A Secret Country

by John Pilger

  It was partly Menzies’s comic sycophancy to the upper reaches of the English class system that qualified him as Our Better, the kind of inflated authoritarian figure many Australians admired, and still do. Menzies not only found us ‘repugnant’, as he wrote in his diaries, he also fooled those of us who confused his verbal flatulence with oratory and regarded the measured affectation of his voice as ‘correct’, and his arrogance as knowledge. One of my aunts claimed ‘Bob’ could be relied upon not to pick his nose in the company of Her Majesty, whereas Labor politicians were said to pick their noses and to adjust their groins with impunity.

  The Australia over which Menzies ruled was deeply unsure of itself. ‘The Stain’ of the convict experience occupied the Australian psyche. Like religion and sex, it was seldom spoken about in public. ‘We were lags and screws set down on the edge of the earth,’ said the poet Dorothy Hewett. ‘There was no love for the country. And when the free settlers came, they came because they were younger sons and there was nothing for them to do in England. So there was neither love nor understanding of the country. I’m sure if most of them were given the choice they would have got up and gone back home to England as quickly as they could. It took such a long time even to make sense of the place.’29

  Certainly no place is more different from Britain than Australia. The land is ancient and harsh, the colours muted and the leaves turn the wrong way to the sun. The heat is intense. In this country an illusion was created; English counties were conjured and prim gardens landscaped, and early nineteenth-century Australian writers described their country as ‘a great parkland’ and Australian painters banished the heat and flies and vastness and saw green fields and hedgerows that did not exist. ‘To me’, said Menzies in 1950, ‘the British Empire means a cottage in the wheat lands of the north-west of the state of Victoria, with the Bible and Henry Drummond and Jerome K. Jerome and the “Scottish Chiefs” and Burns on the shelf.’

  My generation glued cottonwool to its Christmas cards, sang imperial hymns, celebrated ‘Empire Day’ and memorised a catalogue of mostly murderous regal events on the other side of the world; this was known as ‘history’. With honourable exceptions, our teachers made plain that there was ‘no real point’ to the learning of Australian history, for the sound, practical reason that it contributed nothing to the passing of any important examination and was therefore worthless in the pursuit of ‘higher education’.

  I went to Sydney High School, a ‘selective’ state school whose students were chosen on the basis of their successful completion of a jigsaw puzzle and a game of building blocks. This was known as an ‘intelligence test’. At Sydney High I learned about Egyptian pharaohs, Shakespeare and the ‘law’ of supply and demand, most of which I quickly forgot. Sydney High was the only state school in an organisation known as the ‘Great Public Schools’; private schools are sometimes known in Australia, as in Britain, as ‘public schools’. This brought me into contact with the heirs of the ‘squatters’, who owned tracts of Australia, and of the mercantile families who had prospered behind imperial tariff barriers. Here was another Australia, even more Anglo-centric than the lower drawer from which I had come.

  This other Australia assumed a gentility and snobbery which, I was later to discover, originated in the Home Counties of England. This other Australia even affected another accent, although this endeavour was usually unsuccessful; Australian vowels have a resilience all their own. The boys I would meet at the annual rowing regatta and at rugby matches went to schools with names like Sydney Church of England Grammar School (‘Shore’), and The King’s School. ‘King’s boys’ wore a Ruritanian uniform reminiscent of the Crimean and Boer wars and which gave the impression of pyjamas. The Englishness of these people was a manifestation of their power; they were Menzies People. My mother once tried to explain the difference between them and us. ‘They’re not better,’ she said, ‘just better off.’

  Menzies’s return to power ended the hope and ambiguity of the ‘New World’ years. Evatt’s commitment to internationalism had remained at odds with a perceived need to maintain a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, the great power that had ‘saved’ Australia. Australian policy towards Korea had exemplified this. The Labor Government had argued at the United Nations for elections throughout Korea and had criticised the American military Government’s support for the extreme right and its police force, which tortured and murdered political enemies. Australia had voted against separate elections in the south; yet the UN resolution of approval for the American conceived Republic of (South) Korea was drafted by the Australian delegate, James Plimsoll.

  Under Menzies the policy was now clear: the goal of assisting small countries like Korea was to come a poor second to unqualified support for the policies of the United States. ‘Australia’, said the Minister for the Interior, Wilfred Kent Hughes, in 1950, ‘must become the 49th state of America.’30 And this was effectively Australia’s relationship with the United States during the Korean War. When, in 1950, the United States created a ‘United Nations Command’ without the concurring vote of the Soviet Union, as required under Article 27 of the Charter, Washington had one immediate and supine ally in the Menzies Government. The Australian Minister for External Affairs, Percy Spender, heard that Britain had decided to send land troops to Korea. Anxious not to be beaten at ‘the US loyalty stakes’, Spender announced that Australian troops were all but on their way; he had not thought it necessary to consult Menzies.31

  Menzies represented the Korean War to the Australian people, not as the revolutionary civil war it was, but as a struggle against ‘Asiatic communists’ backed by Moscow, who were ‘sweeping down’ on to a ‘plucky democracy’ in the south. The South Korean regime’s record of murder and torture, which had been documented by Australia’s own UN observers, was not an issue. Echoing the US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, Menzies blamed the Soviet Union’s manipulation of events in Korea: Stalin’s ‘world communist plot’ was behind the war. Few now believe this. In November 1950 even General MacArthur told James Plimsoll that he had found ‘no evidence of any close connection between the Soviet Union and the North Korean aggression’.32

  In what the journalist James Cameron later called a ‘dress rehearsal for Vietnam’ three to four million people were killed, millions more became refugees and not one substantial building was left standing in the north. Australian propaganda concentrated on exciting racist fears of the ‘Asiatic hordes’. ‘Look at those dirty Reds run,’ said the commentator on Cinesound newsreel. ‘Look at that scum of the East.’

  As the United States rebuilt Japan, the Menzies Government and its bureaucracy took fright. They had little understanding of the region, except in colonial terms. For example, Australia had supported the return of Indo-China to the humiliated French colons. Our imperial education system had done its work. Oxford degrees were plentiful; the head of the Department of External Affairs and the head of the Pacific Division were both Rhodes scholars, and the Minister himself, Lord Casey, was an experienced servant of Empire, almost as ‘English’ as Menzies. To them, Asia was the ‘Far East’ from which protection had to be sought. Thus, Australia pleaded with the United States for a ‘security pact’. The Australian Ambassador in Washington, Percy Spender, proposed a NATO type agreement under which attack on one signatory constituted an attack on another. Alas, all the Americans would give him was the ANZUS Pact, which, with these words, guaranteed nothing: ‘The Parties will consult together whenever, in the opinion of any one of them, the territorial integrity, political independence or security of any of the Parties is threatened in the Pacific.’

  The Americans saw the ‘pact’ as relatively unimportant, an expression of Australian support for its anti-communist crusade around the world. As Dennis Phillips has pointed out, it was Dulles who, fearing political opposition at home, ‘made certain that the ANZUS pact did not commit the United States to intervene if Australia was attacked’.33 In Australia, the pact was trum
peted as a ‘landmark for diplomacy’ when all it really demonstrated was that ‘Australia could best prove her independence by deciding upon whom she chose to become dependent’.34 In return for an illusion, Australia had committed itself to side with Washington whenever the Americans chose to impose their will in Australia’s part of the world.

  However, the Australian independence movement had not died overnight. On the contrary, as the nuclear arms race accelerated, the Australian peace movement grew proportionately to become one of the largest in the world. In 1950 a quarter of the population signed the petition to ban nuclear weapons. There were mass demonstrations against the Korean War, including a riot that stopped the centre of Sydney.

  In 1951 Menzies called a national referendum in which people were required to vote for or against the banning of the Communist Party of Australia. At the age of eleven I stood outside Mac’s Milk Bar on the corner of Bondi Road and Wellington Street, handing out ‘Vote No’ cards for the Labor Party. I understood clearly the issue, and I recall the opinion of many people that ‘Ming’ (Menzies) had ‘gone too far’: that the right to be a communist was as good as any other right. The ‘no’ votes won. It was a salutary moment of which Australians could be proud.

  Having despatched young men to die for the Americans in Korea and the British in Malaya, and having failed to proscribe an ‘enemy within’, Menzies now immersed Australia in a McCarthyism almost as virulent as the American original. People stopped calling themselves socialists in public for fear of being ‘named’ and losing their job. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, ASIO, took full advantage of its constituted powers as a secret police force, passports were confiscated, politicians were watched, phone tapping was common and official car drivers were encouraged to report on public servants.

  My friend, the novelist Faith Bandler, lost her passport. She remembers ‘how difficult it was to function as a free person if you refused to accept the terms of the Cold War. I had a telephone in my house and I’d go out to a public booth. You had a lot to lose. You could lose your job and I knew of hundreds of professional people who lost their jobs under Menzies. It was a rule of terror and I think it had a very lasting effect on Australians.’35

  When Ben Chifley died in 1951, Bert Evatt became Opposition Leader. Evatt lacked Menzies’s political guile and parliamentary bombast, but he fought steadfastly for the principles he had espoused during the 1940s. In an election called for May 1954, he looked a winner. Menzies’s refrain about a Soviet ‘fifth column’ in Australia was no longer believable, even by many of those who wanted to believe it. Not a single spy had been produced.

  On April 13, with six weeks to go to the election, Menzies had his ‘spy’. On the second to last day of the parliamentary session, with Evatt absent, Menzies announced that Vladimir Petrov, Third Secretary of the Soviet Embassy in Canberra, had defected to ASIO, and that a Royal Commission would enquire into ‘espionage activities’ in Australia. Ten days before the election the three Royal Commissioners sat in a concert hall in Canberra attended by maximum publicity and rumours about ‘nests of communists close to Evatt’.

  The ‘Petrov affair’ consumed the rest of the election campaign. Menzies’s conservative coalition won the House of Representatives by just seven seats, although Labor won a clear majority of the votes cast. Not one criminal charge resulted from the Petrov Commission. Petrov, a drunk, was never seen in public. Smear upon smear was heaped upon Evatt, whose health began to fail. The Labor Party disintegrated under the weight of McCarthyism; and the spoiling tactics of an extreme right-wing splinter group, the Democratic Labor Party, kept the conservatives in power for the next eighteen years. For his part in the Petrov affair, Menzies was credited with a ‘masterful piece of political contrivance’.36 Welcomed in the United States soon afterwards, he was given the honour of addressing the joint houses of the United States Congress. ‘May all that you stand for and we stand for’, he told the Congressmen, ‘be preserved under the providence of God for the happiness of Mankind.’ A Republican Congressman, Lawrence H. Smith, later wrote that an Evatt victory in the 1954 election would have made Australia ‘the Poland of the Southern Hemisphere’. Had Petrov not defected, ‘Australia today might be Iron Curtain territory . . . freedom had a close call Down Under.’37

  In Australia’s secret heartland monoliths stand where the ice receded, and fine white sand drifts over the red earth, through spinifex and dead trees rising like black needles in mist. From a distance this is no more than desert, but look closer and the simplicity is really a rich mosaic of acacias, cassias, emu bushes, honey myrtles, grasses, even daisies, binding the sand. Through the skeins of sand-mist, out on the plain, a red kangaroo comes into sight, a species once almost extinct.

  Rain has just fallen: barely a cloudburst, but enough for plants to throw out new shoots and seeds in the earth to germinate. Some of these plants are able to fit their whole life-cycle into four weeks, providing green feed for the red kangaroo’s body chemistry. Hormones then switch on the female’s breeding mechanism, stimulating a tiny ball of four-day-old cells – the future embryo – that has lain dormant on the uterus wall for as long as there has been drought. Now the cells begin to divide and grow into the young kangaroo. Almost a month later, the mother cleans out her pouch, a sign of impending birth. She places her tail forward and sits back on her rump; and presently a movement is seen. The blind, pink, bean-sized offspring is born and begins its unaided three-minute journey over the fur to the pouch, where it attaches to a nipple, to remain there for 190 days. Shortly afterwards, when the ride becomes too rough, it leaves for good. And the mother can mate again.38

  It was here, between 1952 and 1958, that Australia gained the distinction of becoming the only country in the world to have supplied uranium for nuclear bombs which its Prime Minister allowed to be dropped by a foreign power on his own people without adequate warning.

  On September 16, 1950 the British Prime Minister Clement Attlee sent Prime Minister Menzies a top-secret cable asking for permission to test British nuclear weapons in Australia. According to James McClelland, the Australian judge who presided over the Royal Commission of Enquiry into the effects of the tests, ‘Attlee asked Menzies if Menzies could lend him his country for the atomic tests. Menzies didn’t even consult anybody in his Cabinet. He just said yes. With anything that came from the British it was ask and you shall receive, as if they were God’s anointed.’39

  Menzies took only three days to reply. It was not only his Cabinet who remained unaware of his momentous commitment; the Australian people knew nothing of the decision for eighteen months. On February 19, 1952 they were told in a one-paragraph announcement that ‘an atomic weapon’ would be tested in Australia ‘in conditions that will ensure that there will be no danger to the health of the people or animals’.

  If the well-being of his fellow Australians was of concern to Menzies, it is not apparent in the documentation now available. What concerned him was that the British might change their minds. As Joan Smith has written:

  The one thing Menzies seems to have feared is that Britain would change her mind and go elsewhere. In 1954, a rumour went round that Britain was again thinking of conducting some of her atom tests in Canada. Menzies was beside himself, and had to be placated by the British High Commissioner in Canberra. A cable to London outlined the High Commission’s efforts at smoothing over troubled waters: ‘I felt it best to use discretion . . . and scotch any suggestion that we had been thinking of Canada as an alternative.’40

  The attitude shared by the British Government and Menzies was similar to that of the first colonisers of Australia in the late eighteenth century: that this was an ‘empty land’ and expendable. When one Australian official attempted to speak up for the Aboriginal people who lived within the test area, whose country this was, he was warned that he was ‘apparently placing the affairs of a handful of natives above the affairs of the British Commonwealth of Nations [and] the sooner he realises his loyalt
y is to the department which employs him the sooner his state of mind will be clarified’.41

  It was dawn when I left the Sheraton Hotel at Ayers Rock. The specials of the day were already posted: ‘flambé Pernod prawns’ and ‘kangaroo sirloin, the taste of Australia’. Chauffeured Mercedes awaited Japanese chairmen-of-the-board, who would view the Rock from behind tinted glass. Japanese love the Rock. Japanese golfers climb to the summit and declare it a driving range. One golfer attempted to return to earth by parachute; another threw his clubs, one after the other, down the rock face. Another erected a shrine to his Buddhist prophet and chanted his devotion through a loud-hailer.

  The Rock’s mystery unfailingly touches outsiders, including white Australians who regard the interior of their continent as another country. Only two peoples properly understand it: the Pitjantjatjara and Yankuntjatjara people, the traditional owners of Uluru, their name for the Rock which means ‘meeting place’. Their culture is called Tjukurpa, of which ‘dreaming’ and ‘dreamtime’ are broad and inadequate translations. Tjukurpa is not dreaming in the conventional Western sense, nor is it a collection of stories and fables; it is existence itself: in the past, present and future. It is also the explanation of existence and the law which governs behaviour. For the Aboriginal people, this is expressed in themselves – in their actions of hunting, marrying, ceremony and daily life. And it is in the land: in the creeks, hills, claypans, rockholes, soaks, mountains and red plains that stretch beyond Uluru.42

  The previous day I had climbed the Rock with my son Sam and a friend, Gerrit Fokkema, who took some of the pictures in this book. A wintry wind forced us irresistibly to the edge; and when there was no longer link chain to hold or white arrows to follow, we descended to all fours. Sprawled on the Rock, I looked across to the Olgas, a range of huge stones known by the Pitjantjatjara as Katajuta, or ‘many heads’. Rising out of the plain they appeared as mammoth figures that had died in each other’s arms at the moment a cataclysm had enveloped them. The next morning I flew in a small aircraft between the Rock and the Olgas towards the atomic desert at Maralinga.