Come the Revolution: A Memoir

By Alex Mitchell

A rollicking tale of chain-smoking newspapermen, union leaders, revolutionaries, crooked cops, corrupt politicians, spies, dictators, and ordinary working people, this is the memoir of political journalist Alex Mitchell, who worked on several newspapers around Australia before landing in Fleet Street in the 1960s. Full of vivid anecdotes about the lives of an extraordinary range of people—including Yasser Arafat, Muammar Gadafi, Saddam Hussein, and Vanessa Redgrave—this narrative demonstrates how Mitchell's Sunday Times investigative team exposed Soviet double agent Kim Philby and how the journalist became a full-time political activist. Laying bare his life and loves as well as his past and politics with the flair of a born storyteller, Mitchell is unafraid to ask the hard questions about the world or about himself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Feb 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781742241074

Alex Mitchell

Alex Mitchell is a journalist, author and gardener. She has a regular column in The Sunday Telegraph where she covers everything from how to deter slugs to the best hand cream to use after a day in the elements. She studied at the Chelsea Physic Garden and grows her own fruit, salad, herbs and vegetables.

Book preview

happen.

PROLOGUE

It was an exit organised with almost military precision. I parked the car in a suburban street in south London and locked it. I took the keys and placed them in a large brown envelope which I had addressed and stamped in advance. I had deliberately parked near a Royal Mail postbox, and I now dropped the envelope through the flap. Hours earlier I had filled a plastic bag with clothes that wouldn't be of any use to me in subtropical Australia and dropped them in a council bin. There was a full-length overcoat which I affectionately regarded as my ‘Lieutenant Columbo’ outfit, a couple of thick woollen jumpers, leather gloves and a pair of old shoes that had run out of rubber and badly needed a retread.

On the main road, I flagged down a taxi and told the driver, ‘Heathrow Airport, please, international terminal.’ For the umpteenth time, I made a check of my critical possessions: passport, airline ticket, wallet. Then I rechecked the departure time–10 pm on Saturday, 12 July 1986–and glanced at my watch again to make sure I was on schedule. I had enough cash to pay the fare to the airport, leaving me £40 in two crisp notes. In my wallet was a National Westminster Bank cheque for another £40, signed by solicitors Seifert Sedley Williams, representing the full and final payment of all outstanding monies after 15 years as a reporter and editor for the daily newspaper of the Workers Revolutionary Party, Britain's largest Trotskyist party. I had been on the party's leading bodies as a member of the Central Committee, the Political Committee and the editorial board and represented the WRP as a delegate at conferences of the International Committee of the Fourth International in France, Germany, Spain, Greece, Sri Lanka and the United States. Along the way I took part in official meetings with Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, Iraq's President Saddam Hussein, PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and Zimbabwe nationalist leader Joshua Nkomo at which secret solidarity agreements were reached and signed.

Now I was returning home to Australia without money and without a job to go to. Some nights earlier, during a walk along the Thames Embankment, my partner Judith White had decided that she would make the trip to Sydney with me. It was a bigger wrench for her. She was born in Lancashire, graduated from Oxford and had been in charge of the WRP's extensive book publishing program for 12 years. A linguist, translator and book editor, she had no relatives or friends in Australia, and no job either. I don't know why we were so nervous, but we were. We weren't running away from anybody–just our past. We filed through immigration and then sat silently in the lounge waiting for the boarding call. With nothing to read and no spare change for a drink I studied the other travellers, wondering where they were going and whether their departure was as bizarre as ours. Once on the plane and with the seatbelts clicked in place I seized Judith's hand and squeezed it hard. ‘This is going to be okay,’ I said. ‘We'll be fine. We'll find jobs and I'm sure you're going to like Australia.’ I brushed aside nagging feelings of doubt and dread, and smiled as I recalled the comforting adage of ‘Fearless’ Fred Smidt, a Sydney journalist mate, who often advised, ‘As long as you're above the grass, you're still in front.’

I had joined the wave of self-exiled Aussies who left home in the 1960s for London in the hope of finding fame, fortune and, perhaps, themselves. My original plan had been to spend one or two years learning the ropes of Fleet Street and then return to Sydney to pursue my career with my former employer Rupert Murdoch. I joined the Sunday Times in 1967 during the halcyon days of the Insight team's investigative journalism, taking part in exhaustive probes into Soviet double agent Kim Philby and corporate fraudsters Bernie Cornfeld of Investors Overseas Services (IOS) and Robert Maxwell of Pergamon Press. In the Biafran civil war I saw dead people for the first time, dozens of them, young and old, male and female. All black. I switched to television to work for Granada's World in Action, where I exposed British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling's links with a crooked offshore funds operator, Jerome D Hoffman, and became the first TV reporter to interview President Idi Amin after his military coup in January 1971, laying bare the murderous brutality of his corrupt regime in a current affairs film entitled The Man Who Stole Uganda.

What I experienced in my professional life had a profound impact on my political thinking. So did a succession of world events: the escalating Vietnam war; the May–June 1968 events in Paris; the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr, and Robert F Kennedy; the Israeli invasion and occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Sinai and the Golan Heights; the election of Richard Nixon; and the British army's occupation of the north of Ireland. From being a reporter with left-wing views I was propelled towards socialism. Marx was my navigator, with his 1845 injunction: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’ In May 1971, at the age of 29, I walked away from the capitalist media to be a full-time Trotskyist with the Socialist Labour League, later to become the Workers Revolutionary Party. I worked for the party as a journalist and then as editor of its daily newspaper, Workers Press, reborn as the News Line in 1976. Many of my former colleagues accused me of giving up my objectivity when I joined a party newspaper dedicated to establishing a republican Britain with a socialist planned economy. I told them I had given up the hypocrisy of working for the so-called ‘free press’, and relished reminding them of the rousing line by Fleet Street legend Hannen Swaffer: ‘Freedom of the press in Britain is freedom to print such of the proprietor's prejudices as the advertisers don't object to.’ They were heady times.

As the plane left Heathrow bound for Sydney and the seatbelt light was extinguished, I reached for my wallet and removed the letter that formally brought charges against me for expulsion from the WRP under section 9(a) of the constitution. My ‘crime’ was ‘to associate with the expelled member G Healy, contrary to Section 9 (f) of the constitution’. The letter was dated 5 November 1985, nine months earlier. At that time, the WRP had imploded in debt and shattered into warring factions. Judith and I were among those who stayed loyal to the party's founder, Gerry Healy, a tough Marxist class warrior and commanding orator who had been accused of sexual misconduct with women in the party. The timing of these lurid stories and the blank refusal of the ‘victims’ to give the party an account of what had happened to them or to file a complaint with the police strongly suggested this was a state-organised political provocation with a simple purpose: destroy Healy and thus destroy the WRP. Judith and I were both unashamed ‘Healyites’; after all, he had recruited both of us to revolutionary socialist politics and educated us in Marxism, and he drove the party's theoretical development and its internationalism. When a Channel 4 reporter had asked me about the sex allegations against 73-year-old Healy, I replied combatively, ‘History is made in the class struggle, not in bed.’

On Monday, 14 July, soon after our plane touched down in Sydney, the car keys and our co-signed letter of resignation reached the party headquarters in Southwark, south London. Healy was duly informed that the paper's editor and the head of the publishing department–two of his closest and most loyal political collaborators–had quit and vanished. He was given the news at a modest home in south London purchased for him by Vanessa Redgrave, the Oscar-winning actress, who had joined the WRP at the same time I did. His address was known to only a tiny handful of party leaders. His high-security living arrangements were a consequence of the party's split; his life had been threatened on more than one occasion and an unhinged section of his former followers was now on an avenging rampage.

He listened to the report of our sudden departure without emotion and then sent a message summoning Saleh Khalili, one of the Palestine Liberation Organisation's roving envoys in Europe. They were old friends and a sudden call from Healy wasn't anything exceptional. Nevertheless, Khalili drove to Healy's safe house with foreboding, and the feeling that something untoward had happened. Healy welcomed the Palestinian and then asked his minders for complete privacy. The two men were left alone in a room which had been swept for electronic eavesdropping devices. With all the gravity he could muster, Healy told the PLO man, ‘MI5 [the British domestic intelligence service] has pulled Mitchell out of the WRP and out of England. He's been relocated back to Australia. His trip home has been financed by MI5.’ Khalili was momentarily stunned. Then he replied, ‘But Gerry, MI5 didn't give Alex the money for his airfare home. I did.’

As the old newspaper cliché goes, the seeds of this story were sown many years earlier, in another country on the other side of the world…

PART

ONE

1

A CADET ON THE

TOWNSVILLE BULLETIN

Journalism is a kind of profession, or craft, or racket, for people who never wanted to grow up and go out into the real world.

AMERICAN JOURNALIST HARRY REASONER

The powerful printing presses came to a halt and fell silent. My arms and shoulders were aching from lifting newspapers from the press and stacking them on a nearby table and my eardrums were numb from the screaming throb of the machinery. Without warning four men wearing factory boots and navy blue overalls came for me. They grabbed my arms and legs, carried me across the pressroom and threw me onto a cold metal bench. One of them pulled my trousers down to my ankles and I felt the cold slime of oil being poured over my genitals, followed by a thicker fluid. There was a circle of faces above me, all laughing and cheering as I kicked and struggled to break free. When they let go, I rolled off the table and ran to the washroom clutching my trousers at half-mast. From my waist to my knees I was covered in a mixture of black printer's ink and white sticky glue. In tears, I washed it away with industrial soap and cold water and dried myself with paper towels. Five minutes later the presses whirred into action and I hurried back to my work station to unload more papers. One of the printers made a point of coming over to tell me, ‘Cheer up. It happens to everyone when they start here. It's a tradition and you've just passed the initiation ceremony. You're one of us now.’ And he walked away, chuckling.

I was just 14 years old, earning 12 shillings for working every Saturday morning between 2 am and 6 am in the cavernous pressroom of the Townsville Daily Bulletin, or the Bully, in the port city of Townsville in tropical Queensland, Australia. It was big money in those days, enough to buy me a seat at a local cinema–the Roxy, the Wintergarden or the open-air, under-the-stars Olympia–plus a chocolate milkshake or a strawberry spider, a ham and tomato sandwich on fresh white bread with the crusts removed from Nick Lazaredes's Austral Café, or a Cherry Ripe bar, a box of Jaffas or a Violet Crumble bar. It was 1956 and we knew nothing of the Cold War, the Suez crisis or the Soviet tanks rolling into Hungary. But years later, when people learned I was a newspaper reporter, they would say, ‘So, you must have printer's ink running through your veins’, and I would reply, ‘Well, actually, in a kind of way, I have.’

Townsville was named after its founder, Robert Towns, a merchant, pastoralist and New South Wales parliamentarian, who was born in Northumberland in England in 1794 and died in Sydney in 1873. After strategically marrying into the penal colony's first family, the Wentworths, Towns built a substantial commercial empire in shipping, trading, moneylending, meat packing, whaling and cotton growing. I remember telling a visitor to our home in the 1950s that Townsville owed its name to Captain Towns and receiving the disconcerting response, ‘You mean Towns the blackbirder?’ I went to my parents and asked, ‘What's a blackbirder?’ and learnt that the illustrious founder had been engaged in the kidnapping of Pacific Islanders, bringing them to Queensland to work on his vast agricultural properties, which covered more than 5000 square kilometres of the state. A milder variation of Britain's banned slave trade, blackbirding was eventually outlawed in Australia but not before Towns had profited from the cheap labour it afforded his empire. He also introduced labourers from England, Germany, India and China to work for his various ventures, which carried the business motto: ‘To Hades and back if there is a profit in it’. His life was a rousing confirmation of Honoré de Balzac's rapier remark, ‘At the back of every great fortune lies a great crime.’

My father, James Mitchell, was born in Glasgow at 6.30 am on 5 October 1908 at No 59 Crail Street, Parkhead, in the parish of Camlachie. His parents, Joseph Mitchell, commercial traveller, and Ruth Craven, restaurant waitress, and their three children moved to Oldham in Lancashire in the early 1920s when there were jobs aplenty and prospects were brighter. However, the destructive reverberations of the Wall Street crash put an end to my father's hopes of building a successful career in Depression-ravaged Lancashire. Soon after his 21st birthday he and some friends decided to try their luck on the other side of the world. He arrived in Sydney's Woolloomooloo only to find the unemployment queues were longer than Manchester's, so he ‘jumped the rattler’–rode illegally on the northbound trains–from Sydney along the Pacific Ocean coastline to Far North Queensland, working as a labourer, canecutter, jackeroo and fairground rouseabout.

In the sweltering tropical heat of Cairns the newly arrived Scot met my mother, Lucy Gladys Wilesmith, from the second generation of a pioneering family. She was born on 14 February, St Valentine's Day, 1905, in Herberton, a frontier town on the Atherton Tableland. She was the second-youngest of seven children of Frank Gilbert Wilesmith, a tin miner and timber cutter whose family came from Worcestershire, and Susan Hannah Putt, of Cornish stock. My parents were married in Brisbane on 24 October 1936, and had four sons–James Gilbert (1938), Anthony John (1939), Alexander Robert (1942) and Jeffrey Bernard (1943). Although they were atheists, our parents sent us to Sunday School at St James’ Anglican Cathedral in Townsville, where I was confirmed and became a boy soprano in the church choir and an altar boy. I often carried the crucifix during the processional and also swung the censer back and forth, filling the church with the fragrant smoke of burning incense to ward off evil spirits.

My father worked as an insurance salesman for the Mutual Life and Citizens Company (MLC) and as a supervisor at the Alligator Creek meatworks, ran a newsagency and eventually owned his own used car yard, called Better Used Cars. My mother was involved with the School of Arts and the Townsville Dramatic Society, producing plays and arranging visits by touring productions from the Australia Council. When the One People of Australia League (OPAL) was established in 1961 as an Aboriginal advancement organisation, she became a founding member. Most homes shunned Aboriginal people and many of my classmates were afraid of Indigenous Australians and kept well away from them. But they dropped in for a cup of tea at our place, and my mother gave warm encouragement to local activists like Roberta Sykes, Grace Smallwood and Eddie and Bonita Mabo (Eddie Mabo was to lead the historic claim for land rights to the High Court of Australia), and made firm friends with Henry Reynolds, the eminent historian of Aboriginal culture at James Cook University, and his wife Margaret, later to become a Labor senator. My parents would not tolerate anti-Aboriginal remarks in our house and there were tense times when visitors were asked to apologise or leave. Others were simply never invited back. My mother, in particular, spoke of the dignity, culture and gentleness of the Aborigines with whom she had grown up on the Atherton Tablelands and she instilled in all of us a strong commitment to equality for Aboriginal Australians, who at that time couldn't vote and were classified as ‘wards of the state’, with none of the rights enjoyed by the white European settler population.

Years later I found a booklet recounting the history of the early pioneers of the Watsonville–Stannary Hills area, the rugged rainforest and bush country where my mother grew up. Her mother, Susan Putt, was related to Edward Creber Putt, who ‘selected’ a vast block of land in 1884 (that is, stole it from the local Abori-gines). His son, my great-uncle Albert Creber Barron Putt, later recalled:

My father and his family lived in constant danger from the wild blacks. They would throw spears and boomerangs at the house whenever they saw anyone walking around the place. He applied to the Government for protection and they sent up a Constable Hansen from Brisbane with a supply of rifles, revolvers and ammunition. He taught all the older girls to shoot. Hansen took a party comprising Edward, Ted and Bill Putt, William Colley and Peter Jackson out into the scrub where they shot a number of Aborigines. That ‘civilised’ the rest.¹

This shocking piece of family history–and it wasn't an isolated event in that era–demonstrated to me that everyone who came to Australia as soldier, settler or convict in the late 18th and 19th centuries was connected inextricably to the cruel destruction of the Aboriginal people's 40000-year custodianship of the continent. As the world's largest island was ‘civilised’, the Indigenous people were cruelly displaced, killed off by police and settler hunting parties and reduced to phantom fringe dwellers, ignored and ostracised in their own homeland. Except, of course, when they performed with inspirational athleticism and intelligence in sport, and then they became national heroes.

My parents owned their newsagency in the early 1950s and the ready access to free comics took a highly impressionable toll. I was romantically attached to the notion that Superman could work on the Daily Planet during daylight hours and rescue the world after dark. Our shop in South Townsville stocked the first Penguin books to arrive in North Queensland and I devoured George Orwell and Joseph Conrad. As a teenager, I read Charles Dickens and revelled in his scathing commentary on the poverty and cruelty of Victorian England. I was enthralled by the exploits of Ernest Hemingway and the soaring literature of Dostoyevsky. A real author, Ernestine Hill, who wrote My Love Must Wait, the incomparable novel on the life of the great naval explorer Matthew Flinders, was a family friend. Our house bubbled with dinner table conversation supplied by a procession of guests including itinerant actors, musicians, travelling salesmen, writers and merchant seamen, all of them worldly-wise and spreading homespun philosophy. I'd been to see On the Waterfront on an embarrassing number of occasions and felt Marlon Brando's pain when he said that he could have been a contender but the opportunity had been denied him.

During my 14 years in Townsville our family moved house seven times–once every couple of years. We renovated each new home with a fresh coat of paint, building extensions, repairing bathrooms and kitchens and undertaking backbreaking garden improvements before moving on. It was a nomadic upbringing: my brother Tony swears that as a teenager he went away on a week-long ANZ Bank training course and when he returned the family had moved and he had to ask the neighbours for our new address. The constant need to change houses showed my parents’ restless ambition for a bigger and better place to live, and it was also an insurance policy against the possibility of another economic depression. I took up the rootlessness of my childhood but not its upwardly mobile stability: I was in my sixties before I owned my first piece of real estate. No matter where we lived there was the sound of classical music from my father's collection of vinyl 78s, chiefly the treasured symphonies of Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, the piano masterworks of Chopin and Liszt and the voice of Kathleen Ferrier. And there was always chess. Dad was a keen member of the Townsville Chess Club, where he played competitively one night a week, and collected the books of grandmaster Harry Golombek. Chess was an extension of the man: quiet, thoughtful, reflective and determined. He taught all of us to play at an early age, and he must have been a good teacher: the 1958 school magazine records that A Mitchell was undefeated when our team won the FR North Trophy in the interschool competition.

Four world events, regularly mentioned in our household, informed my early years–World War I, ‘the hungry Thirties’, World War II and the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They weren't the subject of parental lectures but they were absorbed intuitively as gravely terrible events which became woven into my DNA. From my Uncle Arthur, a veteran of the Somme, I learnt that the 1914–18 slaughter which took eight million lives was provoked by armed banditry between the competing European powers. Fugitives from the Great Depression who sat at our dinner table talked of the millions thrown into unemployment, homelessness and destitution in order to rescue the banks and the private corporations in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street crash. Returned servicemen from World War II, which claimed 60 million lives (over half of them civilians), spoke movingly about their part in the defeat of German Nazism and Italian and Japanese fascism but were bewildered by the post-war agreements between Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt that carved up the world into spheres of (their) influence. They spoke angrily about the post-war settlement, which failed to deliver freedom and independence to countries in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Far East. And there were bitter recriminations over America's decision to launch the world's first (and only) nuclear attack on the civilian population of Japan when its defeat was certain and a surrender was under negotiation.

I was too young to hold political convictions but I accepted the strongly held views of my parents and elders and they became part of my received wisdom. As a family we never visited the Cenotaph to glorify war in the company of blood-drenched politicians and the armchair militarists of the Returned Servicemen's League (RSL). I've religiously kept away ever since and I'm pleased to say my three children don't take part either. The genes have been passed along straight and true.

My final years at Townsville State High School had been momentous: on 3 February 1959 Buddy Holly was killed in a plane crash in Iowa, along with Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper. As a mark of respect we rang the school bell between classes in slow motion and when we changed classrooms we marched in single file, evoking the solemnity of a funeral procession. It was ‘the day the music died’ and no one in Form VIB has ever forgotten it.

The previous year I had almost killed myself and some classmates. It was Saturday afternoon, 25 October 1958, when six of us gathered at David ‘Doc’ Hale's house to remove a tree from his backyard. Instead of using conventional tools such as a saw or an axe, I suggested we blow it out of the ground with a homemade explosive device, thereby giving some practical purpose to our chemistry lessons. We placed a thick steel pipe inside a large metal can and packed the space between the two with clay and dirt. The aim was to fill the pipe with gunpowder, place the can under the roots at the base of the tree, light a fuse and sit back and watch the spectacular uprooting of the unwanted tree.

Apart from Hale, my other accomplices were Frank and Brian Bell, Ron Gordon and one of the school's most accomplished pupils, Ken Miskin, a school captain, house captain, prefect, head of the cadet corps, marksman and shot putt record-holder. After the bomb went off prematurely I felt a stomach-turning panic as I watched Miskin trying to stem the blood from his mangled hand: I had almost killed Kenny, the school hero. The Townsville Daily Bulletin accorded our misadventure front page treatment with the headline ‘Six High School Students Injured by Bomb Explosion’. Over three columns it gave a detailed account of our enterprise, saying:

Police said the youths had gathered at Hale's home with the idea of manufacturing a gunpowder bomb to blow up a china apple tree located in a vacant allotment at the rear of the residence. Miskin had commenced ramming the manufactured gunpowder tightly into the cylinder with a piece of one-eighth inch copper wire, which was about eight inches long. While Miskin was doing this for the purpose of obtaining a greater explosive effect, the bomb exploded scattering minute pieces of tin.

I was reported to have been admitted to hospital with a shrapnel injury to the left eye, gunpowder burns and shock. The report concluded, ‘Police said all the youths were students and chemistry is a part of their courses. They had learnt the gunpowder formula in chemistry lessons.’² While it was true we had dabbled in mixing gunpowder in the chemistry laboratory at school, I had benefited from extracurricular instruction expertly given by my eldest brother, Jim.

Miskin's hand was repaired, though some fingers remained crooked and scarred for life. I spent long days and nights in a silent hospital ward in restraints–my wrists tied to the iron bed frame and my head between two sandbags–after I had heard a radio report predicting that I faced blindness and torn the bandages from my eyes to find out for myself. My time in dark immobility was eerily character-forming. First, I made acquaintance with mortality; we casually shook hands and walked on. Second, my enforced immobility freed my imagination to soar to places I'd never been before. And third, I had the time to conduct a searching self-analysis from which I concluded that I was guilty of incredible irresponsibility. I had shamed my parents, made a fool of myself in front of my brothers and inherited the mantle of class clown. How could I redeem myself in their eyes? I wasn't fully aware of it then, but I was climbing onto a treadmill and setting the achievement meter at a punishing pace.

English was my favourite subject but it was a drudge–until our new English teacher came along. Mrs Winifred Sparkes, née Hanger, was a formidable woman with broad shoulders, a straight back and strong arms. She was not glamorous but she was striking. She didn't care much for clothes but she dressed immaculately. She never raised her voice because her commanding presence kept order. She made Shakespeare readable and understandable and she opened to us the treasures of the two plays we studied–As You Like It and The Tempest. She took us on an excursion through British, American and Australian novels and I read Patrick White's Voss under her direction. Until Win Sparkes, poetry started with The Sentimental Bloke (CJ Dennis), The Man from Snowy River (Banjo Patterson) and I Love a Sunburnt Country (Dorothea Mackellar), and ended there. She introduced us to the English Romantics–Wordsworth, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge and Blake–and the world was never the same. We saw the natural world in all its glory and we thought differently as a result. I read Keats's potent lines beginning, ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be/ Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain’ and it went into my memory vault never to be forgotten, and often recalled. In 1958 she took three one-act plays to the city's Theatre Royal, where I had a role in Queer Street. It was the first time school plays were presented on a real stage to a public audience. She also engaged us in the production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado, giving this scrappy bunch of provincial kids a lifelong appreciation of music, opera, theatre, poetry and books. Without the influence of my parents and Mrs Sparkes I would not have started a career in journalism.

The sum total of my childhood and adolescent experiences gave me an exaggerated interest in reading, writing, politics and current affairs. My parents both held strong convictions and my mother, in particular, was never afraid to voice them. In most households in our community, parents kept their views to themselves and never talked politics, religion or books in front of their children. How often I heard our neighbours say, ‘Children should be seen but not heard.’ It was quite the reverse in the Mitchell home, where open discourse prevailed. We discussed topics which were taboo at the dinner table in many homes in the 1950s in Australia's ‘deep north’.

My going into journalism didn't surprise my family or my classmates at high school (motto In Meliora Contende–Strive for Better Things). To me, it seemed like a natural, almost predetermined step. When I started my four-year cadetship (apprenticeship) on the Townsville Daily Bulletin in January 1960 I could not type nor write shorthand, nor had I ever conducted an interview, either on the phone or the doorstep. My chief surprise was that at the end of each week I collected an envelope containing £6 (equivalent to about $120 today). They were actually giving me money for something I loved doing. I was still in disbelief when I gave up full-time reporting 47 years later.

News, news, news–that is what we want. You cannot beat news in a newspaper.

ARTHUR CHRISTIANSEN, EDITOR OF THE LONDON DAILY EXPRESS, 1933–57

The Townsville Daily Bulletin was a morning broadsheet owned by the two Miss Greens, Ethel and Marg, who lived in a forbidding mansion called Kardinia two doors away from one of our homes in Victoria Street on Stanton Hill. Originally, the house had been the first Japanese Consulate in Australia but was bought by their father, Humphrey David Green (1858–1941), who founded and edited the Bully and its weekly edition, the North Queensland Register. The Miss Greens rarely appeared in public. I once knocked on their front door in my newly ironed boy scout uniform and offered to do some gardening during ‘Bob-a-Job’ week. After toiling for two hours weeding the beds, turning the soil with a fork and cutting the edges of the lawn, I presented my job card, expecting a handsome reward from perhaps the city's wealthiest family. The Miss Green who came to the door marked my card with a pencil, signed her name and gave me a bob–a lousy one-shilling coin. I was receiving five shillings and crisp ten-shilling notes for half the work from the poorer end of the street. It made you think.

My first editor was Jim Gibbard, a giant of a man who wore braces and heavy spectacles perched on the end of his beakish nose and barked instructions in a booming voice to compensate for his deafness. He was a genial soul who knew everyone that mattered in the town, wrote the editorials and kept the paper in safe, conservative-minded territory. My initial duties had little to do with writing ‘scoops’ or ‘exclusives’: I cleaned the inkwells and gluepots from the subeditors’ desk, made fresh batches of ink and glue and then refilled them. Later I joined the senior reporters on their daily ‘rounds’. If I was rostered on the police round we visited the magistrate's court, the police headquarters, and the ambulance and fire stations, and if I went on the civic round we tramped down the main street, meeting our contacts along the way–the mayor Alderman Angus Smith at his school textbook and stationery store, the town clerk Colin Campbell and his deputy Doug Michael, the children's librarian Miss Pat Crosthwaite, Alderman Pat Molloy at his jewellery shop, Alderman Harry Hopkins at Hollis Hopkins drapery and finally the Fish Board manager Jack Stevenson, to check on the size of the overnight catch. Soon I was making the rounds on my own and returning to the office to decipher my notes and write stories for the next day's edition. There were no by-lines in those days so you couldn't celebrate what you had written with anyone other than the contacts who had given you the information in the first place. They liked seeing their names in print and it made them more willing to confide in you and pass on information. I also noticed that even if the article was critical, so long as you gave them a fair go, they would talk to you again.

When some of my colleagues returned from their rounds after lunch they would often declare that there was ‘nothing doing’ and they hadn't picked up a single story. My approach was different. If I came back to the office with only three or four stories I considered it a slow day. We published a column on poultry written by ‘Grits’ and one of my earliest journalistic thrills was to write the ‘In the Garden’ column when the full-time contributor was on leave. My riveting treatise on growing long beans duly appeared under the column's by-line, ‘Compost’. The weekly ‘Letter from London’ was written by Sir Beverley Baxter, the Canadian-born MP for Southgate, former editor of fellow Canadian Lord Beaverbrook's Daily Express and theatre reviewer for the London Evening Standard after World War II. Baxter's rambling, pompous prose underpinned the Bulletin 's loyalty to the Empire, the Conservative Party and the monarchy.

On two weeks of every month I was rostered on the night shift, which I greatly enjoyed. It gave me the chance to serve a second apprenticeship learning the mysterious workings of the printers, the skilled artisans who turned our written copy into lines of lead type, then assembled the galleys of type into pages with headlines and finally metal moulds, or ‘stereos’, which were clamped onto the printing presses. Each step of the process required the attention of specially trained craftsmen–typesetters who operated the linotypes; compositors who meticulously arranged the type into pages inside steel frames known as ‘chases’; worldly-wise proofreaders who checked the pages and made spelling, grammatical and factual corrections; blockmakers who worked in dark corners with arcane cameras and chemicals to transform news photographs into zinc plates; foundry men who converted the ‘chases’ of corrected type into plates from which the newspaper was printed; and, finally, press operators who ran the giant presses, controlling their speed to stop the newsprint tearing or the ink losing its sharp impression.

Reporters largely regarded the printers as aristocrats of labour who were overpaid and underworked. Printers took the same jaundiced view of journos. The truth was that they formed part of the same chain of mental and manual labour which produced news-papers, and neither could do without the other. The printers were exclusively male and their senior union official was known as the father of the chapel and, on bigger papers, the imperial father. As the industry's technology changed, many categories of printers followed in the footsteps of French polishers and became extinct species.

While I have been enthusiastic about each new development in printing technology, I freely admit to holding a righteous nostalgia for the business as it used to be. I miss the clattering sound of rows of linotype machines setting type on metal lines to fill the columns of the paper; the smell of the stone room where the comps worked; the foundry and the pressroom and the tremendous roar of the presses in full production. Some nights I stayed behind after my shift finished to venture into the netherworld of the pressroom to watch the operators lovingly stir the machinery into life. The massive rolls of newsprint ran faster and faster through the rotary press, spewing out folded newspapers at the other end. ‘Have you got a spare copy, mate?’ I would ask cautiously. ‘Yes, take one off the table, but leave a tip for me,’ was the usual laconic reply. I turned the freshly inked pages to find my articles and reread them to discover if any changes or cuts had been made. I'd drive home through the darkened streets. There was no traffic, no one was about, just the occasional sound of a dog barking. I went to bed with the paper lying on the floor next to me, knowing that in six or eight hours copies would be thrown over the fences in the neighbourhood and people would be reading it over breakfast. The town had slept while we were bringing out the news.

The alternate night editor was Mr Gibbard's deputy, Austin Donnelly. Also in his sixties, Mr Donnelly was a brute with a protuberant bottom lip and a penchant for a stiff drink, which he took when Mr Gibbard had cleared his desk and left for the day shouting, ‘Call me at home, Austin, if anything breaks’. Nothing ever broke except the occasional teacup when Mr Donnelly smashed his fists like pile-drivers onto the subs’ table and sent crockery flying. As the evening wore on, he would become more agitated, mumbling to himself and cursing Mr Gibbard and members of the staff. When he disappeared into the toilet, we could hear shouts, kicking of doors and the walls being punched. Poor old Mrs McIntyre who wrote the social news would sit in sheer terror as Mr Donnelly conducted his nightly battle with the demons in his soul.

One of his pet hates was having furniture or office equipment moved from what he considered their rightful place. Seeing how this inflamed his temper I would start my shift 30 minutes early and move his chair to the other end of the table. It was a surefire way of sending him into an incandescent rage and turning an otherwise dull evening into a riotous event. Once when I was finishing the day shift I took the plastic cover from his battered Remington typewriter and typed on a piece of copy paper, ‘GOD IS WATCHING YOU’. I then removed myself to the far end of the reporter's room to await developments. Upon arrival, Mr Donnelly unbuttoned his coat and placed it on its hanger, took his seat, swept the cover from his typewriter, stared at my cryptic note and went berserk. A low growl steadily rolled into a roar. He ripped the paper from the typewriter, tore it into tiny pieces, threw it into the wastepaper basket and began marching around the subs’ desk shouting and waving his fists. I finished my article, handed it in and left for home in a hurry. A couple of days later I heard that he had picked up his typewriter and thrown it across the newsroom as if to blame it for delivering the menacing spiritual message. This was less spectacular than an earlier rage in which he hurled a typewriter out of the first floor window into Flinders Street, where it smashed into dozens of pieces in front of startled motorists. Soon after, suffering pangs of guilt, I halted my pranks and Mr Donnelly–who wrote very knowledgeably about the sugar cane industry under the by-line ‘Sucrose’–became a thoughtful mentor in between his bouts of inexplicable anger.

The other night editor, Bill Harris, was a quiet, diligent and meticulous operator in his late fifties who took the time to show me errors in the way I wrote and presented my articles. His simple message to this cub reporter was to grab the reader's attention with an introduction (intro) which explained what the story was about. ‘The opening two or three paragraphs of your story must explain who, what, when and how. Who is the story about, what happened, when did it happen and how did it happen? After you've covered these essential details you can add the interviews you've collected from eyewitnesses or experts.’ His big black pen would strike out intros which started: ‘It was a breathlessly hot day when amateur fisherman John Cod hitched his boat to his trailer and set out for the beach at Kissing Point.’ In its place he would write: ‘Amateur fisherman John Cod was drowned off Kissing Point late yesterday when his boat capsized in high seas.’ When I joined a research boat investigating marine life on the Great Barrier Reef I filed a piece which carried a sentence saying something like: ‘While the marine biologists were swimming near the reef I saw the sharp dorsal fin of a shark knifing through the water. In panic, I shouted to the crew to get out of the water but they took no notice and eventually the shark swam away.’ Mr Harris called me over, put a line through the sentences and said, ‘What is I doing in this story? The readers are not interested in you or what you are doing. They're just interested in the facts. Give them the facts, and keep yourself out of it.’ I took his advice to heart and don't recall using ‘I’ in any newspaper article since.

Mr Harris's ‘who, what, when and how’ approach was concise and economical and I happily adopted it. My major misgiving was that I thought a reporter's duty was also to ask ‘why’ as well. But Mr Harris didn't take me in that direction. For now, I was learning the basics: tackling the ‘why’ question came later.

Australia was one country in which the passions aroused on behalf of the embattled Spanish loyalists [during the Spanish civil war] were felt but dimly; the call for a Common Front of all the Left against Fascism went largely unheard. Except in North Queensland.

BRIAN J DALTON, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, JAMES COOK UNIVERSITY, TOWNSVILLE, 1967–89

One of my favourite rounds was visiting the trade union offices to pick up snippets about wage claims, industrial action, public meetings on community issues and visits by federal and state Australian Labor Party ministers and MPs. At one end of the main street was the Australian Workers’ Union Hall, where the branch secretary Edgar Williams held court, and at the other end was Fred Thompson, district organiser of the Amalgamated Engineering Union. Williams was a ferocious right-winger and a bosses’ man to the core, while Thompson was a member of the Communist Party of Australia, which the Liberal government of Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies tried to ban by calling a national referendum in 1951. Both my parents voted with the majority of sensible Australians against giving Menzies the constitutional power to outlaw the Communist Party, which would have drawn Australia into a divisive and vicious ‘reds under the bed’ crusade in the footsteps of America's Senator Joe McCarthy.

I particularly enjoyed calling on the Seamen's Union, whose office was at the top of a steep, winding staircase in a red brick building at the far end of town. It included a tiny bookshop whose shelves were stacked with books imported from the Soviet Union. The volunteers who manned the bookshop were a gregarious lot who intensely disliked my newspaper, calling it ‘a Tory rag’, which confused me because I didn't know what ‘Tory’ meant. They regaled me with stories about politics, politicians, industrial struggles and overseas conflicts and the bookshop became one of my regular haunts. One day the bookseller said that if I wanted to know about world politics I should read one of the Marxist classics and offered me a copy of Anti-Dühring by Frederick Engels, Karl Marx's collaborator in writing The Communist Manifesto. As I paid one shilling (five cents) for the book, which had the added excitement of being published behind the Iron Curtain, he warned, ‘We'd better put it in a paper bag so that your editors won't see it when you go back to the office of that Tory rag.’ I took his advice and smuggled the book into the newsroom and then home, where I started reading. First published in 1878, Anti-Dühring is a scholarly demolition job on the socialist theorising of Eugen Dühring, and I found it hard going. Indeed, I couldn't read it from cover to cover and merely dipped into the text searching for paragraphs or sentences which I could grasp. I marked one commanding sentence with my pen and read it over and over again:

The new facts [of historical materialism] made imperative a new examination of all past history, and then it was seen that all past history was the history of class struggles, that these warring classes of society are always the product of the modes of production and exchange, in a word, of the economic conditions of their time; that therefore the economic structure of society always forms the real basis from which, in the last analysis, is to be explained the whole superstructure of legal and political institutions, as well as of the religious, philosophical and other conceptions of each historical period.³

What especially endeared Engels to me was the book's final cutting remark: ‘And to sum up our comprehensive judgment on Herr Dühring in the words: mental incompetence due to megalomania.’ This was political philosophy argued in combative language and I felt the urge to read more.

In those days the Bully was a holiday workplace for itinerant journalists from the southern states who were escaping broken relationships or bad debts. Two drifters who pitched up in Townsville were Michael Fordham, who later landed in advertising in Melbourne, and his travelling companion, Derek Wood, who spent most of his time painting, reading books and drinking and whom I last saw working as a finely dressed commissionaire at the Royal Opera House in London's Covent Garden. They were the first authentic bohemians to enter my life. I brought them home for meals and my mother took them under her wing, insisting that they have showers and shaves while she washed their clothes. One evening Derek came back to the dinner table after visiting the toilet saying with courtly reverence, ‘Mrs Mitchell, I am delighted to see that you have a Symphonia and not a Silentia’, referring to the two brands of porcelain toilets then on the market. ‘The Symphonia is so superior.’

Fordham counselled me that my professional future lay in Sydney, where young Rupert Murdoch had just bought the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and the Truth, previously owned by the eccentric Ezra Norton, and was shaking up the staunchly conservative newspaper establishment. It was a dazzling prospect, but how could I possibly persuade the buccaneering young proprietor to hire a first-year cadet more than 2000 kilometres away in North Queensland? Fordham's advice was shrewd. Murdoch, he explained, had just purchased the Mount Isa Mail in the western Queensland copper mining town–why not join Murdoch's newspaper empire via the back door and then ask for a transfer to Sydney? It was a crazy scheme, wholly impractical and improbable. That said, it might just work. I threw caution to the wind and wrote to the Mount Isa Mail 's editor, Noel Turnbull, asking for a job, making clear I was cutting short my cadetship after just 18 months and seeking a position as a D-Grade reporter. He accepted my application and I left for the Wild West.

On my final night my girlfriend Livia Heidecker and I shared a farewell dinner with my Bulletin colleague Des Partridge and his wife Jan. We had conducted an intense courtship at the local drive-in and on the beaches of Magnetic Island, where I belonged to the Arcadia lifesaving club. In a moment of spontaneous madness Livia and I decided to get engaged and we phoned Alderman Pat Molloy at home and persuaded him to reopen his jewellery shop so we could choose a diamond engagement ring. I was 19 and Livia was the 20-year-old daughter of German-born electrical engineer Joe Heidecker, who had recently died from cancer, and his Estonian-born wife Dagmar. I drove to Livia's home to ask Mrs Heidecker for her daughter's hand in marriage. She flew into a tearful rage, saying that if she had a horsewhip she would beat me out of her house. I harboured only carnal desires for her beautiful daughter, who deserved someone better, she sobbed. Because premarital sex wasn't widely fashionable in North Queensland in 1960, there were elements of truth in her hysterical observations. However, it remained an inauspicious introduction to the sacrament of holy matrimony.

My upbringing had been an education in not accepting the official version of history, not taking current events at face value and staying staunch with the underdog. It wasn't surprising, therefore, that I wanted to extend my journalism beyond reporting the worthy pronouncements of local aldermen. What about uncovering the hidden side of news events and starting to name the bad guys? Surely these were the sacred tasks of a good reporter. I was leaving a secure cadetship on a daily newspaper in my home town and heading to the barren outback of Australia to work on a twice-weekly paper in a godforsaken mining town. I comforted myself with the thought, ‘Well, at least you'll be working for Rupert and he knows what hard-edged journalism is all about.’

2

GOING OUTBACK:

THE MOUNT ISA MAIL

It would be pointless and stupid to pretend that Mount Isa is a paradise.

GORDON SHELDON, MOUNT ISA MINES LTD PUBLIC RELATIONS MAN

After the dusty 900-kilometre, all-day drive from Townsville to Mount Isa, I checked into a motel and proceeded to the Isa pub. ‘A pony of lager and a whisky chaser,’ I ordered. A barmaid the size of a front-row footballer wearing a three-inch leather wristband responded with a long stare. ‘Are you a local?’ she demanded. I stammered ‘No’, and she replied, ‘Well, stop trying to fucking act like one. Now, what do you want–and show some manners.’ I began again: ‘I wonder if I could have a small glass of beer, please, and perhaps a shot of whisky on the side?’ ‘That's better,’ she said. ‘Coming up.’

I had met Midge and she was to be my guardian angel for the next couple of years. It was a criminal offence to be caught on hotel premises under the age of 21 and I was just 19. When the cops came into the pub, she tipped me off and I would crouch below the bar and make my escape out the back via the bullring, a square wooden floor area just off the saloon bar where arguments were often settled with flying fists. Two squabbling miners once defied Midge, who had ordered them to behave. When they adjourned to the bullring to fight it out, she left the bar, grabbed one by the collar, put the other in a headlock and threw them out onto the street. If a situation developed which she couldn't handle on her own, she produced a wooden baton that looked like an axe handle and things usually fell quiet.

In 1961 Mount Isa had a population of 17 000, mostly males. About 5000 were employees of Mount Isa Mines Ltd (MIM), a subsidiary of the giant American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO), the global mining and smelting enterprise founded and built by Meyer Guggenheim. Half of MIM's workforce were employed as underground miners to extract copper, lead, zinc and silver from one of the richest ore bodies on the continent. MIM was one of the top ten companies listed on the Australian Stock Exchange. It was Australia's largest copper mining operation and Queensland's biggest industrial enterprise. The mine's foreign export earnings were immense and contributed robustly to the national accounts. In the post-war boom and the mind-numbing, conservative era of Prime Minister Robert Menzies very few Australians knew where Mount Isa was on the map, nor did they care who lived there, how they lived or what happened there. The town's miners were from every corner of the globe–‘new Australians’ fresh off the migrant ships from Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Greece, Italy, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Lithuania, Hungary, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The town boasted 45 nationalities, including a lone Eskimo (today we'd say Inuit), though our paths never crossed. One possible explanation for this is that the Eskimo reputedly returned home, saying that he could not stand the town's winters. When working underground, the miners formed ethnic groups. ‘There's no use yelling Watch out, falling rock! in Polish if your workmate is from Macedonia,’ a miner explained.

It was one of Australia's first ‘company towns’, modelled on the private mining complexes in the south-eastern states of America. The mine dominated the town's economy, its employment, accommodation, transport and recreation, and even (on the quiet) told the cops what to do. Mount Isa was divided by the normally dry bed of the Leichhardt River into