States, and gaining access to information pertaining to the design and manufacture of US nuclear weapons. Development A railhead and a quarry were established at Watson, about west of Ooldea, and Beadell's bush track from Watson to Emu became the main line of communications for the project. It ran north to the edge of the Nullarbor Plain, then over sand hills and the Leisler Range, a mallee, spinifex and quandong covered escarpment, rising to an altitude of . Range headquarters, known as The Village, and an airstrip with a runway were built near the peg. The track continued north over scrub-cover sand hills to the Teitkins Plain. There at a point that came to be known as Roadside, a control point was established for entry to the forward area where bombs were detonated. The UK MoS engaged a firm of British engineering consultants, Sir Alexander Gibb & Partners, to design the test facilities and supervise their construction. The work was carried out by the Kwinana Construction Group (KCG) under a cost-plus contract. It had just finished the construction of an oil refinery near Fremantle, and it was hoped that it could move on to the new venture immediately, but the delay in obtaining Cabinet's approval meant that work could not start until mid-1955, by which time most of its work force had dispersed. The need to create a new work force caused a cascading series of delays. Assembling a labour force of 1,000 from scratch in such a remote location proved difficult, even when KCG was offering wages as high as AU £40 a week (). The Australian Government elected to create a tri-service task force to construct the test installations. The Australian Army's Engineer in Chief, Brigadier Ronald McNicoll designated Major Owen Magee, the Commander, Royal Australian Engineers, Western Command, to lead this task force. He joined a party headed by Lieutenant Colonel John Blomfield, the MoS Atomic Weapons representative in Australia, on a site inspection, and then flew to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) at Aldermaston in the UK in a Royal Air Force (RAF) Handley Page Hastings to review the plans. These were still incomplete, but it gave Magee sufficient information to prepare estimates of the labour and equipment that would be required. The job involved the erection of towers, siting of instrument mounts, grading of of tracks, laying control cables and power lines, and construction