From Alice Springs, you drive 500 kilometres north to Tennant Creek, located almost right in the centre of the Northern Territory. There you’ll be collected by Sam, Joel and Rajesh in a dust-covered four-wheel drive.
Joel plays a lot of Linkin Park on the car stereo. You know this because you see the name on the stereo display, not because you can hear it. The vehicle is not so much driving as lurching half-airborne along the red dirt track from one corrugation to the next, rattling its contents—toolboxes, hard-hats, passengers—like nails being shaken in a tin can. It’s a very noisy way to arrive at one of the quietest places on the planet.
You drive like this for 40 minutes, passing a herd of wild cattle, running alongside you in a dusty blur of shoulder blades and horns, until you get to a sign that reads: The Australian National University.
You are a very long way from Canberra.
The Warramunga Seismic and Infrasound Research Station of the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences is here because nothing much else is. With no traffic or city noise, no mining and no ocean waves, it is geologically quiet. When there are footsteps hitting the ground around the station, they can be detected. When a wild brumby gallops past, it’s detected.
And when a nuclear bomb is tested in North Korea, here, in the desert, it’s detected.
Because Warramunga is actually part of a high-tech global network for monitoring nuclear testing.