Talk:McClelland Royal Commission

Comments

Is the report(s) of the McClelland Royal Commission available; this article is based almost entirely on information taken from newspapers?Pyrotec (talk) 19:12, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

@Pyrotec: I found volume one http://www.industry.gov.au/resource/Documents/radioactive_waste/RoyalCommissioninToBritishNucleartestsinAustraliaVol%201.pdf. 220 of ^Borg 11:14, 8 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks very much for this link Borg. I've bookmarked the link to the pdf file and will read the report with interest. Pyrotec (talk) 10:21, 1 December 2015 (UTC)

"What the bloody hell is going on?"

The text of the article reads:

The Commission was also told that acting Prime Minister Arthur Fadden had sent a message to the British PM asking "What the bloody hell is going on, the cloud is drifting over the mainland?".

(1) Does anyone have actual links to these newspaper references? (2) Fadden was PM in 1941, long before British nuclear tests were carried out. (3) Even allowing for supposed Australian mores, how likely is it that an Australian acting PM would send a British PM a telegram saying "What the bloody hell is going on?"

In the absence of evidence of the contrary, I call BS. 92.8.158.201 (talk) 19:18, 13 January 2019 (UTC)

Fadden was treasurer 1949-1958, so could plausibly have been acting prime minister when Menzies was unavailable.

My google search for the phrase provided many Wikipedia mirrors, but a few other hits including:

• an abstract that does not include the phrase but presumably the full paper does: Zeb Leonard (2014) Tampering with history: varied understanding of Operation Mosaic, Journal of Australian Studies, 38:2, 205-219, DOI: 10.1080/14443058.2014.895956
• Another one: Maralinga Chronology
• "Menzies to Eden: "What the bloody hell is going on?"". The Sydney Morning Herald. 5 January 1985. p. 4 – via newspapers.com. — this suggests the phrase is real, but it was uttered by Menzies not Fadden. The OCR of the page is jumbled and I can't blow up the image as I don't have the right subscription. Anthony Eden was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1955-1957.

--Scott Davis ^Talk 00:42, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

newspapers.com is part of The Wikipedia Library, so I've got access to the 1985 article. The story is as follows:

"What the bloody hell is going on, the cloud is drifting over the mainland" - according to an ex-British serviceman that was the message of protest from Sir Robert Menzies to the British Prime Minister, Mr Eden, after the second Mosaic atomic blast in the Monto Bello islands in June 1956. Mr Bernard Perkins, of Dagenham, London, was a radio operator on board HMS Narvik during the Mosaic series. He said that after the second Mosaic blast he was sending press releases from the journalists who were on board. "Suddenly a signal came direct from Sydney," Mr Perkins told the Royal Commission into British atomic tests in Australia. "It was written on a pad in manuscript by the operator who took it. It was from the Australian Prime Minister to the Prime Minister of Great Britain. It simply said 'What the bloody hell is going on, the cloud is drifting over the mainland.'" Mr Perkins in his statement to the commission said the message was very short and everyone from the radio room just stood there and looked at it in surprise. Mr Perkins said the message was then sent from the Narvik in code to the United Kingdom. Asked why the message had come via the ship, Mr Perkins said it was common and the language used in the message was also not unusual." And subsequently: "Justice McClelland, on hearing the contents of the Prime Minister's message, observed: "I am shocked to think Sir Robert Menzies could use language like that."

So it seems like there's the origin of the story. It doesn't say more than that about how credible McClelland found Mr Perkins. Confusingly, this book on Maralinga notes that no copy of the message has ever been found, cites Mr Perkins' testimony, but attributes it to Fadden, says he was acting PM at the time, and that he put out a statement in response to the British reply four days later. They seem very difficult to reconcile, but the direct quote from McClelland about Menzies suggests that Menzies was the actual figure. The Drover's Wife (talk) 01:38, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

References