Australia's Nuclear Secret

I'm now heading back to the 1950s

to discover another top-secret programme that took surveillance to a whole other level

Alice Springs in 1955 couldn't have been further from the world stage

But unbeknownst to its inhabitants, it was about to become involved in the biggest geopolitical crisis of the century

This little man-made hump in the landscape is very intriguing. In fact, it's more than intriguing

This was at one time of top-secret international importance because it was here where they used to monitor

who'd got nuclear weapons and whether or not they were testing them

The business end was down there, of course. Harold, you were in the US forces at the time, weren't you

I was. So what was it exactly they were doing down there? This vault holds a set of seismometers

that is used to detect earthquakes and nuclear explosions, and it's a part of the United States Atomic Energy Detection System

With the nuclear arms race hotting up, US Army General Dwight Eisenhower urgently needed a monitoring system

that could detect atomic explosions anywhere in the world. Around 20 detection stations were set up

including one right here in Alice Springs. And it really was secret, wasn't it

Yes. We'd meet people downtown and they'd say, what do you do out there? Oh, we're a weather research station

Yeah. And even today, a lot of people around here don't know what this place was

No, they don't. Can we have a look inside? We absolutely can. The ladder on this side

Am I going down first? I guess you're going down first. It's very rusty and a little bit scary

These old bones of mine don't work like they did when they were 20

Here we go. In here. This is what we got How are you going Harold Oh getting there What would have been in these great big container things The seismometers themselves were in here

I believe this was the vertical motion detector. That one there. And one of these was north-south horizontal motion

the other one was east-west. What was it actually that they detected

They detect ground motion. The actual ground that you're standing on never stands still

You don't realise it, but it's always moving. But essentially, that must be the earthquakes or nuclear explosions. Yes

That was our job, to record everything and then determine if anything was the nuclear

events that we were looking at. In the early 60s, the Russians in the US was testing like every other day, it seemed like

But as time went by and nuclear test ban treaties were signed and moratoriums self-imposed were

there and all that, you get half a dozen a year, maybe, I would suspect, of Russia

The U.S. had their own share also. In retrospect, was it worth it, all that work that you did

Was it worthwhile? I think that we made it a safer place for mankind, and I think we're still doing it

The organization still runs, it's still doing its job, and they do it really well

You know what I find so extraordinary? 40 years or so ago, all that was cutting-edge technology

and now it's as redundant as a cannon from the Crimean War

It's just a fast pace our history goes now, doesn't it? It's doubtful that Harold's equipment would have detected it

but for my final time travel, I'm going from the 50s to the 70s

when a political earthquake took place that shook Australia to its very core

I've come to Canberra, the heart of Australian government, to expose a 40-year-old secret

The 1975 dismissal was a constitutional ménage à trois, pitting PM and Labour hero Gough Whitlam against the ambitious but weak Governor Sir John Kerr and the autocratic Liberal opposition leader Malcolm Fraser These days it a well story

but I'm about to uncover a political conspiracy that, had it been known at the time, could have led to a very different ending

Jenny, this is a story that's always absolutely fascinated me. What happened on that day itself

If you look at the newspaper coverage of the early morning, of November 11th, 1975, there was a sort of a lull around Canberra

There was an expectation that the political crisis, which had been in existence for the previous month

with supply bills blocked in the Senate, had actually lifted because Whitlam had decided he would call a half-Senate election

That was the political decision that would actually resolve the crisis situation

But Kerr jumped the gun and sacked his government. Whitlam, though, had an ace up his sleeve

He went to the House of Reps and moved a successful motion of no confidence

in the now caretaker Prime Minister, Fraser. Malcolm Fraser should at that point have resigned

But a second thing happened, which you might see as a second dismissal, which is that Sir John Kerr, the Governor-General

refused to receive the Speaker of the House of Representatives and refused to accept that motion of no confidence

calling for Whitlam to be reinstated. Instead, he dissolved both Houses of Parliament

And, of course, that led to an immense crowd gathering outside this very building

And that, of course, gave us one of the most memorable and imitated speeches in Australian politics

All together now... Well, may we say God save the Queen, because nothing will save the Governor-General

Why did John Kerr do this? I mean, he was just supposed to do a fairly simple job

of representing the Queen of England, wasn't he? Well, what we now know

and this has only been recently discovered in Sir John Kerr's private papers

is that at the time, unknown to the Prime Minister, a member of the High Court of Australia, Sir Anthony Mason

was meeting with the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, regularly discussing the possibility of dismissing the government for two months prior to the dismissal actually taking place I would have thought that some of this stuff could have gone to the High Court so that would make the High Court judge complicit in what was going on

Well, that's right, and for all those reasons it was absolutely extraordinary

that not only that they were meeting, but that they were meeting without the knowledge of the Prime Minister

I mean, the breach of protocol, the breach in the separation of powers

the really questionable moral decisions on a personal level that were made by deceiving a Prime Minister in that way

is really, I think, extremely significant. And who knows? If the public had got wind of what Kerr and Mason were up to

then the impropriety of the Governor-General's behaviour may have tipped the dismissal into being politically unacceptable

No wonder they both wanted to keep it under wraps all these years. I mean, the outcry of the Queen

whatever presumed to remove an elected government in Britain, can only be imagined

and yet in Australia it was a sort of reassertion of that divine right of kings

to remove an elected government and to replace that government with a party that had actually lost the previous two elections

So, yes, I think there's no doubt now that it should never have happened, but it did happen, and so it sits there now as an unfortunate precedent

that could technically occur again. Well, let's hope it never, ever does

I'm with you on that, Tony. Thank you. Bye-bye. And on that note, my time travels through the world of political intrigue and deception have come to an end

On this journey, I've witnessed how state secrets can influence everything from the destiny of governments and empires to the paths of ordinary people's lives

I've discovered the extraordinary lengths the powerful will go to to deceive the public

but no matter how hard the authorities try eventually the truth comes out which makes me

wonder what secrets are governments keeping from us now