The Stories That Changed Australia: 50 Years of Four Corners

by Sally Neighbour

  Under huge pressure from the PNG government and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and with the ABC’s correspondent in Port Moresby, Sean Dorney, threatened with banishment, ABC management ordered that the interview be pulled. I always accepted their right to do that — the decision was well above my pay-grade. But I was incensed that they did not defend our reporter against the PNG government’s allegations of breach of faith. In the end, ABC management’s decision became a national scandal, the board overruled it, and the program went to air complete with the contentious (though, in all honesty, unremarkable) little interview.

  The ‘big digs’ and the headline stories are the ones people still remember decades later. Nevertheless, week by week, Four Corners goes to air with the best program it can manage. For reporters and producers there’s a rhythm to working on the program, increasing in intensity as they progress through research and shooting, to writing and editing, reaching a climax in ‘program week’. For the executive producer, every week is program week. The intensity is draining.

  I did not make myself popular, that first year or so. Indeed, for some of the veteran reporters at Four Corners, most of them 15 or 20 years my senior, I made myself insufferable. I would tear the initial rough-cut versions of their programs into 20 different parts and put them back together in a different order; we called it ‘restructuring’. I would take their scripts and ruthlessly edit and change them, shortening sentences, dropping adjectives, simplifying syntax; we called it ‘polishing’. I would push reporters and producers to think, and think again, about how they could bring glimpses of real life into their reports, with real sound, of people talking not to an interviewer but to each other in real situations; we called it ‘actuality’, and it was a hard thing to achieve. I urged cameramen to take their cameras off the tripod, sound recordists to trade off sound quality for genuine spontaneity.

  Looking back on it, I feel I did more good than harm, but there were plenty who didn’t think so then. One veteran reporter, no longer with us, dismissed me as a mere ‘cutting-room technician’. Another remarked bitterly within my hearing, after a particularly tough rough-cut viewing: ‘And for years I’ve been kidding myself that I understood television!’ Three times, our best film editor, Alec Cullen (who amazingly would keep working at Four Corners until the end of 2011), announced that he had had enough and began packing cardboard boxes. It required a prescribed degree of executive grovelling to persuade him to stay.

  Some reporters gave up making much effort to shape their stories the way they wanted them. ‘What’s the point?’ I heard one ask a colleague. ‘Jonathan will only change it all anyway.’

  So the effort was not without cost, on both sides. It was not a happy experience for me either, at least in the early days. I was a newcomer to the country, and to the job. I had to make my friends and allies where I could and try not to worry about the nay-sayers. Hardest of all, at the end of my first year, I had to tell a couple of people who had served the program faithfully and well that I thought the program would be better off without them.

  But gradually we forged a team — camera crews, editors, producers, a whole new reporting line-up — that understood what we were about.

  Some of the new recruits during the 1980s — Andrew Olle, Kerry O’Brien, Chris Masters, Mark Colvin — had been working in television for most of their careers. Tony Jones came from radio, but became adept in the medium in no time. Others came direct from newspapers, and for them the transition was hard. As a medium, television has three or four times more heft and impact than the written word. But it takes time to learn how to use it.

  For a journalist from a non-television background, the fact that everything you write has to be read to a series of pictures, and must have relevance to them, can seem an infuriating limitation on your ability to say what you want. You have to learn to use the pictures to help you rather than hinder you. A convoy of trucks can illustrate the slow progress of peace talks or the remorseless approach of war; a man gazing through a window at a bank of televisions can stand in for an entire population deciding how to vote. The viewer hardly notices these verbal sleights of hand; and after a while, like a driver instinctively changing gear, the reporter barely notices them either. But they make the difference between a program that a viewer struggles to understand, as image fights with words, and one that slides into the brain like a sword into its sheath.

  For all that, it never gets easy. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that I made the full switch from producing and supervising to reporting in my own write (to pinch John Lennon’s pun). I have done many jobs in television, and a few outside it, since I graduated 40-odd years ago. Writing a Four Corners script is still, intellectually, the hardest thing I’ve done. Decide what the story is. Decide how to tell it, in what order. Decide which short grabs from lengthy interviews work best on screen, and how to link them together. Decide what your best visual sequences are, and how to use them to say what needs to be said, and where to place them so that the program has light and shade, moments where viewers can rest their brains, where words take a back seat. Then write your narration so that it doesn’t conflict with what viewers are feeling as they watch the screen, so that information slips effortlessly into their ears without distracting their eyes.

  But all that was in the future. Of those crowded three and a half years in the early 1980s, far more than individual programs, what comes back to me most vividly is the atmosphere in that cramped suite of offices on the fifth floor at Gore Hill. The battered wooden table around which we sat for our weekly meetings or to scour through the script after a rough cut. The old Remington typewriters on which we bashed out memos and scripts and research notes. The scissors and sticky tape with which we literally cut and pasted scripts, to save having to type them all over again between one version and the next: no word processors then.

  No fax machines either. Jeff McMullen sent his scripts from Washington by telex, and I sent back my revisions the same way — unimaginably cumbersome in this age of the instant email. I remember the Bakelite telephones with the silvery dials — push button phones didn’t come in until the mid 1980s. And everywhere — in offices, in cutting rooms, in studio control suites — a haze of cigarette smoke, and ashtrays overflowing.

  It was a life apart. For an EP, nothing much exists outside that little world: a small group of fiercely intelligent, competitive, ambitious men and women, striving to do better. There were rages and tears and tantrums. There was laughter too, and lunches, every fortnight or so, at which prodigious amounts of alcohol were consumed. Every Saturday night, another program to put to air, and every Tuesday afternoon, another rough cut to worry over.

  I was due to go back to Britain after two years. But just before Christmas 1983, after I’d said my goodbyes (and been given a leaving present, an Aboriginal bark painting, which I still have), Peter Manning and reporter Jenny Brockie came to visit me and persuaded me to stay. A year later, for the 1985 season, the program was expanded back to 50 minutes — a vindication, I suppose, of three years’ effort. In its half-hour incarnation it had needed no presenter, but now I managed to poach Andrew Olle from Channel 9 to be the program’s weekly face. That was one of my better decisions. Another was the move to create new theme music and graphics to introduce the program; Rick Turk’s distinctive tune and the Four Corners spinning cube — my very own graphic idea — have both stood the test of time, albeit much changed and updated, and are now 30 years old.

  When eventually I handed over, with relief, to Peter Manning, my wife and I weren’t convinced that we wanted to return to the grey skies of England. We went instead to Boston, Massachusetts, where I helped to make a documentary series about nuclear weapons. Two years later we were back in the searing light of Sydney. That, too, is a decision I’ve never regretted.

  Since then I’ve put in three stints at Four Corners as a reporter, most recently for five years from 2003. In its spacious offices at the ABC’s new headquarters in Ultimo, it�
��s lost some of its scruffy intimacy. No executive producer I’ve worked for has been anything like as interventionist as I was. If they had been, I probably wouldn’t have stood for it.

  Wherever I’ve been working since 1985, every Monday night at 8.30, with very few exceptions, I’ve had the TV tuned to Channel 2. Sometimes the program is average, sometimes it’s exceptional. But let no one doubt that over every one of those programs, sweat has been sweated, and metaphorically at least, blood has been shed.

  I’ve met reporters from television news who’ve remarked that putting 45 minutes together in seven weeks must be a breeze. You will not hear anyone say that who has ever actually done it.

  6

  AIDING OR ABETTING?

  by Mary Delahunty

  It began with a call. An English voice with a laconic air. ‘I’d like to talk to you — in private.’

  Private ended up a wide, empty and echoing lounge of the Ryde RSL, burnt orange and mission brown tiles hovered over by alarmingly green plastic potted palms. Funny what you remember.

  Jonathan Holmes’s beanpole legs were wrapped in jeans and he appeared supremely relaxed in the Executive Producer’s skin, even though he’d seemingly been in the job five minutes. But the man did come with a reputation; I observed he carried it lightly. He was a gun producer from the BBC’s Panorama program, creating waves of energy in Australian current affairs circles, and here I was a young journo from the Wimmera wheatlands, sitting opposite him on a plastic two-seater, with the distant afternoon jangle of the pokies in the next room, trying to take in a brilliant offer.

  With the insouciance of youth, I didn’t really know my own luck. A chance to enter the ABC’s ‘House of Lords’, as Four Corners had become known by the early ’80s, to be part of its transformation and to absorb by osmosis the finest skills in the business from the talents around me was the opportunity of a lifetime. Four Corners picked at the carapace of life and politics, and like the cat that got the cream I was both surprised and elated. Sitting there on the ugly couch, in my mind I was already straining to be the journalist I hoped to become.

  I had been trained in the chrysalis of the ABC — social-affairs documentaries and Nationwide current affairs in Melbourne. I’d wandered a counterculture festival with a stripped-to-the waist Deputy PM Dr Jim Cairns and trembled in a grubby Williamstown pub waiting for a crim from the Painters’ and Dockers’ Union to find me and spill the beans on the ‘Bottom of the Harbour’ tax rorts. I’d almost been sacked when an April Fools’ Day spoof on doctors exploiting the tax benefits of this scheme went to air with seemingly more truth than spoof. My next move had been to Sydney, to The Reporters, the program plaything of one media mogul, Rupert Murdoch, trying to best another media mogul, Kerry Packer at 9. It didn’t. So I happily exited the glossy world of commercial current affairs, where editorial conversation too often had ranged around slogans rather than sentences.

  It’s been pointed out since, but I don’t remember an obvious sense of being the only female reporter at 4Cs when I arrived. What sticks in my mind was that under Jonathan’s leadership the place was a hive of research and rigour.

  Vigorous debate was the lingua franca of Four Corners, but I recall an exchange between Jonathan and me that carried the frisson of a deeper cultural mismatch. It was over Northern Ireland and the civil war between the Catholic Nationalists and Protestant Unionists. A researcher and I were deep in the story looking for an angle when I was asked into his office.

  ‘You’re too close to the story.’

  Me, fifth-generation Aussie, being told by an English immigrant, just arrived, that I was too close to ‘the Troubles’ half a world away!

  Red hair and pale skin mark me as part of the Irish diaspora but I had never even been to Ireland. Anyway I lost the argument and was taken off the story. It still rankles. I eventually got to the Emerald Isle well after the peace settlement, as a government minister on an education delegation in 2000 — invited by the English!

  If 1983 was a seminal year for this young reporter, it turned out, for totally unrelated reasons, to be a hell of a year for the country — savage wildfires, the Franklin dam stopped by brave protests, and a sudden early federal election.

  On the morning of 3 February 1983, daring a double dissolution to exploit Labor leadership instability and hoping to snatch control of both houses of the parliament, Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser called a snap election. But Fraser had made a monumental miscalculation. As he was doing the necessary constitutional business at Government House, the Labor caucus was efficiently changing leaders from the bland Bill Hayden to the charismatic former trade union leader Bob Hawke. That day at Yarralumla Fraser was on the wrong side of history. It was a day that reverse-mirrored the drama and political unpredictability of an earlier clandestine visit to the Governor General, in the spring of ’75, when Gough Whitlam was sacked while Fraser waited in an anteroom to become the interim PM. What goes around comes around, and in 1983 the political tectonic plates were realigning. Though we didn’t know it then, Labor would govern the country for 13 years, even, almost impudently, seeking 16.

  That leadership change in ’83, as dramatic and telling about the state of the Australian Labor Party as the Rudd – Gillard switch in 2010 (with the same salve for the vanquished — foreign minister), was a thrilling event for a young reporter like me. Political executions, with the blood always seeping out into the wider body politic, are a heart starter for journalists. Like a new engine in an old car, it revs up the show and you are never sure what direction it will go or how fast it will run. It cemented a fascination with politics that started before university and would later propel me into my own political career.

  Of course Four Corners doesn’t bother itself with the daily reporting grind. We had our eyes on the long game, the social and political effects of daily decisions, the ramifications of good and bad policy.

  While Bob Hawke, the new opposition leader, was bristling during the ‘blood on your hands’ interview with Richard Carleton on the ABC’s Nationwide, and Malcolm Fraser was exhorting Australians to ‘put your money under the bed’ to save it from Labor, I had my L-plates on at Four Corners dissecting the tragedy of the Ash Wednesday bushfires. This investigation was personal as well as professional. Friends’ places had been scorched, though our hobby farm in Victoria had survived. I was disturbed by the failure of the state disaster plan and emergency services’ communications. Many of these failures would be repeated nearly 30 years later in Victoria’s Black Saturday inferno.

  As the ’83 election approached, ‘the Silver Bodgie’ — as Hawke was nicknamed by some wag in the party — ran on the mateship anthem ‘Bringing Australia Together’, while the tactically gazumped and wooden PM, Fraser, struggled to look like the national leader we needed, even in the townships of Victoria and South Australia, where wildfire had taken lives and certainty.

  The election of 5 March 1983 brought Bob Hawke’s Labor to government after seven and a half years of the Liberal – Country Party Coalition. Malcolm Fraser’s lip quivered as brash Bob whooped into the tally room to claim victory. Labor gained 23 seats, on only a swing of 4 per cent, and its greatest election win in 40 years. As the surrendering opposition leader, Bill Hayden, had famously predicted, ‘Even a drover’s dog could lead the Labor party to victory.’

  Hayden’s consolation prize was the post of Foreign Minister. The man and the job would loom large in my life six months later, when Four Corners was pursuing an explosive foreign aid story right in the middle of his portfolio patch.

  It was about an Australian aid policy indolently executed on Mindanao Island, in the southern Philippines, which in the ’80s — as now, though for different reasons — was the centre of a festering civil war over land ownership and self-determination. Through the nine-year-old Philippines Australia Development Assistance Project (PADAP), Australia was spending $80 million, a big chunk of its foreign aid budget, building roads on this primitive island. The aim was to provid
e a network of passable roads so subsistence farmers could get their produce and stock to markets. It seemed on the surface — and was presented to Australian government and taxpayers — like a straightforward infrastructure spend with demonstrable community benefit. But was it?

  Four Corners’ research, led by Robyn Smith, had discovered breathtaking Marcos diplomatic duplicity. A 1981 Community Aid Abroad survey had exposed as a sham the project’s supposed benefits to the local community. Our assignment in the Philippines was to ascertain whether Australia was aiding the farmers or innocently abetting the Marcos dictatorship by paying for the asphalt and expertise that carried trained soldiers and military hardware to an undeclared and unequal civil war.

  The Philippines is a beautiful country blessed with rich and productive soil and bountiful crops. Back then, 30 years ago, its natural assets were being plundered by Ferdinand Marcos, his plump wife, Imelda, their family and cronies. Ten years into martial law, they dominated this largely illiterate Catholic nation like demigods. They enjoyed a lot of earthly support.

  Bloated landowning oligarchs poured money into Marcos coffers to protect their patch, as did the United States to shore up their bigger patch. A compliant nation in Southeast Asia, the Philippines was strategically critical after the fall of Vietnam in 1975. Under Marcos, the Philippines was a US-supported anti-communist rampart and commercially lucrative for American sugar interests. With the giant US naval base at Sepik Bay and regular cash-flow from Washington, Marcos and his mates were comfortable in Uncle Sam’s embrace.