Amnesia: A Novel

by Peter Carey

  Celine still did not mention her daughter, except tangentially, to say it was a shitty time to be young.

  It was always a shitty time. I said so.

  But Celine seemed to have become romantic about our past. I was gently “reminded” that we had one hundred thousand people on the streets of Melbourne for the Vietnam Moratorium. In her view we had “won.” Then we voted in a Labor government. One moment Jim Cairns was the evil man who led the moratorium. Then he was Deputy Prime Minister. Soon he would be Treasurer. We had learned that we could change the world.

  She was completely correct, if only in the short term.

  Change was what we wanted. Our new Prime Minister didn’t keep us waiting. In the first two weeks, without a cabinet, Gough Whitlam brought home Australian soldiers from the US war in Vietnam. Was it then that Washington decided we were all communists? This was a big joke if you knew Gough Whitlam.

  The party was elected on Gough’s platform and, by Jesus, he was going to honour it. He abolished conscription. He let the draft resisters out of jail, made university free, gave land rights to Aboriginal peoples wherever the federal government had the power. He, the Prime Minister of what had previously been a reliable American client state, denounced the Nixon bombing of North Vietnam. This outraged our ally, but that’s what we had elected him to do. After almost two centuries of grovelling, we grew some balls. At the UN we spoke up for Palestinian rights. We welcomed Chileans fleeing the CIA coup. We condemned nuclear weapons in the South Pacific.

  To Celine this list was proof that we had won.

  I said our victory was built on the mad idea we would not be punished. For it was exactly these “proofs” that caused Nixon to order the CIA review of US policy towards Australia. In our beginning was our end. Our victory triggered an ever-escalating covert operation which would finally remove the elected government from power.

  Later it would be said that it was the world recession that had undone the Whitlam government. Of course that didn’t help. But Nixon had made Marshall Green his ambassador before the recession hit. Marshall Green was the same guy who had overseen coups in Indonesia in 1965 and Cambodia in 1970.

  Why didn’t we see what the appointment of the coup-master would mean for us? Because the pilot fish thinks it is safe to swim beside its shark? Because we were not Chile? Because we thought it was our own country and we could do what we liked in it? Our newly elected representatives could actually raid our own security service and read all the misinformation in their secret files. Whose security service was it? The Americans thought it was theirs. We knew it was ours. We were thrilled to see the vaults of ASIO open to the air.

  We were naive, of course. We continued to think of the Americans as our friends and allies. We criticised them, of course. Why not? We loved them, didn’t we? We sang their songs. They had saved us from the Japanese. We sacrificed the lives of our beloved sons in Korea, then Vietnam. It never occurred to us that they would murder our democracy. So when it happened, in plain sight, we forgot it right away.

  When the time came, no aircraft bombed the Australian Treasury, but our elected government was attacked continually and relentlessly in so many different ways from so many different quarters. Scandals were seeded in the clouds by hacks and circulated by Packer, Fairfax, Murdoch most of all. Misinformation rose into the sky above Canberra, like rockets that flared and died and left their lies on our retinas so we continued to see what was not true.

  Gough’s ministers set out to raise a loan to “buy back the farm.” It’s a shame they did not go about it in a more worldly manner, that they were forced to act without the hostile Treasury, that they permitted the minister for mines to get himself involved with a broker named Khemlani. Khemlani was a CIA stooge. His job was not to buy back the farm but bring down the government. Of course he never raised a penny of the $4 billion loan the government approved.

  Finally Khemlani would arrive in Australia with a fat briefcase full of “evidence” showing that the Labor ministers were all taking kickbacks from these loans. He was escorted before the cameras with bodyguards. He made a statutory declaration in which he swore his evidence. On the strength of his word, the free press was happy to report the people’s government were crooks.

  It was a death of a thousand cuts. Scandal, scandal, scandal. It was next reported that a Bahamas bank had issued a letter seeking $4,267,365,000 for the Australian government, an outrageous $267 million being “proposed profit.” It didn’t matter that the government had not sought the loan. The headlines were the size of bricks.

  Then Cairns was also offered money by a Melbourne dentist and property developer named Harris. Harris came to Jim’s office and offered to raise $300 million for a “one time commission”: of 2.5 percent. He had a letter he wanted Jim to sign. Jim, who had resisted the Khemlani loan, now refused this.

  In parliament the opposition claimed he had approved this loan.

  Jim denied it, naturally.

  The opposition then tabled a letter which made our man a liar. There it was: his signature, giving his approval to pursue the loan on these terms. Thus was Jim ruined by a letter he had never knowingly signed. Today the question is, who slipped the letter in the pile? Who was the dogsbody? After the “evidence” had been obtained, who fed it to the press and the opposition? Who destroyed the Treasurer? Who killed Jim Cairns?

  There was more to come.

  Gough Whitlam had told the American ambassador that Australia would probably, but not necessarily, extend the lease on the so-called “US signals facility at Alice Springs.” This was and is Pine Gap, the same base that lets the US guide its drones today, but we did not have a clue what happened there, none of us, not even the Prime Minister knew what happened at Pine Gap. But the US would react so drastically to the threat of its closure, it was (and is) clearly so much more than a “signals facility.”

  The American trauma can be seen and measured in a cable, dated days before the Whitlam government was deposed. It is from the CIA to its close collaborators at ASIO. As a kindness to the reader, the following is both edited and summarised. SHACKLEY CHIEF EAST ASIA DIVISION CIA REQUESTED ME TO PASS THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE TO DIRECTOR GENERAL OF ASIO.

  The CIA, the cable stressed, had cause for serious complaint. The Prime Minister of Australia had stated that the CIA had been funding the conservative opposition in Australia. This was true, of course, although the cable admitted no such thing. The American embassy in Australia had approached the Australian government “at the highest level.” At this meeting the Americans “categorically denied” that CIA had given or passed funds to an organisation or candidate for political office in Australia.

  Next day the US State Department relayed the same message to the Australian embassy in Washington. The CIA had not funded an Australian political party.

  The effect of this, as the cable reveals, was unexpected.

  PRIME MINISTER GOUGH WHITLAM PUBLICLY REPEATED THE ALLEGATION THAT HE KNEW OF TWO INSTANCES IN WHICH CIA MONEY HAD BEEN USED TO INFLUENCE DOMESTIC AUSTRALIAN POLITICS.

  The Australians then publicly identified CIA agents working in their country under US State Department and Defense Department cover. This was outrageous enough. Then their Prime Minister revealed that Richard Stallings, the head of the Pine Gap facility, was a CIA agent.

  CIA IS PERPLEXED AS TO WHAT ALL THIS MEANS. DOES THIS SIGNIFY SOME CHANGE IN OUR BILATERAL INTELLIGENCE SECURITY RELATED FIELDS?

  The CIA were then forced to confer with their cover agencies and these agencies (State and Defense) stuck to their stories. This involved them claiming that Pine Gap’s Richard Stallings was a “retired Defense Department employee.”

  Oh, really?

  CIA CANNOT SEE HOW THIS [public dialogue] CAN DO OTHER THAN BLOW THE LID OFF THOSE INSTALLATIONS WHERE THE PERSONS CONCERNED HAVE BEEN WORKING AND WHICH ARE VITAL TO BOTH OF OUR SERVICES AND COUNTRIES, PARTICULARLY THE INSTALLATIONS AT ALICE SPRINGS … CIA FEELS IT NECESSARY TO SPEAK DIRECTLY TO ASIO BECAU
SE OF THE COMPLEXITY OF THE PROBLEM.

  That is, the American secret service could not talk to the elected leader of Australia. They had not forgotten Gough’s threat to permanently terminate the lease on Pine Gap which, as events transpired, was only days from expiring. Whitlam told the US ambassador: “If there were any attempts, to use familiar jargon, ‘to screw or bounce us’ inevitably these arrangements would be a matter of contention.”

  IS THERE A CHANGE IN PRIME MINISTER WHITLAM’S ATTITUDE IN AUSTRALIAN POLICY IN THIS FIELD?… CIA FEELS THAT EVERYTHING POSSIBLE HAS BEEN DONE ON A DIPLOMATIC BASIS.

  If ASIO could not fix this troublesome government, the CIA did not see how OUR MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL RELATIONSHIPS COULD CONTINUE … THE CIA FEELS GRAVE CONCERNS AS TO WHERE THIS TYPE OF PUBLIC DISCUSSION MAY LEAD … THIS MESSAGE SHOULD BE REGARDED AS AN OFFICIAL DEMARCHE ON A SERVICE TO SERVICE LINK … THE ASIO DIRECTOR-GENERAL SHOULD BE ASSURED THAT CIA DOES NOT LIGHTLY ADOPT THIS ATTITUDE.

  Two days following the transmission of this cable the government was illegally dismissed.

  Of course there was a conspiracy. We are old enough to know this now. There are institutions whose task it is to conspire all day long. They spy in every corner of our lives. They employ hundreds of thousands of workers and build acres of employee parking lots. If they are inefficient they are not always ineffective.

  Of course the CIA could not do it all alone. It was like a brute-force attack on a corporate website. It required muscle, persistence, even luck. It required the conservative senate to block the supply of money to the government, which was unconstitutional. It needed Mr. Murdoch and his collaborators to make this seem OK, to create a bullshit crisis which could only be resolved by the governor-general, the representative of the Queen of England, who would then dismiss the people’s government. It also required the press to keep up the hysteria, to slander and criminalise an elected government, to name the process of its illegitimate removal “The Coup” while insisting it was no such thing.

  These events have mostly passed from mind, yet not completely. Mr. Murdoch’s Australian newspaper recently commemorated THE DISMISSAL—30 YEARS ON:

  There was never blood in the streets. Hawke refused to call a general strike. The Queen slept in her Buckingham Palace bed while her prime minister was executed. The media repaired to a restaurant for the biggest binge in Canberra’s history … We don’t kill each other over politics. The army was not called out. Gough Whitlam, a constitutionalist to his core, accepted his fate and went to the hustings. In Jakarta, Gough’s admirer, a confused President Suharto, summoned Australia’s ambassador, Dick Woolcott, to ask, “Why didn’t the prime minister arrest the governor-general?” Good question. The conspiracists were unleashed and their phony claims about a CIA plot ran for years.

  The events of 1975 have been the obsession of my erratic and mostly unsuccessful life, so now I cannot fail to note that Gabrielle Baillieux was born into a Labor Party household in the midst of this traumatic Coup. It is therefore not insane to write about her life and activism in relation to this long-forgotten history.

  NEXT MORNING AT Smiths Gully, I prepared for my mission. I washed and scrubbed my human envelope and shaved three times. As the morning sun illuminated the opposite hillside, I was mentally composing my opening sentences. I wished to incorporate the colours of my native land, the warm pink and ivory and the bright underside of parrot wings. I placed the battered kettle on the gas, dropped two thick slices in the toaster, when bang, bang, bang, a big-beaked, square-headed kookaburra, just outside the windows, beat the shit out of a baby snake on the pergola.

  I buttered my toast. The kettle boiled. I poured.

  Bang, bang, bang. Nature was so violent. Looking up, I was startled to discover the kookaburra had become Wodonga Townes, slamming on the glass door with his open palm and second wedding ring. With a string of sausages he could have played the part of Punch. The kookaburra dropped the snake and swooped to retrieve it.

  Celine hurried from the hallway towards the visitor and then, a metre from the glass, she paused and wrapped a towel around her hair. Did she sense what was about to happen? All I could think was, my first interview with Gaby must be aborted.

  “Hoy. Let me in.” The Big Fella spread his arms and grasped the door. As I turned the locks the kookaburra ascended to its perch and resumed its murder.

  Our visitor wore perfect Persil whites, a tracksuit with gold piping. He had a one-inch strip of shaven scalp, and six red stitches. “What in the fuck are you doing?” he demanded.

  “We’re doing nothing, Woody,” Celine said. “What are you doing?”

  For answer he drank all my coffee and ate half my toast. “Don’t fuck with me,” he said directly to Celine. “You can go to jail for harbouring a fugitive. That includes you, mate.”

  “I’m working for you, remember?”

  He looked astonished.

  “That contract?”

  “Relax Feels. I’m your biggest fan. Just tell me where you’ve got our subject hidden.”

  Celine’s eyes narrowed as she turned to me, but Woody grabbed her by the wrist and jerked her violently towards him. “You must think I’m very stupid, Mum.” He was so clearly resolved to remove her by brute force that she stopped resisting. She was tiny but her cheekbones glazed with anger.

  I told Woody to quit it.

  “Mate,” he smiled, and reached out his hand to me and I smiled duplicitously and that was when the treacherous bastard shackled my wrist with his big red hand. Then he dragged us both behind him, out the door, up the steps, towards the dugout where he planned (it was obvious to me) to confront us with our own deceit. The kookaburra flew overhead and landed in the tree above the dugout amongst the whirling battery chargers. In the midst of all my other upsets I was certain it would drop the snake.

  Our captor produced another hundred-dollar flashlight and Celine took her chance to slap him rapidly, on both cheeks. Did he really spit at her? I never saw it. Certainly his face was contorted and later I wondered if he was more frightened of her than she was of him.

  Once he had us inside the dugout it was over. I flicked a switch to no effect. Inside was total silence, not a milliwatt of illumination. There was a hateful smell. The beam of Woody’s flashlight tracked across split truck batteries, wires ripped like prawn veins straight from the earthen walls. There were no computers anywhere. Blankets and sleeping bags were wet with what I first thought was gore but turned out to be the contents of the composting toilet. When Woody released my wrist I escaped into the light, trembling.

  In the shadow of the entrance Celine was striking Woody’s chest. That he accepted this confirmed my fears. They had murdered her.

  “What have you done to my daughter?”

  “Done to her? I’ve paid half a million dollars bail for her. She’s got no choice. She has to go to trial. So where is she?”

  “Woody,” I said. “She doesn’t know.”

  “You’re a sucker, Feels. This one,” he nodded to Celine, “you cannot trust.”

  “Me?” Celine cried. “Oh, please.”

  “No, I learned it a long time ago, but I keep forgetting it. You’re a dickhead, Celine. The safest thing for you to do is go to trial.” With that he turned and strode into the bush.

  As Woody crashed through the undergrowth, I put my arm around Celine and felt her strangely calm. I thought, if I had been privileged to have Gaby as a daughter I would have been going nuts, throwing myself into the metaphoric grave, pounding my head and rubbing ashes in my hair. Celine walked unsteadily to the house and turned on her computer. I thought, she’s reading bloody email.

  “Come here,” she said, and pointed: the cursor was moving, seemingly of its own accord, opening files and putting them away. We were hacked and owned by who we could not know. Celine held a finger to her lips, picked up the laptop between thumb and forefinger, and I followed her to the bathroom where she placed it in the tub.

  Minutes later, with our iPhones and
computer drowned in bathwater, we were stomping through the bush, Celine with a rucksack and a cardboard box, me with two bottles, a corkscrew, following the story, perhaps, or running for my life. We arrived at my former kidnapper’s disgusting Holden parked in the midst of the chaotic refuse from demolition sites.

  Celine opened the driver-side door and beeped the horn and here he came, her servant, my tormentor, on his way to work.

  I waited while she spoke to him, but of course I understood what was about to happen. I went to the rear of the car and waited like a well-trained dog.

  It was a tight fit for two, head to tail like a dirty joke and as the engine started Celine kicked and jabbed me and surprised me by farting as we set off down the rutted track. When she pushed the cardboard box at me I did not act well.

  “Calm down.”

  I do not like being told to calm down. We all know what that means.

  “Check out the box.”

  It was not wine, which was what I had hoped, but a mess of papers and a huge number of objects, the smaller ones like mahjong tiles, that crutch of lazy reporters: the microcassette. Plus, also, larger cassettes, C120s as it later turned out.

  “I need access,” I said.

  We crossed a culvert and I banged my head. Between my disappointment and my claustrophobia, I could have wept.

  “This is access,” she said. “You’ve got hours and hours of access in this box. Forget Woody,” she said. “Woody will never hear these tapes. You can write this book to please yourself.”

  HE WAS an unlovely old scoundrel with his wide hunched shoulders and his long arms, carrying a cardboard box down onto the dock that morning. His hair was thick, wiry, not quite grey, in the style of forty years before, and if this contributed, to a small degree, to his furtive air the latter was not, it must be stressed, the consequence of his present situation. He had already, before this recent turn of events, been known as “Wink” Moore and Felix “Moore-or-less-correct.”