CHAPTER ONE

‘WHAT’S THE STORY, MORNING GLORY?’

In December 1975, I was in Sydney, aged 30 and feeling pretty pleased with myself because I had achieved my two life’s ambitions. A month earlier my book Damned Whores and God’s Police had been published and now I was starting my new job as a journalist at the National Times. I was still almost trembling with pride at having written my first book. I could scarcely believe that my labour of the past four years was now in print; I could hold it in my hand and see my name on its spine. I placed the book on a shelf, inserted between other volumes written by well-known authors, and looked in awe. There I was, in the company of real writers. Although the reviews so far ranged from sceptical to hostile, I did not allow myself to be upset, or deterred. I was a published writer now. I was, I hoped, on my way. And, after brief forays into journalism that mostly involved book reviews or writing for alternative and underground publications, I had just been hired by the mainstream media and was about to become a real journalist. Newspaper jobs were never advertised in the 1970s, and rarely are today, but Max Suich, the wily editor of what was fast becoming a journalistically groundbreaking newspaper, had decided to cast a wider-than-usual net to find new talent. I’d answered an advertisement for ‘energetic self-starters’ and been put on a three-month trial. Despite having recommendations from a couple of acquaintances who were already on staff, Suich was sceptical about me because I’d been a post-graduate student at the University of Sydney for the past few years. I hastened to assure him that I was not ‘a fucking academic’. Apart from my book, which had just a few weeks earlier received front-page treatment by the National Times, helping get it—and me—widely known, I was, I told him, an accomplished writer. I exaggerated how much freelance experience I actually had, but was able to point to a couple of articles I’d written for his predecessor, Trevor Kennedy. I’d be valuable from day one, I promised, and proposed he start me as an A grade, three levels from the top of the journalists’ salary scale. Suich laughed in my face: ‘You’ll start as a C’, he said. ‘You can earn yourself an A.’ It took me a year.

Suich wasn’t there on my first day but his secretary Maureen Doughty showed me my desk and then left me to it. I must have come in too early, I told myself, because none of the other journalists was there yet. I sat down and picked up the phone, thinking I’d better energetically start and find a story. Around lunchtime David Dale, Susie Anthony and a few other journalists from the Sydney Morning Herald stopped by. Was I interested in a spot of lunch? A short time later we were arranging ourselves around a table at the Italo Club, a fairly basic Italian joint upstairs in a building in the heart of Chinatown. By the time I was back at my desk a couple of hours later, I had learned two things about my new job: that lunch was an essential part of our work and there was this thing called the New Journalism.

I ferreted out the article from New York magazine in which Tom Wolfe’s long essay described the ‘new journalism’.¹ It was, I learned, a form of reporting where any topic was fair game, where the reporter could insert herself into the ‘story’, and draw on techniques of fiction to set scenes and create atmosphere, to evoke people’s appearance and explore their emotions rather than just state their age, their sex and, if they were women, their marital and maternal status, as was standard newspaper practice. One of Wolfe’s famous and trend-setting early pieces was entitled ‘Radical chic’,² and it described a ritzy fundraising party at conductor Leonard Bernstein’s thirteen-room penthouse duplex on Park Avenue. The guests of honour were a bunch of Black Panthers, the militant African-American group raising hell on the fringes of the civil rights movement by combining black pride and community programs with aggressive, sometimes borderline criminal, political activities. Wolfe’s article was an exuberant piece of writing that managed simultaneously to enter the nightmares of the great conductor/composer, and to mock the pretensions (the ‘radical chic’) of the Park Avenue crowd cosying up to gun-toting, tight-pants-wearing men whose Afros had not ‘been shaped and trimmed like a topiary hedge’. Wolfe was rewriting the rules of journalism. The article was merciless in its mockery, but it wasn’t satire. The New Journalism depicted the world as it was, with its ugliness and profanities as well as its kindnesses and confusions. It was absorbing and addictive and, where editors allowed it, feverishly imitated by journalists in newspaper offices all around the world, at the least the English-speaking world. I was one of them.

One of my earliest articles, written ‘on-spec’ since I wasn’t sure that Suich would be receptive, described Christmas Day 1975 in Belmore Park near Central Railway in Sydney. A friend and I were driving past on our way to a festive lunch, when we noticed a number of homeless men sprawled on park benches. On the back seat of our car was an array of freshly cooked food, far more than would be needed at our lunch. We each had the same thought. We took one of the turkeys and, in our atheistic version of Christmas cheer, offered it to the men. My article was self-mocking. We had not foreseen how they would claw at the meat with bare hands, stuff it into stomachs so unaccustomed to food of such quantity and richness that they would spew it up immediately. Not only that. We fled, leaving behind our nice plate and our do-gooder naivety, as a couple of the men unzipped their pants and, fumbling for their penises, told us what they’d really like for Christmas.

The next day I left my story on Suich’s desk.

‘Did you write this?’ he demanded some hours later, brandishing my little composition.

I knew it was an unusual piece, I knew the National Times was not as adventurous as Nation Review, the other weekly newspaper that was enlivening the media scene in the 1970s. The transport magnate Gordon Barton had launched Nation Review in 1970 as a newspaper that characterised itself as ‘the Ferret: lean and nosy’ and in both tone and subject matter, it went where the rest of media seldom trod. Today, it would be seen as utterly misogynist and probably racist as well; it reflected the times, perhaps a little too faithfully.

‘It was just an experiment,’ I responded somewhat defensively. ‘I wanted to try a different way of writing.’

I can’t remember his exact words although they were along the lines that it was a great piece of writing, but that I’d better not think that I could spend all my time on this bleeding hearts stuff when there were real stories out there and we—or, to be more precise, I—was going to get them.

That was fine with me. I wanted to broaden my knowledge and I certainly wanted to avoid being typecast as only able to write about women or other subjects that were seen as ‘soft’. It annoyed me that there was such a hierarchy of status given to subjects and that I would not be taken seriously as a journalist if I was seen as only interested in ‘bleeding hearts’ stories. Politics and crime were the big stories of the era and the only way to build a reputation was to write about these. Later, with some of my male colleagues, we would find new ways of writing stories about particularly brutal or squalid examples of sexual abuse, stories the mainstream media in those days never touched outside their crime pages. We learned to bring in the victims’ point of view and to explore the murky terrain of he said/she said in ways that had never previously been done in Australian journalism. But for now I was finding my feet, learning as fast as I could and loving every moment of it. I was fortunate that I did not have to serve a cadetship, writing shipping news or covering town hall meetings. I was disadvantaged in that I did not learn shorthand, nor was I ever taught the basics of reporting, but I felt more than compensated by being able to go straight into the big, often very big, stories and to have as much time, and as much space, as I needed.

For the first time since I was a teenager when I’d worked in a bank, I had to go to the office each day. I was unaware until Suich called as I was sitting down with guests to a lunch I was hosting on New Year’s Day that journalists worked public holidays: ‘Get your arse in here,’ he’d commanded. I made my apologies and headed for Jones Street, Broadway. The compensation for working public holidays was an extra two weeks annual leave, I discovered. That certainly made up for it. I was in a real job, with deadlines, and working alongside a bunch of highly talented, very opinionated and extremely competitive individuals. I had met John Edwards when he worked for Whitlam’s Labor minister, Clyde Cameron, in Canberra; later, after writing some memorable political profiles for the Australian Financial Review, he was now writing politics for the National Times. I knew Yvonne Preston, renowned for her writing on social and political subjects, from around the traps. Both of them had put in a word for me with Suich. I knew a few other journalists who were part of the Sydney Push, that group of free-spirited and argumentative individuals, mostly self-styled libertarians and anarchists, I had gravitated towards soon after arriving in Sydney. Their numbers also included gamblers and labourers as well as academics, students, poets and people who proudly referred to themselves as layabouts. Our Friday night watering-hole was the Criterion in Sussex Street where, I now found, working for the ‘capitalist press’ was contentious. Our arguments became even more belligerent. I was leaving the safety of the crowd, I realised. I was on my own, I’d have to make my own way.

Eventually I wrote about everything from Defence procurement to children’s books, social workers to corrupt cops, rape to armed robberies, from the murder of police sources to the drug habits of the ‘gonzo’ writer Hunter S. Thompson. But that first week I had started with the familiar, writing a story about what happens to women once they leave a refuge, those safe havens recently established by the women’s movement for women and children escaping domestic violence. It was easy, being a subject I already knew, and the women who ran Elsie Women’s Refuge in Glebe, which I’d helped start the year before, were only too willing to help. Two women who with their kids had recently been moved into public housing agreed to be interviewed on the record. I found out how to organise a photographer and by Thursday I had the story, complete with pics, on Suich’s desk. It was my first published article but it had absolutely zero impact, including with my editor, because the paper came out the weekend of the emotional and rowdy federal election that saw Malcolm Fraser, the Liberal leader who had engineered the ‘constitutional coup’ that led to the sacking of Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam on 11 November 1975, confirmed in office and the dismissed Whitlam consigned to opposition.

Ironically enough, my very next story, which hit the mark with Suich for being tough, came from knowledge I’d acquired during my radical political activities. For the past several years I had been active in the women’s movement, working on a range of issues including publications (I’d helped start Refractory Girl, the first women’s studies journal) as well as being one of the group that had occupied a vacant house in Glebe and opened Australia’s first modern women’s refuge, Elsie. I’d also taken part in resident actions aimed at saving low-income housing and some of Sydney’s older buildings and in prisoner action groups where I met people on both sides of the law. I was able to use such knowledge several times and it resulted in some of my most successful stories. I would make my name, in that first year, by writing a series of articles about the New South Wales prison system that caused a political ruckus and put pressure on the recently established Royal Commission into NSW prisons. Much of the information that I ‘revealed’ was common knowledge among lefty lawyers and others who agitated for prison reform, but the rest of the press wasn’t interested. Once it was clear that Suich was willing to go down paths other newspapers shied away from, the scope for us to break major stories was almost boundless. The first time it happened was the result of Suich mentioning his suspicion that the police routinely disregarded the law requiring the destruction of fingerprints of people who had been charged but not convicted.

‘But everyone knows the cops keep them,’ I’d chipped in. ‘Where’s the story in that?’

‘We suspect they keep them,’ he corrected me. ‘We don’t know for sure.’

‘Yes we do.’

‘Can you prove it?’

‘Yes.’

It was common knowledge around the courts, with any number of lawyers having first-hand experience of a client’s prints being retained. I no longer have the story and I can’t remember how I assembled the proof, but I do know that it was not difficult and that the story when it was published caused all sorts of strife. After that, I got put onto a lot more police stories. But I also found myself needing to confront a fundamental question about what my life had become when Suich asked me to take down a large poster I had pinned to the wall beside my desk. It showed a stylised photograph of a NSW police officer with the words ‘tomorrow’s bacon!’ scrawled across the top. It was a striking piece of work, designed by the renowned graphic artist Chips Mackinolty for the Earthworks Collective, a group based at the Tin Sheds at Sydney University that produced powerful political posters. Now my boss was asking me—or was he telling me?—to take it down. I hesitated. I understood he was in fact asking me to decide whether I was still an activist, or if I was willing to take my heart off my sleeve and become an observer and reporter of events. Hadn’t I already made that choice by joining the National Times? Or was I trying to have it both ways? It was an argument that journalists continue to have. We were not expected to have no political views, but we were expected to not put them on display. In the US, this proscription extended to reporters being discouraged from taking part in political rallies, lest their presence be seen to compromise their objectivity. I was astonished to learn that Linda Greenhouse, who covered the Supreme Court for the New York Times, was criticised for joining the massive march in Washington DC in 1989 in favour of abortion rights. In Australia, the rules were not as stringent. In 2000 many journalists, including the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, would join the several hundred thousand people who walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the March for Indigenous Reconciliation. But in 1976 I was being told I could not display an anti-police poster in the newsroom. I had already been attacked by many of my friends for what they saw as ‘selling out’. I’d argued that the National Times was different, that we could expose the kinds of corruption and abuse of power that our political activism was all about. This was just a different way of doing it. And, I liked to think, perhaps a more effective way since we reached a much larger audience and we had the authority of the Fairfax media company behind us. Not many of my friends bought this argument. They were purists. Later some like Wendy Bacon, who I knew from the Sydney Push and who was also active in resident action and women in prison groups and who had attacked me the most vehemently, themselves joined the media. She wrote ground-breaking articles about corruption for the National Times. But early in 1976, you were a journalist or you were an activist. You could not be both, or at least not in the newsroom. For the rest of my life I would continue to be torn by these conflicting and, it seemed, incompatible desires. It had been a problem for me while I was writing Damned Whores and God’s Police, although that had been more about how I split my time between writing and activism. As a journalist working for a mainstream newspaper I would never have the latitude enjoyed by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, who were their own publishers, and so could engage politically while they wrote articles and novels (and continued to teach). I had to choose. I took the poster down. For now, at least, I was choosing journalism.

The National Times ran articles that were not just long but by the standards of daily newspapers, digressive. We used adjectives and ego-enhancing bylines at a time when the Sydney Morning Herald, the flagship publication of the stately Fairfax newspaper empire, regarded these as rare rewards for major pieces or favoured writers. You were more likely to see a piece ‘From our Canberra correspondent’ than one that disclosed who had actually written the story. The National Times was a unique publication. Without the obligation to report on the news of the day, or even the week (although since we went to press at 11 a.m. on Saturday for Sunday morning publication, we could update stories if necessary, to ensure they were current, and sometimes it was legally astute to do so), it became known for its magazine-style journalism. The paper and its reporting staff were free to roam as far as their editor would allow.

The paper had been established in 1971, the idea of Vic Carroll, the man who had turned the Australian Financial Review into a commercial and journalistic success during the 1960s. He had presided over the covering of the early days of the oil and minerals exploration booms and supervised political and business coverage that launched the careers of Max Walsh, Robert Gottliebsen, Peter Robinson and Trevor Kennedy. Carroll was a dour man who said little but who, you felt, was always sizing you up under those hooded eyes of his. He was, it turned out. I was amazed, and gratified, to discover later that he thought highly of my work. Carroll had once been a stockbroker and understood the ways of money but he knew that journalism was more than just reporting what was in front of you. The essence of journalism was ‘curiosity’, he said in 2013 after being awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Macquarie University.³ Carroll proposed that Fairfax start up a weekend paper that continued, and expanded, the Financial Review’s market. He was managing editor of both papers from 1970 to 1975 before, in 1980, being put in charge of transforming the Sydney Morning Herald into a modern, quality newspaper.

Max Suich was 33 when he became the paper’s second editor in late 1972. He’d been Japan correspondent filing mostly for the Financial Review, covering the big trade and economic stories of the relationship between Japan and Australia. He was single-minded and ambitious, and he succeeded in turning the National Times into a newspaper legend, attracting and then managing the egos of some extraordinary talent. Suich had reddish, rapidly thinning hair and a wicked grin; he could be decidedly brutal as an editor and brusque as a person, but he was nevertheless kind and even shy in some situations. He became embarrassed when a female reporter asked for the day off to have an abortion.

‘Take all the time you need,’ he said. ‘Just don’t talk about it.’

When it came to our work he gave us very free rein. He was adventurous and encouraging and willing to listen to any ideas his staff wanted to run past him.

‘What’s the story, morning glory?’ was Suich’s way of greeting every one of his reporters. Whatever the subject, however mundane, or potentially sensational, he was interested in hearing what we had. Everything was ‘a story’ which I found confusing at first, thinking stories were fiction, but I soon mastered the lingo and relished in the freedom of being able to write about anything that was interesting or, increasingly as I got into stories of crime and corruption, illegal. I began to write more about the police, including the activities of the Special Branch, and about the notorious but previously hard to prove role of some senior police in orchestrating and profiting from criminal activities. And I wrote a great deal about prisons, but also continued to write about subjects that were denigrated as ‘bleeding hearts’ journalism by Suich and his tough-minded contemporaries. Their Friday lunches, were always at a fancy restaurant, where Suich, Carroll, Walsh, Robinson, Fred Brenchley (covering politics in Canberra, but a frequent visitor to Sydney and later editor of the Financial Review) and Paddy McGuinness, the Financial Review’s economics editor and, also, later its editor would dissect the problems of the world and, just as importantly, Fairfax their employer. They were long and extremely liquid affairs. Occasionally, I would be invited to join them. Sometimes Valerie Lawson or Deborah Light from the Financial Review might be there, but it was mostly an all-male affair. I was keen to have these men respect me, and I knew there was no better place to be learning, but I did not see any contradiction between being interested in both the tough stuff and stories about the disadvantages or outright suffering of those who were being excluded from the overall benefits of society. They indulged my little one-woman stand, but no one took it seriously. That wasn’t where ‘the story’ was.

People today look back on the National Times in the 1970s as some kind of halcyon era of journalism and they are right. Our journalism was different, and so was our sense of ourselves. At first, we thought ourselves lucky to be at the pointy-end of the way journalism was evolving, but before long we took it for granted and I, at least, developed a certain smugness. Not only were we right, we were better.

Our office shared a floor with the Sun, the afternoon tabloid that favoured racy headlines and was in frenzied competition with the Daily Mirror, produced by the Murdoch stable a few blocks away in Holt Street, Surry Hills. Derryn Hinch, later well-known as a radio host in Melbourne, and in 2016 elected to the Senate as an Independent, was editor of the Sun. He was a friendly and approachable guy, with the equally affable Terry Hayes, now an internationally best-selling writer of fiction, as his sidekick. I used to see Hinch at the pub, or drop by his office occasionally, so I knew him well enough to storm in one day in May 1976 to protest the headline, ‘Rebel mum suicides in jail’. There were many ways to describe the German radical, Ulrike Meinhof, but ‘rebel mum’ was a bit too reductionist, even for a Sydney tabloid. Meinhof did have twin daughters but, in teaming up with Andreas Baader to form the Red Army Faction, or the Baader-Meinhof gang as it was colloquially known, she went way further than your average rebel, even in the 1960s. Meinhof advocated, and practised, urban guerilla warfare against the state and individual industrialists and was eventually caught, imprisoned and sentenced. There is still controversy as to whether she suicided—or was murdered—in her cell. The Sun, of course, had no room for such ambiguity.

Suich’s deputy was Evan Whitton, a tall long-faced man with a deadpan sense of humour that often got lost in translation when his words were interpreted literally, but he had a ferocious dedication to, as he put it, ‘naming the guilty men’. He had been a prominent reporter at the Melbourne tabloid Truth when it exposed the abortion rackets in the late-1960s—where police protected, and thus perpetuated, abortionists who were not always too particular about the safety or even the lives of the desperate women who sought their services. Later he had worked for News Ltd, first at the Weekend Australian and then the Daily Telegraph before Vic Carroll brought him over to the National Times where he brought the same forensic intensity to organised crime and police corruption in NSW as he had to the Victorian abortion industry. He and I worked closely together on many of my big reporting jobs.

It is difficult to think of any of the reporters engaged by Suich who were not—and, those who survive, mostly still are—stars of journalism. During my three years there I was fortunate enough to work with these writers of extraordinary and distinctive talent—Andrew Clark, John Edwards, David Marr, Paul Kelly, Robert Milliken, Adele Horin, David Hickie, Glennys Bell, Meryl Constance, Yvonne Preston, Bruce Stannard and John Jost—and to count many as lifelong friends. Patrick Cook was the cartoonist and Ward O’Neill drew caricatures. I was thrilled when cartoonist Jenny Coopes, came on board as well. I knew Jenny from the Push but she was also a star in feminist circles for ‘The Adventures of Super Fem’, a witty regular strip she had drawn in the Whitlam era that parodied Elizabeth Reid, Whitlam’s women’s adviser, and was published in Liberaction, the publication of the iconoclastic Hobart Women’s Action Group.

As well as being economics editor for the Financial Review P.P. (Paddy) McGuinness contributed an economics column and reviewed films for the National Times. His picture byline, showing the dark glasses he always wore because his pale Irish eyes could not tolerate bright light, led to lots of jokes about us being the only newspaper to employ a blind film reviewer. Paddy wore nothing but black long before it became de rigueur for the rest of us, and seemed unconcerned about his rapidly expanding girth. He loved his food and drink and was unconvinced of the merits of any form of physical exercise.

Elisabeth Wynhausen was probably my best friend at the office. She was a tough-talking, soft-hearted, eternally optimistic, nervously energetic woman with a thin thatch of soft dark hair, who’d come to the Natty Times (as we’d started calling the paper) from the Bulletin. We’d known each other through the Balmain Push and the literary world; she aspired to be a ‘real’ writer and no one I’ve ever met agonised more over every word. She often pulled all-nighters in the office in order to meet a deadline. We’d come in the next day and she’d be still clacking away, her ashtray piled high, and the floor around her desk littered with ripped, discarded pieces of the three-ply slips of paper we used to type our stories on.

We were a tight and rowdy bunch, banging away on our typewriters, most of us with a cigarette on the go as we typed, pushed the carriage return, ripped out the three-ply, inserted another set and knocked out a few more pars. If we needed space on our desks, to read, or to take notes while we interviewed someone on the phone, we’d simply upend our typewriters onto their backs. There was nothing fancy about the setup; the desks were well-used, the floor was a ghastly pale linoleum which could, and often did, absorb a cigarette butt ground underfoot. If we’d been in a proper newsroom, we could have yelled ‘copy’ when we’d finished our story and a boy—later there were copygirls as well—would scoop up the story and run it over to the subeditors. But we were a small outfit, about a dozen of us, in a windowless space that had been carved out of the cavernous expanse of the fifth floor of the Herald building in Jones Street, Ultimo, that is now occupied by the University of Technology Sydney. We would separate and collate the three-ply ourselves: one copy for the subs, one for the editor and one to keep. That was seldom the end of the process. Apart from any queries the subs might have, there would be wrangles with Max, decisions about what could be cut so as to fit one of Patrick Cook’s acerbic cartoons and, increasingly often with my stories, there would be long hard Friday night negotiations with Frank Hoffey, our defamation lawyer.

Once it was all done, we would stroll across Broadway to The Australian hotel. It was routine for us to have a few rounds after work and on Friday nights to stay on until very late. We mostly drank beer, but the first time I joined my new colleagues I was astonished to see they were drinking Veuve Clicquot. I was embarrassed, too, because I had no money. When it came time for my round, I had to borrow from John Edwards. If you went to the pub any other time, Suich would most likely already be there. The amount of time he, and we, spent at the pub is startling by today’s standards. Today if you needed a private chat with a staff member, you would do it over a coffee. In those days, if Suich, or any of the blokes, wanted a really private chat they could go to the front bar where women were still banned. A bunch of Sydney feminists were working on that, staging protests and ‘drink-ins’ at pubs just a few kilometres further along Parramatta Road. Before long, the ‘ladies lounges’, those rooms at the back of pubs where, notoriously, women would shell the peas for tea that night while downing a shandy or two, went the way of the girdle and other restricting irritants in the lives of women.

On the fourth floor of the Fairfax building was the photo-compositing room where the pages of the newspapers were laid out and where journalists were mostly forbidden. Sometimes, late on a Friday, I would be allowed to go down to check the final version of my story on ‘the stone’, as it was still called although the old hot-metal process of making up pages with metal letters had been superseded. Union rules remained the same, however, and there were few unions as protective of their sphere as the Printing and Kindred Industries Union (PKIU). On the fourth floor, photocopying was printers’ work, as I discovered when I attempted to make a copy of a page and found myself inadvertently precipitating a potential demarcation dispute. Below us the presses hummed, less noisy than they’d once been but you knew they were there. The only contact we had with the men who ran the presses was at the pub. The father of the chapel, as the head of the PKIU onsite was known, liked to drink with journalists. Especially women journalists.

Women were increasingly being employed in journalism and no longer just on the social pages, which themselves were undergoing a makeover. In 1971 the Sydney Morning Herald had replaced its fashion, housewifery, society notes and social pages with ‘Look!’ a livelier, lifestyle approach that at least nodded to the emerging ideas of women’s liberation. Suzanne Baker, a journalist with a background in film, was brought in to do the job although she had moved back to film by the time I started at Fairfax four years later. Gavin Souter’s history of Fairfax records that from a ratio of about one woman to every eleven men in the 1950s and 1960s, the numbers of women doubled between 1969 and 1973, from 15 to 31.⁴ But although I was part of a distinct minority, it did not feel that way at the National Times. Perhaps this was because the ratio of women was greater there than on the other titles, but also because we were not restricted in what we could write. In fact, it was often the other way round, with me wanting to write stories about women and being encouraged, instead, to do the tough pieces about the so-called ‘real world’.

The culture of newspapers was undeniably masculine. It wasn’t just that the pub was our hangout, or that rough language and swearing were our common parlance; it was that the assumptions about what was important, or what was scandalous, or what was funny all derived from a view of the world that had been built around men’s experiences and expectations. Women journalists are as tough and resilient as the men, and certainly none of the women at the National Times were shrinking types. Meryl Constance, who Suich had poached from Choice to write about consumer issues, and Yvonne Preston, who in the mid-1970s had gone to China as the Fairfax correspondent, were the only women on staff who had children and were less likely to go to the pub after work. But the rest of us—Elisabeth Wynhausen, Adele Horin, Glennys Bell and Jenny Coopes breasted the (back) bar along with the boys. We were assertive and unshockable. That did not mean that I, at least, sometimes wondered what universe I was in. As when Suich told us the story of a renowned American journalist who had broken many international stories during his time in Southeast Asia. On this particular evening, Suich recounted, the journalist was ‘rooted’ because he’d worked for days on end filing a particularly important scoop.

‘Then, instead of going home, he took himself to X.’—Suich named a place that, he had to explain to everyone, was a notorious brothel in that particular city.

His avid listeners roared, whether with admiration, awe or envy, I, the only woman present, could not say. All I knew was that while I wasn’t prudish, nor was I able to identify in any way with the story of a journalist who recovered from a hard day at the office by surrounding himself with pliant young Asian hookers.

I was certainly not a pioneer as a woman journalist. Those honours went to women like Margaret Jones, a tall and somewhat stern woman who had been the Herald’s literary editor (and given me a reviewing assignment when I had first arrived in Sydney). She had been correspondent in Washington where as a woman she was denied admission to the National Press Club and thus prevented from reporting key political stories, and in December 1973 became the paper’s first China correspondent. She liked to tell of riding her bike in Peking, as Beijing was still called, and often passing the Chief of the US Liaison Office, as the top American representative was titled before the US formally recognised China in 1979, who was riding his.

‘Good morning, Miss Jones,’ he would say.

‘Good morning, Mr Bush,’ she’d reply to the man who in 1989 would become the 41st President of the United States.

Margaret became something of a mentor to me for the few years she was in Sydney before being sent off to Europe in 1980. We regularly went to the theatre together and she gave me advice on how to handle my job. We were dissimilar in temperament (and politics) and there was a significant age difference which meant I often thought her advice a bit off the mark, but I valued her friendship and that she took time to spend with me.

The stories that earned me my reputation—and a Walkley Award before the end of my first year in journalism—were a multi-part series on NSW prisons. Like the story on police fingerprinting, they began with my being able to establish as true a number of stories that had been circulating around newsrooms and which were widely known to people who worked in the legal system. Lawyers like Tom Kelly, Rod Madgwick, Jim Staples and Jack Grahame often represented men who were in and out of prison and were outspoken in favour of prison reform, as were academics such as David Brown from the University of New South Wales and a number of newly established prisoner action groups. I was active myself in one of these; I visited prisons and I knew prisoners, some still serving, others who were now out. Much of what I wrote was widely known in these circles. It just hadn’t been written about in the press before. And I was able to add a great deal more detail and to get on-the-record corroboration from prison officers and others which added to what was already known. It was information, much of it shocking, that the government, in the form of the Minister for Justice and the Department of Corrective Services, which administered the prison system, had gone to great lengths to keep covered up. For instance, I was able to get a prison officer to confirm that a number of prisoners had been shot during the Bathurst riots of 1974, a couple of them receiving bullet wounds in the back, and that one man had become paraplegic as a result. Prison administrators had always denied this and no one in the media had been able to corroborate it.

NSW prisons were archaic and barbaric, even by the punitive standards of the times. The living conditions of prisoners were appalling and the punishments administered for the most minor infractions were brutal. The prisons became hotbeds of simmering resentment and rage. In 1970, Bathurst jail erupted with a riot that was unable to be kept from the public and which led to calls for an inquiry and reform. Nothing happened. Four years later, the same prison went up again, this time with far more serious consequences. Large sections of the prison were destroyed and the government could not ignore reports of prisoners being savagely beaten and even shot. A Royal Commission was appointed with Justice John Nagle of the Supreme Court heading it. The first day of formal hearings of the Royal Commission was 14 April 1976, two days after my first article appeared. I was encouraged by Suich and Evan Whitton to put together a series of articles reporting on what conditions in NSW prisons were really like. I think we saw ourselves as providing some context to the official inquiry, but also, given the long history of evasion and cover-ups in previous investigations, we wanted to put pressure on the commission to look hard and unflinchingly at a system that, in some places at least, would have given Stalin’s gulag a run for its money. I put things on the public record that could not be ignored. My articles have often been credited with forcing the government to establish the Royal Commission. They didn’t, but I do like to think they helped ensure that, finally, the veil was lifted. I published material that, in any honest investigation, would have to be thoroughly tested. Under Justice Nagle’s leadership, it was.

The first of my six articles, ‘The days the screws were turned loose’,⁵ provided a detailed account of the bashing of four prisoners who had attempted to escape from Sydney’s Long Bay prison in October 1973. I followed this with the first-ever published account of the ‘reception biff ’—the systematic beating of newly arrived intractable prisoners at Grafton Prison by officers with rubber truncheons. I also reported on the new Katingal sensory deprivation unit at Long Bay, designed to replace physical punishment with psychological torture; on the women’s prison at Mulawa; on the way the prison officers and their union were dealing with the impending spotlight on their violent and illegal behaviour; and, finally, my detailed eye-witness account of what really happened at Bathurst in 1974. It is true that the public does not really care about prisons, or prisoners (so long as they are safely locked up) and so this was not regular media fare, but it was also true that, by not having these things reported, the public was ignorant of the archaic and inhumane conditions of prisoners in NSW. This was an era of reform in so many other areas of our society. Anti-discrimination legislation was being passed, homosexuality was being decriminalised, institutions such as the public service were being shaken up, first in Canberra by the Whitlam government, and in the states by Labor leaders like Don Dunstan in South Australia and now Neville Wran, who in May 1976 had led the Labor Party to victory in NSW. Few areas of society were not being scrutinised by avid reformers. It was inevitable that prisons would come into focus.

My first article caused a big stir—and not just with the reading public. Fairfax management summoned Suich. The subject matter was unsavoury, he was told: ‘Our readers’ did not care to know about such things. Suich was told that there should be no further articles about prisons. Then something totally unexpected happened.

For the first time, I took the lift to the 14th floor. It was hard to believe I was still in the same building. No fluorescent lights, or makeshift room dividers. No metal desks with peeling veneers or office chairs lurching drunkenly off their wheels, and certainly no clacking or yelling or raised voices of any kind. The 14th floor was mahogany panelling, Persian carpets, oil portraits of Fairfaxes and whisper quiet. I was shown into an office that I remember as large and elegant and shook the hand of the 75-year-old proprietor of the company, Sir Warwick Fairfax. He was tall and thin with a beaked nose and lots of dark grey hair. He was courteous, but he also seemed to be quite angry about what he’d been confronted with by my story. He was a compassionate and gentle man and he could scarcely believe that such things as I reported were happening in New South Wales.

‘Is this true?’ he demanded to know.

I handed him two pages on which were pasted a copy of my article together with my annotations. I had treated it like a university essay and documented it with footnotes. I had two and, in most cases, three sources for every single assertion. Sir Warwick looked at me with astonishment. Journalism was definitely changing. It would no longer be enough to tell your editor that your source was a cop you’d had a drink with the night before. These days, as I was soon to find out, the cop was just as likely to be the object of your story, not its source.

After this, I was free to pursue prisons and I did so with zest.

The initial stories, or tips that might become stories, often came from crims or lawyers or academics—but then it was a matter of classic reporting, of following leads, interviewing people and, often, strategising about how to get unwilling people to talk. I liked to just turn up at people’s houses, exploit the surprise factor, look them in the eye and—what a phone call, let alone an email can never reveal—assess whether they were telling the truth. It came to be known as ‘investigative reporting’—although that was not a term we used then—but since it was the only kind of reporting I had ever done, I did not know it was special or unusual. It was just journalism. It was also similar in all sorts of ways to the kind of research I had done for my book. Looking up facts, interviewing people, scouring old records, making educated guesses. It did not matter whether I was looking at the rioting of convict women at Parramatta jail in the early years of settlement or the conduct of prison officers during uprisings at Bathurst jail in the 1970s; I was trying to find out what happened. The advantage with researching current stories was, of course, that the players were more likely to be around and could often be persuaded to talk.

For the two years since the 1974 Bathurst riots, authorities had always denied that prisoners had been shot and that one man had been left paralysed. Yet it only took a bit of legwork for me to track down 25-year-old Dennis Bugg to a residential care facility in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. No one had ever visited Bugg before. No one was supposed to know he even existed. He spent his days watching television in the company of several other equally immobile young men, most of them paralysed as a result of motorcycle accidents. I had not made an appointment, or announced myself, so at first they regarded me curiously when I simply walked in and asked which one of them was Dennis. When they saw that I was an unaccompanied young woman who was interested in one of their number, several of them began making sexually explicit catcalls. I engaged in harmless banter with them. I wasn’t offended by what they were saying. Rather, I felt immensely sorry for these men, their lost lives and the fact that no one cared about them.

Bugg was serving a sentence for stealing, which had been supplemented with extra time for trying to escape, when he had been shot in the back during the riot on 3 February 1974. He had been due for parole two days later. After he dropped to the ground three other prisoners helped carry him to safety.

‘They fired at us all the way,’ Bugg told me.

Bugg finally got his parole on 12 February, but by then he was incapacitated in Sydney’s Prince Henry Hospital. The Corrective Services department turned down his parole officer’s request for $1500 to pay for a wheelchair and other equipment. Instead, Bugg was charged under the Crimes Act with offences relating to the riots at Bathurst. A few times he rode his hospital-supplied wheelchair into the traffic on busy nearby Anzac Parade, which was interpreted as a suicide attempt, so he was scheduled to Callan Park, a psychiatric institution. After just a month Callan Park demanded he be removed, saying he was a medical patient, not a psych case. Bugg was sent to the home where I found him three years later. During that time, neither Bugg nor his family had ever paid a bill for his care; the home told me ‘the government’ paid. The charges were never proceeded with. Dennis Bugg was simply hidden away from public view—and public scrutiny.

I also found a prison officer who went on the record and described the floggings ‘the screws’—as the prison officers were called—were expected to administer regularly to ‘tracs’, the so-called intractable prisoners, who were sent ‘to the Jacaranda festival’ as the notorious Grafton jail was known. The ‘reception biff ’ at Grafton was famous throughout the NSW prison system and crims dreaded being sent there. Better to endure the freezing cold of the windowless and non-heated stone cells at Bathurst, and the occasional biff, than the guaranteed savage beating of your naked body when you arrived in the warm climate of northern New South Wales and which was followed by a regular weekly walloping. I interviewed Max Williams who had spent 27 years of his life in institutions of one kind or another, including a stint at Grafton in the 1950s. For a time he and fellow Grafton inmate Darcy Dugan were Australia’s two most notorious criminals. ‘We used to get a hiding regularly about once a week. I used to get flogged on Thursdays,’ he told me. ‘Just in normal conversation someone would say “Aren’t you due to be biffed?” And I’d say, Jeez, what’s today? It was Thursday. Well it was my biff. And this was every week.’ Grafton had broken Max. He’d lost his hair and nearly half his body weight. Like many other prisoners, he turned to writing as a means of expression and escape. After his eventual release he became a renowned poet. He was a gentle man but his past never left him. He willingly told me about it and Justice Nagle made sure that he gave evidence to the Royal Commission; his description of Australia’s Gulag featured on the second page of Nagle’s final report. Grafton was, Nagle reported, ‘a regime of terror’.⁶

I was also able to obtain corroboration for an atrocity that occurred after the Royal Commission had ended its inquiry.⁷ I learned from his lawyer that two days after the commission finished taking its evidence, Bernie Matthews had been beaten unconscious by the screws at Katingal. The whole rationale for Katingal was that it was supposed to use sensory deprivation instead of physical brutality to quell prisoners. But Matthews, who had endured the Grafton ‘biff ’ five years earlier when he’d been sent there for trying to escape from Parramatta, had been bashed at Katingal as well. I found out the name of the doctor who had treated Matthews and who confirmed his injuries and I then called the superintendent of Katingal, whose spluttering obfuscations were certainly not a denial of what had happened.

Bernie Matthews had been an important witness at the Royal Commission, giving first-hand accounts of brutality that was so severe it was hard to comprehend it was happening in New South Wales in the 1970s. Now clearly he was getting paid back. Matthews became a writer while he was in prison, writing poetry and plays and, since his release, has published Intractable, a book about his prison experiences⁸ and he still maintains a blog. I had met Bernie at Parramatta and I gave him his first job as a journalist, getting him to write a review for ‘BookWorld’, the paper’s book pages which I edited for a time. I think he was the first serving crim to write for the paper.

The Nagle Report began with an 1843 quote: ‘Society has the right to punish, but not to corrupt those punished.’ It was from a book by Gustave de Beaumont, a French magistrate and prison reformer, and the man who accompanied Alexis de Tocqueville on his famous journey to inspect the emerging democracy of the colonies in America in 1831–32. The report ‘laid out the horror of the 33-year Grafton regime, recommended closure of the state’s newest prison, Katingal, and made a large number of mainly reformist recommendations for improvement in prison conditions and amenities,’ wrote David Brown in an assessment of the Royal Commission 25 years later.⁹ The NSW prison system had developed into a ruthless regime where deprivation of liberty was no longer seen as sufficient punishment. There is no doubt that many of the prisoners I interviewed or wrote about were dangerous and violent men, but many of them had become so because of what was done to them in prison. Max Williams had been released after serving ten years for stealing an alarm clock and for several escape attempts—and went straight to a gun shop. He planned to kill two of the screws and then shoot the rest of them when they turned up for their mates’ funeral. Mad as a cut snake, he remained free for seven days before being sent back to prison. As I noted in my article, you could not describe Grafton as rehabilitative. I knew other crims who were sexually impotent after being released. Many had severe psychological problems. Anyone who’d been to Grafton had trouble looking you in the eye, something that had earned a flogging inside.

In the 1970s as we tried to grapple with notions of crime and punishment, and liberty and incarceration, we absorbed the new literature that was addressing these issues in a profound and unprecedented way. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago was published in English in 1974 and the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s very influential Discipline and Punish, about the evolution of Western prisons, came out in 1975. This was the environment in which my articles were published and that, together with the Royal Commission offering the hope that justice might be at hand, gave them a resonance they might otherwise not have had. It was also a time when many, including me, were campaigning actively for individual prisoners who, we judged, had been treated unfairly by the system. The Free Sandra Willson campaign, instigated by a group of women calling themselves Women Behind Bars, succeeded when Willson was released in 1977 after eighteen years served ‘at the Governor’s pleasure’ for murdering a taxi driver in Sydney. Our case was not that she wasn’t guilty of the worst crime imaginable, but that the state had given her an indeterminate sentence. A life sentence for murder was generally around thirteen years then, but Willson had no hope of release because although after an initial determination of insanity, when she was later judged to be mentally competent, her sentence was never reviewed. There were many such injustices and anomalies in the NSW prison system and they provided rich fodder for activists, reformers—and writers. In addition to my journalism, I also engaged in some creative writing. A year before the television series Prisoner and long before Wentworth in 1978, I collaborated with my friend Daniela Torsh on a short film we called Saint Therese based on the experiences of women in NSW prisons.

In October 1976 I left the paper and went home to Adelaide. My youngest brother Jamie, aged only seventeen, was dying of cancer. I expected to be gone three months, I’d told Suich when I sought leave without pay, but he died just three days after I got there. He had been diagnosed more than eighteen months earlier with Ewings sarcoma, a rare bone cancer that mostly affects children, and our family had been utterly changed as we tried to deal with his illness and treatment. None of us coped well, but while I held up when giving support or counsel on the phone, it was a different matter when I saw my little brother in the flesh. In January he and his best friend, Chris Ryan, had come to Sydney to stay with me for a few days. At the airport, I watched him make his way off the plane and was horrified. His gaunt grey face told me he was going to die soon and, total coward that I was, I simply could not bear to look at him. I dropped the boys off at my house and went to work, and then to the pub. I kept ringing them from the phone booth in the pub’s lounge, guiltily assuring them I’d be home soon. I simply did not know what to do, physically or emotionally, to help him. Nor could I deal with my inner turmoil as I raged against the total unfairness of it all. Over the eighteen months of his illness I made several visits home to spend time with him. We played chess or listened to his favourite music but we never talked about the cancer. He never complained to me or to our mother about the agonising pain that never left him, although he confided in a couple of his school friends, boys his age who came to see him every single day once he was no longer able to go to school. He died, finally, on 24 October,¹⁰ and our family descended into a shattered state of grief mixed with relief that his ordeal, and ours, was finally over. Just a few days later came the phone call saying I’d won a Walkley Award for Best Newspaper Feature for my prison articles. It felt like an obscene intrusion and I did not want to tell the family, but they had welcomed the distraction. On 5 November I found myself in Perth’s Sheraton Hotel listening to speeches by the premier, Sir Charles Court, and the widow of Sir William Walkley, the founder of Ampol Petroleum who had created the awards in 1956, and who had died just a few months earlier. The Walkleys were a lot smaller than they are today, with just five awards, all of them for print journalism, but I suspect they are still an equally inebriated event. I rampaged around the room giving my views to anyone who would listen, as well as those who seemed reluctant to hear my opinions. As I recall, there were very few women there and certainly no other female winners. But I received many compliments and congratulations from women in the industry, many of whom expressed genuine pride at a rare win by a member of their sex. A few people were pleased because I was a late-starter; it meant that there was hope for other oldies. I was 31 at the time and, I am pretty certain, the youngest winner. I felt an immense pride at winning this prize because of the tough subject matter. In some ways I was more proud than when I’d published Damned Whores, one year to the day earlier. My book had been reprinted three times in 1976 but that seemed remote from me; I could not see people buying or reading it. I received almost no feedback. Journalism was more tangible. It was immediate, and the reaction—whatever it was—instantaneous. Gratifying. Or terrifying. Depending on the story.

After a year I felt I was getting the hang of journalism. I liked it and it seemed that I was good at it. I had learned so much in a very short time and I hoped I would be able to continue to develop. Suich and Whitton pushed me. I was now investigating procurement in the Defence department, probing for potential corruption in the multi-million-dollar deals that kept the military supplied. I was hoping I might uncover something similar to the Lockheed aircraft bribery scandals that had been exposed in several European and Asian countries. Australia purchased aircraft from Lockheed. I did not know where I would end up, with the story or with my life. I just knew that, for now, I was where I wanted to be. I felt I could do anything, not just because of what I was doing at the paper but because of another challenge I had set myself. Ever since I had been fished from the Adelaide baths spluttering and close to drowning when I was about ten, I had been afraid to put my head under water so I could not swim. It was time to conquer that fear. Before work each day, I went to the Sydney University pool and, with help from Rose Creswell, who tutored English at the university, and some other very patient friends, I learned to blow bubbles with my face under the water. I learned to float, to not panic at being adrift. It would be many more months before I could swim a lap, and even longer before it became effortless, but one day I had the breakthrough. Suddenly and dramatically I went from floundering to swimming. I swam a whole lap without gasping, and then another, and another. I still had a lot to work on with my stroke and my speed, but I had made my body respond to my will. I felt I was doing a similar thing with my journalism, always testing myself, pushing harder and taking whatever risks were needed.

We were one of the first papers to do team journalism, where several reporters worked together and told a story from different angles or multiple points of view. The first was a lengthy article entitled ‘How Women are Trained: If it’s not rape what is it?’ published in early December 1976. The article became notorious because of the shocking story it told of ‘trains’ in the Far North Queensland town of Ingham. Bruce Stannard had first heard about this extraordinary phenomenon when attending a media seminar in Brisbane. He had met Heather Ross, a young woman from Ingham, who told him about a local sexual practice that, she said, amounted to pack rape. According to Ross, a train might begin on a Saturday night as a couple left a social event and other men would make a yanking motion in the air, like a conductor pulling the cord on a train, and yell ‘Too-hoot. All aboard’. As many as 50 men would then follow the couple, to the nearby cane fields or a vacant lot, and all of them would have sexual intercourse with the woman. These trains often ran three times a week, Ross said. There was rarely a complaint to police, she told him, as the culture of the town, which was largely populated by descendants of the original Italian immigrants, had very traditional attitudes towards women. The girls who had been ‘trained’, as the local lingo put it, were regarded as ‘sluts’. Even when they had not consented.

‘They have an absolute contempt for women. A hatred,’ Ross told Stannard. ‘They despise any girl who is prepared to have sex.’

Stannard returned to Sydney and got on the phone. He had been sceptical initially that such a story could be true—in the 1970s surely such behaviour would not be tolerated. But a quick chat with an Ingham detective-sergeant confirmed not only that rape was common—between 30 and 40 local women had been raped, he said—but the police were largely powerless to do anything about it for lack of evidence. They did not even bother to record the complaints any more.

Evan Whitton was in the chair at the time because Suich was on assignment in Tokyo. As a former Truth reporter he had a nose for a good crime story and was keen to pursue this one but, partly guided by the young American writer Bruce Hanford who had joined the paper at Whitton’s instigation, he agreed to a novel approach. It was unusual for the paper to send any of us much farther afield than a nearby capital city; it was unheard of to send a team of three to a place as distant as Ingham but it turned out to be an inspired decision. The team was Stannard, who had got the original story; Hanford, who would bring an editor’s eye and a gonzo sensibility to the exercise; and me, the feminist who had written at length about rape in her book and who could now draw on that background when she interviewed the young women who had been ‘trained’. What we did was a first for Australian journalism: a team effort where we split the reporting along gender lines and where we inserted ourselves into the story, New Journalism style, as we tried to get the truth about what was happening to the girls in this town.

We spent just a day in Ingham, driving to and from Townsville in a rented car, and checking into a motel room that would serve as our base and from where we could make telephone calls. We had done enough preliminary work to know who we wanted to talk to, and where to find them, but we still managed to cover an enormous amount of ground in a very short time. I concentrated on tracking down and talking to several of the young girls while Stannard and Hanford talked to the cops, to the local newspaper editor and to several of the perpetrators including, amazingly, the man who was the chief organiser of the ‘trains’.

‘None of the sheilas get raped or anything like that,’ he told the two Bruces. ‘It’s just the way they are.’

I heard a very different story.

A seventeen-year-old who we called X and who had a baby told me how she had been raped at age thirteen when two girls in a car with some boys had invited her to come into town with them: ‘Instead of going to town, they took me out near the mill. There were five men and they all raped me. I reported it to the police. But I didn’t have enough evidence. I wasn’t bruised enough.’ She knew the men but they avoided her for some months afterwards, crossing the street so as not to have to talk to her. That all changed, she told me, after she had the baby that had resulted from the rape and, two days before the birth, the same men raped her little sister. The boys were ‘real proud’ after that, X told me.

I heard similar stories from a couple of other girls and I could not help but be reminded of similar humiliations that I had endured as a teenager. The difference was that I never was subjected to attacks by multiple men, but there was always immense pressure from the man who had asked you out, paid for dinner or even just given you a ride home from a party. Wanting to be liked, thinking giving in to sex would make me popular, the sheer terror of a pregnancy resulting from forced sex; it all came flooding back as I witnessed the misery of these girls as they recounted what had happened to them. I met with a teacher at Ingham’s high school who said: ‘It got that way that when I saw a girl crying at my door, I would go cold all over and think to myself, Oh no. Not again.’

The article caused a sensation. The story itself was scandalous but the way it was reported was also unprecedented. It brought together the points of view of so many of the players, including court and law enforcement officials, as well as the on-the-record comments of alleged rapists and their victims. It contained judgements and commentary that was unusual for newspaper reporting at the time, including my observation that what happened in Ingham was just a more blatant example of what happened to women everywhere. What we ran was raw, and it was recent. We published the story just days after we’d returned from Ingham, running it over four pages of the paper, complete with photographs of the hotel where the trains often started and the courthouse where justice was never dispensed. It became a political issue in Queensland and led to a debate about the state’s rape laws, led by a Liberal Party MP Rosemary Kyburz who championed the girls of Ingham. Somewhat unfairly, since I had been just one of a three-person team, my name was the one that became associated with this story and this persisted for years afterwards. The story was re-reported by overseas media, it was turned into a film, was the subject of documentaries and an extensive number of debates and other forms of follow-up. For years it was synonymous with ground-breaking journalism, and with bringing a subject like rape from the crime blotter and into the feature pages where it would be read by a huge, largely unprepared and therefore utterly shocked audience. It was not a story that people forgot.

Less than a year later, David Marr and I teamed up to report on another gruesome sexual activity.¹¹ This one took place much closer to home, at St Paul’s College at the University of Sydney. But the paper’s introduction to the story compared it to what happened at Ingham, describing it as ‘a similarly ugly custom apparently sanctioned among the more sophisticated and highly educated sons of New South Wales society’.

We reported on the annual valedictory dinner held just three weeks earlier on 3 November 1977. After the formal proceedings—including a witty after-dinner speech by Sydney University Law Professor, former Pauline (as the college’s alumni were known), and later High Court Justice, Dyson Heydon—staff and many senior students retired for their after-dinner ports. It was then, we wrote, that ‘another custom, less formal, but nevertheless traditional, begins.’ The Animal Act of the Year, we reported, has traditionally gone to the student who in the eyes of his peers has committed an act ‘which contravenes commonly accepted social mores in some extravagant fashion’. There were just two nominees: a fellow who had led a team that sprayed cat’s blood on a corridor at nearby Women’s College, and another who had sexually humiliated his girlfriend, also from Women’s College, in July that year by organising a gangbang on her. The gangbanger won. After accepting his trophy, a nickel-plated sports cup, the winner, whose gross exploits had been described in disgusting detail in the nomination, proceeded to simulate sexual intercourse with a life-sized plastic doll. During these proceedings, ‘one of the nominators called out her nickname and she was instantly recognisable as the winner’s girlfriend’. The college reacted immediately and by the next morning the winner and three of his mates had been suspended from college. It was a bridge too far, apparently, for a sex aid to be used and for the ‘mention of a lady’s name in the mess’.

The young woman heard the same night that her name had been called out at the dinner. She was beside herself with shock and outrage. She was from the country and was not a sophisticated person, which was one reason her parents wanted her at Women’s College where, they had assumed, she would be safe. The morning after the dinner, accompanied by her mother, she went to see Barbara Ramjan, the president of the Students’ Representative Council (SRC). At the time of the sexual acts she had confided in several close friends, seen a gynaecologist and sought the services of a student counsellor. Now, several months later, she was making a formal complaint to the SRC. The young woman had thought that perhaps Ramjan, the first woman in more than twenty years to occupy this position, and the now feminist-dominated SRC, might spray-paint St Paul’s College with some derogatory graffiti. Instead, Ramjan contacted me. I went to the City Road offices of the student union, to meet the young woman and to hear her story. At my request, she signed a statutory declaration that set out in gruesome detail what had happened to her that July night when, drunk and stoned, she had sexual intercourse with her boyfriend and three of his mates. She swore that she had consented to the boyfriend but not to his mates. Her mother told me they had consulted a solicitor, a family friend, who had advised them not to press criminal charges; no lawyer in Sydney would touch the case, he said, because of the family connections of one of the students.

Back in the office, we decided that David Marr should interview the young men and the college authorities. The men told David that the woman had consented; they provided details that were meant to support their version. Their interviews were unsworn but David was ‘impressed’ by what they told him. He was not convinced that what happened that night was rape. We repaired to my place to argue about the story. We spent several days at my flat in Elizabeth Bay, that overlooked the boats bobbing on Rushcutters Bay six floors below, going over the materials. We were unable to agree on how to interpret what we had been told. It boiled down to the simple fact that I believed the girl and David believed the boys. Neither of us would budge so, we decided, we needed to make our differing views part of the story. Doing so reflected the reality of so many alleged rape stories; it all came down to he said/she said. In this case, however, there were also other factors at play: the unequal contest between an inexperienced country family and one of the biggest names in Sydney’s legal fraternity, the fact that the university had declined to become involved, leaving St Paul’s College to handle things. The college had only one sanction: expulsion. Given that two of the boys were about to complete their studies within weeks, this was not much of a punishment. In any event, the college was reluctant to do anything because they believed, and supported, the men’s version of events. None of this gave any satisfaction, let alone justice, to the young woman. One thing David and I did agree on was, we wrote, that ‘whatever form of consent may have been given—or assumed—on that night in July, it did not include a willingness to be subjected to public slander’. The young woman’s life was wrecked. She left university and went back to the farm. Our story, which had at its heart the sexual abuse and public humiliation of a naive young woman, reverberated around Sydney but not much changed. In 2016, Fairfax reported similar activities at St Paul’s.¹² What happened to the young woman in 1976 is now called ‘slut-shaming’ and social media today provides Paulines and other young men with potent new tools such as a Facebook ‘pro-rape page’ but the college’s attitude remained atavistically protective of such abusive behaviour. St Paul’s at first announced it would not cooperate with an inquiry into the culture of college life, instigated by the university, by now willing to take some responsibility for what happens on campus. In June 2017, however, after yet further allegations of sexual abuse were made against students at St. Paul’s, the college announced it would join the review being conducted by former Sex Discrimination Commissioner Elizabeth Broderick.¹³

I had been living in Sydney for seven years by 1978, and by now knew the town well. After starting out in Newtown, then Balmain, Annandale and Leichhardt, I had decided the eastern suburbs were where I wanted to be. I liked Kings Cross, which was full of strip clubs and other questionable joints but which also had good food shopping, and for the rest of my time in Sydney I would live a short stroll away in Elizabeth Bay. Partly through living there, I now knew lots of people on both sides of the law and prided myself on being ‘in the know’ about what a dirty little town Sydney really was. But at times even I was astounded at just how crooked the place was. It was common knowledge that many police were corrupt. I’d been to the Forbes Club and Club 33, illegal casinos in Darlinghurst that were always packed with punters, where the drinks were free and where you could always spot a copper or two enjoying a good old time. I was pretty sure I’d seen the Police Commissioner at the Forbes Club one night. I also knew the rumours that some police actually organised bank robberies, making the crims do the dangerous work of breaking in and blowing the safes, and then taking most of the proceeds for themselves. But while we ‘knew’ this, there was no proof. And while there was no proof, the Sydney corruption mill ground on, seemingly unstoppable.

But in March 1978 I managed to get hold of a 64-page transcript of a record of interview, conducted between 18 July and 17 August 1971 between a number of NSW senior police officials and Shirley Brifman, a well-known prostitute who had operated a series of brothels around the area where I now lived. Her most famous one was located in a fancy apartment building, The Reef, in Ithaca Road just steps from my front door. In her record of interview Brifman had made sensational allegations against 34 named police officers. She had paid regular protection money of $100 a week to two cops, Michael Phelan and Freddy Krahe, and had had dealings that were illegal with more than 30 others. In return for these payments, Krahe and Phelan were supposed to protect her business and keep away any ‘gunnies’, as non-police standover men were known. Krahe was especially important; he ensured that each time she changed address, which was often, her phone number 35 3837 which, she claimed was known to ‘millions of men’, moved with her. He arranged for a complaining neighbour at Ithaca Road to be burgled; he often stored stolen goods at Brifman’s place and, perhaps not surprisingly, he regularly availed himself of Brifman’s sexual favours. This cosy little arrangement had come to an abrupt end in early 1971 when Brifman was charged with procuring a thirteen-year-old girl for prostitution. It turned out the girl was her daughter. Events soon spiralled out of control. As Michael Duffy and Nick Hordern have pointed out, the appointment of a new head of the CID, to replace the corrupt Don Fergusson who had suicided in February 1970, signalled the end of this blatant corruption.¹⁴ An enraged Shirley Brifman was hell-bent on revenge. It came in the form of a live ABC television interview, where she made explosive allegations against police in NSW and Queensland. Not long afterwards, she was sitting down with senior NSW police, answering 320 questions about the allegations. It was rumoured at the time that Shirley Brifman had named names. Lots of them. Which is no doubt why she ended up dead in her Brisbane apartment in March 1972, a few days before her trial on the underage girl was about to begin. (She was originally from Brisbane and had begun her sex trade career there.) The media said her death was the result of a heart attack, or a drug overdose. There was no autopsy or inquest so no one could be sure but the word around police circles in Sydney was that Freddie Krahe had flown north and, with the help of a Brisbane detective by the name of Tony Murphy, had gone to Brifman’s apartment and forced drugs down her throat. Now, six years after her death, I had a copy of her record of interview.

It was every bit as sensational as rumour had had it, but it was also highly defamatory. The 34 police officers named were each accused of specific offences, from accepting bribes, to colluding with wealthy homeowners to rob their houses in return for a share of the insurance, to accepting money from underage girls in return for not informing child protection services, to organising bank robberies, and, of course, accepting free sex at the brothel. How to get these allegations into print was going to be one of the biggest challenges the paper had ever faced. There was really only one way, and that was to get the protection of parliamentary privilege for the documents. If a politician was prepared to read the transcripts into Hansard, they would attract privilege, and the media could report their content. There was no chance of any NSW parliamentarian doing this. Too many of them either had questionable connections themselves or would have been prevented by their parties from such a provocative attempt to upset the existing order. However, in South Australia, Peter Duncan, the young and radical Attorney-General in the Dunstan government, and a friend of mine since our days at the University of Adelaide, was known to be anxious to curtail the activities of Abe Saffron, the well-known Sydney crime figure, who was trying to get a foothold in Adelaide. In March 1978 Duncan tabled in the South Australian Parliament three documents: 1. Abe Saffron’s NSW police record, 2. A record of police interview with two Sydney journalists, Tony Reeves and Barry Ward relating to the disappearance and suspected murder of Juanita Nielsen, a community newspaper publisher who had been campaigning against development in Victoria Street, Kings Cross, and 3. The Brifman transcript. In our article, published on 13 March, the National Times wrote the tabled documents ‘might perhaps best be described as the Saffron papers’.¹⁵ The connection with Saffron in each of these documents was the by-now former policeman Freddie Krahe who, Duncan asserted in the SA Parliament, ‘is a well-known business associate of Saffron’. Krahe was suspected as being instrumental in the disappearance and murder of Nielsen, and of course the ex-cop had a starring role in the Brifman tapes. The tabling of these documents helped Duncan to create a climate of apprehension about Saffron; he was able to use this, together with his announcement that the government would oppose the issuance or renewal of all Saffron’s liquor licences, to negotiate the crime organisation’s exit from South Australia. He agreed to give them a year to wind up their operations.¹⁶

With the transcript tabled, we had some cover but would it be enough to satisfy our lawyer and Fairfax management? Any misjudgement could be catastrophically expensive for the company if 30 or more cops were able to sue, but that was not the only danger. Someone from the paper had had to call Krahe for a comment on his association with Saffron (which he denied), so he had prior warning that we were intending to publish. We were pretty sure that Krahe had killed at least two women. It was decided my byline would not appear on the story. The pages were subbed and laid out, with a larger than usual bold headline, ‘POLICE CORRUPTION ALLEGATIONS’, but the story was back in the paper, on page 8, and was not puffed on the cover. Frank Hoffey arrived at around 5 p.m. on Friday. He handled defamation for Stephen Jacques, Fairfax’s legal firm, and was a frequent presence in our office. He was a New Zealander, an affable sandy-haired man of about 40 whose genius was he could always provide the legal reasoning that allowed our story to be published. Unlike many other defamation lawyers I subsequently worked with, Hoffey was creative rather than cautious. He shared the journalist’s enthusiasm for getting the story into print and his role was to ensure it was legally defensible. ‘The form of words was ours, the law was his, and the published version the result of our negotiations with him,’ was the way Max Suich later described how we worked. ‘What we sought from Frank was his “form of words”, advice that if the complainant sued, it could be successfully defended in his opinion’. Hoffey had great confidence in his ability to do this and he was rarely wrong. But this night he was worried. The Brifman transcript had been tabled as distinct from being incorporated in Hansard, which meant the contents were not part of the official parliamentary record. That, Hoffey judged, reduced the privilege. None of us dared contemplate that there might be no privilege attached to the documents. There was also the problem that the National Times was a national newspaper, so whatever privilege existed might be confined to South Australia. Would that prevent these NSW-based cops from suing? We went backwards and forwards for hours. Hoffey said it was dicey and, for once, was unwilling to take responsibility. ‘Management would have to make the call,’ he said.

Graham Wilkinson, the editorial manager, had the head of the International Press Association at his house for dinner when Hoffey rang. He had had a few drinks, which perhaps made him less cautious than usual but nor did he want to appear in front of his international guest to be anything less than enthusiastically promoting freedom of the press when it came to approving a story that alleged extensive police corruption in Sydney. He gave us the all clear. I think I virtually collapsed with elation; it had been a fifteen-hour day. The next day I would turn 33 and on Sunday the National Times would hit the streets with one of the most important stories it had ever published.

There was scarcely a ripple. I could not believe that our naming these cops, and the crimes they had committed, was not a major scandal. But of course no other media would follow up as they knew the legal pitfalls. Premier Neville Wran did ask his Police Commissioner Mervyn Wood for a report, which came back with the finding that all the allegations had been investigated. When we asked the Police department what had happened to each of the named cops, we were given ‘preserving privacy’ as a reason for declining to answer. Frustrated, we decided to push back. Two weeks later we ran an article that described the corrupt activities of each of the 27 cops who were still alive. This time David Hickie and I shared the byline. We did not name the cops, instead using a letter of the alphabet for each one, but there was no doubt some of them were identifiable from the descriptions contained in the earlier article. The first writ arrived on Monday, from a man who was now a chief superintendent in the Commonwealth Police. He delivered it in person to our offices, to Hickie and myself, along with a solicitor’s letter seeking to restrain us from publishing any further material about him. Abe Saffron’s son also rang the paper, just to let us know we were on the radar. I was concerned about the writs but I was more worried to learn that Freddy Krahe was now also an employee of Fairfax. He’d been hired by the Sun, apparently, to help them gather material to defend a defamation case brought by Darcy Dugan but there were rumours that other parts of the organisation had called on him to do strong-arm work. I was uneasy, even a little scared, but told myself that surely Krahe would not harm another employee. But then several senior Fairfax executives told me I should not be living alone (I was). Suich said he would pay for me to move to an apartment somewhere out of the Cross for a month or so. It was then I realised that I did not have the stomach for this particular type of journalism. I was already angry and upset that Whitton had not offered me the deputy editor’s job when he was slated to replace Suich who was leaving in a few weeks. I had been led to believe I would get the job but, without warning, it was announced Paul Kelly from our Canberra bureau would be the deputy. I decided that it was time for me to do something else. Andrew Clark told me about a fellowship for journalists in the United States that he had been awarded some years earlier and encouraged me to go for it. If I was successful, it would mean nine months travelling around America. It sounded like a CIA-funded ploy, but I didn’t care. I applied.

While I waited to hear, I kept writing although I now steered clear of police corruption. In June I’d written about the disappearance of a young woman, Trudie Adams, from the Northern Beaches in Sydney who had last been seen getting into the back of a panel van, a vehicle I referred to as ‘the mobile bedrooms of the young’. Two young women got in touch; they knew all about panel vans, they told me, as they’d been ‘surfie chicks’ in Cronulla in the early 1970s and had written a novel about their experiences. They enclosed a few pages. I’d gone around to the house they shared in Annandale to check them out. They were hilarious, both excited to have a ‘real’ journalist take them seriously, but anxious to appear supercool. They gave me drinks, a book of Dorothy Parker poems and their manuscript. I said I’d help them get published. A week later Suich and I had lunch with them and soon these very impressive nineteen-year-olds were writing a column in the Sun Herald under the byline of the Salami Sisters. In mid-August, just before I left for America to take up the US fellowship which I was thrilled to learn I had been accepted for, I wrote to Hilary McPhee and Di Gribble. Three years earlier they had formed McPhee Gribble Publishers and were making a name for themselves with literary works by emerging writers such as Helen Garner. I had a novel that might interest them, I wrote. As I was leaving Australia in a few days, it was best if they contacted the girls direct: ‘Their names are Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette …’ The book, of course, was Puberty Blues and McPhee Gribble published it the next year.

A year earlier Suich had talked me out of it when I had tried to resign from the paper to work full-time on a book. I had intended to write a biography of Adela Pankhurst Walsh, the daughter of British suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, who had come to Australia in 1914. I’d first encountered her while I was researching Damned Whores and had become intrigued by the story of this English radical pacifist, who had joined Vida Goldstein’s Women’s Peace Army in Melbourne to fight the 1916 conscription referendum but then with her husband Tom Walsh, a communist and an official with the Seamen’s Union, had done a startling political about-face and become sympathisers with Japan in the late 1930s. She was briefly interned during the war. I’d tried to work on the book at nights and weekends but I’d made little progress. I knew lots of journalists wrote books, and the two occupations seemed to complement, even feed off each other, but it didn’t work that way for me. I spent too much time on my journalism and I was too much of a party girl. I was single and young; I would be at the pub, or having dinner with friends, having fun. Maybe if I’d had a partner and a domestic life I might have managed to go straight from the office to my typewriter at home. The only way I could see myself finishing a book was to leave journalism and write full-time. Suich had sweet-talked me into staying then, but now I felt I needed to test what my vocation was: journalist or writer. And what about my feminism? I felt guilty because my unpredictable hours meant I could no longer commit to being a regular on the roster at Elsie Women’s Refuge. I did find time for other less-demanding women-related activities as an editorial board member of Sisters Inc., a new feminist publishing venture in Melbourne, and I was the Australian member of the advisory group for Virago, the feminist publishers in London started by Carmen Callil, the dynamo Australian-born London publisher. Soon I was receiving regular packages of paperbacks with their trademark dark green spines and being introduced to writers such as Maya Angelou and Vera Brittain. I also retained the small editorial consultancy with Penguin Books that I had had since before Damned Whores had been published, and in June I began to write a fortnightly column on the Australian book trade for Fred Brenchley, who was now editing the Financial Review. There were constant invitations to talk, at conferences or seminars—even on television. One such appearance, on a commercial station’s morning show, led to an invitation to do a regular spot. I was establishing a pattern that I have found myself unable to alter ever since: doing too many things, stretching myself too thin, never able to refuse an invitation or an opportunity, never satisfied, always restless. I was startled to learn that some of my colleagues thought of me as ‘ruthlessly ambitious’. I saw myself as driven, as single-minded, someone with boundless energy who could never see a reason not to take on another challenge, but ‘ruthless’? I could not see that.

I hoped that in America I might be able to make sense of my life. Maybe distance, and a vastly different culture, would give me perspective. What kind of writer was I? How did being a woman fit into all of this? Earlier that year, at Writers’ Week in Adelaide, I had asked the novelist Thea Astley what she thought of the fact that none of the major featured women writers had presented themselves as women, preferring instead to be identified by their nationality. Margaret Atwood was a Canadian, Fay Zwicky an Australian. I commented that I was disappointed the feminist voice was not present in Adelaide.

‘When you pick up your biro to write you shed your sex,’ Astley had said to me.

I didn’t argue with her, but I didn’t want to agree either. I did not see how you could ‘shed’ your sex, unless it was to put on a false skin and play at being something other than who you were. But nor did I know what it meant to write as a woman. I was a woman. Who wrote. I was a reporter, an observer but I was also a catalyst, someone who revelled in action, especially action that championed women. I had no idea how to reconcile being a realist and an idealist, an observer and an activist. Maybe it simply was not possible.

At a party I met Jill Neville, a dazzlingly smart and interesting woman who was a writer. She was more than a decade older than me and had come of age at an even worse time. She had escaped to England before she was 21 and only came back to Sydney occasionally to see her family. She and I hit it off immediately as we talked about how to cope with the world as a bright, successful woman. ‘We are still a minority,’ she said. ‘And something men don’t understand. Nor,’ she elaborated, ‘do women who are married or not ambitious.’ Yes, I thought, she’s right. There are not many of us. Not yet.