Ground Zero, Maralinga, in the middle of the sprawling expanses of South Australia’s outback, is about one and a half-kilometres in diameter, and it’s empty – more empty than the seemingly empty desert that surrounds it.

Robin Matthews has been coming to the spot for 41 years, first as a construction worker rehabbing the site, then out of his own personal interest, waiting for signs of life. So far, nothing.

“You can’t really see it, all there is is a concrete plinth and everything,” he says. “If you look around the area, you can distinguish – there’s no bushes or trees have grown back, even though it’s been nearly 60 years.

“It just destroyed all the goodness in the soil for about a kilometre and a half all around it.”

Now, with the permission of the site’s traditional owners, he’s hoping to bring about his own revival – through atomic tourism.

In the early 50s and 60s, the British government conducted a nuclear weapon testing program at Maralinga, in the state’s remote north – a suitable spot, the British claimed at the time, because it was isolated and uninhabited (after they had evicted the local Aboriginal community).

The tests included detonations – mushroom clouds – and smaller but far-more-contaminating experiments with burning plutonium.

Wreckage from the detonations and hundreds of thousands of tonnes of radioactive dirt was excavated and buried in trenches on the site by allied servicemen, and a large area was fenced-off. And then everyone walked away.

Or, at least, officially they did. It would take a royal commission in 1985 to recognise that Maralinga was far-from uninhabitated when the British decided to use it as a testing ground. In fact, the area formed a key part of the traditional lands of the Maralinga Tjarutja people – who were eventually awarded compensation.

Those lands were handed back in 1985, and in 1995 after a second try at remediation (the commission finding the first clean-up attempt didn’t work very well) Maralinga Tjarutja people resettled the area.

Matthews, the site manager, has been planning his tourism project for a while now. The idea’s not even that novel these days – atomic tourism is a recognised industry, with Chernobyl’s exclusion zone a major tourist drawcard for the northern Ukraine.

It’s taken Matthews a while to convince the traditional owners, despite being married to one of them, that letting tourists on their land has merit.There was a fair bit of initial reluctance, he says – perhaps understandably, given the group has had to fight so hard to get their own land back.

“They were just concerned, they didn’t really want people coming in, walking all over their traditional land – fair enough too,” he says.

Tourists still require a permit from Maralinga Tjarutja to travel through the area, but Matthews has permission to give them out to people on the tour.

He thinks the venture can be good for the Maralinga Tjarutja. He hopes the project will be profitable enough within five years to generate a revenue stream for the Maralinga Tjarutja Community Council to use on community-building projects.

“As the older people passed away, and you’re talking to the younger generation, they’re in their 40s or 50s, and look I’ve got to be honest they understand the value of money.

“They know you can’t run cattle out here or things like that. So the only other option to make money out of this place is tourism. There’s so many people interested in this place.”

The venture, which he’s calling Maralinga Guided Tours (a new name is said to be pending) has only been running for the last year, and already almost 400 people have come through – a figure Matthews is delighted with and expects to increase.

“People come up and they book in their accommodation – we’ve got accommodation dongas out the back.

“Next day we take them out from 8.30 to about 4.30… Like a full-day guided tour, take them down to the airstrip and then 37 kays out to the bomb site.”

Matthews plays tour guide, taking travellers to the various sites across the territory.

“There’s a lot of the old memorabilia here from years ago, the 50s and 60s, at the village itself. Some of the old buildings.

“We show the history of the place before it had been set up, when the explorers came through here. It’s well worth a good look around, and so far everybody’s thoroughly enjoyed it.”