The Stories That Changed Australia: 50 Years of Four Corners

by Sally Neighbour

  My early stories at Four Corners, though respectable enough, were far from what I wanted to achieve, but towards the end of my first year, I began to gain some confidence. I missed the more collegiate atmosphere at Nationwide but decided to put my head down and absorb as much about making television as quickly as I could. The editors provided much valuable advice, in particular the legendary Alec Cullen and wonderful, gentle Des Horne.

  Four Corners had built much of its early reputation on social documentary, but now the focus was on hard-edged investigations, the stories that would create headlines. Swirling around us all was the fallout from ‘The Big League’. A Royal Commission had been called and there were continual accusations that Four Corners was ‘out to get’ the Australian Labor Party. It’s hard to convey the depth of the ALP’s animosity towards Four Corners in those days. It was raised continually by Party loyalists and sympathisers everywhere we went. When the following year I did a story investigating international uranium safeguards, I felt it firsthand.

  Uranium mining in Australia was highly contentious in the early ’80s, and due to be debated at the ALP’s annual conference in 1984. The Labor government argued a stringent international safeguards system ensured none of our uranium could be diverted into producing nuclear weapons. We decided to investigate the safeguards system and found elements of it wanting.

  In a one-hour special, ‘Uranium: Handle with Care’, we followed the path of a typical shipment of Australian uranium to Canada, the United States, Germany and France, exploring the safeguards at every stage. One key element of the program was an interview with a nuclear physicist and former International Atomic Energy Agency safeguards inspector, Roger Richter. Richter had travelled the world inspecting nuclear facilities. He’d resigned from the IAEA and had given evidence to a US Senate Committee claiming diplomacy was compromising the safeguards system.

  Richter had refused many international requests for interviews. To my delight and astonishment, he agreed to mine, in part because he had a soft spot for the Antipodes and was thinking about a move to New Zealand. Richter claimed it would be ‘extremely easy’ to fool the IAEA. ‘I think the public would be very surprised just how cursory our inspections are.’

  Coming less than a year after ‘The Big League’, the government saw our story as further proof Four Corners was anti-Labor. Several days after ‘Uranium: Handle with Care’ went to air, Prime Minister Bob Hawke told his caucus, ‘We have enemies in the media’, referring to the ABC and the National Times newspaper. Foreign Minister Bill Hayden called the ABC a ‘second rate organisation’ and Energy and Resources Minister Peter Walsh, who’d been equivocal in his interview on the program, attacked Four Corners in the senate.

  Hayden’s attitude towards me and Four Corners eventually softened. A year later, after an interview for another story, the Foreign Minister smiled and handed me an unopened bottle of Nepalese apple brandy on his desk, which I read as some kind of peace offering (though I did inquire, not knowing what was in the bottle, whether he might be planning to knock off ABC employees one by one). It sat on my desk as a memento until I left Four Corners later that year, when I bequeathed it to my roommate, Kerry O’Brien. Apparently it tasted just fine.

  Even in 1990 when I returned to Four Corners briefly as a guest reporter, it was clear some Labor ministers still held a grudge. During a break from filming a moderately tough interview with Gareth Evans about the disposal of chemical weapons in the Pacific, the then Foreign Minister, knowing the camera was turned off, rose to his feet, arced across his desk towards me and bellowed, ‘Fucking ABC, I should have known you’d do this!’ He then continued to rant about Four Corners and how he was fed up with us.

  The crew and I were stunned. The outburst was ridiculously disproportionate to the mistake I’d picked him up on in the interview, but it betrayed a deep level of animosity. It also reduced his press secretary to a near foetal position on a chair in the corner of the office.

  Making Four Corners programs in the ’80s swamped many of our lives. Social events would be cancelled, dinners left cold, friends stood up, then at some stage we’d register the ABC cleaners vacuuming around us as we slaved away on a script or edit into the wee hours. It was toughest for the editors, stuck on a crazy rat wheel of program after program — structured, restructured, scripted, rescripted, viewed, reviewed, over and over. Often it was tempting to contemplate sleeping in the office rather than dashing home for a few short hours. It was no way to live, and took a heavy toll on relationships. On one overseas trip I remember Guntis Sics, a talented sound recordist I’d travelled with a lot, looking at me over breakfast and declaring, ‘You know Jen, I’ve just figured out I’ve probably shared more meals with you than I have with my wife.’ We both found that disturbing.

  And a word here for those wives at home, waving their husbands off to exotic locations and countless nights in the office. Bills would have been unpaid, clothes unwashed, parent–teacher nights unattended were it not for these remarkable women. And it was mostly women. Their stories may never be documented as part of Four Corners’ illustrious history, but they put up with hell. They’d often say the worst time was when their husbands returned from a filming trip, only to spend night after night in an editing room. ‘He’s home, but he’s not home.’ I can’t begin to describe how regularly I wished, in my few years at Four Corners, that I had a wife at home.

  There were, of course, countless compensations for the punishing hours. We were working on arguably the best current affairs program in the country, able to travel, and do proper research. It was a gift, and it substantially shaped my thinking about journalism and my professional life. Lack of time is a true enemy of good journalism. Four Corners gave me the opportunity to wrestle with ideas, hone my skills, explore the depth in people’s arguments. I began to distrust black and white, became deeply wary of ideologues and much more interested in the intersection of power and human frailty. It eventually led me away from a purely adversarial style of journalism.

  Some of my fondest memories of my stint at Four Corners are moments of sheer hilarity, shared with producers and crews in ludicrous situations on the road, especially internationally. Typically it was when journalistic naivety met real life. There was the boat trip in Hawaii to watch villagers use their traditional deep-sea fishing technique — a huge hook and bait lashed to an enormous rock with thick rope, then hurled overboard to the ocean floor. Of course they quickly hauled in a giant fish — then promptly shot it through the head with a pistol. Or the long trip to a remote island in Palau to film villagers at a traditional dance ceremony, only to have the dancers emerge wearing Nissan T-shirts and chanting ‘hup, two, three four’, a dance clearly shaped by ancestral contact with soldiers during World War II. With time to properly explore anything, there are myths to explode, lessons to learn.

  By the beginning of 1985 I was 30, engaged and thinking about having a child. We began the year with our usual ideas meeting and I proposed a story in the United States, where abortion clinics were being bombed with alarming frequency. US President Ronald Reagan had put his name to an anti-abortion book, and looming changes to the Supreme Court could lead to a change in the law. Jonathan wasn’t convinced; the story was interesting but would be expensive. We agreed to keep an eye on it.

  By the middle of the year, there’d been 40 bombings or attempted arsons at abortion clinics across the United States in 18 months. A radical anti-abortion activist from Chicago had been in Australia, promoting his book and geeing up the movement here. Joseph Scheidler said he didn’t condone violence; he didn’t think it worked, but he was well and truly on the fringe of the anti-abortion movement, harassing people and using inflammatory rhetoric. Chapter titles in Scheidler’s book included ‘Infiltrate Abortion Clinics’, ‘Use Private Detectives’, ‘Get Information from License Plates’ and ‘Warn the Garbage Man You’re Hauling Corpses’. He called doctors who performed abortions ‘murderers’ and didn’t care that abortion was legal. Sch
eidler would later tell me, ‘It’s an unjust, immoral law, and I’m obliged to break it every chance I have.’

  Jonathan asked me if I still wanted to do the story. Of course I did, but by then I was pregnant. He checked again a few days later, looking mildly alarmed. Was I absolutely sure I wanted to do this? It never occurred to me to say no, partly because I didn’t want to be seen as incapable of doing my job. Anyway, it was shaping up as a strong story.

  I arrived in a steamy Washington summer five months pregnant and set about looking for madmen and women who might think bombing an abortion clinic to make a political point was a good idea. The alleged bombers were either facing charges or in hiding and disinclined to talk. It wasn’t looking promising, but I didn’t factor in my appearance. While I didn’t mention my pregnancy to anyone, it was pretty obvious, and doors began to open. It’s a measure of the sophistication of extremist thinking that this fringe group probably assumed because I was pregnant, I would be sympathetic.

  In Pensacola, Florida, I tracked down a classic southern belle, 19-year-old Kaye Wiggins, who with her fiancé, Matt, and another couple had been involved in bombing three local medical centres that provided abortion services. Kaye had bought the gunpowder for the bombings, but was appealing her conviction on the grounds she hadn’t really been in on the action. Kaye said she loved Matt so much, she was worried that if she told on him she’d be throwing away the rest of her life. She said Matt and his friend Jimmy were just ‘ordinary American guys … always pullin’ somethin’ … they’re crazy guys they’re always doin’ strange things’. The bombings had been carried out on Christmas Eve. Matt had told her, ‘What better gift could Jesus have received on his birthday than no abortions being performed, no children being killed?’

  Down the road with his ragbag of followers, John Burt, a former member of the Ku Klux Klan, was picketing the home of a local doctor who performed legal abortions. Did he support the bombings? ‘I understand the bombings and if the Lord told me to bomb a building, yes I would.’ The Pensacola doctor was scared.

  Mr Burt carried a bucket and midway through our interview pulled out what he claimed was a late-term foetus, covered in formaldehyde, to make his point about babies being killed. It looked a bit like a bruised rubber doll to me, but Burt was adamant he’d been given it by ‘a pathologist that’s very pro-life’ who had ‘intercepted’ it at a Midwest hospital before it was sent to the incinerator. It struck me that John Burt had a curious approach to valuing human life. Even shoving a supposedly aborted foetus in front of a pregnant reporter hardly seemed, well, thoughtful.

  As we packed up after filming, cameraman John Hagin and sound recordist Tim Parratt asked if I was okay. I said sure, no problem, but I felt sick to my stomach. Hagin paused, put his arm around me and said the heat was terrible, and that he felt pretty awful too. There’s a touching, understated empathy on the road. You see some dreadful things and Hagin, the kindest of men, knew me well. It was his way of saying, ‘That was hideous; it’s perfectly okay for you to fall in a heap now, and if you do, we won’t tell anyone back at the office.’ I didn’t, but I probably should have. All I wanted was to get back to the hotel and be alone with my baby.

  I’d planned to stay on at Four Corners until the very end of my pregnancy, but my daughter had other ideas. By midway through the seventh month I was sneaking into the first-aid room every lunchtime, locking the door, sleeping for an hour, then emerging as though I’d just ducked out for a little while. I’ve only realised writing this that I may have been the first Four Corners reporter to work through a pregnancy. I did everything I could not to be different to the other reporters — so ridiculous, looking back now. I knew it was time to go when I wanted to stay on that first-aid bed all afternoon.

  On the evening my daughter, Thea, was born, I lay in the delivery room at Sydney’s Women’s Hospital in Paddington, exhilarated but totally exhausted. When a phone beside me rang, I automatically picked it up. It was editor Julia Wright and she was at a party with some of the Four Corners gang. They knew I was in labour and had decided to check how I was going, never imagining they’d bypass the system and get through to me directly. When I told her I’d had a baby girl minutes earlier, a cheer went up in the background. I cried. My life had changed forever. I hadn’t even told my mother yet, but Four Corners was all over it.

  A year’s maternity leave made me realise I didn’t want the Four Corners lifestyle with a small child. I also became interested in a different type of investigation, one which explored people — their motivations and moral boundaries — and institutions. When the ABC asked me to help set up a new Documentary department, I jumped at the chance.

  I returned to Four Corners as a guest reporter in subsequent years, each time aware how much it, and I, had changed. Production values continued to improve, and there were a lot more women. Visiting was great but I’d moved on, and was enjoying telling stories in a different way.

  Ultimately I found my voice outside Four Corners, in documentaries, on ABC morning radio, in interview series, and hosting Insight on SBS. But the time I spent in the early to mid ’80s trying to hold a demanding audience for up to an hour, gave me confidence to take risks I may never have embarked on otherwise. Four Corners taught me a lot about journalism and myself. May many more journalists be blessed with such an opportunity.

  10

  REPORTING BLACK AUSTRALIA: THESE STORIES AREN’T OVER

  by David Marr

  ‘This is Box Ridge,’ said Michael Charlton looking like a man from another planet come to Earth in Coraki, New South Wales. ‘Just over here is a cemetery, a cemetery for the dead. And what Bishop Davies has called “a cemetery for the living” is all around us.’

  Four Corners was three weeks old and filming on location for the first time. Behind Charlton was a cluster of humpies denounced a few days earlier by an Anglican bishop. As the camera roamed, Charlton listed the horrors of the place: more than 100 people living in a dozen shacks, one water point, no light and no power. He said, ‘We are going to talk now to some of the people who live here at Box Ridge.’ With this implacable simplicity, Four Corners began reporting black Australia.

  At that time, pale children were still being stolen from their Aboriginal mothers. Aborigines could vote in neither federal elections nor polls in Queensland and Western Australia. Nearly everywhere, the Country Party held a veto over all reform of laws touching Aborigines. Black stockmen worked for their keep. Bush schools were usually segregated. Missionaries had absolute authority over blacks on reserves. ‘Full bloods’ were forbidden to drink and sly grog was rife across most of the nation. Police and magistrates could always rely on Aborigines pleading guilty. There were no black graduates, playwrights, filmmakers or politicians. Appalling clusters of humpies like those at Box Ridge stood outside hundreds of country towns. Aborigines were thought to have entirely lost ownership of their customary lands. Native title was not yet the daydream of Eddie Mabo and a couple of Melbourne QCs.

  All that changed. Four Corners reported and at times helped provoke those changes. In the early days of television, we took cameras to places like Box Ridge where cameras had never been taken before. We challenged what the Aboriginal leader Pat Dodson calls the ‘placidness’ of Australia: its belief that ‘the destiny of Aboriginal people was to live in squalor and to live on the margins’. The reporting of Indigenous stories was driven by both anger and high hopes, but over time Four Corners showed itself to be sceptical of simple solutions. Complexity and contradiction were acknowledged from the start. Disappointing outcomes in black Australia drove Four Corners further, but not always swiftly, into the difficult territory where black and white Australians struggle with race.

  Bob Raymond came home and created Four Corners after working in West Africa ‘at a time when colonialism was coming to an end, when the Gold Coast was becoming Ghana’. So often in the years that followed, the reporters keenest to investigate black Australia were those returning after years away �
�� or coming here for the first time — and seeing these old, familiar scandals through foreign eyes. They saw the stories with a clarity often denied to the locals. It was inevitable, really, that Raymond would soon take Charlton somewhere like Box Ridge. But the story did not unfold in quite the heroic manner, nor did it have the decisive impact on Four Corners’ reputation Raymond would claim.

  ‘I saw,’ said Raymond, ‘a little item in the Sydney Morning Herald where the Bishop of Newcastle had described an Aboriginal settlement at Box Ridge near Casino as a living cemetery. I said to Mike, maybe we should go and see what he’s talking about.’ The bishop’s remarks were front-page news and the Herald had immediately despatched a reporter and photographer to Coraki. There followed a fine story in the paper, with heartbreaking photographs and a thundering editorial: ‘Must the public be confronted year after year with reports of this kind?’ In the NSW parliament the somnolent minister ultimately responsible for the scandal, Gus Kelly, was fielding questions for days. All this had happened before Raymond and Charlton flew north. A familiar pattern was being set here: the collaboration of newspapers and television in the reporting of black Australia. But Box Ridge was pioneering. ‘In 1961, news crews and television stations didn’t go anywhere near Aboriginal settlements,’ said Raymond. ‘There wasn’t any story there.’

  He took a journalist so impeccably turned out, so intelligent, so decent, a man with a voice of such authority it seemed not only Australia but the whole British Empire was seeing this scandal. Charlton’s questions were perfect: ‘Mr Kapeen, why do you live in this tin shack?’ In nearby Casino he had an exchange with a rather tubby Anglican priest that still reverberates 50 years later. ‘Why have we only just heard about places like this?’ Charlton asked. ‘The indifference of people,’ replied the priest. ‘Usually when people read something about Aborigines they just turn over the page to the next item and look for something sensational. It is only when someone in authority such as a bishop makes a startling statement that people really sit up and take notice. But these things have been said over and over again but people have just ignored them.’