by Mark Colvin
The fact that he did win, though, was extremely significant. Only through decades of persistent scientific detective work did we know back then that there’d been a huge radioactive leak after an accident at a Soviet reactor in the eastern Urals in 1957. Nearly three decades later, in the teeth of all the evidence, Moscow was still denying that one. The Chernobyl admission had taken less than three days.
As prevailing winds drifted the plume of radioactivity across Eastern and Western Europe, the Soviet Union became more and more cooperative, and it became possible to report considerable detail of what was happening. My partner Michele and two-year-old son Nicolas and I were advised to shift to London for a few days as the radioactive cloud blew over Belgium. There we met up with my sister Zoë and her husband, Mark Higgie, then posted at the Australian embassy in Belgrade—the meandering path of the plume had hit what was then Yugoslavia quite hard, and they too had a toddler, Anna. For some odd meteorological reason, the plume was forecast to bypass the British capital, though it did rain radioactive particles on parts of Wales.
I was in the London office briefly, trying to assess the significance and detail of the disaster in reports for ABC News, AM and PM. The footage we’d filmed in the Novovoronezh power station in 1984 came in useful—not many people had film from inside a Soviet reactor plant. Then I travelled to Finland and filmed inside the world’s only exported Soviet-built nuclear reactor. The Finns pointedly showed us the myriad ways they’d modified the system they’d bought: modern dials and especially electronics, extra layers of reactor shielding, a system whereby the pressure inside the building was lower than that outside so any breach would mean air rushing inwards rather than exploding outward. If anything it simply reinforced my sense in 1984 that, unmodified, the Soviet plants were ramshackle and dangerous.
Returning to Brussels a week after the news broke, I filmed in fruit and vegetable markets where people were suddenly avoiding produce like apples from Austria, and leafy greens, like spinach, in general. As it turned out, Belgium, one of Europe’s dampest countries, caught a lucky break that week: there was hardly a drop of rain to precipitate the radioactivity to the ground. But the suspicion about what you could and couldn’t eat persisted in much of Western Europe for months, if not years.
* * *
My time in Brussels was due to be over at the end of 1987. I’d had an extraordinary three years, marked by many new friendships in the international press corps, most closely with Éamonn Lawlor of the Irish broadcaster RTE, with whom I shared an office and who remains a lifelong friend. He and other members of the Brussels press corps, like Martin Sixsmith of the BBC, Quentin Peel and Will Dawkins of The Financial Times, and Derek Brown of The Guardian, were competitive with each other on the big Euro-stories, but had nothing to lose by giving me advice or a helping hand. I’d also got used to sharing crews, footage and notes with massively experienced BBC broadcasters like John Simpson, with whom I worked covering many major events. What I hadn’t had was much competition. I was Australia’s only full-time broadcast correspondent in Europe, and although I was busy, I occasionally wondered whether I had the edge for the scoop.
In May 1987, I got the chance to find out. I was in Paris to interview Foreign Minister Bill Hayden on his visit to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development when ABC News Foreign Editor John Tulloh rang to say that NSW mafia boss Robert Trimbole, Australia’s most wanted fugitive at the time, was reported to have died in southern Spain. The trouble was that the story of Trimbole’s life as a fugitive had been one of false sightings, an arrest and failed extradition in Ireland, and erroneous reports of his death. Now the chase was on to prove whether, this time, it was really him and he was really dead. But, this being the ABC, they didn’t want me to leave Paris without the Hayden interview, which meant that I would arrive in Alicante half a day behind the commercial stations.
At the airport of the Spanish port city, I met a veteran Visnews stringer cameraman, Mike Gore, who was bilingual in Spanish and so was also able to interpret. Our first port of call was a tanatorio (undertaker) called Siempre Viva—Eternal Life. As we arrived, however, my heart sank. The commercial TV crews, led by Paul Lyneham for Channel Seven, Robert Penfold for Nine and Mike Tancred for Ten, were just leaving. It looked like we were way behind. They made a lot of jokes about the lateness of the ABC, particularly when I mentioned the reason for the delay: an interview on the very dry subject of Australia’s position at the OECD. I gritted my teeth, grinned, and hoped that we’d be able to catch up. It was early afternoon and we and the commercials had a joint, four-way, one-hour satellite booking at 8 p.m. up the coast in Murcia. I had to get something together fast.
We went in to see the undertaker, a surprisingly cheerful, bearded man in his thirties named Jose-Luis Vacca, who asked if we’d like a cup of coffee. I’d worked enough in southern Europe to know that you take the time for such courtesies, so we sat down for a chat and a small cup of black, thickly brewed espresso. I knew he’d done an interview with the other TV crews, and he quickly agreed to one with me. As we drank our coffee, I asked if, apart from receiving the body and meeting a man who said he was Trimbole’s son Craig, he’d seen any documentary evidence of the dead man’s identity. Oh yes, he said, the passport.
‘Do you have a copy?’ I asked.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Could I see it?’
‘No problem.’
Not only did he fetch several copied pages of the passport, including one with Robert Trimbole’s photo, but he also brought a death certificate signed ‘Craig Trimbole’.
‘Could we film these?’ I asked.
‘Of course.’
‘Did you give them to those other guys?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Oh, they were in a big hurry. They didn’t want to sit down for a coffee. So they didn’t ask. You did. You asked.’
For the rest of the day, we kept arriving just as the others were leaving: at the cemetery where the embalmed body had been moved, at the supermarket where Trimbole was reported to have shopped, in the hills above Benidorm where we searched for his elusive home address. On each occasion, their teasing of us for being in the rearguard got more raucous. Knowing I had in my briefcase the proof of death they lacked, I just smiled and soaked it up.
By the time I’d done my piece to camera in Benidorm, we had to leave fast for the coastal drive to Murcia. We arrived just after the satellite feed had started, to another chorus of ‘Late again, ABC’. I must say, this is an anecdote I would never even tell if the others hadn’t been so triumphalist. But they’d grabbed the first three-quarters of the hour-long feed, so I had to sit there pretending to look glum as I saw their stories go out. Their voice-overs were all still speculative—Trimbole was ‘probably’ really dead this time—but as I’d thought, none of them had the crucial proof.
They were cracking open some cold beers at the back of the control room when my story started to feed out, leading off with the passport pages.
Shot of passport, including photo.
It’s the documents that have turned this report of Robert Trimbole’s death from a rumour into a near-certainty. His Australian passport, issued in 1979, may have expired but this photograph has now been matched with the dead man’s features.
Shot of death certificate.
The death certificate says Trimbole died of a heart attack at 8 p.m. on the 13th of May. He checked into the La Villa Joyosa hospital under the alias of Robert Witt, a Swiss citizen.
Shots of cemetery.
He died there, and his embalmed remains were removed to this cemetery. The body is still there under guard.
Shot of Craig Trimbole’s signature.
This document, signed Craig Trimbole, authorises the undertakers to make the necessary arrangements.
I kept my eyes fixed on the screens, but Mike Gore told me he could practically see the other reporters’ jaws dropping. What was worse, the feed being
a shared one, their news editors back in Sydney were seeing my story come in, so the others had little choice but to get back in the saddle to try to match it before airtime.
In the ABC, of course, no good deed goes unpunished. Instead of a herogram, I got told off by Foreign Editor John Tulloh. My crime? I’d done what I was supposed to do and filed the story for Radio News and AM, who put it to air at breakfast time, thus spoiling what he thought should have been a 7 p.m. TV News exclusive. But by then, one thing I’d learned was that ‘foreign correspondent’s paranoia’ was a feature of the job: you were never going to please everyone, so you might as well just do the best job you could.
Chapter 26
Human Stories
ON SOME LEVEL, I think of my career before the return to Sydney from Brussels at the end of 1987—all thirteen years of it since my first day as a cadet—as little more than an apprenticeship in journalism. Yes, I had done a lot, seen a lot, been to dozens of countries. But most of what I had done was daily reporting, reacting to events rather than trying to anticipate them. What I lacked was the experience of investigative journalism, or even of long-form explanatory work. I had no idea whether I was capable of it. So when the executive producer of Four Corners, Peter Manning, said he wanted to appoint me as one of the program’s reporters, I was initially reluctant.
Like many so-called ‘high achievers’, I’ve always suffered to some extent from Impostor Syndrome—that sneaking feeling that much of what you’ve achieved has been the result of luck as much as talent. I feared that Four Corners, which had emerged from the doldrums in the mid-1980s to become one of the most influential journalism platforms in the country, would tear aside the curtain and reveal my hidden weaknesses. I was in awe of the investigative and film-making skills of colleagues like Chris Masters, Tony Jones, Marian Wilkinson and Paul Barry, and very much aware that although I had real skills in writing and interviewing, the creation of coherent film sequences to tell stories within an integrated structure over forty-five minutes involved a whole new set of skills, which I would have to learn extremely quickly or fall by the wayside.
I was fortunate to join Four Corners when I did: although Jonathan Holmes, who had led the program’s renaissance, had moved on, his deputy Peter Manning had taken over, and done so with inspiration and guts. The ‘culture’ of the unit was very strong: constant fact-checking, right up to transmission time; endless arguments—usually constructive and creative—about how to tell the story; an obsession with picture and sound quality; and a collaborative sense in which every member of the team on a given story was encouraged to contribute. Peter used to address the troops with a rousing speech at the beginning of every year, and I remember how we started 1988 with his clarion call about doing serious journalism for people who otherwise might never see it: ‘Yes, we need to do National Times stories, but they need to be understandable to a tabloid audience.’
It was a high bar. The National Times was famous for breaking massive, complex stories about everything from organised crime to espionage and national security. Our job was to do that, but also to be storytellers, capable of drawing an audience in and holding it.
It was at least a year before I even began to feel equal to the task. I made films about what even then seemed the growing discontent with big-party politics, about multiculturalism (in the midst of a controversy stirred up by then Leader of the Opposition John Howard), and about the future of the Melbourne Age, then in grave danger of being taken over by the British media magnate and (as it turned out) swindler Robert Maxwell. None of these stories was completely without merit, but they weren’t going to set the world on fire. Above all, in retrospect, I hadn’t started working as a film-maker. I was instead a journalist who happened to be working in the medium of film. But I was unquestionably learning, and over the next few years, I came to internalise the process: to think simultaneously about how to ‘do a story’ and ‘make a film’.
In 1989, for instance, my second year at Four Corners, I travelled to Namibia to follow a refugee, Ndeutala Hishongwa, back to her home-land. It was an early foretaste in miniature of the end of apartheid. South Africa was being forced to withdraw from its nearest colony, formerly known as South-West Africa. Its troops and armour were still in the country, but a UN Transitional force, UNTAG, was going in to supervise their withdrawal and maintain stability: Australia was contributing a force of engineers. Ndeutala had left Namibia in terrifying circumstances in 1974, the South African Police banging down her door while she escaped through a rear bathroom window, leaving her tiny baby son behind. She’d spent the first part of her exile at university in Sweden, then moved to Melbourne to complete a PhD at La Trobe University. She’d had two children in exile, a girl, Hippulengwa, and a boy, Nyoma, with Australian accents and Australian expectations, who were now going to see Africa for the first time, and if all went well, meet the half-brother they’d never known—the baby Ndeutala had been forced to abandon.
Potentially an indigestible foreign affairs and politics essay, it was instead a human story, with the journey of the Hishongwa family, among the first group of refugees to return to Namibia, as its through-line. Its most climactic moment came by sheer coincidence. We’d been to Ndeutala’s home village, in the country’s north-west near the Angolan border, but been unable to find her son. He’d gone to the seaside, we were told, to collect salt. No-one knew when he’d be back. We’d almost given up, and were driving to another location, when we saw something potentially photogenic in the distance. The cameraman, Dave Maguire, stopped the car and set the camera on its tripod. Out of the shimmering heat haze we could see emerging the outline of a vehicle of some sort … a cart … a donkey cart … driven by a teenage boy … Suddenly, behind me, Ndeutala started ululating, in that eerie way you hear so often in Africa. Had she recognised the boy? Could she really do so, at this distance, after all these years? In a minute or two he was beside us, and they fell into each other’s arms. It remains one of the most moving and dramatic scenes I’ve ever witnessed, let alone filmed.
I think it was only with that film that I began to feel comfortable with long-form journalism, but the lessons I’d learned in the first eighteen months at Four Corners stood me in good stead for the rest of my time there, and onwards into my years making films for Foreign Correspondent, 7.30 and Lateline in Europe and Africa.
* * *
For my sixtieth birthday in 2012, my brother- and sister-in-law took me to the Sydney Opera House to see the singer-songwriter Nick Lowe, whose work I’ve admired since the mid-1970s, when he produced the early Elvis Costello albums, was house producer for Stiff records, and put out what remains one of my favourite solo albums, The Jesus of Cool. He’d followed them over the years with a series of beautifully crafted songs that ranged from rock to country, but always, whether funny or plangent, contained a recognisable intelligence and wit. A man less celebrated than his own songs, and a backroom muse to many, Lowe ran the concert gamut from ‘(What’s So Funny ’bout) Peace, Love and Understanding’, which he wrote for Brinsley Schwarz all the way back in 1974, to ‘Stoplight Roses’ from his latest album. As he was coming towards the end of the set, I yelled out from the balcony for ‘The Beast in Me’, the song he wrote but which was first recorded by his father-in-law, Johnny Cash—Cash’s self-lacerating rendition of the piece had haunted me since 1994, and Lowe’s own recorded version was scarcely less affecting. Nick Lowe looked up towards where I sat and said slowly, ‘Yes. Well. [Long pause] There are a lot of good songs.’ Then he dashed my hopes by playing something else entirely.
Yes. Well. There are a lot of good stories. By the time you get to my stage in life, the playlist is always too long for one concert.
Between 1988 and 1998, in fact, there was a whole decade of long-form stories, from the one that helped end the move of the RAN base at Sydney’s Garden Island to pristine Jervis Bay, to the Kimberley cattle station where thirty-two of a total of fifty-six Chinese asylum seekers suddenly appeared out of the
bush in early 1992, with a police rescue operation eventually finding the entire group alive. From a corrupt Ferdinand Marcos–era oligarch with massive landholdings in Australia who briefly looked set to become president of the Philippines, to the Cambodians desperately struggling to live normally again during the United Nations transition that theoretically returned their country to democracy. From Serbia as it pursued its territorial ambitions over what remained of Yugoslavia, to the mountains of Calabria and evidence of close connections between the ’Ndrangheta organised crime group and Australia. There are so many stories, in fact, that perhaps one day they could fill another volume.
There’s also the personal story which has dominated my last two decades: the story of the freakish medical accident—a virus triggering an autoimmune reaction—which turned an assignment in Rwanda, covering the unspeakable atrocities of that country’s 1994 genocide, into an encounter with a disease that came close to killing me, the rare ANCA-positive polyangiitis. It’s a story I’ve tried hard not to allow to define me, or if it does, to define me not as a victim but a survivor. It’s the story of the months in which that disease went undiagnosed, and the cortisone-induced near-psychosis as I haemorrhaged internally and doctors pumped me full of chemicals which undoubtedly saved my life; my mother flying to London from Australia and my sister from Budapest, after the specialist told them it might be their last chance to see me; my father trying hard to conceal his fear that I would die, as he sat beside my bed for many, many days; the three months in Charing Cross Hospital before a brief remission was replaced by a new affliction which put me back ‘inside’ (yes, if you spend enough time in hospitals, your mind subconsciously starts confusing them with prisons); the recovery and return to the road, first on ‘light duties’, then back to making stories for Foreign Correspondent. And the twist in the tail when, in the freezing northern December of 1995, I was making a film, about the fragile future of the beauties of Venice, that turned into another nightmare. As a side-effect of all that cortisone a year before, my hips had turned to chalk overnight—something called avascular necrosis—and in Venice, which is all alleys and bridges, you need to be able to walk. I returned to London to have the hips replaced, and a few months later, still on crutches, went to Bosnia to do a piece on the divided city of Mostar.