The Stories That Changed Australia: 50 Years of Four Corners

by Sally Neighbour

  And television audiences flinch. ‘Black – white relations are a blind spot with Australians,’ says Peter Manning, Executive Producer in the 1980s. ‘They don’t want to know about it in their hearts.’ Liz Jackson, who made a number of key stories on Aboriginal issues in the last 20 years, was warned every time she proposed another that the ratings would crash. That was only one of a number of formal difficulties Four Corners faced when bringing black Australia to television. ‘It’s difficult because it’s expensive,’ says Jackson. ‘It’s difficult because it is a difficult culture; difficult because a lot of Aboriginal communities don’t want white film crews in their parts if they are going to focus on what they call “shame jobs”. It’s difficult because of the gap between what has been reported and should be reported. We are closing that gap.’

  We don’t know how many people watched ‘Box Ridge’ when it went to air on Saturday 9 September but it caused quite a stir. ‘If we were shocked when we saw what was happening there, so were the viewers,’ said Raymond. ‘People all over Australia were outraged and the New South Wales government was deluged on Monday with all kinds of protests.’ The Minister for Justice flew north to inspect the shanties. After cabinet the following Tuesday the elderly Premier, Bob Heffron, declared: ‘Here and now I tell you we are going to give them a new deal in housing.’ The Herald’s ‘Onlooker’ columnist was amazed to see the government shaken out of its torpor: ‘Wonders will never cease!’

  Legend has it that ‘Box Ridge’ made Four Corners’ name at a single blow. Not really. It was ground breaking. It showed how television could reignite interest in an old scandal. Even 50 years later it is remembered with gratitude. But Four Corners first caught the imagination of its audience by filming a beach inspector throwing a woman in a bikini off Bondi. ‘I do not want to see anything indecent on the beach,’ was the war cry of Abe Laidlaw, the gnarled guardian of decency on that stretch of Sydney’s coast. The Herald reported filming the expulsion of that woman ‘rated more newspaper space’ than anything Four Corners screened in its first weeks. And reform came swiftly: by the end of October, the government had announced the repeal of the ordinance mandating neck-to-knee costumes on all Sydney beaches. No Four Corners report from black Australia has ever provoked such a clear-cut response.

  For 40 years, injustice was almost the sole focus of these reports. Four Corners was not blind to troubles in Aboriginal communities. The first years of the show were the last years of alcohol bans and their impact was examined in ‘The Right to Drink’ (1964). But drink, violence and illiteracy hardly seemed to matter at Four Corners in the face of the neglect, dispossession and exploitation of black Australia. There were not many Aboriginal reports — only one or two every couple of years — but they added to the provocative reputation Four Corners was winning. ‘People wanted to watch it, because it was telling them things about the country that they hadn’t really come across before, or hadn’t thought deeply about before,’ said John Penlington, a reporter in those years. ‘Things like Aborigines in humpies in the back streets of some country town in New South Wales, seeing a Communist interviewed during the Cold War on the ABC, seeing people talk freely about sex …’

  Those early years saw so many humpies and so much squalor on Four Corners: Marble Bar (1962), Palm Island (1970), Walgett (1971), Alice Springs (1972), Redfern (1973), Brewarrina (1973). None of these reports had the impact of Peter Reid’s 1969 ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind’, which the then trainee priest Pat Dodson thought ‘absolutely fantastic’ when it went to air. ‘Whilst there are horrifying things said in some of that program, the central thing about the poverty, the injustice that Aboriginal people were living in was graphically portrayed.’ This was not in a newspaper but on television ‘coming into the lounge rooms of many, many Australians’.

  The scene was Cunnamulla in Queensland, where Nancy Young had lived with ten children in a shack on the edge of town. Young had been jailed for manslaughter after the death of her baby. The scene was appalling. There were only four water taps for dozens of shacks. Disease was rife. The camera pans over boils, rashes and sores on the pitted faces of children playing where Cunnamulla’s sewage pours into the river. Reid acknowledges that the inhabitants of these shanties could eat better and drink less, but the conclusion of his report is that they were being deliberately left to live in these wretched conditions. ‘To my way of thinking they are certainly not an underprivileged section of the community,’ said Cunnamulla shire president Jack Tomkins. ‘Something for nothing is their motto. And they don’t get much for nothing, that I’ll admit.’

  Four Corners took Young’s case to Australia. ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind’ went to air as a phalanx of doctors, clergy, lawyers and university students were working to spring her from prison. Embarrassing evidence had emerged that scurvy was killing children in the Cunnamulla camp. The Queensland courts found a technicality on which to quash her conviction. One of the law students caught up in the cause was Geoffrey Robertson, who says Nancy Young’s case was his ‘first inkling about how often justice only gets done when someone takes notice’.

  The ’60s saw Four Corners begin to report black Australia’s struggle for land, which was to be a great theme of the show for nearly two decades until the land rights movement ran into the sand in the early years of Bob Hawke’s government. These reports began in 1966 with Frank Bennett’s impeccable report of the Gurindji walk-off from Wave Hill Station, a corner of Lord Vestey’s pastoral empire in northern Australia. ‘The Price of Equality’, broadcast when the strike was only a couple of months old, is full of complexity. Bennett didn’t assume for a moment all would be well once blacks were given wages rather than flour, tea, tobacco and pocket money. An urbane Vesteys manager he interviewed standing on the wing of his plane warned of ‘disemployment’ among black stockmen ‘when the award wage comes on and the native is in direct competition with the white man’. Bennett pointed to what lay deeper than the conflict over wages and conditions at Wave Hill: ‘The Aborigine’s inherent lack of property rights in his own country is the crux of his unrest.’

  Land rights took Four Corners to some of the most remote and beautiful stretches of Australia. Never have so many didgeridoos been heard on television. Hardly questioned were the high hopes that drove Aborigines, their white supporters and, over time, many of the governments of Australia. More than justice was involved here: something like salvation was said to be at hand. In a dozen or so reports across a vast landscape, Four Corners pursued the enemies of land rights. Mike Willesee took on developers in New South Wales in ‘A Place in the Sun’ (1969) and Tony Jones went back for more in ‘Coast Mortem’ (1988). Others on the list were the mining giant Nabalco in Brian King’s ‘Gove: Land Rights and Wrongs’ (1969); the British Ministry of Defence in David Flatman’s ‘Maralinga’ (1972) and in Bob Hill and Noel Norton’s ‘Maralinga Sequel’ (1980); Rio Tinto mining uranium in the heart of the Kakadu National Park, in Peter Ross’s ‘Northern Land Story’ (1979) and Kerry O’Brien’s ‘Battle for Kakadu’ (1986); and Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland implacably opposing any form of land rights within its borders in Jim Downes’ ‘Palm Island’ (1970), Maryanne Smith’s ‘Aurukun’ (1978) and Jack Pizzey’s ‘Why Are They Marching?’ (1982), which covered the demonstrations that put the struggle for land rights before the press of the world gathered in Brisbane for the Commonwealth Games.

  But the late ’70s and early ’80s were not the finest years of Four Corners. ‘It was a fairly prosaic operation,’ Peter Ross recalls. ‘It didn’t have money and didn’t have real purpose. You simply reacted to stories. It was a machine operation. It lacked gravitas.’ That changed in 1982 with the appointment of Jonathan Holmes as Executive Producer. This young man from the BBC reinvigorated the show but moved cautiously in the reporting of Indigenous affairs. He had no direct experience of black Australia. Holmes says he put his energy in this area into ‘scratching round to find ways of doing Aboriginal stories that might appeal to people�
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  The formal structures of discrimination had all but disappeared by this time. Aborigines could vote, drink and were, everywhere but in Queensland, paid much the same wages as whites. Black graduates were coming through the universities. There were Aboriginal lawyers, doctors and teachers. Charlie Perkins, an Arrernte man from Alice Springs, was about to be promoted to Secretary of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. Traditional owners had been granted title to half the Northern Territory and a swathe of South Australia. Bob Hawke came to office promising uniform land rights across the rest of the country but capitulated in the face of opposition from the miners, pastoralists and Labor government of Western Australia, as David de Vos reported in his obituary for land rights, ‘Labor’s Landmine’ (1984).

  But 25 years of change had only tempered the profound disadvantage of black Australia. Each reform had brought its own disappointment. Old problems along the black – white divide persisted. One of these was the violence by white officials which Alan Hall and I examined in ‘Black Death’ (1985) after a number of Aboriginal men, often drunk, died following beatings by police and prison warders in Western Australia. Our target was a system and a state of mind that saw no one punished, not even reprimanded, for these killings. A black prisoner having some kind of psychotic episode — he had just cut his wrists — was beaten by warders in the yard of Freemantle Prison. Twenty prisoners watching from their cells would give evidence that batons were used, that the prisoner was kicked and punched. They were all disbelieved. The chief forensic pathologist — who told me he had never in 20 years’ service found evidence of assaults by warders or police — couldn’t find a cause of death. A private autopsy in South Australia established swiftly that the young man was killed in a headlock. The warders were commended for their restraint.

  We did not break the deaths in custody story. Four Corners was once again giving form and substance to worries already in the air. The response from the west was visceral: outraged denials, threats of defamation, and a complaint by Hawke to the ABC board. But Pat Dodson credits ‘Black Death’ with waking police, judges and policy-makers to the existence of this ‘gaping sore’ and argues Four Corners was ‘absolutely essential’ to the establishment of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, on which he sat. But that did not come swiftly. A couple of years and a dozen more deaths followed before Hawke established the inquiry. And the deaths didn’t stop, as reported by Deb Richards in ‘Who Killed Mark Quayle?’(1987) and Liz Jackson in her very fine investigation ‘Who Killed Mr Ward?’ (2009) into the death, essentially by slow roasting, of a Western Desert man being driven to Kalgoorlie in a van without air conditioning to face a drink-driving charge.

  In 1985, Holmes handed over to his deputy, Peter Manning, who looks back with regret at the failure of Four Corners to drive change for Aborigines in these years. ‘We brought down governments, we brought down police commissioners, we put people in jail but with Aboriginal Australia we stopped nothing.’ Manning believes too many Indigenous stories were done by Four Corners, not because they had much to reveal or anything to add, but because they should be done. ‘It might have been better to decide stories on merit alone,’ he says. ‘I think audiences can smell an obligation story from a must-be-told story instantly.’ The stories made were heart-rending but correct. Much bad behaviour was forgiven because the problems of black Australia were sheeted home to centuries of white occupation. Little was heard on the show of those voices calling for Aborigines to do more to haul themselves out of their troubles by being more disciplined, better citizens.

  Manning suspects Four Corners was pointing its cameras too often in the wrong direction. ‘I think in retrospect we needed context stories, stories that went deeper than the shock – horror scenes and looked back at our own white racism and maybe how we all are the problem, not just the easy targets of country yokels, cruel cops and mayors of shires. Maybe we should have dug deeper into white Australia to address the problems of black Australia?’

  Outside the ABC, the reluctance to report the dark side of black Australia, the fear of feeding racism by reinforcing old stereotypes, was breaking down. On leaving Four Corners to join 60 Minutes in 1984, Jeff McMullen made a famous report from central Australia. ‘An Aboriginal woman in her twenties, completely out of her mind sniffing petrol drained from a nearby car, lurched towards the crew waving a wheel wrench and screaming,’ he wrote in his memoir, A Life of Extremes. The filmmaker David Bradbury followed McMullen across the line in 1988 with ‘State of Shock’, about drinking and death in Weipa. This was not a report from Kerry Packer’s Nine Network but a film from the heart of the left, and its impact on the new Executive Producer of Four Corners, Marian Wilkinson, was profound. Bradbury’s film convinced her that the show’s old hesitation to investigate drink and violence in black communities had to end. ‘The issue was too critical.’

  She despatched Martin Butler and me to Cape York to make ‘Six-Pack Politics’ (1991), a study of grog’s destructive impact on the contradictory little settlement of Aurukun. ‘It’s grim but a kind of paradise,’ I told the camera. ‘It’s a black community that’s never had so many whites running it. It presents a united face to the world but it’s a town divided by old feuds. Fighting has always been part of the culture here. Nothing much gets done. In the end we have to ask the difficult question: is Aurukun today precisely as they want it?’

  The old were mission-trained and spoke their minds; the young were illiterate and tongue tied. Far from resenting white policing, the senior women of Aurukun were demanding more arrests and more men to be thrown into the cells. One of the locals told us, as we filmed six tonnes of beer being unloaded from a barge, ‘This is the main stuff. The piss.’

  Butler and I decided only blacks would reproach blacks in our report. Marcia Langton did so with magnificent eloquence: ‘In 15 years the conditions in Aboriginal communities have deteriorated beyond belief simply because of alcohol. And standard Aboriginal ways of behaving have simply gone for the younger generation because they see people rolling around on the ground drunk, behaving abominably.’

  This was Four Corners’ second visit to Aurukun. A pattern was being established of returning from time to time to see what had happened to people and their communities after those early reports. As a result, Four Corners was building a unique television archive of material on Indigenous Australia. Most of these return stories are in a little genre of their own: reporting rays of hope in black Australia. There would be three visits to Box Ridge (1961, 1967 and 1993), two to Walgett (1967 and 1971), at least three to Alice Springs (1972, 2006 and 2010) and three to Aurukun. Butler and I weren’t looking for rays of hope in 1991 but when Matthew Carney went back in April 2011, he found a community now officially dry and an encouraging number of kids turning up at school. But the Aurukun story isn’t over — none of these stories is.

  ‘Six-Pack Politics’ did not see a profound shift in Four Corners’ reporting of Aboriginal Australia. Through the 1990s, under Ian Carroll, Paul Williams and John Budd, the show continued to focus on questions of justice. The High Court’s Mabo decision brought land rights back in the new guise of native title. That in turn revived old disputes with mining companies and state governments. The stolen generations made a late entry with Liz Jackson’s ‘Telling His Story’(1996), about the life and suicide of the activist Rob Riley, who had spent his childhood at the appalling Sister Kate’s home for ‘nearly white’ children in Perth. A lawyer not long back from London, Jackson drove the show’s reporting of efforts to find Indigenous punishments to fit black crimes, beginning with ‘Payback’ (1994). Her powerful ‘Go to Jail’ (2000) — provoked by the suicide in prison of a 15-year-old boy from Groote Eylandt jailed for stealing a few marker pens and a tin of paint — helped feed protests across Australia that led to the softening of the Northern Territory’s mandatory detention regime.

  Bruce Belsham became Executive Producer of the show in 1999 with a renewed determination to investig
ate the dark side of Indigenous Australia. A New Zealander, Belsham had absorbed the message of personal responsibility in the writings of Alan Duff, whose novel Once Were Warriors was filmed in 1994. He came to Four Corners having just made Frontier, a television series about Australia’s 150-year land war. The discovery that white Australians were acknowledging even back then the wrong they were doing reinforced his belief that it was time for black Australians to do the same now, in particular to take responsibility for violence and abuse in remote black communities.

  On Groote Eylandt to film the mandatory detention story, Jackson realised most of the people waiting in court weren’t kids about to be slotted for petty theft but victims of domestic violence. ‘We are doing the wrong story,’ she thought. She had also been reading the anthropologist Peter Sutton’s exasperated challenge to the old discourse of white guilt and black independence in the remote communities. ‘When so many lives are being lost,’ he wrote in early 2001, ‘when three-year-old children are found suffering from gonorrhoea, when Indigenous women are 45 times more likely to be victims of domestic violence, when local action on severe problems is not working, does not the wider community have to recognise its responsibility by supporting a more interventionist approach?’ Jackson’s response was ‘The Shame’ (2001), which revealed the scale of child sexual abuse in black communities. Sutton’s blast had not only shattered white illusions but, Jackson believes, encouraged black leaders to break old taboos and speak about this on camera for the first time. Dodson was one of these and he took a particularly grave view of the situation: ‘The survival of the Indigenous people of this country is at stake.’