The Stories That Changed Australia: 50 Years of Four Corners

by Sally Neighbour

  Over the Christmas break Andrew took the opportunity to think. Trust, which is always mutual, had grown a touch, and by the New Year began to extend to his siblings, Mandy and Nikki. They were as much in the dark about who had committed the murders, but could tell what they did know and help us better understand their world.

  The Hodsons were career criminals, with their children accordingly inducted, much the same as if they had grown up on a farm or above a grocery store. They were also a loving family. Terence Hodson doted on his grandchildren. Nikki had just given birth to Dylan, whom Terence dubbed ‘the villain’. The grandparents had been looking forward to a family gathering when, deep into a Saturday evening, they were ordered to their knees and each twice shot in the back of the head.

  We called the program ‘Melbourne Confidential’, an homage to James Ellroy’s novel L.A. Confidential, which had profiled a similarly vicious and amoral landscape. L.A. Confidential was based on a true incident — a police bashing in California in the early 1950s that became a catalyst for wholesale reforms.

  In all probability the Melbourne murders also had a deeper provenance. While corruption did not so clearly reach up as in Queensland, a range of bad habits and unholy alliances maintained a lantana-like grip. The longer-form 45 minutes’ single-issue programming gave us the scope to colour in this background, with the help of cameraman Andrew Taylor and soundo Jerry Rickard. We were also able to interweave candid interviews with the younger Hodsons and home video material that took us inside that Kew home. We broke some news that demonstrated dangerous connections between Hodson’s police handlers and criminals who, in the parlance, Terry had ‘lagged’.

  In other crime programs reported up to then I had seen how corrupt police had the power to eliminate dangerous criminal allies by tipping off their adversaries. It so happened that information reports from Terence Hodson, registered informant number SCS4/390, had been freely dispersed in the underworld.

  I was pleased with the work of our team as the report worked at many levels: as a revealing film and story with strong interviews and breaking news. I don’t know how much of a difference it made. You can measure the number of people who watch, but not so much the impression that is left.

  Paul Dale was charged with the murder of the Hodsons but the charge was later formally withdrawn.

  Former detective Dale was subsequently charged with misleading the Australian Crime Commission about his dealings with the late Carl Williams. Prior to his murder, Williams gave statements to police linking himself and Dale to the Hodson murders. It was reported in the Melbourne Age that Garry Livermore, counsel for the ACC, observed: ‘People who assist in endeavouring to prosecute Paul Dale have got a pretty poor life expectancy.’ Dale proclaims his innocence, and without telling evidence to prove otherwise, deserves to be so considered.

  So the mystery and an important watershed case remain, at the time of writing, unresolved. Victoria never got its Royal Commission. I came to ruefully lament that instead we got a miniseries. The Underbelly franchise would also follow the blood trail in Victoria, with a different approach to public education. ‘Melbourne Confidential’ had shown the world of the gangster as far from glamorous. On that Saturday night in May 2004 what mattered most, love and family and life itself, was extinguished forever.

  As if at the hands of a master forger, the outline of organised crime constantly adjusts. In 2010, Nick McKenzie would make the program that for me best exemplifies the way it was again transforming. ‘Crime Incorporated’ shadowed Operation Hoffman, a multi-agency inquiry led by the ACC which was investigating large-scale drug importation and money laundering.

  The hoods of Kings Cross, Lygon Street and Fortitude Valley stand small before the barely visible transnational crooks targeted by that inquiry. While the Australian gangsters openly blaze away at one another for the sake of territory and market share, others never on the police radar, perhaps never even entering the country, could in a single deal make profits that a Kings Cross nightclub would not see in a lifetime.

  The latest business model saw Chinese triads collaborating with Dutch chemists, Australian bikie gangs, Vietnamese money launderers and waterfront insiders to import container loads of drugs. One scheme became visible through the antics of an Australian crook of Turkish heritage, Hakan Ayik, who was savvy enough to draw these players together. Traditionally, criminal syndicates have been loath to step outside trusted familial and ethnic networks. Now transnational criminal networks, like other big businesses, were globalising.

  Perhaps it simply goes with the territory that Ayik would be revealed through the modern portal of social networking. Ayik became something of a Facebook gangster, unable to resist showing off the high-life trappings of flash watches and exotic cars.

  But one element of the operation belonged very much to the past. The Hoffman inquiry exposed an old guard of corruption still intact on the waterfront. Australian ports were just as porous as the massive coastline. Between Customs, federal and state police jurisdictions were gaps you could sail a supertanker through.

  The story demonstrated that crime and corruption would continue to provide material for investigative journalists like Nick. After a quarter of a century it was time for me to move on. I can’t say I ever found the subject inspiring. It often felt like that bag I carried around. When I was on a big dig my shoulder bag swelled as documents collected. In the early years, property and company searches, court records and the like were obtained by turning up at a registry and filling in a form. As I uncovered important documents I found it safer and easier to hang on to them. And that bag could become a burden.

  Now you access all manner of data online, one of many examples of how investigative journalism should be easier today. Defamation reform has made the court process far less punishing. And as I came to notice, the investigative reporter now has more allies. When we did ‘The Big League’ there was no formal support. When we did ‘Academy of Crime’ 12 years later, it was in cooperation with one of many new anti-corruption agencies that were nonexistent when Four Corners debuted. Nick McKenzie’s ‘Crime Incorporated’ also showed law enforcement bodies had gathered trust to a point where they were pooling inquiries, a circumstance unthinkable in the old days.

  A telling example of change can be seen in a report by Sarah Ferguson in 2009. ‘The Dishonouring of Marcus Einfeld’ told the story of a Federal Court judge from an upper tier of power and influence, disgraced after being unable to escape a $75 speeding fine. Who would try these days what not so long ago was routine?

  A contrast demonstrating the roller-coaster nature of corruption reform emerged in another Four Corners program, ‘Standen — The Inside Man’, reported by Marian Wilkinson in 2011. Mark Standen was one of many police insiders I spoke with over the years. So it was a shock to me as well when the Assistant Director of the NSW Crime Commission was charged and later convicted of attempting to import 300 kilograms of pseudoephedrine.

  As police get closer to the true Mr Bigs there is also an exponential increase in the size of jackpot gains and consequent temptation. Drug law enforcement also increases its vulnerability to corruption as a new generation familiar with recreational drug use is recruited. But in general, undeniably, the skill levels and integrity of policing have improved.

  When I look back on Four Corners’ 50 years I see a similar incremental rising standard. And in doing so I sight the faces of wonderful colleagues now departed. Andrew Olle presented ‘The Moonlight State’ and proved a true friend at a difficult time. Cameraman Brett Joyce and editor Des Horne were part of the esteemed labour force on ‘Academy of Crime’. Sandra Harvey, completely uncontaminated by all those years covering the underworld, was a valued partner on the 2005 prisons’ profile, ‘Supermax’.

  When operating principles awkwardly adjust to a tumultuous online revolution, Four Corners also defines an important industry standard. If it comes to it, citizen journalism will be, in my view, a pale successor. Investigative journalism
requires institutional support; it calls for researchers and lawyers as well as reporters.

  Four Corners is a treasured archive of both modern history and working journalism. A core asset is primary research. While others shrink behind computer screens and recycle evidence to conflate opinion, Four Corners gets out there chasing facts. And instead of milking the headline it forms the narrative. The program takes the time, now too often surrendered, to tell the story.

  8

  THE ADRENALIN YEARS

  by Peter Manning

  Nothing was more pleasurable than being in the back of a camera car constructing a story for the mighty Four Corners. I have two images. In the first, Chris Masters and I, two close mates, are being paid due disrespect by cameraman Chris Doig and soundo Tim Parratt, driving through Melbourne, the day’s main interview having just fallen through. Mere reporters and producers sat in the back, of course. When the Carlton Tennis Club came into view, Doig (‘the dog with one eye’, Chris would tease him) impishly said, ‘Tennis anyone?’ Chris and I exchanged grins and said, ‘Why not?’ We had been working round the clock for days, without much luck, on a story about the impact of the Costigan Royal Commission into the Painters and Dockers Union. For the next two hours, the most ferociously competitive match saw us play each other to a standstill. Beers were called for, so we retired to a pub in Lygon Street. Then followed a good Italian dinner, more drinks and finally the sleep of the just.

  In the second image it is 1983 and I am anxiously waiting for Chris Masters, cameraman John Hagin and soundo Bob Peck to come through the arrivals gate at Hanoi airport in Vietnam. As producer, I have been here for a week, setting up interviews and film locations. I had learned that it was best to understate the amount of currency we were bringing in for the three weeks of filming ahead; currency rackets at Customs were fleecing Westerners. How could I get an effective message to Chris through the gate? Over a large crowd of Vietnamese, all waving and shouting to their friends and relatives, I spotted Chris approaching the well-dressed military guard at Customs. I yelled, ‘Chris! Chris!’

  He stopped right in front of the guard. He looked over at me. He could see my distress. ‘What’s up?’

  I couldn’t tell him the truth in plain English. I had to think quickly how to explain. I said, ‘Mate, fudge the dough!’

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Fudge the dough!’

  ‘Oh!’ he said. ‘Which way?’

  ‘Down!’

  ‘Okay.’

  He came through and we killed ourselves laughing. Aussie vernacular had saved the day.

  There are many, many such memories: of long lunches at La Stazione in Artarmon the Tuesday after a show went to air; days and nights slaving over hot Steenbeck benches in the edit rooms of master craftspeople like Alec Cullen, Des Horne and Julia Wright, fighting the good fight to get stories to air. It was a magic time.

  It was also the time of the Hawke Labor government, the best years of 60 Minutes and the second (and last) decade of the Fairfax Press’s investigative weekly, the National Times. And it was the decade of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

  I was a slightly despondent newcomer to the Four Corners team in January 1982. I had been happy enough on the ABC’s then daily program, Nationwide, breaking stories as an on-air senior reporter in 1980 and ’81. I’d covered the first man to escape from the notorious maximum security Grafton jail, Raymond John Denning; interviewed Peter Baldwin MLC the day after he was bashed in his Marrickville home for taking on the Labor Right’s stranglehold over Sydney’s inner-city ALP branches; and, with Paul Murphy, investigated the Nugan Hand Bank for shonky dealings.

  But I was not your traditional ABC reporter. I had not come up through the ABC News system, instead doing my journalism cadetship at Fairfax’s Sydney Morning Herald. My first appearance on ABC TV was on This Day Tonight (TDT) in 1972 and ’73, and that happy band of TDT firebrands (think Mike Carlton, Stuart Littlemore, Bill Peach, Peter Luck, Richard Carleton, Paul Murphy and Kerry O’Brien) was always viewed slightly askance by the nabobs of the ABC. To make matters worse, at TDT I had worked on investigative, muckraking programs. They included reports on the Premier Bob Askin’s corrupt police and their protected gambling parlours, crooked building societies ripping off small investors and strange land deals in the then outer Sydney suburb of Menai. My return to the ABC in 1979 was to the ‘radical’ youth radio station 2JJ; my year there didn’t help my image either.

  So when I was called up to see Peter Reid, the Head of TV News and Current Affairs in late 1981, I had a sense all was not well. He told me he had created a field producer position on the weekly current affairs program Four Corners, and wanted to transfer me there. This was not a choice but a direction. With a young family to feed, I complied, but it truly felt like being sent to Coventry.

  Four Corners at the time was mocked as ‘the House of Lords’. Reid had been its longest serving Executive Producer during the 1970s, and Caroline Jones its iconic presenter. But most of my colleagues, including Reid and Jones, felt its best programs were well behind it. Many felt it had not long to live. The only colleague I admired there was Paul Lyneham, whose investigative programs on the coal industry and Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen stood out from the pack.

  In the way of Four Corners of 1981, an ‘issue’ was required to head out filming and ‘both sides’ of the issue were to be sought and aired. Also, as a producer I now required filmmaking skills. This was foreign country for me. After more than a decade in journalism, I was confident of my journalism but not of filmmaking — especially in the long form needed for this program.

  The first ‘issue’ I investigated was the rapid loss of trade skills occurring in Australia. In a string of factories I talked to metal workers, carpenters, car mechanics, leather workers, plumbers and electricians about the effect of computerisation on their trades. The accompanying pictures were mainly of lined, sweaty faces, deft handwork and threatening machines pumping out abstract plastic and metal shapes and crushed-wood kitchen cupboards. I did too many interviews and took too many pictures. Whereas the normal ratio of footage shot to footage used was at most 10 to 1, mine was probably 20 to 1. I arrived in the edit room of Alec Cullen with tins and tins of film. When Alec looked appalled, I became red-faced. A week later, though, Alec’s rescue job was a sight to behold. Here was a ‘rough cut’ — with acres of unused footage on the cutting-room floor — that looked like it had a structure and some film sequences, awaiting my script words of wisdom.

  ‘How did you do it?’ I asked Alec, a cockney Englishman.

  ‘I used Kraftwerk; heard of them?’

  I hadn’t, but pretended I had. The minimalist electronic sound of the German band acted as the perfect background for visuals of machinery devouring old craft skills. All I had to do was add a few words, let the interview grabs speak for themselves and, hey presto, a reasonable film. I was entranced.

  Lesson Number One about Four Corners staff: the upper structure might be forbidding, but the film crews and film editors would save your bacon (if reluctantly).

  Gradually, I found myself enjoying this place Four Corners. But I was still somewhat verboten with the old stagers of the unit.

  I approached Peter Ross about doing a story on coal mining. Soon we were in the back of one of those camera cars, uncovering the pros and cons of this industry. At Mount Kembla, near Wollongong, we found a village that had seen a series of mine disasters over the previous century. The cemetery told the story — lines of graves from tragedy after tragedy. Peter seemed unimpressed. I thought we should walk to the village next door on a hunch that the families of the dead miners would still be there. We did, and they were. Peter’s initial reluctance turned to enthusiasm as families told their stories. ‘Coalface Facts’ was my first proper Four Corners report.

  And then a bombshell hit the quiet office. The ABC had advertised for a new Executive Producer and the chosen candidate was a BBC producer with a Cambridge background,
now working on our sister program in Britain, Panorama. Since we already had an English EP in John Temple, this would not seem a change. But when he arrived, change — and immediate change at that — was exactly what he represented.

  Jonathan Holmes was precisely what the program needed. Young, straight-talking, intellectual, with a sharp wit and a beautiful Swedish wife, Ann, he sliced through the torpor at Four Corners like a knife through butter. In a talk with staff he made it clear the most unforgivable of sins for any program was to be boring. He wanted a new staff, with Australian accents, committed to good journalism but also good filmmaking. He would, he warned, be open to ideas but harsh in the cutting rooms when called to see the ‘fine cuts’ of the films before they went to air. Film sequences would dominate storytelling from now on, and the less voice-over talk the better, too. No more ‘issues’.

  Happily, I was working on a good story with a respected member of the ‘old guard’, Jim Downes. I could deliver for this exciting new boss, and fast. We had research showing that an Australian businessman was illegally making money out of his back-room connections in Fiji with the Prime Minister, Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara. Jim and I set off, facts at the ready, to seek an interview with the ‘Father of Fiji’. Mara agreed to the interview, and even though no allegation of direct corruption by him was suggested, he savaged Downes live to camera, outraged that his honour had been questioned. His overbearing anger was something to behold. I saw Jim’s hand shaking. The Prime Minister walked out mid-interview.

  I was delighted. Jim was stunned. I remember thinking, ‘This is the new Four Corners.’

  When Mara lost many seats at the 1982 election, he took his anger out on Four Corners. A Royal Commission was called into ‘Australian interference’ in Fiji’s affairs. But its findings vindicated the program.