Voices from the Air

by Tony Hill

  After his return to Australia, Haydon helped to set up the public relations operation for a new service in Sydney for children with intellectual disabilities. He left journalism and became a taxi owner and manager and chairman of the Manly Warringah taxi co-operative on Sydney’s northern beaches. Lennard was the first ABC news journalist to become a war correspondent, and the only ABC correspondent to cover the Pacific war virtually from beginning to end. He remained a quintessential newsman, rather than a broadcaster. His time as a war correspondent was sometimes turbulent but his reporting was compelling and was an important part of the ABC’s coverage of the war. He was active in the War Correspondents’ Association until his death in 1987.

  Frank Legg

  Frank Legg’s achievements as a war correspondent were marked by his exceptional skills as a storyteller, and his ability to engage people. Charming, humorous and generous, he had an easy manner with people from all walks of life. Known as ‘The Digger’s Friend’ because of his strong kinship with Australian soldiers, he had fought with them in North Africa, as one of the Rats of Tobruk, and then broadcast their stories as a war correspondent in the Pacific. Legg’s reporting of some major campaigns was undermined by technical and communications failures – more so than for any other correspondent – and only a few of his original scripts have survived. However, he retained his sense of humour when, just before he returned to Australia, he received the Asiatic–Pacific Service Ribbon, awarded to war correspondents with a letter of thanks from MacArthur, for having added ‘luster [sic] to the difficult, dangerous and arduous profession of War Correspondent’.26 It was addressed to FG Lugg.

  After the war, Legg produced and presented documentaries on the war, and returned to the radio airwaves as a popular broadcaster of ABC programs such as Weekend Magazine, as well as being the ABC’s film reviewer. He became a well-known television compere of the panel discussion program Any Questions, and wrote several books – including one on the wartime cinematographer Damien Parer, another on the controversial commander of the Australian 8th Division at Singapore, Gordon Bennett, and a memoir of his own time as a war correspondent.

  Frank saw himself as a penniless Englishman who became a ‘dinky-di’ Aussie despite the English accent that he retained all his life, and his warmth and light touch as a broadcaster struck a chord with audiences in his adopted country. His first marriage to Eve ended in divorce but the relationship was foundering even before he went to war as a soldier in the AIF in North Africa. The estrangement from his wife also cut Legg off from his only child, his son Richard, something that must have been a cause of deep regret. He kept a small leather pocket folder containing a picture of his young, fair-haired son which he appears to have carried with him throughout his years as a soldier and a war correspondent. For many years, Richard Legg’s last memory of his father was watching him marching off to war.

  I recall as a child of five standing on the footpath somewhere in Adelaide watching men in uniform march past. Probably because my father was already a sergeant he was slightly separated from the others, at the back. He gave me a big smile, a wave, and then he and the others disappeared from view.27

  Frank Legg eventually re-married and was re-united with his son only a few years before his death in a car crash in 1966.

  Fred Simpson

  After their coverage of the Japanese surrender in Kuching on Borneo, Fred Simpson and Len Edwards would go on to record interviews with POWs in Singapore and elsewhere in the region. In early 1946 Simpson and Edwards covered the activities of the Australian occupation forces in Japan and Simpson, in particular, would spend many months there. Fred had known Japanese friends in New Zealand and his interest in Japanese people and culture had not been erased by his war experiences. He had covered the Japanese midget-submarine attack on Sydney Harbour for the Talks department and remembered ‘the deeply moving burial and cremation’ that was provided for the Japanese sailors. When he went to Japan he took with him a recording of his own report of the burial ceremony to pass on to the sailors’ families, so that they might know something of the scene that day when their sons were laid to rest. ‘The scene is one of quiet simplicity. The occasion of the cremation of the brave men who died for their country, a country whose policies are viewed with abhorrence by us but whose brave men in death are honoured as all brave men are honoured throughout the world.’ He returned to the field as an ABC war correspondent during the Korean War, giving him the distinction of having served in three wars as either a soldier or a correspondent. One of his letters from Korea showed Fred, now in his mid-fifties, yet again out in the field with the troops, but the weather in Korea was a very different challenge from his time in New Guinea. ‘When you wake up in the morning there is frost on the inside of the tent. I’m using three sleeping bags, one inside the other. On top of this I go to bunk with most of my clothes on. I’ve promised myself a bath and shower in a couple of weeks.’28

  Simpson was a Talks correspondent rather than a News correspondent, and his prolific, personalised reporting of the human stories of Australians at war were the characteristics of his time as a war correspondent. When he finally returned from Japan in 1946, Simpson went back to the Talks department to run the topical program News Review, which was the main focus of his later ABC career. Fred spent a year on secondment to the BBC in London, and much later was also seconded to the United Nations media office in New York. All three of his musical daughters fulfilled their potential, and their father’s hopes in bringing his family to Australia before the war, and two of them went on to national and international careers.

  Fred Simpson died in 1986.

  Bill MacFarlane

  The longest serving of any of the ABC war correspondents, Bill MacFarlane returned to some of the same battlefields the year after the war ended. He travelled to Borneo in 1946 to make a series of historic recordings with a joint Australian and British government mission that tracked down the villagers who had helped Allied POWs along the route of the infamous Sandakan death marches. The local people had hidden escapees and given food to those who were starving, and the government mission was to acknowledge and recompense them. Bill travelled with an ABC broadcaster and together they interviewed and recorded the villagers and later interviewed the survivors of Sandakan for a program that was broadcast in 1947.

  In the last, long chapter of his career MacFarlane joined ASIO, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. It’s believed that he worked in a technical role for the body tasked with investigating threats to Australia’s security, in what seems to be an evolution of his work as a technician for the PMG and the ABC. He did not discuss his ASIO work with his children but his oldest daughter, Anne, remembers him testing phone tapping equipment at home and checking for ways of breaking into their house, and it’s likely that his work included electronic surveillance. He also travelled overseas on his work, but his exact role is something of a mystery. When he retired in 1975, a telex message from the ASIO director general thanked him for his ‘outstanding contribution to the work of ASIO, sometimes at considerable personal risk’.29

  He remained a practical man, who spent his spare time tinkering in a shed in the garden and reading electronics magazines. His work in the war years had been truly ground-breaking. He was the first technician to work on the frontlines with the ABC and he was a technical pioneer under dangerous and demanding conditions. Without his skill and perseverance listeners to the ABC and BBC would never have heard Chester Wilmot’s reports from North Africa, Greece and the Middle East. Similarly, much of the historic work by ABC correspondents in the Pacific theatre would not have been possible without him.

  Len Edwards

  Len Edwards stayed with the PMG after the war, working as a technician and operator at a radio station in Hobart and as a member of the PMG engineering branch – and he returned to his ham radio activities. Edwards had found some rare peaceful moments on the warfront, listening to music on the disc player or sitting beneath the moo
n and stars in the night sky. He watched the skies throughout his life and built his own radio telescope, set up in his back garden with a movable array that he controlled with ropes and pulleys. He used the telescope to teach his son Chris and his daughter Suzanne about the stars. In 1957, he listened to the beeps of far-off radio signals as he tracked Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth. Edwards had a brief collaboration with the pioneering radio astronomer Grote Reber, and also observed and noted the effect of solar flares on radio waves and contributed to technical journals. Later on, he designed and built marine radio aerials as a hobby and after he retired from the PMG he turned it into a company, which he named Moonraker Australia. Edward’s life after the war was full of the curiosity and innovation that, as a young man, he had brought to bear on the technical challenges of recording on the frontlines. Like MacFarlane, he was a pioneer in the use of the new recording technology, and his technical dexterity and ability to adapt and modify technology in the worst conditions of the tropical New Guinea jungles was truly remarkable.

  John Thompson

  John Thompson thought that he was probably the only war correspondent who had never seen a shot fired in anger. The only dead body he saw during his time overseas for the ABC was not in Rabaul, but floating in a canal in Batavia during the post-war violence between Indonesian nationalists and the Dutch.

  The war and the Japanese occupation had broken the Dutch hold on Java and Indonesian leaders had declared independence and proclaimed the Republic of Indonesia, two days after the news of the Japanese surrender in August.

  Amid the febrile political atmosphere, Thompson filed copy by cable, recorded stories using equipment provided in Batavia by the British, and also broadcast talks to Australia. He wrote to Molesworth at the ABC that providing ‘the fullest information and objective picture is of the greatest national importance to Australia’.30

  John Thompson returned to Australia from Batavia to a role as an ABC feature writer. The following year, at home in Collaroy on Sydney’s northern beaches, he wrote his book, Hubbub in Java, about his experiences and the Indonesian movement for independence. He created the ABC poetry and literature program Quality Street, which for some time was presented by the actor Peter Finch, and produced and presented radio documentaries, interviews and biographical programs on leading Australians. During the war, John and his wife Pat had taken a young boy into their family, a close friend of their son Peter. Peter would become a film-maker and later a well-known film reviewer and his adopted brother, Jack Thompson, would become a successful actor. Throughout the post-war years, the ABC occupied a central role in John’s life.

  One way or another the ABC was very decent to John. In return, or in gratitude, he contracted a bad case of the ABC disease which used to attack those whose work was directly related to the production of programmes. For such employees, and there used to be many of them, the ABC was far more than a job of work; it was an emotive issue, a way of life, a hobby, an ideal.31

  While his working life was dominated by his radio work for the ABC, Thompson continued to write poetry and over the course of his life, he published four volumes of verse and three books of prose. As a poet he was cast in a different mould to the other war correspondents but he was an outstanding program maker and broadcaster and his poet’s eye gave some of his reporting a thoughtfulness and vivid descriptive strength. His coverage of the early Indonesian struggle for independence was fair-minded, acute and prescient. John was full of plans when he died suddenly in 1968, at the age of 60. He had been an accomplished broadcaster for the ABC and a well-known literary figure, but he was not without regrets: the public knew him best for his radio programs, but his poetry had been closest to his heart.

  I think that poetry is the thing that I should have stuck at all through. The result is I’ve got a small body of verse which I’d stand by . . . But I very much regret that I haven’t written a great deal more.32

  Talbot Duckmanton

  Talbot Duckmanton’s brief time reporting the war crimes trials at the end of the war closed the circle on his war years that had begun as a young ABC broadcaster reporting from the Sydney Harbour Bridge during the first national blackout. He spent much of the war as a pilot in the RAAF and never lost his love of planes and flying, but his great skill was as a broadcaster.

  After the war he continued his career as a field commentator and announcer, and in the late 1940s he also hosted a weekly music program, Starlight and Serenades, featuring many of the famous American bands and performers of the time. He was a commentator for the Empire Games and was part of the BBC radio commentary team for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, broadcasting from the Victoria Memorial outside Buckingham Palace.

  Other skills came into play as he began taking on senior management roles in the ABC. He was the ABC manager overseeing the introduction of television in 1956 and became an international adviser on television to several other countries through the Colombo Plan and UNESCO. He rose to become a long-serving general manager of the ABC, from 1965 until 1982.

  His work as a war correspondent was brief and was overshadowed by his later career at the top of the ABC; and his time in the field, mostly at Morotai, was dominated by its role as a reception and staging point for POWs and as the site of the first war crimes trials. He had no opportunity for the shared experience of battle with the soldiers in the field as did other correspondents, but he was immersed in the tales of the POWs and the crimes of the Japanese on trial at Morotai and his reporting was an important concluding chapter to the ABC’s coverage of the war.

  RESOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I find that I have trodden well-travelled ground in researching Chester Wilmot – tracing the chronology of Wilmot’s movements and his coverage of the war through his scripts, letters and diaries has inevitably traversed many of the same highlights and anecdotes first unearthed by Neil McDonald in his excellent book, Chester Wilmot Reports. However, the stories of Wilmot’s colleagues – the other ABC war correspondents – are largely unknown.

  A very useful source has been Frank Legg’s book, War Correspondent, which has provided wonderful detail about reporting from the field and about Legg’s own assignments, and I have drawn on it liberally throughout. The primary sources for this book are the document and sound archives of the ABC, the National Archives, the Australian War Memorial, the National Library and the State Library of New South Wales. I have also had the co-operation of the correspondents’ families and they have generously provided access to family documents. It has been a privilege to work with them on this fascinating journey of discovery and would not have been possible without them.

  My grateful thanks go to:

  Jane Wilmot Crane, Rosalind Hinde, Richard Legg, Dudley Leggett, Rob Leggett, Lorelei Kerr, Dr John Lennard, Joanne Lennard, Brendan Lennard, Elizabeth-Ann Crossing, Moira Marien, Frank Marien, Merrick Marien, Claire Simpson, Julia Golding-Kostopoulos, Gregory Pikler, Julian Hailes, David Hailes, Peter Hemery, Lyndie Hemery, Peter Thompson, Meredith Stokes, Jonathon Stokes, Tony Fawcus, Wendy Fawcus, Anne MacFarlane, Fiona MacFarlane, Geoffrey MacFarlane, John MacFarlane, Suzanne Skira, Chris Edwards, Diana Chick, Vivienne Benton, John Benton, Jon Paull, Fay Barnes, Christine Lowndes, Robert Lowndes, Craig Duckmanton, Susi Bayes, Kim McKenzie.

  At ABC News, thanks to Gaven Morris for his support, and to Michael Reid and Gordon Lavery for both support and feedback on the manuscript. Jane Benson was my partner on the original history of the ABC’s foreign correspondents many years ago. Guy Tranter of ABC Archives provided generous assistance and patient advice over the years. Thanks also to John Spence and Mary-Jane Stannus, and to Ali Edwards of ABC Rights Management for her great kindness in reviewing the manuscript during her holidays. Peter Cave for his generosity in sharing information about John Elliott. Michele Harris for final fact-checking. Katie Stackhouse and Lachlan McLaine at ABC Books. The staff at the National Archives and Sue Ducker and her team at the Australian War Memorial. And
Gillian most of all, who has edited this book through all versions from start to finish.

  ENDNOTES

  Introduction

  1Neville Petersen, Policy Formation in the ABC News Service, 1942–1961, University of Sydney, 1978

  2Regulations for Press Correspondents Accompanying a Force in the Field, 1940, NAA

  Chapter 1

  1Attributed to Albert Einstein (disputed)

  2Broadcasting in Australia, Ian K Mackay, Melbourne University Press, 1957

  3Note from GB Shaw’s Secretary to Arthur Mason 20 September 1933, NAA

  4Airmail letter from GH Morison to ABC 27 August 1937, NAA

  5RT Peyton-Griffin cable to ABC, 16 January 1938, NAA

  6Commentary by Peter Russo 8 July 1940, NAA

  7Guenther Stein script, Hong Kong Today, 17 November 1938, NAA

  8Letter from ABC General Manager Charles Moses to Arthur Mason 7 October 1938, NAA

  9Hugo Jackson commentary from London, 16 April 1939, NAA

  10Arthur Mason cable to ABC, 1 September 1939, NAA

  11Article by Arthur Mason September 1939, NAA