The Stories That Changed Australia: 50 Years of Four Corners

by Sally Neighbour

  The issue came to a head in May 1963 when Four Corners broadcasted a story on housing without including the Federal Housing Minister, Sir William Spooner, who had been unable to find time for an interview despite a persistent and flexible invitation. When the story went to air without him, he copped criticism from his colleagues for not putting the government’s case. Sir William then demanded the right of reply, and ABC Chairman, Dr James Darling, directed Raymond to put him on air. Raymond sent reporter Bob Sanders to Canberra to ask the minister what he saw wrong with the story — and let him drone on and on and on. Charlton introduced the interview by informing viewers they had been ‘instructed’ to give Spooner his say, ‘and here he is’. The interview went to air unedited, lasting nearly half an hour. ‘It destroyed any credibility he had,’ Raymond said afterwards, apparently satisfied with the result.

  The Spooner incident confirmed a change that Charlton and Raymond were detecting in the immunity they had enjoyed from direction and control. With their patron Charles Moses nearing the end of his term as ABC General Manager, their protection from interference was no longer guaranteed. This made it easier for each of them to accept the attractive offers that followed their success. As Raymond said later, ‘If we couldn’t do it the way we wanted to do it, we weren’t interested.’ Charlton headed off to the BBC’s Panorama while Raymond went to Channel 9 to create a special projects unit. As Moses had predicted, the ABC would take the credit for Four Corners and pour in more resources to keep it running.

  My own career on the show had begun in Sydney as a production assistant for a fortnight, with the job of putting together the ‘Voice of the People’ segment for the final show of 1961, quizzing celebrities about how they were going to spend Christmas. After this I was promoted to the role of Talks Officer in Perth, where I eagerly awaited each week’s Four Corners program and contributed a couple of items to it myself. I also started a half-hour weekly state current affairs show based in Perth called West Coast ’63, unashamedly modelled on Four Corners.

  Allan Ashbolt, who held the position of Federal Talks Supervisor (Topical), was put in charge of Four Corners, with Frank Bennett, Robert Moore and myself as reporters and John Power as producer.

  [In his 1986 book Four Corners: Twenty-Five Years, Robert Pullan described Penlington as ‘a young reporter who brought to his on-camera interviews the formidable combination of fresh-faced, boyish enthusiasm and relentless tenacity’. Ed]

  Under Ashbolt’s leadership, the program would sharpen its investigative skills — and earn some scars to prove it. Ashbolt was tall, confident and energetic. His career had included acting, book reviewing and filmmaking before he joined ABC Talks. He had recently spent three years in New York as an ABC correspondent and came home deeply affected by the inequalities in American society. He was seen by some in ABC management as a radical left-wing intellectual.

  One month after the changeover, Ashbolt put to air his own film report, which analysed the political power of one of Australia’s most sacred cows, the RSL. Today that report seems unexceptional, but in 1963 it was a bombshell. Looking back, it’s so easy to see why. In the 1960s, two fears lingered in the minds of many Australians following World War II — fear of invasion by the so-called ‘hordes of Asians’ to our north, and alarm about the advance of Communism. On both issues, the RSL was the Menzies government’s most insistent pressure group. As the Repatriation Minister admitted to Ashbolt, the RSL was ‘the only public organisation in Australia that has direct and regular access to the federal cabinet’. The League’s original role had been to lobby for welfare benefits; its critics in 1963 thought it enjoyed too much influence on national policies such as defence, Communism and immigration.

  Ashbolt’s questioning of the RSL Federal President, Sir Raymond Huish, confirmed that the League would strongly oppose any revision of immigration policy allowing Asians and Africans into Australia and would support another referendum to ban the Communist Party. Menzies had tried to abolish the Communist Party in 1951, but the High Court ruled the legislation invalid. Menzies then tried a referendum, but it was lost and the Communist Party remained legal.

  One of the critics interviewed by Ashbolt was the editor of the Communist Party newspaper, Tribune, Alec Robertson, an officer in the army and the air force in World War II and an RSL member until the League expelled Communists. This must have been the first time a Communist had been interviewed on the ABC and it caused an uproar. It was like throwing a can of petrol onto a bonfire.

  Menzies called for transcripts of the past ten Four Corners programs and the General Manager decided to intervene. Ashbolt would ‘no longer be active’ on Four Corners but would now concentrate on ‘his other duties’, it was announced. Gerald Lyons, host of the Melbourne People program, would replace him. This proved an unpopular move — both with the audience and with the Talks department staff in Sydney, most of whom signed a petition protesting Ashbolt’s removal. Moses met the signatories and assured them that political pressure had not influenced the change. Many were not convinced.

  Menzies’ own view of the program was spelled out in a remark he made when introduced by the ABC Chairman, Dr James Darling, to Clement Semmler, then the senior executive responsible for Four Corners. ‘Young man, I know you and your Four Corners,’ Menzies told Semmler, ‘and I want you to know that I know, and my ministers know, that the sole reason for that wretched program is to discredit me and my government.’

  According to Semmler, Menzies then turned his back on him.

  I missed most of this trouble. After three months on the program, as planned I had returned to Perth to get married, only to be told to stay there for the time being. By the end of the year, with the audience dwindling, Ashbolt was reinstated to run the program and Lyons returned to Melbourne.

  The RSL affair heralded a continuing battle over the program’s, and indeed the ABC’s, role and commitment to investigative journalism. Despite having championed the program, Moses held the view that Four Corners should inform without taking sides and must not set out to ‘expose’ anything. This of course challenged the essential role of journalists in a democracy — exposing problems, mistakes and issues — and that tension sat uneasily for years in the public service ethos of the ABC.

  My first assignment when I returned to Sydney was a report on the right of Aboriginals to drink alcohol in the Northern Territory. But a far greater challenge lay a few months ahead. An ABC camera crew was finishing a documentary in Japan and Ashbolt assigned me to join them to report on the deepening conflict in Vietnam and Laos. I’d never been out of Australia and needed a passport. Time was pressing so, as the ABC was a government commission, it was decided I should travel on a diplomatic passport, a dangerous practice that fortunately didn’t last. Four Corners reporters should be seen as independent journalists, not representatives of the Australian government.

  Saigon, known then as ‘the Pearl of the Orient’ and now as Ho Chi Minh City, was in bad shape, with sandbagged bunkers outside main buildings, sentries with bayonets fixed on their rifles and wire-mesh screens on cafes and nightclubs. The Viet Cong were infiltrating the city with plastic bombs in the terror phase of the war in the South Vietnamese capital. The previous month had seen 18 bomb attacks in the city. We interviewed an American lieutenant who’d been in a cinema when a bomb went off, killing three people and injuring fifty.

  The scene for this war had been set in 1954 at peace talks after the French were defeated by Vietnamese Communist forces at Dien Bien Phu. Vietnam was split into two temporary states — the Communist-controlled North and the anti-Communist South — and elections were promised two years later to reunify the country. But the South’s dictatorial president, Ngo Dinh Diem, was tardy about holding elections, so the North Vietnamese regime and its supporters in the South, known then as the Viet Cong, turned to ‘revolutionary warfare’ to achieve their goals.

  We met an Australian missionary doctor, Alan Walker, who had come face to face with the Viet
Cong on a trip in the Vietnamese countryside before Australia became so committed to the war. ‘We were coming up from the river bank,’ he told us, ‘and all of a sudden we found ourselves surrounded by guns pointed at us, men shouting and blowing whistles.’ At first the missionary party was treated roughly, but when no weapons were found in their baggage they were marched into the jungle for a two-hour lecture and told the Viet Cong had no objection to their working as missionaries so long as they didn’t interfere in politics.

  Dr Walker, who worked at the Saigon Adventist Hospital, also corroborated stories of Viet Cong terror tactics. ‘Right here in the city we see men and women without ears, with tongues cut out. These are some of the things the Viet Cong do when they want to victimise a person. The worst cases don’t survive to come here.’

  Reports of such cruelty sickened me as I began to grasp the impact of this ideological battle for the loyalty of hapless Vietnamese peasants. We filmed the Strategic Hamlet Program, whereby peasants were forced to live in villages surrounded by barbed wire and sharpened bamboo stakes and were trained in civil defence against Viet Cong attack. The insurgents were targeting village chiefs and officials sympathetic to the Saigon regime. As the war intensified, the United States used napalm, carpet bombing and defoliant sprays on the Viet Cong’s jungle sanctuaries and supply routes.

  Even in that July of 1964, it was clear that Saigon and Washington had a near impossible task ahead of them. They could capture and hold a stretch of country, but could they rely on the loyalty of the peasants who lived there?

  It was also a battle fought with foreign aid — channelled into a civic action program that helped villagers build houses, schools and hospitals. An American adviser on psychological warfare told us, rather naively, I thought, ‘If, for example, we could get all the Viet Cong in a large football stadium and let the Premier explain his policies to them and say, “Just go back to your home town and wait three months and if you don’t see results, go on back to the woods”, I’m convinced we could defect about a half of them.’

  Our Vietnam report went to air just after the first Australian soldier was killed in the conflict. Four Corners devoted many programs to that war as it unfolded into a tragedy of epic proportions. It took the lives of 500 Australians, 50,000 Americans and at least two million Vietnamese in a frantic but flawed attempt to stem the advance of Communism in Asia.

  Reporting on a war can prove harrowing but, as I was to find out a few months later, so could dealing with ABC management as a Four Corners reporter.

  In October 1964, Ashbolt assigned me to do a story on capital punishment in Perth, where a notorious serial killer, Eric Edgar Cooke, was about to be hanged. He wanted the story for the following week’s program. I filmed some street interviews about the hanging, but was having great trouble getting anyone in authority who supported capital punishment to appear on the program.

  When news of our forthcoming report was revealed in the Perth press, an incensed local politician stood up in Parliament and urged the WA Premier to get the ABC to stop the story.

  On the Wednesday afternoon four days before the hanging was scheduled, I went to the ABC’s Perth office to contact Ashbolt about the lack of progress. Before I could phone him, I was handed a press release issued by Clement Semmler, now AGM for Programs, saying it was a ‘mere coincidence’ that I was in Perth ahead of the Cooke hanging and the ABC had no intention of running a story on capital punishment: ‘Not only would it be in poor taste to do so and indeed smacking of sensationalism, but it would obviously be impossible to expect to get a balanced and objective viewpoint at this particularly unfortunate time when feelings were bound to be high among sections of opinions concerned.’ Dr Semmler claimed the statement had ‘no relationship whatsoever’ to the political objection raised in the WA Parliament. I was ordered not to talk to the press.

  I accepted management’s right to control what went to air but deeply resented its distortion of the truth. I remember telling Ashbolt on the phone, ‘We’ve been sold down the river.’ I had had no trouble filming comments in the street both for and against the hanging of Cooke, without resorting to sensationalism. People expressed their views calmly and intelligently. Had Dr Semmler checked on the progress of the story before issuing his statement, the embarrassing explosion that followed could have been avoided.

  That night, when contacted by a reporter from the West Australian, Ashbolt gave a truthful account of the matter and said he was worried that the statement reflected on my integrity by implying that I was not up to the basic task of a journalist — providing a balanced report on such a controversy. When the same reporter told me what Ashbolt had said I felt I could not let him stand alone, so I broke my promise to stay silent and confirmed that I had been assigned to a capital punishment story for that week’s program; it was no ‘mere coincidence’ that I was in Perth.

  I returned to Sydney to receive a verbal walloping in Dr Semmler’s office, with the closing words, ‘Just keep your trap shut!’ Ashbolt and I were removed from Four Corners as punishment for speaking to the press, but the widely reported controversy refused to die. Viewers and concerned citizens bombarded the ABC with complaints that questioned both its programming policy and the probity of Semmler’s statement. Some of the replies went out over the signature of the Chairman, Dr James Darling. One of those replies was brought to the office by a viewer, who handed it to me saying, ‘I think you should read this.’ The Chairman had accused Ashbolt and myself of having ‘against standing instructions and against all decent practice, contradicted their senior officer in the public press’, and said we had been returned to our previous positions ‘because they have shown a lack of the responsibility necessary to conduct a program of the type of Four Corners’.

  I found the letter deeply offensive and sought the opinion of a lawyer at the firm where my wife was working, who told me the letter was defamatory. After much agonising, I decided to approach the Chairman directly and sent a telegram saying, ‘I can hold my peace no longer. I must talk with you.’ Again I was carpeted by Semmler for going over his head, but this time I did most of the talking, telling him I had legal advice that the letter was defamatory and wanted to give the Chairman the opportunity to withdraw it.

  I had a half-hour meeting with Dr Darling, who appeared not to be aware of the whole story. He said he could not condone what I had done, but was prepared to withdraw some of his criticisms of me. He later gave me a letter to that effect which I was free to show to anyone who had received one of his replies. After the summer holidays I was sent back to Four Corners and worked with the ABC for another 12 years.

  In 1967 Four Corners faced its biggest challenge to date — the arrival of nightly current affairs in the form of the ABC’s This Day Tonight. It drew the spotlight away from Four Corners with a cheeky style of reporting that became extremely popular. It encroached on our territory by covering stories we might have done and had the advantage of being able to follow up its stories night after night. To survive in the new climate, Four Corners had to evolve. Single-issue programs became more regular, and overseas assignments helped in the quest for exclusive stories. Among my most memorable assignments were a Middle East series on Israel, Egypt and the Palestinian refugees in Jordan, and reports from South Africa and what was then Rhodesia — when Ian Smith’s government made its unilateral declaration of independence.

  Documenting the social and political changes taking place in Australia also proved fertile ground for Four Corners. I recall filming a story in Brisbane where two women chained themselves to a public bar to protest against the law that forbade women to drink there. Those were the days when women were obliged to drink in the ‘ladies lounge’. The story exposed the absurdity of laws that allowed women to work as barmaids in public bars while forbidding them to be there as customers.

  Australia’s controversial White Australia Policy was still in place, although it would gradually fade away under the more liberal approach of Menzies’ succes
sor, Prime Minister Harold Holt. In 1966 a university-educated Philippines banker’s application to migrate was refused by the Australian government. I went to Manila to canvas the reaction. Viewers saw what many educated Asians thought of Australia at that time: a racially discriminating country that subsidised white immigrants while making it extremely difficult for non-white immigrants to enter. ‘We’ll never be appeased or stop criticising the White Australia Policy until all the inequities have been erased,’ a top Manila newspaper columnist told the Four Corners audience.

  The task of finding fresh topics was aided by the coming of age of the post-war baby-boomer generation. Unencumbered with the fears and social rules ingrained in their parents, they sought freedom and a more open society. Inevitably, sex became more widely discussed.

  Oddly enough, one particularly confronting exclusive story proved the easiest of my time on Four Corners. In 1968 a Sydney judge who had sentenced six teenagers convicted of rape spoke out about the prevalence of that crime in the outer suburbs. At executive producer Sam Lipski’s Monday planning meeting we discussed how Four Corners should cover it. It was agreed that I would go out to Bankstown in Sydney’s outer southwest that night with a producer, David Stiven, and see what we could find.

  Within the first half hour we spent chatting with young men, the story emerged. It wasn’t rape that was prevalent, they kept insisting, it was ‘gangbangs’ — consenting sex between one girl and a group of young men. But would they talk about it on television? Yes, they would — and they did the next evening, after the 24 hours I gave them to think it over.

  Their ease and candour in discussing such a touchy subject shocked many in the audience, but proved a fascinating insight for lawyers and social researchers.