Peter Broughton Tells the Story of Maralinga (continued)

The journey in the Overland was slow and uneventful and at 6 am the following morning the steward called me to prepare for journey's end. When he unlocked the door of the sleeping car I was blinded by the headlights of a vehicle at the side of the track. The steward warned me it was a long way to jump but I never realised just how far the carriage was from the ground. When I jumped into the headlight glare it seemed ages before I hit the ground. The top of my head was in line with the stewards feet as he stretched down to hand me my luggage. Jack Giles introduced himself as we drove to the guardhouse where the duty sergeant offered me a cup of cocoa and a fist of security forms to fill in saying he hadn't the foggiest idea who I was. Jack was in a hurry to start the morning balloon flight so we travelled the 40 kilometres at high speed through dense salt bush to Maralinga beside the unfinished main road. It was difficult to find something to hold on to as we bounced over the pot holes in his Land Rover; alright for Jack, he had hold of the steering wheel. I wasn't so lucky and the cushion under me soon parted company with the seat, so there was no alternative but to hang on to the roof. We arrived at the village just in time to start the flight. Jack was thankful to learn that I had been fully trained to carry out radiosonde and wind flights as he said he was tired of doing all the wind flights on his own. Apparently the station had to be made operational at short notice. Ray Missen and Charlie Holman had both been posted there before the Melbourne course finished and neither had been able to perform slide rule computations operationally.

Since the village was still under construction the radiosonde complex then only consisted of two Wiles garages housing the radiosonde equipment and chemicals and a balloon filling shed capped by a theodolite post which could be accessed by a vertical wooden ladder. It was the chemical store that intrigued me; a large number of bags of six inch nails weighing at least a hundred kilograms were stacked in a corner. "What are they for?" I asked Jack. He explained that Ray Missen was building his own house at the time and wanted to take them home with him. The pilot refused to accept them as excess baggage, throwing them off the aircraft. For all I know they may still be there.

Bureau of Meteorology