Chapter Eight

Clouds on the Horizon

When Colin Bednall walked into the old Heinz factory in Bendigo Street, Richmond, he saw holes in the cement floor where the giant boiling vats had once been, and drains still coated with sauces and jams. Hidden in the long grass outside was a foundation stone for the assembly of Wertheim pianos, laid by former prime minister Alfred Deakin. For the next two years, Bednall’s office would be the anteroom off the toilet attached to the old staff canteen.

In December 1954 a company called General Television was established so it could bid for one of the two commercial television licences in Melbourne. The consortium behind the bid was made up of The Age, The Argus and The Australasian, J.C. Williamson, Greater Union Theatres, and radio broadcasters including 3KZ, 3UZ, and 3KY. Bednall, along with Arthur Warner, was one of the subscribers. Warner was a Victorian Liberal MP and former government minister, and had been something of a kingmaker for the leadership of Henry Bolte, who would become premier six months after General Television came into being. Warner’s electronics business made the Astor range of products, including radios. Now it would make televisions. Bednall’s involvement proved that he was putting his money where his mouth had been in the royal commission. General Television might have been built around Warner’s business and wealth, but Bednall was integral to the company’s licence application — he wrote it.

Television represented the next exciting phase of Bednall’s career, but the move to the new medium disguised how hard he took the death of his mentor, Sir Keith Murdoch. ‘[It] deeply disturbed me and led me in to an unsettled, sometimes tortured life … From my days as a teenage reporter, I had refused every invitation to leave Murdoch,’ Bednall later wrote.1 Murdoch’s sudden death in 1952 exposed Bednall in ways he had not expected, professionally and personally. Some rivals within Murdoch’s Herald and Weekly Times told Bednall how advertising agencies were saying that now Murdoch was gone, Bednall ‘will never be heard of again’.

Bednall’s relationship with Murdoch was filial, but he was one of several young men Murdoch cultivated to aspire to the company’s senior roles. Murdoch’s model was British media tycoon Lord Northcliffe, who had bestowed his patronage on a young Murdoch. Bednall took all his big career decisions to Murdoch for ratification, but that didn’t mean he was unaware of how Murdoch worked. ‘To win men over to his side, he did frequently make promises he had not the slightest interest of honouring to gain wealth and power to himself,’ he observed.2

Bednall found a way out of his despondency by joining The Argus in Melbourne, a once-venerable publication that had started in 1846 and had been bought by the Daily Mirror group of Britain. Under Cecil Harmsworth King, The Daily Mirror became the biggest-selling daily paper in the world. It was King who hired Bednall to be managing director of The Argus and The Australasian from 1 March 1954, six months before the royal commission’s final report was tabled in parliament. Bednall was paid an annual salary of £8,000 (Australian), and had a £1,000 expense allowance. The Mirror was resolutely working-class in focus, but King had no such directions for Bednall. The political complexion of The Argus was to remain ‘independent’.3 The inevitable honeymoon did not last — there were a range of issues that London and Bednall had with each other. Despite Bednall’s championing of the Menzies government during his time in Brisbane, and King’s assurance of independence, King was soon telling Bednall that although there was no obligation to support the Australian Labor Party, ‘[w]e should have regard to the interests of the man in the street’.4

Perhaps most interesting was King’s reading of Menzies’ role on the world stage, which he had no hesitation in sharing with Bednall:

The impression here is that Menzies is a bit too assiduous in toeing the American line. In the last resort we are necessarily in the American camp but at times the irresponsibility of their politicians is frightening. I take the view that it is up to the wiser people of the Commonwealth to keep the Americans from doing something irretrievably foolish. And the way to influence Americans is not by subservience but by making them feel unpopular, which is more alarming to an American than most.5

King’s observations about Menzies were an intriguing perspective on a prime minister who would have thought his acknowledgement of US power did not come at the expense of his Commonwealth affections. King was like most newspaper men and fancied the certainty of his opinions, even if some of them appeared contradictory. In a later letter he told Bednall that Australia had to look to the United States for defence support in the new world order. ‘England’s influence in the Pacific is now weak or non-existent and there is no point ignoring the fact,’ he told Bednall. ‘Financially and commercially, Australia has much closer links to England than with the US, but militarily this is not so.’ In this King was spot-on, as the Suez Crisis would confirm. Finally, King reminded Bednall about the power of the Olympic Games: ‘Nothing could damage Australia’s reputation abroad more surely than a muddle over the Games.’6

King reassured Bednall that he was on track to re-establish The Argus as one of the world’s great newspapers, but the resilience of competitors The Sun in the morning and The Herald in the afternoon was a challenge. Bednall managed to turn a loss of £92,623 at The Argus and The Australasian in 1954 into a modest profit of £50,233 in 1954–55.7 In his first year Bednall also increased the paper’s circulation — from 160,000 to 168,000 copies per day — which put it ahead of The Age (128,000) but still well behind The Sun (440,000). But his attempts to diversify and expand the product often fell on deaf ears in London. Bednall had a bold plan for The Argus to launch an evening paper to take on The Herald, with a pre-lunch edition and a ‘mass’ edition at 3 pm, but no one in London was interested.8 It was no wonder that his enthusiasm started to ebb from newspapers and flow towards television, which seemed to offer limitless opportunities. He resigned from The Argus in 1955 and received a parting note from King at the end of the year, wishing him well in 1956. ‘I am glad to hear you are likely to be the general manager of General Television,’ King noted.9

On 18 April 1956 it was announced that the General Television Corporation (known as GTV) had been granted one of the two commercial television licences in Melbourne. The other licence went to The Herald and Weekly Times, confirming the suspicion that the established media groups were always favourites to pick up the licences. In what was another compelling example of the Labor Party’s inability to unite on anything during its lowest point, an application by Doc Evatt and the Australian Workers’ Union came up against a bid by the notoriously conservative Sir Frank Packer that also included the NSW Labor Council’s 2KY radio station. Evatt’s application was contrary to the royal commission’s opposition to political parties holding a licence, which meant the bid was at best misguided, and at worst a demonstration of Labor picking a fight it didn’t need to be in.

There were seven licence applications in Sydney but only four in Melbourne. GTV’s secretary, V.G.H. Harrison, said: ‘The great object of the corporation now that it has been granted a licence will be to get on the air in time to cover the Olympic Games for the people of Melbourne.’ In Sydney the two licences went to Sir Frank Packer’s TCN 9 and a Fairfax subsidiary, Amalgamated Television Services (ATN), ensuring that the first four television licences issued in Australia were awarded to organisations that already had media interests.

Bednall had got what he wanted. And as general manager of GTV-9, he would have to deliver the modest offering of only eight and a half hours of programming a week in the first year of its operation, 14 and a half hours in the second year and 27 and a half hours in the third. Its crosstown rival, the HSV-7 station, was far more optimistic, planning 35 hours a week in its first year and 50 hours in its second. Sir Arthur Warner’s conservative approach was based on the forecast that only 8,000 television sets would be sold in Victoria in the first year.10

Warner took an almost defeatist air into the looming television battle. He told Bednall that he didn’t need to get GTV on air first. He should take his time: HSV would dominate TV advertising anyway because of its newspaper interests, and GTV should accept that it would be a worthy second. Bednall didn’t believe this and tried unsuccessfully to convince Warner otherwise. He gave up in the end, but he still refused to accept that GTV could not better its competitors. ‘They don’t understand these fellows … newspaper advertising is a great promotion but word of mouth is more powerful and that’s what we’ll do,’ he told one new employee.11

Bednall was up against a tough, cashed-up, buoyant rival which was committed to show almost four times as much content as his station. He had never run a television station, had never been on television, and had no one at his disposal who knew more than he did about any of it. Now he had to turn an old factory into a television studio in time to broadcast the Olympic Games.

*

The Empire might be in decline, but Britain was trying to hang on to its status as a world power. And during the Cold War, the best way to show that you were still pre-eminent was to have atomic weapons. The Soviet Union had done it with its own atomic explosion in 1949, and there was a determination in the United States to match and then outstrip the Soviets when it came to the power and range of its weaponry. Britain had opted in to the arms race, and if anyone had any doubts about the impact the first tests at Montebello had on the British mood, they needed only to look at the tabloid Daily Mirror. ‘Today Britain is GREAT BRITAIN again — in the eyes of the world,’ the front-page story stated.

The orange-coloured flash of the explosion of Britain’s first atomic bomb did more than signal the unleashing of a new and terrifying weapon of war. It changed a world still ruled by power politics. It signalled the undisputed return of Britain to her historic position as one of the great world powers. Today she stands alongside America and Russia in possessing not only the secret of the atomic weapon, but also the power to produce it.12

Australia had become Britain’s handmaiden in its attempt to reclaim primacy in the changing world order. The Australian view, however, made it all sound like a Commonwealth mutual back-scratching exercise. When the time came to announce the Maralinga nuclear tests, the minister for supply, Howard Beale, made clear what was behind Australia’s cooperation with Britain:

It is a challenge to Australian men to show that the pioneering spirit of our forefathers who developed our country is still the driving force of achievement.

The whole project is a striking example of inter-Common-wealth cooperation on the grand scale. England has the bomb and the know how; we have the open spaces, much technical skills and great willingness to help the Motherland. Between us, we should help to build the defences of the free world and make historic advances in harnessing the forces of nature.13

What Beale — and anyone else associated with the tests — failed to point out was that the Mosaic tests at Maralinga were not actually atomic tests — they were trialling the triggering devices for hydrogen weapons that were to be tested the following year.14

The omission was typical of the public discussion about the nuclear tests. There were limits on how much information was put in the public domain. There were ‘D notices’, which were security notices advising newspaper editors not to publish certain information because of the sensitivity of the details. These were a preventative measure, but they were supplemented by public and private rebuttals of any doubt, contrary positions, or even gentle inquiries about the tests. Objections were dismissed, and misgivings swatted away. Critics were marginalised and dismissed.

Some of this aggressive counterattack came from the politicians, but often it emanated from the scientists conducting the tests. Walter MacDougall, in the massive hinterland that most of the nation rarely thought about, traversed the intricate routes which many Indigenous Australians used and concluded that forcibly removing these communities from their traditional lands would be the end of them, as it would condemn them to an aimless wandering far removed from the food and water sources they knew so well. He wrote down his observations, which he planned to publish in an Adelaide newspaper in November 1955:

Whenever the white man finds something of value to him in any Aboriginal area the Aborigines are pushed aside. I believe that what is happening to these natives is contrary to the spirit of the declaration of human rights in the United Nations charter. If no check is possible they seem doomed to increase the number of displaced persons in the work world — to become prideless, homeless vagabonds living by begging, stealing and government handouts.

The reaction to the proposed article became a stick to beat MacDougall with, and a means to prevent him from raising the issue again. After being hauled before the head of the Woomera range and told he had no right to speak publicly, MacDougall pushed back and refused to be intimidated. The matter was taken further, and the Australian department of supply’s chief scientist, Alan Butement, weighed in: MacDougall ‘had a lamentable lack of balance in his outlook in that he is apparently placing the affairs of a handful of natives above those of the British Commonwealth of Nations’.15

It wasn’t an isolated example. When the British scientist Scott Russell was quizzed about the fate of Indigenous Australians at Maralinga, he responded that they were a dying race and were dispensable.16 Later, the British-born scientist Ernest Titterton, one of the founding members of the Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee, claimed that if Indigenous Australians didn’t like the tests, they could vote to change the government. Such ignorance was stupefying: Titterton failed to take into account that it wasn’t until 1967 that Indigenous Australians even got the vote. This hubris was at the heart of the atomic tests to which Menzies signed Australia up; secrecy in the national interest was one thing, but misinformation, wilful ignorance, and sly character-assassination were just as dangerous.

In all the discussions, scientific analysis, and forecasting, the impact of the fallout from the nuclear tests on the Olympic Games barely got a mention. The earlier round of tests in 1956 generated anxiety across the country because radioactive rain fell as far afield as Queensland, but why was there no debate about the next round of tests, scheduled for September? Wasn’t it possible that if the weather patterns were in the wrong place at the wrong time, there would be debris over Melbourne when the world’s attention was on the Games? Patrick Sheehan, the head of mining and metallurgy at the Ballarat School of Mines, certainly thought so.

Sheehan studied rainfall after atomic explosions and noticed a pattern of freak rain soon after the explosion. He forecast rain for Melbourne for three to five days after the September explosion in Maralinga — ‘just two months before the Olympic Games’, he noted. ‘If atomic explosions have no effect on weather, and are not harmful to humans, why are sites selected on the opposite side of the world to those countries which originate the tests?’17

It was a fair question, but not too many people were asking it and certainly no one was answering it. Yet weather did appear to be a factor when deciding to go ahead with the blast. One clue came from tests director William Penney’s notes as he contemplated the final timing of the September blast: ‘Am studying arrangements firings but not easy. Have Olympic Games in mind but still believe weather will not continue bad.’18

The British acknowledged that there needed to be a higher grade of information about the weather that could not only provide more certainty around the blast times but also give more reliable data about the prevailing winds for potential fallout. The best location for the weather station was identified as the Rawlinson Ranges, about 560 kilometres north-west of Maralinga. Butement believed the station was important in ‘ensuring that no circumstances will arise which cause a change in the drift of the fallout to the east or south east centres of population’.19 Regardless of what was said officially and publicly, there was no doubt the scientists were well aware of the how the fallout could be affected by prevailing weather conditions.

MacDougall opposed the station’s location from the start. He believed the road to the station would not only intrude into the lives of the local communities but also open the way for others to follow, including miners. He was also concerned at the prospect of the station’s staff having an impact on the Indigenous Australians’ lives. MacDougall wrote to every relevant bureaucrat he knew to protest about setting up a station in a reserve: it was against policy and against common sense.

He received some initial comforting noises, but once it emerged that MacDougall was about to raise the issue with the Adelaide papers, all signs of support evaporated. He was described as ‘making quite a fuss’; one of his superiors reminded him of his obligations as a Commonwealth officer, and also warned him off speaking to the press. But MacDougall was correct: the original agreement on Indigenous protection made clear that no roads would be built into reserves or interfere with areas that were important to tribal life.20

The station went ahead anyway. Britain paid for it to be built and Australia agreed to pay for the running and maintenance costs for ten years. It named the station Giles after a British-born nineteenth-century explorer of Central Australia, Ernest Giles. Building the station meant carving a road through an Indigenous reserve largely peopled by Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara speakers, from Finke, just south of Alice Springs. The Finke River gave the place its name; although it was usually dry, it was part of a 350-million-year-old river system. It was ancient country, and it was to Giles that Robert Macaulay was sent on his first appointment as native patrol officer.

He started on his fiancée’s Jean’s birthday, 31 August. Although Macaulay was a Department of Supply employee, he was also given the titles of Protector of Aborigines in South Australia and Native Welfare Officer for Western Australia. He spent two weeks in Perth, acquainting himself with the files on Indigenous communities in the remote parts of the state, spent time with the relevant bureaucrats, flew to Adelaide, and from there flew on to his new job. MacDougall was waiting for him at the Mount Davies airstrip, half a day’s drive from Giles.

Macaulay had never spent any time outside of Sydney. He arrived in a landscape that was harsh and subtle, confronting a brutal climate and a complex network of an ancient communities of Indigenous Australians, of whom he had only the most basic understanding. Giles was a building site: there were up to 30 construction workers putting the station together, and seven or eight meteorologists carrying out some preliminary testing. Macaulay saw an Indigenous camp very close to the station, but it would soon move a couple of kilometres away.

Macaulay slept under canvas and for two weeks was able to pick MacDougall’s brain and hear about his experiences of the vast area the pair were about to share. There was no mention of the tests to come and what role Macaulay would play in them. Instead, he reminded himself of his two duties. The first task, from his bosses at the Department of Supply, was to help cushion the impact between the local communities and the people building — and, later, staffing — the weather station. The second set of directions came from Perth: that Indigenous Australians should remain in their traditional means of life as much as possible.21

Macaulay would implement these two goals with a firm adherence to protocol. He was not MacDougall, seasoned and able to draw on years of experience, who was prepared to grumble and agitate, but a young man trying to find his way in a bewildering and challenging environment. In time, some of the Indigenous Australians would think Macaulay was actually MacDougall’s son: they were both tall and shared some Scottish antecedents, but that was where the resemblance ended. MacDougall made it clear that Macaulay was his junior. For the time being, Macaulay tried to settle in, with neither a vehicle of his own nor a radio to help him.

*

The chefs had finally arrived — from India, Pakistan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. There were ten cooks with experience of Muslim cooking who had been hired in Singapore by the Malayan Olympic Committee, the Royal Inter-Ocean Line, and the RAF. It was not a moment too soon, as the Olympic Village was about to undertake its first dress rehearsals.

On the first three weekends of September the athletes’ village in Heidelberg was put through its paces, to see if it could cope with the 6,200 guests it would have in two months’ time. The journalists went through on the first weekend; the other guinea pigs were 70 executive staff from Sydney and Canberra. The dress rehearsal was playfully called ‘Operation Get Set’. The 70 ‘guests’ slept in the beds, ate the food, and listened to the briefing about safety and medical facilities during the course of the weekend.

The Asian cooks were supervised by one of Melbourne’s best established Chinese chefs, Chinney Poon, who ran a cafe in the city’s Chinatown. Poon had migrated from China in the 1930s, and believed that any Chinese cook would be able to handle the distinct cuisines of the ‘Far East’, whether it was Japanese, Siamese (Thai), Malay, Filipino, or Korean. And all offerings would be accompanied by Australia’s ‘world-class’ rice.22 While 92 per cent of the produce would be Australian — here indeed was the land of plenty — there was a shortage of certain spices. Nations were encouraged to bring along their own spice person to provide any additional flavourings required. Any other gaps in the menu would be covered by a selection of cookery books at the Village Catering Office.23

The simulations worked well enough for Melbourne’s Olympic organisers to declare it a success. Now for the real thing.

*

Colin Bednall had plenty of ideas he wanted to roll out in the next few months, and the more time he had, the better. GTV would become the last of the four stations to launch. The first station was Frank Packer’s TCN-9 in Sydney, which ushered in the first night of Australian television at 7 pm on Sunday 16 September. The opening footage was of a tall, elegant man wearing black tie. This was a gala occasion. Bruce Gyngell, the man in the dinner suit, then uttered the simple words: ‘Good evening and welcome to television.’

Gyngell was speaking from TCN-9’s studios at Willoughby, as two German-made television cameras transmitted his words to thousands of stunned viewers, some of whom were so unsure of what they were watching that they applauded. Although the introduction was simple, the rest of Gyngell’s comments were more in keeping with the anticipation that surrounded the new medium:

We feel very proud to be the first to give you television now and [a] preview of the exciting potential of its future in this country. Television, to millions of people overseas, is more than mere entertainment: it has become a window to a wider and more fascinating world. It is our sincere hope that television in Australia will be the same.24

What followed was six weeks of programming, of about three hours a day, before the station formally launched in October with a full schedule. Gyngell, an erudite former Sydney Grammarian whose great-grandfather had organised the fireworks for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert’s wedding, had become a favourite of Sir Frank Packer. He had been installed as the station’s programming director, which meant a range of duties, including, apparently, introducing the start of television.

There was no doubt that those behind the introduction of television in Australia had grand hopes for the noble purpose of the medium. Those who owned a television set in those opening weeks were able to see a range of overseas programs, providing instant exposure to what was predominantly American popular culture. TCN-9 and Bednall’s rival Melbourne station, known to some as Herald Sun Vision (HSV) after its owners, The Herald & Weekly Times, announced that they would be sharing the cost of those overseas programs, which meant advertisers could access both the Sydney and Melbourne markets. The stations’ rate card offered advertisers the opportunity to sponsor a program on a one-off basis for £160 an hour.25 The technical problems of broadcasting were to be ironed out by test transmissions — usually twice a day during the week — which would help TV manufacturers and retailers decide which type of aerial suited a particular region.26

Television was off and running. Bednall knew what he had to beat.

*

Robert Macaulay finally learnt about the new part of his job before the first atomic test at Maralinga, when MacDougall came back to Giles and told him that what was known as the Buffalo series was imminent. Even then, it wasn’t made clear to Macaulay that a bomb was about to go off. Instead, he was asked to advise on the location of Indigenous Australians and whether any movement was likely within the next few weeks, particularly to the south.27

Macaulay’s first patrol, with a driver while he awaited the arrival of his own vehicle, took him to the Tomkinson, Mann, and Musgrave ranges, along the northern border of South Australia. Whatever he found was as waste of time, because with no radio he lacked the means to contact anyone. Macaulay did meet some Indigenous Australians but, after speaking with missionaries and locals, concluded that they would not be moving.

With the date of the first blast looming, Supply Minister Beale submitted a report to cabinet: ‘The Safety Committee point out that strict continuous ground and air patrols will ensure that there will be no natives inside the prohibited zone, but that there may be a few in the area immediately outside the prohibited zone.’28 MacDougall and Macaulay were considered to be part of that ‘continuous ground control’.

But the ground and air patrolling was neither strict nor continuous. Only two aerial searches were made of an area related to the intended explosion site — the first was 17 days before the first bomb, the second close to the firing of the fourth bomb, in October. One of the pilots involved thought that a single search of the area was enough because Indigenous Australians ‘sleep most of the afternoon’ and therefore didn’t move around much.29

Another observer saw a group of 24 Indigenous Australians north-west of Maralinga, about four days before the first blast. They had left a mission and were heading south when they were picked up by a station truck. Another member of the Australian Radiation Detection Unit reported sightings of what he believed to be Indigenous Australians’ hunting fires in the prohibited zone. MacDougall took the report seriously and went looking for them. No one else believed the ARDU member. Radio traffic derided what he had seen. ‘A communication came back to me that I was going troppo. I had been up there too long; did I realize what sort of damage I would be doing by finding Aborigines where Aborigines could not be,’ the officer said. His report was regarded with ‘absolute disbelief’.30 But MacDougall found them.

Neither MacDougall nor Macaulay could patrol the enormous outback hinterland to ascertain the Indigenous Australians’ location, how many there were, and whether they were going to move into — or already were in — the prohibited zone around the blast site. MacDougall admitted to one scientist that his job was impossible. A member of the South Australian Aboriginal Protection Board later said that keeping Indigenous Australians out of the prohibited areas was a ‘hopeless task’.31

One of the key British scientists involved, William Penney, later admitted he had no idea how the patrols operated: ‘It was a very empty area. If there had been any Aboriginals I thought [MacDougall] would know about them and that sort of thing. If he was satisfied and he told me it was okay, then that was the best that could be done.’32

And so, on 27 September 1956, the first of the bombs went off.

*

On the same day, Colin Bednall’s GTV network rolled out its first test program, a John Wayne western, to viewers in Melbourne and Geelong. The excellent quality of the images was courtesy of the station’s transmitter, set at a height of 700 metres on Mount Dandenong, east of the city.

Bednall was delighted, and couldn’t help spruiking the feedback GTV had received. ‘We had scores of telephone calls, including calls from Americans visiting Australia who said they had never seen better transmission in America,’ he said.33 Better than America? That was saying something.