THE SHOW

Mark Aarons was an investigative reporter on ABC Radio National for twenty years, and was the founding executive producer of Background Briefing. He is the author or co-author of six books, including investigations of war criminals in Australia and the Vatican’s role in smuggling mass killers, and works on Israel, Western intelligence, and East Timor. His most recent book was The Family File, an account of four generations of the Aarons family who were members of the Communist Party of Australia over seven decades, based on the largest single collection of ASIO files in history.

John Grenville joined the National Civic Council (NCC, also known as The Movement and The Show) in 1957, and operated as an influential but secret NCC member in the trade union movement for a decade. A committed Catholic, he was a senior official of the Victorian Trades Hall Council in the 1960s and 1970s, and federal secretary of the Federated Clerks’ Union from 1973 to 1975. He resigned from the NCC and his union position in 1975 in the midst of a bitter faction fight that ultimately tore the organisation apart in the early 1980s. He continued to work for the labour movement, as a freelance industrial advocate for many small and medium-sized unions.