The Stories That Changed Australia: 50 Years of Four Corners

by Sally Neighbour

  Next came ‘The Big League’, Chris Masters and my Australian bombshell. Jonathan had made it plain he wanted a program that would re-establish the name of Four Corners in the popular mind. Neither Chris nor I had any knowledge at the start of our research into rugby league that this would be it. There were two different initial strands: a smell around league refereeing decisions, especially when Manly was playing; and a suggestion of something wrong in the case of Kevin Humphries, Rugby League boss, in a magistrate’s court some years earlier. Neither seemed connected. We set off, following up on leads independent of each other. Four Corners stories normally take at least six weeks to turn around (two weeks each for research, shooting and editing) but in this case both of us could see we were not hitting pay dirt, even after we’d been researching for a month. Getting people who normally don’t talk to the media to put their faces on the ABC’s national program to allege corruption of a treasured sport, thereby risking their own careers, was proving difficult.

  The story behind ‘The Big League’ has been told many times; suffice to say we got there. Remarkably, through persistence, not taking no for an answer and appealing to fundamental social values, the right people spoke out. In the end, Humphreys was convicted and the offending magistrate, Murray Farquhar, went to jail.

  I was hugely impressed with Chris. Viewing the program today, I see the same honest face that so impressed our fragile sources. Chris’s serious honesty, dedication to detail, concern for the ordinary man and Aussie self-deprecation was a winning combination. We became great friends. We needed to be.

  Not surprisingly, the program had a huge night in the ratings, beating its commercial rivals for the timeslot. This was Four Corners back from the dead! But the political cost to the ABC was long-reaching. Accusing Labor Premier Neville Wran of involvement in the Humphreys case earned not only Wran’s ire — followed by the Street Royal Commission, which cleared him — but the wrath of the entire right-wing faction running the Party for the next decade. Quite apart from the personal abuse Chris and I received from Labor supporters, the anonymous packages of forged documents about us sent to commercial radio stations, television commentators alleging pro-Liberal bias and the friends who quietly dropped off, Labor leaders used the program as a stick to beat the ABC with at every opportunity. A paranoia developed about ‘these people’ out to ‘get’ the Hawke government.

  Incidents followed which involved pressure on the ABC from Labor: over Jenny Brockie’s program on uranium mining the next year; over Marian Wilkinson’s program on transport boss Peter Abeles (a mate of Bob Hawke) in 1987; and — as late as 1991 — over the First Gulf War and the ABC’s news and current affairs coverage. The powerful leader of the right wing in New South Wales, Senator Graham Richardson, told an ABC executive in February 1985: ‘We’ve no problems with management. The problems are Manning, Holmes and Masters.’ By that date, Labor had installed a clutch of candidates on the ABC Board. I anticipated retribution by the new Labor-appointed Chair. Fortunately, that didn’t happen.

  Denied the opportunity to apply for the Walkley Award later in 1983 for legal reasons (Wran sued the ABC for defamation; he settled later), Jonathan organised for a tongue-in-cheek office awards ceremony. The whole Four Corners staff — 60 or so of us — had gone through the terrors and excitement of the program (Jonathan’s secretary, Nadine Connor, had even taken documents home in case we were all arrested) and we needed some acknowledgment. In a solemn ceremony, Jonathan presented a framed ‘Clayton’s Award’ for Best TV Program 1983 to Chris and me. We patted ourselves on the back; it had been a baptism of fire.

  Far easier was a program shot in late 1983 with Jenny Brockie as reporter and me as producer. It looked at whether the ‘safeguards’ on the Hawke government’s export of uranium were working in Canada, the United States and Europe. Jenny and I had formed a close relationship, soon going beyond work. Then, over northern Ontario, in search of a nuclear facility fabricating Australian uranium, our light plane got lost. In driving snow, over white mountains and under heavy cloud, all Jenny and I could see was white every which way. The pilot said he would search for the nearest airport and to keep calm. Jenny and I got closer fast. We held hands as we scanned the terrain for anything not white. Finally, a small airport reared up before us as the plane skidded to a stop at a hangar manned by Indigenous Canadians. I proposed at a small restaurant in Paris, on our way to a German facility near Hamburg. The so-called safeguards, of course, were more rhetoric than reality and, of course, the program angered the Foreign Minister, Bill Hayden, and Hawke, yet again. Jenny and I would marry the next year and have our beautiful daughter, Thea Manning, now working for ABC Radio News!

  The work – life balance was a constant issue on a hardworking program like Four Corners. Long hours in the office (sometimes editing until early morning), long periods on the road filming, intense pressures in the office mixed with plenty of alcohol tested just about all relationships. Sometimes it was easy to feel we were one big team and we alone understood the stresses and strains. I remember Kerry O’Brien suggesting we would all end up in the same nursing home together!

  The impact on our families struck me in 1983, after leaving Vietnam with Chris Masters. When we finally made it to Bangkok, there was a lovely handwritten letter at our hotel from my 13-year-old daughter, Megan, from my previous marriage. It asked me gently to please stop travelling so much and spend some time with her and my son, Paddy. She wanted and needed me. It had an immediate effect. I decided to seek an office job in Sydney and be around more for my teenage young adults. When Jonathan said he needed a new Associate Producer, I applied. For the next year he and I operated as a smooth double act: I supervised the researchers and story selection; he did the post-production. It worked extremely well.

  Robyn Smith, Sue Spencer (now Executive Producer), Shaun Hoyt, Virginia Moncrieff, Penny Lysaght, Deborah Whitmont, Monica Attard and Kate McClymont were researchers over my seven years. They were all meticulous, cautious journalists, with an investigative edge. Penny and Deb were both lawyers; Deb had arrived as a casualty of the law, wanting something more public-spirited.

  There was usually a staff of three researchers at any one period. They were not there as fact-checkers for ‘star’ reporters but were the engine room for Four Corners: the ones who sniffed out stories, chased them down and then ‘sold’ them to the Engine Driver (AP or EP). Reporters were often in cahoots with them, trying to get first dibs on an upcoming scoop. For many years, Sue, Shaun and Deb made up a core that drove the investigative agenda from the ground up, appearing as unsung heroes in the credits that went to air each Monday night. They were a delight to work with.

  Being a second-in-charge was good for me. Jonathan was nothing if not fully committed to the independence of the program. I watched as he fought upper management when Allan Hogan’s program ‘Borderline’ brought down upon Four Corners the full wrath of the Papua New Guinea government of Michael Somare. Hogan had interviewed James Nyaro of the Free Papua Movement in a program about PNG. Indonesia would not be pleased. PNG and Australian governments would not be pleased. And, behind the scenes, our very own News department, often at odds with Current Affairs, feared that their correspondent in Port Moresby would be asked to leave. All of that came to pass — including Sean Dorney in Moresby being expelled. But the Free Papua Movement had had its voice heard on Australia’s national program.

  One curly-haired young reporter from Radio Current Affairs (AM and PM in those days) stuck his neck out too. He did a program about the pressures on Four Corners inside the ABC to buckle and not air their report. His name was Tony Jones. Jonathan called him across to do a report on ‘youth today’. But when he applied for a job later that year, he was beaten by another young candidate, Sarah Walls. Jonathan might have felt we needed a better gender balance. I remained a firm believer in Jones. I waited my chance to hire him.

  My chance to shape the team came after a year as Associate Producer when Jonathan decided to mov
e to the United States to produce documentaries for public TV. By then he had become a mentor and a friend. He had changed Four Corners forever, restructuring its filmmaking, beefing up the program producer’s power, giving it a public profile, good ratings and a reputation for reliability and independence under pressure. When I won the Executive Producer position in mid-1985, I was beside myself with happiness. I set myself the task of taking the program to another level. It would be marked by journalistic excellence, bravery, more investigations, risk-taking and currency, and all with a more Australian feel.

  In particular, I wanted to sharpen our focus to finally eliminate ‘issues’ stories. Only those that broke fresh angles or revealed fresh information would make it to air. The best, of course, would be where the program itself was the news. But that couldn’t happen every week because big stories didn’t come that often but, in the meantime, we would develop something we later called ‘over the horizon radar’ — stories that broke news on the day, they were aired in reaction to an event we knew would happen. But the programs would have taken six weeks to produce (and looked great).

  And from now on we would occasionally jump out of the six-week cycle mode and put together a program in a week, just to show Four Corners was the place to go on your dial each Monday night if you wanted to know what was happening. Reactive stories would juggle with blockbusters.

  And, finally, we would do special documentaries on Australian stories — like the last generation of Australian soldiers from Gallipoli — that not only recorded precious voices from our past but picked up on Australian themes. My childhood had been spent at Bondi Beach and Parramatta, two iconic places of Australian history. I was a proud fifth-generation Australian on both sides of my family. I was confident I knew how Australians thought. A side-bar to this reasoning was also to encourage the reporters who did the big stories to take off a block of time after the program and bring out a compelling book on the subject, thereby inserting Four Corners into Australian culture. Bestsellers about Alan Bond and Kerry Packer stand as testimony to that.

  For me, the key element in this mix was having the bravery to back my own judgment and take risks. Only by taking the risk to commission unlikely stories, and to make snap decisions, could some spectacular journalistic successes come our way. This kind of leadership was new to me — even though I had been editor of the national weekly Nation Review in the mid-70s, not that ‘The Ferret’ was like Four Corners — but with our excellent reporters, producer, researchers, crews and editors, I felt we could achieve anything.

  The challenge struck in my first week as Executive Producer. Two bombs exploded in the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior, berthed in Auckland Harbour, on 10 July 1985. Many thought it was unremarkable, the unfortunate actions (a photographer was killed) of some crazy New Zealander. I didn’t. Greenpeace had been sending ships to protest French nuclear tests in the French Polynesian island of Mururoa earlier in the 1980s, and its ship seemed likely to have been headed back to that island. Checking out French government movements seemed a reasonable bet. In the background, I had no admiration for French actions in Algeria and had no illusions about their military penchant to strike with maximum force. Within hours I’d sent Chris Masters as investigative reporter and Bruce Belsham as his Kiwi researcher and producer.

  It paid off. Within days Chris and Bruce returned with evidence of the French trail, plus pictures. I despatched Chris to Paris for interviews with French Intelligence agents and experts. Within a month we’d broken an international scoop: French terrorism had struck in friendly New Zealand. The story went to air on 16 August and sold like hot cakes around the world. It set off its own series of bombshells: the jailing of the terrorists; the resignation of the French Defence Minister; and, ultimately, the admission that the French President, François Mitterrand, had ordered the bombings. ‘French Connections’ became a classic. And my nose for a good story was in fine shape!

  David Marr soon joined Four Corners as a reporter. We were friends from our days on the Bulletin magazine in the early 1970s but by now he was a seasoned investigative reporter from the National Times. A month after ‘French Connections’, David’s searing story of how the West Australian Police had treated four Aboriginal prisoners in custody hit the headlines. The WA Police Union stood by the appalling actions of their members, torturing Aboriginal men to death — by strangulation, leading to heart attack. The Labor Police Minister said he was ‘disgusted’ by the program. The union banned interviews with ABC reporters.

  I also moved quickly to hire that young radio journalist Tony Jones (now of Q&A and Lateline). It was important to me to achieve a balanced staff structure at Four Corners, both by age and gender. The ‘old’ Four Corners seemed to me to be full of senior men. Sarah Walls joined Jenny Brockie and Clare Petre as members of the team. And Tony Jones would join Chris Masters and David Marr (and then Kerry O’Brien for a year).

  Jones hit the ground running. He’d heard whisperings about alleged strange dealings at the croupier’s table at the Palace Casino by contacts of the famous bookmaker Bill Waterhouse. One source was a sometime uninvited visitor to the Four Corners office, Sydney bouncer and private eye, big Tim Bristow (who looked like Chesty Bond and knew the worst cops in town). Another was Valerie Murphy, sister of criminal defence barrister Chris Murphy. Robbie Waterhouse was then facing charges over the Fine Cotton/Bold Personality ‘ring-in’, but these stories Jones was hearing were unrelated. Jones came to me alleging Bill Waterhouse was involved in illegal gambling, running a casino and paying off the NSW Deputy Police Commissioner, Bill Allen. I urged him to continue the research, checking fact on fact with first, second and third sources. Jones’s report also covered the internal battles of the Waterhouse clan — between Bill and his brother Martin’s grieving widow.

  As the program came together, Bill Waterhouse, also a powerful man in Sydney’s police and political world, was letting it be known he would stop it going to air. ‘Horses for Courses’ became the subject of a legal injunction. It went to the Supreme Court and was defeated. One of the judges remarked on how truly defamatory the program was, but that the ABC had the right to broadcast it: on 10 November 1986 it went to air. It was then the subject of criminal defamation action by Bill Waterhouse in which not only the ABC were named but so were Jones and myself. Tony and I pictured ourselves sharing cells together in Long Bay jail. NSW Police came raiding our offices at Gore Hill (we filmed them). Tony remembers us sitting in court near Bill and his son, Robbie Waterhouse. Their trousers were pulled up, displaying silk socks. When Tony looked up at the Waterhouses, their braces were pulling their trousers up. He started thinking Alcatraz. Luckily, they lost their case. I had felt genuinely scared, both to be criminally charged and to be up against the powerful Waterhouse family. It underlined that this bravery act of mine was fragile and close to bravado. It had what US judges called ‘a chilling effect’. Nevertheless, I appeared on news broadcasts singing the praises of freedom of speech.

  Around this time two major changes in staffing took place, both due to have big implications for the program. This year — 1985 — Andrew Olle had been appointed by Jonathan and me as presenter of a new-look program, complete with a studio component and a weekday timeslot. Backed by top News Director Glyn Patrick and her feisty and humorous director’s assistant, Mandy Hasler, we now had the capacity to tackle a political crisis in minutes. Andrew was a colleague of mine from way back — as a Nationwide reporter and, long before that, on This Day Tonight in the ’70s. His urbane, calm, fair-minded attitude to everything made him a natural presenter. He was on good terms with all across the political spectrum. He lived near Gore Hill and, within a block, was Opposition leader John Howard. They were friends.

  Olle’s funniest interviews were always with Queensland Nationals’ Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen. Old Joh loved Andrew because he was a Queenslander and would let him know that in on-air interviews. On the other hand, Joh didn’t like being questioned. He’d blame Andrew’s cu
rly questions on his being corrupted by his time down south in Sin City, full of lefties and communists. It used to reduce me to stitches. I never had any idea of Andrew’s own politics.

  Having a studio component forced me to get on with appointing my own Associate Producer. I chose Martin Butler from Channel 10’s Good Morning Australia program. Martin had a thick English working-class accent and a degree from Oxford to his name. He sold himself on his studio skills but we did a deal: he would be allowed once a year to go on the road as a producer. He would later team up with Mark Colvin (one of the ABC’s great foreign correspondents) to head off to New Caledonia to interview leaders of the Kanak Liberation Front about an alleged atrocity by French police in a cave where militants were hiding. As with ‘French Connections’, I followed my hunch and, in under an hour, ordered the team off to catch the moment. The program ‘Murder a la Carte’ was a terrific opening salvo for the Butler and Colvin combination.

  We took our upgraded studio capability to Sutherland Town Hall in southern Sydney to look at the Grim Reaper campaign, designed to combat the HIV virus (then called AIDS). Under Olle’s deft questioning of a suburban audience, the full gamut of opinion was aired about this disease, now disproportionately affecting Australia’s homosexual community. The first known cases had emerged only two years earlier but already HIV was the subject of this full-scale national health campaign. I was proud of our ability be part of Australian community education.

  Meanwhile, Chris Masters was again on a research-intensive burrowing mission. He’d told me in late 1986 that a police contact of his had been offered a bribe by a superior in the Queensland Police Force and that it related to a criminal who wanted the freedom to run brothels in Fortitude Valley in Brisbane. Now this sounded promising! I assigned one of our top researchers, Shaun Hoyt, who I’d also encouraged to go out on the road producing, to head towards Queensland. The result is now well known as the award-winning ‘Moonlight State’ — the program that brought down not only the Police Commissioner, Terry Lewis, but also the Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen and, after the Fitzgerald inquiry into police corruption, the whole era of Nationals’ domination of Queensland through rigged electoral boundaries.