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The Limits of Sacrifice: Locating the nuclear “veteran” in Australian military mythology
This paper analyses the ways in which both the Australian government and nuclear “veteran” groups have contested official remembrance of military involvement in the British nuclear tests. Drawing upon developing research for my PhD candidature, the paper suggests that the “forgetting” of Australian nuclear “veterans” is the result of the state’s careful management of inconvenient military bodies, rather than an unjust mistake of past governments. Between 1952 and 1957, the British and Australian governments collaborated on five series of nuclear tests on Australian soil. The British brought the technology and scientific expertise, while the Australians provided over 8,000 military personnel for logistical support. Despite being responsible for the daily running of the test program, these personnel have repeatedly been denied veteran status by successive Australian governments. Former nuclear servicemen have instead been grouped with civilians as “participants” of the nuclear tests. This designation represents the driving force behind the existence of several nuclear “veteran” organisations, which campaign for the recognition of their members’ work as military service and their inclusion under veterans’ benefits legislation. However, Australian nuclear “veterans” themselves struggle to define the parameters of their desired recognition and even dispute one another’s eligibility to veteranship. I ask, therefore, how historians might proactively counter deliberate systems of official forgetting, beyond pointing out the casualties of their ongoing application.
1 April 2026, 11am AEST
Burwood: C2.05.01
Waurn Ponds: IC1.108
Zoom: Click here
Max Billington is a PhD candidate (History) at Deakin University and a History Honours (First-Class) graduate from the University of Melbourne. Their thesis concerns the role of Australian military personnel in the British nuclear testing program. Max is a recipient of the 2025 National Archives of Australia Postgraduate Scholarship, winner of the 2023 Royal Air Force Museum’s Undergraduate Prize and the author of a chapter on the erasure of Australian atomic veterans in the forthcoming edited collection, Challenging Anzac.
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