The Stories That Changed Australia: 50 Years of Four Corners

by Sally Neighbour

  No doubt I missed out on an adventure, a generous salary and the celebrity treatment. But I had been trained to keep myself out of the story. I’m not sure I would have succeeded in the role of reporter as ‘star’. It’s worth observing that my ‘no’ opened a door for Jana Wendt. I was happy to see how capably she walked through it, into an impressive career.

  If, over the years, my lead did pave a way for other women, then I am glad. I rejoiced whenever I saw another female face appear on TV. And today women are among the best in news and current affairs reporting, especially at the ABC, with Four Corners women excelling, equalled by my colleagues on ABC TV’s Australian Story.

  I left Four Corners at the end of 1981 to work with social researcher Hugh Mackay at his Centre for Communication Studies in Bathurst, New South Wales. I’m deeply grateful for my time with Four Corners, the ABC’s flagship program. It gave me a worthwhile job, good people to work with and a marvellous education about Australia and its place in the world.

  I began my life as a shy person from a small, weatherboard cottage on Mayne Street, Murrurundi, New South Wales, in wartime. Four Corners gave me a passport to find a welcome almost anywhere in the land, with the exception of Jerilderie! It gave me a privileged place in the national conversation of a country I love very deeply. It is a country with many wounds to heal, many inequities to correct. Yet it is the best place in the world, if only we remain vigilant to the welfare of the land and all our people.

  Today, more than ever, Australia needs intelligent, sceptical, forensic reporting on every aspect of national life, with those in power at the top of the list, including those of us in the communications media. This is an essential element in a healthy society and it can best be done by a fearless, determined, independent, well-resourced public broadcaster.

  4

  THE COOK WITH ALL THE FIREWOOD

  by Allan Hogan

  In his account of Four Corners’ first 25 years, author Robert Pullan referred to it as ‘a time when Australia was turning to the gigantic mystery out there — overseas’. While ABC News and Current Affairs could never be accused of neglecting foreign stories, until 60 Minutes began in 1979, Four Corners was the only Australian television program whose reporters travelled abroad to produce comprehensive reports on international issues, providing Australians with a window on the world outside their nation’s borders.

  Bob Raymond and Michael Charlton paved the way with their airline-sponsored travelogues in the early ’60s, followed by reporters Frank Bennett, John Penlington and later Mike Willesee, who chronicled Australia’s plunge into the Vietnam War. In 1971 there was controversy over a planned visit by reporter John Penlington to ‘Red China’; Prime Minister William McMahon was outraged that the trip was to be ‘facilitated’ by Ted Hill, secretary of the Communist Party of Australia (Marxist – Leninist), and the assignment was cancelled. As my own experience would later show, that was by no means the last time ABC management would try to censor programs dealing with events overseas.

  In 1971, at the ripe old age of 28, and after two years as a reporter on This Day Tonight, I was encouraged by Tony Ferguson, TDT’s Executive Producer, to apply for an ABC correspondent’s job in London. My main tasks were reporting for the radio programs AM and PM, but my TV experience opened the door to sending back reports for TDT and Four Corners and producing TV stories by other ABC journalists, including a Four Corners report by Ray Martin on the 1972 US presidential campaign; he was the ABC’s New York correspondent. It was my first role as producer, a job description that was in those years virtually unknown in TV current affairs.

  Given Four Corners’ long-term coverage of environmental issues, I’m proud that the first time I fronted the camera for the program was to report on the 1972 Stockholm Conference, sponsored by the United Nations. The conference was attended by 113 countries and marked the beginning of international political awareness of global environmental problems. One of its declarations urged governments ‘to be mindful of activities in which there is an appreciable risk of effects on climate’. Sadly, some 37 years later at another UN convention — in Copenhagen in 2009 — the good intentions of the 1972 conference did not transform into a binding agreement on how the problem might be addressed.

  For a young man on his first stint overseas, it was a great privilege to be an ABC reporter based in Britain. Suddenly, I was in the midst of those stories that had seemed so distant when I read about them in Australia. I travelled to Egypt and to Libya, just four years after the coup that brought Colonel Muammar Gaddafi to power, and made a number of trips to Northern Ireland, where I met and interviewed a young Irish Republican Army leader named Martin McGuinness in the ‘no go’ area of Londonderry, controlled by the IRA. When I asked McGuinness how many British soldiers he had killed, his steely blue eyes were a clear warning that this was a line of questioning not to be pursued.

  In 1973 I was assigned to cover the fourth Arab – Israeli war, which had begun on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, when a coalition of Arab states mounted a surprise attack on Israel’s borders. I travelled to the Golan Heights, where Syrian forces had made major inroads to regain territory they had lost in the 1967 war waged by Israel. I had never been to a war zone before, and this was the biggest artillery battle since World War II; Israeli brigades confronted 28,000 Syrian soldiers with 800 tanks.

  When we got there the Israelis had miraculously repulsed the Syrian attack and were within 40 kilometres of the Syrian capital, Damascus. The battleground was strewn with wrecked tanks and artillery, but amazingly there were no bodies. Both sides had already removed their dead. The Syrians had been brutally rebuffed by Israeli air raids and it was clear from the wreckage that many of their soldiers had died suddenly, caught in surprise attacks.

  By a burnt-out Syrian tank, there was a trail of personal belongings where a soldier had been killed. A toothbrush lay on the ground alongside some toothpaste, a comb, a mirror, a razor, a Syrian newspaper and a pannikin, at the spot where the soldier had perhaps had his last breakfast. Nearby lay an open wallet. Inside it was a photo of a young man with what appeared to be his wife and children. Tears filled my eyes, and I had to walk away from the crew so they didn’t see me weeping. Our Israeli minder saw that I was upset and came over to me. ‘Our boys died, too,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t feel sympathy for these bastards.’ Of course, my tears were about something far more complex. My father was killed in World War II, and somehow this scene had touched something deeply personal.

  At the invitation of Executive Producer Peter Reid, I returned to Australia in 1974 as a Sydney-based, full-time reporter on Four Corners. The Australian political landscape had changed dramatically while I was based in London. A Labor government was in power after 23 years of conservative rule and long-running battles between ABC management and the producers and reporters of TDT and Four Corners had subsided. Gough Whitlam planned to replace the ABC Chairman and commissioners, all of whom had been appointed by conservative governments and had acted as their surrogates in battles with program-makers. But if Whitlam thought he now had a tame ABC on his side, there were still some tough interviewers who could and would ask difficult questions.

  My assignments for Four Corners in 1974 were mainly domestic. One story I attempted never went to air. In October, the iconoclastic Sunday newspaper Nation Review published a report revealing the address of Vladimir Petrov, the Soviet diplomat who had defected to Australia in 1954 after confessing to his role in a Russian spy ring. He was living under an assumed name in Melbourne with his wife, Evdokia, who had also defected to Australia in spectacular fashion. She had been dragged on to a Moscow-bound aircraft by KGB agents at Mascot airport, then escorted back off the plane by ASIO officials when it reached Darwin.

  The Petrovs’ whereabouts was the subject of a ‘D Notice’ — a government list of matters that were off limits to the media on the grounds of national security. Breach of a D Notice carried no penalty since the system relied on
voluntary agreement by media organisations. Peter Reid believed we would not breach the D Notice if we did not disclose the Petrovs’ address and sent me to Melbourne to try to interview them. Early one morning I knocked at their door, but there was no answer. I waited with the crew outside the house for 30 minutes or so before Mrs Petrov emerged and drove off in her car. We followed, and soon I realised that she had been well trained in her previous career as a Russian spy. She quickly worked out that she was being tailed and her efforts to lose us would have done justice to a Formula One driver.

  A wiser person than me might have given the game away at that point, but I doggedly pursued her until she turned into the driveway of a local police station. It wasn’t long before a senior plod came out and told us to move on, saying we knew we shouldn’t be following her. That certainly was the moment to cease and desist, but I made the serious mistake of returning to the Petrovs’ residence, via a local florist. Along with the bunch of flowers I left on the doorstep was my handwritten note to Mrs Petrov, apologising for anything I might have done to offend her, but informing her I intended to keep pursuing her for an interview.

  A few days later I suffered the humiliation of being the subject of an unflattering character analysis delivered on the floor of the senate by the Attorney General, Lionel Murphy. He read out my letter to Mrs Petrov, which he described as an outrage, accusing me of invading her privacy. A Liberal senator asked whether my conduct would be referred to the ethics committee of the Australian Journalists’ Association, and the president of the AJA said the incident showed the need for a media council. The Minister for the Media, Senator McClelland, wrote a ‘please explain’ letter to the ABC Chairman.

  Given that, years earlier, Labor’s leader, Dr Evatt, had been badly damaged by Robert Menzies’ exploitation of the Petrov affair, I had thought Senator Murphy might not be particularly concerned by Mrs Petrov’s possible discomfort. But perhaps the senator saw some value in being the champion of a woman in distress, albeit one who had been a spy and a bureaucrat in the Soviet Union’s notorious gulags. What I hadn’t realised was that Mrs Petrov was employed by ASIO, so it was hardly surprising that my letter fell into Senator Murphy’s hands so quickly. It was also not surprising that ABC management thought that the story should not be pursued, and made that clear to Peter Reid. In any event, in the absence of an interview with Mrs Petrov there was no story worth pursuing.

  Soon there was a more pressing assignment. The end was in sight in the protracted war in Vietnam. South Vietnam’s third largest city, Hu, had fallen to the Communist North Vietnamese forces, and now they had the capital, Saigon, in their sights. Peter Reid made it clear covering the story was for volunteers only, and so it was that cameraman Les Wasley, soundman David Norton-Smith and I boarded a plane for Saigon. I was nervous because, unlike a number of my more seasoned colleagues, I had no previous experience in Vietnam and there was no doubt it would be dangerous.

  Something personal drove me to take on the assignment. As a student I had been passionately opposed to Australia’s involvement in the war, taking part in demonstrations and writing strident editorials in the University of New South Wales student newspaper, Tharunka. The Four Corners assignment would give me the opportunity to see for myself what I had been so vociferous about, and to discover if I had the strength of character to handle a tough assignment. Today, occupational health and safety policies require journalists going into war zones to undergo extensive training by skilled professionals, and be counselled on their return. When I headed for Vietnam it was literally on a wing and a prayer, but fortunately Les Wasley had served in the Korean War and would provide me with a security blanket, for which my gratitude can never suffice.

  After we arrived I managed to negotiate two precious seats on a South Vietnamese helicopter flight to the city of Xuan Loc, 64 kilometres east of Saigon. When the chopper dropped us in fields just outside the city, three North Vietnamese divisions had been pounding it for a week. They were meeting fierce resistance from the South Vietnamese, who were outnumbered six to one. At a staging post the South Vietnamese commander told Les and I, ‘No matter how many they send, we will knock them down.’ We found a helpful South Vietnamese soldier with a jeep who drove us through the city streets, where buildings were on fire and bodies lay on the road. Occasionally, a shell would lob and explode nearby. If the South Vietnamese had hoped to show us they were winning the war, this scenario wasn’t working.

  It wasn’t long before we noticed a stream of panicked civilians and soldiers heading out of town. After a few hours Les and I also decided it was time to go, but in our haste to get into Xuan Loc, we’d given little thought to getting out. And it turned out there were a lot of people who wanted to leave, all of whom had gathered where the choppers had brought us in, in the hope that they could get a lift out before it was overrun.

  On the skyline some Chinook helicopters made their way towards us. The Chinook is the elephant of helicopters, a giant twin-rotor beast with a wide drop-down loading ramp at the rear. As each of them came in to land there was mayhem, everyone with one intention — to make it onto a chopper and get out, ASAP. A Chinook would come in, but rather than land it would hover just above the ground, loading ramp down, while the panicked crowd rushed towards it. The pilot would decide when he’d taken enough passengers on board and then simply head off, with people still trying to climb the ramp. The normal precaution of standing back from the huge wash of the chopper blades was something this crowd was not prepared to do as it could mean missing out on boarding.

  Les Wasley and I had been bowled over by the wash of three departing choppers by the time we made our last attempt. Deserting soldiers pushed past wounded civilians in their determination to scramble up the slippery ramp, which was awash with leaking hydraulic fluid. Les turned on his Arriflex film camera, tucked it under his arm and followed me in our desperate dash to get on board. The loading ramp dangled at a steep incline that I climbed on all fours, carrying a heavy Nagra tape recorder. And even as the chopper lifted off there was still the fear we would attract the attention of North Vietnamese artillery. Over pictures Les shot from the chopper of the ruined city, the last line of voice-over in my report was, ‘If this was victory at Xuan Loc, God knows what defeat would look like.’

  I sent back two more stories from Vietnam for TDT: one about the grim future facing local journalists who had supported the South Vietnamese regime and the other about the plight of children who had been orphaned by the war, many of whom were destined to come to Australia. I was back in Sydney when Saigon fell two weeks later, and the veteran reporter Neil Davis recorded that iconic footage of North Vietnamese tanks arriving at the Presidential Palace. Whenever the footage of our escape from Xuan Loc is shown, I feel an imposter, knowing I never paid the dues incurred by other more experienced reporters in Vietnam. Tragically, Neil was killed in Bangkok ten years later covering a minor coup attempt in Thailand that lasted only a few hours. As he died, his camera fell to the ground, still running.

  In October 1975, the Australian senate voted to defer debating the budget, beginning the process that would ultimately lead to the dismissal of the Whitlam government. When Malcolm Fraser had deposed Billy Snedden as Liberal Party leader in March, my report on the Liberal leadership battle hinted that Fraser was determined to use unconventional tactics to bring down the Whitlam government. I interviewed Malcolm Fraser for Four Corners on three occasions in the crucial period before November 1975, asking him whether he was prepared to defy the parliamentary convention that the budget of a popularly elected government should not be blocked by a hostile senate. Fraser reminded me that Gough Whitlam had said in opposition that he would defy this convention if he thought it necessary. The Governor General put an end to the standoff in December, sacking the Whitlam government and installing Malcolm Fraser as caretaker Prime Minister.

  The change of government boded ill for the ABC. In the lead-up to the dismissal, the ABC had come under increasing fire fro
m the conservative opposition. Peter Nixon, the Shadow Minister for the Media, was critical of an ABC news report on Vietnam which had used the term ‘forces opposing the Saigon government’; Nixon thought the description ‘Viet Cong’ or ‘Communist’ should have been used. Nixon was quoted as saying there were ‘too many pinkoes or out-and-out socialists on the ABC’s News and Current Affairs programs’.

  There were no prizes for guessing that one of the first acts of the Fraser government would be to cut the ABC’s budget. Across television and radio, costs were trimmed, programs axed and travel budgets reduced. Surprisingly, in this climate, Peter Reid encouraged me to plan a trip to Africa, where historic events were in play; but to make it cost-effective I had to come up with three stories. It wasn’t hard. At the time apartheid was being cruelly enforced by the South African government, Rhodesia was a rogue state denying majority rule, and Idi Amin was the crazy and deadly dictator in control of Uganda. I proposed that Four Corners produce separate reports on the status of the black majorities in all three countries.

  So in January 1976, with cameraman David Brill and soundman Chris Fileman, I boarded a British Airways flight in Perth bound for London. When the aircraft stopped to refuel at Entebbe Airport, 35 kilometres from Kampala, the Ugandan capital, the cabin crew were astonished and concerned that we planned to leave the flight. Didn’t we realise this was Uganda, run by that madman Idi Amin? The airport was a shambles, deserted except for a few soldiers asleep by the baggage carousel. Amin had kicked out all Western media and we had no visas or any document suggesting we might be welcome, so the soldiers locked us up for the night, in the airport ‘hotel’. At some previous time it might have provided shabby accommodation for those who wanted to stay at the airport, but in our case it was functioning as a detention centre.