PENLINGTON: How many gangbangs do you think you’ve been along to?
INTERVIEWEE: Oh about six. Just did it for kicks, I suppose, to be part of the group, you know. They’re all mates, we all went to school together, grown up together, just out for kicks, something to do. There’s about nine of us altogether.
PENLINGTON: How do you prevent a gangbang becoming a pack rape?
INTERVIEWEE: Well, you can’t really unless only the guys that are selected turn up. If it’s any more, you know, like crashers come, that’s when it starts to be pack rape. When the girl says she’s had enough, but these guys, they haven’t had theirs yet so they start to get a bit cranky about it, start bashing the girl around a bit forcing her into it. That’s rape then.
In Canberra, the Catholic Women’s League of Decency tried to have the regular Sunday repeat of the program cancelled, but Dr Semmler withstood the pressure this time and let it go ahead.
I left Four Corners at the end of 1971 to become an overseas correspondent, but returned as acting Executive Producer for a few months in 1981 when Paul Lyneham suddenly left for Channel 7. Soon afterwards I also decided to move to commercial current affairs, partly because I was convinced the program needed fresh blood. It got it the following year with Jonathan Holmes, recruited from the BBC’s Panorama, who turned out to be one of the best acquisitions the ABC ever made.
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TIMES THEY WERE A-CHANGING
by Peter Reid
Australia was in the throes of far-reaching social and political transition in the late swinging ’60s when I joined the Four Corners team making its mark as Australia’s first national TV current affairs program. I was a young producer back from a stint overseas honing skills in advanced electronic news-gathering with Visnews and ITN (International Television News) in London.
I returned to a nation still embroiled in the divisive Vietnam War, with anti-war protests escalating coast to coast. Women, too, were demonstrating in the streets, demanding greater equality in society, with the advent of the contraceptive pill rekindling moral debate about premarital sex.
With the demise of the White Australia Policy, new immigration patterns were reshaping us into one of the world’s most ethnically and culturally diverse countries, while a national referendum eventually gave Aboriginal Australians citizenship rights.
The Rolling Stones, the Beatles and Bob Dylan toured Australia as the hippie movement embraced rock’n’roll, drugs and free love. Alternative lifestyles challenged outmoded values, typified by beach inspectors fining a bikini-clad young woman for being ‘unsuitably dressed’ on Bondi Beach, and supermodel Jean Shrimpton shocking staid matrons at the Melbourne Cup by posing in an audacious mini-skirt — that became an iconic image of the decade’s supposedly permissive society.
Around the globe, the mega-news events of the 1960s could hardly have given rise to a more journalistically fortuitous period for Four Corners to debut. The Cold War was at a peak. So, too, was rivalry for supremacy in space, with the United States and the Soviet Union locked in an historic race to put a man on the moon. Global leadership was in flux with the passing of two Western leaders of prodigious stature: John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic and youngest man to become US president, assassinated in the prime of life; and the death at 90 of Britain’s World War II leader, Sir Winston Churchill, acclaimed in a BBC poll as the greatest ever Briton, his state funeral attended by the biggest gathering of dignitaries yet seen. In Australia, our longest serving prime minister, Sir Robert Menzies, quit after a record 16 years.
Pivotal changes, too, were under way at Four Corners when I joined in 1967. The program was expanding its largely observational style of coverage, by not only holding a mirror up to Australian society but also shining a spotlight into dark places, with a new emphasis on investigative reporting.
A significant step in this direction was the formation of ‘Focus Report’, an editorial unit within the program devoted chiefly to penetrating investigative coverage. It added another dimension to Four Corners — a hard-edged documentary approach with less personalised reporter involvement and more top-grade producer input and in-depth story research. The series was conceived and co-produced by myself and Gordon Bick, a senior journalist recruited from ABC TV’s This Day Tonight. The format was akin to the British Granada TV’s current affairs series World in Action, then regarded in the UK as TV investigative journalism at its best.
One of the first major issues we set our sights on was Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War, destined to become the longest and most controversial military conflict in our history. Public support for the war had waned in both Australia and the United States, particularly after the infamous My Lai massacre in the late 1960s, when 514 noncombatant Vietnamese villagers, ranging from a year-old baby to an elder of 81, were killed by a US infantry patrol. Most of the victims were women, raped and tortured before being slain. The atrocity provoked outrage in many countries, including Australia, and was credited with advancing the end of the war by eroding public support.
Only one person, US army lieutenant William Calley, was convicted — of premeditated murder for ordering the My Lai killings. Calley claimed in his defence that he was justifiably obeying his senior officer’s orders while leading a ‘search-and-destroy’ troop patrol against a suspected Viet Cong presence near My Lai. He was sentenced to life in prison but, following intervention by President Nixon, served only a few years under house arrest. Calley’s case evoked calls by military analysts to review the standards of officer selection and training after it was revealed that Calley had been a jobless college dropout who was rushed through basic training; as the war dragged on America’s recruitment intake had started dwindling.
In Australia, the issue of training standards became a topic of debate among instructors and cadets at the elite Royal Military College, Duntroon, which prided itself on the quality of its graduate officers being equal to, if not better than, the world’s best. Duntroon also had another distinction: it was probably the most conservative institution of its kind in Australia, with deep-rooted British army traditions that didn’t readily yield to change. To its harsher critics, the college had become a military anachronism, a cosy haven for time-serving Colonel Blimps turning out tin soldiers in the same mould.
But to its top brass Duntroon symbolised the acme of military leadership and the ideals of duty, honour and loyalty, on a par with Britain’s Sandhurst and America’s West Point.
Duntroon’s reputation had been tarnished the previous year — in 1969 — with the exposure of bastardisation, a debasing form of cadet punishment that caused the worst scandal in the college’s history up until then and prompted a federal government inquiry. New cadets had been forced to do 200 push-ups at a time, stand naked in the mess hall and perform sexual acts with frozen chickens. In the aftermath, it seemed timely for Four Corners to chronicle the ethos and mood at the nation’s premier military training establishment, and the sort of moral challenges that officer graduates would encounter when deployed in Vietnam, commanding conscripts in combat zones in an increasingly unpopular war.
Gaining media access to an institution of Duntroon’s venerable status was easier than we’d thought. But tensions soon surfaced when I began asking what were deemed ‘difficult’ questions about college training methods, particularly during on-camera interviews with cadets, which their supervisors insisted on monitoring closely. The answers hinted at a regimented environment that fostered conformity and subordination of self to group.
Most cadets I spoke to hoped to serve in Vietnam after graduation that year and ultimately to lead others into action. I asked them how much thought had they given to how they’d perform under fire, having to kill and face the hazard of being killed.
‘Very little,’ replied one cadet. ‘You don’t join the army … to be a professional killer. You join the army to become an officer.’
REID: Hypothetically, if you were ordered to shoot innocent women and children, wou
ld you do so?
Typical responses included:
I hope I’d react in the right way, if there is a right way.
I don’t know what I’d do if I was in that situation whereby my superior officer told me to shoot people I knew were innocent. He would obviously have some superior reason for them to be shot. But I really couldn’t say what I’d do.
When it’s merely your opinion against a superior officer, you must realise a superior isn’t a superior for nothing, and that he’s giving an order because he’s qualified to do so and is probably in possession of facts you don’t have.
It’s up to the individual. If he considers he shouldn’t carry out an order he should make his appropriate protest.
The custodian of the college’s moral compass was Duntroon’s padre, Lester Thompson. I asked him what sort of ethical and moral problems cadets brought to him for advice. He replied that a common question was whether Christians in the armed services were permitted to kill.
‘We would go straight to the Scriptures for the answer,’ he said, ‘and point out that soldiering has always been a profession within the Scriptures when Our Lord makes contact with soldiers.’
So how did Padre Lester personally reconcile war with Christian principles? Did he find conflict within himself in that regard?
He replied, ‘I do find conflict. We all do. And I’m sure every soldier who goes to Vietnam and comes under fire questions himself. This is a good thing, and I’d like to assure everybody outside that we do question ourselves because we hate death. But then, of course, we believe that we’re there as a protecting force as well, and we’ve seen a lot of death caused by other people.’
Relationships between Duntroon’s academic staff and military instructors had soured after a college lecturer, Gerald Walsh, had publicly exposed bastardisation the previous year. ‘I don’t regret it at all,’ Walsh told me. ‘Actually, I think all the publicity is the best thing that’s happened to Duntroon in 60 years because it’s now cleared the air. A lot of Duntroon people agree with me on this. They can see that now the stage is set for even greater developments at the college, and that it was extremely necessary to have this public exposure.’
I asked if he believed bastardisation at Duntroon was finished for good or was there a risk it could recur in the future.
‘It’s certainly finished for the time being,’ Walsh said. ‘But I’m not sure about it being finished for good. We should draw the lesson from America’s West Point Academy, where it came back again.’
When the Four Corners program was broadcast, audience reaction was mixed. The Duntroon administration resented what it saw as an attack on its traditions, particularly as the Queen was in Australia on a royal tour and had visited the college that very week. There was also pointed criticism of the visual reconstruction sequences, a technique used to illustrate how bastardisation occurred. The then Army Minister, Andrew Peacock, called the program ‘unbalanced’ and ‘partly fake’.
The Four Corners report had featured the academy’s new commandant, Major General Sandy Pearson, who had been tasked with moulding a new-look Duntroon in the era of push-button warfare. ‘It’s important we keep the good traditions and throw out the bad,’ he said. ‘Let’s face it, we’ve had some bad traditions not only here but in the army. We should all be challenging these traditions from time to time.’
Yet one of Duntroon’s oldest traditions — its unswerving refusal to admit woman students — still remained deeply entrenched. It wasn’t until the mid-1970s that the Whitlam Labor government legislated to absorb Duntroon into the newly integrated Australian Defence Force Academy, which accepted women students for officer training.
Fast forward to 2011 when the ADFA found itself mired in scandal after students allegedly filmed and broadcast over the internet a female cadet having consensual sex.
An independent inquiry found that while for most women students, most of the time, ADFA was a safe and rewarding place, more than 70 per cent of female students at ADFA had reported gender-related or sexual harassment. But within just weeks of the inquiry’s report came allegations of another sex incident that could further sully ADFA’s reputation: a male officer cadet was charged at the ACT’s Magistrates’ Court in April 2012 with two counts of sexual intercourse without consent. He pleaded not guilty. The alleged victim was reportedly a young woman civilian living at the college.
A great deal had changed since Duntroon’s integration with ADFA, but it seemed some things stayed the same.
If the 1960s were the genesis of Four Corners, the ’70s became its decade of consolidation, when it evolved into one of the nation’s most watched programs, featuring a range of talented, TV-savvy journalists and presenters, some of whom became household names. The reporters included Paul Barry, Gordon Bick, Jenny Brockie, Peter Couchman, Mary Delahunty, Jim Downes, Bob Hill, Allan Hogan, Jonathan Holmes, Caroline Jones, Tony Jones, Brian King, Stuart Littlemore, Paul Lyneham, Peter Luck, Peter Manning, David Marr, Ray Martin, Chris Masters, Jeff McMullen, Robert Moore, Kerry O’Brien, Andrew Olle, Richard Oxenburgh, John Penlington, Clare Petre, Peter Ross, Maryanne Smith, Jeff Watson, Deb Whitmont, Marian Wilkinson, Michael Willesee and Charles Wooley, buttressed by peerless researchers like Patti Warn, Robyn Smith, Anne Parker and Wendy Borchers, with producers Gordon Bick and Brian Davies, and executive producers Allan Martin and Tony Ferguson.
Another pervasive issue that would become a focus for Four Corners — influenced by US biologist Rachel Carson’s paradigm-shifting bestseller, Silent Spring — was the environment. The conservation movement, though still in its infancy, was gaining momentum. In 1967 I was assigned with a Four Corners camera crew to join a research team headed by Dr Robert Endean, one of Australia’s most respected marine scientists, traversing the waters of the Great Barrier Reef to assess coral devastation caused by the crown-of-thorns starfish, named for the mass of deadly poisonous spines covering its body, which can inflict a wound of agonising pain. It is the world’s biggest starfish, growing to the size of a car tyre, and ravages reefs by feeding off vulnerable coral polyps. Most Australians had never even heard of the crown-of-thorns, let alone seen one. When the Four Corners report went to air, viewers were taken aback by the program’s opening sequence of the starfish in repellent close-up being plucked from the sea, accompanied by voice-over narration:
If God created a satanic villain of the ocean, this surely is it: a grotesque specimen of starfish that is slowly but surely devastating one of the world’s largest natural wonders. In the sea, the starfish is virtually indestructible. On the Barrier Reef, in vast labyrinths of coral that sprawl over thousands of kilometres, the chances of halting the starfish infestation are now considered remote. The crown-of-thorns now infests the reef in untold millions. To seek them out over such immense areas of reef and kill them by hand is virtually impossible. Is it only a matter of time before Australia loses its most precious natural heritage?
Our research revealed the probable causes of the starfish scourge included an ecological imbalance in the reef’s delicate habitat, partly the result of over-fishing by trawlers, toxic chemical pesticide run-off from coastal farms, and coral bleaching due to climate change.
In an investigative follow-up titled ‘Oil in Troubled Waters’, I teamed up in 1970 with Michael Willesee, who’d joined the program as its presenter after an outstanding spell anchoring ABC TV’s This Day Tonight.
The Great Barrier Reef was again making headlines. Now it was controversy over renewed attempts by sectors of the petroleum industry to drill for oil on the reef despite conservationists’ fears about the risks of pollution from oil-rig blowouts or tankers going aground in waters designated to become the world’s largest marine park.
The story’s newsworthy peg was the upcoming national conference of the Australian Petroleum Producers’ Association at Surfers Paradise. It came amid growing public concern after Queensland’s worst oil spill which occurred when a Liberian-flagged tanker ran aground off the s
tate’s eastern seaboard. The conference was opened by its guest of honour, Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Queensland’s maverick premier, who had recently championed oil exploration on the Barrier Reef and who reportedly had a financial stake in an oil company, raising questions of potential conflict of interest. The terse on-camera exchange with Bjelke-Petersen was one of the most penetrating interviews Willesee did on Four Corners.
WILLESEE: Premier, I’d like to look at your personal involvement in the oil search. Can I ask you if you still hold shares in oil exploration companies?
BJELKE-PETERSEN: Well, I’ve made my decision very clear in the past. There’s no question on where I stand in this way. There’s absolutely no conflict in the interests I have in oil exploration companies.
WILLESEE: Can we establish what your interests are?
BJELKE-PETERSEN: No. This has nothing to do [with] my private interests in what oil exploration companies I’m interested in. I don’t think this has got any real interest for anyone other than I —
WILLESEE: You are the Premier of Queensland —
BJELKE-PETERSEN: Yes. But I want to say this — there is absolutely no conflict. The minister brings his recommendations to cabinet in the matter and cabinet as a whole makes the decision … And these are interests that I held long before I ever became premier —
WILLESEE: Are there applications for leases or leases granted but held in abeyance because of the current dispute over the reef?
BJELKE-PETERSEN: Well, this is a matter for the Mines Department and has been canvassed and spoken for a long time.
WILLESEE: I’m asking you, as premier, do you know —
BJELKE-PETERSEN: And I’m telling you, as premier, this is something I’m not going to tell you —
WILLESEE: Can we then presume that there are some applications for leases?
The Stories That Changed Australia: 50 Years of Four Corners Page 3