by John Pilger
An editorial in the Adelaide Advertiser pronounced that if the CIA had conspired to bring down the Australian Government, ‘it could succeed only in the unthinkable situation that Australia had in positions of power people who were utterly unscrupulous and misguided in their conception of the responsibilities of their office’.105 Shoring up a myth of ‘national innocence’, in a society of established venality, remains a quaint pastime of Australian editorial writers.
When Bill Hayden, a senior Minister in the Whitlam Government, succeeded Whitlam as Leader of the Opposition, he addressed the question of conspiracy. Hayden then had a reputation for speaking his mind. ‘It’s always a dangerous thing’, he said, ‘for Labor Party people to talk about conspiracies and certainly international conspiracies [but] I’m quite convinced that there was an international conspiracy that contributed to the undermining of the Government of the day.’ Moreover, he said he had evidence of ‘a well-orchestrated effort stretching beyond this country’s shores’ in copies of ‘documentation still securely stashed away’. He declined to say more, except that the conspirators had operated ‘in a lurid and inexcusable way’.106
In June 1988 I sent Hayden the transcript of a 1981 radio interview in which he made his damning remarks. I asked him for details, on or off the record, of the ‘documentation’ he had ‘stashed away’. He was then Minister for Foreign Affairs in the Hawke Labor Government. He replied that ‘with the benefit of a further seven years’ reflection’, he had come to the view that the problems of the Whitlam Government ‘were of our own making and were not the product of an international conspiracy’.107 I replied that I fully understood that opinions and conviction could change, but that I was enquiring about a clear statement of fact which he had made. I added, ‘With great respect, either these documents exist or they don’t.’108 He did not reply.
The Whitlam Government left in its wake many secrets which, until they are made known, leave Australian politics disfigured and national independence as remote as ever. Some individuals and groups understandably fear that, with the passage of time, more pieces will fit the puzzle and the whole truth will emerge. Their concern was made evident early in the Bicentenary year when, in my television documentary series, The Last Dream, I raised questions about Whitlam’s demise: questions which were not new, but which remain unpalatable and unanswered.
When the series was shown in Australia it drew a positive popular response described by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation as ‘unprecedented’. This contrasted with attacks mostly by those who had not seen the series. One whose indignation became ubiquitous was Gerard Henderson, described as ‘Director of the Institute of Public Affairs, NSW’. This title gave Henderson a certain legitimacy in media interviews, although few journalists could say who exactly he was or what his ‘institute’ represented. Henderson wrote a weekly column in Rupert Murdoch’s Australian, in which he described a ‘breast-beating left-wing intelligentsia [giving] vent to their frustrations and self hatred’ in the Bicentenary year. He named expatriates as among the worst culprits: Robert Hughes, Germaine Greer and myself. I was bracketed with Pol Pot, which seemed harsh. (The logic was that, although I had helped to expose Pol Pot, I had been a closet supporter of his.) Worse, I was a propagator of ‘a brand-new conspiracy theory’ about the Whitlam Government: the sort of conspiracy theory which caused some Australians to ‘salivate with glee’.109
Henderson’s apparently unconscious sense of comic irony became a regular treat. In one column he bemoaned my ‘tactic’ of accusing critics of not having seen my documentary. In order to overcome this ‘debating trick’ of mine he told his readers, in who-dunnit tones, how he got into his office at five in the morning to receive a purloined copy of the transcript overnight from London. ‘I have never read anything so full of self-loathing and so complete with conspiracy theories,’ he wrote. He then took the transcript to Sir John Kerr, who told him that he ‘resented this Pilger nonsense’ because he had never had ‘any direct or indirect association with the CIA or with British intelligence organisations’ or indeed ‘any intelligence contacts whatsoever’.110
I have already dealt with this denial of Kerr’s; suffice to say here that the record is rich with his intelligence connections. In issuing blanket denials through an ideological messenger such as Henderson, Kerr was merely maintaining his silence. But who is Gerard Henderson and what is his ‘Institute’? Henderson is part of Australia’s established extreme right. He was an adviser to the former conservative Opposition leader, John Howard, and worked with B. A. Santamaria, the ideologue of the era of McCarthyism in Australia. Certainly, his views are heard widely, often as a result of a phone call to a radio or television station from Henderson himself, demanding ‘equal time’. The ‘Institute of Public Affairs’, long associated with conservatism in Australia, has become a shop front for the far right. Since renamed the ‘Sydney Institute’ in New South Wales, it is similar to the ultra-right ‘think tanks’ which devoted themselves during the Reagan years to monitoring and ‘naming’ American liberal politicians and journalists and to exploring methods and avenues of propagandafn1. While campaigning for ‘greater accountability’ in the media, Henderson has consistently refused to reveal the sources of his funding. In 1987 Henderson attended a seminar in Washington entitled ‘The Red Orchestra in the South-West Pacific’. Speakers described ‘the left network and the Australian media’ and Moscow’s ‘penetration’ of the Australian press (most of which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch). Henderson spoke on the subject, ‘How Fertile the Ground?’ The conference was organised by the Russians-are-coming Hoover Institution with the help of Owen Harries of the Association for Cultural Freedom, which, wrote Jonathan Kwitny, ‘was exposed in the US Congress as founded, funded and generally run by the CIA’.111
With Henderson’s attacks on my films came a shower of denials. Almost everybody, it seemed, who had been involved in or had profited from the overthrow of the Whitlam Government, issued or was asked for a denial. Malcolm Fraser denied that foreign intelligence organisations had assisted him to power. ‘Absurd,’ he said. He failed to remember that, as Prime Minister, he was sufficiently nervous about what the CIA might do to his Government to seek reassurance from President Carter.112 Denials also came from the former head of ASIO, Sir Charles Spry (‘utter drivel and rubbish’) and the US Consul-General in Sydney, John C. Dorrance, who complained that my report had omitted the denial of CIA complicity by the Director of the CIA in 1975, George Bush, as well as various ‘Royal Commission findings’.113 William Colby, not Bush, was Director of the CIA at the time, and there has been no Royal Commission into the dismissal of Whitlam or CIA activities in Australia. The US Ambassador during most of the Whitlam time, Marshall Green, happened to arrive in Australia as my series was about to be broadcast. ‘NO CIA PLOT IN 1975, SAYS FORMER US AMBASSADOR’ ran the headline in the Sydney Morning Herald. ‘Our people weren’t operating behind your back,’ Green was quoted as saying. As Ambassador he had ‘believed in knowing everything [that was] going on’.114 A few months earlier, in a recorded interview in Washington, Green had told me the very opposite: that as Ambassador he had not known ‘the CIA contact points’.115
The last ‘denial’ came from Bob Hawke, who described the very notion of foreign involvement in Whitlam’s demise as ‘ridiculous’. In 1977 a front-page headline in the Sydney Sun read, HAWKE SUSPECTS CIA OF SACKING, and beneath it Hawke called for an urgent public enquiry into ‘foreign interference into the domestic processes of Australia’. What had made Hawke change his mind? He did not say.116
History is hosed down with official denials. Of course they are worthless unless they are subjected to scrutiny. Journalism is not about accepting the glib assurances of politicians and intelligence bosses. One has only to read Edwin R. Bayley’s Joe McCarthy and the Press to appreciate how easily lies become enshrined as ‘objective facts’ simply because they are invested with specious authority.117 This process was in evidence during and immediat
ely following the Whitlam coup. Journalists on Murdoch’s Australian walked out, demanding that the paper cease systematic censorship and distortion that amounted to a vendetta against the Whitlam Government. Newspapers paid large sums for dubious documents, a number of them forgeries; these were published as if their validity was never in doubt.
The spirit of that campaign survives, ensuring that the public memory remains short and the truth obsolete. In this way, historical amnesia is induced. Facts already on the record are omitted or obscured; vital connections are not made because of ignorance and idleness, and only sensational snippets are published. Analysis suggesting the culpability, even criminality of established forces is denigrated or ignored; and professional propagandists, or ‘lobbyists’, are allowed to fill a vacuum where there ought to be real and challenging journalism.
‘WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE?’ demanded a headline in Murdoch’s Melbourne Herald in 1988, while ignoring the wealth of prima facie documented evidence. The same question can be asked of almost every political exposé, which relies on leaks and the anonymity of primary sources. As one of Australia’s finest journalists, William Pinwill, pointed out. ‘The bulk of better reporting consists of information that does not meet the courtroom standards of proof. Journalism is not a court of law; it is a process of weaving together, often from necessarily anonymous sources, the strands of history. If legal standards were applied to news reporting, the public would have learned nothing of the Watergate scandal and President Nixon would not have resigned in disgrace.’118
When Christopher Boyce spoke out in a Los Angeles courtroom, in 1977, his revelations about Australia made big news in the United States. In Australia, only three journalists, Brian Toohey of the Financial Review, Bill D’Arcy of the Sydney Sun and Ray Martin of the ABC’s bureau in New York, pursued the story with original research and information. The significance of Whitlam’s response to Boyce’s allegations, in a speech in which he effectively broke his silence about the coup, was little understood. Instead, the evidence now on the record was denigrated. In a long editorial headed ‘THE CIA BOGY’, the Sydney Morning Herald commented:
The furore is childish. Why do the Left and perhaps a few other misguided Australians pursue it? Is it not a kind of McCarthyism in reverse – an undermining of public confidence in government and the probity and good sense of officials of all kinds, from trade-unions upwards? Does it not promote anti-Americanism by troubling Australian minds with dark insinuations that we are the helpless puppets of a vast but impalpable conspiracy?119
Absurdity is always close at hand in these matters. Shortly before The Last Dream was broadcast in Australia, with more evidence to ‘trouble Australian minds’, it was promoted by the ABC as ‘the conscience of the Bicentenary’. On the night of transmission, however, a disclaimer was added, disassociating the ABC from the ‘opinions’ expressed in the films. A voice intoned the words of the disclaimer in case the viewers missed them. Not only was the ‘conscience of the Bicentenary’ disavowed, it was also censored. A line in an interview which referred to Sir John Kerr’s sacking of Whitlam as ‘not necessarily in the interests of Australia’ was cut – for ‘legal reasons’, even though the film had been cleared by two Australian barristers.
The day after the last film was shown, Gough Whitlam was to be interviewed on the ABC’s main current affairs programme, The 7.30 Report. The interview was cancelled. ‘They thought interest had declined in the issue,’ Whitlam said, ‘which seemed to me a remarkable judgment . . . They seem to be running scared [as if they] are being stood over.’120 In the only interview he gave subsequently, Whitlam said he had no doubt that the CIA had been involved in Australia in 1975 and there had been contact between the CIA and MI6. None of this, he said, was ‘scuttlebutt’ or ‘loose talk’. He repeated that President Carter had sent an envoy to assure him that the United States would ‘never again’ intervene in Australian affairs. However, he believed that Sir John Kerr ‘needed no encouragement from outside forces to do what he did’.121
Australian Associated Press, the agency which services almost all the Australian media, put this on its wires under the headline, ‘WHITLAM DOESN’T SEE CIA/MI6 HAND IN EVENTS IN 1975’ and reported that the former Prime Minister ‘rejected theories of foreign intelligence service involvement in his downfall’.122 With the exception of the Melbourne Age, this interpretation was used in all the principal newspapers of Australia. Thereafter the story died.
‘The struggle of people [against power]’, wrote the Czech author Milan Kundera, ‘is the struggle of memory against forgetting.’123
From the Melbourne Age, February 23, 1988
* * *
fn1 The Sydney Institute is given dubious respectability by the ruling Labor Party’s right-wing establishment. Its speakers have included Federal cabinet ministers, notably the Minister for Foreign Affairs, Gareth Evans. One of Henderson’s numerous smear campaigns has been against the internationally-renowned Australian Khmer scholar, Ben Kiernan, author of How Pol Pot Came to Power and now Associate Professor of South East Asian History at Yale University in the US. Henderson has accused Kiernan of failing to oppose Pol Pot before the tyrant’s overthrow and of ‘visiting’ Pol Pot’s closed regime during the terror. Kiernan never made such a visit, and on the contrary, has devoted most of his work to exposing Pol Pot’s crimes, which include the killing of many of his Cambodian wife’s relatives.
6
MATES
The Rise and Rise of the Silver Bodgie, Sir Peter and the Dirty Digger, Goanna and Nifty, Bondy and Others
The billions lost in taxation revenue from shonky deals by those who can most afford to pay tax; the price paid by society for heroin-related crime; the cynical secret deals between Governments and big business over the carving up of cities . . . have all been shameful features of Australian life over the past ten years and more.
Robert Milliken, journalist
If I see my mates attacked without justification, my mates will find me shoulder to shoulder with them.
Bob Hawke, Prime Minister
If this was South America, a people’s liberation movement would be under way . . .
Australian Financial Review
FITZROY GARDENS ARE in the centre of Melbourne, Australia’s most English city. They are green and gentle and landscaped around imperial statues; on days when the Melbourne rain is fine and steady the setting could be Kew or St James’s Park in London.
Melbourne is where Australia’s establishment used to reside, and its powerful men would gather at the nearby Melbourne Club, an uneasy blend of White’s in London and the Calcutta Club in the days of the Raj. They were the proconsuls of English interests in the Antipodes: men of the ‘squattocracy’ whose forebears had acquired the best of the land, having ‘squatted’ on it and claimed it, or stolen it outright; mercantile men in wool and shipping; men of the judiciary who sweltered in imported wigs of English horsehair; and men of politics, who were Whigs of a sort but for the most part regarded politics as the pursuit of commerce by other means. This last group were the heirs of Sir Robert Menzies, who was above all a Melbourne man. But this was 1976, Menzies was long retired and for most of the previous three years there had been political disruption of an especially unsettling kind. Thankfully, that dark episode was now past.
I had arranged to meet Bob Hawke – the Silver Bodgie – in Fitzroy Gardens at three. On the same day I had been invited by my father-in-law to have lunch at the ‘gentlemen only’ Melbourne Club. He was a mischievous Scot who had managed the Orient Line in Australia, and he wanted me, he said, ‘to observe the beached whales of the Australian establishment at close quarters’.
Entering the Melbourne Club, we were greeted by a huge moose head and a tiger head with skin. Presumably these were to give the impression of Lord Delamere’s Kenya or Lord Cromer’s India; there are no big-game hunters in Australia. The assistant secretary, a colonel from out of the pages of pre-war Punch, shook my father-in-law’s hand and led us
through Doric columns to the Lawn Room, where members were drinking gin and brandy and reading old copies of Punch, from whose pages they, too, appeared to have stepped.
‘Ah, little boys,’ the cry suddenly went up, ‘my favourite!’
‘Little boys’, at the Melbourne Club, are cocktail sausages dipped in tomato sauce. The grandfather clock had just chimed noon, and those in the leather chairs rose and funeral-marched to the dining-room where, beneath chandeliers, the members eat off monogrammed plates in the atmosphere of a minor English public school common room. The food is what the English upper classes call ‘nursery food’ – sausages, beans, boiled potatoes, jam tart.
Etiquette dictates that you join a table and your ‘leader’, who sits at the head, takes your order and gives it to the waitresses. But first our leader called us to attention. ‘Gentlemen, the Queen!’ he said, and those who were able to, stood. All but two at our table were Australian born, but their accents were a puzzling blend of swallowed consonants and rounded vowels, brayed rather than shouted; and the word ‘actually’ was deployed frequently. But as more was drunk the familiar nasal pitch of the Australian voice asserted itself in statements such as: ‘That socialist bastard, Whitlam.’
Here, as almost everywhere in Australia at that time, the talk was about the demise of Gough Whitlam’s government three months earlier and its replacement by the forces of established order, led by the black-hatted Sir John Kerr and Malcolm Fraser, the squatter who was now Prime Minister and, of course, a member of the Melbourne Club. It was agreed at our table that Whitlam and ‘those commos around him’ had presented an intolerable risk to national stability, but all was well now that ‘the right people’ were again in charge.