between 1952 and 1963, the British Government conducted 12 major nuclear weapons tests on Australian territory, along with hundreds of toxic ‘minor’ trials covertly piggybacked onto the larger tests. Britain walked away with a nuclear arsenal that secured its place as a major player in the Cold War era. Taranaki, a site in the Maralinga range where the minor trials were conducted, remains one of the most contaminated places on Earth.