The first Australian legation was a modest double-storey building on Goose Ridge Hill, in the heart of the city, not far from the confluence of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers. The building is still there today, dwarfed by the forest of high-rise towers of what claims to be the world’s biggest city, its dazzling skyline a bold rival to Manhattan’s.

Australia’s initial diplomatic engagement with China came to an abrupt end with the communist victory in 1949. It wouldn’t resume for another quarter-century after a revolution of sorts in Australia swept away a generation of conservatism under Sir Robert Menzies and his successors.

Gough Whitlam had advocated diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China as early as 1954. It became Labor policy the following year. But it wasn’t until Whitlam’s election victory in 1972 that his vision became a reality.

Fifty years ago this week, Whitlam became the first Australian prime minister to visit the People’s Republic. A few days later, an RAAF Hercules landed in Beijing carrying a novel gift to mark the historic occasion — Saber Bogong, a 567-kilogram Murray Grey stud bull. Australia’s Beijing embassy had opened in January 1973 and the first resident Australian journalists soon followed. It would be another five years before the Americans turned up.

Whitlam’s maverick diplomacy — at the same time as the Nixon administration was taking its first halting steps towards normalising relations with China — set Australia apart.  We had been a firm and unequivocal ally of the United States since the second world war but we were prepared to make our own way in the region and the world — a fact that impressed the Chinese leadership and helped secure the foundations of a flourishing trade relationship that has underwritten Australia’s prosperity for half a century.

When he arrives in Beijing next weekend prime minister Anthony Albanese will find a city and a country largely unrecognisable from those Whitlam visited and receive a welcome that’s likely to be far less effusive if not overtly constrained.

Relations between China and Australia are slowly improving after reaching a nadir under the former government. The Chinese were infuriated in April 2020 when Scott Morrison demanded an independent international investigation with “weapons inspector powers” to reveal the cause of the Covid-19 pandemic. Soon after, they imposed a crippling raft of sanctions on Australian coal, barley, meat, cotton, lobster, timber and wine. The measures wiped out an estimated $20 billion in Australian exports.

The tensions worsened after ASIO agents staged early-morning raids in June 2020 on the Sydney homes of three Chinese journalists, including the bureau chief of the Xinhua news agency, alarming their families and seizing computers and documents — raids for which no official explanation has ever been given. A few weeks later, Cheng Lei, a Chinese-born Australian journalist working for Chinese television was detained and accused of illegally sending state secrets abroad. In early September, the ABC and Australian Financial Review correspondents sought diplomatic sanctuary, later fleeing the country after police warned they were to be interviewed regarding a “national security case.” A period of “wolf warrior diplomacy” during which Chinese critics were aggressively targeted and sometimes physically abused inflamed the hostility.

Since the Albanese government was elected early last year a gradual thaw in the relationship has seen the lifting or promised lifting of about three-quarters of the trade restrictions and a resumption of high-level government contacts. Cheng Lei was released and reunited with her family in Melbourne earlier this month, but no Australian journalists have yet returned to live in China. Australian writer and activist Yang Hengjun, who was arrested in August 2019 and accused of espionage, remains in prison with his health reported to be deteriorating.

While there are strong expectations of further improvement in the relationship as a consequence of Albanese’s visit to Beijing and Shanghai, it appears highly unlikely that it will return to anything resembling the détente of the 1970s and 1980s in the near future, if ever. And that is due mostly to a hardening of attitudes in Canberra.

The Australian government’s position, first enunciated by foreign minister Penny Wong, and still the script closely followed by senior Australian officials, is that while we seek to rebuild a cordial and constructive relationship with China it can’t be as close as it once was because of growing cybersecurity threats from Beijing, its more aggressive posture on Taiwan and the South China Sea and its efforts to expand its influence in the South Pacific.

During his state visit to the United States last week, Albanese went further in defining his government’s view of a growing divergence driven by China’s more assertive global posture. “China has been explicit: it does not see itself as a status quo power,” he told a gathering at the State Department attended by US vice-president Kamala Harris and secretary of state Antony Blinken. “It seeks a region and a world that is much more accommodating of its values and interests.”

A day earlier, an avuncular Joe Biden counselled his youngish guest that he needed to “trust but verify” the responses in his meeting next week with Chinese president Xi Jinping. Albanese responded to this somewhat patronising advice by insisting that he was “clear-eyed” about the challenge Australia faced: “We’re two nations with very different histories, values and political systems. Australia will always look to cooperate with China where we can, but we will disagree where we must, but continue to engage in our national interest. Our approach has been patient, calibrated and deliberate, and that will continue when I visit Beijing and Shanghai.”

It won’t be lost on the Chinese leadership that Albanese has chosen to visit them straight after a state visit to Washington. While the ANZUS alliance has been a fact of life in Australia–China relations since the beginning, it has never been as bluntly inserted into the bilateral equation as it has been since Australia ratified its new AUKUS partnership with the United States and Britain.

The timing of the Washington and Beijing visits will feed the Chinese view that Australia remains an unquestioning acolyte in America’s global reach, as it was in Vietnam and Iraq. “Australia’s political situation is not stable. They are influenced too much by the US and others,” Liu Zhiqin, a senior fellow at Renmin University’s Chongyang Institute, told a group of visiting Australian journalists in Beijing last week. “It sometimes shows that they don’t have their own independent ideas. Sometimes, in my opinion, Australians behave like a fellow following the big brother.”

For years Western leaders recited the mantra that their defence and economic policies were never designed to “contain” China or thwart its inevitable emergence as a global economic and military superpower. Now that pretence has been abandoned. America is energetically pursuing efforts to “decouple” its economy from interdependence with China and to thwart China’s efforts to become self-sufficient in strategically critical industries. The AUKUS pact — along with the nascent Quad partnership between the US, India, Japan and Australia — is seen in China as part of an escalating effort to deny the nation its hard-earned place in the front row on the global stage.

Any Australian pretence that buying long-range nuclear-powered submarines from the United States under AUKUS is anything but a challenge to China was laid bare when deputy prime minister Richard Marles told a security forum in South Korea last week that if a war broke out over China’s determination to reunite Taiwan with the mainland, Australia would be in it. While mouthing the usual lines about the need for a peaceful solution, Marles added: “The consequences of a US–China conflict over Taiwan are so grave that we cannot be passive bystanders.” It sounded like an echo of Peter Dutton, his belligerent predecessor as defence minister, who declared in 2021 that in a war over Taiwan it “would be inconceivable that we wouldn’t support the US in an action if the US chose to take that action.”

Chinese analysts scoff at the view that China’s military build-up poses any kind of threat to Australia. “China harbours no ambition at all in anything remotely close to Australia,” Renmin University’s Gong Jiong told the Australian journalists. “Why is it that politicians in Australia are even talking about China representing a security risk to Australia? That is something hard to accept and understand.” He says China’s increased engagement in the South Pacific was designed to counter Taiwanese influence in the region rather than challenge Australia.

Prominent Chinese also note the absurdity at the heart of Australia’s decision to spend an eye-watering $365 billion to buy a few hulking American nuclear-powered submarines on the grounds that they are essential to protect international trade routes vital to our economy. When a third of all Australian exports are sold to China and 90 per cent of Australian merchandise imports come from China, what exactly is the danger that requires us to give American and British industry a mortgage over the Australian defence budget from here to eternity?

While Marles was war-gaming in Seoul last week, ASIO chief Mike Burgess was joining his “Five Eyes” intelligence colleagues at a gathering in California to denounce the escalating cybersecurity threat posed by China. “The Chinese government are engaged in the most sustained, sophisticated and scaled theft of intellectual property and expertise in human history,” Burgess declared. Yet if the cyber-security threat from China is indeed far worse than ever before, is it perhaps simply that they are getting much better at strategic and commercial espionage and we are finding it harder to keep up with countermeasures? In the spying games that all nations play, are we struggling to keep up?

The more measured and less confrontational diplomacy pursued by the Albanese government has undoubtedly been crucial to stabilising the China–Australia relationship after years of upheaval, but China has good reasons of its own to seek a return to greater harmony.

The Chinese economy is facing a range of serious challenges that make continued friction with the West, and particularly with one of its most important trading partners, an unhelpful distraction. Chinese growth between July and September slowed to 4.9 per cent, compared with 6.3 per cent in the previous quarter. A crisis in its property sector has seen several major construction companies face collapse with hundreds of billions of dollars in debts. And China’s unemployment is rising, with the jobless rate for sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds climbing to more than 20 per cent.

Despite the recent economic turmoil, the Chinese economy is still expected to finish the year with growth of between 5 and 6 per cent — well below the boom years of the past but still a creditable performance. And despite the headwinds, China’s modernisation remains breathtaking. Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing are bustling and glamorous modern cities, linked to the rest of the country by the world’s biggest fast rail network. In this month’s glorious autumn weather, restaurants, shopping malls and parks are thronged with well-dressed, well-fed and obviously happy people. If the Communist Party’s contract with the people was to end the abject poverty that blighted most of the country before the revolution, it has delivered in spades.

Last week China celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Belt and Road Initiative, President Xi Jinping’s signature global engagement policy which has driven US$1500 billion in new development projects around the world. While the BRI has been widely criticised outside China for saddling many developing nations with crippling debts, building excessively extravagant infrastructure and causing widespread environmental degradation, many of the 150 participating nations have embraced China’s global leadership, opened lucrative new markets for Chinese exports, and provided access to new sources of oil, gas and minerals for Beijing.

Washington’s mostly unspoken distaste for the BRI stems from a perception that it is a crude device to extend China’s political influence at the expense of the United States and its allies, not least in the South Pacific. At a joint media conference with Albanese at the White House last week, President Biden derided the BRI as a “debt noose” for most countries that had signed on — then offered Xi Jinping the flattery of imitation by declaring that the G7 nations were working on their own version of the scheme: “His Belt and Road Initiative, well, we’re going to compete on that.”

Among the guests of honour at the BRI celebrations in Beijing were Russian president Vladimir Putin and Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, whose warm embrace of Putin outraged his fellow European leaders. What escaped most media attention was the fact that among the other guests were president Joko Widodo of Indonesia and prime minister James Marape of Papua New Guinea. In a week when Australia was preoccupied with its American alliance, the leaders of the two countries that are our nearest neighbours were building stronger partnerships with China.

In recent days, Albanese has mused about the potential for Australia to build a role as an intermediary in the increasingly volatile relationship between Washington and Beijing. “I think both China and the United States probably see Australia as playing a role. We are a middle power,” he told journalists. “My concern with the relationship between the United States and China is that there has been good engagement at the diplomatic level… but military to military, there is still a lack of engagement. We need to build guardrails.”

That might also be an opportunity to rebuild some of the respect for Australia as an American ally with an independent worldview that prevailed through the years of the Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke governments. “China wants to see a very independent, strategic and autonomous Australia,” says Zhou Rong, another senior fellow at Renmin University’s Chongyang Institute. “You don’t need to depend on other countries. You are a European Asian country or you are a white Asian country, so you can function as a bridge between Asia and America — North America — and Europe.” •

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Often acerbic and sometimes irascible in public, Hayden had a fine sense of humour, a passion for political intrigue and a liking for journalists. As Geoff Kitney noted in a tribute in the Australian Financial Review, he loved to hear and trade gossip, preferably salacious.

After a tour of the private quarters of Ferdinand and Imelda that day in 1986, Hayden emerged to present us newshounds with a global scoop. Imelda might have been famous for her vast wardrobe of shoes, but she also had another collecting passion. Her rooms, he gleefully reported, contained a formidable stash of pornographic cassette tapes.

Hayden is mostly remembered as the Labor leader whose keys to The Lodge were snatched by Bob Hawke; as the fleeting but steadying treasurer in the last inglorious days of the Whitlam government; and as a principal architect of Medicare and the landmark economic reforms of the 1980s. He should also be celebrated as one of Australia’s most determined and effective foreign ministers.

When he fell on his sword, enabling Hawke’s unstoppable ascendancy to the Labor leadership to go unchallenged on the cusp of the 1983 federal election, Hayden had already anointed Paul Keating as the next treasurer and instead took foreign affairs as his consolation prize.

In his five years in the job, he would lay the groundwork for a peace settlement in Cambodia, strengthen the campaign against South Africa’s apartheid regime during Australia’s tenure on the UN Security Council and weather a period of bruising conflict with France over nuclear testing at Mururoa atoll, the Rainbow Warrior scandal and Paris’s intransigence on self-determination for its Polynesian subjects. He worked hard to build closer and deeper ties between Australia and its Asian and Pacific neighbours.

Hayden brought a stubborn determination and moral clarity to a job that saw him open talks over Cambodia with Vietnamese prime minister Pham Van Dong in defiance of the United States, face down French bullying, and oversee a sensitive review of the ANZUS treaty. Through it all, he consistently spoke out in defence of what he saw to be Australia’s best interests.

In the same year as his visit to Manila, Hayden embarked on a grand tour of the nations of the South Pacific — if a two-week island-hopping expedition aboard an ageing Royal Australian Air Force Hawker Siddeley turboprop aircraft can be considered grand. At Funafuti, the tiny main island of Tuvalu, I vividly remember the plane almost getting bogged on the short grassy runway.

I missed another of the ports of call. The night before departure, a greatly amused Bill Hayden announced to his entourage over drinks, “We’re all off to Tonga tomorrow, but not Mr Baker, who has been declared persona non grata!” This is the first I knew of a ban imposed after I had detailed the extravagant lifestyle of the feudal court in Nuku‘alofa during an earlier visit to Tonga.

I rejoined the caravan in time for Western Samoa. On a free day, the travellers set off with togs and towels to a beautiful but treacherous beach on the north of the main island. To the consternation of his retinue, Hayden ignored the warnings, dived straight into the surf and swam far out to sea. Mercifully, Harold Holt’s fate was not replicated.

During the trip there was some engagement between the travelling journalists and the locals that went beyond the conventional scope of diplomatic intercourse. Hayden revelled in the gossip. At his first press conference at Old Parliament House after returning to Canberra he began by serenading one of the journalists with a variation on “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.”

Hayden was also notorious for collecting outsized souvenirs on his global travels, many of them of dubious artistic merit. It was said that the garden of his Ipswich home was a Disneyland of kitsch, many of the pieces acquired on his travels around the world.

During a visit to Papua New Guinea Hayden alarmed his advisers by taking a particular shine to a large garamut, a slit drum fashioned from a tree trunk, that he spotted in the garden of the Mount Hagen hotel where his party was staying. Such was his enthusiasm that the hotel owner appeared to feel compelled to offer it as a gift to his distinguished guest.

The minders and the media — and perhaps the hotelier — concluded there was little risk of the gift being accepted given its great size and weight. Not so. By early the next morning it had been loaded aboard the VIP jet and found its way back to Ipswich via RAAF Amberley.

Throughout the tribulations and triumphs of his long political career, Hayden’s devotion to Dallas, his wife of sixty-two years, was a constant. In 1987 he was poised to travel to the frontline states of southern Africa at the height of the campaign against apartheid. It was a trip at the heart of Hayden’s determination to see an end to the racist regime in Pretoria — with the bonus of some exotic sightseeing and the chance to augment the Ipswich artefact collection. Days before departure, Dallas suffered a mental health episode and without hesitation Hayden cancelled the trip to stay with her while she recovered.

Among many fine tributes paid to Hayden in recent days was one by Laurie Oakes, former doyen of the Canberra press gallery. “They don’t come much better than Bill Hayden,” Oakes tweeted. “He would have made a great PM. Inheriting Bill’s policies and the people he’d put in key roles gave Hawke a head start. A politician in the finest Labor tradition. Humble, decent, clever, game as they come, Bill’s contribution was immense.”

Prime minister Anthony Albanese singled out Hayden’s achievements as foreign minister for particular praise: “Without Bill Hayden’s instinctive grasp of the relationship between facing our nation to the world and securing our prosperity for the future, the government in which he served might not have achieved the same degree of engagement in our region that still benefits Australia today.”

Had that vision been embraced and effectively driven by all of those who followed Hayden as foreign minister, Australia might not be struggling with some of the formidable challenges it now faces with its neighbours, not least in the South Pacific. •

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Ben Roberts-Smith was already the most famous and celebrated soldier of his generation. During multiple operational tours in Afghanistan, he had won the Victoria Cross, the Medal for Gallantry and the Commendation for Distinguished Service — making him the most highly decorated Australian serviceman since the second world war.

After retiring from the army in 2013, Roberts-Smith had done an MBA and traded his $120,000-a-year soldier’s pay packet for a $700,000 package as Queensland manager of the Seven Network. Venerated as an exemplary role model in war and peace, he was named Australian Father of the Year in 2013 and served as chair of the National Australia Day Council from 2014 to 2017.

During his research in Afghanistan and Australia, Masters had heard claims that Roberts-Smith was not quite the paragon of virtue that political leaders, powerful business figures and the Australian public had come to embrace. There were mutterings that he was a headstrong bully, that the circumstances in which he had won his medals were dubious and that he had been involved in multiple battlefield abuses. But there was nothing concrete.

The meeting in the privacy of the Hyatt Hotel rose garden had been arranged as an opportunity for the former soldier to rebut various criticisms being levelled by his old comrades, rather than as an inquisition. “While I was obliged to ask difficult questions, which is the job of a journalist, I was in a mood to mediate,” Masters, an admirer of Australia’s special forces and supporter of their engagement in Afghanistan, would write. But while Roberts-Smith had begun by revealing himself to be “articulate, measured and persuasive,” the conversation soon degenerated into anger and vitriol.

The war hero went to war on his accusers. He blasted some of the soldiers who had served with him as cowardly, incompetent and toxic. He said his critics were driven by jealousy and were smearing him with lies. He was “vicious” in his angry rebuttal of their accusations. As Masters later watched the two-metre-tall figure in the tailored business suit depart, he would reflect: “My overwhelming impression… was that Ben Roberts-Smith VC, MG was not behaving like a man with nothing to hide.”

A few days later, Masters received a late-night call on his mobile phone from an anonymous source on an encrypted line, who said: “He kicked this bloke off a cliff. As his face spun down, it smashed against the wall and his teeth sprayed out. The bloke who saw it can’t get the image out of his mind. He said he had to get away from Ben Roberts-Smith. It was not the first time he said this stuff happened. RS is a bloody psychopath.” After Masters pursued further details from sources, “the outline of a shocking story emerged, cruel to the point of abomination.”

He realised he was on the cusp of perhaps his biggest story since the 1980s, when he had exposed the French government’s involvement in the sinking of the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior and revealed the police corruption in Queensland, helping to trigger the Fitzgerald royal commission. But the former Four Corners star was now a freelance journalist and writer with limited resources. “I needed an ally,” he would concede.

And so began one of the most formidable partnerships in the history of Australian investigative journalism — Chris Masters and the Age’s Nick McKenzie. Despite being thirty-three years younger than Masters, McKenzie had a CV to rival if not surpass that of the man who had once mentored him as a cadet journalist. After two decades of spectacular investigative journalism, McKenzie had won an unprecedented fourteen national Walkley awards for journalism and twice been named Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year.

Their six-year collaboration delivered a series of shocking revelations about the conduct of Australian soldiers in Afghanistan and a marathon defamation trial that ended last month with a finding by Justice Anthony Besanko in the NSW Supreme Court that Ben Roberts-Smith was a liar, a serial bully and a war criminal. Besanko found it was “substantially true” that the VC winner had been involved in the murder of four unarmed Afghan prisoners and civilians, had intimidated and threatened court witnesses to hide the truth, and had lied repeatedly in his sworn evidence.

Despite Roberts-Smith’s decision on Tuesday to lodge an appeal in the Federal Court challenging Besanko’s findings, the dramatic conclusion of the case has starkly framed the prospect of years of sensational war crimes prosecutions that are likely to shred the reputation of our armed forces at home and abroad and scar the Anzac mythology that has been a cornerstone of our national identity for more than a century. The failure of Roberts-Smith to hide what Besanko found to be true must give new impetus to the work of the Australian Federal Police and the Special Investigator appointed in the wake of the internal defence department inquiry into war crimes in Afghanistan headed by NSW judge and army reservist Major General Paul Brereton.

Brereton reported in 2020 that there was credible evidence that thirty-nine Afghan non-combatants had been unlawfully killed by or at the direction of Australian special forces, “which may constitute the war crime of murder.” His report identified twenty-five current or former Australian soldiers who were “alleged perpetrators — either as principals or accessories.” Brereton described one of the unspecified incidents he investigated as “the most disgraceful episode in Australia’s military history.”

Had Besanko found in favour of Roberts-Smith, it would likely have dampened if not derailed the cumbersome process of bringing appropriate criminal charges against those identified by the Brereton inquiry. It would have re-energised the many powerful voices who continue to argue that whatever happened in Afghanistan should be left behind in Afghanistan. And it would certainly have discouraged the media from further interrogating matters that might risk ruinous defamation costs.

Instead, the chief of the defence force, General Angus Campbell, this week declared that thoroughly investigating those Australian soldiers accused of war crimes in Afghanistan was “utterly critical” to Australia regaining moral authority at home and with its allies. Campbell, who deserves great credit for initiating the Brereton process in 2016 in the face of strong military and political opposition, told the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s journal the Strategist that it was also imperative to deal more broadly with “the breadth of the cultural professional issues” that had been highlighted by the inquiry.

“Our operational capability is in large part about our capacity to win the friends and partners who will stand with us in conflict,” he said. “We need to be a force that people want to serve in, but also to join with in partnership across nations. We have never fought alone. We never want to fight alone. What a tragedy if because of real or perceived lapses in our military conduct we found ourselves alone.”

While the tenacious partnership between Masters and McKenzie secured victory in what became the biggest and, with costs now estimated to be as high as $35 million, the most expensive defamation case in Australian history, it would not survive the final reckoning. Their plans to jointly write a book about the saga unravelled. According to Masters, he and McKenzie “worked well together as investigators, but regrettably could not coordinate the writing” of a joint book.

That apparently amicable literary separation has now delivered two compelling accounts of the partnership that complement and illuminate each other — Nick McKenzie’s Crossing the Line and Chris Masters’s Flawed Hero. Both are powerful, passionate and often moving narratives infused with the personal impacts of fighting the most protracted and enervating journalistic battle each of them had ever experienced. Had they lost, it would have been a serious setback late in the illustrious career of seventy-four-year-old Masters. For Nick McKenzie, it would have been the end. He writes that he could not have coped professionally with the failure and, aged forty-one, would have quit journalism.

The two journalists reveal how perilously close they thought they came to losing. While they were sure of the accuracy of their reporting and the details of the atrocities they had helped to uncover, they concede that they faced an uphill battle proving it to the standard required for a defence of truth in a civil defamation case.

To succeed, it was essential to persuade soldiers who witnessed the abuses to agree to give evidence or, if they were compelled to appear, to tell the truth about what they had seen. When the case began, they were pessimistic about the prospects of persuading even those soldiers who were appalled by what they had seen and supported their reporting to willingly give evidence. They were sure Roberts-Smith had the upper hand at the start of the hearings and held it until close to the end.

Had the hearings not been delayed many months by the intervention of Covid, they felt it unlikely they would have had enough time to persuade reluctant witnesses to cooperate. But in the end, the defendants called twenty-one serving and former soldiers, and it was the compelling testimony of a number of them that ultimately defeated Roberts-Smith’s claims.

For both journalists it was, before the final victory, a deeply disillusioning experience. For Masters, who had spent decades working closely with special forces and growing to admire their dedication and professionalism, this was especially so. Beyond the shocking evidence of the multiple murders of unarmed prisoners and civilians, there was what Liberal MP and former SAS captain Andrew Hastie would describe as a pervasive “pagan warrior culture”: rookie soldiers “blooded” by being ordered to kill Afghan captives, “throw downs” in which radios or weapons were planted on the bodies of unarmed victims to pretend they were legitimate battlefield casualties, and “kill boards” kept by SAS units with targets of Afghans to be killed. “It amounted to a descent into the depravity we fight against,” writes Masters.

For McKenzie, seeking justice for the most famous of the victims became a driving force. Ali Jan was the innocent farmer and father of six who was visiting the village of Darwan in Oruzgan province to buy flour and a pair of shoes for his young daughter on 11 September 2012 — the eleventh anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks in New York — when Australian soldiers swooped on the village. Justice Besanko would accept the evidence of multiple witnesses that after he was handcuffed and questioned, Ali Jan was taken to the edge of a nearby cliff and kicked off by Ben Roberts-Smith, who later ordered the execution of the helpless and badly injured farmer.

In 2019 McKenzie travelled to Afghanistan to meet Ali Jan’s widow, Bibi Dhorko, who was desperately struggling to support her young family after the loss of her husband. “One of the soldiers who’d been at Darwan the day Ali Jan died told me something just before I made the trip to Kabul,” he writes. “I’d thought about it ever since. Ali had lived a relatively meagre existence confined to a few villages, a cluster of kin and a daily struggle to survive. Once the story of his death was exposed in our newspapers, it had viscerally exposed the barbarity of those few Australian soldiers who had gone rogue… In death, Ali had reinforced to my war-bitten source the sanctity of human life, even in conflict. This was why the laws of war mattered. Maybe that was Ali’s ultimate legacy.”

As much as the Roberts-Smith saga showed the best of Australian journalism through the determined work of our finest investigative reporters, it also showed the worst of Australian journalism in the outrageously partisan conduct of rival media organisations. They not only failed in their professional duty to help expose the scandal but also worked hard to undermine the credibility of the fine work done by McKenzie and Masters, gormlessly joining the Roberts-Smith cheer squad.

“I can’t say I handle well being beaten up by fellow reporters,” Masters writes. “My view is that there is a shared responsibility. We work first for the public, so there should be some shared values and purpose.” He derides in particular the reporting of the Murdoch press: “The Australian’s reporting on the war crimes now under scrutiny, and especially on Ben Roberts-Smith, was flimsy and partisan. Probably because they had not done the work, because they were incapable of catching up and had an ingrained oppositional stance to Fairfax, and because they could not resist the spoils of a drip-feeding by Roberts-Smith’s lawyers.”

The magnitude of Roberts-Smith’s fall from grace has been amplified by the heights to which he was elevated in popular perception, in large part a product of jingoistic and uncritical coverage in the popular media. Chris Masters dubbed him the Anzac Avatar — the superman soldier whose fame and legendary battlefield exploits made him the embodiment of Australia’s self-perception as a nation of rugged, fearless and independent individuals.

“Craving identity,” Masters writes, “Ben Roberts-Smith found the shape of who he wanted to be in the persona of the killing machine. The special forces operative, amped in popular media to superhero veneration, became a poster boy. We could not help ourselves. The seven-foot-tall and bulletproof Anzac avatar assumed that pedestal.” This, says Masters, is where it went “monstrously wrong.”

Ben Roberts-Smith was one of four Australians to win the Victoria Cross in Afghanistan. Why was he the household name when most Australians would be unaware of the three other Australian soldiers who also won the highest award for gallantry, let alone know their names? How many know the story of Trooper Mark Donaldson who rescued a wounded Afghan interpreter under heavy fire, or Corporal Daniel Keighran who drew enemy fire away from a wounded colleague, or Corporal Cameron Baird who was killed in action storming an enemy-controlled building?

While it was central to Roberts-Smith’s case to portray himself as the victim of a reckless media smear campaign, Masters points out that the complaints about the soldier “originated not from the pampered, irresponsible media but from battle-hardened colleagues.”

Both McKenzie and Masters argue persuasively that Australians rightly dismayed by the scandalous misconduct within the ranks of our elite forces in Afghanistan should be heartened by the fact that the truth would probably never have been revealed without the courageous stand of many decent and professional soldiers appalled by the actions of their comrades.

Says McKenzie: “It was the good men and the moral soldiers of the SAS who stood up and told the truth in court.” Masters writes: “There are soldiers in Australia’s Special Air Services Regiment who have moral as well as physical courage. While those who spoke endured condemnation from many of their brothers, it is hoped that some glancing consideration might be given to the probability that they saved their regiment. Had these revelations erupted as a scandal that was unforeseen and not self-reported, the SASR would have been lucky to escape disbandment.”

As Australia braces for years of traumatic testimony with the twenty-five potential war criminals identified by the Brereton inquiry facing prosecution, we might hope that the courage and decency of those who called out the renegades and forced the reckoning will be the narrative that begins to salvage the tarnished honour of our armed forces. •

Crossing the Line: The Inside Story of Murder, Lies and a Fallen Hero
By Nick McKenzie | Hachette | $34.95 | 488 pages

Flawed Hero: Truth, Lies and War Crimes
By Chris Masters | Allen & Unwin | $34.99 | 592 pages

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But Besanko’s incendiary finding early yesterday afternoon that Ben Roberts-Smith, the most highly decorated and revered Australian soldier since the Vietnam war, was “a murderer, a war criminal and a bully” — as the headline in the Age instantly trumpeted its victory — is a watershed moment for the future of investigative journalism and, more profoundly, for the future of our military forces, upon whose reputation much of our national self-esteem has been cultivated for more than a century.

Besanko ruled that Roberts-Smith murdered or was complicit in the murder of multiple unarmed civilians while serving in Afghanistan. He found, on the balance of probabilities, that Roberts-Smith kicked a handcuffed prisoner off a cliff in 2012 before ordering another soldier to shoot him dead. He further found that in 2009, the SAS corporal ordered the killing of an elderly man found hiding in a tunnel in a bombed-out compound and, during the same operation, murdered with a machine gun a disabled man with a prosthetic.

The decision was not a criminal conviction but a civil judicial determination of truth on the “balance of probabilities.” But the reputation of Victoria Cross and Medal for Gallantry winner Roberts-Smith lies in tatters, along with that of the Special Air Service Regiment, with which he served, and the troubled Australian deployment in Afghanistan for which he was once a poster boy. And an air of grim foreboding hangs over the coming Afghanistan war crimes prosecutions in which Roberts-Smith is front and centre among many soldiers accused of grave abuses.

Roberts-Smith’s decision to sue for defamation must go down as one of the biggest own goals in history. As Age reporter Nick McKenzie pointed out after the verdict, the journalists had not wanted to go to court and neither had the SAS soldiers forced to give evidence against their former comrade. Roberts-Smith gambled that by taking defamation action he would intimidate and silence his media accusers. Instead, he simply amplified massively the damaging publicity in a case that dragged out over five years, thanks to Covid, and ended by vindicating his accusers.

Had Roberts-Smith simply professed his innocence and rejected the allegations in the Age reports, however damning they were, the media coverage would likely have subsided until the findings of the Brereton inquiry evolved into war crimes prosecutions, a process that clearly still has a way to run. At that point, if charged, he would have been judged alongside others accused of equally heinous crimes, with perhaps a better opportunity to introduce mitigating evidence and supportive witnesses — instead of flying solo into the sun in the civil courts.

Nine Entertainment, dating back to when it was known as Fairfax Media, has been rightly applauded for backing its journalists in this case. Had it lost, it would likely have been up for the bulk of the costs of the two legal teams — estimated at as much as $25 million — aside from any award of damages. (Another $10 million is estimated to have been spent by the Commonwealth on its representation in the case.) Even with an expected costs order in its favour, Nine is likely to finish out of pocket to the tune of several million dollars. But given the gravity of the matters at the heart of the stories, the company really had no choice but to stand and fight, for the sake of its own reputation as much as that of its star journalists.

The modern history of media defamation cases in Australia, including at Fairfax, has been mostly about negotiating early settlements and quick payouts to avoid the potentially crippling costs of going to trial and losing — a fact that often has only emboldened litigants whose misconduct was a proper target of journalistic investigation but who have plenty of money to stare down the media and muddy the waters with writs.

Had Nine lost to Roberts-Smith, the fallout would likely have been very serious for the future of investigative journalism in Australia. The huge financial toll would have made all publishers and broadcasters even more wary about tackling big stories challenging high-profile, well-resourced entities, more likely to fold than fight when their journalism was challenged legally, and probably less enthusiastic about investing the big bucks needed to employ and deploy good investigative journalists.

The decision in the defamation case has no formal bearing on the war crimes proceedings, which is why defence minister Richard Marles was able to escape yesterday with a brusque “no comment” on the civil matter when his office will undoubtedly be consumed with analysis of the fallout from the case. But the intense publicity surrounding the trial and its shocking conclusion will sharpen expectations of a timely and thorough interrogation of the conduct of Australian forces in Afghanistan, which is now a full-blown national scandal and an international embarrassment.

On the steps of the court after the verdict, Nick McKenzie — whose formidable career and reputation also hung in the balance with the trial’s outcome — rightly pointed out that the decision involved one soldier not his entire regiment, many of whose members had bravely spoken out about his conduct. “I’d like Ben Roberts-Smith to reflect on the pain that he’s brought on lots of men in the SAS who stood up and told the truth about his conduct,” McKenzie said. “They were mocked and ridiculed in court. They were bullied. They were intimidated.”

But with many other SAS soldiers under active investigation for murder and other very serious war crimes, and with the brutal and ugly culture of the unit drawn in graphic detail during the defamation hearings, the future of the SAS Regiment is in serious question if not untenable. It is painfully evident that much of the behaviour that led to the alleged atrocities thrived under an elitist and secretive code. Some SAS members were clearly emboldened to believe they could act with impunity and in defiance of international law.

The indications that multiple offences occurred over many years in Afghanistan calls into serious question not only the failure of the SAS commanders to maintain discipline but also the lack of supervision by the entire command structure of the Australian Defence Force.

Just as the misconduct of a minority has tarnished the reputation of the entire SAS and all those who fought with courage and dedication in Afghanistan, so too has that misconduct cast a shadow over the reputation of the entire ADF, its proud legacy in two world wars and multiple other conflicts, and its claim to be the repository of the hallowed Anzac spirit and a standard-bearer of the Australian character.

The problem has been compounded by sections of our defence establishment who have resolutely defended Ben Roberts-Smith and denounced the work of those journalists who dared to challenge his record, not least within the previous leadership of the Australian War Memorial. Most egregious among them was former AWM director and later chairman Brendan Nelson who, after the first reports appeared in the Age, accused the journalists of running a scurrilous and unfounded campaign against the SAS and Roberts-Smith in particular.

“Australians need to understand that we have amongst us a small number of real heroes and Ben Roberts-Smith is one of them,” Nelson declared. “I say to the average Aussie, if you see Ben Roberts-Smith, wave and give him a thumbs up.” When he appeared as a witness in the Federal Court two years ago, Nelson said he had been cautioned by a senior member of government about his effusive support for the soldier, and went on to say that he had rung Roberts-Smith after reading the story about him: “I told him I’d read the story, I knew it was about him. I told him that I believed in him. I was very sorry that such an article should be published about him.”

The $25 million question is how Ben Roberts-Smith will foot the bill for his and Nine’s costs in the likely event that the court orders him to pay. It has been reported that his boss and principal backer, Seven Network magnate Kerry Stokes, lent him $2 million to pursue the action against Nine. Stokes, who was chairing the AWM board when the case was launched, yesterday expressed disappointment with the decision and appeared to try to dismiss it as a disagreement between soldiers.

“The judgement does not accord with the man I know,” Stokes said. “I know this will be particularly hard for Ben, who has always maintained his innocence. That his fellow soldiers have disagreed with each other, this outcome will be the source of additional grief.”

It has been reported that the Stokes loan to Roberts-Smith was secured with his Victoria Cross medal. If so, this could well prove one of the worst commercial decisions in the shrewd businessman’s career.

As I have written previously, it would be politically and morally untenable for a soldier found to have committed murder to be allowed to keep a Victoria Cross — and an insult to the memory of all other VC winners. If Roberts-Smith’s right to wear the VC is revoked for dishonourable conduct, the medal will have little value beyond that of a historical curiosity, and certainly won’t be worth the $1 million-plus that Kerry Stokes has generously paid to acquire other Australian VCs for the AWM.

The court victory is another feather in the illustrious cap of veteran journalist Chris Masters but it cements McKenzie’s place as the pre-eminent Australian investigative journalist of his generation, if not all generations. Over two decades he has exposed a succession of scandals in Australian public, corporate and criminal life, but none more serious or consequential than the rot at the core of Australia’s armed forces. •

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“Justice is courage, the courage of conviction,” Anwar seethed on that day in July 2002. “God willing, the day of justice will return, and I call on the friends of justice to remain steadfast. We shall clear the rubble — the corruption and injustices Dr Mahathir left in his trail — and we will build a democratic and just Malaysia.”

Moments earlier, the judges had delivered a preposterous verdict, unanimously rejecting Anwar’s final appeal against a fifteen-year prison sentence for corruption and sexual misconduct. It was a verdict that ignored emphatic denials by the supposed victims of abuse, a police report dismissing the allegations as baseless and the discrediting of critical forensic evidence. It was roundly condemned by legal experts around the world and by foreign governments, including in Washington.

Anwar’s defiant words seemed more pitiful than prescient in that moment. It would take more than twenty years for his promised day of justice to return. His appointment this week as Malaysia’s tenth prime minister after the mid-November general election closes the circle on a titanic struggle between the man once called the father of Malaysian politics and his wayward son that has consumed the country’s politics for a generation.

In 1997, Mahathir Mohamad had been Malaysia’s prime minister for sixteen years. Anwar Ibrahim was the deputy he had recruited, groomed and anointed as his successor. Their partnership fell apart spectacularly in the aftermath of the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

As finance minister, Anwar had committed to austerity measures suggested by the International Monetary Fund to rescue the battered Malaysian economy. But Mahathir, who claimed the cause of the problem was a conspiracy by global financiers, backed a slew of lavish bailouts for failing Malaysian corporations, not least his son’s shipping company. Anwar also angered Mahathir by beginning to tackle widespread corruption in the government and — as many Malaysians cheered the fall of Indonesia’s Suharto regime in May 1998 — embracing political and social reform.

Mahathir abruptly sacked Anwar that September. Three days later, police used tear gas and water cannons to break up the biggest protest rally in Malaysia’s history as more than 50,000 people took to the streets of Kuala Lumpur in support of Anwar. Malaysia’s reformasi movement was born.

That night, Anwar was arrested and detained. A week later he appeared in court with a black eye, the result of a beating in prison by police inspector-general Rahim Noor. (Rahim was later jailed for two months for the assault.) Anwar was eventually sentenced to six years’ jail for supposedly abusing his ministerial position by directing police special branch officers to pressure witnesses to retract allegations he’d had sex with his family’s driver and an illicit affair with the wife of his private secretary. (Both homosexuality and adultery are criminal offences in Malaysia.) A subsequent trial saw him also convicted for the alleged sexual offences themselves.

The Federal Court decision to uphold those verdicts in 2002 came despite evidence that Anwar’s driver had three times denied having sex with his employer and compelling evidence that police had threatened witnesses and manipulated evidence. The appeal judges also ignored an admission by police special branch chief Mohamad Said bin Awang that in 1997 — a year before Anwar’s sacking — he had sent a report to Mahathir dismissing the allegations of sexual misconduct as a whispered smear campaign.

Mahathir’s confected crucifixion of Anwar would do much more than brutally derail the career of a charismatic leader who had promised, since his earliest days as a student activist, to build a cleaner, fairer and more racially egalitarian Malaysia. It paved the way for even greater levels of cronyism and corruption within the ruling Malay elite, culminating in the kleptocracy of Najib Razak’s nine-year prime ministership from 2009 that presaged a twelve-year prison sentence. It also robbed the country, Southeast Asia and the world of a democratic and West-friendly Muslim leader committed to building a better order.

The day after emerging as leader of the most successful coalition in Malaysia’s latest general election, the now seventy-five-year-old Anwar told reporters gathered outside his home, “This you need to learn from Anwar Ibrahim — patience, wait a long time, patience.” Patience indeed. And extraordinary determination.

Anwar would spend a total of almost ten years in prison and be double-crossed a second time by Mahathir Mohamad before achieving what he believed was his destiny, and what his legions of devoted supporters among younger Malays and the country’s often marginalised Indian and Chinese minorities had long hoped for.

Anwar’s first years of imprisonment ended in late 2004, a year after Mahathir stood down as prime minister, after Malaysia’s Supreme Court overturned his conviction for sodomy. On his release, Anwar was still barred from politics but resumed de facto leadership of a resurgent opposition that went on to make a strong showing in the 2008 general election. The United Malays National Organisation, which had dominated Malaysian politics since independence in 1957, lost fifty-eight of its seats while the People’s Alliance, led by Anwar’s wife Wan Azizah, increased its numbers by sixty-one. After his ban ended, Anwar was returned to parliament in a by-election in April 2008 and resumed formal leadership of the opposition.

During the 2013 general election campaign Anwar drew massive and jubilant crowds to his rallies across the country. As I travelled with him on part of the journey, he spoke eloquently about his determination to change Malaysian politics. “The last fifteen years have certainly changed me,” he said. “You talk about freedom or reform. It is not the same when you understand what it is to be denied your freedom. My passion for justice is far more pronounced now… I can’t allow this to continue.”

His alliance would win the popular vote in that election with 50.9 per cent against 47.4 per cent for the ruling coalition, but was again thwarted by an entrenched gerrymander and allegations of widespread electoral fraud.

Nationwide protests led by Anwar rattled the government. Early the following year, as he was poised to contest and capture the premiership of Selangor State, Najib Razak dusted off the old Mahathir political playbook. On 7 March 2014, the Court of Appeal overturned Anwar’s earlier acquittal, unanimously declaring the High Court had failed to “critically evaluate” the evidence submitted by a government chemist. It rushed through a fresh sentence of five years’ imprisonment, once more disqualifying Anwar from political office. A year later, the Federal Court upheld the decision and he was sent back to jail.

Three years later, the man primarily responsible for Anwar’s torment came in search of a breathtaking favour. Now at war with the rest of the UMNO old guard, Mahathir Mohamed cut a deal with Anwar to unite their followers in a new coalition to contest the 2018 general election. Under the agreement, Mahathir would return to the prime ministership but would hand over to Anwar after an interim period.

Mahathir’s strategy worked. The new alliance led by Anwar’s Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope) — its leader still behind bars — won a simple majority and Najib’s Barisan Nasional coalition was relegated to opposition. After being sworn in as prime minister, Mahathir engineered a royal pardon for Anwar. But it surprised few — including most likely Anwar himself — when Mahathir stalled and then reneged on his promise to surrender the leadership. Their coalition collapsed after twenty-two months.

If Anwar’s path to power has been strewn with landmines, the road ahead may be similarly treacherous. While his reformist Pakatan Harapan coalition won eighty-two seats in this general election to emerge as the largest political grouping, he remains well short of a majority in the 222-seat national parliament. After days of wrangling in which the rival conservative Malay alliance Perikatan Nasional, with seventy-three seats, claimed it too was poised to forge a majority with minor parties, Malaysia’s King Sultan Abdullah stepped in and appointed Anwar as prime minister.

While incumbency gives Anwar a clear advantage, and he is a highly skilled negotiator, the deep and often bitter divisions in Malaysian politics mean success is not guaranteed when the numbers are finally put to the test in the parliamentary vote of confidence the new leader has promised to call on 19 December. Not least of his challenges will be the strong electoral showing of PAS, the Malaysian Islamic Party, which is opposed to the development of a more pluralist society, an essential element of Anwar’s vision for the country.

It is more than poetic justice that Anwar’s final ascent to the top of Malaysian politics has coincided with the end of Mahathir Mohamad’s political career. The general election was a humiliating repudiation of the man who had been an irrepressible force in the country’s politics for more than half a century, including serving a total of twenty-two years as prime minister.

The ninety-seven-year-old Mahathir — who had boldly proposed himself for a third term as leader and boasted to journalists that he had a good chance of winning — came fourth in a five-way contest in his electorate on the resort island of Langkawi, this time running under the banner of his own Pejuang Party. In his first election defeat in fifty-three years in politics, Mahathir also lost his candidate’s deposit after failing to secure a minimum of 12.5 per cent of the vote. •

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Jack would recall that the mothers of service personnel were issued with little brooch badges by the government: “On the badge was a star to show you had a son or daughter in the war. My mother wore one with three stars. She was very proud.”

Jack and Bob trained together with the 8th Division Signals, sailed together to Malaya, and fought and were captured together when Singapore fell to the Japanese in February 1942. Later that year, they were shipped to Nagasaki with “C Force,” the first of more than 3800 Australians sent to work as slave labourers on the Japanese mainland.

The Chapmans were initially deployed at the Kawasaki Shipyard in Kobe, before much of the city including the shipyard was destroyed in the US air force’s firebombing raids in 1944. They were then transferred to the infamous Yoshikuma coalmine in Fukuoka and forced to work in deadly tunnels miles underground.

The brothers would both credit each other’s support as the main reason they survived three years in captivity and made it home to Australia in 1945. Bob had a particularly vivid memory of one day at the shipyard in 1943: “Our job was fitting steel sheets to the side of the boat frame using big bolts and big spanners. If you stripped a bolt, it was easy to lose your balance… One time I was working high up on the side of the boat and Jack slipped. I reckon he was on his way down and would have gone if I hadn’t grabbed him and held him. If I hadn’t been there that day, he would never have made it.”

Bob Chapman died on 18 October, five years after Jack, at a nursing home in southern Queensland. He was 101. His death claimed the last of the signallers who had lived through the trials of Kobe and Fukuoka. And now the 8th Division Signals Association, which once had hundreds of active members, has just two veterans left.

When Alec Campbell, the last of the Anzacs who fought at Gallipoli, died in May 2002, it was a moment of national sadness and reflection. Campbell, who lied about his age to enlist at sixteen, had said of himself, “I don’t feel special. I am an ordinary man.” But prime minister John Howard attended his funeral, eulogised him and spoke of “the respect we feel and the debt we owe to this grand old man and those he came to represent.” Howard rightly observed that the child soldier who lived to be the oldest of his era had “shouldered the weight of history imposed upon him.”

Now, just two decades after the last Anzac departed, Australia is rapidly approaching the moment when the last veterans of the second world war will be gone.

Close to a million Australians served in that conflict. Now the youngest of those who enlisted before the war finally ended must be at least ninety-five years old. How many are still alive remains a mystery, even to those charged with their care and support.

Fewer than 3700 individuals who served during that war currently hold Department of Veterans’ Affairs healthcare cards — gold for those who went overseas and white for those who served at home. The number has plunged from about 23,000 in 2017 and 13,300 in 2019. The department estimates hundreds more surviving veterans may not have enlisted for the health support, although it is hard to imagine that many would have failed to apply for the substantial assistance.

Beyond the health card numbers, Veterans’ Affairs appears to be hopelessly uninformed about the men and women whose support in their final years should be its highest priority. It can’t give a breakdown of how many surviving veterans served in the army, navy and air force. And it refuses not only to identify the youngest and oldest surviving veterans but even to indicate their age, for “privacy” reasons.

The RSL also struggles with its roll call of those who ought to be the most venerated of their ranks. The NSW branch lists 694 surviving second world war vets among its members but says the statistics from its sub-branches are unreliable. The RSL in the ACT has twenty-one. RSL Tasmania thinks it has nineteen but is not sure. RSL Queensland counts 609 but says it may be unaware of a number of listed life subscribers who are no longer alive. Repeated requests drew a blank from other state branches.

The rapid thinning of the ranks of second world war veterans is being felt keenly across the hundreds of unit associations formed after the war, many of which have been forced to wind up over the past few years. Among those that have gone is the 467–463 RAAF Squadrons Association, which represented veterans of the two Australian Lancaster bomber squadrons that suffered among the highest casualty rates of the war in Europe and whose members took part in some of the most famous raids, including the sinking of the German battleship Tirpitz in late 1944.

Along with the Kokoda Track campaign in New Guinea, the siege of Tobruk in 1941 remains one of the most celebrated Australian achievements of the second world war after the Allies held off the German and Italian armies for 241 days in the Libyan port. When the Nazi propagandist Lord Haw-Haw derided them as “rats in a trap,” the 14,000 Australians who fought at Tobruk embraced the label as a badge of honour.

The Rats of Tobruk Association soon had a membership of about 3500 after its formation in 1945, including “water rats” — the Royal Australian Navy personnel whose ships gamely helped to keep Tobruk supplied during the siege. Now there are just four Rats still clinging to the sinking ship of our ranks of veterans — three in Victoria and one in New South Wales. All of them are centenarians, the oldest 106. Nine of their comrades died during the past year.

But while the numbers of veterans are rapidly dwindling, the Rats of Tobruk Association still has a national membership of about 600 consisting mainly of the family and friends of departed veterans. The association’s Victorian secretary, Lachlan Gaylard, says there is still a strong desire among the descendants of veterans and those who knew them to keep alive the memory of their deeds. “We also see signs that there is a hunger in the wider community, especially amonsg younger Australians, to learn more about this history,” Gaylard says. “It is a part of our history that schools don’t do enough to celebrate.”

Perhaps the most tangible legacy we have of those who have gone and those who remain is the priceless archive of service records and enlistment photographs of those Australians who served in the second world war. More than seventy-seven years after the war ended, though, hundreds of thousands of those records are still locked away in crumbling paper folders in a Canberra warehouse largely inaccessible to the general public.

While the digitising of all first world war personnel files was completed in 2010 — enabling them to be readily and freely viewed online — the task of digitising the files from the second world war has been excruciatingly slow.

The National Archives of Australia holds 1,169,199 personnel files documenting the service of Australian men and women in the army, air force and navy during the second world war. So far, less than two-thirds have been digitised. Those who wish to see any of the undigitised files must book a private viewing at the NAA’s Canberra offices or pay a $36 fee to have them copied — and even then wait up to ninety business days to see the results uploaded onto the NAA website. More than 14,460 people have so far paid rather than wait.

Two years ago, the NAA announced the signing of contracts worth $4.4 million for the bulk digitisation of remaining service files. The then NAA director-general, David Fricker, declared, “The World War II service records are among the most popular in our vast collection and this project will ensure Australians can access almost one million of those records digitally by 2023.”

Two years on, just half of the remaining records have been copied, and the NAA says it does not have enough funding to complete the job. It says the $10 million allocated by the federal government in 2019 for the work is not enough to cover the cost of digitising photos of personnel in the service files or to copy more than 100,000 outstanding files. “It’s a shame, it’s a real shame that this may not be done before the last of these veterans has died,” says Lachlan Gaylard.

While the NAA appeals for private donations to help meet the cost shortfall, $500 million is being lavished on the Disneyfication of the Australian War Memorial (after the scandalously wasteful decision to bulldoze the fabulous Anzac Hall — home of Lancaster bomber “G” for George — to make way for the structure).

Engraved in stone at the entrance to the War Memorial is a quotation from its founding father, the war correspondent and official historian Charles Bean: “Here is their spirit, in the heart of the land they loved; and here we guard the record which they themselves made.”

What Bean would make of the architectural extravaganza transforming the imposing yet modest shrine he helped build is anyone’s guess. But there can be little doubt what the man who was also foundation chairman of the 1940s war archives committee that would become the National Archives of Australia would think of the failure to complete the proper preservation of records of the men and women who fought in the second world war. •

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The young woman’s body lay on an open tiled platform in the yard of Bali’s Sanglah hospital surrounded by piles of other corpses, many charred beyond recognition. A medical team in gumboots and rubber gloves moved slowly through, checking teeth and scraps of clothing that might help identify the victims. Scores more bodies filled the entrance foyer of the hospital and lined the walkways to wards crowded with the injured. Flies were swarming in the oppressive evening heat.

Ambulances weaved through the traffic, ferrying the most seriously injured to evacuation flights. Pickup trucks unloaded dozens of crude plywood coffins. The dead and wounded were mostly young, mostly Australian — many kids on their first trip to Bali.

I had woken in Singapore on the morning of 13 October 2002 to the shocking news of the massive bomb blasts that had destroyed the popular Sari Club and the neighbouring Paddy’s Bar in the heart of Kuta’s nightlife district. Within hours, I was reporting from the midst of the chaos.

The Bali bombings would soon be confirmed as the worst act of terrorism in Australian history. The ultimate toll would be 202 dead — eighty-eight of them Australians — and hundreds more seriously injured, many of them Australians.

As shocking as the moment was, it should not have come as the surprise it did to most Australians. A year earlier, the world had been numbed by the attack on the World Trade Center towers in New York. It was clear that al Qaeda and its global affiliates had the means and the determination to continue striking their Western enemies at will — and anywhere.

Moments before the first suicide bomber walked into Paddy’s Bar just after 11pm on Saturday 12 October and, seconds later, another detonated a massive car bomb in front of the Sari Club, a smaller bomb — crude calling card of al Qaeda’s Asian surrogate Jemaah Islamiyah — had exploded outside the United States consulate in Denpasar. But while the Americans undoubtedly remained the primary focus of the terrorists, the Australian toll in Bali was far from incidental.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had denounced Australia as a “crusader” country after it sent troops to join the invasion of Afghanistan and the failed hunt for him. And just a few weeks before the Bali bombings, twenty-one men, most of them Jemaah Islamiyah members, were detained in Singapore in connection with an alleged conspiracy to build seven truck bombs and attack Western military and diplomatic targets, including the Australian High Commission.

On the eve of the twentieth anniversary of the bombings, the media has once more been revisiting the events in Bali and their shocking fallout. Controversy has stirred around a four-part miniseries, Bali 2002, airing on Stan. As with the release last year of Nitram, the film based on the Port Arthur massacre, concerns have been expressed about the emotional impact on survivors and the families of those who died.

One Western Australian academic has accused the producers of Bali 2002 of “cashing in” while disregarding the grief of the victims and giving too much attention to the terrorists. Guardian film critic Luke Buckmaster has criticised the realism of the series and declared it to be “out of its depth” in the dramatisation: “Bali 2002 feels like a very loose simulation of historical events.”

In fact, Bali 2002 holds remarkably true to the actual events and is finely and fairly balanced in its depiction of the impact on the victims both foreign and Indonesian, the motivation of the terrorists, and the immense challenges faced by the emergency responders and the crime investigators. Its graphic recreation of the moments before and after the bombs exploded, and the carnage that unfolded in the minutes and hours that followed, is disturbing viewing even for those not personally affected by the massacre, but it is utterly authentic, mostly factual and not gratuitous in the least.

Buckmaster also derides for “too little realism” an opening sequence in which Balinese woman Ni Luh Erniati (played powerfully by Sri Ayu Jati Kartika), whose husband was one of the staff killed in the Sari Club blast, stares into the camera lens and pleads, “What did we do wrong to make the gods angry?” He dismisses this as “vague spiritual commentary, as if supposed to symbolise the soul of the country.”

In fact, the bombings were as traumatic for the deeply spiritual Balinese Hindus as they were for the foreign victims. For many, the disaster raised disturbing issues about the unchecked development and commercialisation of their idyll. A few days after the attacks, the professor of psychiatry at Bali’s Udayana University, Luh Ketut Suryani, described the bombings as divine retribution for the crass commercialisation that had upset the harmony of Bali’s culture. “Bali has lost its Hindi identity and there is no longer a balance between the spiritual and the material in our society,” she told me. “Everything now is about money. Balinese must ask why God has punished us. We must see this not only as a sign but as a punishment from God because we have taken a wrong direction in our society. This is a lesson for the Balinese.”

At one moment in the final episode of the series, though, the narrative does appear to divert from the historical record. Back home after leading the Australian Federal Police contingent that helped track down the bombers, assistant commissioner Graham Ashton (Richard Roxburgh), confronts an unnamed superior officer: “You lied to me. The government had intel that Bali was going to happen… The Office of National Assessments and ASIO briefed the government that Bali was a target.”

The day after the bombings, Ashton (who later become chief commissioner of Victoria Police) was appointed to head the Bali investigating team by AFP commissioner Mick Keelty on the strength of Ashton’s years as AFP liaison officer in Australia’s Jakarta embassy and his fluency in Bahasa Indonesia. There is no evidence that Ashton ever confronted Keelty over lying about intelligence warnings, or that Keelty was complicit in any such cover-up. But the case that the Australian government was well aware of the danger to Australians visiting Bali in October 2002 — and did nothing to warn them — gained substantial momentum after the bombings.

As early as December 2001, ASIO assessed Indonesia as being at high risk of terrorist attack. In the months that followed, evidence grew of the intensity of that threat and the capacity of al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah to realise it. In April 2002, Australian and US intelligence analysts simulated scenarios of such terrorist attacks — including one in which Bali was identified as an attractive al Qaeda target.

In June 2002, the Office of National Assessments was so concerned about the growing risk of regional attacks that it sought a face-to-face meeting with foreign minister Alexander Downer at which it identified Bali as a target for Jemaah Islamiyah — at a time when an average of 20,000 Australian tourists were visiting the island each month. The minister was told the extremists had the intent and ability to attack targets such as hotels, bars and airports. In July, ASIO warned Qantas that the threat across all Indonesia, including Bali, was high.

Despite the alarm bells, the Department of Foreign Affairs travel advice continued to claim that despite terrorist incidents in parts of Indonesia, tourism services elsewhere were “operating normally, including Bali.”

A Senate inquiry concluded in August 2004 that while there had been a general terrorism risk in Indonesia in late 2002 there had been no specific warning of the Bali attack. Labor’s Steve Hutchins, the committee’s chair, declared that while there had been failures of intelligence, there had not been “a culpable lapse by Australian government agencies or individual officials.”

In a dissenting report, Greens leader Bob Brown and Australian Democrats leader Natasha Stott Despoja thought otherwise. In calling for a royal commission to fully assess the performance of agencies and government in the lead-up to the Bali bombings, they were scathing about the role of the foreign minister. “Mr Downer could have taken the evidence of the danger of an attack to cabinet,” they wrote. “He could have used his considerable influence to persuade the Indonesian authorities, who appeared unwilling to recognise the terrorist danger, to act. The minister’s inaction contributed to Australia’s unpreparedness for the attack in Bali.”

If Australian officials were unprepared for the Bali bombings, their performance after the event was outstanding, as Bali 2002 recounts. The RAAF’s biggest medical airlift since the Vietnam war and the heroic efforts of medical staff, including plastic surgeon Fiona Wood, undoubtedly saved scores of lives. And its part in identifying and tracking down the bombers and the bombmakers was probably the AFP’s finest hour.

The series rightly acknowledges Graham Ashton’s skill in deftly handling the cultural sensitivities and building a powerful partnership with Bali police chief General Made Pastika. But great credit is also due to Mick Keelty in negotiating an unprecedented agreement in which Australian police were able to work with great freedom within a foreign jurisdiction.

Within hours of the bombings, Keelty was on the phone to Indonesian National Police chief General Da’i Bachtiar. The two men had cemented an evolving friendship a year earlier during a visit to Australia by Bachtiar. After Keelty offered his sympathy and support, his friend replied, “Mick, I need all the help I can get.” Later that day, the first of more than one hundred AFP investigators and forensic specialists were on their way to Bali.

The partnership that grew from that collaboration would help build a broader strengthening in the relationship between Australia and Indonesia. At a memorial service in Bali to mark the first anniversary of the attacks, Indonesian security minister Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono would speak powerfully of the need for closer “brotherhood” between the two nations.

Nine years later, President Yudhoyono would describe the emotional event as one of the most poignant moments of his political career: “It was heart-wrenching to see those who had lost their loved ones among the gathering.” He said the attack had been a turning point in a bilateral relationship challenged by the confrontation over East Timor. It had produced “a compelling reason for Jakarta and Canberra to explore new ways of cooperation in a world haunted by new, unfamiliar threats.” •

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Her humility as much as her humanity was perhaps the secret of her success, why those for whom she fought so passionately and tenaciously throughout her life trusted her and shared their stories — and why she was able to pierce the defences of the powerful to reveal often shocking truths.

Jan Mayman, who has died at the age of eighty, was the most important journalist of her generation in exposing the systemic cruelty, neglect and injustice suffered by Indigenous Australians — long before most of the mainstream media were awakened to that grim and abiding reality.

For Jan, the turning point came in a hotel in the town of Roebourne on the northwest coast of Western Australia in 1983. A teacher friend had told her the alarming story of a sixteen-year-old Aboriginal boy who had died in police custody in Roebourne after a brawl with police officers. She flew north from Perth to investigate.

After the Aboriginal Legal Service lawyer refused to talk to her, a tall Aboriginal man approached: “I’d never met him before, he just beckoned me and I sort of followed him… He led me to a hotel room and he had eight Aboriginal people, all men, and they were lined up sitting on two beds and he said, ‘Tell her.’ And they all told me this shocking story.”

John Pat had joined a drunken confrontation with four off-duty policemen outside the Victoria Hotel on the evening of 28 September 1983. According to the witnesses, he was struck in the face by one policeman and fell backwards, striking his head hard on the roadway. Another officer kicked Pat in the head before he was dragged to a waiting police van, kicked in the face, and thrown in.

Other witnesses, who had been across the street from the police station, said Pat and several other Aboriginal prisoners were beaten as they were taken from the van and, one after another, dropped on the cement path. Each was then picked up, punched to the ground, and kicked. According to one observer, none of the prisoners fought back or resisted. An hour later, when police checked on Pat in his cell, he was dead.

The dramatic story was accepted by Age editor Creighton Burns, who ran it on the front page. The subsequent inquest, which led to the four policemen being charged with manslaughter, triggered the public outcry that precipitated the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody. Jan Mayman’s reporting earned her a Gold Walkley, the highest accolade in Australian journalism.

It would be the first of many powerful stories detailing injustice over the next four decades. These included more cases of abuses and deaths in custody, the plight of stolen generations survivors and the battle to protect sacred Aboriginal lands against the encroachment of mining — notably the epic struggle by the Yindjibarndi of the Pilbara against Twiggy Forrest’s Fortescue Metals.

Jan became a champion of Indigenous rights with an unlikely colonial pedigree. Her grandfather, George Mayman, was a pioneering gold hunter and mine owner in the Kalgoorlie goldfields.

She was never comfortable in the tough, ego-driven world of journalism, where she was always an outlier, a freelancer who worked for some of the biggest newspapers in Australia and overseas but was never really embraced by the mainstream. Her independence was an asset, but she always struggled to earn enough money and was fearful of ruinous litigation without the guaranteed backing of a monied publisher.

She was both a powerful reporter and an elegant, evocative writer — a rare combination in journalism. While her investigative journalism was compelling, her writing captured the beauty of Aboriginal lands and powerful mystery of Indigenous traditions.

A generation before the killing of George Floyd in the United States ignited the Black Lives Matter movement around the world, Jan Mayman had exposed the ugly truth of endemic racism and abuse in Australia to a largely indifferent or ignorant mainstream audience.

The royal commission triggered by her journalism promised a sea change. Its 339 recommendations lit the path to reducing deaths in custody, imprisonment rates, inequality and disadvantage. “Few Australian royal commissions have attracted stronger, more passionate media attention than the 1991 final report,” journalist Wendy Bacon would write. The failure of that promise of change broke Jan’s heart.

The issues on which she fought so hard remain as far from resolution as ever. In the thirty years since the royal commission, almost 500 more Aboriginal people have died in custody. To John Pat’s name have been added others whose deaths are etched in shame – Mulrunji Doomadgee, Mr Ward, Ms Dhu. But most are forgotten numbers on a roll without end. •

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Biden was right about one thing, at least. The abrupt collapse of another bankrupt regime — propped up for years beyond its deserved expiry only with the lives and largesse of the United States and its dutiful allies — didn’t end on an embassy rooftop. Instead, there was a terrified stampede across a nearby airfield.

This time the spectacle was more shocking as it unfolded in graphic live streaming around the world. The humiliation of the fall of Saigon was etched in the iconic black-and-white image, taken by United Press International photographer Hugh van Es, of a helicopter lifting desperate refugees from a rooftop near the American embassy. The capitulation in Kabul would be captured on scores of smartphones — defined with appalling images of desperate Afghans clinging to the fuselage of a departing US transport plane before plunging to their deaths.

Biden was also right to call out the unfair comparison between the defeat in Vietnam and that in Afghanistan, but not in the context he implied. The Taliban is certainly not the North Vietnamese army. In the Vietnam war, the United States was beaten by millions of North Vietnamese troops and Vietcong fighters backed by massive military and economic aid from the Soviet Union and China. In Afghanistan, it took just 80,000 Taliban fighters with rudimentary weapons and an unshakeable fundamentalist faith to exhaust the will of the most powerful armed forces in the world.

The waste, however, has indeed been comparable. As Biden confirmed on Monday, close to US$1 trillion has been squandered in Afghanistan over the past two decades — only to see the Taliban come full circle from a stunning victory in 1996 to a stunning return to power in 2021. And although the casualties are nothing like the 47,000 American military personnel who died in Vietnam, more than 4000 American troops and contractors have been killed in Afghanistan and another 20,000 wounded — along with the 50,000 Afghan civilians and a similar number of Taliban fighters estimated to have perished.

As Biden ruefully conceded, the speed with which the Taliban swept across the country recapturing cities and towns before reaching the capital in just ten days — and the correspondingly rapid disintegration of the 300,000-strong Afghan army — has been breathtaking. As recently as early last week, the Washington Post was reporting US military estimates that it would be at least another month before the city fell.

But the inevitability of this week’s events should have surprised no one, least of all the Republican rabble now baying for Biden’s blood. “What we have seen is an unmitigated disaster, a stain on the reputation of the United States of America,” intoned Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell. “Every terrorist around the world, in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen, in Africa, are cheering the defeat of the United States military by a terrorist organisation in Afghanistan.”

In truth, Biden is little more than a late-shift janitor charged with clearing up the mess created by his predecessors, most recently the man for whom McConnell ran a shameless four-year protection racket, president Donald Trump. Trump’s decision to cut a deal with the Taliban in February last year made their return to power inevitable. Under the agreement, the United States and NATO promised to withdraw all their troops within fourteen months in return for the insurgents pledging not to allow al Qaeda or any other extremist group to operate again in the areas they control. Whether or not the Taliban kept their side of deal — many analysts believe their links with al Qaeda remain strong — the die was cast.

Of course, ultimate responsibility for the debacle rests with Trump’s Republican predecessors in the Bush administration, which drove the Taliban out of Kabul in 2001 in their fumbled pursuit of Osama bin Laden. As former Australian foreign minister Bob Carr said this week, “They’ll blame Biden, but Afghanistan, like Iraq, was the work of the neo-cons who fooled the Bush administration and seized 9/11 to prove American weaponry could dominate. Tribesmen with Kalashnikovs prevailed.”

The speed with which the Afghan government fell apart over recent weeks has laid bare how thin the veneer of its control was all along, and how utterly dependent it always was on US dollars and the Western military. As Biden rightly postulated, another year, five years or ten years on US life support would not have changed the prognosis for the corrupt and bitterly divided administration — and would have done nothing to blunt the stubborn resistance of the Taliban. “We gave them every chance to determine their own future,” said Biden of the fallen government. “We could not provide them with the will to fight for that future.”

Not surprisingly, the return of the Taliban has triggered alarm around the world. The images from Kabul over recent days seem like a flashback to 1996: a movement frozen in time, at least sartorially, as the same sullen men with beards and turbans brandished their weapons while posing with flags and banners in newly captured government offices, or roamed the largely deserted streets of the city.

It was almost inevitable that thousands of panicked residents remembering the brutal first coming of the Taliban would overrun the airport in a desperate and mostly vain bid to escape from the country. And it was grimly predictable that the women of Kabul — banished from their jobs and schools and ruthlessly suppressed last time around — would flee indoors and hunt for their mothballed burqas.

The decision by president Ashraf Ghani to flee last Sunday — reportedly aboard a plane overloaded with bags of cash — has been denounced by his former political partners and ridiculed by Joe Biden. While Ghani sought to clothe his escape with the virtue of seeking to avoid bloodshed, it is likely the blood he worried most about was his own. He would have been acutely aware that when the Taliban first came to Kabul, his predecessor, the Soviet-installed Mohammad Najibullah, was abducted from his refuge in the United Nations compound and tortured to death, his body dragged through the streets behind a truck before being suspended from a traffic light pole in front of the presidential palace.

While first appearances can certainly be deceptive, the return of the Taliban has so far been remarkably peaceful, a largely bloodless coup. While there were reported episodes of fighting and reprisals as the insurgents swept across the country in the face of token resistance from government forces, their arrival in Kabul this time came without violence or loss of life.

The Taliban leadership, so far at least, has been true to its word. “We want a peaceful transfer of power,” declared spokesperson Suhail Shaheen, as the Taliban forces paused at the entrances to the city, only proceeding as it became clear the regime’s soldiers and police had abandoned their posts. Shaheen told the BBC the Taliban wanted to form an “inclusive” government to run its new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan: “There will be no retaliation and revenge.” There would also be an amnesty for those who had collaborated with the former regime and foreign governments: “We once again invite them all to come and serve the nation and the country.”

In a media conference on Tuesday, Taliban representative Zabihullah Mujahid indicated that the new regime would honour its undertakings not to allow the country to again become a sanctuary for terrorism: “We will not be allowing the soil of Afghanistan to be used against anybody.” And he promised that women’s rights would be protected: “All our sisters, all our women are secure… They can work. They can get education. They are needed in our society and they will be actively involved.”

Such pledges should rightly be viewed with great scepticism given the Taliban’s brutal track record, but there are reasons to believe their leadership will proceed more cautiously and perhaps more inclusively this time around. One of the movement’s highest priorities will be to win international legitimacy. Already Russia and China have effectively recognised the new order. Having engineered the negotiations that opened the way for the Taliban’s return, the United States can hardly now deny the reality of that return to power nor, more importantly, fail to acknowledge that for the first time in the modern history of Afghanistan a single political group controls the entire nation.

It was the US’s refusal to allow the Taliban to take Afghanistan’s seat at the United Nations after their victory in 1996 that was widely credited with driving the isolated regime into the embrace of Osama bin Laden, who then plotted the devastation of 9/11 from within Afghanistan. Western governments and Afghanistan’s neighbours will be acutely vigilant watching for any signs of a renewed embrace of extremist allies now that the Taliban’s own revolution has been re-won. And the purportedly more pragmatic new leadership group will be mindful that it was the enabling of al Qaeda that visited the wrath of the West on their last government and saw them driven into the political wilderness for twenty years.

As Western governments consider the parameters of their relationships with the new Afghanistan, they would do well to contemplate anew the dangers and costs of adventures in foreign nation-building. Once more Afghanistan has taught a humiliating lesson to foreigners seeking to impose their will and way of life on its proud and ancient civilisation. First, it was the imperial British whose noses were bloodied in a series of presumptuous military campaigns in the nineteenth century. Then it was the Soviet Union, whose ten-year occupation in the 1980s saw 15,000 of its soldiers killed and more than one million Afghans perish before the Russians were driven out by the Mujahideen alliance. Now it is the turn of the United States to make its inglorious exit.

The failure of the latest Afghan misadventure is a failure shared by all of the American allies, including Australia.

Australia stumbled into Afghanistan on the coat-tails of our powerful ally — desperate as ever to ingratiate ourselves by delivering a marginal military contribution. In Vietnam, our war for the asking, as Michael Sexton revealed it to be, cost more than 500 Australian lives. In Afghanistan, we lost forty-one — each of them killed in a fight not of their making. And like their forefathers thrust onto the shores of Gallipoli a century before them, many must have wondered what exactly they were doing on such a strange battleground so far from home.

In the midst of the chaos and confusion of events in Kabul this week, prime minister Scott Morrison had the temerity to cast a military defeat as a success — and to swaggeringly place Australia in a starring role in that supposed success.

“Let me say this about our presence there,” said Morrison. “We went there to stop Osama bin Laden and to stop al Qaeda having a base of operations in Afghanistan. And that’s what was achieved. We were there in the cause of freedom. And every Australian who fell in that cause… is a national hero. And for that we are forever thankful and they’ve died in a great cause.”

A great cause? In fact, despite the bloody invasion of Afghanistan twenty years ago, Osama bin Laden brazenly evaded capture and remained at large for many more years before the Americans finally tracked him down in Pakistan. Al Qaeda was forced to relocate and regroup but would remain a dangerous and elusive terrorist network. In truth, our continued presence beyond these initial military objectives served only to help prolong the violence and instability in Afghanistan. The ambition of building a new and freer society is now exposed as the profligate fantasy that it always was. •

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The towering figure of Labor leader Gough Whitlam led the way through echoing corridors flanked by Red Guards. When the visitors were finally ushered into the austere grandeur of the East Room, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai stepped forward and greeted each member of the delegation in English. To their astonishment, Zhou then invited the twenty Australian journalists and their Chinese counterparts to remain throughout the almost two hours of official talks “to bear witness to the fact that the people of China want to be friends with the people of Australia.”

Whitlam’s bold decision to embrace China while Australian troops were still fighting in Vietnam was widely regarded as a reckless adventure. Even allies of the opposition leader feared it would endanger the big gains Whitlam had made at the 1969 election towards ending two decades of conservative rule in Australia.

Prime minister William McMahon ridiculed the China visit as “instant coffee diplomacy” and denounced Whitlam for disloyalty to Australia’s alliance with the United States. “In no time at all,” he declared, “Zhou Enlai had Mr Whitlam on a hook and he played him as a fisherman plays a trout.”

Days later, it was McMahon who was beached and gasping for air when it was revealed that US presidential envoy Henry Kissinger had secretly visited Beijing on 9 July — four days after Whitlam’s meeting with Zhou Enlai — to pave the way for Richard Nixon’s visit to Beijing in February 1972. As Whitlam’s successor, Bill Hayden, would remark, that news transformed “a disaster in the making” into “a stroke of genius.”

The presence of the big media contingent in Whitlam’s entourage would be important in turning public opinion. As historian Billy Griffiths wrote in his book The China Breakthrough: Whitlam in the Middle Kingdom, 1971, “The journalists shared his sense of adventure and their presence proved crucial to the success of the visit. Importantly, the stories that filtered back to Australia gave the public rare insights into a forbidden and unknown land.”

After his landslide election victory in December 1972, one of Whitlam’s first foreign policy acts — as well as ending Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war — would be to establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. Along with the first Australian diplomats to arrive in Beijing in 1973 were three Australian correspondents establishing permanent bureaus — Margaret Jones of the Sydney Morning Herald, Paul Raffaele of the ABC and Lachie Shaw of Australian Associated Press. It would be another five years before the first American journalists were accredited in China.

The importance of the Australian media’s engagement with China over the subsequent half century has been underscored by the publication this month of The Beijing Bureau, edited by former China correspondents Trevor Watson and Melissa Roberts. The book carries firsthand accounts by them and twenty-one other Australian journalists of a half century of tumultuous events: the final years of the Cultural Revolution, the economic liberalisation through the 1980s under Deng Xiaoping, the crushing of the democracy movement at Tiananmen and, most recently, the ascendancy of president Xi Jinping, the persecution of the Uighurs and the upheaval in Hong Kong.

While the book includes a surfeit of old ABC China hands, it reminds us of the high calibre of Australian journalists who have reported from Beijing through the decades for both domestic and international media outlets, particularly the likes of Richard McGregor (the Australian and the Financial Times), Stephen McDonell (ABC and BBC), and Jane Perlez and Chris Buckley of the New York Times.

Conspicuously absent from a line-up that boasts “Australia’s most acclaimed journalists” are Tony Walker of Fairfax and the Financial Times, who served longer — from 1978 to 1983 and from 1993 to 1998 — than any other newspaper correspondent; the Age’s Peter Ellingsen, the only one to win the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year award, for his outstanding coverage of the Tiananmen massacre; and Robert Thomson, initially posted to Beijing by the Sydney Morning Herald before becoming the first staff correspondent in China for the Financial Times. Thomson went on to edit the London Times and the Wall Street Journal before being appointed chief of Rupert Murdoch’s publishing empire.

But perhaps the most striking feature of the book is the contribution of Michael Smith of the Australian Financial Review. The expulsion of Smith and ABC correspondent Bill Birtles from China in September last year marked the first time since 1973 that no staff correspondents of mainstream Australian media organisations are reporting from China, a telling sign of the depth of the deterioration in the bilateral relationship over the past few years. As Smith writes in his own book-length account of those events, The Last Correspondent (published this month by Ultimo Press), describing his thoughts as he sheltered in the Australian consul-general’s residence in Shanghai before flying home to Sydney: “There was only one conclusion. Relations between Australia and China had become so bad that journalists were now political pawns in a wider diplomatic game.”

Just as the Australian media played a key role in Gough Whitlam’s reconciliation with China in the early 1970s, journalists have been reduced to bargaining chips in the alarming unravelling of that accord. And while the crisis in the relationship owes much to the increasingly assertive, if not aggressive, leadership of Xi Jinping, it has been brought to breaking point by the missteps of the Morrison government.

Scott Morrison is the bull in our China shop. His reckless mismanagement has driven Australia’s vital relationship with Beijing into a state of cold war, done nothing to advance the issues at the heart of the crisis, and along the way wiped out billions of dollars of export revenues via punitive retaliation by the Chinese.

How has it come to this? The government’s increasingly hardline approach towards Beijing has been driven by growing alarm at Xi Jinping’s actions at home and abroad, and emboldened by a souring of perceptions of China in the Australian community. But there is nothing new in much of China’s disturbing conduct. China’s minorities have been abused, patronised and politically sidelined since the People’s Republic enshrined Han Chinese chauvinism. Mainland China has remained in a state of restrained hostility towards Taiwan — and insisted on its return to the motherland, if necessary by force — since Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled there in 1949. And Beijing’s ambitious claims over the waters and resources of the South China Sea have always challenged those of its neighbours. The only difference now is that a richer, more militarily powerful and more determined China under Xi has far greater ability to silence dissent at home and deliver on its threats abroad.

So what has changed in fifty years? Australia’s diplomatic recognition of China was forged at the height of the Cultural Revolution, during which millions of Chinese perished. The relationship endured the Tiananmen massacre and its brutal aftermath. Save perhaps for the brief interlude between those events in the 1980s, when Deng Xiaoping opened the country to the world and embraced economic liberalism, China has been synonymous with repression: a communist state that embraced capitalist economics but never democracy.

The appalling treatment of the Uighurs is essentially a sequel to the religious, cultural and economic subjugation of the Tibetans that gathered unstoppable momentum in the early 1980s. And while nothing can excuse the abuses committed in both Tibet and Xinjiang, they are partially explained by Chinese paranoia about security on its western frontiers. Tibet straddles the long-troubled frontier with rival India, and Xinjiang with its predominantly Muslim population is perceived as a potential gateway for separatist Islamic extremism.

And however shocking the trampling of democratic freedoms in Hong Kong has been over the past two years, it is not surprising that Beijing has torn up its agreement to respect the autonomy of its Special Administrative Region under the “one country, two systems” formula. The only real surprise is that it took so long to do so — and then only after sustained protests in the territory posed a fundamental challenge to its sovereignty.

When British prime minister Margaret Thatcher flew to Beijing in 1984 to toast with Deng Xiaoping the signing of Britain’s agreement to hand back control of its colony to the communist regime, it was window dressing for what at heart was a Faustian pact with illusory benefits for the bedevilled Iron Lady. The bottom line was that Hong Kong was real estate stolen from imperial China by the opium-peddling Victorian British, and the expiry of Britain’s ninety-nine-year lease over the New Territories in 1997 made its continued rule of the entrepot untenable beyond that date.

The West’s anguish and indignation over Beijing’s ruthless suppression of democracy in Hong Kong ignores or is ignorant of the inconvenient truth that the enclave was snatched by rapacious imperialists who governed by decree for most of their reign and showed racist disdain for the rights of their Cantonese subjects. The rule of British law might have enabled Hong Kong to flourish, but the prosperity of the colonial masters was always paramount.

The exhaustive Hong Kong negotiations in the early 1980s were essentially a game in which the Chinese held an unbeatable hand and the British knew they must ultimately fold. The Sino-British agreement that emerged was a fig leaf for Britain that was destined to wilt unless democracy took root on the Chinese mainland — a possibility crushed when the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

In the face of the deteriorating security outlook in North Asia, the challenges for Australian diplomacy today are the same as they have always been: to stand up for our principles while recognising the limits of our ability to exert diplomatic pressure, to respond proportionately to perceived challenges, and to act in concert with our allies to maintain regional peace and stability. Above all, we need to understand that while the actions of the Chinese regime make it difficult, if not impossible, to be close friends, it is sheer folly to turn it into an enemy.

At a time when deft diplomacy is needed more than ever, though, the skills that have enabled Australia to navigate the tricky relationship with our most important trading partner appear largely to have deserted us. The Morrison government’s reckless decision early last year to jump ahead of its allies in demanding an independent inquiry into the origins of Covid-19 — with Morrison advocating that the World Health Organization have “weapons inspector powers” to investigate future outbreaks — infuriated Beijing with the still-unproven implication that it was covering up its culpability in the pandemic, or worse. The retaliation against Australian coal, barley and other exports was swift and devastating — and largely avoidable, had we taken the prudent step of acting in concert with our allies in reasonably seeking answers to the genesis of the pandemic.

Since that turning point, things have gone from bad to worse. The expulsion seven months ago of the last Australian journalists in China was at first interpreted as yet another heavy-handed provocation by Beijing, but it is now clear that it was in fact a tit-for-tat response to another apparent overreaction by Australian authorities.

In late June last year, Australian Security Intelligence Organisation officers conducted simultaneous early morning raids on the homes of four Chinese journalists based in Australia, as part of an investigation of alleged Chinese political interference. One of the journalists, believed to be Yang Jingzhong, the Australian bureau chief of the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, said his daughter had been traumatised during the seven-hour dawn raid by ten ASIO agents, during which his mobile phone, computer, iPad and work documents were seized. The four journalists, who have since left Australia, insisted they had done nothing wrong and, almost a year after the raids, no specific allegations against them have been made public.

At almost every turn, Scott Morrison’s interventions on China-related issues have been clumsy, uninformed and counterproductive. His recent pronouncements about Taiwan (confusing its status with that of Hong Kong and then doubling down on the blunder when called out) have revealed a man out of his depth in managing a relationship that requires diplomatic finesse. And recent public speculation by Morrison’s new defence minister, Peter Dutton, and others in the government about the possibility of armed conflict across the Taiwan Strait has broken a fundamental diplomatic taboo and reportedly raised alarm in Washington, Tokyo and Taipei itself. As former prime minister Kevin Rudd has rightly, if self-servingly, observed, “This government lacks the temperament to manage the profoundly complex national security challenges that lie ahead.”

The loss of experienced Australian journalists reporting from China — and the loss of Chinese journalists reporting from Australia — has made a volatile situation even more dangerous. Those Australian journalists, and the many other foreign journalists evicted from China in recent years, were the ones best equipped to report with expertise and balance, the ones who often spoke the language, the ones with Chinese contacts and friendships who understood that China is a far more complex, sophisticated and diverse society than its monolithic leadership implies.

In this vacuum of informed reporting and analysis it is harder to temper the fearmongering, and sometimes warmongering, of lightweight partisan journalists peddling conspiracy theories in the mainstream Australian media. We risk a situation in which the media — and its social media echo chamber — serves to worsen the bilateral crisis. The journalism that drove us closer to China could become the journalism that drives us further apart. •

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The Argylls had been in the thick of some of the heaviest fighting down the peninsula over the preceding weeks, and their number had been reduced to just ninety men. But they departed the mainland in style early on the morning of 1 February, watched by the Scottish journalist and novelist Eric Linklater: “Their pipers played their own regiment out of Malaya. The morning sun was already hot when the still air was broken by ‘A Hundred Pipers’ and ‘Heilan’ Laddie.’” Then, with “steady bearing and their heads high” the Highlanders marched “from a lost campaign into a doomed island.”

The last to make the crossing over the causeway linking the island and the mainland was the Argylls’ commanding officer, Colonel Ian Stewart, with his batman Drummer Hardy and a pet dog on a leash. Accompanying them were Lieutenant Doug Lush and the men from his J Section, who had formed the last Australian Signals Corps unit deployed on the mainland. In the final moments, a wave of twenty-seven Japanese planes swept over the area, dropping about fifty bombs on the retreating troops.

When Colonel Stewart and Lieutenant Lush reached the island side of the causeway, the Japanese shelling intensified and most of the troops dived for cover in slit trenches. To Lush’s astonishment, Stewart stepped forward, ignoring the danger, to be greeted by Brigadier Harold Taylor, commanding officer of the Australian 22nd Brigade. “Colonel Stewart saluted and simply said, ‘Good morning, Brigadier,’” recalled Lush. “The Brigadier returned the salute, both of them standing to attention in the midst of the shelling.”

After the last of the men had crossed, depth charges laid along a twenty-five-metre section of the causeway were detonated. The ferocious explosion sent a column of debris flying into the air and water coursing through the gap. With the severing of the last physical link to the mainland, “Fortress Singapore” was now alone to face its fate. In less than two months the Japanese army had swept aside almost a century and a half of British hegemony in Malaya, driving the combined British, Indian and Australian defending force 800 kilometres down the Malayan peninsula and into a state of siege on Singapore island.

Having installed himself in the sultan’s palace in Johore Bahru, the triumphant General Tomoyuki Yamashita surveyed his trapped quarry from a glass-domed observation tower while plotting their final defeat. The great British naval base “lay beneath one’s eyes,” his intelligence officer, Colonel Tsuji, observed, and Tengah airfield “appeared as if it could be grasped in the hand.”

The fighting had exacted a terrible toll. The Allies had suffered more than 19,000 casualties — killed, wounded or missing in action. The Japanese casualties, at 1793 dead and 2772 wounded, were less than a quarter of that. Many more were to perish on both sides in the days ahead, but Yamashita chose to pause for a week to regroup and refine his plans for the Battle of Singapore. Inexplicably, and to the disgust of many of the Australian troops, no attempt was made to shell him in his palatial redoubt.

During a visit to Singapore on 20 January 1942, General Sir Archibald Wavell, the commander-in-chief of Allied forces in the southwest Pacific, had been convinced that the Japanese would launch their invasion along the northwest coast of the island. The Johore Strait was narrowest in this sector, and a number of river mouths on the mainland side provided potential cover for launching amphibious landing craft.

Wavell believed this would be the place to deploy the freshest and strongest troops, the British 18th Division, most of whom arrived on 29 January. Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, the British commander in Malaya, strongly disagreed. He thought the attack was most likely to come down the Johore River and on the eastern side of the island. In the end, despite Wavell’s growing concern that Percival was not the “really vigorous, ruthless personality” needed to organise the defence of Singapore, Percival prevailed. It would be a fateful decision for the island, and for the men of the Australian 8th Division.

Percival ordered the Australian 22nd and 27th Brigades to deploy along the northwest coast and sent the 18th Division and the best of the remaining Indian troops to the northeast. In the northwestern sector, Brigadier Harold Taylor and his 22nd Brigade troops faced a massive challenge with severely limited resources. Their task was to defend an eight-mile front with just three battalions — half the number of men deployed along an eight-mile section of coastline near Changi on the island’s northeast coast.

The terrain — largely mangrove swamp and mud flats — was an operational nightmare. One officer with the 2/19 Battalion would complain that he and his men had been “dumped in a scraggy waste of stunted rubber and tangled undergrowth, apparently miles from anywhere, our vision limited to the next rise in the undulating ground and our means of movement confined to a few native foot tracks winding through the wilderness.” Lieutenant Frank Gaven of the 2/20th Battalion was appalled at the sight: “I have never felt such a feeling of desperation in all my life. I then realised that forward defence in this situation was an impossible task.”

As Wavell had predicted, the onslaught came from the west. At dawn on 8 February, the Japanese launched a severe bombardment of Singapore and heavy artillery attacks on the areas held by the Australian brigades. At first, the shelling of the western sector was considered to be either a feint or merely part of a general “softening up” operation. But as the attack intensified through the day, the Japanese plan became clear.

It was the Australians’ first experience of heavy shellfire and many were shocked and even traumatised by the ordeal. The 2/18 Battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Varley, who had endured the German shelling of Pozières in 1916, said he had never experienced “such concentrated shellfire over such a period” in the four years of the first world war. Major General Gordon Bennett, whose 8th Division headquarters had been targeted during the morning, visited Taylor and found him “somewhat shaken.” Taylor had good reason to be agitated. His desperate efforts to call in artillery support had been rebuffed and his superiors had not assembled reserves behind his men or prepared a reserve line.

The Japanese struck just after 10.30pm. The first men from a force of sixteen battalions boarded a flotilla of motorboats, many of them towing rafts, and raced towards the positions held by the 2/18th and 2/20th battalions. The Australians responded with intense fire from their Vickers machine guns and a barrage of grenades but were soon overwhelmed. The 2/20th alone would lose more than 400 men as the waves of landing Japanese surged over and around them. Throughout the night and through the following day Taylor’s brigade was pushed back as the Japanese captured their initial objective, Tengah airfield.

Around 9am on 9 February a second Japanese force came ashore in the area between the causeway and the Kranji River held by Brigadier Duncan Maxwell’s 27th Brigade. The Japanese fell back after huge oil storage tanks near the causeway were blown up, sending more than nine million litres of burning oil flooding across the strait. But by the morning of 10 February they were comfortably ashore and had most of northwest Singapore under their control.

Throughout the first days of the fighting on the island, Lieutenant Doug Lush had been detached to work as 22nd Brigade Signals Officer, working alongside Brigadier Taylor. Lush was responsible for keeping Taylor in touch with the various units under his brigade command. It was a challenging task. The preliminary bombardment by the Japanese had severed most of the telephone lines running to the companies on the front lines. And the brigade’s wireless sets had only returned from servicing the morning of the Japanese landings, while the smaller and less powerful battalion sets proved to be of little use.

Despite these setbacks, the signallers worked feverishly to maintain communications. As Lieutenant Colonel Roland Oakes would later write, “From the shelter of a slit trench in which I was crouching, I saw a regimental signaller lying in the open nearby, in the middle of a severe shelling bout, transmitting messages on a line phone he had connected up. And this was typical of the whole tribe throughout the campaign.”

On the afternoon of 9 February, the decision was made to relocate Taylor’s headquarters from Bukit Timah to a villa on Holland Road, several miles closer to the centre of the city. A night of hectic activity followed as the signals team packed up the large quantities of stores and equipment. In the early hours of the morning, the Japanese began shelling and bombing the area, and several quartermaster staff who were among the last to leave narrowly escaped being hit. The teams immediately began work laying cable from their new Holland Road office, led by Doug Lush.

The signallers were increasingly being called on to fight as well as to maintain the brigade’s precarious communications. Just before the move to Holland Road, several signallers from Lush’s cable party had been wounded in a desperate effort to silence a menacing Japanese machine gun located nearby. Leading the brigade, Major Rex Beale had ordered several of the signallers to arm themselves with grenades and join him in an attack on the machine gun position. As they made their way forward, one of the signallers, Lance Sergeant Geoff Bingham — who would be awarded the Military Medal for his bravery during the Singapore fighting — was hit in the hip and had to be carried away by Signaller Todd Morgan.

“Major Beale was also hit in the hip,” Lush would recount, “because there was a bit of a contour between our men and this Japanese position, and once they got up over this contour the Jap machine gunners began firing low and, of course, this was hitting our fellows at about waist height, although Bobby Hook, another of the attackers, was only a little chap and this gun got him in the chest. Morgan also picked up Bobby Hook and carried him back to our position.” Hook and Major Beale were later taken to the Alexandria Hospital, and were killed by the Japanese when they captured the hospital. “Bingham had been far luckier,” added Lush, “instead being conveyed to the St Andrew’s Cathedral, which was now being used as a main medical post. He would later recover from his wounds.”

By 12 February the situation was rapidly deteriorating. The 22nd Brigade could muster just 800 men from the three infantry battalions and the machine gun battalion that had started the battle with roughly 3400 men. Two days later, the 2/4th Machine Gun Battalion’s commander, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Anketell, was mortally wounded. After Harold Taylor collapsed from exhaustion and was hospitalised, Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Varley was promoted to command the 22nd Brigade.

The Allied troops faced an impossible situation after the Japanese captured the MacRitchie Reservoir and water became desperately scarce for both the civilian population and the many wounded being cared for in various hospitals. Percival was left with no choice. He sent his last telegram to Wavell on 15 February: “Owing to losses from enemy action, water, petrol, food and ammunition practically finished. Unable therefore to continue the fight any longer. All ranks have done their best and are grateful for your help.”

Late that afternoon, Percival drove with a sombre posse of senior officers to the shell-damaged Ford Motor Factory near Bukit Timah village where, after a brief and terse meeting with General Yamashita, he signed the document of surrender at 7.50pm. As historian Mark Clisby would write, “With the signing of these terms of surrender, 100,000 Allied soldiers, including nearly 15,000 Australians, would be led into captivity. After only eight weeks of fighting, the Japanese were the undisputed masters of Singapore and the entire Malayan Peninsula.” •

This is an edited extract from The Emperor’s Grace: Untold Stories of the Australians Enslaved in Japan During World War II (Monash University Publishing).

The post The fall of Singapore appeared first on Inside Story.

“When I walked out into the foyer, there was Bruce Lee,” Gulpilil recalled decades later, still shaking his head in astonishment. “He was watching my movie and I was watching his. It was a shock to meet each other, but we got a good photograph.”

Brushes with fame became almost commonplace in the early years after Walkabout told the story of the Australian landscape’s ancient mysteries and the collision of black and white cultures. The world opened up for the teenage actor and dancer from Arnhem Land whose haunting performance made the film an instant classic.

In America he rubbed shoulders with Clint Eastwood, John Lennon, Muhammad Ali and “that singer bloke” Bob Dylan. In Frankfurt he met Marlon Brando. And in London, dressed in a twenty-four-hour Hong Kong suit, he dined with and danced for the Queen. “That was great. The Queen of England was there. I was proud. Wow! I was among the stars. I was in all the newspapers.”

Walkabout was soon joined by a string of other memorable films that secured Gulpilil’s reputation as one of Australia’s greatest actors. Storm Boy, for which he won an Australian Film Institute best actor nomination, was followed by The Last Wave and the Crocodile Dundee blockbusters. (He says he was paid a derisory $10,000 for the latter, while the white stars pocketed millions.) Then, almost as suddenly as it had flowered, his brilliant career stalled.

By the late 1990s David Gulpilil was back where he had begun: broke, frustrated and living on the fringe. Largely forgotten by the world that had feted him, he was unsettled and struggling in the land of his people.

“I am sad and ashamed,” he said when we met in 1998 in the remote settlement of Ramingining, 500 kilometres east of Darwin, where he shared a makeshift camp with his large extended family. “Once I was famous, everybody knew my name. Now I’m just a simple man living down here in a humpy. It’s a hopeless life. Why do other people have apples and I have none? I don’t want my children to grow up like this.”

Gulpilil had travelled a path sadly familiar to many of Australia’s greatest Aboriginal artists and athletes: moments of triumph and acclaim overshadowed by bouts of alcoholism and drug abuse, broken relationships, and alienation from both the worlds they sought to straddle. He was jailed for a month in 1987 for drink-driving, and he blamed alcohol for the break-up of his first two marriages. And more trouble lay ahead, including domestic violence and offensive weapons incidents fuelled by alcohol, and more time in prison.

“Sometimes I feel like two people,” he lamented. “It would have been a different life if I had stayed here with my people, but I have grown up in the Western world because the film Walkabout took me away from here. Now I have come back, it is different.”

The frustrations were sharpened in the long months when he was forced to stay in the camp at Ramingining, cut off by wet-season flooding from his homelands just thirty kilometres away. It was the place where he found peace, hunting and fishing and teaching the young men the ceremonies and dances.

“My homeland is paradise. Here, I am trapped, but in my land I am free. I am not a foreigner there. In the land of my forefathers, in my mother’s land, I can sleep under the cool shadow of trees. Back there, all I have is my spear and my woomera. It’s all I need.”

But those years in Ramingining proved to be no more than an interval in a career that had yet to reach its peak. Soon he was back in demand and being celebrated for a contribution that transcended his screen roles. Rolf de Heer, who directed him in three of his best movies, credits Gulpilil with beginning “the process of white Australia looking at Indigenous people in a different way. When he did Storm Boy, the white people fell in love with him and Indigenous people could feel proud.”

He won a clutch of accolades in 2002, including the AFI best actor award for his performance in de Heer’s The Tracker and an AFI nomination for best supporting actor for Rabbit-Proof Fence. His collaboration with de Heer in Charlie’s Country was recognised in 2014 with a second best actor award from AACTA (successor to the AFI)  and the same prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Now David Gulpilil is dying. Diagnosed with lung cancer and emphysema in 2017, the doctors gave him six months to live. The treatments that helped him defy the odds are exhausted, and soon, he concedes, he will be “going back to country on a one-way ticket.”

As the end approaches, he remains a man torn between the celebrity of his life in the world of movies and the power of his tribal heritage.

Back in 1998 I asked what he would do differently if he had his time again. He reached out and touched my arm. “You have to help me with this,” he said, searching for words. “If I had another chance, I’d still do it all again, but this time maybe I could take my children to see and learn.

“I want to teach my children about the world and to bring a better life for them. My people don’t know about the world, how the world spins. They need to learn. We have to live in the bigger world. I want my children to know how to use the woomera and the spear and the knife and fork.”

In Molly Reynolds’s new documentary on his life, My Name Is Gulpilil, the actor, now living in Murray Bridge with his carer Mary, laments the fact that he is no longer well enough to travel back to Arnhem Land. “I will miss my children. I think of them and I love them… I’m only waiting. I’m walking like across the desert of country — long, long way — until the time comes for me.”

Soon enough he will be back there, a spirit that delighted and enlightened the world reunited with those of his ancestors. •

The post How the world spins appeared first on Inside Story.

In recounting the story, the feisty and garrulous Michael Somare would concede that for once he was lost for words. But the encounter helped cement a friendship between the two men who would soon transform the histories of both their nations.

Shortly after his PNG visit, Whitlam narrowly lost the October 1969 federal election, despite a 7 per cent swing that saw Labor take sixteen seats from the Coalition. Had he won, PNG would likely have achieved independence if not by tomorrow then at least well before it did in 1975 — an event that white conservatives on both sides of the Torres Strait still decried as a perilous dereliction of Australia’s duty to its primitive colonial territory.

There certainly was some merit in the argument that PNG was ill-prepared to stand on its own feet. The expatriate planters, business figures and bureaucrats who ruled the roost in Port Moresby and in the rich highlands and islands had been in no hurry to surrender their cosy sinecures, and the first Papua New Guineans, including Somare, hadn’t been elected to the National Assembly until 1968. The vast majority of the population still lived in traditional villages, and the country’s infrastructure and institutions were rudimentary.

But both Whitlam and Somare were determined to crash through. After Whitlam’s election as prime minister in 1972, normalising diplomatic relations with China and seeing PNG take charge of its own future were foreign policy priorities. Self-government came in 1973, with Somare installed as chief minister, and full independence two years later.

At a dinner in a house overlooking Port Moresby’s Fairfax Harbour on 16 September 1975, just hours after they had together watched the lowering of the Australian flag and the raising of PNG’s striking new ensign, Whitlam wept as Somare, speaking passionately without notes, extolled his counterpart’s role in delivering independence.

But as much as Whitlam had enabled what the Coalition’s external territories minister Charles Barnes had argued should not happen until the end of the twentieth century, it was the irrepressible Somare, and the exceptional group of young Papua New Guineans who coalesced around him, who made it happen. His death closes the circle on a remarkable episode in peaceful decolonisation.

Somare’s transformation from village teacher and radio journalist to statesman owed much to the ambitious vision of two former Australian patrol officers — Barry Holloway and Tony Voutas, who helped found the Pangu Party — along with a clutch of individuals who would become leading figures in the emerging nation, including Albert Maori Kiki, John Guise and Ebia Olewale. Pangu would form PNG’s first independent government and dominate the country’s politics for much of the next half-century. Holloway, one of the first Australians to take PNG citizenship in 1975, chaired the committee that drafted the constitution, became speaker of the first parliament and later served as a senior minister in various governments.

But while Australia had by the early 1970s begun to fast-track the preparation of young Papua New Guineans to assume leadership roles in the post-independence administration, there was still only a handful of competent university graduates in 1975 and none with substantial experience. The success of the first government would rely heavily on a small group of young men who soon became known as the “Gang of Four.” All were still in their twenties when Australia surrendered the reins of government.

Mekere Morauta, the first head of the finance department, and Rabbie Namaliu, a leading academic and diplomat, both went on to become prime ministers and members of the Privy Council. Charles Lepani headed the National Planning Office before becoming a long-term high commissioner to Australia. Tony Siaguru, the first head of PNG’s foreign affairs department, later became deputy secretary-general of the Commonwealth and was eulogised by Ross Garnaut as “the decathlon gold medallist in Papua New Guinea’s national life since independence.”

The inexperience of its politicians and bureaucrats would be just one of the difficulties to face the new nation. Despite the country’s vast natural resources, delivering essential services to a rapidly growing and urbanising population was an enormous challenge, as were maintaining national unity and combating a tide of endemic official corruption that would embroil even Somare himself.

But despite numerous crises and upheavals, and despite the dire predictions of the early Australian doomsayers, PNG would survive and largely succeed as a stable and functioning democracy. And much of that achievement was due to Michael Somare’s unique ability to transcend the historical enmity of PNG’s diverse ethnic, regional and linguistic groups and be widely embraced with the unprecedented accolade of “Grand Chief,” as well as being recognised universally as “father of the nation.”

Through four separate terms as prime minister totalling almost seventeen years and spanning thirty-five years, he became an enduring and stabilising constant of PNG politics. When not seated on the throne he was often the power behind it. And every one of the eight other men to serve substantive terms as prime minister of PNG at one time served under him.

His achievements were vindication of Gough Whitlam’s bold vision for PNG independence, but the credit for delivering it was his. •

The post How about tomorrow? appeared first on Inside Story.

After an initial assault by soldiers from the 2nd Commando Regiment on 10 June, reinforcements from the Special Air Service Regiment were called the next day to the hamlet of Tizak as the Taliban prepared to counterattack. The fighting was intense, with the SAS troopers under heavy fire from the moment they alighted from their helicopters.

At the height of the thirteen-hour battle, an SAS corporal led an assault against an enemy fortification. When members of his patrol were pinned down by Taliban fire, he exposed his own position to draw the fire away from his comrades then, fighting at close range, stormed two enemy machine-gun posts and silenced both of them.

The following January, back in his home town of Perth, Ben Roberts-Smith was presented with the Commonwealth’s highest and most revered award for gallantry, the Victoria Cross. According to the citation for the award, “his selfless actions in circumstances of great peril served to enable his patrol to break into the enemy’s defences and regain the initiative… resulting in a tactical victory.”

The award would transform Ben Roberts-Smith from an anonymous soldier into a national celebrity. After leaving the army in 2013, he was named Australian Father of the Year, appointed chair of the National Australia Day Council and honoured as number-one ticketholder of the Fremantle Dockers. On completing an MBA at the University of Queensland, he became a senior executive with Kerry Stokes’s Seven television network and a star performer on the lucrative corporate speakers’ circuit. Lauded wherever he travelled as a hero and an exemplary role model, he was much sought after as a business consultant and an adviser to governments.

Now that celebrity has been engulfed by allegations that may yet end in infamy for Ben Roberts-Smith. In 2017, investigative journalists Chris Masters and Nick McKenzie revealed the first details of allegations implicating the former SAS soldier in a series of war crimes in Afghanistan. Last month the two journalists reported that the Australian Federal Police had referred Roberts-Smith to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions to face possible charges. The Sydney Morning Herald subsequently reported that the DPP had appointed Sydney barrister David McClure SC to examine the case for proceeding to prosecution.

According to Masters and McKenzie, the AFP’s brief of evidence outlined allegations that Roberts-Smith had kicked a defenceless prisoner off a cliff during a special forces operation in Afghanistan in 2012, and covered up his subsequent murder, and that fellow SAS soldiers had witnessed the future VC recipient’s involvement in the murder of other defenceless Afghans. In addition to the AFP investigations, an extensive internal military inquiry led by NSW Supreme Court of Appeal judge Paul Brereton is soon to hand down a report into these and other alleged war crimes in Afghanistan.

Roberts-Smith has vehemently protested his innocence, claiming that the reporting has branded him a murderer and deriding the allegations as “recklessly untrue.” He told the Australian in December, “I have put my family name and medals on the line to sue Nine [publisher of the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald] and restore my reputation.” But his decision to sue the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald for defamation may have compounded his problems.

While the start of the trial has been delayed because of the pandemic, fresh witness statements submitted in the Federal Court in early June claimed Roberts-Smith was involved in seven unlawful killings in Afghanistan. Counsel for the newspapers, Sandy Dawson SC, told the court Roberts-Smith and another unnamed soldier had kicked a handcuffed man, Ali Jan, off a cliff in the village of Darwan in September 2012 and that either he or another soldier had subsequently shot and killed the prisoner.

The implications of the case run far deeper than the reputation of one man, the jealously guarded pride of the elite Special Air Service Regiment and the honour of all Australian military forces. It could have consequences around the world for holders of a hallowed band of crimson ribbon like the one that sat above the breast pocket on Ben Roberts-Smith’s army tunic — and Australia’s long and storied association with the Victoria Cross.

It was at the end of the Crimean war, in 1856, that Queen Victoria decided a new honour was needed to recognise the remarkable acts of heroism that had been reported during the great victory by Britain and its allies over the Russians. The medal she authorised would become the highest award in the imperial honours system. In the order of precedence it outranks even the Most Noble Order of the Garter — the highest order of knighthood — which is confined to the reigning sovereign, the Prince of Wales and no more than twenty-five others. Yet from the outset, the Victoria Cross was intended to be both exceptional and egalitarian.

Victoria insisted that it stand out for its humble simplicity: a plain bronze cross struck from captured cannon metal (not from the Crimea as folklore has it, but from the colonial wars in China) suspended on a plain crimson ribbon. And at her direction, it was to be blind to class and seniority. Its awarding would be influenced by “neither rank, nor long service, nor wounds, nor any other circumstance or condition whatsoever save the merit of conspicuous bravery.”

But the criteria for its awarding were far from modest. The VC was to recognise only “the most conspicuous bravery, or some preeminent act of valour or self-sacrifice in the presence of the enemy.” In modern times, the perception in military circles is that the VC can be earned only by a member of the armed forces who lays his or her life on the line in a situation of clear and present danger in combat. It often has been awarded posthumously.

Since its inception, the medal has been won 1358 times. Each of those awards is revered in the military (a general will salute a private displaying the ribbon) and exulted in popular perception. And those medals not locked away in museums and private collections can fetch staggering prices at auction. In 2006 Kerry Stokes paid a world record price of $1.2 million for the medals of Captain Alfred Shout — who was posthumously awarded the VC for his bravery during the Battle of Lone Pine at Gallipoli — and then donated them to the Australian War Memorial.

But the prestige of the VC and the instant celebrity it confers on those who win it are, so to speak, a double-edged sword. Those who so distinguish themselves in battle invariably are expected to lead exemplary lives in peacetime. And it can be a dizzying height from which to fall for any of them who fail to live up to that onerous standard. Here lies the potential challenge for the Australian government in the event that Ben Roberts-Smith is unable to clear his name.

During its 164-year history, the VC has been forfeited just eight times for serious misconduct: twice for desertion, five times for theft and assault and once for bigamy. But while many more recipients have publicly fallen from grace after coming home from battle, none have had their honour revoked since 1920, when King George V declared his displeasure at the practice.

As George’s private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, would write, “The King feels so strongly that, no matter the crime committed by anyone on whom the VC has been conferred, the decoration should not be forfeited. Even were a VC to be sentenced to be hanged for murder, he should be allowed to wear the VC on the scaffold.” Winston Churchill, then Britain’s secretary of state for war, disagreed but approved an amendment to the regulations stipulating that henceforth only “treason, cowardice, felony or any infamous crime” should lead to forfeiture.

In the annals of crime, few are more infamous than murder, and while VC winners so convicted would no longer face the option of wearing their medal to the gallows it would be untenable for them not to be stripped of the honour. Sitting at the top of the honours system, the Victoria Cross can hardly be exempt from the practice that has seen hundreds of disgraced honours recipients stripped of their gongs — from Kaiser Wilhelm, who forfeited his Order of the Garter (for starting a world war), to artist and royal favourite Rolf Harris, who ceased to be a Commander of the Order of the British Empire after he was jailed for sexually assaulting underage girls.

Since Australia severed ties with the British honours system in 1975 and instituted its own awards under the Order of Australia, the conferring of the Victoria Cross to Australian military personnel has been made by the governor-general on the advice of the defence minister. The Victoria Cross for Australia — which has identical status to the British award — has been presented to four Australians, including Ben Roberts-Smith, all of them for valour in Afghanistan.

There are dozens of precedents for Australians to be defrocked under our honours system. Disgraced former WA premier Brian Burke lost his award as a Companion of the Order of Australia, billionaire businessman Richard Pratt pre-empted the same fate by surrendering his AC after being fined $36 million for price-fixing, and the Order of Australia medal of criminologist Paul Wilson was rescinded after his conviction for the indecent treatment of a child.

In 2015 Australia’s Defence Honours and Awards Appeal Tribunal recommended the discretionary forfeiture of gallantry medals if the recipient were convicted “of an offence which is considered so disgraceful or serious that it would be improper for the offender to retain the award.” But while subsequently stipulating a range of grounds for mandatory forfeiture — including treason, mutiny and cowardice in the face of the enemy — the defence department added what smelt like an escape clause: “However, the circumstances under which gallantry and distinguished service decorations are awarded dictates that entitlements should not be forfeited except under extreme conditions.”

If the Australian government were confronted with a winner of the highest award for gallantry being convicted of a serious crime and it showed cowardice in the face of military or public opinion, it would risk far more than domestic opprobrium. A person allowed to continuing wearing the medal in such circumstances — and the authorities that permitted him to — would diminish not only the deeds of other Australian VC winners but also the hundreds of others throughout the Commonwealth who came before them. •

The post Double-edged sword appeared first on Inside Story.

It was 1986 and I was working in Canberra as foreign affairs and defence correspondent for the Age. Turnbull, who had dabbled briefly in journalism before realising there was a bigger future and a lot more money in media law, was a cocky young lawyer about to secure an outsized international profile. The publicity would launch him towards his lifelong ambition of becoming prime minister.

On the morning in early November I picked up my home phone to find Turnbull on the line. I had landed a minor scoop that had appeared on the front page of the Age. On the basis of a cabinet leak, I reported that the Hawke government had resolved to join a case in the NSW Supreme Court in support of the British government’s bid to block publication of Spycatcher.

Former MI5 agent Peter Wright, then living in retirement in Tasmania, had spent much of his twenty-five-year career with the British spy agency hunting Russian moles — a busy enterprise during the era in which top agents Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were revealed as traitors. Wright had investigated Roger Hollis, head of MI5 from 1956 to 1965, and his book set out his case that Hollis was another double agent and should not have been cleared. The Thatcher government had obtained a preliminary injunction to stop the book’s publication in Britain and now wanted to stop its release in Australia.

The revelation that Hawke’s Labor government was getting into bed with Britain’s Tories to silence a whistleblower was significant news, although ultimately its support would have little impact on the outcome of the case.

The morning phone conversation began cordially enough, with Turnbull complimenting me on a “great story” before requesting that I tell him who my source was. When I gently pointed out that, as a former journalist, he should understand that revealing sources was the equivalent of breaching the seal of the confessional, the caller exploded, describing me in terms that might make even sophisticated Inside Story readers blush. Before slamming down the phone, he declared, “Don’t ever expect anything from me.”

It had never occurred to me that I might expect anything from Malcolm Turnbull, and in the years since he left with a dial tone I was relieved never to find myself in a situation of needing anything from him — beyond, perhaps, the republic he was supposed to deliver and some serious action by his faction-riven government on global warming.

A few days after the morning call, I was seated in courtroom 8B of the Supreme Court in Sydney for the commencement of the Spycatcher hearing. While I’ve forgotten most of what happened over subsequent days, two indelible memories remain.

The first was the brash and theatrical style with which the thirty-two-year-old Turnbull conducted himself, and how much his antics were indulged by Justice Philip Powell, who seemed almost in awe of the young Rumpole. The other was the starkly contrasting presence of the urbane Sir Robert Armstrong, cabinet secretary and head of the British civil service, who had been sent by Thatcher as her government’s principal witness.

In an immortal moment, Turnbull was questioning Armstrong about Andrew Boyle’s 1979 book The Climate of Treason, which effectively outed Anthony Blunt as the fourth member of the Cambridge ring of Russian spies. Turnbull was seeking to demonstrate that the British authorities had turned a blind eye to the disclosure of official secrets in Boyle’s book and shouldn’t be treating Spycatcher differently.

Turnbull had established that the British government was well aware of the Boyle book before its publication and had, indeed, obtained a copy, yet Armstrong had written to the publisher asking whether Thatcher could be provided a copy to enable her to be fully informed should she need to make a public statement. Turnbull pressed Armstrong as to whether the letter was calculated to mislead. Armstrong conceded the point but insisted that creating a misleading impression did not amount to lying.

Turnbull: What is the difference between a misleading impression and a lie?

Armstrong: A lie is a straight untruth.

Turnbull: What is a misleading impression — a sort of bent untruth?

Armstrong: As one person said, it is perhaps being economical with the truth.

The delicious phrase might have danced straight out of a script for Yes Minister, the classic TV series at the height of its popularity at the time. And while it may have originated with Edmund Burke’s expression of “an economy of truth,” it was propelled into the lexicon of global political commentary by Sir Robert Armstrong in an austere Sydney courtroom in November 1986.

These memories have been stirred with the arrival of Malcolm Turnbull’s memoir A Bigger Picture. And big it certainly is — a 700-page, densely typeset tome landing, fortuitously for its author, in the time of national home detention when surely no one has anything better to do than relive the career of our most recently superannuated statesman. (And should any reader bridle at the size of the task, be thankful the author only lodged at The Lodge for just under three years.)

Turnbull had already gained prominence working in the early 1980s as general counsel for media mogul Kerry Packer and successfully running his defence against scurrilous allegations raised in the Costigan royal commission into union corruption and tax evasion. But the Spycatcher trial would take his brand to another level.

As Turnbull writes, he was approached to run the case by a London solicitor representing the book’s publisher, Heinemann. The pitch was hardly enticing for an ambitious lawyer who had only started in private practice a few months earlier. He was advised that Heinemann was depressed about the British injunction, was ready to throw in the towel and would only proceed if it could be done cheaply.

In the end, Turnbull agreed to do it for a flat fee of $20,000. It would turn out to be the best low-budget commission of his fabulously well-remunerated career as a commercial lawyer and, later, merchant banker.

Thanks largely to the admissions he extracted from the hapless Sir Robert, Turnbull won the case. Justice Powell ruled that having failed to take action to prevent the publication of Their Trade Is Treachery and other books with similar content to Spycatcher’s, the British government had “surrendered any claim to the confidentiality of that information.” When the case went to the NSW Court of Appeal later in 1987, Turnbull won again.

Obstinate to the end, the British then took the case to the High Court, where in early 1988 their repudiation was complete — the judges voted seven–nil in favour of Spycatcher. The road to greater fame and fortune now unfolding before him, Malcolm Turnbull found no need to be economical with the truth.

“I’d taken on the UK government and its army of top lawyers, fought the case through a trial and two appeals and won,” he writes. “What appalled many of my former colleagues at the Bar was that not only was I absurdly young, at thirty-two, but that I hadn’t appeared as a barrister, but unrobed as a solicitor. Surreally, the case was much bigger news in London than in Australia. I was being encouraged to capitalise on my international notoriety — move to the Bar in London or New York; head spinning really.” •

The post “Don’t ever expect anything from me” appeared first on Inside Story.

Moorehead ranged over the peninsula with the venerable Major Tasman Millington, who had arrived in 1919 to help establish the imperial war graves and stayed for forty years to tend them. “Except for occasional organised tours not more than half a dozen visitors arrive from one year’s end to the other,” Moorehead wrote. “Often for months at a time nothing of any consequence happens, lizards scuttle about the tombstones in the sunshine and time goes by in an endless dream.”

In the years leading to the centenary of the landing in 2015, Anzac Cove and its rugged, scrubby hinterland was in danger of being trampled to dust by hordes of Australian pilgrims anxious to tap the wellspring of our national identity — the place where our traits of courage, sacrifice, mateship and resilience against impossible odds were first displayed to an awestruck world despite the perfidy of hopeless military leaders driving a lost cause.

Over the past decade, hundreds of thousands of Australians, old and increasingly young, have flocked there. In April 2015 more than 10,000 attended the dawn service, with thousands more turned away in a hotly contested ballot for spots on the crowded shore. While the traffic has eased in the aftermath of the saturation commemorations of the centenary, the fervour lives on.

But this year the Anzac battlefields will once more be as deserted as they were a week before Christmas 1915, when the last of the diggers stole away in the depths of night, miraculously without a single casualty. Now Turkey and Australia, reunited in peace, are united in lockdown as the coronavirus reigns. And as a planet under quarantine ponders how we might build a better post-pandemic world, perhaps we might also consider a rethink of the view of the Gallipoli campaign in Australian history.

The assessment of the campaign still taken as gospel by most Australians — and still driven monotonously through Australian school curriculums — is that Gallipoli was an unmitigated and pointless disaster driven by callous British generals and leavened only by the heroism of the first diggers, 7600 of whom died needless deaths while another 18,000 were wounded.

The foundation of that mythology was largely the work of two journalists, one of whom essentially plagiarised the other. Between them they sowed the popular fiction of Australians as some kind of military master race and, in tandem, the equally exaggerated thesis that the campaign was an ill-conceived folly that did nothing to advance the Allied cause in the Great War.

Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett was a buccaneering beat-up merchant straight from the pages of Evelyn Waugh’s classic satire on the press, Scoop. Doyen of the small group of correspondents accredited to cover the campaign, the man from the London Daily Telegraph was an inveterate gambler, a voracious womaniser and a serial bankrupt. He also had a fine and sometimes ferocious pen.

Ashmead-Bartlett’s florid account of the landing at Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915 was the first to be published in Australia, a week before the hapless official Australian correspondent, Charles Bean, beset by accreditation problems, was able to get his relatively lacklustre dispatch through. The British journalist’s story, published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 8 May, caused an eruption of patriotic jubilation as readers who had spent days fearing the worst rejoiced in a victorious account that might have seemed too good to be true.

The journalist described “a race of athletes” storming ashore and rushing the enemy’s trenches with empty rifle magazines and just the “cold steel” of their bayonets: “It was over in a minute. The Turks in the first trench either were bayoneted or ran away.” He wrote of wounded men cheering as they were towed back to hospital ships. And he described a Turkish counterattack the next morning met by a two-hour barrage from British warships: “Then, amidst the flash of the bayonet and a sudden charge by the Colonials… the Turkish broke… and fell back, sullen and checked. They kept up incessant fire throughout the day, but the Colonials had now dug themselves in.”

The dispatch, immediately reprinted and distributed to schools by the NSW government, was written four days after the landing. By then Ashmead-Bartlett knew full well how perilous the military situation was, how close the commanders had come to abandoning Anzac Cove during the mayhem of the first night, how massive the casualties had been and how, far from being safely dug in, the troops were clinging desperately to the hillsides under relentless Turkish fire. The truth was that while the Anzacs had indeed fought tenaciously, they had little to show for their huge sacrifices and they and their leaders had gravely miscalculated the strength and determination of the Turks.

No sooner had he erected the gilded pedestal on which he placed the Anzacs than Ashmead-Bartlett began to attack its foundations. And before long he would be aided in his task by the arrival of a gormless Australian journalist who stopped briefly at Gallipoli on his way to manage a cable news service in London.

The British journalist had grown up and grown famous in the freewheeling era of correspondents who flitted unchecked between opposing military and political forces in a series of colonial wars and local skirmishes across Europe and North Africa in the decade before the first world war. He was infuriated by strict new controls on the movement of journalists and the censorship of their work imposed by Whitehall in late 1914. At Gallipoli he vented his spleen against the commander, General Sir Ian Hamilton, even though Hamilton was not responsible for the rules and, as a champion of greater press freedom, did his best to bend them.

As the stalemate reached in those first hours at Gallipoli remained largely unchanged in the months that followed and a major offensive mounted in August failed to break it, the frustration of the politically well-connected Ashmead-Bartlett boiled over. He resolved to write to British prime minister Herbert Asquith arguing that the campaign be aborted and Hamilton sacked. Censorship controls made it impossible for him to send such a letter, but he found a willing smuggler for it with the arrival at Gallipoli in early September of journalist Keith Murdoch.

Murdoch, who sixteen years later would pass the gene of political intrigue and self-promotion to his son Rupert, was an enthusiastic conscript to the conspiracy. The letter was duly penned, but the courier only got as far as Marseilles before he was intercepted by military police who seized it. Undeterred, Murdoch proceeded to London where he audaciously produced a far more incendiary 8000-word epistle of his own — informed by the coaching he had received from Ashmead-Bartlett, his patchy recollections of what the British journalist had written, and scattered impressions formed during the mere four days he’d spent on the ground at Gallipoli. It was a beat-up that, a generation later, would have put to shame his son’s Fleet Street rags.

The Murdoch letter, addressed to former Australian prime minister Andrew Fisher, the high commissioner in London, synthesised what would become the two unshakeable pillars of popular Australian perceptions of Gallipoli: all the British commanders were terrible and the Anzac troops were strapping, almost god-like heroes: “It is stirring to see them, magnificent manhood, swinging their fine limbs as they walk about Anzac. They have the noble faces of men who have endured. Oh, if you could picture Anzac as I have seen it, you would find that to be an Australian is the greatest privilege the world has to offer.”

Murdoch declared that the August offensive had cost the Allies 35 per cent of their strength, or 33,000 men. (In fact, total Allied casualties were 21,500 against vastly greater Turkish losses.) He claimed that during the ill-fated August landings at Suvla Bay, officers were ordered to “shoot without mercy” any troops who lagged or loitered. (No such orders were issued.) He claimed that many of the 90,000 troops who landed at Suvla had died of thirst. (Although there were severe water shortages, none of the troops at Suvla — actually 30,000 in number — died of thirst.) He said an Australian general was “staggered” to see the IXth and Xth Corps retreating from the Anafarta Hills behind Suvla. (Staggering indeed: there was no Xth Corps at Suvla.)

Unlike Ashmead-Bartlett, who had not attacked Hamilton by name — instead leaving it to the reader to draw the obvious conclusion — Murdoch went straight for the jugular. After smearing the British troops as “toy soldiers… merely a lot of childlike youths without the strength to endure or brains to improve” and dismissing Hamilton’s entire headquarters staff as lazy cowards (never mind that three of them had won the Victoria Cross and would later die in battle), he denounced the general (himself twice nominated for the VC) and demanded his sacking. “I cannot see any solution which does not begin with the recall of Hamilton,” Murdoch wrote. “It is plain that when an army has completely lost faith in its general, and he has on numerous occasions proved his weaknesses, only one thing can be done.”

The intrigues of Murdoch and Ashmead-Bartlett found willing ears in London, where frustration was already mounting over the lack of success in the Dardanelles and pressure was growing from the generals on the Western Front to divert the men and matériel from Gallipoli to bolster their struggle. In mid October, Hamilton was recalled to London and, ignoring his argument that victory was within the Allies’ grasp, the government soon confirmed plans to evacuate.

And so Gallipoli was cast in Australia as a defining moment of our national character but an abject military failure.

What was not recognised at the time, and is still largely forgotten, was how much had been achieved during the eight months of the campaign. The Allied landings in April 1915 were the biggest amphibious assault in the history of warfare, waged against an enemy given months of warning of the impending attack, with superior manpower and firepower and in full control of the high ground. And the lack of men and matériel that hampered the tenacious General Hamilton from the outset would never be properly rectified.

After the war, ample evidence emerged to vindicate Hamilton’s conviction that, had his army stuck it out through the bitter winter into 1916 and been adequately reinforced and resupplied, it would have broken through at Gallipoli, neutralised Turkey and helped bring the war to a much earlier conclusion. It would be revealed that twice — during the naval attack at The Narrows in March 1915 and during the August offensive — the Allies had come breathtakingly close to victory.

In 1917 German journalist Harry Stuermer, who had been based in Turkey, revealed that Turkish defences at The Narrows were at breaking point after the British and French bombardment on 18 March 1915 and, desperately short of ammunition, would have been unable to withstand a renewed attack the following day — had the naval commanders not lost their nerve after losing several warships. Ismail Enver Pasha, the Ottoman war minister, later verified the account: “If the English had only had the courage to rush more ships through the Dardanelles they could have got to Constantinople.”

Stuermer also wrote that the Turkish leadership was convinced the Allies were about to break through in August. There was panic in Constantinople and the state archives and bullion reserves had been moved to Asia Minor in the expectation that the capital was about to fall.

The decision to open a new front at Suvla Bay, north of Anzac, as part of the August push was a brilliant tactic to outflank the Turks that unravelled under the incompetent leadership of the ageing Lieutenant General Frederick Stopford, who inexplicably ordered his troops to pause and rest as soon as they had landed. It was later confirmed that Stopford’s force faced just 1500 Turks who were taken completely by surprise. The general’s prevarication gave the Turks time to reinforce and hold their ground, largely because of the initiative of Colonel Mustafa Kemal, who a decade later would emerge as president of the Turkish republic. When General William Birdwood, one of the most distinguished commanders at Gallipoli, made a return visit in 1936, the Turkish army’s chief of staff, General Fahretein Pasha, told him, “When we saw your troops landing there we were taken utterly by surprise, and we wired Constantinople advising the government to evacuate the capital as the British would be through.”

Keith Murdoch’s great conceit — still propagated through media, movies and miniseries by his doting son — was that his courageous whistleblowing ended an unconscionable slaughter and saved countless Australian lives. What is forgotten is that the Allied toll of 110,000 casualties during the eight months at Gallipoli, terrible as it was, equalled the losses incurred in about three weeks of heavy fighting on the Western Front. The Australians liberated from the Dardanelles, in part through Murdoch’s agitation, headed not for safety but for the more ghastly killing fields of Flanders.

What is also largely forgotten about the retreat from Gallipoli is the impact that the freeing of six divisions of Turkish troops and their German overseers had on the future course of the war. Just as the eight-month campaign had meant those forces were tied down and unable to fight elsewhere — a much-underestimated dividend — their release had very serious consequences. “Within a few months,” wrote Maurice Hankey, the Australian-born secretary of the British War Council, “the Turks were rioting all over the East, capturing our besieged army at Kut (April 29), attacking our vital communications through the Suez Canal (July) and penetrating far into Persia; in August they even sent a corps to help the Germans in Galacia where the Allies, with armies even larger in aggregate than had been employed on the Peninsula, were everywhere on the defensive.”

One of the few who had argued in vain for the navy to persevere in the Dardanelles was Commodore Roger Keyes. Keyes would later be one of the few senior officers to fight strongly in support of Sir Ian Hamilton’s efforts to stop the evacuation and continue pressing the Turks.

In 1925, Keyes, by then an admiral and commander of Britain’s Mediterranean Fleet, steamed through the Dardanelles. Overcome with emotion, he told Britain’s official war historian, Cecil Aspinall-Oglander, “My God, it would have been easier than I thought; we simply couldn’t have failed… and because we didn’t try, another million lives were thrown away and the war went on for another three years.” •

Letters from a pilgrimage: Ken Inglis’s dispatches from his April 1965 trip to Gallipoli with 300 Anzac pilgrims

The post “My God, it would have been easier than I thought” appeared first on Inside Story.

Desperate to stave off defeat in the House of Commons, the government bowed to pressure and convened two commissions of inquiry. One was to examine the disaster in Mesopotamia, the other Gallipoli. Both would meet in closed session and be denied access to sensitive official papers, but they were still an extraordinary indulgence for a nation in the depths of war.

The Dardanelles inquiry began its hearings in August 1917. Inevitably, a key focus was the conduct of Sir Ian Hamilton, the sacked commander-in-chief of the campaign at Gallipoli. Sir William Pickford, an eminent judge and privy councillor, chaired a commission made up of politicians, diplomats and senior military officers. From the outset, the Gallipoli jury appeared to be stacked against Hamilton and in favour of Keith Murdoch, the journalist whose damning “Gallipoli letter” was credited with being a catalyst for the decision to abandon the Dardanelles campaign.

Although the four MPs on the commission were uncontroversial appointments, the diplomats and senior officers were anything but. NZ high commissioner Sir Thomas Mackenzie was joined by his Australian counterpart, Andrew Fisher, Keith Murdoch’s long-time friend and the man who, as prime minister, had given Murdoch a commission to visit Egypt in late 1915 to report on the military postal services. Admiral of the fleet Sir William May took his place alongside field marshal William Nicholson, a peer and former chief of the imperial general staff who had been recalled from retirement at the start of the war to serve on the Committee of Imperial Defence. Irascible and sharp-tongued, “Old Nick” was also a career rival of Ian Hamilton dating back to their Boer war days.

The new Australian government of Billy Hughes, who had succeeded Fisher as prime minister in October 1915, was opposed to the establishment of the commission and to the appointment of Fisher as a commissioner. The government thought the inquiry, even behind closed doors, was a sign of weakness in wartime, and it was concerned about the impact on army recruitment of any criticism of the Gallipoli campaign and the already burgeoning legend of Anzac heroism. In the end, Hughes agreed to accept the inquiry but on condition that the Australian government was not officially involved. Asquith then confirmed Fisher’s appointment on the basis that he was “a nominee of the home government.”

Hamilton had lobbied against Fisher’s appointment, writing to Asquith questioning the high commissioner’s impartiality and pointing out Fisher’s close relationship with Keith Murdoch. “Mr A.K. Murdoch was introduced to me by Mr Fisher,” he wrote.

He would never have got to the Dardanelles had it not been for my respect for Mr Fisher. His letter deprecating the conduct of British generals, staff officers and troops was addressed to Mr Fisher. Mr Fisher is a friend of Mr Murdoch’s. Therefore, the judgement of Mr Fisher might hereafter be held to have been biased in advance.

The plea got short shrift at 10 Downing Street. Sir Maurice Bonham Carter, Asquith’s principal private secretary, told Hamilton that while his point about the relationship between Fisher and Murdoch had occurred to the prime minister, Fisher’s character was such that Asquith “does not think he need be biased by Mr Murdoch’s opinions.”

Hamilton, who still harboured ambitions for another fighting command in a war that had a long way to run, worked hard behind the scenes and at the hearings in defence of his actions at Gallipoli – and in defence of the reputations of his trusted senior officers and the men in the trenches. He saw his task as not about defending or explaining fatal errors but about convincing those now sitting in judgement of what had been achieved and what more might have been achieved had the government held its nerve.

Hamilton was invited to propose a number of witnesses who should be summoned to give evidence. High on his list was Phillip Schuler, the Age’s correspondent at Gallipoli, who had since enlisted and was serving on the Western Front. “I put his name into my category of important witnesses, who should without fail be called – not as my witnesses but as the best witnesses,” Hamilton told Schuler’s close friend, Richard Dowse.

And he expressly told the commission that Schuler’s evidence would be needed to balance that of Keith Murdoch:

Murdoch is one of two civilian pressmen who came to the Dardanelles in the capacity of guests. His views have been selected as being worthy of being printed and circulated amongst cabinet ministers. I now ask that the other be also given a hearing. His name is Mr Phillip Schuler. He is the son of the editor of the “Age” newspaper of Melbourne. The only difference between his qualifications and those of Mr Murdoch are that he stayed longer on the Peninsula; that he saw fighting; and that he has since joined and is serving in the ranks.

In the end, all the witnesses Hamilton proposed were called – except for Schuler. No reason was given. When Schuler wrote to Hamilton from France expressing his disappointment at not being invited to appear, the general made a fresh request to the commission, in mid 1917, for him to be brought to London. Again it was refused without explanation.

Phillip Schuler on board HMAT Orvieto, the flagship of the first AIF convoy, en route to Egypt in late 1914. Charles Bean/Australian War Memorial

At the outset, Hamilton urged the commission to table the original “Gallipoli Letter,” penned by British correspondent Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, which Keith Murdoch had agreed to carry to London before he was intercepted, and the letter confiscated, by military police at Marseilles in September 1915. He also sought the tabling of the embellished version of the letter, which Murdoch had then drafted and circulated to senior officials, including Andrew Fisher, when he finally reached London. Hamilton argued that the letters were “the final causes of a momentous and, I believe, ruinous decision” to withdraw from the Dardanelles. His request was not granted.

Keith Murdoch’s day in court came on 5 February 1917. It was a humiliating moment for the journalist who, in the eighteen months since delivering his letter to Fisher, had propelled himself into a position of remarkable power and influence in London. While his day job involved running a nondescript Antipodean news service in a corner of the London Times office, Murdoch had by late 1916 become in effect Australia’s de facto high commissioner. The ailing Andrew Fisher might have been a long-time friend and the prime minister who had given Murdoch his initial passport to power, but the journalist was quick to usurp Fisher’s London role as soon as the opportunity arose.

Billy Hughes had been unhappy with Murdoch’s Gallipoli escapade and the inquiry it helped trigger, and had demanded that in future no Australian correspondents be permitted to visit the front lines without prior approval of the Australian government. But, as Murdoch biographer Desmond Zwar would later write, Hughes saw the journalist – with his growing connections to the all-powerful press baron Lord Northcliffe and a clutch of senior politicians and officials – as more likely than Fisher to advance his ambitious agenda in Britain.

When Hughes arrived in Britain for a four-month visit in March 1916, Murdoch hosted a private dinner for the prime minister at his apartment. It was attended by a group of the most powerful men in London: munitions minister Lloyd George, press magnate Lord Northcliffe, chief of the imperial general staff William Robertson, colonial secretary Andrew Bonar Law and Times editor Geoffrey Dawson.

As soon as Hughes established his headquarters in a grand suite at the Hotel Cecil, Murdoch was brought in as a key assistant, publicist and political adviser. But several hours of intense questioning before the Dardanelles commission would expose the shallow foundations on which that prestige had been built. Fortunately for Murdoch, it would be years before the full details became public.

On the Monday of Murdoch’s appearance, chairman Sir William Pickford was joined by Field Marshal Nicholson, Andrew Fisher, Admiral May, Sir Thomas Mackenzie and Welsh MP Walter Roch. Sir Ian Hamilton had been diffident about directly challenging Murdoch’s conduct when he gave evidence a month earlier, but Pickford had no such qualms. The venerable judge quickly assumed the role of prosecutor.

After reading verbatim the undertakings Murdoch had given Hamilton to “faithfully observe” any conditions imposed in return for permission to “record censored impressions in the London and Australian newspapers” at Gallipoli, Pickford drew the first of a series of highly damaging admissions from Murdoch about his limited knowledge and expertise in composing the letter to Fisher.

Sir William Pickford: You reported, and I daresay quite properly, to Mr Fisher a good many things that were said. What we chiefly want is what you know of your own knowledge.

Keith Murdoch: I do not think I can help you much because I only formed impressions. That was all I ever claimed to have. While I was there I formed one exceedingly strong impression on which I acted to my utmost power. As to the military operations and even the condition of the army at that time I should think you would be able to get very much sounder and fuller evidence from other people.

Murdoch claimed that during his “four or five days” ashore at Anzac he had spoken to “almost all” of the Australian generals, other Australian officers and men and “some” English officers. They had left him with the strong impression that “the expedition had wholly failed, the armies were in a parlous position, and that the situation was not receiving due consideration in London.” When pressed to elaborate on his sources, he conceded that he had not obtained information from any British general that the expedition was in serious trouble and that he had not met the English generals whose character and competence he had most severely criticised.

Pickford: It was what you heard other people say about them?

Murdoch: To a large extent, yes – of course, solely it was the impression I formed from the observations of other people. That was inevitable, of course. I could not meet them.

Pickford: Are these criticisms entirely from what you were told by generals and people in responsible positions?

Murdoch: No, I should think, so far as I remember, not a single Australian general criticised a British officer in my hearing.

Pickford: Then was this information from soldiers or from correspondents?

Murdoch: It was from soldiers, and also it was the opinion of some of the correspondents, I think.

Pickford: Did these criticisms come, at any rate to some extent, from information from other correspondents?

Murdoch: To some slight extent, yes.

Pickford: From Mr Ashmead-Bartlett?

Murdoch: Well yes, I certainly talked it over with Ashmead-Bartlett.

During further intense questioning from the chair, Murdoch asserted that despite his written undertaking to observe the strict rules of censorship he was completely within his rights to carry Ashmead-Bartlett’s letter and, after that was confiscated, to draft his own. He insisted that the rules did not preclude a correspondent from communicating with a minister of the Crown – a supposed exemption not even Ashmead-Bartlett had claimed.

As Pickford pressed the point that Murdoch had broken the censorship rules and the journalist’s discomfort intensified, Andrew Fisher, who to that point had listened in silence, sprang to the defence of his friend. In doing so he completely recast the simple commission he had given Murdoch twenty months earlier to take a quick look at the soldiers’ mail services on his way to London.

Murdoch’s letter of engagement from the defence department had specified only that he visit Egypt and made no reference to his visiting Gallipoli, although he did have an official letter of introduction to Hamilton. Now Fisher claimed Murdoch carried “a letter from me to the commander-in-chief for leave for you to visit the Dardanelles in order to make a communication to me of your impressions.” Murdoch’s brief to check on the soldiers’ mail was now stamped by the former prime minister as “a mandate from one self-governing dominion which was directly concerned with the operation of their forces in Gallipoli and elsewhere.”

Fisher then handed a series of rhetorical lifelines to his drowning compatriot:

Fisher: You are Australian born?

Murdoch: Yes.

Fisher: And you naturally felt that you would like to do the best not only for your own particular country but the Empire’s forces now and always?

Murdoch: I think I risked my whole career. I am always prepared to offer everything I have to Australia.

Fisher: You have held senior positions on the most important journals in Australia and have had the confidence of your employers?

Murdoch: Yes, I think so.

Fisher: And you felt that you were not exceeding the expectations of myself and others in making a true report of what you considered the situation in Gallipoli at the time you visited it?

Murdoch: No, I thought I was fulfilling your wishes in the matter and also carrying out my duty.

Fisher: You had no thought of casting a reflection upon anyone or doing anything but giving a non-soldier opinion on the situation. You had no wish to cast reflections nor did you know any of the parties personally or otherwise?

Murdoch: No, I was absolutely unprejudiced.

But the cloak of patriotic rectitude Fisher had so deftly wrapped around the embattled journalist soon fell away. When he resumed his examination, Pickford pressed Murdoch on one of the most sensational – and unsubstantiated – allegations in his letter: that “an order had to be issued to officers to shoot without mercy any soldier who lagged behind or loitered in advance” during the August offensive.

Pickford: Did you get that information from any responsible person?

Murdoch: I forget where I got it.

Pickford: It is a very serious allegation.

Murdoch: I do not think it is so serious. It was the diary of a British officer which I saw on the spot.

Pickford: Do you mean a living officer or a dead officer?

Murdoch: A living officer.

Pickford: I should like to know who it was.

Murdoch: I do not know his name. I cannot inform you. All I know is that Mr Nevinson (British correspondent Henry Nevinson) had that diary and it was confirmed, I remember, by an officer from Suvla who I met on the transport returning from Mudros. I do not know his name. He was an artillery officer who had been through Suvla.

Pickford: It is unfortunate you do not remember his name.

Murdoch: It is very hard to remember names. It is a long time ago.

When Welsh MP Walter Roch picked up the questioning, Murdoch would then reveal not only that many of the most damaging allegations he had made in his letter were wrong or unsubstantiated but, much more seriously, that he had deliberately lied to ensure his objective “to startle the government” into abandoning the Dardanelles campaign.

Amid the sweeping condemnation of senior British officers in his letter, Murdoch had belittled the capabilities of the Anzac Corps commander, lieutenant-general William Birdwood. The general, who would be venerated by a generation of Australian soldiers as a strong and compassionate leader and who would end the war commanding the Fifth Army on the Western Front, was declared unfit for such a role by the thirty-one-year-old reporter from Melbourne who had not even spoken to the man during his Gallipoli stopover.

“Birdwood struck me as a good army corps commander, but nothing more,” Murdoch had written. “He has not the fighting quality, nor the big brain, of a great general.” In response to a question from Roch, Murdoch conceded that he had deliberately maligned Birdwood because he was concerned that the general would be seen in London as the natural successor to Hamilton and that he too would resist pressure to abandon Gallipoli:

It was what you might call a highly coloured document written with a set purpose of producing one effect only, and I was afraid it would lead to certain injustices such as the statement about General Birdwood which I deliberately made. I think it was essential to make it as I knew he would probably be appointed to the command if Sir Ian Hamilton were removed, and I thought it was absolutely essential to get a fresh mind out there, and that was the reason I put in a sentence about General Birdwood which possibly is an injustice.

For Sir Ian Hamilton, Murdoch’s startling admission was both an outrage and further vindication of his case that the journalist was prepared to write and say whatever it took to achieve his political objective. On hearing of the evidence, Hamilton wrote to Birdwood, “In its way this retraction of Murdoch’s is a good weather gauge of your steady rise in prestige and popularity. Murdoch felt he had to back out of that particular lie at all costs.”

Hamilton also wrote to the commissioners, asking them to request that cabinet secretary Maurice Hankey circulate Murdoch’s “tardy retraction” to everyone who had seen the Murdoch letter. “As to the evidence of Mr Murdoch as a whole,” he added. “All I can say is I hope generals more fortunate than myself will be protected against the possibility of this kind of backstairs influence being used against them. Unless in the full tide of victory no soldier can stand up against it for long.”

At the end of his appearance before the commission, Murdoch repeated an earlier request that he be given a copy of a memorandum from Hamilton in which the general had delivered a detailed rebuttal of the allegations in the Murdoch letter. Seemingly oblivious to the irony, Murdoch argued that the document amounted to “a violent personal attack” on him and expressed his concern that, without him being given a right of reply, the commissioners might be unfairly influenced.

“I assure you we shall not,” said Sir William Pickford, in a final rebuke before dismissing the witness. “Any more than we shall be influenced, if I may say so, by a good many hearsay statements, which are in your statement, and as to which you have not given us any evidence.” •

This is an edited extract from Phillip Schuler: The Remarkable Life of One of Australia’s Greatest War Correspondents, published by Allen & Unwin.

The post The myth of Keith Murdoch’s Gallipoli letter appeared first on Inside Story.

“The coast faded to a dim blue, more distant once the sun rose over the hills, but soon vanished over the swelling horizon,” he wrote of that moment. “It was the last link with the homeland, and who knew how many would see those shores again.”

Unlike thousands of the men he followed to the camps at Mena, in the shadows of the pyramids, and into the trenches at Gallipoli, Phillip Schuler would return briefly to his home in Lisson Grove, Hawthorn. But by June 1917 he, too, would be dead – cut to pieces by a stray salvo on a battlefield in Belgium.

Yet between the stirring departure from Albany and the horrors of Flanders, Schuler was to assemble an extraordinary body of work in words and pictures that would distinguish him as one of the greatest Australian war correspondents.

Four journalists were to play leading roles in forming the indelible legend of Gallipoli in the minds of Australians. Yet it was probably the one who remains least-known today – Phillip Schuler – whose role was the most immediately profound.

Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, the brash veteran correspondent for London’s Daily Telegraph, was the first to extol the dash and daring of the Anzac troops in his dispatches after 25 April 1915.

Keith Murdoch, the later Australian newspaper proprietor and sire of a global media dynasty, stopped briefly at Gallipoli, never got around to filing a story from the front and tried to smuggle an explosive letter from Ashmead-Bartlett to the British cabinet accusing commanders of blundering the campaign. (The original letter was confiscated by military police. Murdoch’s fabled “Gallipoli Letter” was a rehash of Ashmead-Bartlett’s work, recklessly embellished and riddled with errors.)

Charles Bean, the meticulous diarist who also came ashore with the first troops on 25 April, stayed throughout the doomed campaign and went on to devote his life to writing the epic official history of the war.

But it was Schuler’s evocative and compassionate dispatches from Gallipoli that most eloquently captured the horror and the heroism for Australian newspaper readers, and it was those dispatches that first revealed the scandalous neglect and mistreatment of wounded Australian soldiers during the early weeks. It was Schuler’s 1916 book, Australia in Arms, that gave the first full account of Australia’s role in the Dardanelles campaign. And it was Schuler the amateur photographer whose hundreds of images from Egypt and Gallipoli remain our most precious pictorial archive of the era.

To mark the centenary of Anzac, Penguin has republished a series of Australian first world war classics, including Australia in Arms. Irritatingly, the paperback edition changes the author’s name (he wrote as Phillip F.E. Schuler) and ditches all the maps and illustrations, the index and the appendix of gallantry awards to Australians at Gallipoli, which were all part of T. Fisher Unwin’s first edition. But given the Penguin reprint retails for $9.95 and scarce copies of the original edition have been fetching as much as $200 in recent years, the abridgment is a reasonable price to pay for a new generation to gain access to this important work.

Almost a century after it first appeared, Australia in Arms remains a remarkably fresh, compelling and dispassionate account of Australia’s role in the nine-month Dardanelles campaign. Like most contemporary correspondents, Schuler was deeply affected by the spirit and sacrifice of the first Anzacs. And he was perhaps the first to forecast the abiding impact the campaign would have on successive generations of Australians. “In one day – 25th April – Australia attained nationhood by the heroism of her noble sons,” he wrote just weeks after the last troops were evacuated. “Anzac will ever form the front page in her history.”

Unlike others, particularly Ashmead-Bartlett and Murdoch, Schuler retained respect and admiration for the British and Australian commanders at Gallipoli and was convinced the campaign was lost not because of any great failure of field leadership or strategy, but because of “the lack of men, the lack of reinforcement, the lack of munitions.”

And while Schuler was deeply impressed by the Australian troops he worked alongside over many months, he was often equally impressed by the bravery and sacrifice of the Turks. Describing a Turkish assault at the Nek – a few weeks before the suicidal charges there by Australian light horsemen – he wrote: “The Turks showed a desperate courage; for this attack on the Nek was but sending troops to certain destruction; yet the men never flinched.”

Unlike Bean, who won a journalists’ union ballot to be Australia’s sole official war correspondent, Schuler got to Gallipoli via the back door. Unable to cover the first landings, he eventually persuaded British commander General Sir Ian Hamilton, whom he had befriended during Hamilton’s inspection tour of Australian forces in early 1914, to bend the rules. “Although I was exceeding my powers, I gladly gave him his permit,” Hamilton wrote in his diary, saying how impressed he was with Schuler.

Arriving at Anzac Cove on 20 July, Schuler was soon reunited with Bean, with whom he had become friends aboard the Orvieto. When Bean was wounded and refused evacuation, Schuler nursed him in the dugout they shared.

Within days, Schuler was caught up in the carnage of the August offensives, including the battle of Lone Pine and the charge at the Nek. His account of that murderous few minutes stands among the finest pieces of war reporting. He is believed to have been the first journalist to record the extraordinary moment when Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander White prepared to lead the soldiers of his 8th Light Horse into the barrage of Turkish machine guns with the fateful words: “Men, you have ten minutes to live.”

As the Dardanelles campaign drifted towards evacuation in December 1915, Schuler returned to Australia to work on the book his anxious family hoped would be the end of his wartime adventures. But in early April 1916, to the consternation of his father, with whom he had a difficult relationship, Schuler enlisted in the army. Driven by a desire to share the sacrifices of the men he had so keenly felt at Gallipoli, he refused a commission and took a job as a driver with Monash’s 4th Division. Within little more than a year of his enlistment, he was dead, just days short of his twenty-eighth birthday.

In June 1917, soon after the Battle of Messines, in which Schuler had been noted for his bravery, he was severely wounded. With injuries to his left arm, right leg, face and throat, he died a few days later in an army hospital in northern France.

Just before he died, Schuler was visited by Colonel Richard Dowse, his former commanding officer. Dowse later wrote to Bean: “His head was all bandaged up but he had use of one eye and when he saw me remarked, ‘Dick, well I ask you,’ a favourite saying of his. He knew he was for it and gave me a few messages and instructions before I left. He died about an hour later.”

Dowse wrote immediately to Hamilton, who replied: “I am quite upset myself to think that a man who had such a future before him; who possessed such a delightful personality and who would certainly have made a name for himself by his writings in the future has prematurely dropped out.”

In the two years between his arrival at Gallipoli and his death, Schuler developed a close, almost father–son relationship with Hamilton. The two men wrote regularly to one another. Believing Hamilton’s heroic military career had been unfairly sullied by the critics of the defeat at Gallipoli – not least Keith Murdoch – Schuler had sought but was refused leave to give evidence in 1917 at the Dardanelles Commission investigating the failed campaign.

After Schuler’s death, Hamilton wrote to his father, Frederick Schuler: “Had my last recommendations that he should attend [the Commission] borne fruit, it is improbable that he would have been exactly where he was on that fateful day. On the other hand, ‘Fate’s hid ends eyes cannot see.’” •

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