Copyright © 2019 Owen W. Cameron
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For my parents
Contents
Foreword
The Birthday Ballot
A Highland Youth
A Teenage Wedding
The Influence Of Outsiders
Australian Goldfield, Iranian Oilfield
The Rise Of Reza
From Exile, To Return
Bullets Fired, The Shah Spared
A Coup In Parts
The Mahdi And The Shia
From The Mosque To The Market
Enter The Ayatollah
The Khomeini Uprising
Philosophy And Oil
A Letter On A Noticeboard
Return From The Wild Years
Tehran, 1977
1978
Ramadan Rebellion
The Fire Burns
Afterword
Endnotes
Foreword
On 19th August 1978, in the small Iranian town of Abidan on the edge of the Persian Gulf, a tired old cinema began the screening of a popular local film called The Deers. Within the hour, four men had blocked the exits, set fire to the cinema, and sealed the fates of more than 400 people trapped inside.
Mixing solvent and vegetable oil in soft drink bottles, they each bought a ticket, shared a seat in the crowded balcony of the Rex Cinema, and waited for fifteen minutes to slip out and stoke a flank of flames that would link up the lobby, corridors and the main stairs.
So much of that summer night echoed the 1970s: on the drawbridge between the crumbling, unregulated past and the modernity we inhabit today. Abidan possessed the best trained civil fire brigade in Iran, but it counted for little when the janitor and cinema staff couldn’t work the fire extinguishers and fled the scene. The wooden walls were clad in a polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a petrochemical by-product that the industrial town made more than it knew what to do with. Almost certainly more died in their cinema seats from smoke inhalation and the burning PVC gases than the fire itself.
Only hours earlier, the four arsonists had eaten liver kebabs at a local food stand and driven around town looking for a cinema on a Saturday night – seemingly like young men from any city in the world. With one failed attempt due to a poor solvent mixture, and another ticket office shut, they finally found the Rex and tried to raze the picture theatre to the ground.
Abidan had been a British oil town from the days of the earliest discoveries in the twentieth century; an alluvial island flanked by rivers on every side, with palm groves that helped to weather the brutal summer temperatures. Yet in the anarchy of the few days after the cinema fire, rumour and conspiracy theories engulfed the city and the nation.
Many locals suspected the new police chief had ordered the side fire exits to be bolted shut. A woman who escaped saw no bolts on the door, and many today believe the doors were opened inwards due to a design flaw.1
In the din of Abidan’s grief, the truth in the years after the event mattered for little. A judge in 1980 condemned the elderly owner of the Rex (away in Tehran at the time), the cinema manager and several police officers all to death. Another wild theory alleged fire trucks were deliberately sent with no water; several firefighters were sent to jail, despite their efforts to tear down the cinema’s west wall and save whomever they could.2
The actions and response to the Abidan cinema fire laid bare Iran’s simmering anger – it was a nation wrestling with a deep fragility it did not know how to repair or resolve. In that same month of August 1978, an infamous CIA assessment from the Tehran Station to the Carter Administration stated that Iran ‘is not in a revolutionary or even a pre-revolutionary situation.’3 Within a year, events would turn the Middle East on its head, and continue echoing around the world for the rest of the twentieth century, even to the present day.
Revolutions are nothing new. They come from nowhere, and in a matter of days or weeks they have wrought their own course. Over time, they fossilise into history books and family legends. But to live through one, to know that raw upheaval and watch life change in terrifying, uncontrollable ways – what is that like?
The unprecedented extremism of the 1979 Iranian Revolution is only really comparable to its French and Russian equivalents – two events that now stand like totem poles in world history, taught to schoolchildren all over the globe.
Some years in the last hundred have taken on an iconic resonance in our collective memory: 1914, 1929, 1939, 1945, 1989. In contrast, 1979 does not quite join that company; yet there was very much a sense that those who rose to power in that calendar year – Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, Deng Xiaoping and Ayatollah Khomeini – were going to the shape the world.
In 1976, all of them were in relative obscurity. Thatcher was a failed British Education Secretary. The future Pontiff was the Archbishop of Krakow. Deng was an outcast Chinese politician removed from all formal positions. And Khomeini was an exiled cleric, preaching a puritan version of Islam that enjoyed little support anywhere. After the Revolution, Khomeini’s actions shaped America’s hand in the Middle East, and recast the daily existence of tens of millions of people. Yet within a single generation, the average Westerner knows so little about 1979.
For the most unusual of reasons, I have been a fortunate exception. Why? Because my parents lived through it all. In the crosswinds of the mid-1970s, an Australian mining engineer and a Scottish nurse took two strange foreign assignments, relocated to the famous old heart of Persia, and met one night over expat drinks. They fell in love, then found themselves amid the surveillance, explosions, rallies and riots of a nation tearing itself apart. History changes at a pace those living through it are seldom able to grapple with. It is a lesson that continues to be relevant, and one that shaped my parent’s lives forever.
The events of the world most vividly come to life when we are connected to the journeys of individuals. For that reason, this book is both the history of those times and a personal record. My motive to write comes from knowing the end to this tale, and the incredible events that led to my parents’ escape.
I hope some will read this eager to know why 1979 rocked the world, and how a storied, eclectic nation like Iran slipped silently behind a curtain; one that many of us have never peered beyond or understood since. But much more than this, I chronicle my parents’ days of the revolution for the children and grandchildren I am yet to have – so they stride into the world knowing how lucky we all are to be here, how life and death are fickle absolutes, and how t
he world is more impulsive and fragile than we would ever wish to admit.
The Birthday Ballot
On a late evening in March 1966, the car engine hummed, motionless by a quiet bush roadside. It was a turquoise 1956 FJ Holden, the epitome of post-war Australian car-making. The radio crackled with voices and music and the clock counted down to the moment of truth. Leslie John Woolcock sat quietly in his most prized possession and trembled. With a cigarette in hand and the window down, he waited for the verdict.
It was known as the Birthday Ballot. Introduced in 1964 by the Robert Menzies Government, the military conscription scheme was actually conceived on the fear of clashes between Malaya and Indonesia to Australia’s near north, and the chance that Australia’s sole colonial vestige of Papua New Guinea would be entangled in the conflict. Further north, 15,000 US military advisors were already in Indochina, with bombing raids taking place across North Vietnam. Few in Australia imagined the role they would eventually be asked to play.
Between 1964 and December 1972, over 800,000 young Australian men were asked to register for national service on, or just after, their twentieth birthday. From 1966, many watched surreal black and white TV broadcasts as 181 marbles (representing birthdays) were swirled around a machine and 96 were drawn to ensure a nucleus of 4,200 young men twice each year for the next intake of military availability.
On that balmy night of 11th March 1966, my father listened in his FJ Holden to the broadcast on the radio; in a quiet place, alone with his thoughts and fears. The Vietnam War had escalated beyond all comprehension. Worse was to come. For all the guidelines and reassurances about part-time service first in the Regular Army Reserve, he knew the number sent for combat duty was likely to rise.
The sound of balls rotating went on for long, agonising intervals. His birthday was 7th December 1946. He knew the 6th and 10th of December had been called in the prior September ballot – would fate spare him?
Life for Les had already been hard, with the world feeling short of second chances. Raised in a Christian Brothers Orphanage at Clontarf College in the outer bushlands of Perth, his intelligence and talent for numbers had been identified by the teachers at a very early age. With most students at the orphanage destined for difficult, economically uncertain lives, Les became Brother Pat O’Doherty’s great hope. Extra classes and tuition support were provided at every turn, and money was cobbled together for him to attend the well regarded senior school at Aquinas College, closer to town. Every day he pedalled from the orphanage up to school; bags on his back and a feisty ambition in his body. He rowed, sang (poorly) in choir, and spent the long nights working on his love of numbers.
Just before his sixteenth birthday, news came of a Commonwealth Scholarship to study economics at the University of Western Australia. The Brothers who’d put hundreds of hours of extra teaching attention into him were overjoyed. But they would be heartbroken within two years to see Les’s talents squandered. Upon arrival at St Thomas More College, his Catholic halls of residence, he drank himself into a stupor almost every night, crashed a friend’s car into the local Swan River, and repeatedly passed out on the college front lawn. Classes were skipped, exams were missed; and at a time when Australia had just ten institutions and 60,000 students, Les was kicked out of university. He had wasted a tuition-fee free chance to climb from his orphanage beginnings into a better life. When he sat in his FJ Holden listening to that Birthday Ballot verdict in March 1966, just a year after his dismissal from university, the call to fight felt like a punishment, and a spiral to an early oblivion.
The balls continued to tumble and bounce. ‘December… 4th’, said the announcer over the radio. My father gripped the edge of the roof and car door and squeezed them tight like a handlebar. ‘December… 7th’. In that moment, he felt nothing – just a thick, blue chill roll through his chest. He sat alone for a minute or two more, probably cried, and then did something he could never really undo. He reversed the turquoise FJ Holden out onto the late-night road, and he drove for the desert.
Today there is a begrudging admiration for American or Australian ‘draft dodgers’. History has shown the Vietnam War to be a waste of materials, money and wonderfully capable men. But at the time, Australian society viewed such an act as rank cowardice. Some tried to pass it off as the independent thinking many Baby Boomers felt in themselves in the 1960s. But for the vast majority, it was abandoning a duty, when others would have to take that place. As my nineteen-year-old father turned sharply in the sand and drove hard into the deep desert night, he headed away from the world for as long as he needed to.
It would be seven long years before he returned.
A Highland Youth
At the very same moment in the spring of 1966, Joan Cameron was just eleven, and somewhere deep in the wild of her own childhood. But still she looked past the auburn ridges of the Scottish Highlands and wondered what lay beyond.
My mother filled innumerable hours of her youth with the same motion: walking the long uncut passes of her valley glen, alive with flowers and spring life, and watching the wisps of cloud hang in the bright evening light.
As a child, one is totally alone but in the middle of everything. The experience of early life for nearly all of us is of people and motion, of few specific milestones and simply being to the side of the adult world. For Joan, everything was taller – grown-ups, trees, mounds by the river’s edge. It was the markings of a raw experience: days in the open unknown, on a constant wandering adventure.
The Highland way in the early 1960s had barely altered in centuries. In the mornings, Joan’s mother would carry in buckets from a stream down at the slope base, across a single tarmac road that wound its way up Strathkyle, parallel to the Kyle River. Joan watched this ritual a thousand times, and then turned to see the caterpillars and hedgehogs behind the black ridge of the track road to the forest. Soft glowing shadows hit the corners of every home down the valley, with the smell of peat burning in the open fires.
But that centuries-old insularity was ending, as the modern world slowly tapped at the door. She heard Mungo Jerry’s In the Summertime on the general store radio during errands and watched the dresses of the older girls at the local dance slowly rising above the knee.
The local ceilidh music filled out the evening halls, and young boys and girls still went to stand nervously by the door and wait for a chance to dance. Little did they know the rock ‘n’ roll guitars and Beatles haircuts were just a few months away – when young people’s tastes in her small local town of Bonar Bridge would soon be indistinguishable from Boston or Brisbane.
Compared to the dust roads of inland Australia, my mother’s beginnings were like another world. Born in 1954 in the Highlands, she lived in a lodge amid the Firths to the north of Inverness – as good as the top of the world. Dark, snowy winter walks to a school of just fifteen pupils, and long midsummer nights where the sun didn’t set for eighteen hours per day. It was a world of extremes. No running water. No pocket money. A hardworking father who wandered from lumberjack labour to horse caring, to gardening, to any other makeshift job that came with the new season.
In a small bothy, or three-room shack, on a hillside protected by tall pines, there was Joan, her father Murdo, her strict, Presbyterian mother Cath, and a rebellious younger sister, Irene. Something early in my mother’s life made her love to read, and imagine. She devoured Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, and enjoyed nestling by the fizzling candles late into the night.
Her earliest memory of work was as a babysitter for younger cousins when the adults would storm out to search for chicken thieves on the hillside of the small farm. In her early teens, she waded through the water with her grandfather during the salmon runs, feeling the blue chill of the water but loving the sense that nature was everywhere around her.
Joan was particularly fascinated by family emigrants – the generations of poor, uneducated Scots who turned to the seas f
or a new life in America, Canada, Australia and elsewhere. The Highland Clearances were a bitter chapter of Scottish history through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the landowning aristocracy (usually clan chiefs) forced evictions of farming tenants, in some cases literally pushing them to the brink of death and starvation. Entire valleys or ‘glens’ were cleared for sheep farming, and over a hundred years, waves of Scottish families fled their cherished homeland to repopulate the world. And so it came to be in the Scottish blood: always pushing off, rarely returning or looking back. Joan knew she was different to those who tended to stay behind, and so did her own mother.
*
It was now 1971. The mood in Britain was uncertain, with council strikes, rising unemployment, and the lingering sore of Northern Ireland. By sixteen Joan was working waitress and cleaning jobs to save for her entry into nursing college, and at seventeen she’d arrived in Glasgow, still a city of bustling trade and lights, an urban wonder that many of her family had never visited. When her first pay cheque came through, she had no idea what to do with it – a friend from a middle-class family showed her how to open a post office account and deposit and withdraw funds.
My mother kept wishing to expand her horizons, and maintained an interest in the Isle of Skye, where her father’s family could be traced back through the centuries. She would hear people whistling the Scottish folk song Over the Sea to Skye, and it led her to apply for work in Portree, as a companion for a woman in her sixties. It would be one of her first exposures to the tenuous length of life.
The seagulls raced along the harbour in front of the pastel pink and blue houses, and a canary strip hid behind the low cloud in the late breezy chill of the day. The interview was brief. Joan stood at the bedside of the one of the most elegant women she’d ever seen.
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