Early next morning there was a knock on my door and a short, portly Englishman introduced himself as Bob Astles. He was dressed in a suit with a New Zealand Rugby tie and boasted of his close connection with President Amin. He told me the walkie-talkie he was carrying connected directly with ‘H.E.’ (His Excellency) and the prospects for our visit were not good. A French documentary crew had visited Uganda some nine months earlier, and the film they had made was screening widely across Europe, where audiences were laughing uncontrollably at the antics of Amin. ‘If you try something like that,’ Astles told me, ‘you’ll be in big trouble.’ I babbled something about our story wanting to celebrate the fifth anniversary of Amin’s regime, which I’m sure Astles didn’t believe for a moment, but somehow we found ourselves in his black Mercedes on the way to a Kampala hotel.
Bob Astles had come to Uganda as a British soldier in 1949 and after independence had worked for Milton Obote, the leader who was deposed by Amin. Astles managed to survive the coup and transferred his allegiance to Amin. Amin called him ‘Major Bob’ and his role was mysterious — many considered he had a Svengali-like influence on Amin. He made it clear we would be travelling nowhere without him, and when we left or returned to our rooms at the hotel we were always being watched by Amin’s not-so-secret police. Every morning Astles would arrive in the black Mercedes to take us to Amin’s public appearances, and it wasn’t long before the president was smiling and waving for our camera.
One morning Astles arrived to pick us up and I told him I had had difficulty in making an overnight phone call to Australia. ‘I know,’ said Astles. ‘We don’t like that kind of inefficiency. The hotel telephonist was executed this morning.’
It was an Alice in Wonderland moment. Sometimes it was hard to get a firm grip on reality in Amin’s Uganda; Astles may not have been telling the truth. I wasn’t sure whether I was horrified or incredulous.
Amin was a brutal dictator. He had expelled all Asian-born Ugandans, resulting in the collapse of the Ugandan economy, and had ordered the murder of at least 100,000 of his own countrymen. Stories of his macabre cruelty abounded, including one that he kept the severed head of one of his enemies in a refrigerator. No one was safe from his murderous rampage, including the Chief Justice, the Anglican Archbishop, the Governor of the Central Bank, and two of his own cabinet ministers, all of whom disappeared or were murdered on Amin’s instructions.
Bob Astles made sure Four Corners was not given the chance to report those crimes. Instead, we attended endless formal functions where military bands played very badly out of tune, and His Excellency, The President for Life, The Father of All Twins, The Cook with All the Firewood (the list of these hilarious honorifics was endless), Field Marshal Dr Idi Amin Dada made speeches that were so inappropriate they were extremely amusing. Opening a factory backed by Japanese finance, Amin praised the Japanese for their kamikaze pilots during World War II.
Astles was not willing to arrange an interview with Amin for me. He said he had been jailed by Amin previously for his role in the Obote government, and wasn’t keen to repeat the experience. But he did suggest I should ask H.E. myself for an interview. ‘Just phone the State House, Entebbe,’ he said. ‘It’s in the phone book.’ This seemed preposterously simple, but amazingly, moments after making the phone call and asking the receptionist if I could speak to the President, Amin was on the line. When he asked me what questions I wanted to put to him, it didn’t seem wise to suggest that his appalling human rights record would be a suitable starting point. Instead I rambled on about his role in the Organization of African Unity, and it wasn’t long before His Excellency had agreed to an interview the next day.
When we arrived to set up for the interview, it turned out that a crew from Uganda TV was preparing to broadcast it ‘live’. This added only slightly to my apprehension about what lay ahead — it was the sight of the president arriving with a large pistol in a holster on his hip that made me think things could go badly wrong. I have to admit that my reputation as a fearless inquisitor was not enhanced by my interview with Amin. Somewhere I injected an anodyne question about reports of his abuses, but he brushed it off by saying these allegations were the subject of an independent inquiry, and I cowardly failed to follow up his response. I regret that my report added to the international perception of Amin as a buffoon, rather than a murderous despot.
From Uganda we travelled to Rhodesia, where most blacks were denied the vote by the white minority government led by Prime Minister Ian Smith. My progressive views from my student days on black nationalism in Africa had been tempered by the horrors of Amin’s regime, and now they were again challenged by the apparent prosperity and calm of Smith’s Rhodesia. Blacks in Rhodesia enjoyed the highest standard of living in any African country; they had access to good schools and hospitals; and there were no apartheid laws, as in South Africa. But gathered on Rhodesia’s borders were guerrilla armies, backed by the Soviet Union, determined to unseat Smith’s government and install black majority rule. Two factions were vying for power, one (ZAPU) led by Joshua Nkomo, a former trade union leader, the other (ZANU) led by Robert Mugabe, who had been jailed in Rhodesia as a political prisoner from 1964 to 1974. It was a moot question whether the two men hated each other more than they hated the Smith regime.
Despite being engaged in a deadly war with these forces, the Rhodesian government made no attempt to prevent me interviewing Nkomo in his home town of Bulawayo, where he openly expressed his support for the armed rebellion. Nor was I prevented from recording the views of ordinary black Rhodesians who backed the struggle for their rights. One of the questions in my interview with Smith was, ‘Surely black men must run black men’s countries, even if they make a mess of it?’ Smith replied, ‘I don’t think people should run countries for the worse, and make a mess of it.’ In the end it was Robert Mugabe who won the battle for control of the new nation of Zimbabwe. Some 30 years later, in 2012, Mugabe was still in power, his regime universally condemned for its human rights abuses and economic incompetence.
In 1977 and 1978, the Fraser government’s budget cuts continued to rob the ABC of the resources necessary to do its job. The national broadcaster could not afford the rights to major sporting events, local drama production had almost stopped, and the facilities for news-gathering were falling well behind those at the commercial stations. A retiring ABC commissioner, Richard Harding, said at a press conference that the Fraser government had reduced the ABC to a ‘timid, dispirited, and punch-drunk organisation’. There were stop-work meetings, and strikes that put programs off air and caused blank screens.
In 1979, along with Ray Martin, George Negus, Gordon Bick and Jeff Watson, I joined an exodus of ABC staff accepting Gerald Stone’s invitation to join Channel 9, where 60 Minutes was taking shape. It wasn’t the salary that attracted me; it was the program budget, which promised generous funding for overseas travel and the resources to make high-quality television reports. It was also comforting to know that so many former ABC staffers were involved, including Stone himself. We may have been working for Kerry Packer, but other than requiring us to make a popular program, that didn’t seem to require any fundamental change in our journalism.
Gerald Stone delivered on his promise of the resources to travel widely. In three years at 60 Minutes, I produced reports from Japan, Korea, India, Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Egypt, Germany, El Salvador, Israel and Spain. The assignments included an interview with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and a Walkley Award-winning story on three Australians jailed on drugs charges in Bangkok. I had no regrets at leaving Four Corners, despite my former colleagues’ criticism that 60 Minutes was shallow and superficial. When John Penlington defected to 60 Minutes, the ABC lost one of its most widely admired journalists.
In 1981 I started the Sunday program for the Nine Network, poaching a neglected ABC journalist, Andrew Olle, to join Jennifer Byrne, a promising young reporter from the Age, as the program’s two reporters. To cut a
long story short, despite the program enjoying great critical acclaim, at the end of its first year, Channel 9 instructed me to cut Sunday’s budget and sack five of its staff. I could not sack people who had taken the risk of joining the program, and who had been responsible for its success. I said that if Nine insisted on the cuts, I would be one of the five who went. Nine tried to get me to change my mind but I refused, and so I sacked myself.
And that’s how I ended up as a reporter back at Four Corners, with Jonathan Holmes as Executive Producer. I thought Holmes had acted admirably in refusing Nine’s blandishments to take my highly paid job at Sunday, and he made me feel extremely welcome in the job I had left some five years earlier. Holmes was in the process of revitalising a tired program, and was determined to restore its reputation.
In May 1984 Holmes assigned me to Port Moresby for a story I never suspected would lead to controversy and confrontation. Thousands of West Irian refugees had crossed into Papua New Guinea, fleeing what they claimed was persecution by Indonesian authorities. It created a major diplomatic headache for Michael Somare’s government. If he sent them back, many Papuans would be angry at the fate of their fellow Melanesians; if he let them stay in PNG, he risked the wrath of the Indonesian government. Somare wanted to show Jakarta he was not sympathetic to the cause of the OPM (Free Papua Movement), a ragged army of Melanesian guerrillas who were fighting the Indonesians for independence in West Irian.
On arrival in Port Moresby I met Sean Dorney, the ABC’s PNG-based correspondent. He was welcoming and extremely helpful, even though he might have regarded me as an invader on his territory. With his advice, I made contact with the OPM and made secret plans to interview its leader, James Nyaro. The meeting was to take place in a remote part of the country, close to the West Irian border, and the Four Corners crew and I flew there covertly in a chartered aircraft. Shortly before we took off, Dorney phoned me to say the PNG government knew of our plans and was extremely angry. We were breaking the law, the government claimed, because we were enticing Nyaro to cross the border and enter PNG illegally. The truth was that Nyaro lived most of the time on the PNG side of the border, but the government wanted to maintain the fiction that it was able to prevent him doing so. I had interviewed Michael Somare earlier in our visit, so once the interview with Nyaro was recorded we headed for home.
On our return to Sydney the report was given the title ‘Borderline’, and I began writing the story and editing the footage. It wasn’t long before Sean Dorney was on the phone, saying he had been told by the PNG government he would be deported if Four Corners ran the interview with Nyaro. Sean had also informed ABC management of this threat and the matter was referred up to the acting Managing Director, Stuart Revill, in the absence of Geoffrey Whitehead. The Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, following discussions with the PNG government, sent Revill a telex, saying that I had broken a promise not to interview Nyaro and that I had violated the immigration laws by doing so. The Department told Revill that the Foreign Minister, Bill Hayden, believed that if these allegations were true, the Four Corners interview would cause tensions with PNG.
Revill contacted Jonathan Holmes and asked him to consider the value of the interview if the consequence of broadcasting it was to be Dorney’s deportation. At that stage the program was still being edited, and the interview with Nyaro remained uncut. I told Jonathan that Nyaro’s halting English meant that I would use little of the interview anyway, and he in turn informed Revill that the interview was important to the story but not vital. Current Affairs management made the decision that the interview was not to be shown, and Revill contacted the PNG government to inform them of that decision. I was disappointed because the interview was a scoop, and even if it wasn’t riveting television, it was important to an understanding of the issues.
The threat to expel Dorney remained unreported by the media until PNG’s Foreign Minister told an AAP correspondent that he had complained to the Australian government about the Four Corners interview. Then it hit the front pages — and when the decision to ban the interview became known, it was even bigger news, covered extensively by the ABC’s own programs. Tony Jones, then a young reporter for PM, followed the story closely. Battlelines were drawn: some argued the ABC was being censored by a foreign government; others believed that management had the right to manage. Jonathan Holmes defended my integrity, making it clear I had neither given nor broken undertakings to the PNG government.
Now the value of the Nyaro interview took second place to the principle of the ABC’s independence. Holmes asked Revill to reconsider his decision, but Revill argued that the ABC’s presence in PNG was his primary concern. This was understandable — the ABC was protective of its overseas bureaux: some had been established only after delicate diplomacy, and anything that might cause the expulsion of an ABC foreign correspondent was not to be taken lightly. Some years earlier the broadcast of the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s film about China on ABC TV had led to the Chinese government severely limiting the activities of Paul Raffaele, the ABC’s first correspondent in Beijing. Revill would not change his mind about the ban on the interview, and he was supported by the Managing Director, Geoffrey Whitehead, when he returned from holidays.
The controversy deepened when ABC Chairman Ken Myer gave an interview in which he said that in Asian countries the media was totally controlled by government, and ‘you have got to follow the rules set by those governments or you won’t get in’. He was undeniably correct, but it was not a ringing endorsement of independent, truthful journalism, and in the context of the Nyaro interview it reflected badly on PNG. Myer was attacked on all sides and compounded his embarrassment by releasing a poorly worded statement which seemed to contradict his earlier view.
When the ABC board met a few days later, it was the founding father of Four Corners, Bob Raymond, now a board member, who declared that the issue went to the heart of the ABC’s independence. He was joined by five other board members who voted to overturn the ban on the interview. That meant that Myer and Whitehead, who found themselves among a minority of four board members, had been overruled. Whitehead insisted that the decision was one for management, not the board. The meeting was adjourned until the next day, when Myer told the board he had received letters of resignation from Whitehead and Revill. This was not an outcome those who had voted to overturn the ban wanted, so a statement was prepared supporting the earlier management decision, but saying the board believed the issue had been elevated into a matter of principle by the PNG government’s threat to expel Dorney. At the same time it was announced the Nyaro interview would go to air as part of the Four Corners story the next day.
The ‘Borderline’ report was half an hour in length, and the Nyaro interview took up about one minute of that time. The fallout from the ABC’s prevarication was much greater than the issues raised by the story itself. Newspaper editorials questioned the competency of the board, and the Australian declared that ‘at no time has there been so much public dissatisfaction with its performance’. I felt like an innocent bystander throughout the controversy. I was angered by the false allegations that I had broken the law or breached agreements with the PNG government, but I acknowledged that management had the right to make a decision about whether the interview should be broadcast.
Some months later, the PNG government carried out the threat to expel Dorney, but made it clear he was not held personally responsible for what had happened. I felt great sympathy for Sean, who is an excellent journalist, and greater sympathy for his wife, Pauline, who was a PNG citizen with extensive family connections in her homeland. Sean returned to PNG in 1987, and in 1991 was awarded an MBE ‘for services to broadcasting and sport’.
Soon after ‘Borderline’ was broadcast, Ian Carroll, the Executive Producer of the nightly ABC TV program Nationwide, spoke to me about plans he had to shake up the evening TV news bulletin. He wanted to shift the starting time to 6.30 and soften the sharp demarcation between news and curr
ent affairs. The program would be called The National, and Carroll asked me to be his Deputy Editor. In what was perhaps one of my poorer career decisions, I agreed, and left Four Corners to help set up the new program. But that’s a story for another time.
5
RECOLLECTIONS OF A CUTTING-ROOM TECHNICIAN
by Jonathan Holmes
By the end of 1981, Four Corners was in a bad way. Its budget had been cut until its crews could barely travel beyond the Blue Mountains. With a handful of veteran reporters it was struggling to fill 50 minutes each week. It had had three executive producers in a single year, all of them reporters who would much rather have been in the field. I’ve heard it said that at the end of that year, management came close to dropping the program altogether.
Instead, they took some drastic decisions to salvage it. Four Corners’ duration was cut from 50 to 30 minutes; the budget for travel and expenses was almost doubled; and since no one in Australia wanted to take on what was seen as a somewhat thankless task, management decided to go to Britain to find a new executive producer.
The first two of those decisions, as much as the third, were the ones that helped to save the program. Suddenly it became possible to travel again all over Australia, and indeed to at least some of the four corners of the earth. And the program’s weekly efforts were now concentrated on a single story, instead of two or three. All that had already happened before I arrived in Australia in April 1982.
My first instinct was that if Four Corners was still in trouble, it was because it lacked up-to-the-minute topicality. I soon discovered that the program’s limited technical resources were a barrier to the ‘fast turnaround’ story.
The Stories That Changed Australia: 50 Years of Four Corners Page 7