Two atomic bomb craters, nearly 200 kilometres of trackless desert between them, and one man tasked with joining them by road. After the British detonated their first mainland atomic bombs at Emu Field in October 1953, the clay-pan there proved too contaminated and too hard to supply for the larger test program to come. A better site was needed, and the surveyor Len Beadell, who had already pegged both Woomera and Emu, was sent back into the Great Victoria Desert to find it. What he found became Maralinga. What he built to connect the old test field to the new is the Maralinga to Emu Road.
Beadell worked the way he always did: alone, first. To find the new site he drove a solo reconnaissance of some 800 kilometres through the southern Great Victoria Desert, navigating by sun and compass across country with no roads and no water, settling at last on a spot 39 kilometres north-northeast of Watson siding on the Trans-Australian Railway. He then spent most of 1954 and the first half of 1955 surveying out the township that would become Maralinga. Only once that was done did the next problem present itself. The old bomb field at Emu and the new one at Maralinga had to be linked, so in early August 1955 Beadell set off north again to survey the line, naming Observatory Hill as he went.
Back at Maralinga, Beadell gathered a small crew with a bulldozer and a grader and began pushing a road toward Emu on 19 August 1955. He liked his roads straight, as straight as a gunbarrel, and he jokingly called his outfit the Gunbarrel Road Construction Party. The joke stuck, passing into Australian outback folklore; the same party, in its various forms, would go on to carve more than six thousand kilometres of desert tracks. The Emu road had one last quirk. When the work was still 23 kilometres short of Emu, the bulldozer was recalled to Maralinga. Rather than lose the progress, the crew pressed into service the bulldozer that had been left sitting at Emu since the bomb test two years earlier. With that old machine they finished the job, the two ends meeting on 17 September 1955.
It is easy to admire the craft and the sheer doggedness of it: one surveyor, a compass and a few machines, ruling lines across one of the emptiest deserts on Earth. But these roads were not built to open up the country for its people. They were built to service nuclear weapons, and they ran straight through the homelands of the Anangu, the Pitjantjatjara, Yankunytjatjara and other Aboriginal peoples whose land this had always been. The country Beadell mapped as empty was anything but. The road made the bombs easier to deliver, and the testing that followed at Maralinga, like the black mist that had already rolled from Emu, would scar the land and the people who belonged to it. The straight line on the map carries a long shadow.
The Maralinga to Emu Road runs through the Great Victoria Desert in remote western South Australia, its northern end near Emu Field at 28.64 degrees south, 132.20 degrees east, connecting south to the Maralinga township area. The entire route lies within restricted, permit-only country in and around the Woomera Prohibited Area and the Maralinga Tjarutja lands; ground access requires authorisation. From the air the road appears as a characteristically dead-straight red dirt line scored across flat desert scrub and clay-pan, with few other features to break the plain. The nearest sizeable controlled airfield is Coober Pedy (ICAO YCBP), well to the east-northeast. Expect outstanding desert visibility, often beyond 50 nautical miles in clear, stable air.