Operation Buffalo

Marilinga, South Australia was the British above ground testing area for nuclear weapons in the 1950's.

The British Government indescriminatly murdered thousands of Aboriginal People and their own soldiers with reckless and incompetent testing protocols, corruption and and cover ups. It was a serious disaster that by and large has been kept from history books. It was the first nuclear disaster that never happened.

They approach the story with a fictionalized account, that has some dark humor and downplay the genocide. Aboriginal People were intentionally contaminated with nuclear fallout, the studied, dissected and tested.

Read up on Marilinga, then comment. Otherwise you just have no standing to reviwe this series.

It's good, worth a watch, do some homework.

As only one episode has been aired I wonder at the low scores. I may revisit this but at the moment my opinion is that it is good. The complaints are about the fact that they did not get what they expected or decided it would be ahead of watching it. The acting is fine and the mystery is intriguing and I am curious about where it is heading. It shocked and surprised me and kept me interested. The desert is an unforgiving landscape unless you are Aboriginal and understand it. I am happy with what I have seen so far and look forward to episode two.

What a contrast there is among the reviews so far posted about "Operation Buffalo"! Were all these people watching the same show? I have a suspicion that the 1/10 reviews were written by ASIO agents, keen to avoid the scrutiny of the public (as usual). It is a light satire, set in a cringe-worthy period of Australian history in which politicians routinely doffed their caps to Englishmen (who would have happily let them be over-run by Japanese in 1944). There are very serious issues to consider in this series: nuclear war, treatment of aboriginal people in the vicinity of the nuclear tests, lack of protection for the soldiers who "volunteered", political intrigue, blackmail, cover-ups, all of which were true to at least some degree. The Wilcox MP character is clearly Richard Casey who spent much of his career trying to knife Menzies PM. Lachlan MP is based on Philip McBride. Both of these worthless pollies were knighted by Menzies and pushed sideways, leaving Menzies to rule as a dictator. There were times when I laughed uncontrollably in Episode 4 but the humour is generally subtle. There is a dark side to the plot but the writing takes the viewpoint of the soldiers involved and they probably didn't appreciate the danger they were in. Before "This Day Tonight" and the standard of investigative journalism that we have today, ordinary people were unaware of the egregious lack of talent of their leaders. There were Reds under every bed and King Ming was keeping us safe. We were part of an empire on which the sun never set, well didn't set for very long. If you didn't live through this period, you could not appreciate this series fully.

It's sad to see the one star ratings from people with no sense of humour. Very watch able and quite amusing at times. Not for those who want to deny our past.

I found the series a little inconsistent at times, but overall an enjoyable satire. James Cromwell definitely stole the show.