by Anne Summers
I heard similar stories from a couple of other girls and I could not help but be reminded of similar humiliations that I had endured as a teenager. The difference was that I never was subjected to attacks by multiple men, but there was always immense pressure from the man who had asked you out, paid for dinner or even just given you a ride home from a party. Wanting to be liked, thinking giving in to sex would make me popular, the sheer terror of a pregnancy resulting from forced sex; it all came flooding back as I witnessed the misery of these girls as they recounted what had happened to them. I met with a teacher at Ingham’s high school who said: ‘It got that way that when I saw a girl crying at my door, I would go cold all over and think to myself, Oh no. Not again.’
The article caused a sensation. The story itself was scandalous but the way it was reported was also unprecedented. It brought together the points of view of so many of the players, including court and law enforcement officials, as well as the on-the-record comments of alleged rapists and their victims. It contained judgements and commentary that was unusual for newspaper reporting at the time, including my observation that what happened in Ingham was just a more blatant example of what happened to women everywhere. What we ran was raw, and it was recent. We published the story just days after we’d returned from Ingham, running it over four pages of the paper, complete with photographs of the hotel where the trains often started and the courthouse where justice was never dispensed. It became a political issue in Queensland and led to a debate about the state’s rape laws, led by a Liberal Party MP Rosemary Kyburz who championed the girls of Ingham. Somewhat unfairly, since I had been just one of a three-person team, my name was the one that became associated with this story and this persisted for years afterwards. The story was re-reported by overseas media, it was turned into a film, was the subject of documentaries and an extensive number of debates and other forms of follow-up. For years it was synonymous with ground-breaking journalism, and with bringing a subject like rape from the crime blotter and into the feature pages where it would be read by a huge, largely unprepared and therefore utterly shocked audience. It was not a story that people forgot.
Less than a year later, David Marr and I teamed up to report on another gruesome sexual activity.11 This one took place much closer to home, at St Paul’s College at the University of Sydney. But the paper’s introduction to the story compared it to what happened at Ingham, describing it as ‘a similarly ugly custom apparently sanctioned among the more sophisticated and highly educated sons of New South Wales society’.
We reported on the annual valedictory dinner held just three weeks earlier on 3 November 1977. After the formal proceedings—including a witty after-dinner speech by Sydney University Law Professor, former Pauline (as the college’s alumni were known), and later High Court Justice, Dyson Heydon—staff and many senior students retired for their after-dinner ports. It was then, we wrote, that ‘another custom, less formal, but nevertheless traditional, begins.’ The Animal Act of the Year, we reported, has traditionally gone to the student who in the eyes of his peers has committed an act ‘which contravenes commonly accepted social mores in some extravagant fashion’. There were just two nominees: a fellow who had led a team that sprayed cat’s blood on a corridor at nearby Women’s College, and another who had sexually humiliated his girlfriend, also from Women’s College, in July that year by organising a gangbang on her. The gangbanger won. After accepting his trophy, a nickel-plated sports cup, the winner, whose gross exploits had been described in disgusting detail in the nomination, proceeded to simulate sexual intercourse with a life-sized plastic doll. During these proceedings, ‘one of the nominators called out her nickname and she was instantly recognisable as the winner’s girlfriend’. The college reacted immediately and by the next morning the winner and three of his mates had been suspended from college. It was a bridge too far, apparently, for a sex aid to be used and for the ‘mention of a lady’s name in the mess’.
The young woman heard the same night that her name had been called out at the dinner. She was beside herself with shock and outrage. She was from the country and was not a sophisticated person, which was one reason her parents wanted her at Women’s College where, they had assumed, she would be safe. The morning after the dinner, accompanied by her mother, she went to see Barbara Ramjan, the president of the Students’ Representative Council (SRC). At the time of the sexual acts she had confided in several close friends, seen a gynaecologist and sought the services of a student counsellor. Now, several months later, she was making a formal complaint to the SRC. The young woman had thought that perhaps Ramjan, the first woman in more than twenty years to occupy this position, and the now feminist-dominated SRC, might spray-paint St Paul’s College with some derogatory graffiti. Instead, Ramjan contacted me. I went to the City Road offices of the student union, to meet the young woman and to hear her story. At my request, she signed a statutory declaration that set out in gruesome detail what had happened to her that July night when, drunk and stoned, she had sexual intercourse with her boyfriend and three of his mates. She swore that she had consented to the boyfriend but not to his mates. Her mother told me they had consulted a solicitor, a family friend, who had advised them not to press criminal charges; no lawyer in Sydney would touch the case, he said, because of the family connections of one of the students.
Back in the office, we decided that David Marr should interview the young men and the college authorities. The men told David that the woman had consented; they provided details that were meant to support their version. Their interviews were unsworn but David was ‘impressed’ by what they told him. He was not convinced that what happened that night was rape. We repaired to my place to argue about the story. We spent several days at my flat in Elizabeth Bay, that overlooked the boats bobbing on Rushcutters Bay six floors below, going over the materials. We were unable to agree on how to interpret what we had been told. It boiled down to the simple fact that I believed the girl and David believed the boys. Neither of us would budge so, we decided, we needed to make our differing views part of the story. Doing so reflected the reality of so many alleged rape stories; it all came down to he said/she said. In this case, however, there were also other factors at play: the unequal contest between an inexperienced country family and one of the biggest names in Sydney’s legal fraternity, the fact that the university had declined to become involved, leaving St Paul’s College to handle things. The college had only one sanction: expulsion. Given that two of the boys were about to complete their studies within weeks, this was not much of a punishment. In any event, the college was reluctant to do anything because they believed, and supported, the men’s version of events. None of this gave any satisfaction, let alone justice, to the young woman. One thing David and I did agree on was, we wrote, that ‘whatever form of consent may have been given—or assumed—on that night in July, it did not include a willingness to be subjected to public slander’. The young woman’s life was wrecked. She left university and went back to the farm. Our story, which had at its heart the sexual abuse and public humiliation of a naive young woman, reverberated around Sydney but not much changed. In 2016, Fairfax reported similar activities at St Paul’s.12 What happened to the young woman in 1976 is now called ‘slut-shaming’ and social media today provides Paulines and other young men with potent new tools such as a Facebook ‘pro-rape page’ but the college’s attitude remained atavistically protective of such abusive behaviour. St Paul’s at first announced it would not cooperate with an inquiry into the culture of college life, instigated by the university, by now willing to take some responsibility for what happens on campus. In June 2017, however, after yet further allegations of sexual abuse were made against students at St. Paul’s, the college announced it would join the review being conducted by former Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick.13
I had been living in Sydney for seven years by 1978, and by now knew the town well. After starting out in Newtown, then Balmain, Annandale and
Leichhardt, I had decided the eastern suburbs were where I wanted to be. I liked Kings Cross, which was full of strip clubs and other questionable joints but which also had good food shopping, and for the rest of my time in Sydney I would live a short stroll away in Elizabeth Bay. Partly through living there, I now knew lots of people on both sides of the law and prided myself on being ‘in the know’ about what a dirty little town Sydney really was. But at times even I was astounded at just how crooked the place was. It was common knowledge that many police were corrupt. I’d been to the Forbes Club and Club 33, illegal casinos in Darlinghurst that were always packed with punters, where the drinks were free and where you could always spot a copper or two enjoying a good old time. I was pretty sure I’d seen the Police Commissioner at the Forbes Club one night. I also knew the rumours that some police actually organised bank robberies, making the crims do the dangerous work of breaking in and blowing the safes, and then taking most of the proceeds for themselves. But while we ‘knew’ this, there was no proof. And while there was no proof, the Sydney corruption mill ground on, seemingly unstoppable.
But in March 1978 I managed to get hold of a 64-page transcript of a record of interview, conducted between 18 July and 17 August 1971 between a number of NSW senior police officials and Shirley Brifman, a well-known prostitute who had operated a series of brothels around the area where I now lived. Her most famous one was located in a fancy apartment building, The Reef, in Ithaca Road just steps from my front door. In her record of interview Brifman had made sensational allegations against 34 named police officers. She had paid regular protection money of $100 a week to two cops, Michael Phelan and Freddy Krahe, and had had dealings that were illegal with more than 30 others. In return for these payments, Krahe and Phelan were supposed to protect her business and keep away any ‘gunnies’, as non-police standover men were known. Krahe was especially important; he ensured that each time she changed address, which was often, her phone number 35 3837 which, she claimed was known to ‘millions of men’, moved with her. He arranged for a complaining neighbour at Ithaca Road to be burgled; he often stored stolen goods at Brifman’s place and, perhaps not surprisingly, he regularly availed himself of Brifman’s sexual favours. This cosy little arrangement had come to an abrupt end in early 1971 when Brifman was charged with procuring a thirteen-year-old girl for prostitution. It turned out the girl was her daughter. Events soon spiralled out of control. As Michael Duffy and Nick Hordern have pointed out, the appointment of a new head of the CID, to replace the corrupt Don Fergusson who had suicided in February 1970, signalled the end of this blatant corruption.14 An enraged Shirley Brifman was hell-bent on revenge. It came in the form of a live ABC television interview, where she made explosive allegations against police in NSW and Queensland. Not long afterwards, she was sitting down with senior NSW police, answering 320 questions about the allegations. It was rumoured at the time that Shirley Brifman had named names. Lots of them. Which is no doubt why she ended up dead in her Brisbane apartment in March 1972, a few days before her trial on the underage girl was about to begin. (She was originally from Brisbane and had begun her sex trade career there.) The media said her death was the result of a heart attack, or a drug overdose. There was no autopsy or inquest so no one could be sure but the word around police circles in Sydney was that Freddie Krahe had flown north and, with the help of a Brisbane detective by the name of Tony Murphy, had gone to Brifman’s apartment and forced drugs down her throat. Now, six years after her death, I had a copy of her record of interview.
It was every bit as sensational as rumour had had it, but it was also highly defamatory. The 34 police officers named were each accused of specific offences, from accepting bribes, to colluding with wealthy homeowners to rob their houses in return for a share of the insurance, to accepting money from underage girls in return for not informing child protection services, to organising bank robberies, and, of course, accepting free sex at the brothel. How to get these allegations into print was going to be one of the biggest challenges the paper had ever faced. There was really only one way, and that was to get the protection of parliamentary privilege for the documents. If a politician was prepared to read the transcripts into Hansard, they would attract privilege, and the media could report their content. There was no chance of any NSW parliamentarian doing this. Too many of them either had questionable connections themselves or would have been prevented by their parties from such a provocative attempt to upset the existing order. However, in South Australia, Peter Duncan, the young and radical Attorney-General in the Dunstan government, and a friend of mine since our days at the University of Adelaide, was known to be anxious to curtail the activities of Abe Saffron, the well-known Sydney crime figure, who was trying to get a foothold in Adelaide. In March 1978 Duncan tabled in the South Australian Parliament three documents: 1. Abe Saffron’s NSW police record, 2. A record of police interview with two Sydney journalists, Tony Reeves and Barry Ward relating to the disappearance and suspected murder of Juanita Nielsen, a community newspaper publisher who had been campaigning against development in Victoria Street, Kings Cross, and 3. The Brifman transcript. In our article, published on 13 March, the National Times wrote the tabled documents ‘might perhaps best be described as the Saffron papers’.15 The connection with Saffron in each of these documents was the by-now former policeman Freddie Krahe who, Duncan asserted in the SA Parliament, ‘is a well-known business associate of Saffron’. Krahe was suspected as being instrumental in the disappearance and murder of Nielsen, and of course the ex-cop had a starring role in the Brifman tapes. The tabling of these documents helped Duncan to create a climate of apprehension about Saffron; he was able to use this, together with his announcement that the government would oppose the issuance or renewal of all Saffron’s liquor licences, to negotiate the crime organisation’s exit from South Australia. He agreed to give them a year to wind up their operations.16
With the transcript tabled, we had some cover but would it be enough to satisfy our lawyer and Fairfax management? Any misjudgement could be catastrophically expensive for the company if 30 or more cops were able to sue, but that was not the only danger. Someone from the paper had had to call Krahe for a comment on his association with Saffron (which he denied), so he had prior warning that we were intending to publish. We were pretty sure that Krahe had killed at least two women. It was decided my byline would not appear on the story. The pages were subbed and laid out, with a larger than usual bold headline, ‘POLICE CORRUPTION ALLEGATIONS’, but the story was back in the paper, on page 8, and was not puffed on the cover. Frank Hoffey arrived at around 5 p.m. on Friday. He handled defamation for Stephen Jacques, Fairfax’s legal firm, and was a frequent presence in our office. He was a New Zealander, an affable sandy-haired man of about 40 whose genius was he could always provide the legal reasoning that allowed our story to be published. Unlike many other defamation lawyers I subsequently worked with, Hoffey was creative rather than cautious. He shared the journalist’s enthusiasm for getting the story into print and his role was to ensure it was legally defensible. ‘The form of words was ours, the law was his, and the published version the result of our negotiations with him,’ was the way Max Suich later described how we worked. ‘What we sought from Frank was his “form of words”, advice that if the complainant sued, it could be successfully defended in his opinion’. Hoffey had great confidence in his ability to do this and he was rarely wrong. But this night he was worried. The Brifman transcript had been tabled as distinct from being incorporated in Hansard, which meant the contents were not part of the official parliamentary record. That, Hoffey judged, reduced the privilege. None of us dared contemplate that there might be no privilege attached to the documents. There was also the problem that the National Times was a national newspaper, so whatever privilege existed might be confined to South Australia. Would that prevent these NSW-based cops from suing? We went backwards and forwards for hours. Hoffey said it was dicey and, for once, was unwilling to take responsibil
ity. ‘Management would have to make the call,’ he said.
Graham Wilkinson, the editorial manager, had the head of the International Press Association at his house for dinner when Hoffey rang. He had had a few drinks, which perhaps made him less cautious than usual but nor did he want to appear in front of his international guest to be anything less than enthusiastically promoting freedom of the press when it came to approving a story that alleged extensive police corruption in Sydney. He gave us the all clear. I think I virtually collapsed with elation; it had been a fifteen-hour day. The next day I would turn 33 and on Sunday the National Times would hit the streets with one of the most important stories it had ever published.
There was scarcely a ripple. I could not believe that our naming these cops, and the crimes they had committed, was not a major scandal. But of course no other media would follow up as they knew the legal pitfalls. Premier Neville Wran did ask his Police Commissioner Mervyn Wood for a report, which came back with the finding that all the allegations had been investigated. When we asked the Police department what had happened to each of the named cops, we were given ‘preserving privacy’ as a reason for declining to answer. Frustrated, we decided to push back. Two weeks later we ran an article that described the corrupt activities of each of the 27 cops who were still alive. This time David Hickie and I shared the byline. We did not name the cops, instead using a letter of the alphabet for each one, but there was no doubt some of them were identifiable from the descriptions contained in the earlier article. The first writ arrived on Monday, from a man who was now a chief superintendent in the Commonwealth Police. He delivered it in person to our offices, to Hickie and myself, along with a solicitor’s letter seeking to restrain us from publishing any further material about him. Abe Saffron’s son also rang the paper, just to let us know we were on the radar. I was concerned about the writs but I was more worried to learn that Freddy Krahe was now also an employee of Fairfax. He’d been hired by the Sun, apparently, to help them gather material to defend a defamation case brought by Darcy Dugan but there were rumours that other parts of the organisation had called on him to do strong-arm work. I was uneasy, even a little scared, but told myself that surely Krahe would not harm another employee. But then several senior Fairfax executives told me I should not be living alone (I was). Suich said he would pay for me to move to an apartment somewhere out of the Cross for a month or so. It was then I realised that I did not have the stomach for this particular type of journalism. I was already angry and upset that Whitton had not offered me the deputy editor’s job when he was slated to replace Suich who was leaving in a few weeks. I had been led to believe I would get the job but, without warning, it was announced Paul Kelly from our Canberra bureau would be the deputy. I decided that it was time for me to do something else. Andrew Clark told me about a fellowship for journalists in the United States that he had been awarded some years earlier and encouraged me to go for it. If I was successful, it would mean nine months travelling around America. It sounded like a CIA-funded ploy, but I didn’t care. I applied.