In the weeks that followed, Clare’s sense of self-worth unravelled, until one night the Christchurch police took a call from her, alone in her car sobbing and threatening to commit suicide. Clare was brought to police headquarters and kept on suicide watch. The New Zealand Accident and Compensation Commission funded her ongoing psychiatric care, noting she remained suicidal, had cut her wrists and brought a rope to hang herself with. The New Zealand police’s commitment to supporting Clare continues today.
I met Clare in the lobby of a hotel overseas. She was polite and neatly dressed and worried about how she would get me a receipt for her taxi journey home. We sat in the coffee lounge drinking tea from delicate china cups, surrounded by groups of men holding business meetings. Almost whispering, we talked about the sordid events in the motel in New Zealand. I introduced baldly one of the more grotesque elements of the sex that the players had volunteered to the police. Her self-possession evaporated; through tears she said, ‘I don’t even remember that.’
In 2002 Clare was a young 19-year-old, newly out in the world. Listening to the still naive young woman struggle through the retelling, she seemed to be looking for a way of making some sense of the destruction that had followed. Her distress was hard to witness; there were moments when I thought about stopping the interview.
The individual Clare best remembered from the night at the motel was also the most famous person in the room: then 30-year-old rugby league star Matthew Johns. It was the morning after the Logies when I first called him and he was in a buoyant mood, The Footy Show had just won a Logie. Johns wasn’t hostile, he was polite. He said he had been expecting a call like this for years, that he knew the incident would catch up with him one day. He was most worried about his family and the details we planned to broadcast. I carefully told Johns how distressed Clare was in the interview and the catastrophic effect the incident had had on her life. She had singled him out and I wanted him to do an interview so that his role that night would be clearly understood. He didn’t agree to the interview but subsequently said that he had left the room before the other men joined in.
The researchers, Ivan and I tracked down as many of the Cronulla team and staff as we could. Some players and player – managers were abusive and threatening; one prominent player said it didn’t matter about the other players; only he and Johns mattered because they had ‘profiles’. Although some of the touring party provided details off the record, none of the other players and staff was willing to go on camera, ensuring the attention remained almost solely on the celebrity Matthew Johns.
As the broadcast approached, an increasingly nervous Johns rang again to check which details we were running; he also agreed the worst outcome would be for the media to go after the girl. We had warned Clare and all the program’s participants to expect a vitriolic response from some sections of the audience and the media. I don’t think any of us quite expected the force of it. Much of the coverage was positive and sincere, especially from the NRL as an organisation, but the negative responses were vicious in a way I had never seen. We urged Clare unsuccessfully to stay off Facebook and the internet; the anonymous attacks there were the worst. The Executive Producer and I worked around the clock for weeks, trying to protect Clare from some of these excesses, including media stories featuring people she didn’t remember ever meeting claiming to know her intimately in order to attack her credibility. Clare made a single statement:
They have got people speaking of me that are not my friends or people I have ever met. It feels like I am living in a nightmare. All I wanted to do was to make people aware of the culture and stop it happening to other girls.
Newspapers and TV programs hunted her down to the point where we became afraid for her safety and sanity. One of the networks had a graphic ready to reveal not only her identity but also that of her new husband. At the last minute, at our urging, they decided not to run it.
Three years later, Clare is proud of playing a part in improving the way women are treated in sport. After the broadcast, Phil Gould described ‘Code of Silence’ as ‘the sledgehammer to the back of the head’ that the game needed:
For so long we’ve been having incidents like this, whether it was drugs or alcohol or abuse of women, and we all say, ‘Well, that was a wake-up call’, but no one wakes up. What comes out of this report now should be a message to all players, and all young people and all young girls, that there are no winners in any of this. The behaviour has to be addressed.
The idea was perhaps best expressed by Caroline, one of the other women in the program:
I have the vague hope that maybe something will change. That every season there isn’t going to be another girl hiding with the curtains shut and the blinds down, hoping like hell that her name and her face isn’t going to get out in the media. That it’s not going to happen over and over and that the football players involved and named aren’t just going to go straight back on the paddock the next weekend, the next Saturday or the next Friday night.
In early 2010 producer Michael Doyle and I were sitting in a café in Jakarta, watching my mobile phone on the table, waiting for it to ring. It beeped, delivering a text: ‘I got problem the got pen’. It took me a minute to work out what it meant: our Iraqi colleague Hussain Nasir, who had sent the text, was letting us know security officers at the Indonesian Department of Immigration had caught him using a camera concealed in a pen. Hussain had been looking for evidence of a corruption racket in which senior officials were soliciting large bribes from asylum seekers in return for releasing them from detention centres into the hands of people smugglers.
There was nothing Michael and I could do. To reply to the text message would have endangered him further. Hussain had worked with the US Special Forces in Iraq, if anyone could escape, he could, but at that moment we were unsure if we would see him again.
At Immigration, the guards unscrewed the data key from the pen, plugged it into a computer and watched the vision of their own office play on the screen. They demanded Hussein call someone to pay a large bribe or they would make him disappear into prison beyond anyone’s reach. While we endured an agonising wait, Hussain pretended to make phone calls, then asked the officers to take him to the foyer where he said the cash would be delivered. As he looked around the busy foyer for a means of escape, the Muslim call to prayer sounded through the building. Some of the guards in the foyer drifted off to pray. Hussain asked to use the bathroom and slipped through a side door in the cafeteria. He ran across the car park, jumped into a taxi and drove a short distance. Then he switched to a motorbike taxi, pulled the helmet visor down over his face and urged the driver to speed up, away from Immigration, through the busy traffic on Rasuna Said.
In the café my phone beeped again: ‘ok I run away already’. When Hussain walked into our hotel room hours later, moustache shaved off, dressed improbably in perfectly ironed new clothes, you might assume the story we had come to film was over. It was just beginning.
It took a further six months and a second trip to Indonesia to gather together the material for ‘Smugglers’ Paradise’. Over a single week in Jakarta, meetings were set up in a small hotel in the seedy area of Jalan Jaksa between Hussain and a number of Indonesia’s most successful people smugglers as well as a couple of new operators trying to break into the lucrative market. With Hussain posing as a would-be passenger, they discussed the details of their operations in front of our hidden cameras. Hussain even persuaded one smuggler, Abbas Al Kurdi, to go away and video the boat he planned to use. In the footage he brought back, Al Kurdi’s girlfriend provided running commentary like a travel agent showing off a cruise ship. ‘See, inside it’s like a café,’ she boasted as the camera panned across the hull of a splintered wooden fishing boat.
Not all the people Hussain filmed would come to Jalan Jaksa. An army colonel who provided cover for one of the smuggling syndicates insisted the meeting take place in the army-owned Hotel Borobodur. This time Hussain had to slip the camera past the hotel metal detector and
security. In the back seat of the car driving away from the meeting, Hussain played the video material on his laptop; there in full colour was Colonel Hotman, leaning back in his chair in his hotel slippers, discussing the large sums of money he needed to make worthwhile the risk of providing cover to the boats.
The last scene was filmed in a private room of a restaurant called the Ali Basha: a group of smugglers stretched comfortably on cushions, discussing business. The head of the syndicate, Abu Ali Al Kuwaiti, spoke urgently into one of his three phones, demanding money from passengers. Next to him, Haider Hani sat idly puffing on a hubbly bubbly. Haider Hani now faces charges in Australia of sending the boat that smashed on the rocks of Christmas Island, killing 50 people in December 2010.
The key to ‘Smugglers’ Paradise’ (like ‘A Bloody Business’) was the abundant footage: people smugglers, corrupt officials, agents, military officers caught on screen conducting their business. No one had seen this sort of material before in such detail and abundance. It revealed the extent of the task facing the Australian authorities and showed clearly how cynical the smugglers’ operations were. Four Corners, with its ability to sustain difficult, sometimes dangerous and lengthy investigations, is one of the few means that exist in Australia of bringing such comprehensive revelations to the audience.
Following the screening of the program, many of the smugglers in the story were detained by the Indonesian authorities. What we didn’t anticipate was the response of the United High Commission for Refugees.
‘Smugglers’ Paradise’ had revealed that a number of major people smugglers were living in Indonesia under the protection of the UNHCR, their food and accommodation paid for by an Australian government program to assist refugees. The UNHCR’s chief representative in Indonesia, Manuel Jordao, said on camera that getting their assessments of refugee status wrong was ‘not a main worry’.
Hussain Nasir, his wife and four young children were also UNHCR-registered refugees awaiting settlement in Australia. We had checked Hussain’s bona fides with the US Special Forces unit he worked for in Iraq. The work he did in Najaf after the US invasion was so dangerous he was eventually forced to flee the country. An officer from the Special Forces unit he worked with said it was much too dangerous for Hussain to go back to Iraq now as a number of the people he had helped them arrest were being released. In Indonesia, Hussain had also helped the Australian Federal Police with their anti-smuggling operations following an introduction by a senior UN official in Jakarta. When we asked the UNHCR for help protecting Hussain, they instead reviewed his case and cancelled his refugee status.
The decision stranded Hussain in Indonesia with his wife and children at a time when people smugglers were threatening to harm him. I was with friends in Sydney when Hussain called from Jakarta to tell me about the letter from the UNHCR. I told him he must have misunderstood the contents and asked him to scan the letter urgently and email it to my host’s computer. I tilted my head as the pages of the letter loaded slowly, sideways onto the screen and was unable to believe the words I was reading. In a few sentences, the UNHCR stated that it had no evidence against him to support the decision to cancel his refugee status. They said they had made the decision on the basis of an assumption that as a young conscript in the Iraq army, he may have been party to war crimes.
The UNHCR, it appeared, had made no attempt to check their facts before cancelling Hussain’s refugee status. They asserted that he might have been connected to crimes that didn’t exist. Four Corners started checking the facts in Iraq and consulted more than 15 of the world’s leading experts on the situation in Iraq at that time — academics, NGOs, leading Iraqi jurists and military experts — who all said the assumptions made by the UNHCR in their decision were dangerous and unjust.
For Hussain, the injustice was almost unbearable. He had tried to help Australia in its fight against people smugglers and he was being punished. Soon afterwards, Hussain survived a stabbing attack in a market on the outskirts of Jakarta. His wife became increasingly distressed with their predicament. In a decisive response, the Australian government brought his wife and children to safety in Australia, where they were settled as refugees. In Indonesia, Hussain moved frequently to stay ahead of the smugglers, while Michael Doyle and I searched for information to challenge the UNHCR’s decision.
In November 2011, a year after Hussain said goodbye to his wife and children, the UNHCR’s determination was over-ridden by the Australian government. When Hussain arrived in Australia, Michael and I picked him up from the airport and drove him to his new home. He sat nervously in the front seat of the car, clutching a bunch of deep red roses. Having lived with their story every day for many months, Michael and I stood back shyly while Hussain and his wife held each other in a long embrace. No moment in journalism has meant as much to me as that one.
PHOTOGRAPHIC INSERT
Michael Charlton conducts a studio interview via a remote link on screen, 1960s.
Michael Charlton on the cover of TV Times, 18 August 1962.
Early advertising for the new program, 1967.
John Penlington (far right) with the Four Corners crew outside the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, 1964. Until he started at the program, Penlington had never been out of Australia and had no passport.
‘Where Have All the Poisons Gone?’ (1972). ‘One of the most disquieting environmental reports screened on the ABC’: Peter Reid’s investigation into the hazardous waste being dumped each week in Australia, to which governments turned a blind eye.
‘A lot of lady’: the program’s first female presenter, Caroline Jones, setting out on assignment from the ABC’s Gore Hill studios.
Four Corners was one of the few programs to cover ‘that gigantic mystery — overseas’. Cameraman David Brill and reporter Michael Willesee filming the war in Vietnam, with the South Vietnamese army.
‘Vietnam: Triumph or Tragedy’ (1971). John Penlington and Gordon Bick on the role Australia played in Vietnam.
Jonathan Holmes: ‘Four Corners needed big stories. It always has.’ Jeff McMullen reporting on Nicaragua’s secret wars.
Mary Delahunty’s investigation into the misuse of Australian aid to the Philippines, which won a Gold Walkley Award.
‘A chance to enter the House of Lords’: Delahunty reports on the disastrous Ash Wednesday bushfires, Mount Macedon, 1983.
‘French Connections’: The sinking of the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour, 1985, was a world exclusive for Chris Masters
‘Banned Aid’ (1985) brought the conflict and famine of Ethiopia into Australian living rooms
‘The Big League’ (1983): sensational revelations about how NSW officials ran the game of rugby league nearly toppled a state premier.
Celebrating 30 years of a program no one thought would last. Chris Masters and Executive Producer Peter Manning lift their glasses at a Four Corners party.
‘This fringe group assumed because I was pregnant, I would be sympathetic.’ Jenny Brockie on the trail of the pro-life movement in the United States.
US pro-life protesters.
‘It’s difficult because of the gap between what has been reported and what should be reported.’ David Marr’s story on alcohol use in Aurukun, Queensland, was one of a line of ground-breaking reports on black Australia.
Despite numerous clashes on air, Liz Jackson profiled the Prime Minister John Howard on several occasions. The tension between the two never abated.
‘The Network’ (2002). The story that changed a life: Sally Neighbour on the trail of Al Qaeda in Bali, Indonesia.
‘The Inside Story’ (2001). Debbie Whitmont’s smuggled images of Villawood detention centre uncovered the heartbreaking tale of Shayan Badraie, a traumatised six-year-old Iranian boy held behind bars.
‘The Inside Story’ (2001). Six-year-old Villawood detainee Shayan Badraie channelled his trauma and despair into an illustration.
‘A Bloody Business’ (2011). Sarah Ferguson’s report on Australi
an cattle exports to the slaughterhouses of Indonesia attracted the lowest ratings and had the biggest impact of any story that year, winning Ferguson a Gold Walkley Award.
An image from ‘A Bloody Business’ (2011).
Author Biographies
Jenny Brockie reported for Four Corners in 1983–85, returning briefly in 1986 and 1990. Her media awards include the Gold Walkley for Excellence in Journalism, two AFI Awards, a Logie, a Human Rights Award and two United Nations Association Media Peace Awards. She has produced and directed groundbreaking ABC TV documentaries such as ‘Cop It Sweet’, about Sydney’s Redfern police, and ‘So Help Me God’, about Campbelltown local court. She also presented The Morning Show on 702 ABC Radio in Sydney and her own interview series, Speaking Personally, on ABC TV. Jenny currently hosts Insight on SBS TV, where she drives a lively debate each week involving more than 50 people.
Mary Delahunty is the CEO and National Director of Writing Australia Ltd, a Gold Walkley Award-winning journalist, with a prominent career in television news, current affairs and the arts. She is a published author (Public Life, Private Grief, 2010). Mary was a senior Victorian government minister in the portfolios of Education, Planning and the Arts and is the longest serving Victorian Arts Minister. She is the Chair of Orchestra Victoria and director of the not-for-profit boards Harold Mitchell Foundation, Melbourne Recital Centre, and Centre for Advanced Journalism at Melbourne University. She also established a residential writers’ retreat at Rosebank in the Macedon Ranges.
The Stories That Changed Australia: 50 Years of Four Corners Page 24