by Anne Summers
The CHOGM meeting of 1979 had turned out to be one of the most significant in the history of the Commonwealth. It produced the Lusaka Declaration on Racism and Racial Prejudice, an important statement of principles, but the meeting’s final communiqué had charted a political solution to the Zimbabwe crisis. Malcolm Fraser had played a key role in both and in the process had cemented his reputation as a champion against racism—a position that would be formally recognised when the CHOGM meeting in Nassau in 1985 appointed him, by then no longer Prime Minister, a member of the Eminent Persons Group that was charged with encouraging political dialogue around the world to end apartheid. The Lusaka meeting had been full of drama. Joseph Nkomo, leader of ZAPU, which with Mugabe’s ZANU formed the Patriotic Front alliance fighting for majority rule in Zimbabwe, had very undiplomatically taken a seat inside the conference room and was thrown out. The ZANU guerillas had put down their arms to work the diplomatic route and been far more effective. But the biggest drama of all was how Fraser dealt with Margaret Thatcher. It had taken enormous effort to get Thatcher to agree to set aside her earlier support for the new puppet Zimbabwe government and to sign on for new, supervised free elections, but Fraser was worried that she might get cold feet at the last minute. She was under great pressure from the conservatives in her party who felt that any repudiation of their ‘kith and kin’ in Rhodesia was unconscionable.
So Fraser leaked the communiqué. He called us Australian journalists in and gave us the not-yet-finalised document. He justified this by pointing to the nine-hour time delay between Australia and Zambia; if the Aussies had had to wait for the official release, the British press who were in a much-closer time zone, would scoop our coverage. Thatcher was angry enough when she learned about this, from a note passed to her by her Foreign Secretary Lord Peter Carrington while she was trapped at a church service and unable to intervene. But she went into orbit when she turned up to a barbecue hosted by Fraser that Sunday afternoon to discover he had invited eight leading British journalists for a background briefing. The draft communiqué now a fait accompli—even before the other heads of government had signed-off on it—and Thatcher was locked in. Fraser had triumphed. And so had the black countries and the Patriotic Front. Fraser would attend the Independence celebrations in Zimbabwe the following April, and Australia was the first country to extend diplomatic recognition to the new democracy. We journalists never figured out how to account for Fraser’s strong and enduring abhorrence of racism. It seemed so at odds with his conservative, even reactionary, views on so many other topics, yet it was a consistent theme of his government. There was no greater illustration of the man’s complexities. In 1981 he prevented a plane carrying South African football players from re-fuelling in Australia. Having helped bring majority rule in Zimbabwe he set his sights on South Africa, and argued ardently for why apartheid had to end. And his anti-racism views were not confined to Africa. He controversially allowed large numbers of Vietnamese boat people into Australia; championed multiculturalism including establishing the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) radio and television network; and enacted land rights legislation. When he died in 2015, Malcolm Fraser received heartfelt tributes from many Indigenous Australians.
On the final night of CHOGM, Michelle Grattan and I danced with the guerillas in a series of Lusaka nightspots. We drank cognac with Edgar Tekere, Richard Hove and Simba Makoni. Less than a year later, all three men would be ministers in Mugabe’s government. They would all eventually fall out with their despotic leader and in 2008, Makoni, endorsed by Tekere, ran for President against Mugabe. On this night, however, in between dancing, the talk was all of revolution: how to manage the increasingly-fractious Patriotic Front, and what to do about the Voice of Free Africa, the Rhodesian propaganda service that was getting to some of Tekere’s troops. Sitting there that night, talking and drinking, it was easy to forget that just a few hundred kilometres away across the border in Zimbabwe the war was still raging. A couple of weeks earlier, I had had my first experience of that war when I had flown from Bulawayo to Salisbury, the capital of what everyone on the crammed DC4 was still calling Rhodesia. As the plane had taken off, it had seemed to rise straight up and then it turned, violently.
‘That’s what’s called a corkscrew takeoff,’ said the young man sitting next to me. He was wearing an army uniform. As the plane pushed into the atmosphere, the flight attendant came crawling up the aisle on her stomach. She had a torch clenched between her teeth, a tiny notebook in her hand, taking drink orders. Since it was only a twenty-minute flight, I did not bother ordering anything, but I heard everyone around me ordering two, or even three, double Scotches. A blue light suddenly flashed outside the plane’s window.
‘It’s a SAM,’ said my companion, seeing that I was startled. ‘The terrs are firing at us.’
I took ‘terrs’ to mean the terrorists, but I had to ask: ‘What’s a SAM?’
‘Surface to air missile,’ he offered. ‘They’ll fire at us when we land, too. They usually miss.’
So that’s why everyone had ordered the stiff drinks, I thought to myself. I regretted I had not followed their example.
The flight attendant had not bothered with glasses but had walked the aisle with a basket full of miniature bottles the moment the plane flattened-out.
In the nightclub, Tekere’s bodyguards waited at a discrete distance until the Secretary-General was ready to leave. They then organised for another shiny, new Mercedes-Benz vehicle to drive Michelle and me back to our hotel. I was a little shocked to see Red Cross signs on the car doors. Oh well, I thought, I guess they are all on the same side.
Once CHOGM was over I said goodbye to my press gallery colleagues who were returning to Canberra with the Prime Minister and headed back to Johannesburg. I was going home via New York, where I’d planned a few days holiday and I was on a Pan Am flight later that evening. When I checked-in, I was told that the seat I’d requested was available. Puzzled, I took the boarding pass. I had not requested a seat. Who would I be sitting next to, I wondered? He turned out to be a non-descript middle-aged man in a suit. He ignored me as I stepped over him to get to my window seat and seemed more interested in talking to his two companions, one of whom was seated across the aisle, the other in front of him. Why didn’t they sit together? I wondered.
As soon as were airborne I took out my book. It was The Super-Afrikaners. Inside the Afrikaner Broederbond, an exposé by investigative journalists Ivor Wilkins and Hans Strydom of the secret Afrikaner all-male fraternity that supposedly ran South Africa. The book had created a big stir when it was published the previous year, not just because it had actually dared to expose the existence of this group that had never been previously publicly acknowledged but, even more sensationally, an Index listed 7500 names, reputed to be a near-complete list of all its members. I was running my finger down the list, to see if any of the government people I had interviewed were included, when my travelling companion said to me:
‘I’m in there.’
He reached for the book and indicated a name: ‘That’s me.’ He then reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card. It listed his name and his occupation: Mayor of Stellenbosch. Stellenbosch, I knew, was the spiritual and intellectual heartland of Afrikaner South Africa. It was a small city in the Western Cape province, about 50 kilometres from Cape Town, whose population was totally white and which prided itself on making no concessions to the English minority. It was where the Afrikaner University was located, the place where the next generation was trained to assume leadership of the country’s political, military and religious institutions.
Just then the flight attendant arrived with the drinks trolley, and as I sipped my pre-dinner bloody mary, the man began to engage me.
‘What were you doing in South Africa? Where did you go? Did you like our country?’
‘I could not accept the country’s apartheid laws,’ I told him. I found the institutional oppression of the country’s black majority abhorren
t.
‘But that is changing,’ he assured me.
I disagreed. ‘Maybe in Johannesburg the Whites Only signs were coming down,’ I said, ‘but once you got out into the country it was business as usual.’
By now our dinner had been served and we were both into our glasses of red wine.
‘Let me buy you another drink,’ said my companion.
He made sure my glass was never empty as he continued to question me: ‘Who had I interviewed? What were their names? Did anyone criticise the government?’ I smiled to myself. The poor man has obviously not been briefed on the capacity of Australians—especially of journalists—to hold their liquor. Eventually it was his voice that became slurred, and he was the one who first fell asleep.
When I awoke it was light outside, and we were only an hour or so from New York. I noticed that my companion was standing in the aisle, conferring with his friends. When he saw that I was awake, he introduced them, telling me they were diamond dealers going to New York on business. My companion sat down and his friend seated in front of him passed over two glasses of what looked like champagne and orange juice. I protested that it was a bit early in the day but the man insisted:
‘It’s my birthday,’ he said. ‘You must help me celebrate.’
As I gamely sipped, the questions resumed. ‘Where are you staying in New York? We’d love to take you to dinner.’ I was vague and instead turned the questions back on him: ‘Where are you staying? What are you going to be doing?’
‘We’ve got meetings on 45th Street,’ the man across the aisle called over. ‘You know, the diamond district.’
I knew enough about New York to know that the diamond district was on 47th Street. These guys aren’t diamond dealers, I thought. I was shaken at the thought of how much trouble the South African government appeared to have taken to try to find out who I’d spoken to. Three men! All the way to New York!
We were soon on the ground and, I noticed with relief that once I had cleared customs, the men had disappeared. I headed for Seventh Avenue South in the Village, where I had the use of a friend’s apartment. I was intending to complete at least a draft of the three articles I proposed to write on South Africa while everything was still fresh in my mind. They would follow-on from the pieces I had written on Mozambique, Namibia and Rhodesia while I had been on the road, as well as the daily articles I had filed from Lusaka. I got out my notebooks and as I arranged them in order, I remembered a conversation I’d had with the journalist John Kane-Bermann.
‘Be careful with your notebooks,’ he’d warned me when I’d spoken to him just before I got onto the plane for New York. ‘They will have been watching you but they will want to know who you have spoken with.’
Of course, I reassured him. Privately, I thought he was being rather paranoid. Even for South Africa.
I was careful of course. There had been no need to hide the fact that I’d met with well-known anti-apartheid figures such as Helen Suzman, Ken Rashidi, Helen Joseph, Dr Nthato Motlana or the various government officials, but there were others who could get into trouble if it was known they were talking to a foreign journalist. One of these was Zwelakhe Sisulu, the son of Walter Sisulu who was still imprisoned on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela, and several other activists and journalists who had been particularly helpful. I had not used their names in my notebooks and I had not written down anywhere the code I’d used to help me identify them.
Before I could even start writing, I began to feel dizzy and nauseous and I had a splitting headache. I must be getting the flu, I thought. A tremendous weariness enveloped me and I found that I could not work, so I climbed into bed. I woke up three days later.
With just a day or two left of my Manhattan stay, I decided to go out. I went shopping, I went for a walk with Kate Jennings, a writer friend from Sydney who now lived in New York; and had a drink with Frank Hoffey, the brilliant defamation lawyer who had always found a way to help me get into print what I wanted to report when I was at the National Times. He had moved from Sydney to New York a few months earlier. Then it was time to leave and I went back to the apartment to pack. I then did something for which I have never forgiven myself. Instead of carrying them with me, I packed my notebooks and the drafts of my articles into one of my suitcases, and checked it through. I felt it was safe to do so as, I had been assured by South African Airways, which had written my ticket although the carrier was Pan Am, that it was a direct flight. In fact, the flight stopped in Los Angeles where we changed planes, and again in Auckland. On the morning of 18 August, I arrived back in Sydney. One of my two bags did not.
Luggage is never really lost, of course. But a week later, Pan Am wrote to tell me they had been unable to find my bag and requested further information so they could have their Central Tracing Office in New York take over the search. Then, just over two weeks after my return, Qantas got in touch to say my bag had been found—in Vienna. Nothing seemed to be missing. I examined the notebooks carefully. They were all there but I realised, heart lurching, that although I had not attached names to the actual interviews, I had compiled a list of people I’d intended to try to contact. The list was in another book but it would be easy enough to match it with my notes of the people I had spoken to. But who would do that, I reasoned? I had already left South Africa. I should not have let the notebooks out of my hands, but they were on a flight to Sydney. No one could possibly have seen them. Then I realised something. In New York, I had slipped some pamphlets about Stellenbosch given to me by the man who said he was the mayor into one of the notebooks. They weren’t there. That’s when I started asking questions. Qantas? Why would Qantas be able to find luggage from a Pan Am flight? How could luggage tagged for Sydney end up in Vienna? I rang John Kane-Berman who gave me the ghastly news. Three of the people I had interviewed, included Zwelakhe Sisulu, had been arrested. I felt sick.2 I had put people’s lives in danger. Although I had my notebooks back, I did not feel able to write my planned series of articles. Maybe exposing the evils of South Africa would be the best—perhaps the only—way to atone for my incompetence. But I was paralysed by remorse. I found myself totally unable to write anything.
And then on 25 September, three weeks after my bag was returned to me, I received a phone call at work from a young woman. She would not tell me her name, but she had some information for me.
‘ASIO took your South African files,’ she told me.
I was thunderstruck. Only a few people at Fairfax knew about the missing luggage. I had been far too embarrassed to make my blunder public, yet this stranger knew. She said she worked for ASIO on campus, keeping an eye on left-wing groups. She said that she had been ‘disgusted’ to hear from two of her ASIO colleagues that my files had been stolen. She did not think I was the sort of person who did not have the best interests of Australia at heart, which was how she rationalised spying on students. I gave her my home phone number and asked if she would ring me again if she could find out what had happened to my files. From the way she spoke, she did not seem to know that they had been returned to me. I did not know what to make of her call. I still don’t. In the note for my file I wrote straight afterwards, I noted that Pan Am had told me they were perplexed at their inability to find the luggage and were equally mystified by how it had ultimately turned up. ‘Was there any politically sensitive material in the files?’ the managing director of Pam Am had asked me. He conceded that was the only explanation for the disappearance of the luggage in the first place, and for the preposterous explanation from Qantas that it had gone astray to Vienna.
On 5 October, I wrote a column for the Financial Review about this episode, disguising the gender of my caller, and speculating that if the information was true it meant that, contrary to the instructions of the Whitlam government, ASIO still maintained connections with the notorious South African Bureau of State Security, or BOSS as it was known. ASIO must have intercepted my bag in Sydney, rifled through my belongings and, I could scarcely bear to think about it,
read my notebooks, at the request of BOSS. Yet, when I finally got access to my quite extensive ASIO file many years later, although it included a copy of this column, there was no commentary as to its accuracy.
The only possible motivation for stealing my luggage, and reading my notebooks and draft articles, was to accomplish what the men on the plane from Johannesburg had failed to discover: who I had spoken to and what they had told me. Melodramatic as it sounded, I could not escape concluding that a drug in the champagne I’d been given on the plane must have caused me to be so sick in New York. A further motive might have been merely to delay publication of my articles; the files were returned to me, after all. My articles would have less currency the longer it took me to write them. With any luck, they might have concluded, I would just give up and not write anything. In the meantime, they had rounded-up the people I’d talked to. The repressive state rolled on.
My article on South Africa was eventually published on 10 October, three months after I had first arrived in the country. It was a tough-enough piece. I dismissed the changes to apartheid as cosmetic and argued that the regime had not changed its basic purpose. ‘The ultimate goal of apartheid,’ I wrote, ‘and one that is non-negotiable is to assign all blacks to a homeland and to oblige them to give up South African citizenship.’ I compared the process with the expulsion of Chinese from Vietnam: ‘The homelands residents are the boatpeople of South Africa.’ But the piece had no context and thus not much currency. It was no longer part of the build-up to CHOGM, able to be seen in the light of the efforts to dismantle minority rule in Zimbabwe. It was just another isolated article about a country that was doing its best to stay out of the international spotlight while it continued on its evil mission to deny basic rights to its non-white citizens. What was so startling was the lengths the country had gone to in order to prevent my writing about it. The bitter lesson for me was how utterly inept I had been, and the consequences that had had for other people. I’d best stick to the small playpen of Canberra, I concluded bitterly.
