I left a Britain that was in a fever of jingoistic excitement as its fleet sailed south through the Atlantic Ocean towards the Falkland Islands. I travelled the long way around the world to take up my new job in Sydney; Four Corners reporter Jeff McMullen was based in Washington DC, so I went via the United States to meet him. In total the journey took about five days. Thus, I arrived in Australia with the worst case of jet lag I have ever experienced, before or since. I was met by the ABC’s Head of TV Current Affairs, Peter Reid — my new boss, who for seven years in the 1970s had himself been the Executive Producer of Four Corners. I think he was probably alarmed by my youth. I had been hired at long distance, interviewed not by him but by the ABC’s London manager. I was 34 years old and looked about five years younger.
As we drove north through Sydney’s central business district and over the Harbour Bridge towards the ABC’s television studio at Gore Hill (no harbour tunnel in those days), I asked Peter what the program had done about the coming Falklands War. Nothing so far, he said.
I could hardly believe it. In London the story had been all-encompassing for months. It seemed extraordinary that a weekly current affairs program, even on the other side of the world, could have ignored it. I determined that the very next program would deal with the question of why Argentina had taken the colossal gamble of invading the Falklands (or recovering the Malvinas, as the Argentines saw it).
We had neither the time nor the money to even think about travelling to Argentina. But the idea for the story had occurred to me because four years earlier, I had myself produced a 50-minute report for the BBC’s Panorama about Argentina’s military junta and its ‘dirty war’ against left-wing guerrillas and anyone who might conceivably support them. We persuaded the BBC to send bits of that program to Australia by satellite. But that meant that it ended up on videotape, whereas Four Corners was shot and edited on film. Videotape editing in the early 1980s was crude and cumbersome; we had to go to the ABC in Canberra to get the facilities, and after that to a production house in North Sydney.
Writing and improvising as we went, veteran reporter John Temple and I put together a half-hour program, an amalgam of the old BBC report, more recent news footage and new material shot by our own people with Argentine exiles in Sydney.
Four Corners went to air on a Saturday night at 7.30, as it had done for 21 years. At 7.20 there were still a few embarrassing holes in the soundtrack where the pictures were absolutely mute. But we had run out of time. With a one-inch video reel clutched in my hand I leaped in a cab and tore through the back streets from Crows Nest to Gore Hill. We got it onto the ABC videotape machine at 7.29pm. One minute later, and my first week would have ended in complete disaster.
As it was, the program was a mess, technically and journalistically. That was nobody’s fault but mine. Four Corners’ staff wondered what had hit them.
I learned my lesson, and from then on we did very few fast-turnaround programs. The strength of Four Corners, everyone agreed, lay in stories that took weeks to research, film and edit.
But it turned out there was a gulf of understanding between the senior reporters and their brash new English Executive Producer. Panorama, where I had spent the past seven years as a producer, was Four Corners’ closest equivalent in the English-speaking world; yet it was a wholly different beast. For a start, the BBC program was far better resourced. It had more money for travel; it had access to, and was beginning to learn how to use, new-fangled computer-assisted video post-production techniques, which only advertisers used in Australia; and above all, it had a lot more staff. When I left the UK, Panorama had six full-time reporters and 12 producers, giving it an emphasis on production quality that Four Corners lacked.
Four Corners had the same number of reporters but just one associate producer — my deputy, Mike Berry — and one producer, the formidable Peter Manning. We had three researchers, who helped the reporters get their stories under way. But once they left the office with their two-man film crews, the reporters were mostly on their own. They were used to that autonomy. They liked it. They were at the peak of the profession. Elsewhere in the ABC, Four Corners was known as the ‘House of Lords’. As I began to recruit more producers, the reporters struggled to see the point of them.
Naturally enough, I regarded the job I’d been doing myself for years as indispensible. I wasn’t used to having its value questioned. The philosophy at Panorama was that doing long-form television journalism was hard; there was too much to think about for one person alone. Since in those days most experienced journalists had their grounding in print, it was felt that they needed the help of people who, though they might be and usually were much younger, were television-makers first and foremost.
The producers had a lot of power at Panorama. Because we had often spent weeks on a story before a reporter was even assigned, we usually knew more about it than they did. What the reporters brought to the job was on-air gravitas and authority. But our job was to make sure that our combined efforts worked as television. In crude terms, they worried about the words — the narration and interviews — and we worried about the pictures and the sounds. We obsessed about ‘sequences’ and ‘actuality’ and ‘pace’ and ‘structure’ — technical terms that were barely recognised at Four Corners. We spent hours in the cutting rooms with the editors, shaping scenes, long before a formal script arrived. At times, we rather grandiloquently called ourselves ‘filmmakers’.
To my eye, Four Corners’ television style was at least ten years out of date. It seemed to me that its programs were too often illustrated lectures rather than living television. Mellifluous scripts were written without much regard to what pictures had been shot to accompany them. Interview grabs would run on interminably. It was a style of television that had long since gone out of fashion in Britain.
I set about changing things with plenty of vigour and precious little tact. No one who had survived for 12 years at the BBC ended up humble. We were confident that we simply knew better than everyone else in the world how to do what we did. And if the BBC had too little humility, the ABC had too much: why else would it hire a foreigner, younger than anyone else on the program’s staff, who barely knew the names of the Australian states, let alone anything about the social, political or economic history of the country, to run Australia’s premier current affairs program?
It is unthinkable that such a decision would be made today (though far more important jobs are regularly dished out to well-remunerated CEOs from overseas). But that was a time of cultural cringe. It puzzled me that while all around me I heard Australian accents — not just in the streets and in my kids’ school playground, but among the off-air staff at the ABC, and on-air on every commercial radio and TV channel — many of the voices that you heard on ABC Radio and TV, including those of most Four Corners reporters, could have come straight from the Home Counties of England.
And so, with the blithe arrogance of (comparative) youth, I set about trying to turn Four Corners into a cheaper version (for there was nothing I could do about its comparatively meagre budget) of Panorama, albeit with an Australian voice. Somehow Peter Reid procured funding for two or three more producer positions.
Finding suitable people was another matter. In Britain there were numerous training grounds, in commercial television and at the BBC, for young television journalists who wanted a career behind the camera, in features and documentaries and in daily current affairs programs. In Australia there were virtually none — and the few who had the right combination of journalistic and television experience were snapped up at twice the salary we could afford to pay by the newly arrived big kid on the current affairs block, Nine’s hugely successful 60 Minutes.
The producers we did recruit — often people who came more from the documentary world than from journalism — discovered that collaborating with reporters accustomed to near-total autonomy was tough. Often a producer or reporter would come to me and ask, ‘When the crunch comes, who’s the boss?’ At Panorama
it was a question that was seldom asked. If the argument was about words, the reporter usually won; if about pictures, the producer — but most of the time there wasn’t a conflict. At Four Corners, I found there wasn’t sufficient common culture for that to work.
Within a year or two Four Corners had its own answer: the reporter was the boss — and still is. It’s simpler. It resolves the creative tension — but at the cost, I’ve occasionally felt, of the creativity.
The producer we had when I began, Peter Manning, wasn’t subservient to anyone. His qualifications were overwhelmingly journalistic, not televisual. He had wanted my job as Executive Producer, and in a journalistic sense was far better equipped than me to do it, as he proved when he took over from me in 1985. Meanwhile he provided much of the journalistic grunt at Four Corners.
Both Peter and I agreed that as well as a slicker television style, Four Corners needed big stories. It always has. Not necessarily many of them: if once or twice a year, weekly programs like Four Corners produce a story which makes headlines and becomes a talking point around the nation’s water-coolers, they more than justify their place in the schedule. But if every week they do no more than a competent, thorough treatment of a worthy topic, they will be vulnerable when the razor gang starts looking for cuts. It had been too long since Four Corners had had a truly groundbreaking story. The lack of budget was no longer an excuse.
We first made headlines in 1982 when Peter and reporter Jim Downes went to Fiji to investigate the role of Clive Speed, an Australian adviser in the Prime Minister’s office whose salary was paid by Australian aid, and his connections to a group of business consultants, also mostly Australian, who had been commissioned by a Fijian businessman to write a report for the ruling Alliance Party. The report included some ethically dubious advice about how to win the forthcoming election.
The PM, Sir Kamisese Mara, did us a favour by stalking imperiously out of his interview with Jim Downes. Tapes of the program, acquired by the Fijian opposition, played a major part in the 1982 election — although arguably they had the effect of uniting Indigenous Fijians behind Sir Kamisese Mara. His party won, and afterwards his government set up a Royal Commission, with a New Zealand judge as commissioner, to look into Australian interference in the political process — not only by Sir Kamisese’s ‘consultants’, but by Four Corners. The Commissioner exonerated the program of collaborating with the opposition or interfering in Fijian politics.
But ‘The Fijian Project’ was dwarfed, in terms of impact, by ‘The Big League’, which went to air on 30 April 1983. At the start of the year, I’d invited Chris Masters to join Four Corners from the ABC’s Rural department, where he’d been making films for Countrywide and A Big Country. I liked his air of Aussie honesty; I had no inkling, and nor did he, that he would turn into the country’s most formidable investigative journalist.
I paired Chris with Peter Manning to make his first report — about the state of rugby league, something that Chris knew a bit about since his brother Roy was one of the best-known coaches in the game. But within a couple of weeks, Peter and Chris sniffed out a story that was far bigger than football. They uncovered suspicions in the New South Wales magistracy that seven years earlier a fraud case involving the Executive Director of the NSW Rugby League had been dismissed by a compliant magistrate on the instructions of the Chief Magistrate, who claimed to be passing on the wishes of the Premier, Neville Wran.
Hearing a rumour was one thing. Getting the report into a state where it could be put to air was another. Chris and Peter interviewed hundreds of people and tirelessly worked on their sources in the magistracy. It turned into what we came to call ‘a big dig’ — a story that instead of taking six or seven weeks took months to research and shoot. Everyone else on the program had to work harder and faster while Peter and Chris ground on remorselessly.
When it finally went to air, ‘The Big League’ caused Australia’s most powerful premier to stand aside while the Chief Justice of New South Wales, Sir Laurence Street, took on the role of Royal Commissioner. Neville Wran was exonerated, but the Chief Magistrate, Murray Farquhar, went to jail.
There were epic battles fought in getting that program to air. Some in Australia — especially in the Australian Labor Party — still believe it never should have been aired, because it sullied the Premier’s name with allegations that in the end we could not prove. Our view was that the allegations had been swirling around the magistracy for years, deeply damaging morale and trust in the judicial system. It was essential they be made public, and the issues resolved.
Still, if Dame Leonie Kramer, a Fraser appointee, had not been chairman of the Commission (it did not become a Corporation until later that year), ‘The Big League’ might never have got to air. It’s the only program I know of, before or since, that was referred up beyond the Managing Director (or the General Manager as he was then) to the board, before it aired. In the end, a committee of the three commissioners who were based in Sydney — Kramer herself; Ken Tribe, a solicitor and prominent classical music administrator; and Laurie Short, the veteran secretary of the Federated Ironworkers’ Association and a hard-boiled member of the ALP Right — decided two to one that it should air. Laurie Short, unsurprisingly, was the dissenting voice.
Even before that decision was taken, other battles had gone on behind the scenes — far less important in the political history of New South Wales, but significant in the evolution of Four Corners. Once again, they stemmed from my determination to make investigative journalism into television.
I believed that the story we had to tell, and the evidence upon which it was based, would not be understood by first-time viewers unless we dramatised the events we were describing. So we used actors to recreate some crucial scenes: the Chief Magistrate, Murray Farquhar, casting about for a suitably pliant magistrate to hear the case; his secretary announcing to Farquhar, in front of other magistrates, ‘The Premier is on the phone’; Farquhar telling his deputy, ‘The Premier wants the case dismissed.’
The ABC’s lawyers were horrified. We were going to put words in the mouths of actors representing the Chief Magistrate, other magistrates and the Clerk of the Court. Not many words, it is true — indeed only a couple of sentences, based on notes that Chris and Peter had made after conversations with our three most vital sources. We’d shown the notes to the sources and they had signed or at least initialled them, but had refused to make out statutory declarations. They had promised that if it came to an official inquiry or a defamation proceeding they would give evidence — but the lawyers could not be sure that our sources would repeat on the witness stand the precise words we had put into the mouths of our actors. At the subsequent Royal Commission, I should add, they did. However, that came to nought as the Commission found that Wran could not have made the call.
And in any case, actors act, and sometimes overact. Meaning is conveyed not by words alone, but by tone and body language. How could we be sure we’d got that right in a dramatic reconstruction? ‘Can’t you read out the statements instead?’ the lawyers asked.
I was adamant. This was long before iview and digital recorders; for most people there would be no second look at the program. We needed to create visual and aural impact if viewers were to understand the significance of what we were reporting. So the reconstructions remained — though we went to great lengths to make it plain that reconstruction is what they were. They were shot in a studio, in front of black drapes, not a simulated magistrates’ common room; Chris Masters strode through the set before and afterwards, explaining that we’d based these scenes on the evidence of witnesses whom we could not name but who, we believed, were telling the truth.
It was a device the program used frequently for at least a decade thereafter, with ever-increasing subtlety and sophistication. Chris Masters’ Walkley Award-winning films about a failed rescue in Bass Strait and the French Secret Service’s bombing of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand both included extensive recon
structions. Re-created scenes of an empty dinghy tossing in the Bass Strait waves or a wet-suited diver sliding into the black waters of Auckland Harbour at midnight brought alive the events we were describing. Reconstructions have slipped in and out of fashion in the 30 years since ‘The Big League’, but I don’t think we have ever again included dialogue. The circumstances were unique: the dialogue was essential, and based on the recollections of first-hand witnesses; anything more speculative than that would not have been journalistically, or legally, acceptable.
‘The Fiji Project’ was the first really memorable story to go to air on my watch; ‘The Big League’, without a doubt, was the biggest. But of course there were other significant programs. In 1983, reporter Mary Delahunty and producer Alan Hall won Australia’s highest journalistic award, the Gold Walkley, for ‘Aiding or Abetting?’, a program about the use and misuse of Australian aid in the southern Philippines. Though I was delighted, Chris Masters probably had mixed feelings about that — with a defamation suit from Neville Wran hanging over it, ‘The Big League’ could not be submitted for awards that year.
Chris’s turn came the year after, when the multi-millionaire electronics entrepreneur and helicopter enthusiast Dick Smith approached me with a proposition: he would part-fund a Four Corners investigation into how an aeroplane had crashed and its pilot drowned in Bass Strait because of what Smith saw as the inadequacies of the search-and-rescue system. In an arrangement which would never be contemplated today by ABC News management, Dick Smith provided the producer, and cash to pay for chartered helicopters and other expensive essentials, while we provided the reporter — Chris Masters — the crew, the editor and facilities. The program, ‘Search Without Rescue’, won Chris Masters a Walkley Award (the first of many) in 1984.
Then there was the battle over reporter Allan Hogan’s brief interview with an armed militant from the OPM, the movement for the independence from Indonesia of Irian Jaya, or West Papua. The PNG government insisted that Hogan had ‘lured’ Nyaro across the border from Irian Jaya to do the interview, in defiance of promises he had made when he was given a journalist’s visa. We never said publicly where the interview was conducted, but Allan Hogan always maintained that Nyaro lived most of the time in PNG, a fact that the government did not want to admit.
The Stories That Changed Australia: 50 Years of Four Corners Page 8