by Mark Colvin
Force it down you had to, though. First, the local chairman would toast the British ambassador for honouring his region with a visit, then my father would reply with a toast of thanks, then there would be a toast to the beauty and elegance of my stepmother, and perhaps a few words from her and another shot glass downed in return, then ‘Amity between our peoples’, then ‘Peace among nations’, and so on. There was no mercy, and each toast demanded the next, until everyone was more or less under the table. I was twenty and still had a young man’s powers of recovery, but my father was fifty that year, and it was no wonder that as the tour progressed he began to look a bit grey. On the other hand, he had always been a hard drinker: he had the spy’s training of out-drinking his opponent while still remembering and noting everything that happened. We all survived somehow, but in a sort of bleary fog.
Much of the ground in our four-province journey was covered in Gaziks, a far cry in comfort or reliability from the embassy Range Rover. My father and stepmother were always in the lead vehicle with the driver and translator, while I followed behind in the second Gazik, with little idea of what was happening or where we were going. The hangovers, combined with the Gaziks’ extremely uncomfortable seats and heavy leaf-sprung suspension, made these long drives, always across almost trackless steppes and stretches of Gobi (desert-like terrain), supremely tedious. The monotony was usually broken only by mechanical failure, followed by an hour or two of argument between the drivers about which spanner to use to get the vehicle going again.
On the other hand, this made the highlights seem even more remarkable, such as going across a pass in the Altai Mountains and stopping at the highest point of the road, where there was a tall cairn of stones. Atop it, looking west out to one grand expanse of steppe, the skull of an ibex, and gazing east, towards the valley from which we had come, the bleached skull of an argal, and with prayer-flags fluttering in the stiff, cold mountain breeze. And driving along a line of hills on what was obviously a very old and well-worn track, we met a camel train coming the other way, the great beasts loaded with dismantled gers, rugs, kettles, saucepans and all the apparatus of nomadic life: thinking ‘Marco Polo must have seen something like this, as must all those who travelled the Silk Road, for hundreds of years.’ Elsewhere, we came across a camel market in the middle of nowhere: hundreds of the creatures were tethered or wandered with hobbled feet, moaning and keening at extraordinary volume, while their owners haggled and lied like animal dealers everywhere.
Driving across a vast stretch of uninhabited plain towards a line of cliffs, we saw a pair of eagles on tree stumps, a kilometre or so from a village under the hill. Diverting to get closer, we were puzzled to note that the birds didn’t fly away. Then we saw why: they were chained to the stumps. Someone was dispatched to the village and returned with a wizened old Mongol, who said he owned them. ‘What did he use them for?’ my father asked through the translator. ‘Hunting.’ ‘Hunting what?’ A shrug. ‘Foxes. Wolves.’ It seemed the eagle would swoop on the wolf, take its pelt in her claws, then fly laboriously up with this considerable load, before dropping it from a great height. The Mongol told us that every year at hatching time, the villagers would gather at the foot of the cliffs and make a great racket, leading the parent birds to swoop angrily. Meanwhile, young men would be lowered down to steal one or two of the eaglets from the nest. Each stolen bird would then be reared to adolescence, when it would be bent to its master’s will. This was done by tying it to a perch, then keeping it awake by shouting at it for up to seventy-two hours. After that, the villager said, it would be ready to train.
These were hard people in a hard terrain. In Uvs province in the country’s north-western corner, after breakfasting on rice pudding and vodka (grain spirit this time, not arkhi, which was a small comfort), we were taken out for a day of traditional activities. There was a large herd of unbroken horses, and first we saw a Mongol rider on his high wooden saddle cutting one animal out from the rest and lassoing it. When the horse bolted, the rider leapt off his mount, still holding the rope, and allowed himself to be dragged by it, though digging in his heels: an effect that resembled watching a waterskier on dry land. He simply wore the beast out and led it back to a pen. Then we watched aghast as he took a second horse from the pens—one which had been caught the day before—and subdued it to the bridle by first tying a rope painfully around its nose and upper lip and dragging it around: treatment which would have appalled animal lovers anywhere. Finally, there was a demonstration of breaking a horse caught three days ago to the saddle, again a process in which the horse’s fury and fear were to absolutely no avail: the ruthlessness of Mongol horsemen was clearly matched only by their skill.
Much of the rest of the afternoon was spent watching displays of Mongol wrestling, and feats of horsemanship which included accurate archery by men actually hanging off the side of their horses, held apparently only by the grip of their thighs. A late-afternoon meal was served in a ger in which goats and calves came and went, and more and more vodka was drunk. In addition to the toasts this time, there was singing: the local chairman demonstrated the Homi, something akin to Tuvan throat-singing, in which the singer seems to emit two tones, nasal and bronchial, simultaneously. Songs were demanded from us in return. I remember my father bellowing ‘Old MacDonald had a farm’, while I contributed the whole of ‘Waltzing Matilda’.
Drunk though we were, that day at the top of a low slope looking out on the great Central Asian plains was not just memorable but often hilarious: proof that despite all differences of language, ideology and nationality, totally disparate people can still occasionally form some kind of bond.
The final leg of our journey was intended to take us to Hovsgol, in the Mongolian north, but we were diverted by blizzards and had to fly south instead to the forbidden province of GoviAltai (rough translation: ‘Desert/Mountain’). If previous flights had seemed merely unpleasant, this one was genuinely frightening. We climbed and climbed, but still the Altai Mountains towered above us. Unable to surmount them, we flew through a pass so narrow that the wingtips almost seemed to be in touching distance of the rocks on either side. The winds were so strong that the aircraft was being blown from side to side and up and down in the currents. Above the entrance to the cockpit was a considerately placed altimeter, its dial registering from nought to 20 000 feet. The needle climbed inexorably towards 20 000, where it stuck in the vertical position while the plane continued to climb. I tried to focus on my copy of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia but succeeded only in reading the same page about thirty times, with not a single word registering. We survived, but this time on landing we felt very much like joining the Mongol passengers in a spot of grateful ground-kissing.
The local bureaucrats, completely unprepared for our visit, nevertheless managed to put together a program. I remember an experimental livestock station where a scientist was trying to interbreed wild sheep and goats with the domestic variety, and Mongol horses with donkeys, in innovative ways, but can recall little else. Our requests to visit the southern half of GoviAltai, bordering on Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, were flatly refused, presumably because of Russian troop movements. There was not a lot of rhyme or reason to this, because as my return trip to Peking in daytime would later prove, there were plenty of large and elaborate Soviet military installations near the Chinese border, clearly visible from the train window.
No flight could ever match the horror trip to GoviAltai, and our return to Ulan Bator seemed almost luxurious by comparison. I remember looking out the window down to the faintly visible ruins of Karakorum, the historic capital of Genghis Khan, now little more than an outline in the desert. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.
* * *
A while after we got back to the embassy from GoviAltai, there was a diplomatic incident. What it was wasn’t clear to me till dinner one night, when we sat down to eat and my father motioned us to silence.
I knew already that the walls had ears. I’d been t
old the story of how, every year, the de-buggers—tech-heads from London—came and removed all the hidden microphones and wires. Then, predictably within days, a team from the Ulan Bator central heating department turned up, always in the middle of summer, by the way, declaring that they’d detected a fault and needed to service the radiators. ‘Servicing’ meant dismantling them entirely and reinstalling them, including removal and replacement of half the plaster in the walls. Of course.
I could also see with my own eyes that the embassy’s phone lines weren’t connected to the nearest telegraph pole. They all went through the blockish, windowless brick sentry post just outside the compound. Why on earth would that be?
I hadn’t really let these bugging warnings bother me too much, except to notice that my father only ever really opened up when we were out fishing. Then he talked freely about all kinds of things, including the fact that one of his predecessors was so obsessed by the bugging that he went mad, imagining that cameras were following him everywhere, even on long walks on the Mongolian steppe—so mad, in fact, that he had to be recalled to England.
But tonight was the evening when the reality sank in. My father, astonishingly, wanted to talk shop in the dining room. And he didn’t want a conversation either. This was going to be a monologue, and Moranna and I were not the intended audience. He leaned back in his chair at the head of the table and began to talk very loudly … to the ceiling. He was very angry, he said, almost more angry than he could express. And Her Majesty’s Government was angry too. Diplomatic bags had arrived from London on a plane via Moscow, and they’d been tampered with. The wax seals had been broken, the padlocks had been smashed, and the contents had been rifled.
Now I happened to know this was not in itself a deeply serious security breach, because all the really sensitive material came in by land across China, the way I’d come with the Queen’s Messengers. But I had just enough sense to keep my mouth shut about that, because my father was talking about a point of principle. Diplomatic bags of any kind are sacrosanct under the Vienna Conventions, and what the Mongolians or maybe the Russians had done was a casual insult at best, and at worst a deliberate provocation.
All these points my father made, loudly, to the walls and ceiling, while saying that his repeated protests to the country’s foreign ministry had been blandly ignored. Now, he said, he’d had enough. He’d decided to cable London the following morning to recommend they begin proceedings to break off diplomatic relations with Outer Mongolia, close the embassy and return him home. Which would have been huge, as big a diplomatic breach as they come—enough to make headlines from The Washington Post to Pravda. It was quite a speech, probably about ten minutes long, and delivered with exceptional dramatic vehemence. It took real effort, when Dad gave us the sign that it was all over, to resume the charade of normal dinner-table conversation.
This would have been about nine o’clock of a Thursday evening. Promptly at eight o’clock the next morning, there was an obsequious call from the Mongolian Foreign Ministry. They were sending an official car to collect the ambassador for a face-to-face meeting with the minister, who wanted to apologise profusely for an incident which had only just been brought to his personal attention, and which should never have happened.
As I’ve already written, I didn’t then know that my father was actually a spy. That kind of bugging was normal for conventional diplomats in every embassy, every residence, every staff flat and often every car in every country where the KGB and its sister organisations like the Stasi held sway.
* * *
It had been a beautiful and fascinating summer, but at the end of August it was time to go home—and also time for one more little adventure—after saying goodbye. Dad always wore sunglasses for farewells, to hide the possibility of tears. On this day he wore his darkest pair. We would not, as it turned out, meet again for another five years. We hugged, and I boarded the train with a small task to perform.
To test the degree of thaw in the Cultural Revolution, the UK embassy in Peking had hatched a plan to have me travel to Hong Kong overland, rather than by another potentially nightmarish CAAC flight, something no Westerner had been able to do since 1966. Rather than book me direct from Ulan Bator to the southern border, Dad had bought an Ulan Bator–Peking ticket, and, to fool the system, the Peking embassy had bought a ticket in my name for the rest of the journey. A British embassy staffer met me at the station in Peking and escorted me onto the train. The authorities might, or might not, notice the subterfuge. If they did, I would presumably spend another night in Peking before being put on a plane. If they noticed while the train was well underway, there was probably nothing they could or would do about it.
With the confidence or ignorance of youth, I remember feeling excited rather than nervous. This train was faster but far less luxurious than the Ulan Bator service, and with the added disadvantage of loudspeakers in every corridor blaring out incessant renditions of Maoist revolutionary operas like The White-Haired Girl and The Red Detachment of Women. The compensation was the view from my sleeper cabin window: the Chinese landscape spooling by, like a scroll-painting unrolling, and especially waking in the morning to views of what I think was the edge of the famous Wulingyuan National Park, with its plunging peaks, dramatic cliffs and grottoes among dense forest.
And so, after twenty-four hours, I arrived at Hong Kong as the first Westerner to have travelled overland from China’s north to its south since the Cultural Revolution had begun. It was no feat of mine, merely a little embassy experiment, but one which marked its own tiny little moment in history.
Emerging into the high-energy hustle of mercantile Hong Kong, I had also, after a summer spent travelling through one communist country and living in another, received a thorough lifetime inoculation—not by propaganda but lived experience—against any form of Marxist-Leninist thought.
Chapter 18
Five Lines of Copy
WHEN I GRADUATED in 1973, I had, really, nowhere in England to go, but my last year had been so much fun that I didn’t want to leave Oxford. I hung around for a few months while my circle of friends gradually scattered. I did bar jobs and washed up in restaurants, and slept on people’s sofas. But soon the fun was fading, it was getting cold, and I signed on for the dole. There wasn’t enough work around. Not having got a First, I was told not to bother applying for a BBC traineeship, and not yet having discovered a vocation for journalism, it didn’t occur to me to start applying for junior reporting jobs on provincial papers—easily the fastest track to Fleet Street in those days. I felt I had no long-term prospects, and Dad would not be back in England for more than a year. There was less and less to keep me, and when my mother sent me a ticket back to Canberra, I accepted gratefully.
I described in the preface how I was accepted as a cadet (trainee) journalist at the ABC in William Street, Sydney, starting in February 1974. There being no journalism schools then, let alone journalism degrees, the first few weeks were basic training: how to write a news lead, how to arrange a story in a sort of pyramid order of importance, how to keep your sentences simple, declarative, active and short. We were ABC News trainees, starting by learning how to do radio news: that meant that mostly we would be trying to distil whatever we needed to say into ten sentences at most, with the likelihood that they’d be cut down to five, or even three.
ABC News had stringent standards: we were not to assume that anything that had been published in a newspaper was true without making phone calls or consulting authoritative sources to check. There was to be no opinion, no analysis, no comment. A young journalist was rumoured to have been sacked a couple of years before for wearing a badge supporting the Moratorium (against the Vietnam War). If you were on camera, beards and moustaches were strongly discouraged and jackets and ties were mandatory.
Radio Current Affairs, down the road in another building, seemed tacitly to be the enemy, much more so than the newspapers or other TV and radio stations. This was partly because they had diff
erent rules: their reporters were freer to analyse, had more time to ask sharp questions, and were even occasionally encouraged to inject some satire. But it was also partly a literally sectarian rivalry: News’ leadership was said to have been historically Catholic, while Current Affairs was thought of as Protestant.
The soon-to-retire head of News, Keith Fraser, was a former policeman from Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland, with a temperament that matched the stereotype. His deputy and designated successor, Russ Handley, a kindly but vague man, was famous for once having emerged from the toilets, walked up to the chief sub-editor, and said ‘G’day chiefer, what’s happening?’ unaware that he was trailing a long roll of lavatory paper from the back of his trousers. The cadet counsellor, Don Gordon, was usually known as ‘Spring-heeled Jack’ because of his peculiar bouncing gait. He was a decent man, and not a bad tutor, but it wasn’t hard to pick up the notion that he was in this job because his career as a reporter or sub-editor had reached about as high as it was ever going to.
Our leaders all seemed very old. I think people in their late fifties and sixties really did look older then, faces cured by sun and tobacco smoke and lined with ten thousand hangovers.
The newsroom I joined was a clattery, cluttery place full of typewriters, big rotary-dial phones, and lots and lots of paper. Newspaper, typing paper, carbon paper. Fresh paper, scrumpled-up, discarded paper. Occasionally paper on fire, in a rubbish bin, when someone had carelessly stubbed out a cigarette. If you wanted to make an interstate call, you had to go through the ABC switchboard; if (a rare event) you needed to make an international call, the ABC switchboard had to ring the international switchboard, and they had to ring a switchboard in the country you were ringing, and as often as not the person you were ringing would be out. News came in from overseas on telex machines, so noisy that they had to be housed in a soundproof room at the back. ‘Research’ was a cuttings library of fading photocopied or Roneo-ed ABC News stories, the collected volumes of old ABC News bulletins, some battered encyclopaedias, and a Who’s Who.
