Unfettered and Alive

by Anne Summers

  ‘Lent,’ he explained, as he refilled his glass.

  Otherwise it would have been whisky.

  It was our first meeting so it was formal and uninformative, but I did get to experience the very entertaining ways of Australia’s Defence Minister. A blowfly had buzzed-in through the open doors and annoyingly zoomed in on us. The minister made a few ineffectual attempts to shoo it away, but when that did not work he picked up a heavy, serious-looking book. Within seconds, mashed fly embellished the cover of The Strategic Basis of Australian Defence Policy, the government’s most secret document, the one that prioritised actual and possible threats to the country and assessed whether military might need to be deployed to meet them. Killen placed the book back on his desk. I looked at it longingly; if only I could have got my hands on that, I thought, I could have got more out of this meeting than a few laughs.

  I never was able to simply ring a minister, let alone the Prime Minister, and get a rundown on what had happened that day in cabinet, as I was sure some of my colleagues did, but it did get easier. By the end of my first year, I felt I was getting on top of the political scene and was feeling more confident about the job. I was also starting to overcome my doubts that I would never be able to reconcile myself to the manipulation politicians engage in. These efforts seemingly reached new levels under Fraser. While the press was grateful to David Barnett for introducing transcripts of every one of the Prime Minister’s utterances, some of his other innovations were less welcome. He initiated the door-stop, today a standard device used by all politicians, but then exclusively a tool for the Prime Minister to create a few minutes of television footage or a radio sound-bite on the subject he wanted to emphasise that day, without the burden of having to answer any questions. In my first three years in Canberra, Fraser did not give a single full-scale press conference where he submitted to questions on subjects of the journalists’ choosing. Even worse than the door-stop was the T-fac, the television-only opportunity, where Barnett allowed the cameras in to film the Prime Minister’s response to what he determined was the subject of the day. These T-facs were resented by print journalists, who had no comparable way of getting access, but in the end it was the television reporters themselves who killed them. The likes of Laurie Oakes, Peter Harvey, Channel 7’s Laurie Wilson and the ABC’s Ken Begg were experienced journalists who wanted to report—and give commentary—to air, not just provide narratives to images of the Prime Minister’s choosing. The practice ended with the Fraser government.

  I was finding the political process increasingly fascinating. I was well-placed to observe the feints and the ethics of politics as well as the behaviour of the players themselves. It was instructive to observe their fear and anxiety. Men who had been barristers or businessmen, at the top of their game, men who had run organisations or been figures of substance in their communities were very different people when they got to Canberra and had to calculate their standing in an entirely different kind of hierarchy. The skills needed to survive, let alone advance, were not the same as those they had used to succeed in the past, and many of them were palpably lost and diminished by their continual angst about their political prospects. Maybe at weekends they were still top dog at home in the paterfamilias role, but in Canberra a surprising number of them became supine, like schoolboys, needing to please, always looking-out for how they were doing. The anxiety became palpable when a ministerial reshuffle was imminent. Then it was ministers calling journalists. ‘Have you heard anything?’ they’d plead.

  I stayed on the perimeter, observing and judging, writing about it as best I could. I never became a player. But that did not mean I escaped the ire of these men (there were very few women politicians then) who had so much skin in the game. Paul Keating once left an angry three-page handwritten letter on my desk. Keating, who was the shadow spokesman on Minerals and Energy, was a frequent visitor to our office as we were the only paper that covered these issues, but he was also a big factional player and he was annoyed at me for a political piece. Whether it was because I got it wrong or—perhaps more damagingly—got it right, I can no longer remember. But you were never left wondering what he thought about your journalism. It was the same with Malcolm Fraser.

  The phone had rung at home early one morning. The Prime Minister was on the line.

  ‘Your story is wrong,’ he said.

  That day the paper had splashed with my exclusive budget leak. I did not have the entire budget document as Laurie Oakes did one year, but it was a respectable-enough scoop. A cabinet minister had given it to me. Even this long after the event, I do not feel I can name the source and thus reveal the motive for the leak and hence my confidence that it was indeed from the budget due to be delivered in a few days’ time. Now here was Malcolm Fraser telling me I was wrong. What did he mean? That I was wrong to publish it? That my source had misled me and given me wrong information? And what did he want? It was all over the front page of the country’s national financial daily, already published, already read by thousands of people. If I was to retract—and I certainly did not think I should—it could not be done until the next day’s paper. The news cycle was a lot more leisurely then. There were no websites on which to post updates or corrections. But, straining to hear what Fraser was really saying, I concluded that this was essentially an exercise in intimidation. He could easily have had David Barnett call and tell me I’d been led astray. That he chose to ring himself, and that he had no specific course of action to demand, suggested he just wanted to warn me off.

  It was not my first clash with the Prime Minister, but the previous one had been far more spectacular because it was protracted—and very public.

  In January 1980 I had been the Financial Review’s political correspondent for almost a year. When I’d taken the job I had agreed to Max Walsh’s suggestion that I not be Bureau Chief as well. I could get a better and faster grasp on the political scene, he’d advised, if I did not also have the responsibilities of the six-person bureau, of supervising the paper’s overall Canberra coverage and managing its staff. Instead, he appointed John Short, a former Treasury official who had recently joined the paper’s Canberra bureau to cover economics and trade issues. It will never work, I was told by my new gallery colleagues; the political correspondent needs to have the added authority of being Bureau Chief if you want to be taken seriously by the government and by the bureaucracy. I was prepared to put up with the reduced authority while I learned the job. But it quickly emerged that political factors were in play, that John Short, who for very good reason had been given the nickname ‘Swotto’, was very close to the government and was being favoured with political stories that should have been mine. It all came to a head on 24 January, a week before the Prime Minister was due to leave on a big overseas trip, when Short informed me that I would not be able to get on Fraser’s plane. It was unusual for the political correspondents of major news organisations not to accompany the Prime Minister when he travelled, so I confronted David Barnett, who would only say,

  ‘There is no room on the plane for the Financial Review.’

  However when Walsh rang a short time later, Barnett told him that if another person from the Financial Review were to apply, the decision might be reconsidered. If the Financial Review was able ‘to squeeze a story out of the paper, we can squeeze Summers off the plane’, Barnett said. I had been outraged a few days earlier to discover that Fraser had given Short an exclusive one-on-one interview. The convention was that such interviews only be given to political correspondents. I persuaded Walsh that in my opinion this was a clear example of Short, with the active collaboration of the government, trying to undermine my position. Walsh did not publish the interview.

  I heard later from people in the Sydney office who overheard the phone call, that Walsh called Barnett a ‘grey little scumbag’ and a ‘cringing toady’. Max Walsh was from the Paul Keating school of invective; indeed as two boys who had both grown up Catholic and made it out of working-class suburbs of S
ydney to the top of their respective professions, the two had a lot in common. They were now also good friends. In May 2007, Walsh hosted a large gathering of former colleagues and other friends at his home in Sydney’s Mosman to celebrate his 70th birthday. It was similar in its range of attendees, its utter informality and copious amounts of alcohol consumed to the annual parties Walsh had hosted each year, starting in the late 1970s and lasting for around seven years, to celebrate his deputy Fred Brenchley’s getting the all-clear on cancer. At one of these parties Elisabeth Wynhausen and I had decided we needed to cool down and had discarded all of our clothes and jumped into the pool on the front lawn. I’d been mortified to recall the next day how I had insouciantly handed my watch and earrings to Jennie Suich, the wife of my boss Max, for safekeeping. Fortunately Jennie was as unflappable as she was unshockable. In 2007 we were all a lot older and this party was free of such incidents, but it was memorable for an intervention by Paul Keating who decided the party was a little too informal and that someone needed to say something about the man whose birthday we were celebrating. There is no record of that speech but those of us who were present remember that it was a fervent tribute from Australia’s former Treasurer to the man he acknowledged as having taught him more about economics than any other person. Keating not only has a way with words, he always has something to say, and he used both gifts that afternoon to sketch for an avid audience a comprehensive portrait of Walsh and his contribution to journalism, to politics and, ultimately, to the betterment of Australia.

  On 25 January, the morning after Walsh’s call to Barnett, the paper ran a front-page story, ‘PM Bans Financial Review journalist’ under the byline of Maximilian Walsh, managing editor. The paper would not tolerate the government managing news or dictating who were acceptable journalists, Walsh wrote. He announced that I would cover the trip anyway—flying commercial. Walsh then went on the ABC’s AM radio program that morning and accused the Prime Minister of sex discrimination and news management. Now we really were at war.

  My phone rang like crazy all day. Airlines offered me free travel, every media outlet in the country wanted an interview. I was trying to write a ‘Canberra Observed’, to book my tickets for a trip that had originally been just to Washington and London but had now, Fraser had just announced, been extended to Paris and Bonn. I also had the problem that in his article Walsh had referred to me as Dr Anne Summers. I had been intending to keep secret that a few months earlier, I had been formally awarded a PhD by the University of Sydney. Not only was a post-graduate qualification superfluous in journalism but I was already seen as enough of a blow-in without the added burden of a title. I knew I’d pay for it—and I did. I finally got a nickname. For the rest of my time in the Press Gallery, I’d be known as ‘doc’, ‘the doctor’ or, by a few people, as ‘quack’. And the title has stuck to me ever since. Although I rarely use it in everyday transactions, people somehow seem to know to call me ‘Dr’. It used to embarrass me; I did not like looking as if, to use that great Australian expression, I had ‘tickets on myself ’, but I am now resigned to it and accept that it is just part of my name, even, my ‘brand’.

  Before this already eventful day was over, John Short had resigned from the Financial Review to take a position as adviser to Michael MacKellar, who was Minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs. I was appointed Bureau Chief, effective immediately, so there would be no ambiguity about the fact I was the sole representative of the paper when I followed Fraser round the world. Just before I flew out, on 27 January, on a Pan Am flight whose other passengers included Rupert Murdoch, the US Ambassador to Australia and a Who’s Who of the Australian film industry, I decided with Walsh’s concurrence that I would also try to visit Moscow. A week earlier, US President Jimmy Carter had announced that his country would boycott the Moscow Olympic Games to be held in July that year unless Russia withdrew its troops from Afghanistan. I was travelling solo so I could determine my itinerary. It would be easy enough to get to Moscow from Bonn. There were just two problems. I had not had time to apply for a visa for the Soviet Union before I’d left, and I had a very strong suspicion that I was pregnant.

  The visa I could deal with once I got to London. The other problem was not so simple. I had been using contraceptives but my period was late and I had sore breasts, so I had to take seriously that I might be pregnant. I contacted Control, the feminist abortion referral service, and asked about a menstrual extraction. This procedure, I’d heard, could sort me out without even needing a pregnancy test. They advised against it: an early extraction could often miss a fertilised egg and thus be a waste of time, they’d said. They suggested instead a herbal remedy three times a day, for three days. It sounded like what we once disparagingly referred to as an ‘old wives tale’, but they assured me that it had ‘worked’ with other women, which meant that it had brought on either a period or a miscarriage. It did not work with me, but I had to put this possible pregnancy out of my mind while I set out to chase Australia’s Prime Minister around the world.

  In London, I savoured the luxury of Claridge’s Hotel. On my first night there, after I’d been to the Soviet Embassy to apply for a visa and before Fraser and the travelling party arrived, I had rung down to ask about room service. There was no menu in the room so I did not know how to order. I tired of waiting for someone to bring me the menu so I stepped into the bath I’d started to run as soon as I’d got to my room. No sooner had I slid into its deep steaming water than the door opened and a butler appeared. He had not knocked and he appeared not to notice that I was naked; he merely asked what Madam would like to eat. This was the service aristocratic England was accustomed to apparently. As was the fact that when I went to check-out, Claridge’s told me they did not accept credit cards. ‘Perfectly all right, Madam,’ I was assured. ‘We will send you the account.’ And, a few weeks later, they did. More disconcerting was the fact that while I was out covering Fraser the next day, someone had clearly been through my things. I doubted an English butler would have any interest in finding where I had hidden my diary and, just to let me know, left it out on the desk.

  The trip was dominated by talk of war. An unsourced story had appeared on the ABC and in the Sunday papers stating that President Carter was prepared to use tactical nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union if it invaded Iran. Fraser took advantage of this story to change his travel plans to return to Washington to report personally to Jimmy Carter on the outcome of his talks with Margaret Thatcher, France’s Giscard d’Estaing and Helmut Schmidt. The German Chancellor had suggested he do this, Fraser told a believing Australian press party. In fact, Fraser said, Schmidt had even rung President Carter to ensure that the Australian Prime Minister would be able to secure a meeting. You had to give Fraser full marks for knowing how to extract maximum political advantage out of a situation. In Paris, I had gone to the Soviet Embassy in yet another attempt to get a visa for Moscow but now, I informed Max Walsh, I thought I’d better follow them all to Washington. He agreed.

  At each stop on the visit, I managed to arrive first and be there on the tarmac—you could do that in those days—to greet the official party. In Paris, the travelling press ignored Fraser and all gathered around me for an update on my status as an outcast. This infuriated Barnett and he realised there was only one way to kill this story: he informed me that a seat had been found for me on the VIP to Washington. I rang Max to tell him.

  ‘That’s a shame, doctor,’ he said. ‘We’d booked you on the Concorde.’

  After Washington, I travelled as far as Honolulu with the official party. We went to Pearl Harbor and watched Fraser drop his large frame into the narrow opening of an American submarine. I was going to be travelling on my own again as I’d had to give up my seat on the VIP to an Australian Defence official. But I did not mind. I was anxious to get home as soon as possible and deal with what I was now certain was a pregnancy. I felt I had no choice but to have an abortion and I just wanted to get it over with. As I was leaving ear
lier than the others, I offered to carry back the canister of film of Fraser at Pearl Harbor shot by a pool TV cameraman and hand it over to the waiting network courier when I landed in Sydney. My plane did not leave until midnight so after packing, I dropped the briefing book into the rubbish bin in my room and went down to the hotel bar for a farewell drink with the other journalists. Media were supplied with these briefing books for every trip; they were usually substantial documents that contained information ranging from weather and clothing recommendations to low-classified political briefs about the countries to be visited, their key people and various other pieces of background that might be useful for fleshing out our stories. As was my practice when I checked out of a hotel, I left the door open.

  I was enjoying my goodbye drinks when I realised that a tense and angry David Barnett was standing by our table.

  ‘Can I speak with you,’ he said.

  ‘Of course, David,’ I said, not moving.

  ‘In private,’ he said.

  I followed him into the hotel lobby where he turned and confronted me: ‘Why did you leave your door open?’

  ‘If you mean my hotel room, I left it open because I had checked out,’ I said. ‘I always leave my door open to show that I have gone.’

  ‘That wasn’t the only reason, was it?’

  I stared at him.

  ‘You had left something there, hadn’t you?’ He was getting edgy. ‘Who was it for? Who was coming to get it?’

  I realised he must be referring to the briefing book.

  ‘Yes, David,’ I said, still thinking this was a joke. ‘I left it there for the Russians. They are dying to know what we think about the British …’

  Then it struck me.

  ‘Hang on! How the hell did you know that I had left anything in my room? What were you doing in my room?’

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ he said.