"It made me aware that Maralinga had dropped off the consciousness in Australia," says Sheehan.Ĭromwell, while unfamiliar with this chapter of Australian history, recognised its universality. Producer Vincent Sheehan, who recalled the damning McClelland royal commission into the tests in the mid-'80s, says he was sold on the concept after a fellow producer, Tanya Phegan, a generation or so younger, voiced shock at the details: the colonial exploitation, Indigenous displacement, ecological disaster, and a government's betrayal of its people.
JAMES CROMWELL SERIES
But a lot of the really bad history actually happened", the series strikes an odd tone, playing coyly with the dreadful absurdity of British aristocrats stationed in the remote Australian desert, toying with radioactive bombs like toddlers in a sandpit. Opening with the sly header, "This is a work of historical fiction.
Written and directed by Peter Duncan ( Rake), Operation Buffalo is set amid the British nuclear tests at Maralinga in South Australia in 1956. "But, because they don't know my politics so much, I'm not such a liability," the 80-year-old chuckles. Don't make a wave! That's the whole idea. "Now when they get down to the smaller parts, the last thing they want is somebody who, when they have an interview like this, suddenly starts to talk critically about something – the President, our dysfunctional system, the end of the world – because somebody might publish it and that screws the whole thing up.
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