Long after nuclear testing, Oak Valley is far from the madding crowd ... and everything else

If you’re sick of spending half your life stuck in Sydney traffic or ­nudging elbows with fellow commuters on a crowded Melbourne tram, Oak Valley – once near the site of British nuclear testing –might be the place for you.

Maralinga chairperson and Oak Valley community manager Jeremy Lebois in the remote SA town of Oak Valley.

If you’re sick of spending half your life stuck in Sydney traffic or ­nudging elbows with fellow commuters on a crowded Melbourne tram, Oak Valley might be the place for you.

Just 16½ hours’ drive northwest of Adelaide, Oak Valley and surrounds have a unique boast when it comes to their population.

Each resident of the region has almost 1000sq km of space to themselves. With an official population of 144 – which locals dispute as an over-estimate – the vast 102,860sq km Maralinga-Tjutja region on the SA-WA border is officially the most sparsely populated statistical division in Australia.

Indeed, outside the small township of Oak Valley – home to a school, general store and a handful of houses – you can walk for days in any direction without seeing anybody. The vast region accounts for 10 per cent of the SA land mass and is entirely landlocked.

If it’s solitude you want, this is the place to be. The locals wouldn’t have it any other way.

This is a peaceful and well-­adjusted community that prides ­itself on being free of alcohol problems and having a close connection to the land. While the name of the region recalls the dark period of British nuclear testing – seven atomic bombs were dropped on Maralinga in the late 1950s – the handback of land by John Bannon’s SA Labor government in 1984 was pivotal in letting the ­Aboriginal population live happily on their traditional country.

“The things I like the most are the remoteness, the climate, and the freshness of the country,” Oak Valley community manager Jeremy Lebois told The Weekend Australian. “This is a very important place for us culturally. There might not be many of us here, we think there’s about 120 at the ­moment, but when we have special cultural business there are about 2000 people who come here from all around, from WA, the NT and elsewhere in SA.”

Mr Lebois, 50, says the handing back of native title rights by the Bannon government, and their later expansion by the Rann government, had given the local people “real pride of place”.

“It really is a great place to live,” he says. “I have seen it go from being a place where all the traditional owners originally lived in humpies, but right now we have some homes.

“The only bad thing I would say in being so remote is the price of fuel and food. Petrol at the ­moment is $3.25 a litre. It means we have to think twice before we travel anywhere. We are sort of stuck here, but we don’t mind. The nearest big town is Ceduna and it’s more than six hours away.

“Food is expensive too. Even things like ice cream. If you want to buy one of those Giant Twins, the chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream, you will pay $5.20 for just one. That would get you a whole box of them in Adelaide.” The ­remoteness of the area and its tiny population mean there are few jobs available or even required in the Maralinga-Tjutja region. Aside from the Oak Valley Anangu School, the main employer is the Oak Valley Rangers program, which oversees the protection and management of the environment and places of cultural significance.

“Rangers is the main thing for a lot of Indigenous people because out here it’s pumped into them from a very young age how to survive in country,” Mr Lebois says.