If you are a long-time listener, you would have heard me talk about falling down numerous Trove rabbit holes. In the bicycle face case, the nuclear testing case and more recently the black death in Australia case where I found many a ratchatcher’s obituary. I even remember one wild Friday night where I went on to YouTube and watched Trove tutorials, and that evening ended with me staying up past 9pm and making corrections on the scanned newspaper articles. Yep, I warned you it was wild.

If you do not know what Trove is, it is a digital archive that is run by the National Library of Australia and it has a massive online database of newspapers, magazines, pictures, books, letters, diaries, video, audio and much more. Sometimes the records are on the site and sometimes there might be a link to another state library where the record can be found digitally.

Today, I am going to tell you about how a Trove deep dive helped me to solve the mystery of Chernobyl and case of the missing cheese.

If you don’t know about the Chernobyl disaster, it was an accident in a nuclear power plant in 1986 and is considered the worst nuclear disaster in history. For some context 1986 was the same year that Top Gun, Crocodile Dundee and Ferris Bueller’s Day off were released at the cinema.

If you want to read about it further, I recommend a book by Adam Higginbotham Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster.

When I first watched the gripping HBO Television series Chernobyl, I had this flash back to when the disaster happened, and I distinctly remember that as a direct result of the nuclear explosion, we could not buy my favourite cheese from the health food store. In my defence, I was 11 years old and a very fussy eater, so clearly not being able to get my favourite cheese must have really done a number on me. Just for the record the cheese was a very mild Swiss cheese with those air bubbles in it. It was so creamy and delicious, and I would go to the fridge after school and just cut chunks off it to snack on. 

Anyway, I was perplexed as to why the beautifully filmed, incredibly emotive Television series about a nuclear disaster that had tragic consequences on the people of Chernobyl, had me thinking about cheese.

So, where does one go to solve a Chernobyl cheese mystery from 1986? The Trove digital archives.

One of my favourite features of the search function is being able to select a decade and then a specific year. For example, if I type in “Chernobyl”, there are almost 1000 entries in the Newspapers section. The best thing to do is click on “See all newspapers and gazette results”. Why? Because, this gets you to the “refine your results” section on the right-hand side of the page. This is where the real magic happens!

You can choose the state the newspaper was published, the name of the newspaper, even the type, if it is an Article, an ad or a weather notice and then to the pièce de résistance, the date range. It is divided into decades, so I could see that the 1980s had the bulk of the articles about Chernobyl with more than 500. Once you select the decade, you can then narrow it down to the year of publication. My cheese loss was a short term effect so it seemed only natural to choose 1986. And that narrowed my search down to 284 articles.

Another sneaky little tip, especially if you know the date that something happened on, is to then sort the articles into “Earliest First”. This is a really great way to get a sense of the timeline of how events unfolded. Even through the disaster happened on the 26^th of April 1986, the very first report in the Canberra Times about Chernobyl was not until the 30^th of April and it mentions that there was a fire at the Nuclear power plant that damaged one of the reactors. Also that high levels of radiation had been recorded in Finland and Sweden. It was not until the next day that the Media firestorm broke out. One article referred to the Chernobyl disaster it as “The China Syndrome”. This was a reference to a 1979 Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas movie about a journalist who exposes a cover up at a nuclear power plant.

I feel like I have lost focus, back to the missing cheese. I came across, an article from the 4^th of May 1986, 9 days after the disaster that explained everything. The article was titled, “Australia to seize food.” And here is what it said.

“Food from areas which might be affected by the Soviet nuclear reactor disaster would be impounded by the Australian Customs Service… All food consignments leaving affected countries on or after April 25 would be impounded under Customs regulations.” The Minister for Health Dr Blewett then explains that it would be some months before potentially affected processed foods such as, dairy products, small goods and preserves, would be arriving in Australia.

There you have it! Because of the nuclear fallout, European countries, had potentially tainted dairy products, ban and this 11- year old Swiss cheese fiend, was unable to get her fix. And that is why I have a strange association with Chernobyl and cheese.

This Kelly Chase, on the Case.

If you like hearing Aussie voices talking about history, I have a podcast recommendation for you. How did it come to this? Podcast, takes a current news item and traces its origins back through history to answer the question, “How did it come to this?” One of my favourites was Episode 7: Our Pod is girt by anthems. For my overseas listeners, if you are confused by my use of the word “girt”, it is one of the archaic lyrics of the Australian national anthem it means “surrounded by”. We don’t use it in our everyday vernacular, but I suppose I could. I have four adopted pets and I am constantly girt by pet fur. I don’t know, I’ll keep trying. But check out the podcast How did it come to this? If you want to find out more about how the past and the present  are connected.