PROFILE: MAXINE GOODWIN
ICAN AMBASSADOR
By Jesse Boylan
April 16th, 2025
No special preparations or precautions had been made with a view to entering the cloud*
As the youngest of three children, Maxine Goodwin had a happy childhood. She grew up in a close-knit family in southwest Sydney in the 1960s and 1970s during a time of great social, political, and cultural change. Her family would enjoy meals out together, visit the grandparents on the weekend, and spend long days at the beach during the summer. Her mother, Delphine, was a housewife, and her father, Max, worked full time as an electronics avionics engineer. Maxine’s parents had met on a dancefloor in Amberly, Queensland, while both serving in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). After they married, Delphine had to leave the Air Force as she was no longer allowed to serve, which upset her, as she had loved being part of it. Delphine was smart and became involved in all sorts of volunteer work to keep herself engaged while raising young children. “She was really into computers,” said Maxine. When computers were not even generally in people’s households. She was quite the go-to for everybody if they had issues with those things.”
When Maxine was nine, her father was diagnosed with lymphoma. “He’d apparently been sick for many years,” said Maxine. “He had obvious lumps visible under his chin and in his neck. But doctors were dismissive, and no one was interested in doing anything about it until my parents insisted on having the lumps removed, and that’s when he was diagnosed.” For the next several years, Max went in and out of remission, and in the years prior to his death in 1981, stories about nuclear veterans who had served at Australia’s atomic testing sites had begun to surface in the mainstream media. Avon Hudson, who was deployed to Maralinga in South Australia as a RAAF mechanic, blew the whistle on national television in 1976 about the fact that plutonium was still buried at Maralinga, delaying the return of land to the Anangu Traditional Owners. Other veterans were also starting to speak out because they were seeing their mates get diagnosed with cancers and die in their thirties and forties. Maxine’s parents, too, began questioning: could Max be sick from his work at the Montebello Islands?
Operation Hurricane, October 3, 1952, Monte Bello Islands, Australia
“I knew he was in the Air Force, but I had no idea about his experience,” Maxine said. Delphine knew that he had served at Montebello, but “it wasn’t until the later stages of his illness that he mentioned anything about it,” said Maxine. Realising that his experience at Montebello could have caused his cancer, Max told his family that he had been in a plane that had flown through a radioactive cloud. “That’s all he said,” Maxine recalled. “That was all we knew until he passed away and then my mum connected with the Australian Nuclear Veterans Association [ANVA],” who helped the family gain more understanding about the nuclear testing program at Montebello and what Max might have done while stationed there.
After Max died, Delphine applied for compensation with Veterans Affairs, and Ric Johnstone, then President of the ANVA, helped guide her through the process. Delphine was told that her initial application was rejected because “it was possible, but not probable, that his illness was caused by his potential exposure to radiation,” said Maxine. “We certainly know a lot more now in hindsight. I would say 99% chance it probably was [caused by radiation], there’s no other history of cancer in our family on either side.” Delphine appealed the decision in 1983 but was eventually advised to close the application. Over the years, Delphine joined several class actions alongside the ANVA, but all of those were denied as well.
ANVA Index Cards, Balaklava, South Australia, 2015. The Australian Nuclear Veterans Association documented servicemen’s posts and their illnesses associated with their work.
By Jesse Boylan
Well we’ve had many die since we’ve started going to Canberra to the consultative forum, and I’ve taken all of ’em [the names] down and presented ’em to the, meetings, and said what’s the deal with the widows of these people, and how come… Oh I get upset down there… because they’re only interested in lookin’ at the people who are dead, how many are dead, what they died from, and was it cancer? And I say to you, stuff the dead, we can’t help them, we can only help the widows. And the way they’re going, they won’t have to pay out much because they’ll be all dead.
Ric Johnstone in an interview included in ‘British Nuclear Testing in Australia: Performing the Maralinga Experiment through Verbatim Theatre’, by Paul Brown
Journal & Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales, Vol. 139, p. 39-50, 2006
“When Mum first started this process applying for compensation I was still at high school,” said Maxine. “I was doing year 11 and 12 and we were dealing with the fact that my father had passed away and my mum was now a single parent.” Delphine had also become the sole carer of the three grandparents who lived nearby. “While she’s dealing with the loss of her husband, she’s also taken on this new role as carer for all the grandparents. And I knew all of this was going on in the background that she’d applied for compensation, but I didn’t really understand fully what it was.”
Following Max’s death, Maxine studied paramedicine and worked as a paramedic for eight years, putting the cause of her father’s death to the back of her mind. It wasn’t until twenty years later that Maxine began to want to know more about her father’s experience at Montebello. “I started researching the story more and I applied for his records through the National Archives, and I actually found the two compensation files,” she said. The files documented what unit Max had been in, as well as what day he had arrived at Onslow in Western Australia. “It talked a little bit about what his role was. It was really interesting looking at how the Australian government solicitor was quite… you could sense his frustration with the authorities who didn’t want to provide information to assist him to investigate the claim. You can read through those files and sense the arrogance of certain individuals that are trying to just block the natural process of giving a widow due compensation.”
While raising her own children, Maxine continued to scour the archives and read as much as she could. Through this research, Maxine began to piece together more of her father’s story. “He was a radio technician, he’d only just finished his apprenticeship, which was a new scheme for the Air Force,” said Maxine. “Within weeks he was sent to Onslow.” Max’s role was to service the Dakota Aircraft and fit it with special equipment for testing, such as filter canisters and equipment for measuring radiation. “My understanding is that his unit was sent to Onslow [to monitor] for radioactivity along the coastline,” said Maxine. “My mum always said she didn’t understand why he was in the aircraft because he was ground crew, but I think it’s pretty clear that he was in the aircraft because the equipment that he’d fitted was being used on the day after the test to monitor the coastline and so perhaps he was there to ensure it worked.”
Max Ward (third left front row), Onslow, Western Australia, 1952.
Maxine will never be able to know if her father knew that he and his colleagues were about to fly through a radioactive cloud. “To me it sounded like it wasn’t expected to happen,” said Maxine. “But when I look at the archives and what I’ve read since and the Royal Commission findings, it seems pretty clear to me that they were deliberately looking for that cloud. They weren’t just monitoring the coastline; they flew at different altitudes and for several hours to look for that radioactivity. And it’s pretty clear from any sort of information that the scientists have reported on that day after the test, that was the sole purpose of their flights between Onslow and Broome.”
Paul Grace’s book, Operation Hurricane: The story of Britain’s first atomic test in Australia and the legacy that remains (2023), describes in detail the activities of aircraft and ground crew in the lead up to, and on the day of, the Hurricane test on October 2, 1952. It’s possible that Paul Grace’s grandfather, Lieutenant Ron Grace, was piloting the exact plane that Maxine’s father was in:
Flight Lieutenant Grace was flying Dakota A65-99. ‘The return flight from Broome to Onslow was planned direct over the sea’, he wrote in response to a 1982 Department of Health survey. ‘At a point approximately halfway, Mr Hale reported high levels of Radiation being recorded by his instruments and declared that we were in the Atomic Cloud.’ The Dakota had flown straight into an invisible concentration of radioactive particles over the coast near Port Hedland, sending the ultra-sensitive radiac device right off the scale.
Although Maxine will never get to hear her father’s own story, she can connect to others like it. By searching the ANVA website, Maxine found a diary section of the page with posts written by children of veterans, who had very similar experiences to her own. She left a comment on one of the posts and put it out of her mind. A year later, Maxine received a call from Ellise Barkley, a theatre producer who had found the comment on the ANVA website. Ellise was working with Paul Brown, a playwright, on a verbatim theatre project called Half a Life, about the experiences of British and Australian veterans who had served in the British atomic testing program. Paul visited Maxine and Delphine to record their story. The experience of Paul sitting down and listening to them was validating. “[It] helped mum and I come together to explore this story,” Maxine said. “When we watched the play [and] listened to our own words being spoken back to us from the actors on the stage, it was kind of a bizarre experience, but it was also really powerful because… you always know this story, and it’s so mysterious and the government continued to say, ‘oh, this never happened and you were never exposed,’ and ‘there was never any risk,’ but here’s a group of actors on stage relaying the story of multiple people all pretty much saying the same thing. So, you kind of walk away thinking ‘I’m not making this up.’”
Maxine went on to be involved with another of Brown’s productions called Nuclear Futures, a community arts project, which linked artists with atomic survivor communities in a series of interconnected projects. Paul and Maxine went to the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association conference in Manchester in the UK, where she met with politicians and UK veterans and their descendants. “That was a big turning point for me,” said Maxine. “Meeting all of those descendants and also meeting veterans who had the similar role to my dad and some of the widows who sat down with me and told me why my father would have been in the plane; they were filling in the gaps and saying he most certainly would have been in the plane to ensure the equipment was working.” Those encounters helped Maxine put all the pieces together. It was also through Nuclear Futures where Maxine met nuclear veterans Avon Hudson and Doug Brooks, as well as nuclear survivors and their descendants from the Yalata Aboriginal community in far-west South Australia. “The community arts have been really important in having an opportunity to tell [my] story without having to justify it with compensation claims and class actions,” said Maxine. “It recognises the story exists and it’s one that needs to be told. [It’s] a positive way to continue telling the story without creating that negative energy that [you get left with] when you have these experiences.”
Ten Minutes to Midnight, Balaklava, SA, 2015, Nuclear Futures
Photo: Tania Safi
Avon Hudson in the Adelaide Advertiser as part of the Nuclear Futures Project, 2015
In 2023, Maxine was invited to participate in an atomic survivors delegation to Canberra organised by ICAN Australia. Joining the trip was Karina Lester, a Yankunytjatjara Anangu woman and second-generation nuclear test survivor, June Lennon a Yankunytjatjara, Antikarinya and Pitjantjatjara woman and nuclear test survivor, and Doug Brooks, a nuclear veteran from the Montebello Islands tests. “It was a special couple of days,” said Maxine. “The story’s often been told as a veteran story or an Aboriginal story, and obviously all stories are valid and need to be heard, but, in respect to politicians, [to hear it] as a united group was really important. We have this unique shared experience, even though each experience is an individual one. And considering we were talking about some very personal and emotional experiences, it was really lovely to just hang out together and hang out with the ICAN team and learn more about the TPNW [Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons].”
Maxine’s mum passed away in 2018, which prompted Maxine to question how much more she can gain from continuing to research her father’s story and from continuing to participate in class actions. “What’s the purpose for me? Do I really continue with this?” she asked. “Going to Canberra helped me realise, well there is a reason to keep talking about it and it’s the future, not the past, and I think that’s where I’m headed now, to be honest.”
Maxine Goodwin interviewed on ABC Canberra during the atomic survivors delegation, 2023.
Atomic Survivors Delegation, Canberra, 2023. Photo: Jesse Boylan
An ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) ambassador’s role is to promote the campaign’s mission to achieve universal adherence to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and advocating for nuclear abolition. This involves raising awareness about the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons, engaging in advocacy, and supporting ICAN’s work to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons.