While I was in Canberra mostly my journalism was focused on writing about Australian politics, but I was given two tremendously challenging and rewarding overseas assignments, one to southern Africa, the other to Pakistan, as a result of Max Walsh’s conviction that his leading journalists should be encouraged to test themselves in different environments. It was an innovative approach shared by few other editors. Walsh was willing to take risks, and to spend money on his reporters. If it paid off, he and his paper had yet another laurel to burnish an already sterling reputation. If not, well better luck next time. I had only been in Canberra a few months when Walsh suggested I travel round southern Africa in the weeks preceding the Commonwealth Heads of Government (CHOGM) meeting to be held in Lusaka, Zambia in early August 1979. I would of course go to CHOGM as a member of the Press Gallery covering the Prime Minister but if I went a few weeks early, he said, I could report on South Africa’s brutal apartheid system. I could also visit a few countries in the region, perhaps Namibia and Mozambique, from where the Portuguese had fled just four years before, as well as Rhodesia, which was still holding out against ceding political power to its black majority. Walsh told me to put together a possible itinerary. I could scarcely believe my good fortune: I was going to spend a month in southern Africa. I sought out anyone I could find with southern African connections. I got myself a second passport, knowing that no African country would accept one that had been stamped by South Africa and, inoculations organised, and excitement and wariness competing inside my fevered brain, I flew into Johannesburg for my first outing as a foreign correspondent.
The future of Rhodesia was going to dominate the CHOGM meeting, which was the first to be held in Africa, and there were threats from most of the black countries to sever diplomatic relations with Britain if she recognised the new puppet regime in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe today), as the country was then being called. This would be tantamount to a breakup of the commonwealth, so there was a lot riding on this meeting and Australia would have a central role. Rhodesia was a former British colony of about 275,000 white people and a black population of just under five million that, along with South Africa and Namibia, was the last standout in southern Africa against majority black rule. In 1965 Rhodesia’s Prime Minister Ian Smith had unilaterally declared independence from Britain in order to protect white rule, an action that led to the country being isolated internationally. Rhodesia was getting strong military support from South Africa, and had installed a puppet government headed by a black bishop, Abel Muzorewa, but under a constitution that ensured all political and military power was retained in the hands of the whites. No other country apart from South Africa recognised this regime but the newly elected Prime Minister of Britain, Margaret Thatcher, was making noises she might follow suit. Britain feared that Russia or Cuba might intervene, as they had in Angola. With Thatcher referring to the putative leaders of a majority-rule government in Rhodesia as ‘terrorists’, negotiations were not going to be easy. Malcolm Fraser, Australia’s Prime Minister, was expected to play a key role in getting his ideological soul mate to agree to a solution that would end what all sides knew was an untenable, and increasingly violent, situation.
This was the overall context for my trip. Each of the countries I visited before ending up in Lusaka would embody important elements of the struggle for black majority rule that was now the political imperative in Africa. Most critical of these was, of course, South Africa. I had introductions to a Who’s Who of the anti-apartheid movement. Relatives and political supporters in Australia had briefed and backgrounded me so that I understood not just the complexity of the issues, but also the dangers for people on the ground of even talking to me. I was counselled to never write names in diaries or notebooks, nor confide in anyone whose credentials I was not certain of. I had to be very, very careful, I was warned.
It was less than two years since the 30-year-old Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko had been murdered while in police custody, and only three years since the Soweto Uprising when up to 10,000 school children in Soweto, the poverty-stricken black township adjoining Johannesburg, had taken to the streets to protest against the directive that the Afrikaans language be used to teach certain subjects in schools. The police had fired on the children, killing around 23 on the first day and leading to riots that lasted for days and ultimately led to the death of as many as 700 with a further 1000 injured. The world had been shocked by the press images of the murdered children. In response to the international outrage, the South African government had announced a series of reforms. ‘Petty apartheid’, the laws requiring the colour-segregation of public places, including transport, restaurants and beaches, were to be relaxed. But no one was fooled. The infamous ‘pass laws’ were retained; these required all non-whites to carry identification at all times or risk being arrested and detained. And people were still being arrested for no reason and held for months on end without trial.
I was going to see first-hand what apartheid was all about. I was very lucky to have as my guide Bruce Haigh, Second Secretary, Politics at the Australian Embassy in Pretoria, the national capital of South Africa. Haigh was an activist diplomat who made it his business to be close to the regime’s opponents, and took considerable personal risks in doing so. He had befriended Steve Biko and other activists. Just eighteen months before I met him, Haigh had helped newspaper editor Donald Woods to escape from South Africa. (Richard Attenborough later portrayed this courageous act in his film Cry Freedom.) After the Biko murder, Woods had been placed under a five year ‘ban’, whereby he was stripped of the editorship of the Daily Dispatch newspaper and prevented from travelling, writing, speaking in public or even from working. Haigh introduced me to a number of activists. He also took it on himself to show me what South Africa was really like.
We went to Bophuthatswana, one of the bantustans or so-called ‘homelands’ that had been granted to African people by the South African government in 1977 under their ‘separate but equal’ policy. It was no coincidence, Haigh demonstrated to me, that the lands on which white people were allowed to settle were rich, fertile, contiguous and often coastal areas, whereas the black lands were without exception land-locked and barren pockets that seemed to have been picked for their aridity. This place was home to more than one million people, yet only 10 per cent of its 40,000 square kilometres was arable. It had mineral resources but at the time of my visit, the benefits from these had yet to be shared with the population.
We went to a primary school where hundreds of enthusiastic students crowded into tin sheds that served as class rooms and where the only learning equipment was the kind of rudimentary slate boards and chalk that would have been considered outmoded when I was a child. The kids learned to tell the time from a clock made from cardboard. The Australian government provided aid to this school, and when I was introduced as Australian, the kids crowded around, screaming their gratitude. It was a sickening experience, and the image of those laughing children in their squalid dustbowl of a school was still firmly in my memory when, late one afternoon, I interviewed Dr Piet Koornhof, the Minister for Cooperation and Development, at his home. This man was the enforcer of apartheid. He was responsible for the forcible removal of thousands of black people from residential areas that had been declared to be ‘white’ to places such as Bophuthatswana where they were condemned to lives of inactivity and poverty.
‘Think of the homelands as being like the Greek islands,’ he said to me. ‘But whereas the Greek islands are separated by water, in South Africa, the homelands are separated by land.’
I looked at him in disbelief.
‘But how do account for the disparities between white and black lands?’ I asked him. ‘Why is it that the white lands are good for agriculture and grazing but the black lands are arid?’
Koornhof was angry at the question. He had apparently assumed, given the name of my newspaper, that I would at least be obsequious, even if I did not agree with his country’s policies. He had recently got into trouble for telling the National Press Club in Washington that ‘apartheid is dead’. He’d been forced to back down after the outcry and, just the evening before our interview, he had made a statement: ‘the caricature of apartheid is dead.’ Now, he was saying to me ‘off-the-record’ that he was ‘very sad’ about Australia’s ‘harsher and harsher’ attitudes towards South Africa. He reminisced about the days when Australia and South Africa had played sport against one another and was clearly disappointed that I did not share his nostalgia.
Piet Koornhof was, of course, a member of the ruling National Party and prior to entering Parliament he had been national secretary of the Broederbond, the secret, all-male, Calvinist organisation that had essentially created apartheid. From 1948, every single Prime Minister and President of South Africa was a member of the Broederbond. This ended only in 1994, when the first free elections led to the election of Nelson Mandela as South Africa’s first black African President.
Koornhof had worked for the notorious Hendrik Veorwoerd, known as the architect of apartheid, who was Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958 until his assassination on the floor of the Parliament in 1966. But Koornhof had also been a Rhodes Scholar, and at Oxford he had written a doctoral dissertation on the ‘inevitable urbanization’ of black people in South Africa. I learned later that in 1986 he was ‘punished’ by being appointed South African Ambassador to the United States, after telling the Prime Minister P.W. Botha that peace would never come to South Africa until Nelson Mandela was released. Later still, in 1993, Dr Koornhof scandalised his former colleagues by leaving his wife (and, I presume, the comfortable house where I interviewed him) for a young coloured woman with whom he went on to have five children. The following year, he testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and was one of the few former ministers of the apartheid regime to acknowledge and take responsibility for the atrocities that had occurred during those years.
That afternoon in July 1979, I was amazed at what this man said and seemed to believe. But I was even more astonished by the fact that his house was on a main road and the two of us, sitting in comfort in well-stuffed armchairs, were clearly visible from the street. There was no security. It would have been so easy to lob a bomb through that window, I thought. That morning, Bruce Haigh had taken me to Soweto, the black township where more than one million people lived in conditions of extraordinary squalor and deprivation. But, as I was to learn, the activists in South Africa were not guerilla fighters as were, for instance, Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) Party, who from their base in neighbouring Mozambique were waging a war of liberation to regain Rhodesia. Together with Joshua Nkomo’s Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), based in Zambia, they formed the Patriotic Front and were intent on ending white rule in Zimbabwe. In South Africa, there was no armed struggle and the black people were extraordinarily passive, it seemed to me. The whole system depended on their compliance, the thousands of maids and other domestic staff whose live-in labour made possible the comfortable lives enjoyed by Dr Koornhof and the rest of the white population. The English population also benefited, as did other white non-Afrikaaners, such as South Africa’s many Jews (who had themselves mostly fled there from persecution in pre-war Europe). In 1977, the 4.3 million whites amounted to just under 17 per cent of the population, yet even the poorest white person enjoyed luxury, and legal rights, simply not available to the black majority. I found it baffling that there was so little physical resistance but, of course, this was deterred by such measures as requiring blacks to have ten continuous years with one employer before they could obtain the notorious ‘pass’ that enabled them to live legally in South Africa, outside the bantustans. The system was utterly repressive and—so far, at least—it had mostly succeeded. Yet resentment simmered everywhere; hatred glowered in many eyes. South Africa’s blacks appeared (to me anyway) abject and cowed, but they were not acquiescent. The Soweto uprising had been unprecedented, but it had happened. And it was children who had led the way. Perhaps it was a sign of things to come.
Most of the houses in Soweto were three-roomed very basic shelters, with no bathrooms, or electricity, which housed up to twenty people each. There were no gardens, hardly any trees, no street names or numbers but, incongruously, each house was fenced, as if it were sitting on a lush suburban plot. Street lighting came from arc lights set on high poles, giving the place the appearance of a prison, or a concentration camp. To my great surprise, there were a few houses that, while not being mansions, were large and obviously occupied by well-off people. Haigh pointed out Winnie Mandela’s house, and another that belonged to Dr Nthato Motlana, a doctor and a prominent anti-apartheid activist I was due to meet the next day. Motlana had been charged, alongside Mandela and others, for taking part in the ANC’s 1952 Campaign of Defiance, whereby people defied the race laws and sat on benches reserved for another colour, or entered libraries that were for whites only. Motlana had received a suspended sentence. Following the Soweto uprising he became one of the Committee of Ten, local citizens who united to provide leadership to the community in the wake of the massacre. He was detained and held without trial for five months.
Mostly, though, Soweto was a desolate place. There was street after street of these dwellings—it was hard to call them houses—stretching as far as the eye could see. There were no proper shops, just one primitive clinic and at the school we visited, the cement floors were cracked and kids were crammed three to a desk. Wrecked cars littered the streets. This was where people struggled to live and to give a chance to their kids, whose perfectly laundered and starched white shirts were a seeming miracle in this dustbowl, where women garbed in bright-coloured dresses and headgear cooked and cleaned and shopped and gossiped as women do everywhere. It was as if they had no idea that just up the road were oases of plenitude, where houses were large and built of brick, where gardens bloomed with colour and lush greenery. But of course they did. These were the women who were the maids who served the white children, who did all the work while the women of the house played tennis or lunched or lounged about, secure in the knowledge that their affairs were in good black hands.
It was while Haigh was showing me Soweto in all its confronting squalor that the security police stopped us. White people were forbidden to visit the townships. They demanded to know what we were doing there.
‘I am an Australian diplomat,’ Haigh said, offering them his official passport. ‘We allow your diplomats in Australia to travel wherever they wish in our country, so I am entitled to do the same here.’
I was sitting beside him in the front of the four-wheeled drive vehicle. I had been scribbling in my notebook and had not had time to conceal it when we were stopped. It was absolutely, totally forbidden for journalists to visit Soweto. We looked at each other.
‘Stay calm,’ he said to me.
The police had taken Haigh’s passport and were radioing back to base. He’d told them I was a newly arrived member of the embassy staff who did not yet have a passport or ID. There was a lot of conferring and head-shaking and foot-shuffling, but eventually they came back to our vehicle and allowed us to go on our way.
For the next two days, I met with dozens of people, most of them anti-apartheid activists of one kind or another. I met lawyers, doctors, journalists, students; some of them famous like Helen Suzman, the parliamentarian who for many years was the only MP who opposed apartheid and who regularly visited Mandela in prison, or John Kane-Berman, a well-known journalist with the Financial Mail; but most of them were anxious for our meetings not to be known to the state. I followed my instructions and made sure that my interview notes and the names of the people I’d spoken to were in separate notebooks. I hoped no one would be able to crack my private code.
I was surprised at the inefficiency of South Africa. For all that Johannesburg looked like a modern city, with its skyscrapers and highways, it functioned liked the cumbersome over-bureaucratised state that it was. Television had only just been introduced that year, and was strictly controlled by the state. There was no chance of images of apartheid being beamed out of the country. Repression, more than mining, was the country’s main industry and it dominated everything. It was impossible to get anything done on the phone. Even the Anglo-American Corporation, the mining giant, insisted I made my interview requests in writing. Not easy when I was only there for two days and there was no faxing, let alone email. Everything had to be done by telex, which meant I had to get the operator at the hotel to help me. The Information Department, which was meant to arrange foreign journalists’ access to politicians, treated me with utter suspicion. I could not interview Dr Koornhof, I was told, because he was out of the country. I knew that was a lie because he’d been quoted at a local event in that morning’s newspaper so I pushed back, and miraculously Koornhof reappeared in the country, ready to meet with me. Everyone seemed nervy and uptight. There were uniforms everywhere, including in the bureaucracy, where most positions appeared to require epaulettes and shiny brass buttons.
Mozambique opened my eyes to the reality of a country recently ‘liberated’ from colonial rule. The Polana Hotel where I stayed was once grand. It had been, I was told, the place for holidaying white South Africans, with its large airy rooms, its gardens flowing down to a beach where the Indian Ocean lapped at the shores. But four years of neglect, partly no doubt as a result of it now being state owned, had changed all that. The water in the taps in my room ran brown and, I’d been warned, under no circumstances was I to drink it. In the dining room, there were few choices on the menu, although what food there was was excellent and the waiters struggled to maintain appearances. They did silver service and they still wore livery, although their sandshoes were acknowledgement that standards were not what they’d once been. A large man wheeled around a trolley with covered dishes containing dessert but each one, when opened, revealed just humble quivering jellies and pieces of swiss roll. None of the cream-laden delicacies that would once have tempted diners. The shelves of the local supermarket were almost entirely empty. There was very little food in the country, I was told by X, the representative from the Revolutionary Front for the Independence of East Timor (Fretilin), which had established an embassy in Maputo and was training young men for its revolution. He took me on a tour of the city and its environs, showing me the chaos that had descended on the country since 1975.
Mozambique had been a Portuguese colony since around 1500, although efforts to develop the country were sporadic and, compared with some of their other colonial endeavours, half-hearted. But in the mid-1960s as part of the continuing worldwide uprising against colonialism, FRELIMO, a Marxist party, had led a guerilla war of independence. The war succeeded, somewhat abruptly, when democracy returned to Portugal and in June 1975, Mozambique acquired its independence. One of the first laws of the new government was to require all Portuguese to leave the country immediately, allowed to take just 20 kilograms of luggage with them. Now a civil war was raging. The national front—funded and largely organised by the South African and Rhodesian governments—was trying to bring down the government of Samora Machel.1 My most striking memory of Maputo was the number of road accidents. Every few hundred metres we encountered yet another car wreck, some of them very serious with bodies strewn all over the road. The South Africans are sending cars in, said my Fretilin guide, but very few people know how to drive. The Portuguese had kept that skill to themselves apparently.
My reason for going to Mozambique had been to try to interview Robert Mugabe. In 1974, after spending eleven years in a Rhodesian prison, he and compatriot Edgar Tekere had made Maputo their base for the revolutionary war ZANU was waging against the regime of Ian Smith. Before the interview could be scheduled, I had to be ‘screened’, I was informed by the ZANU press office. This had involved meeting in a bar with several of Mugabe’s men, all of whom wore the full Che Guevara guerilla garb: khaki pants, leather vests, berets, sunglasses, guns. Justin Nyoka, who headed the ZANU Public Information department, would decide if I could get to interview Comrade Mugabe. It seemed to me that the meeting was more a flirtation than a screening but I remained professional and explained how my newspaper would be a wonderful vehicle for their leader to get his views on how independence should be won for Zimbabwe to an Australian audience. There was only miniscule diplomatic representation in Mozambique, so the Australian government had no direct contact with Mugabe and his men. Australia’s Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser and his Foreign Minister, Andrew Peacock, would be flying into Lusaka in just a few days, I explained. My interview offered the perfect way to get the ZANU point of view in front of CHOGM. Nyoka was noncommittal. I explained that I would be flying to Tanzania, en route to Lusaka, the day after tomorrow; I needed the interview before then.
A few days later I was at the airport, angry and disappointed. I had not got the interview. I had waited. I had called Justin Nyoka as often as Maputo’s failing telephone system would allow, but I could not get a commitment. Instead, he gave me Edgar Tekere, who did not fit my preconceptions of what a guerilla should be like. He was a tall, softly spoken man, the son of an Anglican priest, who laughed a lot during our interview and he began each answer with a rhetorical question. But he was, I reminded myself, committed to armed struggle, he had spent years in prison and he had recently succeeded Mugabe as Secretary-General of ZANU, which organisation he—and not Mugabe—had co-founded. Getting to talk to him was something, I suppose, and the paper had run my lengthy Q&A with him. When I re-read the interview while writing this, I was surprised at how significant it really was. Tekere disclosed details of ZANU’s military position in Zimbabwe, its political position on a number of key issues to be addressed in Lusaka and was clearly sending messages to British and other Commonwealth diplomats. Perhaps most important of all, he told me that while ZANU enjoyed ‘the support of socialist countries to varying degrees’, it would not be allowing Cuban troops to join the fight. It was the fear that Cuba, acting as proxy for the Soviet Union, might send in troops that was one factor driving Malcolm Fraser’s efforts to secure a political solution in Zimbabwe.
But no one had heard of Edgar Tekere and I was worried that I had failed in my first assignment as a foreign correspondent. I had not been able to snare the top guy. I had yet to learn that securing an interview with a foreign political leader takes time and patience and that success had very long odds. Now I was heading to Lusaka where I would join my colleagues in the Canberra Press Gallery who were flying in with Fraser. I’d attend the briefings, write about the CHOGM meeting, report on the expected stoush between Fraser and Thatcher; in other words, I’d be just another hack, doing what all the others were doing. I had dashed my chance of breaking out and getting my own special story, the big scoop of an interview with the world-famous Robert Mugabe. Oriana Fallaci had nothing to fear, I told myself bitterly. The bold Italian journalist Fallaci was my idol and, if we’d had such a term then, my role model. I admired her without reservation. Her Interview with History had been published just three years earlier. It was a collection of her most famous and audacious interviews, with the likes of Henry Kissinger, the Shah of Iran, Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir. Fallaci was not only able to sit down with such people; she gave them hell when she did. Her trademark was to berate, confront or otherwise embarrass her subjects. In 1972, she famously reported Kissinger describing himself as ‘the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse’. Kissinger later said this was the most ‘disastrous’ media interview he had ever given. Just a month after I failed to interview Mugabe, in September 1979, Fallaci would again make headlines when during her interview with the Ayatollah Khomeini, she ripped off the chador she had been required to don in order to meet the Iranian leader and challenged him to confront her full face and her hair.
Still angry, I watched miserably from the Maputo departure lounge as a spanking-new plane, with a huge giraffe painted on its tail, took off. Wondering what was happening to my flight, I went over to the counter. It turned out that flights were not called at this tiny excuse for an airport. The plane I’d just seen speed down the runway was heading for Tanzania. Not only that, on board was Robert Mugabe and his team, on their way to Lusaka. Worse, there would not be another plane for days. And worse still, my luggage was on that plane.
The only way I would be able to get to Lusaka would be to return to South Africa and find a flight from there. I made my way to the train station where there was a dirty old local, with just one class of travel, that would stop frequently until it reached the border where I’d transfer to a South African train. Before I boarded I had to be inspected by customs, to ensure I was taking nothing illegally out of the country. That was a bit of joke, I thought to myself, it was not like there’d been anything to buy in Maputo. I had nothing except the clothes I was wearing, a sleeveless knee-length red dress, and my handbag. I did not have a jacket or even a cardigan, although I had had the wit to keep my typewriter and tape-recorder with me. Now the customs men were homing in on my bright yellow, and admittedly snazzy, Olivetti portable and my small tape-recorder. I was taking them out of the country illegally, they declared. Where was my export permit? It was useless to state that items such as these were not procurable anywhere in Mozambique because that, of course, was why they wanted them. Grimly, I handed over my tools of trade, demanded token pieces of paper as receipts in return and carrying only my bag slung over my shoulder, walked down the platform.
As the train chugged away from the station, I realised that I was alone in my compartment. The corridors were teeming with people looking for seats so once I’d beckoned that it was okay to join me, an astonished-looking crowd of school kids poured in. They made sure to keep a respectful distance between the white lady and their dark bodies. We did a lot of reassuring smiling at each other. As the train stopped at each station the crowd in my compartment changed, but what did not alter was the initial look of incomprehension and wariness on their faces when they saw me. ‘Are you sure it’s okay?’ everyone seemed to be saying. They all knew that a few hundred kilometres further west, once we reached the South African border, what we were doing would be against the law. And they, not me, were the ones who would be punished. But we weren’t there yet so I continued to share the relative luxury of my space.
It soon got dark and adults, almost all of them men, replaced the school kids as my travelling companions. Again, there was a lot of smiling as they sought to calm any nervousness I might have felt. I was still too angry and upset at myself for missing the plane, losing my luggage and my typewriter to have any concerns about anything else. We stopped for a while at a station where everyone seemed to get off, to stretch legs and to buy food. Cautiously, I stepped down onto the platform. I was nervous at being stranded here if the train suddenly took off but I savoured my luck at being able to see this tiny outpost. The place was noisy and dirty and full of laughter and the uncensored sounds of people simply living and dealing with each other. Back on the train, the men in my compartment started opening bags of sandwiches. I realised they must be on their way to work in the diamond mines. These men were the backbone of the South African economy, imported labour, paid a pittance, forced to live for months on end in harsh barracks-style accommodation, sentenced to instant death if they were caught stealing even the smallest stone. One of them noticed my hungry glances. After buying the train ticket, I had no money left. A man shyly offered half his sandwich; he took measures to demonstrate to me that his black skin had not touched the bread, that it was okay for me to accept his offering. I gratefully devoured the food but I felt overcome by shame that there was this hierarchy based on race and that, for no reason at all, my skin colour placed me near its top.
The train stopped. I realised from watching the miners that we had to disembark. With gestures, they made me understand I had to have my passport stamped and then walk a short distance to Komatipoort, the South African border town, where another newer and sleeker train waited. Bright klieg-like lights revealed the platform to be so clean it could have satisfied hospital standards, but I felt as if I was walking onto a World War II movie set. Every few metres stood a uniformed guard, his peaked cap resembling those worn (at least in the movies) by Nazis, and beside each guard a large and savage Alsatian dog. The dogs surged and strained at their leashes and I cowed as I passed them. But I soon understood that they were not barking at me. It was the men beside me, those generous souls who had shared their sandwiches, who were the target of the dogs’ fury. These men, too, shrank back, but other guards emerged behind us and forced the men to march past the dogs and ordered them to form a line in front of a small table where another guard sat, papers spread out in front of him. I needed to go to the toilet and found myself forced to use the one marked ‘Blankes Dames’. Then I joined the line, feeling really frightened for the first time since I had arrived in southern Africa.
Suddenly, two guards were at my side. They were pulling me by the arm and dragging me out of the queue. It was quickly apparent that I had made a dreadful mistake in joining the black line. The guards were friendly enough, but insistent. I lowered my eyes in embarrassment as I was escorted past the miners to the very front of the line. I was pushed ahead of an Indian woman and her five children who, until my arrival, had been first in the queue. When I squatted down to rest the papers on my leg while I filled them out, a chair was brought for me. I was treated with courtesy despite the fact that I looked like a ruffian; I had not been able to change my clothes for a couple of days. I remembered that I had a bundle of Fretilin leaflets in my handbag. All communist organisations were proscribed in South Africa; it was a crime to even possess, let alone distribute, their publications. But my skin colour saved me, just as my sex had saved me in Soweto. It simply did not occur to these guards that this white woman would be smuggling subversive literature, just as it did not cross the minds of the police in Soweto that I was anything other than a secretary at the embassy. The man at the little table looked at my passport, checked the visa that had been awarded me by the embassy in Canberra, and waved me through. I was taken to the other train and guided towards a compartment. Three women were already seated there, a mother and two daughters, all Afrikaans, plump and smug. They wrinkled their noses in disgust. I probably did smell by now. As we sped towards Johannesburg I shrank into my corner, unable to overlook the difference between the two train trips. The government might be touting the end of petty apartheid but if it was happening at all, it was only in the big cities, in front of the international gaze. Move to rural South Africa and, as I had just observed, nothing had changed.
In Lusaka, Andrew Peacock cheerily informed me that he had rescued my luggage while he was in Dar-es-Salaam. And, he said, he’d been able to get consular staff to retrieve my typewriter and tape-recorder. It was impossible to exaggerate how relieved I was. As a show of gratitude, I introduced him to Justin Nyoka. At a press conference in London the week before, Peacock had said he was willing to hold talks with the Patriotic Front in Lusaka ‘should they want to meet with us’. Soon Australia’s Foreign Affairs Minister was sitting down with Edgar Tekere. I had not got the interview with Mugabe but at least I was able to facilitate a diplomatic connection between the Australian government and the man who in April the following year would be elected as the newly independent Zimbabwe’s first black Prime Minister. We did not know then that Robert Mugabe would become as brutal a dictator as the world has seen, that his regime would turn murderous within months and that he would find the way to retain power, despite vigorous opposition from those who had once fought by his side in the independence struggle. In November 2017, Mugabe was finally deposed as President of Zimbabwe by his own military, who awarded him millions of dollars in compensation and a gurantee of immunity from prosecution. He had held the position since 1980, a despot clinging to power in the face of international condemnation. But in 1979 he was seen as a freedom fighter and a patriot. Unlike Mandela who still languished in a South African prison, Mugabe was free and was being cheered by the world as he defeated the harsh and racist regime of Ian Smith. In promising democracy and recognition for all, regardless of race, Mugabe had brought hope to southern Africa that the end was in sight for the remaining racist regime, the government of South Africa.
The CHOGM meeting of 1979 had turned out to be one of the most significant in the history of the Commonwealth. It produced the Lusaka Declaration on Racism and Racial Prejudice, an important statement of principles, but the meeting’s final communiqué had charted a political solution to the Zimbabwe crisis. Malcolm Fraser had played a key role in both and in the process had cemented his reputation as a champion against racism—a position that would be formally recognised when the CHOGM meeting in Nassau in 1985 appointed him, by then no longer Prime Minister, a member of the Eminent Persons Group that was charged with encouraging political dialogue around the world to end apartheid. The Lusaka meeting had been full of drama. Joseph Nkomo, leader of ZAPU, which with Mugabe’s ZANU formed the Patriotic Front alliance fighting for majority rule in Zimbabwe, had very undiplomatically taken a seat inside the conference room and was thrown out. The ZANU guerillas had put down their arms to work the diplomatic route and been far more effective. But the biggest drama of all was how Fraser dealt with Margaret Thatcher. It had taken enormous effort to get Thatcher to agree to set aside her earlier support for the new puppet Zimbabwe government and to sign on for new, supervised free elections, but Fraser was worried that she might get cold feet at the last minute. She was under great pressure from the conservatives in her party who felt that any repudiation of their ‘kith and kin’ in Rhodesia was unconscionable.
So Fraser leaked the communiqué. He called us Australian journalists in and gave us the not-yet-finalised document. He justified this by pointing to the nine-hour time delay between Australia and Zambia; if the Aussies had had to wait for the official release, the British press who were in a much-closer time zone, would scoop our coverage. Thatcher was angry enough when she learned about this, from a note passed to her by her Foreign Secretary Lord Peter Carrington while she was trapped at a church service and unable to intervene. But she went into orbit when she turned up to a barbecue hosted by Fraser that Sunday afternoon to discover he had invited eight leading British journalists for a background briefing. The draft communiqué now a fait accompli—even before the other heads of government had signed-off on it—and Thatcher was locked in. Fraser had triumphed. And so had the black countries and the Patriotic Front. Fraser would attend the Independence celebrations in Zimbabwe the following April, and Australia was the first country to extend diplomatic recognition to the new democracy. We journalists never figured out how to account for Fraser’s strong and enduring abhorrence of racism. It seemed so at odds with his conservative, even reactionary, views on so many other topics, yet it was a consistent theme of his government. There was no greater illustration of the man’s complexities. In 1981 he prevented a plane carrying South African football players from re-fuelling in Australia. Having helped bring majority rule in Zimbabwe he set his sights on South Africa, and argued ardently for why apartheid had to end. And his anti-racism views were not confined to Africa. He controversially allowed large numbers of Vietnamese boat people into Australia; championed multiculturalism including establishing the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) radio and television network; and enacted land rights legislation. When he died in 2015, Malcolm Fraser received heartfelt tributes from many Indigenous Australians.
On the final night of CHOGM, Michelle Grattan and I danced with the guerillas in a series of Lusaka nightspots. We drank cognac with Edgar Tekere, Richard Hove and Simba Makoni. Less than a year later, all three men would be ministers in Mugabe’s government. They would all eventually fall out with their despotic leader and in 2008, Makoni, endorsed by Tekere, ran for President against Mugabe. On this night, however, in between dancing, the talk was all of revolution: how to manage the increasingly-fractious Patriotic Front, and what to do about the Voice of Free Africa, the Rhodesian propaganda service that was getting to some of Tekere’s troops. Sitting there that night, talking and drinking, it was easy to forget that just a few hundred kilometres away across the border in Zimbabwe the war was still raging. A couple of weeks earlier, I had had my first experience of that war when I had flown from Bulawayo to Salisbury, the capital of what everyone on the crammed DC4 was still calling Rhodesia. As the plane had taken off, it had seemed to rise straight up and then it turned, violently.
‘That’s what’s called a corkscrew takeoff,’ said the young man sitting next to me. He was wearing an army uniform. As the plane pushed into the atmosphere, the flight attendant came crawling up the aisle on her stomach. She had a torch clenched between her teeth, a tiny notebook in her hand, taking drink orders. Since it was only a twenty-minute flight, I did not bother ordering anything, but I heard everyone around me ordering two, or even three, double Scotches. A blue light suddenly flashed outside the plane’s window.
‘It’s a SAM,’ said my companion, seeing that I was startled. ‘The terrs are firing at us.’
I took ‘terrs’ to mean the terrorists, but I had to ask: ‘What’s a SAM?’
‘Surface to air missile,’ he offered. ‘They’ll fire at us when we land, too. They usually miss.’
So that’s why everyone had ordered the stiff drinks, I thought to myself. I regretted I had not followed their example.
The flight attendant had not bothered with glasses but had walked the aisle with a basket full of miniature bottles the moment the plane flattened-out.
In the nightclub, Tekere’s bodyguards waited at a discrete distance until the Secretary-General was ready to leave. They then organised for another shiny, new Mercedes-Benz vehicle to drive Michelle and me back to our hotel. I was a little shocked to see Red Cross signs on the car doors. Oh well, I thought, I guess they are all on the same side.
Once CHOGM was over I said goodbye to my press gallery colleagues who were returning to Canberra with the Prime Minister and headed back to Johannesburg. I was going home via New York, where I’d planned a few days holiday and I was on a Pan Am flight later that evening. When I checked-in, I was told that the seat I’d requested was available. Puzzled, I took the boarding pass. I had not requested a seat. Who would I be sitting next to, I wondered? He turned out to be a non-descript middle-aged man in a suit. He ignored me as I stepped over him to get to my window seat and seemed more interested in talking to his two companions, one of whom was seated across the aisle, the other in front of him. Why didn’t they sit together? I wondered.
As soon as were airborne I took out my book. It was The Super-Afrikaners. Inside the Afrikaner Broederbond, an exposé by investigative journalists Ivor Wilkins and Hans Strydom of the secret Afrikaner all-male fraternity that supposedly ran South Africa. The book had created a big stir when it was published the previous year, not just because it had actually dared to expose the existence of this group that had never been previously publicly acknowledged but, even more sensationally, an Index listed 7500 names, reputed to be a near-complete list of all its members. I was running my finger down the list, to see if any of the government people I had interviewed were included, when my travelling companion said to me:
‘I’m in there.’
He reached for the book and indicated a name: ‘That’s me.’ He then reached into his pocket and pulled out a business card. It listed his name and his occupation: Mayor of Stellenbosch. Stellenbosch, I knew, was the spiritual and intellectual heartland of Afrikaner South Africa. It was a small city in the Western Cape province, about 50 kilometres from Cape Town, whose population was totally white and which prided itself on making no concessions to the English minority. It was where the Afrikaner University was located, the place where the next generation was trained to assume leadership of the country’s political, military and religious institutions.
Just then the flight attendant arrived with the drinks trolley, and as I sipped my pre-dinner bloody mary, the man began to engage me.
‘What were you doing in South Africa? Where did you go? Did you like our country?’
‘I could not accept the country’s apartheid laws,’ I told him. I found the institutional oppression of the country’s black majority abhorrent.
‘But that is changing,’ he assured me.
I disagreed. ‘Maybe in Johannesburg the Whites Only signs were coming down,’ I said, ‘but once you got out into the country it was business as usual.’
By now our dinner had been served and we were both into our glasses of red wine.
‘Let me buy you another drink,’ said my companion.
He made sure my glass was never empty as he continued to question me: ‘Who had I interviewed? What were their names? Did anyone criticise the government?’ I smiled to myself. The poor man has obviously not been briefed on the capacity of Australians—especially of journalists—to hold their liquor. Eventually it was his voice that became slurred, and he was the one who first fell asleep.
When I awoke it was light outside, and we were only an hour or so from New York. I noticed that my companion was standing in the aisle, conferring with his friends. When he saw that I was awake, he introduced them, telling me they were diamond dealers going to New York on business. My companion sat down and his friend seated in front of him passed over two glasses of what looked like champagne and orange juice. I protested that it was a bit early in the day but the man insisted:
‘It’s my birthday,’ he said. ‘You must help me celebrate.’
As I gamely sipped, the questions resumed. ‘Where are you staying in New York? We’d love to take you to dinner.’ I was vague and instead turned the questions back on him: ‘Where are you staying? What are you going to be doing?’
‘We’ve got meetings on 45th Street,’ the man across the aisle called over. ‘You know, the diamond district.’
I knew enough about New York to know that the diamond district was on 47th Street. These guys aren’t diamond dealers, I thought. I was shaken at the thought of how much trouble the South African government appeared to have taken to try to find out who I’d spoken to. Three men! All the way to New York!
We were soon on the ground and, I noticed with relief that once I had cleared customs, the men had disappeared. I headed for Seventh Avenue South in the Village, where I had the use of a friend’s apartment. I was intending to complete at least a draft of the three articles I proposed to write on South Africa while everything was still fresh in my mind. They would follow-on from the pieces I had written on Mozambique, Namibia and Rhodesia while I had been on the road, as well as the daily articles I had filed from Lusaka. I got out my notebooks and as I arranged them in order, I remembered a conversation I’d had with the journalist John Kane-Bermann.
‘Be careful with your notebooks,’ he’d warned me when I’d spoken to him just before I got onto the plane for New York. ‘They will have been watching you but they will want to know who you have spoken with.’
Of course, I reassured him. Privately, I thought he was being rather paranoid. Even for South Africa.
I was careful of course. There had been no need to hide the fact that I’d met with well-known anti-apartheid figures such as Helen Suzman, Ken Rashidi, Helen Joseph, Dr Nthato Motlana or the various government officials, but there were others who could get into trouble if it was known they were talking to a foreign journalist. One of these was Zwelakhe Sisulu, the son of Walter Sisulu who was still imprisoned on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela, and several other activists and journalists who had been particularly helpful. I had not used their names in my notebooks and I had not written down anywhere the code I’d used to help me identify them.
Before I could even start writing, I began to feel dizzy and nauseous and I had a splitting headache. I must be getting the flu, I thought. A tremendous weariness enveloped me and I found that I could not work, so I climbed into bed. I woke up three days later.
With just a day or two left of my Manhattan stay, I decided to go out. I went shopping, I went for a walk with Kate Jennings, a writer friend from Sydney who now lived in New York; and had a drink with Frank Hoffey, the brilliant defamation lawyer who had always found a way to help me get into print what I wanted to report when I was at the National Times. He had moved from Sydney to New York a few months earlier. Then it was time to leave and I went back to the apartment to pack. I then did something for which I have never forgiven myself. Instead of carrying them with me, I packed my notebooks and the drafts of my articles into one of my suitcases, and checked it through. I felt it was safe to do so as, I had been assured by South African Airways, which had written my ticket although the carrier was Pan Am, that it was a direct flight. In fact, the flight stopped in Los Angeles where we changed planes, and again in Auckland. On the morning of 18 August, I arrived back in Sydney. One of my two bags did not.
Luggage is never really lost, of course. But a week later, Pan Am wrote to tell me they had been unable to find my bag and requested further information so they could have their Central Tracing Office in New York take over the search. Then, just over two weeks after my return, Qantas got in touch to say my bag had been found—in Vienna. Nothing seemed to be missing. I examined the notebooks carefully. They were all there but I realised, heart lurching, that although I had not attached names to the actual interviews, I had compiled a list of people I’d intended to try to contact. The list was in another book but it would be easy enough to match it with my notes of the people I had spoken to. But who would do that, I reasoned? I had already left South Africa. I should not have let the notebooks out of my hands, but they were on a flight to Sydney. No one could possibly have seen them. Then I realised something. In New York, I had slipped some pamphlets about Stellenbosch given to me by the man who said he was the mayor into one of the notebooks. They weren’t there. That’s when I started asking questions. Qantas? Why would Qantas be able to find luggage from a Pan Am flight? How could luggage tagged for Sydney end up in Vienna? I rang John Kane-Berman who gave me the ghastly news. Three of the people I had interviewed, included Zwelakhe Sisulu, had been arrested. I felt sick.2 I had put people’s lives in danger. Although I had my notebooks back, I did not feel able to write my planned series of articles. Maybe exposing the evils of South Africa would be the best—perhaps the only—way to atone for my incompetence. But I was paralysed by remorse. I found myself totally unable to write anything.
And then on 25 September, three weeks after my bag was returned to me, I received a phone call at work from a young woman. She would not tell me her name, but she had some information for me.
‘ASIO took your South African files,’ she told me.
I was thunderstruck. Only a few people at Fairfax knew about the missing luggage. I had been far too embarrassed to make my blunder public, yet this stranger knew. She said she worked for ASIO on campus, keeping an eye on left-wing groups. She said that she had been ‘disgusted’ to hear from two of her ASIO colleagues that my files had been stolen. She did not think I was the sort of person who did not have the best interests of Australia at heart, which was how she rationalised spying on students. I gave her my home phone number and asked if she would ring me again if she could find out what had happened to my files. From the way she spoke, she did not seem to know that they had been returned to me. I did not know what to make of her call. I still don’t. In the note for my file I wrote straight afterwards, I noted that Pan Am had told me they were perplexed at their inability to find the luggage and were equally mystified by how it had ultimately turned up. ‘Was there any politically sensitive material in the files?’ the managing director of Pam Am had asked me. He conceded that was the only explanation for the disappearance of the luggage in the first place, and for the preposterous explanation from Qantas that it had gone astray to Vienna.
On 5 October, I wrote a column for the Financial Review about this episode, disguising the gender of my caller, and speculating that if the information was true it meant that, contrary to the instructions of the Whitlam government, ASIO still maintained connections with the notorious South African Bureau of State Security, or BOSS as it was known. ASIO must have intercepted my bag in Sydney, rifled through my belongings and, I could scarcely bear to think about it, read my notebooks, at the request of BOSS. Yet, when I finally got access to my quite extensive ASIO file many years later, although it included a copy of this column, there was no commentary as to its accuracy.
The only possible motivation for stealing my luggage, and reading my notebooks and draft articles, was to accomplish what the men on the plane from Johannesburg had failed to discover: who I had spoken to and what they had told me. Melodramatic as it sounded, I could not escape concluding that a drug in the champagne I’d been given on the plane must have caused me to be so sick in New York. A further motive might have been merely to delay publication of my articles; the files were returned to me, after all. My articles would have less currency the longer it took me to write them. With any luck, they might have concluded, I would just give up and not write anything. In the meantime, they had rounded-up the people I’d talked to. The repressive state rolled on.
My article on South Africa was eventually published on 10 October, three months after I had first arrived in the country. It was a tough-enough piece. I dismissed the changes to apartheid as cosmetic and argued that the regime had not changed its basic purpose. ‘The ultimate goal of apartheid,’ I wrote, ‘and one that is non-negotiable is to assign all blacks to a homeland and to oblige them to give up South African citizenship.’ I compared the process with the expulsion of Chinese from Vietnam: ‘The homelands residents are the boatpeople of South Africa.’ But the piece had no context and thus not much currency. It was no longer part of the build-up to CHOGM, able to be seen in the light of the efforts to dismantle minority rule in Zimbabwe. It was just another isolated article about a country that was doing its best to stay out of the international spotlight while it continued on its evil mission to deny basic rights to its non-white citizens. What was so startling was the lengths the country had gone to in order to prevent my writing about it. The bitter lesson for me was how utterly inept I had been, and the consequences that had had for other people. I’d best stick to the small playpen of Canberra, I concluded bitterly.
Yet, less than a year later, Max Walsh had sent me off again, this time to Pakistan. This assignment was also tied to a Prime Ministerial CHOGM trip. Fraser was travelling to New Delhi for a CHOGM regional meeting, and Max had suggested I peel off at the end and try to interview President Zia ul–Haq, the general who had seized power two years earlier, deposing Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was later executed. Before I left Canberra, I had made a formal request through the Pakistani High Commission and once in New Delhi, while the rest of the press party took the day off to visit the Taj Mahal, I found myself being shunted between bureaucrats in the soulless offices of the Pakistani Embassy, trying to firm up the interview. Go to Islamabad and wait, I was advised, and that was how I came to be in Lahore, on my way to Islamabad, and discovering how very different Pakistan was from the laidback countries of most of southern Africa.
I discovered in less than an hour the truth of the saying of the time, that in Pakistan there are three sexes: men, women and Western women. I was trying to get my bearings in an overcrowded Lahore airport, picking my way through bunches of people who clung together in seeming trepidation, anxious perhaps about the looming adventure of flight. The next day, 11 September, was a major public holiday: 48 years since the death of Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, and millions were on the move, visiting their families. It was almost impossible to move in the airport. I found myself trying to edge around a bunch of women who were squatting on the cold floor, in a circle around their bundles of belongings. They were tiny, these women, almost miniature people, the smallest adult human beings I had ever seen, clad in light-coloured robes. It was a chaotic and contradictory scene: women covered and not moving, animals squawking, a sense of nothing happening, yet the only reason to be there was to travel. It felt more like a bus stop than that most modern of places: an airport. Were these women nuns? Or an example of the creeping Islamisation being instigated by President ul-Huq? Women were being, for now, merely encouraged to cover up. Wear the chador, at least. Compulsion would replace encouragement before long. Or maybe these women were just in traditional tribal garb? No one seemed to take any notice of me, despite my height, my informal clothes, and the fact that I was female, with unruly uncovered hair. At Lahore airport and, later, in Islamabad and travelling to the border, I was able to get at least a superficial glimpse of the craziness and the paradox that was Pakistan in 1980: the ultra-modern and the medieval in lockstep. Or in contest?
The line was very long and moved slowly. When I eventually made it to the front, the young man at the information counter beamed, as if it were the happiest moment in his life to have before him a scruffy and travel-worn woman whose jeans and checked cotton shirt, purchased in a bazaar in New Delhi a few days earlier, clearly branded her as epitomising Western decadence. I asked for directions. I was in transit to Islamabad. His instructions, delivered in highly excitable English, were difficult to understand. The man noticed my hesitation.
‘Let me show you,’ he said as, abandoning a lengthening line of travellers needing help, he leapt over the counter, grabbed my hand and started pulling me towards the door. As soon as we were outside, in a chaotic and noisy space where decrepit vehicles played dodgem cars, the man’s warmly ingratiating manner changed: ‘There is a hotel we can go to,’ he said, waving his arm towards some buildings on the perimeter of the car park. He was not coercive, rather his dark eyes looked pleadingly at me as if to say, I know all you Western women are whores so why not with me? ‘No!’ I said firmly as I disentangled my arm and marched back into the terminal, from where, it turned out, my next flight would soon be leaving.
It did not occur to me to be nervous, let alone frightened, during my week in Pakistan. I took risks that today would be inconceivable. The political, and religious landscape of Pakistan is vastly different post 9/11; post the assassination of several of its Prime Ministers; post the movement of the Taliban into sections of the country; post the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden who, it turned out, had been hiding out in Pakistan for some years. Today, Westerners cannot move freely, and even within protected compounds are at risk from suicide bombers. Journalists face particular perils such as befell Daniel Pearl from the Wall Street Journal, who was kidnapped and executed in 2002. But in 1980 it was not yet dangerous for a Westerner, even a Western woman, to travel alone to places that today are more-or-less no-go areas. Or, maybe, I was just lucky.
I checked into the Holiday Inn Islamabad and began immediately to organise my work. I would meet with the Foreign Affairs Minister, with whom I had an introduction, as well as making contact with local journalists and foreign diplomats. I also hoped to travel to the Afghan border, of course, through the famous Khyber Pass, but my most pressing task—the reason I had come to Pakistan—was to keep pushing for the interview with the President. I went to the hotel coffee shop for some lunch. I was fascinated to see, for the first time, a number of Arab men in thobes and headdresses. I fell into conversation with one of them. Sheik A was a diplomat, he told me, from one of the Gulf States. He invited me to have dinner with him the following night. Later that afternoon I wandered down to the bar where correspondents from various Western newspapers were hanging out. They were friendly enough, if perhaps a little patronising to someone who was new to the scene and who clearly knew nothing. There was talk of how the Russian occupation of Afghanistan was going; it had been nine months since the invasion and refugees were starting to come across into Pakistan. ‘It would be interesting to talk to them,’ I ventured. ‘No way,’ was the consensus from the blokes at the bar. ‘You can’t get to the border.’
The next morning, the day of the big holiday, everything was closed but I asked the hotel about hiring a local driver. They soon found me M., a young man who seemed affable and who agreed to drive me for the rest of my stay. I said I wanted to go to Peshawar. ‘No problem,’ he said. We agreed to go Sunday. On our way, my driver took me to Murree, a summer resort in the hills outside Rawalpindi, the old city that lies adjacent to Pakistan’s capital of Islamabad, and one of the most beautiful places on earth. He introduced me to his family, which I took as meaning he wanted me to know that I could trust him not to behave the way the guy at the airline counter in Lahore had. I was relieved. I was going to be spending a lot of time with M., and in some very remote and potentially dangerous places.
The drive to the outpost of Peshawar, the last town before the Afghan border, took a couple of hours. We stopped so I could see the Old Town. I walked through a bazaar, conspicuous not only as a Western woman wearing just jeans and a cotton shirt, but as the only woman around. I did not feel any hostility towards me. Bemusement perhaps. In the stalls along the dusty streets, ancient vendors presided over baskets piled high with spices and other substances.
‘You want heroin?’ a bright-eyed boy called out to me. ‘You come with me?’
‘No thanks.’
Was that really hashish? I wondered, peering more closely at one of the piled-up baskets in front of an old man.
‘Madam, like?’ he asked, apparently seeing no difference between the drug, the quantities of which would make several of my friends back in Australia gasp in wonder, and the baskets of turmeric, cumin and other spices he had on offer. No, Madam would not like. She might be foolhardy, travelling by herself to what was fast becoming a war zone, but she was not insane. She was not going to even think about what could happen if she was discovered carrying the tiniest quantity of this drug as she made her way home through Bangkok and Singapore.
I had been given permission to visit the Afghan refugee camps at Jamrud and Aza Khel, outside Peshawar. In these tent cities, people surrounded me, begging for help. ‘Tell your government,’ they said, eyes fixed on mine, testing my sincerity, ‘tell your government we need Kalashnikov.’ ‘I can write about your situation,’ was the best I could offer. And indeed as soon as I was back in Islamabad I went to see the people at UNHCR, to get more material for an article about the displacement of tribal people by the Russians, but I knew that no one back in Canberra was going to care about these people.
We then headed for the border. The road was narrow as it wound tightly around the large mountain range that divides Pakistan from Afghanistan. The landscape was dusty, brown, inhospitable-seeming, with low-slung mountains in the distance giving the terrain its only relief. I saw tank traps, formations of rock blocks, similar to today’s ubiquitous bollards outside public buildings, and left by the British after World War II. The Khyber Pass, the only way from Europe to Asia though the mountains to Pakistan and, beyond there, the riches of India, is not known as the ‘gateway of conquerors’ for nothing. The road was isolated, unpatrolled and, I had been warned, the domain of various gangs, some of whom might demand money. I hoped that was all they would want. At Landi Kotal, a town midway to the border, we saw a sign: ‘Visitors are requested not to stop or sleep at remote or lonely places. They must try to reach Peshawar before nightfall.’ We were stopped once by some kind of militia who searched the car. They were convinced that the only Westerners who travelled in these parts were drug-smugglers. Another three or four times groups of men, brandishing rifles, demanded money. Each time I handed over the amount advised by M., huge wads of local currency that amounted to just a few Australian dollars. One group, obviously officials, at Jamrud Fort, even gave me the bottom copy of an in-triplicate receipt. There was no paper acknowledgement for the other ‘taxes’ that I had handed over, although I kept track of the amounts so I could claim them on my expenses. There were men in the Canberra Press Gallery who boasted of claiming for brothels on their expenses, so I didn’t see why I could not make a legitimate claim for baksheesh.
After being stopped the first few times at no cost except a few dollars, I relaxed enough to start to worry about what for me was the most terrifying part of the trip: the traffic. The road was mostly narrow, with sharp hairpin bends, and as we crawled higher and higher in our tiny car, I steeled myself at each bend for the gaudily decorated and overcrowded bus that would invariably come hurtling towards us. There was scarcely room to pass, especially at speed. Each time we survived what I thought was an inevitable head-on collision, I breathed heavily with relief. M. was highly amused by my fear. ‘Allah will look after us,’ he reassured me cheerily, though I noticed that he, too, closed his eyes as the buses sped towards us. Fortunately Allah did ensure our safe passage and we made it to the Afghan border. I stood beside the sign that noted Kabul was 225 kilometres away, and looked down on the road between the two countries. The border functioned as a duty-free port and it was quite astonishing to watch the steady procession of men and black burkha-clad women, looking like mobile tents, trudging eastwards, their backs burdened by contraband. They were carrying stoves, refrigerators, car-parts, rugs, furniture, huge cartons containing cigarettes. There were also cases of what looked like Coca-Cola—from Russian-held Afghanistan! It was said that you could buy anything at that border, and that if you wanted something that was not on offer, you’d be told to come back the next day and it would be waiting for you. Watching the human carriers (I saw very few vehicles) walk from Afghanistan with their multifarious goods, I could believe it. I settled for some cigarettes and a bottle of Coke. None of these were intended for consumption, and I was quite annoyed a few months later when a friend who was staying with me in Canberra told me she’d drunk the Coke.
‘I’ll replace it, of course,’ she said.
‘That will not be easy,’ I told her.
Back in Islamabad, I breasted the bar at the Holiday Inn and, trying to maintain my sangfroid, mentioned in passing that I’d just returned from the border.
The other journos looked at me sceptically.
‘No way you could have got there,’ one of them said disbelievingly. ‘The road’s closed.’
I continued to press my case for an interview with the President. Be patient, I was told. He will see you. I had been waiting four days now and I was not encouraged. I kept busy, gathering information and perspectives. Whatever the outcome with the President, I would be writing something about my visit to Pakistan. I called on the Thai Embassy and the Japanese, saw the US Political Counsellor and met with local journalists. I was asked to do an interview with a local newspaper, The Muslim, about the position of women in Australia. Later, I was surprised to see myself described in the article as ‘the young blonde Australian journalist Anne Summers of Woman’s Day and the first woman Bureau Chief of the Australian Financial Review’—I would have put it the other way round, my weekly column for a women’s magazine being an add-on to my main job of writing about politics. I was even more surprised to see myself quoted as saying, ‘If young smart, brilliant girls begin wearing this garment which has a flare of its own, it will gradually become more popular.’ I most assuredly had not endorsed ‘this garment’, the chador, the local version of headscarf, which the Zia ul-Haq government was trying to compel women to wear. The Australian High Commission thought this misquoting of me was hilarious: ‘Never knew you were so Islamic,’ commented the person who had sent me the article.
The President’s people said I might have a better chance of seeing him if I went to Karachi. While I was there I would try to meet the Bhutto women, the widow of the late President, killed by the current President, and his daughter, Benazir. They were apparently under some kind of house arrest. I sent out some feelers. I also heard from the Thai Embassy that I should make contact with their people in Karachi. It was my last night in Islamabad and I was finally going to have the several-times deferred dinner with Sheik A. When I arrived in the hotel lobby I did not, at first, recognise him. Gone were the beguiling robes; in front of me was a man wearing what could only be described as a John Travolta suit: it was clinging, it had flared trousers and it was baby blue. Serves you right Summers, I said to myself as I followed him across the marble floors of the Holiday Inn, you were objectifying him; you don’t like it when it’s done to you.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked, trying to rescue the evening.
‘To a friend’s place,’ he said. ‘You will see.’
As we climbed into his chauffeur-driven embassy vehicle, I noticed that a group of men who had been lingering near us in the foyer had followed us out, and were clambering into other vehicles that formed themselves into a convoy behind ours. We headed out of town, and as the houses grew fewer I began to feel apprehensive.
‘Whose place are we going to?’
‘We are nearly there.’
And indeed we were. The cars pulled up outside a nice-looking low-slung desert house, with vines and flowering creepers, and we all piled out. There must have been ten men, most of them wearing robes. And me. Oh shit, I thought to myself, and not a soul in the world knows I am here.
We sat down to dinner. I was placed at the head of the long table. Our host, who was an ambassador from, I think, Tunisia, sat at the other end. We were served on plates of solid gold. My recall of the evening is incomplete. We may have been served by a woman, I am not sure, but I do remember this: these men could not have been nicer, more considerate or more anxious to make me feel welcome and safe. We must have talked politics. However strange it must have seemed to all of us that I was there, and however impossible such a gathering would have been in this country anywhere outside an embassy residence (as I learned this house was), on this occasion being a Western woman was a plus. It was yet another instance of the privileged access journalists have to people, to places and to experiences that lie outside the ambit of their usual lives. As conduits to the wide world of our audiences, we are often used and manipulated and misled for craven motives, but we also get to see and do extraordinary and amazing things and meet the world’s best (as well as its worst) people. It is a trade that allows seamless access and interchange and where work relations often gravitate into friendships and more.
While I was having no luck getting to meet with President Zia, I did have my interview with the Aga Shahi, the Minister for Foreign Affairs. His sister lived in Canberra and had kindly arranged this for me. When I arrived at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs it was raining heavily, and as I made my way to the entrance I lost my balance on the slippery terrazzo and fell flat on my face. Worse, I was unable to stop slithering along the wet surface. Very undignified, I thought, trying to scramble to my feet. It was then that I noticed the group of men squatting on the verandah outside the main entrance. They watched me, impassively. By the time I had managed to stand up, I was soaked through. I sent a grim smile in the direction of the men. No response. Inside, the Foreign Minister’s aide looked surprised when I asked for a towel.
Minister Shahi was a courtly, dignified man whose eyes made no comment on my bedraggled state. I began to ask him questions, but it soon became clear that he had an agenda of his own. He started telling me about a four-country peace initiative that was to be launched in a week’s time. I felt the rising excitement that always accompanied getting a leak, the knowledge that I was going to be able to scoop my colleagues. In this case, those bastards back at the bar of the Holiday Inn.
It was like those times in Canberra when a cabinet minister would ‘drop a story’ on me. I’d be sitting across the desk, doing my usual routine: ‘What happened in cabinet today? Did you make a decision on the national wage case?’ (or the airline strike, or whatever was the big issue of the moment).
‘Anne, you know I can’t discuss confidential cabinet matters,’ he’d usually say. ‘I thought you just wanted some background.’
But sometimes there’d be that magic moment when he would answer my question, sometimes obliquely, sometimes without reference to an actual cabinet decision, but he’d be talking, he’d be singing, and I’d be trying to gauge whether it would be safe to take notes, whether the magic would dissolve if I lost my lock on his eyes. Afterwards, I’d rush outside, perch myself on one of the leather couches that were positioned along the corridors in the Old Parliament House, and furiously write down everything I could remember.
(It wasn’t always a ‘he’. There was one woman cabinet minister, Senator Margaret Guilfoyle, who was initially Minister for Social Security and later, the first woman to be Minister for Finance. She sometimes saw it as a sisterly gesture to drop a story on a women journalist. The men would always complain that she was ‘a tight-arsed bitch who never told you anything’. I would smile to myself. That’s what you think, buster.)
As I listened to the Pakistani Foreign Minister I felt the same rising excitement, the familiar anticipation of the glory that would cover me. This was no grubby little Canberra story; this was a genuine international scoop. I felt I was in the big league. Okay. This was a small country and a little war. It wasn’t as if the US Secretary of Defence was telling me a state secret (although that would happen a few years later) but I allowed myself to feel, just for a moment, as if I were Oriana Fallaci. Then I checked myself. Fallaci would not be sitting here passively receiving the minister’s version of events. She’d be interrogating the little man, demanding he accept responsibility for the crimes of the Zia regime. Or probing his hypocrisy: asking if he drank liquor or otherwise breached the Islamic code. Instead I was sitting there meekly, my shirt stiffening as it started to dry, wondering how I could check what he was telling me.
All journalism is risky. Sources can lie. They can betray you, say they never said what they told you, leaving the reporter stranded and obliged by the code of ethics not to disclose, in order to denounce, the source. We used to debate this in the gallery. What if your source lies? What if he misleads you? Do you still protect him? Yes, the consensus seemed to be, because there will always be a next time when you’ll need him. You can’t ‘burn’ a source unless you are planning a very short career in journalism. And even then, did you really want to be known as a dobber?
Back at the hotel I phoned the Australian Ambassador.3 The diplomatic circle in Islamabad, a political capital like Canberra and Brasilia, that had no reason for existence outside government, was as bored and isolated as if they were confined to a compound the way diplomats in some other countries are. They thrived on rumour and speculation, hungry for any tid-bit they could report back home to help their careers along. Subsisting on such a diet, they are unusually alert to changes in nuance or phraseology that signals a new policy direction. Like fashion experts, they sense things before they become evident to the eye.
‘Does this sound plausible?’ I asked, trying out the story on him.
‘He had heard a whisper,’ he said.
I decided to go with it. Over a scratchy telephone line I dictated to a copytaker in Sydney the details of the peace initiative that was to be launched under Pakistan’s sponsorship in the coming days. The next morning I got a herogram from Max Walsh.
‘Great story,’ he cabled. ‘Reuters picked it up and it’s running worldwide.’
I was ecstatic but there was no one to share the glory with. No admiring or envious peers, no angry Prime Minister on the phone, not even the satisfaction of having the paper and seeing my byline over an international scoop. Instead I called Zia’s office, and once again I was assured that everything would be okay. The President was going to Baluchistan next week. I could go with him. There would be plenty of time to talk on the plane. I did not believe them. I decided to go to Karachi where, I’d been told, there was a chance I could meet the Bhutto women. An interview with them would in so many ways be better.
I was woken at around 2 a.m. by someone battering on my door.
‘Miss, Miss,’ a man was calling. It was the desk clerk from downstairs. ‘You have a telephone call from Australia.’
I followed him down the eight flights of stairs as, of course, the lift wasn’t working, and picked up the phone.
‘Doctor!’ It was Max Walsh. ‘Fraser’s called an election. You’ve got to come home.’
I left the next morning and, as planned, travelled via Karachi but discovered it could take weeks to arrange to meet the Bhutto women. That was out of the question, but then I got a summons from the Thai Consul-General. Could I get myself to Bangkok? Immediately. Since it was on my way, I figured Why not!
I got there too late. The Thai government had invited a select number of journalists to a very special interview that involved travelling to the Cambodian border. They had left an hour before I arrived. I would never get another opportunity to interview Pol Pot, whose murderous Khmer Rouge regime had been toppled in December the previous year, when Vietnam invaded Cambodia. Pol Pot was now hiding out in the jungle near the border. He had, with the support of the Thai government, resumed guerilla activities against the Vietnamese-imposed regime, and it seemed the Thais wanted to showcase this to the international media. It was important because Pol Pot’s was still the internationally recognised government of Cambodia. Back home Malcolm Fraser was locked in a ferocious battle with his Foreign Minister Andrew Peacock about whether to de-recognise Pol Pot. At the meeting they had just attended in New Delhi, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew had made clear that Pol Pot’s regime was to be preferred over the Vietnamese puppets, and the Americans had a similar view. Peacock said he was willing to resign over the issue. On 12 September Fraser had called a federal election, and thus deferred the showdown with Peacock over Pol Pot until after the poll. I met with Gordon Jockel, Australia’s Ambassador to Thailand, that afternoon in Bangkok to try to understand this messy diplomatic situation.
That night at the airport, while I waited to fly back to Sydney, I went over in my mind what a disaster the trip had been. I had not managed to interview General Zia; I had not met Benazir Bhutto; and now, I had missed out on a once-in-a-lifetime interview with one of the great mass murderers of our time. At least, I consoled myself, the wires had picked up my story on the four-way peace plan. Then I learned that, just hours after my little story had whizzed around the world, Iraq had invaded Iran. A much bigger story. A real, headline-grabbing war. My little scoop evaporated into the ether.
The federal election of 19 October 1980 swept away the commanding majority Malcolm Fraser had enjoyed since 1975. Labor obtained 49.6 per cent of the vote and won 51 seats, a gain of thirteen. Among the new Labor members was Bob Hawke, former president of the ACTU and a man who was impatient to be Prime Minister. The only question was how long it would take him to dislodge Bill Hayden and then defeat Fraser. Politics was suddenly getting a lot more interesting than it had been for my first two years. The first ructions came from the Liberal Party, however, on 28 April 1981, when Andrew Peacock resigned from cabinet in protest at Fraser’s style of government. He had already declined to be reappointed Minister for Foreign Affairs after the 1980 election and had become Minister for Industrial Relations. At a leadership ballot called by the Prime Minister that April evening in 1981, Peacock was defeated. He retired to the backbench. For a time, he and Hawke had nearby offices and the crowds of journalists, lobbyists, politicians and others who trod the constant path to their doors gave the corridor the appearance of housing a government-in-exile.
I was fortunate to be able to cover two leadership challenges, one change of leader and a change of government during my time in the Press Gallery. There had not been such political upheaval since the days of the Whitlam government. We journalists became accustomed to hanging around in Kings Hall waiting to hear the outcome of leadership challenges, something that had not happened since 1971 when, for the first time in Australian political history, a sitting Prime Minister was deposed. John Gorton had instigated a ‘spill’ to test the numbers for his leadership—and lost. Today, such challenges are more frequent and journalists often learn the outcome, via text from inside the party room, as soon as the counting is completed but we had to wait, often for a very long time, until the party tellers came and gave us the formal results. Bob Hawke had failed in his first challenge to Hayden on 16 July 1982, but seven months later the party installed him as leader at a shadow cabinet meeting in Brisbane just as, in faraway Canberra, Malcolm Fraser was driving to Government House to seek a double-dissolution. Fraser believed he had outwitted Labor which, he calculated, would not change leaders once an election had been called. But, as the press described it at the time, Fraser was caught with his pants down. Labor had already made the switch and it was too late for the election to be called off. Labor went on to win a 25-seat majority in the House of Representatives on 5 March 1983, in a victory that would see Labor remain in power first under Hawke then, from late-1991, under former Treasurer Paul Keating, until 1996.
Hawke had promised reconciliation and consultation after the divisive Fraser years and one of his earliest initiatives was the National Economic Summit, held in April 1983. It was unprecedented for the leaders of business, the trade unions, and state and federal government to come together to agree on a national economic strategy. Many of the business leaders had never met a trade unionist before, and none of the participants—apart from the state premiers—had ever been in the House of Representatives chamber where the summit was held. Hawke knew how to impress. There was a dinner at The Lodge—most of them had never been there before either—and more hospitality at Government House. At the end of the three days, the summit had agreed to Hawke’s economic proposal for a Prices and Incomes Accord, designed to return to centralised wage fixing and to control both unemployment and inflation, using tools such as government-provided services and social policies (including the reintroduction of Medicare) that became known as a social wage, and which alleviated the need for wage increases. It was a new and conciliatory way of working, and it became something of a signature approach of the Hawke government. As did policies to benefit women. One of the earliest acts of the government was to upgrade women’s policy by moving the Office of Women’s Affairs into the Prime Minister’s department, and in September it introduced sweeping sex discrimination legislation. Both had been promised during the election and were seen as important in attracting women’s votes which, for the first time, were decisive in delivering victory. Not that the Press Gallery was especially interested in either the politics or the policies affecting women. They preferred to focus on what they saw as the main game.
I had taken six weeks off straight after the election to write Gamble for Power4 and I was pleased at how well it was received, especially as it was one of several books written about the election. Perhaps I could become a chronicler of Australian politics in addition to my daily journalism. Like the rest of the Press Gallery, I was caught up in the palpable excitement of the new government, its energy and reformist spirit, and I was relishing reporting this sea change in Australian politics. I could see myself writing more books on politics. Then a phone call changed everything. Susan Ryan, who had become Labor’s first-ever woman cabinet minister and was Minister Assisting the Prime Minister on the Status of Women as well as Minister for Education, rang to say she thought I should apply for the newly advertised job of running the upgraded and renamed Office of the Status of Women.
I had not planned on leaving. I liked the rush of daily journalism, the urgency of getting, and confirming, a story, trying to scoop my colleagues from other news outlets. I liked the travel, even if arriving on a Prime Ministerial RAAF plane, and staying in only the best hotels did not really give you an idea of what a place was like. I liked the easy access to power that went with being a journalist, especially with the nation’s only daily financial newspaper. I could get virtually anyone in business or politics on the phone, including senior public servants who, I soon learned, were best called at home on Sunday afternoons when they were relaxed and comparatively unguarded. Public servants were not gagged the way they are now. They actually saw it as a duty to help ensure that newspaper reports were accurate and relevant.
I had also just been elected President of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, the first woman to hold the position. I’d been urged to run by colleagues who felt the long-term incumbent, Peter Costigan, bureau chief for the Melbourne Herald, was treating it as a sinecure. He did not like being challenged and while the contest might have seemed light-hearted on the surface, underneath it was deadly serious. Costigan ran with what he thought was the hilarious slogan, ‘May the best man win’. I countered with ‘Go for the Doctor’, thinking I might as well capitalise on my newly conferred title with a racing term that meant to try really hard but which, I was informed by Gary O’Neill, had another far racier meaning that had nothing to do with the track. I’d had to campaign, which included asking Gallery gods like Alan Reid, Wally Brown, Rob Chalmers and Ian Fitchett, who had been there for decades, to vote for me, a neophyte, and a woman. And I’d won—by a large margin. How could I walk away—just a few weeks later?
I asked Max Walsh what he thought. He was now with the Packer organisation, working with the Bulletin and Channel 9’s Sunday program. As he was no longer my boss, I thought he might offer an objective opinion; he would certainly grasp the allure of the offer. The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C), where women’s policy was now located, was the epicentre of political and bureaucratic power. It would be fascinating to see how it all worked. But it would be a drastic shift to move from reporting to government, from observing to being a player.
‘Would look great on your CV,’ was all he said.
There were a lot of things to consider. Even though the job was a public service appointment and I would have to go through all the proper processes, I would be seen as Hawke’s person. That was unlikely to be an advantage within PM&C. And I would be turning my back on journalism, which had been my life for eight years now. Would I ever be able to return to it? For my generation of journalists, apart from the intrinsic rewards of covering society with your reporting, the job offered us worlds that would not otherwise have been open to us; already my passport had many more stamps than I could ever have imagined. Only my job as the international board chair of Greenpeace, in the early 2000s, enabled me to travel to more countries. As a journalist, I was able to not just meet a very wide range of political, business and other leaders but to engage with and, in some cases, befriend them. I was able to move easily into entertainment circles, to become on first-name terms with actors and film directors and those in their worlds. It was easy to forget that there was a bargain entailed in this intimacy. As I would discover several times in my future when I again moved from the media, the terms of your entry into this glamorous world are very stark. You learn quickly once you are no longer in the job that you are no longer of any use. The friends quickly disappear and the invitations stop overnight.
Leaving the Press Gallery had its risks but the opportunity, in the end, was irresistible. I was being offered a chance to help advance women’s equality in Australia in a unique and unprecedented way. My previous efforts had been through activism or writing. Now I had the prospect of learning how to use the power of the bureaucracy to actually deliver the policies we activists had long argued and campaigned for. The newly elected government had promised to make these policies a priority and had already started to do so. I would be irresponsible, I told myself, if I did not step up to the challenge.