by Alex Nicol
‘Nic, he’s back!’ Devina was obviously frightened this time, and I wasn’t much better.
I tried to reason with him. ‘Why us? What do you want?’
He made it clear in short order that we were fools—worse, traitors—and that our actions in thwarting him would have serious consequences. ‘I need,’ he glared, ‘to talk with President Bush on a matter of national importance.’
Where’s a policeman when you need one? Devina was sidling away, and my task was clearly to calm him and get him to leave.
My response—‘President Bush is a busy man and we may not be able to make contact’—was swatted furiously aside. He shouted that I was deliberately trying to prevent him from passing on vital information, and he became more and more agitated. Obviously, one wrong move now and our cheerful cop would get his wish and be able to pin an assault charge on him.
I tried again. ‘Perhaps if you told me … if I interviewed you, for example, I could pass the information on as soon as I can make contact.’
That really set him off. What sort of clearance did I have? How did he know that I could be trusted? This was just a ruse to prise information from him.
There were still no signs of flashing lights or the friendly sound of sirens. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I took him into a ‘dead studio’. There was no chance that he could go to air, but he could speak into a microphone and see dials move.
I put a fresh tape on the recorder and set it in motion. Tape was spooling. The VU meter was fluctuating encouragingly. He was in touch with President Bush. I closed the studio door.
Devina had made contact with the boys in blue. They were busy on another call at present, but would be around as soon as … etc. Great.
Fifteen minutes later, our agitated friend emerged from the studio a changed man. He was calm. He seemed rational. The president, I was informed, was ‘grateful for my assistance and asked that his thanks be passed on’. I was suitably impressed. Then he warned me that the tape must be guarded with my life.
‘Straight into the studio safe,’ I assured him. He insisted on shaking hands. He thanked me again and walked calmly away. I erased the tape.
When the police came, I told them that we’d been able to talk him down, but that it had been scary.
‘Told you, mate. Gentle as a lamb. Wouldn’t hurt a fly. Good as gold.’
The next week he came back. We repeated the pantomime, and when he left, I played the tape back. You never know—James Bond resorted to all sorts of subterfuge to get messages back to M. But it was gibberish. Unless our learned friend was conversing in code, President Bush could sleep soundly.
He came back again. I won’t say we were enjoying it, but we were no longer in fear of our guest. We’d learned the secret: you calmed him by allowing him to speak into a microphone for fifteen minutes, and he went away satisfied. It was a nuisance, but he was no longer a nuisance to anyone else. We were performing a public service.
The next time he came back, I went to arrange his studio—but, no, this time was different. Those tapes, the ones he’d recorded, he must have them. Now!
The old signs of mounting anger were back. He paced. He became agitated. I swear I could smell his anger, or perhaps it was my fear. The tapes, of course, were long gone, erased as soon as he’d finished his ‘broadcast’.
‘They’re not here,’ I began. That wasn’t the right answer, and now he was really angry. ‘I just didn’t feel they were safe.’ I was making this up as I went along. ‘I sent them to head office for safekeeping.’
And it worked. He slowed. ‘To Sydney?’ he demanded.
‘To Sydney. You understand … top-secret stuff like that … junior officer like me.’ Oh, I laid it on.
‘And they got there safely?’
‘We sent them by courier in a sealed envelope.’
I was convincing. He calmed. He actually congratulated me on my foresight, and we exchanged the now requisite formal handshake of co-conspirators and he left.
I vowed never again. Gentle as a lamb or not, something had to be done about him. But, for now at least, problem solved.
Two days later, the ABC’s managing director, David Hill, wanted to talk to me. He had a very big, very smelly, very angry man in his office demanding some tapes. Would I like to explain?
Sometimes you can be too clever.
ON THE OUTER
I knew I’d done it—I’d committed a faux pas in the pub. But what did I do?
‘Two beers, please,’ I had said.
That seemed a reasonable request. It was well after opening time. It was hot. We’d been working. Why the glare from the barman?
The beers hit the counter.
I passed one to my helper, who’d turned up unasked to lend a hand as we were unloading camera and recording gear into the pub. Nice bloke—chatty, friendly. A bit diffident about accepting my invitation to have a beer, but here he was.
Then it hit me. He’s an alky. It’s a small town. Everyone knows he’s having a battle to stay off it, and I’d just dragged him into the pub and put a beer in his hand.
He wasn’t chatty now; I couldn’t get a word out of him. He downed the beer and shuffled out.
‘Don’t bring him in here again. He’s barred.’ The barman was not happy.
What do you do in that situation? Apologise? Ask what he’d done? Shut up?
‘Sorry. Didn’t know.’
‘He won’t be round here long.’
There was no one else in the bar, and it was obvious the barman was desperate to tell me the story. My helper was the local cop.
‘You barred the local cop?’
It turned out there’d been a big fundraiser the previous weekend. Gymkhana out on the claypan. Raising money for the bush nurse. Things are tight—the drought. No one’s got any money but … the bush nurse, you know.
‘He never put his hand in his kick all day. Got pissed. We locked him in the back of his paddy wagon and left him there.’
The locals had taken the law into their own hands. They’d left him in his own paddy wagon overnight on the claypan. He’d had to sit there and listen while they cleaned up after the big day.
It was summer. It’s a wonder that he was alive when they let him out.
The barman was right that the local cop wouldn’t be around much longer. Either he’d apply for a transfer, or a word to the wise back in Dubbo would see him moved. You need to be a diplomat to enforce the law in a small community.
THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’
Sir William Gunn will address a meeting at Walgett. It’s the late 1960s. Once-mighty wool is on the slide. This talk of a floor price scheme is dividing the graziers, and the great man—at this time the chairman of the Australian Wool Board—is making one appearance only. The meeting will be a beauty. It has to be covered.
Orange to Walgett is over 400 kilometres by road, so it’s a case of me finishing my breakfast session and driving to Walgett. Attending the meeting. Interviewing Sir William. Driving back to Orange. Editing the material and writing the story. Then putting it to air the next morning. A long day, but exciting.
The world is turning over. Mother England is joining something called the Common Market. The days of an Australian pound for a pound of wool are long gone. Country that has never before seen a plough is now going over to wheat. Stock water is being eyed for its irrigation potential. Farming consortia are planning mini irrigation districts in country that has only ever grazed cattle. Mysterious explosions sometimes destroy those new banks that are being constructed so as to divert water. There are stories everywhere. It’s a great time to be a journalist in the bush.
But there was a price to be paid. A once-hungry world was awash with food. Australian farms were producing too much wheat, and they had only one buyer, the Australian Wheat Board. Its response was to regulate who could deliver wheat to them and how much they could deliver. Johnny-come-lately growers could make their own arrangements.
The young
man from Nyngan was angry, and I was his target. He’d sold his sheep—the mob that his father and his grandfather had so carefully bred. He’d bought a tractor, a plough and trucks; he’d learned to grow wheat, and now he couldn’t sell it. He depended on his ABC—on me—to warn him about a world that was changing too fast for him to keep up with. I’d failed him. He didn’t know whether he could hold onto the family farm. How did I feel now?
My job came with responsibilities.
In the 1960s, Australian farmers had been represented by a plethora of organisations. In New South Wales the main groups had been the Graziers’ Association and the United Farmers and Woolgrowers’ Association (UFWA). If you attended a meeting to discuss any one of the dozens of issues facing farmers back then, you’d find the graziers sitting on one side of the hall and the UFWA members on the other side. The trick for any journalist was not to sit at a press table, but to take a seat down the back with the grumblers. That’s where you heard what the mob thought. That’s where you picked up the good copy.
Would-be rural leaders quickly learned that in a changing world they needed to speak with a unified voice and to learn to use the media. Some were good at it; others were shaky, but unafraid to ask for help. Yes, they’d ask a journalist for help in how to ‘get across’ in an interview, and the best of them were quick learners
This new generation of farm leaders, these agri-politicians, brought about a change in our relationship with our audience. The cosy ‘We’re All Part of the One Family’ approach was gone. The rules were changing. We journos needed to treat these people as professional politicians and give them the respect they deserved, or we’d pay the price.
Bending the back. The things you do to get a story.
There was no issue to better illustrate the change than the wide comb dispute in the early 1980s.
In a nutshell, Kiwi shearers had traditionally used a shearing handpiece with a slightly wider comb than their Australian counterparts. It made great sense. Most sheep ‘across the ditch’ were crossbred, plainer-bodied sheep than the Australian merino, and therefore easier to shear.
When there was a shortage of shearers in Australia, the Kiwis filled the gap. They brought their wide combs with them and discovered merinos weren’t so hard to shear after all. With their wide combs, they could get through more sheep in a day than the Aussies—and so the call went out from the union to ban the wide combs.
Why? Think of the staff in a shearing shed as a triangle, with the shearer at the apex. The number of sheep he can shear in a day will decide how many shed hands are employed. If he can shear more sheep with new technology, then either the graziers should employ more shed hands or they should pay the same number more money to work harder. That was the union’s logic.
If you know your Australian history, you’ll remember that both the Australian Labor Party and the White Australia policy grew out of the great shearers’ strike of the late nineteenth century, when shearing sheds were burned and armed troops were used to control the strikers. We still sing a song about a bloke who ‘jumped into the billabong’. The bush was divided at that time, and now the wide comb dispute was dividing it again.
Woolgrowers and shearers were part of the 2CR family. The dispute raged bitterly over the station’s broadcast area. Our job came with responsibilities—including the responsibility to cover both sides of the story.
I went and listened at farmers’ meetings and at AWU meetings. I’ve got to say that the more colourful copy came from AWU leaders. ‘My members,’ one rep told me, ‘will stick like shit to a blanket, and you can quote me.’ He knew what he was doing. Both sides knew what they were about. I was a tool to be used.
That dispute grew very nasty. Each side sent me invitations to be present at the next ‘spontaneous’ outbreak of violence so that I could see for myself what thugs those graziers/shearers were. Better yet, could I bring a television crew? Things got very ugly, and I remember remarking to one particularly agitated individual that, unlike on TV, when you shoot someone in real life, they tend not to get up again.
The age of innocence was long gone.
LET’S DRINK TO THE NEXT MAN TO DIE
I met many ‘celebrities’ during my time as a journalist, and few left a lasting impression. The drive was always to talk with ‘real’ people.
In the late 1980s I received a brief that matched perfectly. I was asked to provide the ‘pilot’ for a special project for the Australian War Memorial. It aimed to tell the stories of ordinary people—the ‘real’ people I so enjoyed talking with—and how they performed in extraordinary circumstances, in this case the Second World War.
This gave me the opportunity to talk with Philip Opas. In many ways he was, in 1936, an ordinary young Australian. Ten years later he was anything but. He began his military career as a sergeant in the RAAF. He rose to the rank of air commodore, and subsequently enjoyed a distinguished career as a barrister.
The story he told me began as the story of a boy living in an Australia that most of us now wouldn’t recognise. His life was shaped by his experiences during a terrible war, and by an extraordinary metamorphosis that brought those experiences full circle.
It was a story that spanned some 45 years, and in many ways paralleled the changes that have happened in Australia.
His story could well have been titled Innocence Lost and Recovered.
Philip Opas had a vivid memory of the night the Second World War was declared. He painted a picture of a then sleepy Australia.
On a Sunday night, 3 September 1939, he and his younger brother rushed excitedly into the city of Melbourne to join what he estimated were ‘a hundred thousand people wandering around’.
‘I’m not sure what we expected,’ he remembered. ‘Perhaps for bombing to start that night.’
The two brothers joined a curious crowd that walked down to the German consulate; they were disappointed to find it dark and closed up.
Both tried unsuccessfully to join the armed services the next day. There must have been 100 different reasons young men and women volunteered for the forces at the outbreak of the war, but few could have had the insight of the eighteen-year-old Philip Opas. He was studying Law, and International Relations was a crucial element in his course. He had read Mein Kampf, Hitler’s manifesto, and for some time he had felt it was inevitable that Australia would go to war.
Why?
‘Because England would be involved, and if England was involved, it would be unthinkable for Australia not to be involved,’ he told me.
He was a fourth-generation Australian—yet he remembered his mother and father, who had never been outside Australia, referring to England as ‘home’. He confessed that when, as a young law clerk, he attended the Supreme Court to hear the chief justice formally announce the death of King George V, he had cried. ‘I felt I’d lost a grandfather figure,’ he recalled.
Philip had obviously been a well-educated and thoughtful young man. But he told me that, until that time, he had never met a foreigner and never heard a foreign word spoken; in that, he would not have been exceptional. Australia, as he was to find to his cost, was a sleepy, ill-prepared outpost.
Before this time, he’d had training with the 46th Infantry Battalion in Melbourne, a militia battalion training volunteers, but now when he tried to enlist he found the battalion headquarters locked up. A couple of days later, when the adjutant made an appearance, he was told, ‘We’re not actually sure we’re at war yet.’
Fed up with waiting, Philip and his brother joined the RAAF. Eighteen months later, when he was well and truly in action in New Guinea, he received a stiff note from the 46th Infantry Battalion’s headquarters asking him to show cause why he should not be fined £5 for not attending training.
Philip and his brother both became air crew. One of them flew in the Battle of Britain, and eventually died somewhere in the Western Desert; the other flew against the Japanese in the Pacific, and counted himself very lucky to survive the war.
&
nbsp; I was surprised when Philip told me that he’d done his training with the RAAF in New Guinea. It was there he acquired his navigation and gunnery skills. In the early days of the war, he flew reconnaissance missions, searching for submarines ahead of troop convoys. Even then, he remembered an air of unreality about the whole business.
Australia’s first air defences in the area were four Qantas Short Sunderland flying boats requisitioned by the government and equipped with First World War–era machine guns. Wives were allowed to join their husbands, and Philip remembered his early days in New Guinea as ‘a wonderful fifteen months honeymoon’.
But Australia was about to pay a heavy price for our unpreparedness. In 1941 our modern aircraft arrived: Catalina flying boats and Wirraway fighters. Even at that stage, the Wirraway was obsolete. There is only one recorded incident of it having a victory over a Japanese Zero fighter.
As a sergeant, Philip flew on the new Catalina flying boat—which he described as ‘a sardine tin with a crew of eight, 2000 pounds of bombs and 1000 gallons of fuel. A beautiful aircraft when used for the purpose it was intended. It was great at recognisance and at mine-laying, but when we had to carry out a masthead attack on ships armed with anti-aircraft guns, we were a lumbering sitting duck.’
Trying to put his experiences into sporting parlance, I suggested to Philip that it sounded like a second-grade team playing in first grade.
‘Third,’ he told me. ‘Third. We were third-grade.’
I asked what every one of us who had never been tested, as he and his mates were, must wonder: how did you get into that aircraft every morning, knowing the probability was that you would be killed that day?
He began by saying things like, ‘When you’re young, you believe you’re invincible.’ He talked about ‘whistling in the dark’ and making sure that you ‘never got really close to anyone, because the blokes you had breakfast with mightn’t be there at lunchtime’. And then he sang me a ditty he’d sung in the mess: