ASIO has a filing cabinet of deatils on Alex Mitchell, and Laurie Oakes would like to take some of the the credit
Bob Hawke had a rule that he wouldn’t launch a book unless his name was in the index. That’s whyDavid Marr’s 1980 biography of Garfield Barwick has the following index entry: Hawke, R.J., no mention of.
I regard the Hawke approach as eminently sensible, so the first thing I did when I got my hands on Come the Revolution by Alex Mitchell was check the index. My name was there but the first reference I looked up caused me some distress.
When Alex and I shared a flat in Sydney’s Paddington in 1964, the legendary Mount Isa strike leader Pat Mackie turned up on our doorstep. We had to hide him from the rozzers and help smuggle him back to Queensland.
I’m quoted as saying: “The Mackie episode was an eye-opener for me, but it was pretty much par for the course for Alex. I blame him and the Mackie incident for the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation opening a file on me.”
Later, I thought it would be interesting to see my ASIO file but what I was sent was a letter saying there never had been an ASIO file on me. You can imagine the humiliation but I take comfort from the knowledge there’s not a security file on Alex, either. Instead there’s a filing cabinet and I deserve at least a bit of credit for that.
Because, as he says in Come the Revolution, I gave him his introduction to the anti-Vietnam war movement and as Alex puts it, “The war was the watershed of my life.”
Come the Revolution is a very political book. It tells the story of a political movement, the author’s political development, it details the activities and ultimate destruction of a radical party but it’s also a terrific book about journalism.
Mitchell started out at 14 working at The Townsville Bulletin and went on to cover some of the most notorious murders in Sydney in the 1960s. He asked the first question at Ming’s final press conference, moved to Fleet Street, became part of the Sunday Times Insight team and made a ground-breaking TV documentary on IdiAmin which involved conning the dictator into an interview that helped to expose him for the monster he was.
When the documentary team returned to England after the interview, the cameraman was asked what had been the scariest moment in Uganda. He replied it was when Amin was chatting to the producer while the camera and lights were being set up. “I saw out of the corner of my eye Alex grabbing documents from Amin’s desk and shoving them into his pocket,” the cameraman said. “I thought we’d never get out of there alive.”
What Alex’s politics and journalism have in common is passion. A lot of us in the craft stand back, adhering to the view that journalists should maintain a certain detachment, but this was not a comfortable fit for Alex. Eventually he lost faith in the ability of mainstream journalism to bring about the kind of changes he believed necessary and opted for a more direct approach in Gerry Healy’s Workers’ Revolutionary Party (WRP), editing its newspaper.
Come the Revolution got me excited about journalism all over again and when I read the tips Alex got as a young journalist from old pros, it was déjà vu because some of the same old pros mentored me.
“Give them the facts and keep yourself out of it,” and “Pretend that a reader is sitting in front of you on the other side of the typewriter and asking you the question, What’s this story about?”
Phillip Knightley and Murray Sayle,two great expat Australian investigative journalists, taught Alex to look at ordinary, everyday reporting as public service journalism when he first got to Fleet Street. They called it PSJ.
Alex writes: “PSJ is the staple diet of the reporting class. It basically means telling the readers what is really going on. PSJ is the sworn enemy of lazy rewrites of press releases and rescripted quotations from politicians and business leaders. To effectively conduct PSJ you need to be inquisitive, ask hard questions and go the extra distance in researching an article because that is your responsibility to the readers.”
If every journalist saw their job as a public service, the standard of reporting in this country would shoot up and the decline in the public’s trust in journalism might be arrested.
It was Mitchell who asked at Menzies’ final press conference, “Sir Robert, you have told us about your achievements, but what about the failures?” To which Menzies replied instantly, “There weren’t any.”
Mitchell left Australia immediately after the anti-Labor landslide in the 1966 Vietnam War election. It was partly because he was depressed about Australian politics and partly because he was drawn towards Fleet Street, the then Mecca of world journalism.
“I had spent hours in the parliamentary library reading the British newspapers and was captivated by the quality of the writing and the scope and depth of the coverage,” he writes.
Living with Alex I saw a deeply serious side to him that was largely hidden from most of his colleagues.What I didn’t understand was how his experiences as a journalist gradually shaped his politics. The injustices he saw, the people he met, pushed him in one direction.
He abandoned mainstream journalism (or capitalist journalism as he called it)to become editor of the WRP’sTrotskyist newspaper The Workers’ Press, later renamed News Line.
“It seemed to me that if you wanted to be taken seriously, then it was time to do something serious. There was little point in talking about socialism while selling your talent to Lord Thomson of Fleet Street or Lord Bernstein,” he writes.
This section of Mitchell’s life is a rattling good read, with a cast of characters that includes Yasser Arafat and Muammar Gaddafi.It culminated in the WRP’sleader, Gerry Healy, being framed in a sex scandal and his opponents flogging off everything in sight.
After the WRP imploded, Alex and his partner, Judith, returned to Australia and he rebuilt his career in mainstream media, writing about crime, corruption, cops, anything that fell into the category of public service journalism. Eventually he became the state political editor for Sydney’s Sun-Herald.
But if you think the political fire in Alex Mitchell’s belly has gone out, you could not be more wrong. “As capitalism repeats its failures,” he says, “and the planet suffers more irreversible damage from corporate exploitation, people’s attitudes will change. Surely then the revolution will come.”
His final comment on journalism is sobering.
“I had worked both sides of the street and appreciated the advantages and disadvantages of the capitalist press and the socialist press,” he says. “Neither are good places for freethinkers, democrats or individualists.”
Come the Revolution by Alex Mitchell, published by NewSouth, RRP $39.95
Laurie Oakes is the chief political correspondent with the Nine Network
