by Mark Colvin
And so we were up the road in a tatty Camelot-themed pub called King Arthur’s, having a sandwich and a quick drink, when the news broke. It was the publican, a big, cheery bloke, who heard the newsflash on his radio, so it was his voice we heard telling us, ‘Kerr’s sacked Whitlam’. We all thought, in the first seconds, that he was pulling our leg, but in response, he turned up the radio and there it was: Malcolm Fraser had been to see Governor-General Sir John Kerr at Government House in Yarralumla, and Sir John had agreed to sack Whitlam and appoint Fraser as ‘caretaker’ PM.
We ran down William Street, up Cardiac Hill and into the studio, from which we broadcast on Mac Cocker’s show, almost non-stop, for the next few hours. It was my first major experience of live-broadcasting a major event, and it was like surfing a Hawaii-strength wave of adrenaline. Colleagues were running a more or less permanent relay between the newsroom and our studio with copy and tapes, and we essentially had to riff on what we had.
After the visits to Government House, first by Fraser, then by Whitlam, there was the proclamation on the steps of Parliament House by the governor-general’s secretary, David Smith, followed by the now-famous appearance of the newly sacked PM: ‘Well may he say “God Save the Queen” … because nothing will save the governor-general.’ On air, Jim astutely, and almost instantly, pointed out a new idea: such were the numbers in the Senate that it was technically possible that Labor could now turn the tables on Fraser, the new caretaker PM, and deny him passage of the supply Bills they’d been working so desperately to pass only hours before.
We were listening to and discussing the audio feed from the Senate, but the law said we were not to broadcast it: the only legal way to broadcast any parliamentary proceedings then was live, uncut, without commentary, and on the designated parliamentary network. After a short while, we collectively took the decision to break this law now, and face the consequences later. We kept talking, interspersed with live crosses to the Senate with explanatory commentary. We got away with it on the day—not surprisingly, given how much else was going on—and forty-something years on, I imagine it’s probably too late for us to be brought before the bar of parliament and threatened with the full might of the law. Still, it was, I believe, an Australian broadcasting first, and yet another illustration of how much more controlled the media were at the time.
Whitlam, who had been caught completely by surprise in any case (he was eating lunch), either didn’t see the potential should he decide to counter-block supply in the Senate, or decided against it. We can’t know if it was rationalisation after the fact or whether he considered it on the day, but he said much later that to do so would have contravened Labor policy never to use the Upper House to block supply.
At any rate, the die was effectively cast. The most divisive and bitter election campaign in Australian history had begun. For the next month, I would be fully immersed in reporting it—the most intense experience of my working life so far.
Chapter 20
Rage and Revelation
THERE WAS NOW a month for Australians to decide their political leadership, and the country was clearly deeply (though not evenly) divided. I think now, with the benefit of long hindsight, that had Fraser left Whitlam to run another twelve to eighteen months, the Coalition would have won anyway, easily and above all legitimately.
The rot had set in nearly a year before when Whitlam toured Europe: ‘It was ruins, ruins, ruins all the way,’ began one of the reports from the ABC’s Ken Begg, on the road with a prime minister who appeared to be pursuing his interest in classical architecture just as Cyclone Tracy flattened the entire Northern Territory capital beyond ruin. The year just went on getting worse for the ALP, as the international oil shock underscored Treasurer Jim Cairns’ mishandling of the economy, and, as recession bit, Whitlam gave the increasing impression of believing himself in some way ‘above’ economics as he pushed through his political agenda. Yet it was economic reality which was starting to put people out of work in increasing numbers. A prime minister who was so uninterested in economics surely could not have survived.
Those were the issues which would have dominated a ‘normal’ campaign, but instead, this one was filled with fury. On the conservative side, many believed that because the governor-general, a lawyer and judge of long standing, had sacked the prime minister, he had somehow officially confirmed that the Whitlam government was illegitimate. For them, this was confirmation of their suspicions around all the scandals and controversies of recent months. On the left, there was ‘Maintain Your Rage’, a line in Whitlam’s parliament-steps speech which had become the slogan. It summed up the fury that blew in the wake of 11 November. It represented a sense among Labor supporters, one certainly widespread among the young listenership of Double J, that Fraser and Sir John Kerr had not only ambushed Whitlam, they had conspired to do so, and in the process breached the letter or the spirit of the Constitution.
I concertinaed half a lifetime’s journalistic experience into that intense month. The work became far more than churning out news bulletins, doing a few interviews or covering a demonstration and going home. I remember being at the station for twelve- and fourteen-hour days as we struggled to put together a professional and balanced coverage of the campaign.
We organised a series of debates between federal ministers, who proved surprisingly willing (for the time) to come into our little station, to talk not just about youth issues—schools, universities, apprenticeships, health—but also about foreign policy and economic management. Some of these debates contained talkback from listeners, but not as many as we would have liked. Another major problem for broadcasters at the time was the antiquated legal requirement, imposed by the Postmaster-General’s Department, to broadcast a loud beep across every telephone call every few seconds. This made the kind of listener feedback we take for granted now much more rare, because it made for ‘bad radio’. Instead, we generally had to gather questions from the audience beforehand and read them out to the politicians.
Outside the office and the studio, though, public opinion was making itself loudly heard—on one side at least. The demonstrations were big, angry and hugely focused on the legitimacy of what had happened. That said, it became more difficult to measure public sentiment. If you judged it by the numbers at public protests, you were in danger of predicting a Whitlam landslide instead of the Fraser avalanche that was, as it turned out, on its way. Coalition voters, by and large, were quietly at home waiting for their chance to vote Whitlam out, so that on the streets and in the TV news bulletins they were relatively invisible. Maintain Your Rage protesters, on the other hand, were out on Sydney’s streets—at rallies in the Domain, Hyde Park and at Town Hall, for example—in large numbers.
This imbalance of visibility, however, was no excuse for understating the vehemence or size of the demonstrations, as Rupert Murdoch’s papers—The Australian, The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mirror—unquestionably did. On several occasions my colleagues and I returned from covering protests and broadcast crowd-size estimates, including those of the always-cautious NSW Police. The Murdoch journalists covering the same demonstrations would have been in the same huddle to agree an estimate, and would have filed the same numbers. That afternoon or the next day, their papers would print a drastically reduced figure: on one occasion, a police estimate of 50 000 was cut down to 10 000 in the next day’s Australian. You’d run into the same reporter at the next demo and ask what happened. ‘Orders from on high. Nothing I could do, mate.’
It was the beginning of a dangerous trend in those papers, in which the separation of news and comment was blurred to the point of nonexistence. It wasn’t just downplaying crowd numbers: Murdoch journalists complained of a crescendo of management interference in their copy, and the insertion of editorial comment into straight news reporting, as the campaign went on.
This is not some conspiratorial half-memory I’ve conjured up. The interference was real, and so egregious that it led The Australian’s j
ournalists to go on strike from 8–10 December, during the crucial last week of the election campaign. They wrote a letter to management complaining of ‘the deliberate and careless slanting of headlines, seemingly blatant imbalance in news presentation, political censorship and, more occasionally, distortion of copy from senior specialist journalists, the political management of news and features, the stifling of dissident and even palatably impartial opinion in the papers’ columns’.
What made it somehow worse was that it was so unnecessary—if you accept that Whitlam was actually on a hiding to nothing from day one, and the Fraser victory was a foregone conclusion. But Rupert Murdoch was a belt-and-braces man: he wanted to make doubly sure.
On the night of 13 December 1975, we called the election results live: the station’s first ever election-night broadcast. Our political analyst, Denis Altman, the homosexual rights pioneer who is now a professor at La Trobe University, could see within the first hour what the early counting portended—a win for Fraser so big that it ended with one of the most lopsided parliaments in Australia’s history: ninety-one seats for the Coalition, just thirty-six for what was left of the tattered ALP.
The ballot-box trouncing did nothing to diminish the rage of the Left. The ‘Shame, Fraser, Shame’ posters and lapel-pins lingered for years. And the party’s remaining MPs refused to make Whitlam shoulder any real immediate blame for the loss: he remained as leader for the whole of the next parliament. The party postponed the soul-searching it might otherwise have begun in favour of a continuing resentment and a sense, both spoken and unspoken, of the illegitimacy of the Fraser government. It was especially prevalent in the age group Double J aimed at, and among many of the people we spoke to. With his whirlwind of health, education, social and welfare spending, Whitlam had captured a large chunk of the youth vote, and with rapidly growing youth unemployment there was real fear of what the Fraser government would bring. A couple of days spent interviewing Year 12 students at a Sydney western-suburbs high school left me with an impression of their deep uncertainty about the future.
Those who had certainty, however, had it in spades. People talk now about the bitterness and abuse of partisan politics today, but that period after the Dismissal remains unmatched, in my memory, for vitriol, partisanship and refusal of dialogue. I can only hope we never see its like again.
* * *
At Double J, we were very aware of one particular story that had been pushed out of the national consciousness by the supply crisis and the Dismissal. Another of the station’s founding journalists, Tony Maniaty, had elected to go back to ABC News after a few months’ work with the station, and in early October 1975 had been sent to East Timor. From there, he reported for us on the worsening situation of what was still a Portuguese colony, but one from which the Portuguese had abruptly withdrawn. With no transition period, and in the aftermath of direct rule by a military junta in faraway Lisbon, the country quickly spiralled into civil war. It had come down to a battle between the conservative UDT and the Marxist Fretilin, and throughout October, as the supply crisis dominated Australian news, they were fighting it out with guns and machetes.
But Indonesian forces, encouraged by the USA, were getting ready to pounce, marshalling in West Timor and making incursions into East Timor. Tony reported for us from Balibo in mid-October, but was warned to leave because it was becoming too dangerous. On his way out, he met the Channel Seven and Nine crews, who later became known as the Balibo Five, going in. Within days, they were dead, massacred, as we now know for certain, by Indonesian special forces.
Gough Whitlam might have done nothing, unprompted, to intervene in any of this: he was known to have a strong prejudice in favour of large states over small, autonomous or independent ones. And there seems little doubt that it was a nod from US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger that emboldened the Indonesian leader, Suharto, to launch the invasion that finally came on 7 December—six days before Australians went to the polls in the Dismissal election. On a broader scale, there was certainly fear in Western capitals that a communist-led state on Indonesia’s border was a dangerous option.
In Sydney, we tried to give Timor as much coverage as we could, but on our little station, with its 18–30-year-olds audience, we were shouting into the gale as far as media influence was concerned. I remain convinced that if Australia had not been so relentlessly focused on itself during that period, the plight of a nation that had done so much to defend us in World War II might have touched a lot more hearts: perhaps, just perhaps, there might have been enough of an outcry to put real heat on Whitlam and his Cabinet to change the course of events. At worst, I sometimes think the hundred thousand or more East Timorese who died over the next quarter-century, and the many more who were tortured and imprisoned, were indirect human victims of Australia’s most dramatic political crisis.
At any rate, Australians—and the ABC—now had the Christmas and New Year break to absorb all that had happened. This was probably fortunate, because passions were running nearly as high after the decisive federal election result as they had after the Dismissal itself. I returned to work in January 1976 with trepidation. I wasn’t particularly worried about being put out of work myself—I was still substantively an employee of ABC News, to which I would return should Double J be dismantled—but I had put a year’s work and passion into the station, many of my friends were there, and it provided the greatest opportunities for autonomy and adventure that a 23-year-old journalist at the time could possibly ask for.
I had formed close bonds with my newsroom colleagues, and with our increasing excursions into longer work came a warm and creative collaboration with Carl Tyson-Hall, an ex-2SM producer who brought a useful sense of scepticism to any attempt at pretension or long-windedness—in scripts or in interview grabs. He helped us understand that you could do journalism-as-montage, using music tracks and sound recorded in the field as well as the usual fare of script and interview. There was also a realisation, following the whirlwind month of the election campaign, that we could be more productive in terms of how much content we contributed to the station.
I had a really strong interest in broadening our foreign coverage, to try to present international stories that might mean something to our generation. I’d just read George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, and somehow, in November 1975, in the maelstrom of the election coverage, I found time to produce a short documentary on the death of the Spanish dictator Generalissimo Franco; the following year I put one together on the dirty war in Rhodesia, which was still some years away from becoming Zimbabwe. We gave ourselves ‘rounds’ so as to get a bit more organised and avoid treading on each other’s toes: mine included environment and the arts, which meant among other things freedom to interview film directors and write book reviews.
I remember doing a lengthy piece about Vincent Bugliosi’s book on the Charles Manson murders, Helter Skelter, interspersed with The Beatles’ tracks which Manson’s crazed mind had told him were secret messages inspiring him to slaughter. He interpreted McCartney’s ‘Helter-Skelter’ in some twisted way as a rallying call for bloody mayhem. To this day, I can’t hear the delicately beautiful ‘Blackbird’ without a mental picture of the word ‘Rise!’ painted in blood on the living-room wall in the house of two of his cult’s victims. In retrospect, we can see 1969, the year of the Manson Family and the murder of a concertgoer by a Hells Angel ‘security guard’ at a Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, as the year the decade turned sour, but at the time many still found it shocking to read such graphic proof that all the sunny idealism of the Summer of Love had dissipated so quickly, and was gone for good.
During the Manson piece, I reeled off the long list of religions and cults that Manson had embraced before forming his own, including, briefly, Scientology. Immediately, I began receiving abusive and anonymous calls to my office and home numbers, claiming that this was a lie (it wasn’t: Manson had dabbled in Dianetics for a few years in the early 1960s). The calls only ended when I ran
g a Scientology spokesman who’d earlier come in to Double J to try and proselytise his ‘religion’, and told him in the strongest possible terms that if they didn’t stop I’d start doing daily stories about the harassment itself. He flatly denied that Scientology had anything to do with the calls, but—by the strangest coincidence, no doubt—they stopped instantly.
Double J in the early years was something of a magnet for ‘alternative’, especially Eastern, religions: the Rajneeshis or ‘orange people’, Ananda Marga, and the guru Sri Chinmoy among others. It had its funny side: you’d occasionally come back sweating from an assignment, Nagra over your shoulder, to find someone in the lotus position under your desk. Our audience age-group was clearly a major target for them, and most of us knew at least someone our age who had made, or wanted to make, a pilgrimage to an ashram somewhere on the Subcontinent. One of the DJs, Sandy McCutcheon, was particularly interested in the Eastern gurus, but in the newsroom, most of their press releases ended up in the wastepaper basket.
I’d moved in mid-1975 to a small rented flat in Rose Bay, which happened to be directly across the road from a beautiful 1920s picture palace, the Wintergarden. It no longer exists, thanks to one of Sydney’s many periodic outbursts of architectural vandalism, but back then a relatively austere classical façade led through to a great circular sweep of white, gilt and Dresden blue. I liked sitting at the front-most of the balcony seats, faded and far from their glory days as they were, watching two or three movies there almost every weekend. I’d always liked films, but in youth had thought of them just as ‘stories’, not in the same critical or analytical spirit university had taught me to bring to literature. It was my ABC News cadet training in directing and editing news footage, rudimentary as it had been, that opened my eyes. Where once I’d watched films for the plots and performances, I now suddenly found myself also seeing the techniques: the lighting, the camera angles, the edit points; the choice of close-up, medium shot, long-shot. I even began noticing something I’d never really seen, though it was always there: that little dot that appeared in the corner of the screen towards the end of a reel to cue the projectionist to change over.
