The Dark Truth About Australia's Rocket Town

Subscribe for more stories from Australia's forbidden places:    / @beyondtheoutbacka   In 1946, Britain and Australia drew a line across a third of a continent and started firing rockets down it. At the near end they built a secret town called Woomera, where every resident needed a pass, every house belonged to the government, and nobody was allowed to keep a camera at home. At the far end, near Eighty Mile Beach in Western Australia, they built a second town to catch a nuclear missile that never flew. This is the story of the Woomera rocket range, the largest land-based test range in the western world. It's the story of Blue Streak, Britain's cancelled intercontinental missile, and of the Europa rocket that failed ten times out of ten. It's the story of how Australia launched its own satellite, WRESAT, in 1967, and how Britain reached orbit from this desert with Black Arrow and Prospero three months after cancelling the program. It's also the story of the doctor and the anthropologist who warned in 1947 that the range would cut straight through the Central Aboriginal Reserves, were called communists for saying so, and what happened in 1964 when a rocket came down exactly where they said it would. And it's the story of what Woomera became afterwards: the American early-warning base at Nurrungar, the notorious Woomera Immigration Detention Centre, the hypersonic missile tests happening there today, and the Kokatha traditional owners who are still finding weapons in the sand. Woomera, Maralinga, Emu Field, Talgarno, Nurrungar, Len Beadell, Walter MacDougall, Charles Duguid, Blue Streak, Black Arrow, Prospero, WRESAT: this is Australian outback history most people were never taught. Did you or your family ever live at Woomera? Do you think the range should still exist on Kokatha land today? Tell us in the comments.