But today in 1972, under grey skies with light rain floating down, Pentridge Prison, itself built in part by convicts, is home to a thousand men – the wretched, the unlucky, the brutal, the untrustworthy, and a few innocent fellows conspired against by circumstance.
On the wall next to the desk at which you surrender your bag is a notice advising you that no guns or knives or weapons of any sort can be carried beyond this point. The sign makes you wonder what sort of person would require such a warning.
But I am not in the mood for irony. I am in the mood for breaking down in tears. I do not like prisons. I think of camps. I think of gates that close behind you forever. I think of people shuffling in a long line to a building in which they undress themselves and accept a rough grey garment with black stripes running down its length.
I am terrified of this place, like a child. I obey instructions from people in uniform without the slightest objection. If I am told I must undress, I will do so. If any of these coolly indifferent guards says to me, ‘So, a Jew, is that right?’ I would say, ‘Am I to die?’
Not now, but later – tonight maybe – when I think back on today, I will resent these fantasies of victimhood that so stubbornly play themselves out in my imagination. I have a right to dread, I know that, but often these dramas seem so blatant. I did not die in Belżec, in Janowska, in Auschwitz. I was not shot in Peltewna Street. Can I not, without fear, enter a prison as a visitor in a country where Jews have never been rounded up, never murdered? Is it necessary for me to tremble in this way, like a character in a second-rate horror movie? The stink of the compartments in Lvov is in my nostrils, like shit stuck to my shoe.
At a third stop, a prison officer asks me a question. He says, in a friendly way, ‘You’re here to see Prisoner Ratten?’
I say, ‘Yes, Leith Ratten.’
And the officer, without any change of expression, says, ‘Right you are.’
I am led down a long corridor, in places painted the pale green colour you take on when you are kneeling at a toilet bowl, about to vomit up five hours’ consumption of alcohol; in other places not painted at all, bluestone blocks left exposed. We reach a door in which a flap of metal that can be opened and closed has been installed at eye level. I am shown inside, asked if I’d like to take a seat at a bare, wooden table.
The prison officer says, ‘Leith’ll be here in a mo. Just hold your horses.’
And Leith is indeed with me in a very short time. He is a man in his early thirties, quite strongly built in his upper body, but without any sense of masculine menace. He is dressed in the greyish-blue denim of the prison’s inmates. Responding to an order from the guard, he takes the second chair at the table. He is not manacled. The prison guard is content to leave us together unsupervised.
I say, ‘Leith, I am Vera Wasowski, from the ABC. We want to do a story about your conviction and appeal. It’s for This Day Tonight. Do you know the show?’
Leith says, ‘What’s it called?’
‘This Day Tonight.’
‘No.’
‘Do you watch the ABC?’
‘Sometimes.’
The instant I see him, I know he is terrified. Of course he is terrified – they intend to hang him in this very prison.
The quality of terror in his face is very familiar to me, although I haven’t seen it since Lvov. No, later than Lvov: Warsaw, in 1957. I saw it then when I looked in the mirror on a day when the news was full of stories of Jews being murdered in Poland in one city and another, one town and another, and hearing these stories brought a surge of fear rushing up from the pit of my stomach. It was in my face that I saw that dread, and I wanted to run and never stop.
I pause in my questioning and stare at Prisoner Ratten’s face, which is drained of blood, as pale as bone. He was once a handsome man: I can see that. A strong jaw; thick dark eyebrows; a smooth forehead, quite high; short, dark hair. His upper lip is a little too thin to benefit him when a jury studies him over a period of weeks. They might think his thin upper lip is exactly the upper lip you would see on a man who made a plan to murder his wife, and carried it out.
I do not believe that this man, this Prisoner Ratten, murdered his wife. But maybe he did. There’s a puppy softness in his eyes still, but what he’s facing (the scaffold, supporting hands helping him up the steps, a brief glimpse of the sombre witnesses …) has marred his good looks.
I say, ‘We will be telling the story of your wife’s death again, and we will have a barrister looking at your case, and your appeal. He is our expert. He believes you are innocent.’
Leith says, ‘I am.’
For the sake of hearing him answer while I’m watching, I ask, ‘You are innocent? You did not murder Beverley Ratten?’
‘I didn’t murder Beverley. No.’ He speaks at a low pitch, but not a mumble.
‘It was an accident?’
‘It was an accident.’
Even if he is guilty, I hope with all my heart he doesn’t hang. I do not wish to see anyone hang. Okay, maybe Eichmann. Otherwise, no-one.
I have come here late in the afternoon. One of the things about Pentridge is this: no visitors are permitted to exit the prison after five. Once the doors close, you are there for the night. By the time I have asked twenty more questions, the hands on my wristwatch approach 4.45 and my heart is beating as fast as a cat’s.
Leith has become increasingly passionate in his responses. It’s as if he’s on trial again, as if he must convince me (me!) of his innocence. There is such tension in his body. Such tension in mine, too. If the penalty for remaining in the prison after five were to be hanged beside Leith, I could scarcely be sicker, or more panicky. I want to leap to my feet, say ‘Good luck with not being hanged, poor fellow! I have to dash!,’ and run for my life.
When the time comes for me to leave – 4.50 – I find the self-control to shake Leith’s hand and smile, fold my notebook and head for the exit.
The prison officer seems happy to saunter down the corridor towards the three doors we must negotiate before I can breathe again. My legs shriek, ‘Werunia, use us, run!’
‘So how’d you go with old Leithy?’ asks the officer, ever cheerful. ‘Good, thank you. Very good.’
‘He did it. You know that, don’t you?’
‘Do you think so? I don’t think he did.’
‘Oh my word. He did it all right.’
Once out of the prison, I hurry to Sydney Road, tears of shame in my eyes. My fear inside that place was disgraceful. I can go home by taxi, by train, by tram, or I could, if I wished, walk all the way. I could step into a pub and order brandy; I could pause here (and I do pause) and light a cigarette (I light a cigarette, shielding the flame from the cold wind).
Leith must remain where he is, on death row. What right do I have to dissolve in this way? Leith will hang. ‘Do you, crybaby, concede that he has the harder fate to bear?’ I ask myself.
I am off camera, holding my clipboard, listening, wincing, murmuring, ‘For God’s sake.’ On camera is John Gorton. The prime minister has, a couple of days ago, been rubbished by Malcolm Fraser, one of his ministers, and is struggling to make it appear as if he’s supremely unconcerned.
Often, at this time, 1971, Gorton is only a half hour away from his last drink, and a half hour from the next one. Malcolm despises him (these days; a few years back, he was a big Gorton booster), mostly because Gorton’s incapable of remembering from day to day what the hell he stands for. He has few friends, Gorton. For one thing, he treats his wife, Bettina, insensitively; he barely bothers to zip up his fly after emerging from a room off the PM’s office with the wife of a junior minister on the make, Bettina flushing with humiliation. In fact, a good part of the ministry and the entire press gallery, normally pretty jovial about the rascally behaviour of parliamentarians, at least so far as zippers and fly buttons are concerned, are disgusted with John.
It might be Bill Peach doing the interview, maybe Richard Carleton. I should remember if it was Ric
hard Carleton, because he would have been savage. Savage is okay, but he is a conceited prick, Richard Carleton, like a vain schoolboy who scorns his teachers.
Gorton is facing the end of his tenure as PM, and in keeping with the melodramatic metaphors that politics attracts, I could say that he was on the scaffold, the trapdoor beneath his feet about to swing open. It’s to be an execution.
All this is unfolding fifteen months before my visit to Leith in Pentridge. Gorton on the scaffold will fall through the air metaphorically, and his neck will metaphorically be broken, and he will die, metaphorically. And then he will wake up the next morning and think, ‘No longer Prime Minister, what a bastard.’ And he will have his breakfast, and Bettina will comfort him, and his kids will call by and say consoling things. Then he’ll have a beer and mutter once more, ‘What a bastard.’
As I hurry out of the prison, trembling like a kitten, the image in my mind is of the fear in Leith’s face. What is waiting for him is not metaphoric. For Leith, it will be the end of the one truly precious thing that anyone possesses: the spark of life.
The political stories on TDT – well, they’re a game. A serious game, but a game nonetheless. You win this round, you lose the next. If your life amounts to anything, you can recover. It’s the stories where people’s lives are at stake that really shake me.
I’ve been a communist, sure – maybe I still am – but slogans have never meant a thing to me. Slogans, dogmas, ideologies: they have their place if you like, but thank God, I have always been more devoted to the individual lives of individual people.
Allan Hogan does Leith’s story. He gives all the details of the case; he interviews Peter Brett. We see images of Leith, of him entering court, and of his wife. It’s a good, solid story, as always when Allan is in control. But the story doesn’t make any difference to Leith’s situation.
He is not hanged, however. His sentence is commuted to twenty-five years in prison. After further appeals, Leith is released, in 1983. The evidence of his innocence had become so overwhelming that even those with a vested interest in seeing him hang, or at least spend most of his life in jail – the police, who didn’t wish to concede any shortcomings in their investigation – are forced to acknowledge that Leith’s wife’s death was not murder. When the news comes through in 1985 that Leith has been released, I hear it with a flush of gladness. This is what good, hard, disciplined investigative journalism makes possible.
I think, One innocent man spared hanging; a million others, men and women and small children, just as innocent, hanged in my lifetime. But I am happy that at least this one has been spared.
20
THE TALENT
The appeal of each night’s program is dependent on ‘the talent’ – those who appear in the stories. Certain politicians give great value, are great ‘talent’.
One of these people is Fred Daly, the Minister for Administrative Services and Leader of the House in the Whitlam government. He gives his tales a garnish of humour, as you’ll recall, Robert, from his 1974 ‘Valley of Death’ performance in parliament, when he ridiculed Billy Snedden, the Leader of the Opposition. Snedden had boasted that Liberal MPs would follow him ‘through the Valley of Death’ and Fred, responding the next day, claimed that he’d searched all the relevant documents but could find no such electorate as Valley of Death in the Australian Commonwealth.
Jim Cairns we don’t bother with until later in the Whitlam years. Then he starts to be considered talent, but not for his charisma – there’s none there – but because you might get him to say something mad or bad. People on the right think that the ABC staff, and particularly the TDT reporters and presenters, are fervently devoted to promoting some socialist agenda. We adore the ALP, they think. Really? Bill is delighted when he gets a chance to milk the madness out of people like Cairns. Any good journalist’s loyalty is to the story above all else. At TDT, we hide stories that would reveal how many slobs and schmucks are in the ALP? No, no, no. We love stories about slobs and schmucks in the ALP, and everywhere else in Australian politics. If Allan or Andrew or Ian Finlay, or even Peter Couchman, came across evidence of Gough living on smack, what do you think they’d do? They’d get the story on air even if it were the eve of the election. Of course! They’d be a bit grieved at destroying the ALP’s chance at government for the first time in five hundred years, sure. But baby – the story!
John Gorton, we never court. He’s crap television.
Billy Snedden is good. He has the intellect of a retarded wombat, but his bluster is tasty.
Gough, I love. He is insanely egotistical, sure, but I notice he has a heart in him. He’s completely unsentimental, but the heart is there; it’s a good one. I chat with him off camera a few times. He has no knack for small talk and substitutes his erudition. It comes up in conversation that my background is Polish, and he runs through the Poles he knows personally, also the more famous Poles, and delights me by refusing to mention Chopin, and instead mentioning Tadeusz Kościuszko and Paweł Strzelecki. He can roll on in that characteristic cadence of his forever, much in the manner of an autodidact, not that he is one. All the while, I’m staring almost straight up in the air; he towers over me like Mount Kosciuszko above a molehill. I want to clap and laugh, reach up and pat him on his cheeks.
I also want to say, ‘Your wife is fabulous, Mr Whitlam, please tell her I said so.’
Malcolm Fraser also plays well on television. When I first meet him, I see a shyness that you sometimes come across in towering men who have spent a lot of their lives being over-conspicuous. He’s even more conspicuous now, in 1969, speaking up against Gorton. We take a crew down to his property at Nareen to interview him. There is some suggestion that we might make a story out of this fellow with the patrician bearing, characterised in the media as an aloof country squire, get him to say something ridiculous, such as ‘Bring back the stocks, also public floggings.’ We might be able to follow him about his property and catch on camera the serfs tugging their forelocks as he passes.
He’s nothing like that, in fact. He’s intelligent, essentially egalitarian, and there’s a genuine interest there in other humans. We don’t get any footage of Malcolm exercising the droit du seigneur or calling for the cat-o’-nine-tails. He’s charming enough; his manners are perfect.
Watching him, I experience a spooky little frisson of premonition. Malcolm, I think, will become leader of the opposition, but not before Gough becomes prime minister, and then somehow or other, one fine day, one foul day, Malcolm will meet Gough in the political arena, and become PM. Then he will meet Bob Hawke in that same arena, and cease to be PM.
I say to myself, Werunia, who do you think you are, a gypsy fortune teller? You’re ridiculous. Don’t say anything about this to Malcolm.
But I do, naturally.
We stay the night at Nareen, and drink heartily, and the chance comes for me to reveal my vision. Malcolm laughs, I laugh.
He says, ‘Gough becomes PM? I doubt that. And I will never be opposition leader, never be PM, and Hawke will be at the ACTU until he retires.’
I insist, ‘Oh, yes, it will happen.’
He bets me a bottle of the best local wine that he will never become opposition leader, let alone prime minister.
I meet Tamie, naturally. She’s a wife of the Classic School; it’s impossible to imagine a woman who’d make a more complete, more competent missus for an ambitious MP on the land. I get the feeling that she could dig a dozen post-holes between nine and noon, looking gorgeous in twill trousers and shirt, shower, change outfits, prepare lunch, and serve it in a skirt and blouse, spend two hours over the Nareen accounts, then organise a five-course meal for a visiting Nobel laureate. And, sure, have the reading to discuss Leavis and Derrida over the soup and grilled trout. She admires a pendant I’m wearing, an ankh symbol in silver, signifying life and the spirit in us all (well, not quite all). I make a gift of it to her. Years and years later I meet her once more, she looks about six months older, and she h
as a perfect recollection of the day of our last meeting, and the gift.
And, of course, both Malcolm and I live long enough to see my prediction come to pass. Let me tell you about the day on which the Oracle of Lvov was vindicated – the day on which this drama I’d foreseen while completely pissed began to unfold.
Word comes through to Gordon Street from Canberra that Malcolm is about to draw himself up to his full height, throw out his chest, and challenge Billy Snedden for the leadership of the Liberal Party. This is a big deal. Gough and the Labor Party are confident that the electorate will never vote Snedden into office. It’s not just that Snedden is hopeless; it’s that he doesn’t realise he’s hopeless. He thinks he’s masterful, and in believing this, he’s become a figure of fun. Malcolm would be a much bigger problem for Labor. He’s intelligent, ruthless, ambitious. And he’s not in the least bit afraid of Gough.
Malcolm makes his run, wins the ballot. Then he’s all over the television studios, laying down footage for the big current affairs shows. But as of five in the afternoon, not for TDT. He’s flown down to Melbourne from Canberra and we’re desperate to get him on the show. This is the biggest day in Australian politics since Labor’s double dissolution win in 1974. It would be humiliating if Malcolm dodged us. Malcolm’s people haven’t been answering our calls. Richard Carleton is supposed to have enough clout to book Malcolm for TDT, but Malcolm’s people have turned him down. With a story like this, reporters don’t accept being turned down. If you have to walk barefoot over broken glass to get the story, that’s what you do.
Vera Page 19