Unfettered and Alive

by Anne Summers

  I got it out of him: apparently it was standard practice for ASIO to ‘sweep’ all hotel rooms after delegation members checked out, and this applied to the media as well. The ASIO operative had reported to Barnett that I had left the book behind.

  ‘Didn’t you know it was classified?’ David said.

  ‘Didn’t you know it was heavy?’ I countered, ‘and that I am carrying footage of your boss back to Australia so his adoring public can see him on television. I didn’t have room to carry the stupid briefing book as well.’

  ‘It’s not the first time, is it?’

  I looked at him blankly.

  ‘It’s not the first time you have talked to the Russians. You visited them in London and also in Paris. Why?’

  I was stunned. I remembered those efforts to get a visa for Moscow, how uncooperative the consulates in both cities had been and what an infuriating waste of time it had been.

  I lost it.

  ‘David, you have caught me red-handed,’ I said. ‘Yes, I did try to sell them the briefing book and guess what, they weren’t interested. So I thought, okay I’ll just give it to them, so I left it in a hotel room in Honolulu where I fully expect a surfboard riding Soviet agent has by now collected it and teams of cipher agents are going through it as we speak, trying to understand what the fuck Malcolm Fraser thought he was doing over Afghanistan.’

  Barnett was grinning sheepishly. He fluttered his hands in a deprecating gesture.

  ‘I had to check,’ he said. ‘See it from my point of view.’

  I certainly wasn’t going to do that. He was the person who had tried to set me up so I would lose my job. He had not calculated on Max Walsh standing up to Fraser, and he had seriously underestimated how much of a fighter I can be. But in a funny way he had done me a favour. I was now Bureau Chief of Australia’s financial daily newspaper. From now on, the Prime Minister’s office had to deal with me. From now on, I would always have a seat on the Prime Minister’s plane, and a place at press briefings. I would get my own regular one-on-ones with Malcolm Fraser; cabinet ministers would see me after meetings and share bits and pieces of information; I would start to get my share of the big leaks (something I felt very ambivalent about but it meant I was accepted into the main game); and, perhaps most important of all, everyone now knew my name. I no longer had to explain who I was when I called a bureaucrat or business leader for the first time. They knew who I was and they took me seriously. I would move into the spacious company house in Forrest and, for the first time in my life, enjoy an ensuite bathroom and a walk-in robe, as well as an inground swimming pool and several rooms for entertaining which, I decided, was something I should start doing. I had been in Canberra a year, and my career as a political reporter and commentator was about to really take off.

  In 2011, I obtained my ASIO files. They revealed that Australia’s domestic security agency had been keeping an eye on me since I was a student protester in Adelaide in 1966. My file contains extensive notes on my activities as a student protestor, as a woman’s movement activist, and they even kept track of some of my journalistic endeavours while I was at the National Times.4 There were notes on my attending press drinks at the Soviet Embassy with a man they—but not I—knew to be the chief KGB agent in Australia. They recorded in some detail how Sir Geoffrey Yeend, the Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, expedited my getting a high-level security clearance so I could be appointed to run the Office of the Status of Women in late-1983. But there was absolutely no record of ASIO watching me in Paris, in London or in Honolulu. If it was indeed Australia’s domestic intelligence service ASIO—rather than ASIS Australia’s overseas intelligence service—working overseas in the way Barnett described, it had evidently not thought any of this worth noting in my file. Or maybe it wasn’t a security exercise at all. Perhaps it was just, pure and simple, political revenge.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE

  While I was in Canberra mostly my journalism was focused on writing about Australian politics, but I was given two tremendously challenging and rewarding overseas assignments, one to southern Africa, the other to Pakistan, as a result of Max Walsh’s conviction that his leading journalists should be encouraged to test themselves in different environments. It was an innovative approach shared by few other editors. Walsh was willing to take risks, and to spend money on his reporters. If it paid off, he and his paper had yet another laurel to burnish an already sterling reputation. If not, well better luck next time. I had only been in Canberra a few months when Walsh suggested I travel round southern Africa in the weeks preceding the Commonwealth Heads of Government (CHOGM) meeting to be held in Lusaka, Zambia in early August 1979. I would of course go to CHOGM as a member of the Press Gallery covering the Prime Minister but if I went a few weeks early, he said, I could report on South Africa’s brutal apartheid system. I could also visit a few countries in the region, perhaps Namibia and Mozambique, from where the Portuguese had fled just four years before, as well as Rhodesia, which was still holding out against ceding political power to its black majority. Walsh told me to put together a possible itinerary. I could scarcely believe my good fortune: I was going to spend a month in southern Africa. I sought out anyone I could find with southern African connections. I got myself a second passport, knowing that no African country would accept one that had been stamped by South Africa and, inoculations organised, and excitement and wariness competing inside my fevered brain, I flew into Johannesburg for my first outing as a foreign correspondent.

  The future of Rhodesia was going to dominate the CHOGM meeting, which was the first to be held in Africa, and there were threats from most of the black countries to sever diplomatic relations with Britain if she recognised the new puppet regime in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe today), as the country was then being called. This would be tantamount to a breakup of the commonwealth, so there was a lot riding on this meeting and Australia would have a central role. Rhodesia was a former British colony of about 275,000 white people and a black population of just under five million that, along with South Africa and Namibia, was the last standout in southern Africa against majority black rule. In 1965 Rhodesia’s Prime Minister Ian Smith had unilaterally declared independence from Britain in order to protect white rule, an action that led to the country being isolated internationally. Rhodesia was getting strong military support from South Africa, and had installed a puppet government headed by a black bishop, Abel Muzorewa, but under a constitution that ensured all political and military power was retained in the hands of the whites. No other country apart from South Africa recognised this regime but the newly elected Prime Minister of Britain, Margaret Thatcher, was making noises she might follow suit. Britain feared that Russia or Cuba might intervene, as they had in Angola. With Thatcher referring to the putative leaders of a majority-rule government in Rhodesia as ‘terrorists’, negotiations were not going to be easy. Malcolm Fraser, Australia’s Prime Minister, was expected to play a key role in getting his ideological soul mate to agree to a solution that would end what all sides knew was an untenable, and increasingly violent, situation.

  This was the overall context for my trip. Each of the countries I visited before ending up in Lusaka would embody important elements of the struggle for black majority rule that was now the political imperative in Africa. Most critical of these was, of course, South Africa. I had introductions to a Who’s Who of the anti-apartheid movement. Relatives and political supporters in Australia had briefed and backgrounded me so that I understood not just the complexity of the issues, but also the dangers for people on the ground of even talking to me. I was counselled to never write names in diaries or notebooks, nor confide in anyone whose credentials I was not certain of. I had to be very, very careful, I was warned.

  It was less than two years since the 30-year-old Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko had been murdered while in police custody, and only three years since the Soweto Uprising when up to 10,000 school children in
Soweto, the poverty-stricken black township adjoining Johannesburg, had taken to the streets to protest against the directive that the Afrikaans language be used to teach certain subjects in schools. The police had fired on the children, killing around 23 on the first day and leading to riots that lasted for days and ultimately led to the death of as many as 700 with a further 1000 injured. The world had been shocked by the press images of the murdered children. In response to the international outrage, the South African government had announced a series of reforms. ‘Petty apartheid’, the laws requiring the colour-segregation of public places, including transport, restaurants and beaches, were to be relaxed. But no one was fooled. The infamous ‘pass laws’ were retained; these required all non-whites to carry identification at all times or risk being arrested and detained. And people were still being arrested for no reason and held for months on end without trial.

  I was going to see first-hand what apartheid was all about. I was very lucky to have as my guide Bruce Haigh, Second Secretary, Politics at the Australian Embassy in Pretoria, the national capital of South Africa. Haigh was an activist diplomat who made it his business to be close to the regime’s opponents, and took considerable personal risks in doing so. He had befriended Steve Biko and other activists. Just eighteen months before I met him, Haigh had helped newspaper editor Donald Woods to escape from South Africa. (Richard Attenborough later portrayed this courageous act in his film Cry Freedom.) After the Biko murder, Woods had been placed under a five year ‘ban’, whereby he was stripped of the editorship of the Daily Dispatch newspaper and prevented from travelling, writing, speaking in public or even from working. Haigh introduced me to a number of activists. He also took it on himself to show me what South Africa was really like.

  We went to Bophuthatswana, one of the bantustans or so-called ‘homelands’ that had been granted to African people by the South African government in 1977 under their ‘separate but equal’ policy. It was no coincidence, Haigh demonstrated to me, that the lands on which white people were allowed to settle were rich, fertile, contiguous and often coastal areas, whereas the black lands were without exception land-locked and barren pockets that seemed to have been picked for their aridity. This place was home to more than one million people, yet only 10 per cent of its 40,000 square kilometres was arable. It had mineral resources but at the time of my visit, the benefits from these had yet to be shared with the population.

  We went to a primary school where hundreds of enthusiastic students crowded into tin sheds that served as class rooms and where the only learning equipment was the kind of rudimentary slate boards and chalk that would have been considered outmoded when I was a child. The kids learned to tell the time from a clock made from cardboard. The Australian government provided aid to this school, and when I was introduced as Australian, the kids crowded around, screaming their gratitude. It was a sickening experience, and the image of those laughing children in their squalid dustbowl of a school was still firmly in my memory when, late one afternoon, I interviewed Dr Piet Koornhof, the Minister for Cooperation and Development, at his home. This man was the enforcer of apartheid. He was responsible for the forcible removal of thousands of black people from residential areas that had been declared to be ‘white’ to places such as Bophuthatswana where they were condemned to lives of inactivity and poverty.

  ‘Think of the homelands as being like the Greek islands,’ he said to me. ‘But whereas the Greek islands are separated by water, in South Africa, the homelands are separated by land.’

  I looked at him in disbelief.

  ‘But how do account for the disparities between white and black lands?’ I asked him. ‘Why is it that the white lands are good for agriculture and grazing but the black lands are arid?’

  Koornhof was angry at the question. He had apparently assumed, given the name of my newspaper, that I would at least be obsequious, even if I did not agree with his country’s policies. He had recently got into trouble for telling the National Press Club in Washington that ‘apartheid is dead’. He’d been forced to back down after the outcry and, just the evening before our interview, he had made a statement: ‘the caricature of apartheid is dead.’ Now, he was saying to me ‘off-the-record’ that he was ‘very sad’ about Australia’s ‘harsher and harsher’ attitudes towards South Africa. He reminisced about the days when Australia and South Africa had played sport against one another and was clearly disappointed that I did not share his nostalgia.

  Piet Koornhof was, of course, a member of the ruling National Party and prior to entering Parliament he had been national secretary of the Broederbond, the secret, all-male, Calvinist organisation that had essentially created apartheid. From 1948, every single Prime Minister and President of South Africa was a member of the Broederbond. This ended only in 1994, when the first free elections led to the election of Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s first black African President.

  Koornhof had worked for the notorious Hendrik Veorwoerd, known as the architect of apartheid, who was Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958 until his assassination on the floor of the Parliament in 1966. But Koornhof had also been a Rhodes Scholar, and at Oxford he had written a doctoral dissertation on the ‘inevitable urbanization’ of black people in South Africa. I learned later that in 1986 he was ‘punished’ by being appointed South African Ambassador to the United States, after telling the Prime Minister P.W. Botha that peace would never come to South Africa until Nelson Mandela was released. Later still, in 1993, Dr Koornhof scandalised his former colleagues by leaving his wife (and, I presume, the comfortable house where I interviewed him) for a young coloured woman with whom he went on to have five children. The following year, he testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and was one of the few former ministers of the apartheid regime to acknowledge and take responsibility for the atrocities that had occurred during those years.

  That afternoon in July 1979, I was amazed at what this man said and seemed to believe. But I was even more astonished by the fact that his house was on a main road and the two of us, sitting in comfort in well-stuffed armchairs, were clearly visible from the street. There was no security. It would have been so easy to lob a bomb through that window, I thought. That morning, Bruce Haigh had taken me to Soweto, the black township where more than one million people lived in conditions of extraordinary squalor and deprivation. But, as I was to learn, the activists in South Africa were not guerilla fighters as were, for instance, Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) Party, who from their base in neighbouring Mozambique were waging a war of liberation to regain Rhodesia. Together with Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), based in Zambia, they formed the Patriotic Front and were intent on ending white rule in Zimbabwe. In South Africa, there was no armed struggle and the black people were extraordinarily passive, it seemed to me. The whole system depended on their compliance, the thousands of maids and other domestic staff whose live-in labour made possible the comfortable lives enjoyed by Dr Koornhof and the rest of the white population. The English population also benefited, as did other white non-Afrikaaners, such as South Africa’s many Jews (who had themselves mostly fled there from persecution in pre-war Europe). In 1977, the 4.3 million whites amounted to just under 17 per cent of the population, yet even the poorest white person enjoyed luxury, and legal rights, simply not available to the black majority. I found it baffling that there was so little physical resistance but, of course, this was deterred by such measures as requiring blacks to have ten continuous years with one employer before they could obtain the notorious ‘pass’ that enabled them to live legally in South Africa, outside the bantustans. The system was utterly repressive and—so far, at least—it had mostly succeeded. Yet resentment simmered everywhere; hatred glowered in many eyes. South Africa’s blacks appeared (to me anyway) abject and cowed, but they were not acquiescent. The Soweto uprising had been unprecedented, but it had happened. And it was children who had led the way. Perhaps it was a sign of thi
ngs to come.

  Most of the houses in Soweto were three-roomed very basic shelters, with no bathrooms, or electricity, which housed up to twenty people each. There were no gardens, hardly any trees, no street names or numbers but, incongruously, each house was fenced, as if it were sitting on a lush suburban plot. Street lighting came from arc lights set on high poles, giving the place the appearance of a prison, or a concentration camp. To my great surprise, there were a few houses that, while not being mansions, were large and obviously occupied by well-off people. Haigh pointed out Winnie Mandela’s house, and another that belonged to Dr Nthato Motlana, a doctor and a prominent anti-apartheid activist I was due to meet the next day. Motlana had been charged, alongside Mandela and others, for taking part in the ANC’s 1952 Campaign of Defiance, whereby people defied the race laws and sat on benches reserved for another colour, or entered libraries that were for whites only. Motlana had received a suspended sentence. Following the Soweto uprising he became one of the Committee of Ten, local citizens who united to provide leadership to the community in the wake of the massacre. He was detained and held without trial for five months.

  Mostly, though, Soweto was a desolate place. There was street after street of these dwellings—it was hard to call them houses—stretching as far as the eye could see. There were no proper shops, just one primitive clinic and at the school we visited, the cement floors were cracked and kids were crammed three to a desk. Wrecked cars littered the streets. This was where people struggled to live and to give a chance to their kids, whose perfectly laundered and starched white shirts were a seeming miracle in this dustbowl, where women garbed in bright-coloured dresses and headgear cooked and cleaned and shopped and gossiped as women do everywhere. It was as if they had no idea that just up the road were oases of plenitude, where houses were large and built of brick, where gardens bloomed with colour and lush greenery. But of course they did. These were the women who were the maids who served the white children, who did all the work while the women of the house played tennis or lunched or lounged about, secure in the knowledge that their affairs were in good black hands.