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Chapter 1: What mysterious event occurred at Merewether High School in 2003?
ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music and more. Hello, I'm Annabelle Crabb. Now, I wouldn't say I'm a hoarder exactly, but I do hang on to things. It's not just you and me. Australia's oldest library is crammed with stuff that isn't books. Terrible paintings, old menus, human hair. Is this history or hoarding? Come and have a rummage through the story of us told by our stuff.
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This podcast was produced on the lands of the Wabakal and Gadigal people. G'day, Matt Bevan here. This is If You're Listening. Today we're taking a break from the news cycle to bring you something a little bit different. This is part of a live show we did last month at the Newcastle Writers' Festival, which we called If You're Listening Declassified.
I was joined on stage at Newcastle City Hall by my producers, Pat Sunderland and Adair Shepherd. Each of us brought original stories that had never been heard before on the podcast or by each other. Stories that we hadn't been able to squeeze into the news cycle. You'll hear Pat and Adair's stories next week.
But first, here's the story I told about the truly bizarre sequence of events that led to my first ever appearance on live radio. I was standing in the drama room at my high school and hyperventilating. That didn't usually happen to me in that room.
For better or worse, I've never had a problem with stage fright, but I was 14 years old and I was about to go on live radio for the first time in my life. The presenter talking to me on the phone before the segment was very reassuring. Just describe what you can see, okay?
Don't guess, don't speculate, don't tell me anything you've heard from your friends, just tell me the stuff you can see with your eyes. Actually, that's incredible advice, and I've been trying to use it ever since, but it didn't help calm me down, even though the presenter giving me this advice was my dad. I should explain how all this came about.
My dad, Paul Bevan, worked at ABC Radio from the mid-1980s until 2018. For most of that time, he was one of the most prominent presenters on the ABC's local radio station in Newcastle. And in 2003, he was doing the 8.30 a.m. to 11 a.m. morning news shift. That morning, the 23rd of September, 2003, a strange news story was breaking at a local school.
Fire trucks, ambulances, and hazmat vehicles had been seen at Merritha High School after reports of a radioactive incident. This is exactly the kind of story that ABC Local Radio exists to cover, and yet nobody was able to explain exactly what was going on.
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Chapter 2: How did a 14-year-old student become the source of information during the incident?
The first thing that happened was they evacuated the block and all the classrooms around it. And currently there's some science teachers around the area and some fire guys. Fire brigade.
Fire brigade, sorry.
And they're standing outside the prep room and not much activity at the moment. Can I pause there? I love that you were jumping between a child's cadence and when the commissioner of police gives a press conference. Currently there are some individuals in the area and some fire guys. I don't know. Yeah, yeah.
So these days, my dad and I have very similar voices and are often confused for each other while we're talking on the phone. But at the time of this incident, my voice had not broken. That plus the stress I was feeling as I cast my eyes frantically across the scene for things to describe meant that I was speaking at least two octaves higher than my current voice.
And I was just, I was nearby, I was in the drama rooms and I was able to watch them kind of talking to students and things. and they evacuated the entire block, so upstairs and downstairs, and that's four classrooms in total.
Now that's the first actual information that I had provided that wasn't already obvious. Mind you, the ABC reporter who had been sent to the scene hadn't told the listener whether or not the police rescue squad was wearing belts. I went on to say that the kids that I'd talked to at recess weren't aware that anything unusual was happening.
But then I broke the only describe what you can see rule by saying this.
Yeah, I was talking to some kids out the back.
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Chapter 3: What advice did Matt's father give him before going live on air?
out in the backfields, and a lot of them had no idea that it happened, so it's being kept pretty quiet at the moment. Okay.
Now, that was speculative, and, to be honest, slightly conspiracy theory adjacent.
I like how you refer to them as, I was talking to some kids, like, you're not one of them.
Yeah, that's right. Dad, perhaps wisely, decided that that was enough at this point and he said goodbye.
Okay. Well, that's good to hear and we'll get the official story a little bit later. Matt, thank you very much.
That's all right.
Bye-bye. My son, Matt, there. It's good to know from my own personal perspective that he's okay.
So a school assembly was called soon after this. No new information was provided, but the principal said that she was disappointed that some students had been talking to the media. And now that's gonna probably happen if you don't speak to the media yourself. As the day went on, more information came out about the incident at Merriweather High that day. This is what ABC News reported.
Emergency service crews were called to Merriweather High School around 10.30 a.m. AEST after the discovery of the material, which has been confirmed as cesium-137. It is believed a student picked up the substance from a nearby road and carried it into the school to show his science teacher. The radioactive material is being sent to Sydney for disposal.
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Chapter 4: What was the initial response from emergency services at the school?
A radiation hotspot excited but nervous the team called headquarters. Asked him to repeat, you found it. And when I said that, everyone in the room went quiet. But they still needed to confirm it was the exact capsule they had all been searching for. Pretty confident, but we needed that serial number and that took quite a while. A convoy has transported the capsule to a confidential location.
While the investigation continues into exactly how the capsule was lost in the first place, this team's job is done.
So my favourite part of that story is that the guy's like, we just need to make sure that this wasn't another random radioactive capsule on the side of the road.
Can you imagine? They're checking it like, no, this is someone else's season.
This is the wrong one. Put it back.
So, a month later after that, in Thailand, another lump of caesium went missing from a power station. Following an extensive search, investigators traced it to a metal recycling plant. It seemed that someone had taken it, stolen it, and sold the metal container with the caesium inside for scrap.
Bags of dust from the recycling plant's furnace were found to have high levels of radiation in them, though it was determined that the plant was not a health risk. Now, the thing is, there is a very, very good reason why authorities are extremely keen to trace where these canisters end up, and it's because of something that happened in Ukraine.
Sometime in the late 1970s, a cesium-137 capsule was misplaced at a quarry near the city of Kramatorsk, which is in the part of Ukraine that currently wishes it was a bit less interesting. It was lost in the stones the quarry was sending off to be turned into concrete. The concrete made its way into the city of Kramatorsk, where it was turned into this apartment building. Yeah.
The story's a bit less fun from this stage. The capsule was embedded in the wall of apartment number 85 on the fourth floor. Over the course of the 1980s, people in apartment 85 began mysteriously dying. First an 18-year-old girl, then her 16-year-old brother, then their mother. All died of leukaemia. The remaining family members moved out and someone else moved in. Their teenage son died.
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