Aborigines Demand Payment for Land Lost to British Nuclear Testing : Environment: Desert natives want some of homeland restored and compensation for areas that are permanently damaged. Talks are aimed at settling the issue.

MARALINGA, Australia —  Forty years later, Hughie Windlass remembers in vivid detail the day Great Britain became a nuclear power, exploding an atomic bomb over his Aboriginal homeland in South Australia.

“I could hear a funny noise and feel the ground shake,” said Windlass, 64. “It’s a bomb, they told us. We were a long way away, and we saw the big mushroom cloud. It was gorgeous.”

From 1953 to 1967, the British government transformed 300 square miles of its Australian commonwealth’s Great Victoria Desert into the center of its post-World War II nuclear weapons research program.

Britain dropped seven atomic bombs and exploded 700 radioactive bomb components on Aboriginal lands near Emu and Maralinga.

Before the testing began, Windlass and his family, along with hundreds of other Aborigines, were uprooted from their age-old homes in the barren desert and resettled at Yalata, a reservation on Australia’s southern coast.

“Before, it was a free country, a happy country, a nice, clean country,” said Windlass, standing at his makeshift campsite about a mile from where the bombs were detonated. “It was a good life. We went on walkabouts, ate traditional food and had a hunting lifestyle.”

Now all that is gone. Despite a cleanup attempt, the earth is poisoned by radioactive plutonium. Parts of the region will be unsafe forever. Although Aborigines have had access to the land surrounding the blast zone for about a decade, only one sign at the fenced entrance to the site warns of contamination.

“It’s a bad place now,” Windlass said. “The British didn’t give a hang about us. They can’t say, ‘Sorry.’ It’s too late. They’ve done the damage; they’ve got to pay us.”

That is the subject of negotiations between the British and Australian governments. Who should pay to clean up the salvageable land and compensate the Aborigines for the permanently damaged portion?

It will cost an estimated $68 million, with as much as $34 million going directly to the people of Maralinga.

Contamination from the seven bombs was buried in 29 pits. Scientists deem their danger relatively small.

The biggest remaining hazard is from the 700 tests, dubbed “minor trials,” which explored what would happen if an atomic bomb were accidentally damaged or destroyed before it was dropped. Scientists set plutonium-filled bomb parts afire in the atmosphere. Contaminated metal fell to the ground.

In 1967 the British launched an operation to clean up the contamination. Officials say the fragments were plowed evenly into the ground, about 6 inches below the surface. But in 1984 the Australian government made a disturbing discovery.

Keith Lokan, director of the Australian Radiation Laboratory, said he and his staff were shocked to find thousands of contaminated metal fragments, from tweezer-size to a foot long, lying in the open.

“It certainly did not meet the description that everything was uniformly mixed into the ground,” Lokan said. It was clear, he said, that the Aborigines could not yet return to their land.

The only way to clean up the fragments is to remove every tree and plant and to scrape off four inches of topsoil, Lokan said. But even this, he said, would risk spreading contaminated dust particles.

As a result, this portion of the Maralinga site, about 72 square miles, will have to be permanently fenced off, never again to be lived on, Lokan said.

Discovery of the contamination angered the Australian government. “Britain is legally and morally obliged to make a substantial contribution to the cost of rehabilitation and to pay the entire amount of the Aboriginals’ compensation claim,” said Pat Davoren, manager of rehabilitation and radioactive-waste policy for the Australian government.

The British contend that, using the best available technology, they fulfilled their part of the cleanup agreement with Australia. “We are released from all liability,” said a spokesman for the British High Commission in Sydney, Australia.

Settlement of the dispute is expected this year.

It took eight years just to get the two governments to the table, said Windlass, who, along with other Maralinga exiles, has been pleading to have the land cleaned up so that they can try to rebuild their traditions.

Archie Barton, 56, representing the displaced Tjarutja people of Maralinga, has been pivotal in pressing their case.

He has combined publicity stunts and tenacious lobbying to bring the issue into mainstream policy discussions. Last September Barton had Windlass and several other traditional tribal men flown to London, where they presented a tin can of plutonium-laced dirt to Britain’s Defense Ministry.

The Aborigines of Maralinga are just one example of indigenous people who have been forced off their lands or otherwise harmed by nuclear testing. Many of these groups, from places as diverse as Russia, the United States and Africa, are awaiting legal precedents in the Maralinga case.

Even if much of the Maralinga land is decontaminated and the native people are compensated, it will be difficult if not impossible for them to resurrect their society, tribal members say.

Most of them live in poverty on a reservation, cut off from their heritage. Many are alcoholics.

In 1984 the South Australian government handed back to the people of Maralinga the land surrounding the nuclear test site. But resettlement efforts by the Aborigines have generally failed. Ultimately they find themselves back at Yalata, where there is food, water, medical facilities--and alcohol.

The Australian government tried unsuccessfully to start a school, offer health care and set up a store at Maralinga.

“We tried everything,” said Graham Steele, who coordinated educational services on the Maralinga lands. The problem, he said, was that the Aborigines changed campsites from one day to the next. “We never knew where the children were.”