ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to show how the meaning of the Maralinga Royal Commission was constructed through a set of 'homely simplifications'. The mid-1980s trials over ex-MI5 agent Peter Wright's memoirs, Spycatcher, started out as a pretty forlorn effort by the publishers, Heinemann, to head off the British government's curiously bloodyminded attempt to prohibit publication in Australia as well as in Britain. The nationalism which provides the major discursive frame for the reporting of the Maralinga Royal Commission dramatically narrowed the meanings of the inquiry. The clarity of the position that McClelland took against the British allowed the Commission's report, when tabled, to be seen as irredeemably tainted by McClelland's Anglophobia. The 'British bastardry' thesis got more complicated as we watched: 'the colonial cringe is alive and well', he finally admitted as the complicity of a succession of Australian governments in a series of cover-ups stood revealed.
