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THE YEAR OF SUFFERING, AND DECISION — 1968-69
Arriving back from Japan and Southeast Asia in May, the
Canberra autumn colors that year seemed even stronger than I had
remembered.
I set about the painful business of writing up my doctoral thesis.
The problems were probably greater than those suffered by most
would-be PhDs. Materials were in a difficult foreign language.
And I still could not consider myself a full-fledged economist.
And despite the Southeast Asian tour, I still did not have enough
data. Japan was still not a very large, or welcome, player on the
world economic stage. Its direct investment was still small.
As well, my main conclusions - that Japanese investors put
emphasis not so much on profits or royalties but rather on securing
sources of supply (raw materials investments) or overseas markets
for finished goods (sales network investments) and parts and
materials (assembly operations behind tariff barriers) were hardly
earth-shattering, even if quite interesting in the context of existing
direct investment theory,
But within the year I had a draft ready. My ANU mentor, Heinz
Arndt, said he was satisfied with it. All I had to do was get it typed
up in the elaborate style demanded of doctoral candidates, and my
four years of effort would be over.
I could begin to think about my next move — how and where to get
re-employed.
FINDING A JOB
Clearly External Affairs would be a non-starter. Apart from
anything else, Plimsoll’s earlier promise to come back ‘after the
Vietnam thing was over’ was of little use since the ‘Vietnam thing’
was still far from over.
Besides, only a few years earlier I had had that ugly run-in with
Canberra’s spy apparatus. That alone would effectively put an end
to any chance of working in the government, at least while a
conservative government was in power.
My first move was to go through the motions of approaching
J.D.B.Miller of the ANU international relations department, to see
if the China research position he had offered me back in 1962 was
still open. I knew he would say no. But I wanted to get the
rejection on record.
In 1962 I had been seen by the university as someone very suitable
for appointment to a well-paid research position on China, despite
the fact that at the time my only qualifications were a few years
experience working in External Affairs, and a so-so knowledge of
the Chinese language.
Now, seven years later, in 1969, my qualifications had expanded to
include the following:
(a) a further three years of EA experience
(b) greatly improved Chinese,
(c) good Russian,
(d) adequate Japanese,
(e) reasonable economics,
(f) an imminent doctorate in a topic of some significance.
On top of all this I also had produced a 215-page book on Chinese
foreign policies whose chapters on the Sino-Indian frontier dispute
and the Sino-Soviet ideological dispute alone had enough original
and closely researched material for each to be recognised at any
impartial university as deserving an international relations
doctorate.
It was probably one of the very few books on foreign affairs to be
published in Australia at the time that could be republished today
without change — something that certainly could not be said for the
rubbish that was coming out of Miller’s department at the time.
In short, if I was qualified for the position I had been offered in
1962, I was certainly a lot more qualified in 1969. So was I
offered the position? Of course not.
By 1969 I had become a critic of government policies, a
troublemaker, a black sheep, possibly even a communist agitator. It
took Miller just five minutes to close the door on me.
And at the time Crawford was telling the world how the ANU was
a center of something called academic excellence. Uh uh?
More worrying was the fact that my informal approaches to other
universities were also getting nowhere. Monash University in
Melbourne seemed a possibility; it was said to be both fairly
progressive and trying hard to move into Asian studies. But I did
not even get through the door there.
I had hoped to get the vacant China slot at Monash. In the event, it
went to a quite unqualified, and now totally forgotten, rightwing
ideological fanatic called Bob Beveridge who used to hector me in
public for my Vietnam views.
Years later I learned from Max Teichman that the Monash
authorities had been told firmly by some ASIO type not to offer me
any position under any circumstances. I assume the same thing was
going on at other universities.
To this day the extent of ASIO infiltration of our universities at the
time has never been fully realised, let alone criticised. True, at the
time even some otherwise balanced and sensible academics went
along with the China/Vietnam threat talk.
They felt they were really doing the nation a service by
cooperating with ASIO to keep alleged left-wingers at bay.
But in that case, why no apology or mea culpas now that it is
obvious they were wrong over Vietnam and China?
The Australian personality seems unable to grasp the need to seek
objective standards of right and wrong. Right lies in doing what
everyone else is doing and thinking. Wrong lies in opposing the
consensus, in rocking the boat, in seeming to cause trouble.
Similarities with the Japanese psyche are frightening. Japan too
still refuses to retract harsh wartime judgements against those
accused of anti-war sentiments.
True, many years later Miller was to write an article for the journal
of the Australian Institute of Political Science where he at least had
the honesty to admit he and quite a few others had been wrong
over China. But, he added, he had been quite right to oppose the
extremism of ‘left-wingers’ like Clark and Jim Cairns.
Left-winger? On many domestic issues —aborigines, welfare,
crime, trade unions, refugees — I tend to go along with the
conservative view, unlike Jim Cairns. I just happen to object to the
slaughter of foreigners in the name of spurious causes.
But to come back to my own affairs.
MORE BRICK WALLS
By early 1969 it was clear I had no future in Australia, either as a
Japanologist or as a Sinologist. Crawford was making sure that the
still non-Japanese speaking Drysdale would consolidate his ANU
dictatorship over Japan economic research.
And he had obviously forgotten how in 1962 he had tried to recruit
me to set up a China economic research group. (In an empire-
building move typical of ANU politics, China was soon to be taken
over those non-Japanese speaking Japan research academics, in
partnership with non-Chinese speaking academics claiming
expertise on China.)
Meanwhile Fitzgerald, who had finished his PhD work on the topic
of Overseas Chinese in Asia, had moved into the China slot in
theANU Asian Studies department. He was already making his run
in the ALP and elsewhere as Canberra’s resident expert on China.
With both Japan and China ruled out, for a while I tinkered with
the idea of going back into the Russian studies field. But there too I
was to be stymied, by an unknown Brit called Paul Dibb who was
finishing up a very unremarkable thesis on the Soviet Far East.
As far as I could make out, Dibb had little grip on either the
Russian language or Soviet affairs. Certainly he had never spent
any serious time in the USSR.
But in Canberra’s intellectually impoverished climate that did not
stop him from making a strong run later as an expert on Soviet, and
then global, military affairs. He has ended up as military affairs
guru for the Australian establishment.
The only academic opening I received, and then only tentatively,
came from West Australia.
*************
Partly as a result of some persistent media urging on my part, WA
University was going to set up a special Japan course that would
train people properly in the language AND in business/economics.
Graduates from such a course could then hope to get business-
related jobs in Japan, or feed into Australian firms doing business
with Japan. I had long seen a course along these lines as crucial to
the future of the Japan-Australia business relationship.
It would also help to put an end to the farce I had had to endure at
the ANU four years earlier. There, students who had signed up to
learn the language graduated three-four years later with neither the
language or the prospect of sensible employment.
If they wanted to widen their education they could do little more
than dabble in some other area of Oriental exotica equally non-
employment generating. The gain to Australia from this
fraudulently expensive education was precisely nil. .
WA University had sent Professor Reg Appleyard to Canberra to
try to find someone to set up and run the new course. I was one of
the first on his calling list.
I said I was interested, but would have to wait a few more months
till I had finished my ANU work. But I never heard anything more
from him.
Years later I discovered that the university had also approached
officialdom for a recommendation. Officialdom had contacted W -
their chief spy operative in Japan, an occupation era hangover with
good business cover and quite good Japanese. .
No doubt one of W’s briefs was to keep dangerous left-wingers
like myself at bay (when Labour gained power in 1972 W went
into reverse and used his positions in various Australia-Japan
organisations to be nice to me, invite me to give talks etc).
W quickly tapped into the Hitotsubashi connection and came up
with the name of an American, Bernard Key, about to graduate
with a PhD in the history of foreign investment in Japan.
Key had no connection with Australia, or with the world of
business. But he was given the position anyway.
As it turned out, Key was conscientious and did quite a good job in
Perth. But he left after a few years to become a stock analyst in
Japan and the course fell apart soon after, thanks largely to the
appointment, recommended almost certainly by W, of a retired
Japanese ex-CIA operative who proved to be totally unsuitable, or
even worse.
(Ironically, Key was to approach me for a university job almost
thirty years later. I had been made president of the business-
oriented Tama University on the outskirts of Tokyo. He wanted to
get out of the grubby stock-market world, and back into academia.
We gave him what he wanted. But once again, he only lasted a few
years.
He succumbed to the mental pressure of trying to teach Japanese
university students, and I do not blame him)
That the WA course was able during its brief span to produce most
of the young Australians who were to come to play important roles
in the Australian business relationship with Japan during the
seventies and eighties — Bill Hall, Ken Boston, Richard Pyvis, the
Walker brothers — was full vindication for my original idea.
Many more could have been produced if the course had not been
collapsed so quickly by officialdom’s obsessive desire to plant its
operatives in our universities , or if other Australian universities
had had the sense to run similar courses.
Needless to say, the ANU would remain impervious to my
suggestions that it should have its own Japanese business studies
unit. It would be decades before any of the products from their
well-funded Japan economic research center with its mainly non-
Japanese speaking academics caught up in PAFTA, APEC and
various other academic fantasies, or with their PhD research efforts
mainly devoted to the alleged theoretical merits of unlimited free
trade, made any impact at the grassroots level of the Japan-
Australian business relationship.
But that did little to prevent the center from coming to dominate
most Japan-Australia economic relationship activity, and for
making sure that those such as myself who were seen as rivals
would be carefully excluded.
THE ANU WALL
True, there is nothing unusual about academics staking out
exclusive research areas and keeping others at bay. But when this
is done with government-supplied funds, by people who do not
know the language of the country they are supposed to be studying,
and in the process use their power and position to discriminate
against those who do know the language, then it IS unusual.
On the other hand it is also true that in the narrow world of
Australian academic bureaucracy, not knowing the language of the
country you are supposed to be studying is not quite the sin it
would be in some of the more academically advanced nations of
the world. Even so, it still came as a shock.
I had been brought up in an ethic that said if you study hard and
work honestly, then the society around you will recognise you for
what you are, and treat you accordingly. There should be no need
to engage in grubby political maneuvers in order to get ahead.
And in the early years of my career the ethic seemed to be in place.
After entering External Affairs, I had worked hard to learn Chinese
and Russian. My superiors had seen that, and rewarded me with
good postings.
But with the ANU I discovered an entirely different ethic — one
that said the rewards went to activists skilled at political
maneuvering. Those who went quietly about the difficult business
of serious research and gaining required academic skills were
easily ignored.
I once tried to pin down Heinz on the morality of this bitchy
exclusion. The ANU Japan people had by far the loin’s share of
Australian official funds for academic research and involvement
with Japan, and were being allowed to use those funds to pursue
petty jealousies and personal ambitions.
He muttered something about things being the way they were and
left it at that.
I should have remembered that he himself had done some political
maneuvering in the past, which prevented my father from getting
the post Colin had wanted in Canberra ten years earlier (see part
two).
Colin, by contrast, had gone through life seemingly quite unaware
of the need to play academic politics. He seemed to assume that
others would automatically recognise him for his
accomplishments.
And for the most part that was what happened. It was only in
Australia that he came unstuck.
I may have inherited some of that thinking. But clearly it was of
little use in the Australian academic world, where the prizes often
went to the quick and the cunning.
Sometimes the maneuvering went to the point of absurdity.
For example, I had long been involved with Okita Saburo, a well-
known MITI official whom Kojima at Hitotsubashi had early on
recruited to give respectability to his various pre-APEC moves
(later Okita was made Foreign Affairs Minister). Some time in the
seventies, the ANU people had seized on him as their one point of
high-level contact into Japan. They were even to publish the
English version of his memoirs.
Okita was not a proper economist. He was originally just a run-of-
the-mill bureaucrat who had made his name as a signatory of the
somewhat bogus Club of Rome 1970 report saying the world was
about to run out of raw material resources. In Japan, just seeming
to be involved in something of international significance was
enough to make one famous in those days.
I can’t complain since a few years later I was to gain some fame in
much the same way. But more of that later.
During the war years Okita had been involved with Japan’s
colonial efforts in Manchuria, including the rather unsavory
Koyain opium production and sales operation designed to
impoverish and enslave the Chinese - a point ignored in the many
ANU eulogies he received. But then again, it is very unlikely that
the ANU Japan ‘experts’ were even aware of such details.
Like many Japanese of his generation, Okita was an admirer of my
father. As a result, I had got to know him quite well, back during
my Hongkong days in the early sixties ( we once had a hilarious
party with my father on the balcony of my Hongkong penthouse).
That was long before any of the ANU people.had even begun to
appear on the Japan scene.
Later, when I was trying to get established in Japan, Okita had
helped me through a MITI-backed research committee he headed.
Despite these strong connections, not once during my long stay in
Japan was I ever invited by the ANU people, or the Topkyo
Embassy people, to join in any of the many activities they
organised around Okita. It was embarrassing for both of us to have
to pretend ignorance of this petty exclusiveness.
Much the same went on with the ANU’s Hitotsubashi connection.
Various seminars and other activities were arranged there, with
Clark excluded as if he did not exist.
One of my good friends at that university was the economist Ishi
Hiromitsu. He liked some of the things I had written about Japan’s
land tax policies, and once asked me to address the government
tax commission he headed.
When he was made the Hitotsubashi president, he also asked me to
be a member of the university’s oversee committee (shimon
iinkai). In theory at least, one of my jobs was to oversee the ANU
people involved with the university.
The wheel had finally turned full circle.
LOOKING ABROAD
With the academic door closed firmly on me in Australia, I began
to look abroad. I wrote to Derek Davies, the well-known editor of
the Hongkong-based Far Eastern Economic Review and with
whom I had had a friendly relationship earlier in Hongkong.
In those days the Review was an authoritative and generally
progressive source of information on China and the rest of Asia. It
was far removed from the bland pro-business views and the
persistent anti-Beijing slant it has acquired under its current
owners, the Wall Street Journal.
Davies wrote back saying he could give me the job as chief China
watcher, The offer was attractive. Over the years the Review had
nurtured some of the West’s best China watchers, and was to train
more — Mirsky, Gittings etc.
But the pull of Japan was strong too. The fact my book was about
to published there in Japanese gave me a psychological base,
something I certainly did not have with China (to this day I have
had no recognition whatsoever from the Chinese of the fact I once
wrote a book trying to throw a more favorable light on their
foreign policies. But that is what you have to expect from that very
self-centered, even if very dynamic, nation.) .
Most of all, there were those happy memories from my one-year
student existence in Japan, and what I call the Yasuko tapes.
While in Tokyo I had tried to learn the language as much as
possible by taping radio broadcasts of interest and listening to them
concentratedly. One broadcast I liked especially was called
Watashitachi no Kotoba — readings of letters sent in by public
minded citizens, most elderly, suggesting ideas for improving the
society — proper garbage disposal, removing abandoned bicycles,
better school education, etc. Both the language and the ideas
taught me a lot about Japan.
Back in Canberra I had wanted to keep my Japanese up. I had
asked a typically nationalistic rightwing Japanese academic invited
by ANU international relations for yet another useless research
project to record a text, any text, on tape for me to listen to (in
those days commercial language tapes were hard to come by).
He had refused pointblank. He seemed to think he did not need to
waste his valuable time helping this no-good Australian learn his
nation’s precious language.
But Yasuko would tape the Watashitachi no Kotoba broadcasts and
send them to me regularly by mail.
She would also write charming letters in simple Japanese telling
me what was happening with her and her friends. It was typical of
the gentle consideration the Japanese, the women especially, can
show in personal relationships.
Stuck in the cold, antiseptic world of Canberra, those letters were a
lifeline — a lifeline of memories pulling me back to Japan.
Meanwhile I had to prepare the final version of my thesis. No
amount of nostalgia for Japan could help me there.
PhD PROBLEMS
Sometime when I was about to deliver my second draft to the
typist for the complete re-type demanded by the primitive
technologies of the time, the futility of it all began to crowd in on
me. Why was I doing all this? The establishment had already
made it clear that I would have no career in Australia, even after I
had submitted the final version and had it approved.
In effect, I still had another month or so of exhausting editorial
work to get the document into the shape demanded by the
academics who were determined to make sure that I would never
get any academic recognition in Australia.
Even Arndt, my one point of honest contact at the ANU, had made
it clear I was on my own work-wise once I finished the thesis. As
he saw it, my China book meant that I was still more of an
international relations specialist than an economist. Maybe he was
right.
He could help me get a job with the Asian Development Bank in
Manila, he hinted once, but that was about all.
Worse was the pretentiousness of it all. PhD theses have to be
presented as original contributions to knowledge fit for book
publication. Yet everyone knows that the research is often either
too narrow or too superficial.
In the social sciences, being able to add the words PhD to your
name may give you an academic meal ticket. But in reality it often
means little more than that you had nothing better to do for three
years — years in which you could have been out in the world doing
something useful.
Post-graduate study for mature students makes sense. In my own
case, the exposure to good economics teachers at a stage of life
when, as my father had predicted, I had the maturity and
enthusiasm to understand what I was being taught, was invaluable.
But for those who come directly from the under-graduate world,
post-graduate economics simply helps produce the fundamentalist
scholastic robots who have done so much harm to the Western
economies in recent years.
Hardly any of the thick, carefully bound and annotated documents
produced by most PhD candidates in the social sciences could
qualify for book publication. Few would deserve even summary
publication in an academic journal.
So why was I, at age 33, going along with these intellectual
pretensions?
I had no ready answer. On the other hand, I knew that if I did not
serve out my time, there would a lot of people out there only too
happy to throw rocks.
BACK TO ‘THE AUSTRALIAN’
It was at this moment, just a year after returning to Canberra, that I
ran into Eric Walsh again - the consummate fixer who had given
me my introduction to The Australian four years earlier. I told him
about my problems.
Why not get a job as Tokyo correspondent for The Australian, he
said. Under its new editor, Adrian Deamer, it was still Australia’s
only progressive newspaper, and Deamer remembered my earlier
Vietnam and China contributions. There was a good chance the
paper would be willing to employ me in Japan.
The Japan-Australia business relationship was heating up. Lacking
a Tokyo correspondent, The Australian was being hammered
almost daily by big headline articles in the Sydney Morning Herald
and the Financial Review, breaking news about major resource
export contracts with Japan from their active, Tokyo-based
stringer, Max Suich. Clearly The Australian needed someone in
Tokyo to match the competition.
Walsh said he would check possibilities with John Menadue - the
same Menadue he had introduced me to when I had wanted to get
to Whitlam in 1966, and who was now the business manager for
The Australian. I had to say yes, even though I had no experience
of journalism.
Menadue was receptive enough. But he said that while the
newspaper could not afford to have someone in Japan purely as a
news correspondent (the paper was still suffering heavy red ink)
they could send me there if I would help garner Japanese
advertising - yet another area where The Australian was being
beaten by the Fairfax Press.
I was agreeable. But Deamer, who was also keen to have a Tokyo
correspondent, was not happy about the idea of my having to
handle advertising too. Good newspapers try to keep a clear barrier
between advertising and editorial, he warned. I said brashly I was
sure I could handle the problem.
BACK TO THE THESIS PROBLEM
But if I was to take up the Tokyo job, what was I to do about the
ANU thesis? I still had a month or so to go before I could hand
over the kind of document demanded by the PhD system.
On the other hand, both Menadue and Deamer wanted me to get to
Tokyo quickly. And I did not want to lose this golden opportunity
to get back to Japan, with a job.
I decided to try to find a compromise. I wrote to the ANU, telling
them that while I was close to finishing my thesis, I was sure I
could write a much better thesis if I could get back to Japan.
A lot more information on Japanese overseas investment was
coming out of Tokyo at the time (which was true; the Export-
Import Bank people were finally publishing the detailed statistics
demanded by the IMF).
As a correspondent for a major Australian newspaper, I would also
have chances to get into large Japanese firms and query them on
their investment policies — chances I rarely had as a struggling
researcher two years earlier.
In short, I could say in all honesty that the job offer from The
Australian would let me get back to Japan to get the extra
information that I needed to prepare a much better thesis, and at no
expense to the ANU.
The ANU establishment was not impressed. Crawford came back
with a blunt letter saying they would only give me a six months
extension, and no more.
To some extent I could understand his position. The ANU
provided quite generous three-year PhD scholarships. I had been
given an extra year because I had to learn Japanese, plus another
six months to write my China book. The university had a right to
demand that people finish their research in the time allotted.
But researching a topic requiring a very wide range of sensitive
inside information from businessmen and bureaucrats in a very
foreign nation was never going to be easy. And few can learn
Japanese to fluency in one year, even if they have Chinese, as I
had.
In this situation, if people are willing to spend their own time and
money to complete research of some importance, exceptions can
and should be made.
Or to put it another way, because the ANU was not willing to make
such exceptions, it ended up being saddled for decades with a
bunch of non-Asian language speaking PhDs pretending to be
knowledgeable about Asian societies and economies.
Even Japanese speakers had trouble working on Japan while sitting
in distant Canberra. One allegedly Japanese-speaking researcher
in the ANU international relations department spent twenty years
working on his Japan topic. And he still could not produce a book
at the end of it. But he had tenure and could not be sacked.
THE MOMENT OF DECISION
What to do? Deep down I already realised that the work demands
in my new job would make it impossible to meet the six month
deadline. Apart from anything else, I would have to spend two of
that six months in Sydney learning how to be a journalist — and
how to handle advertising.
So should I abandon all academic pretension and just head off for
Tokyo?
I tried to rationalize: Maybe I would have to give up hope of the
PhD tag. But that would not stop me from putting out a
worthwhile book out on the subject while I was in Tokyo. That
was more important than any PhD.
True, all that would take a lot more than six months, years even.
But in the meantime I would be gaining valuable experience in a
variety of other Japan fields — politics, foreign affairs etc. And
hopefully by the end of all that the political climate in Australia
would have improved to the point where I could use my experience
finally to get a job there — either in academia, business or the
bureaucracy. .
Besides, I had already prepared the basic data and conclusions of
the thesis. I would always be able to get that published in Japan
(which I did, two years later, via Ajiken). If others felt that was
not enough, then that was their problem.
I also happened to disapprove of academic credentialism.
One of my first anti-credentialist efforts had been refusing in 1956
to pay the ten pounds sterling that Oxford demanded as the price
for automatically being awarded an MA, purely on the basis of
producing the rather simple thesis needed for a BA. Fortunately,
my father had found out about this and had paid the money for me.
Even in non-credentialist Japan, the words MA Oxon after one’s
name carry weight - in academic circles at least.
But PhD Canberra is not quite the same. The Japanese had the term
‘over-doctor.’ It meant that they saw someone with a doctorate as
being over-educated. In many ways, they were right.
THE VIETNAM DEBATE REVISITED
But there was a much deeper reason for my wanting to get out of
Australia and back to Japan. This was the shallowness and
hopelessness of the continuing Vietnam debate in Australia.
Even planting trees in the Japanese mountains would be preferable
to trying to cope with the daily barrage of ignorance and
insensitivity to the war for which Australia had much
responsibility. I had to get away from it all.
Concern about PhDs and other academic credentials had become
secondary.
It was the Podolsk syndrome all over again. I was in a
psychological logjam. I had to make a fresh start.
In 1965-66 after returning from Moscow, I could feel the mild
euphoria of joining a genuine debate over the rights and wrongs of
a war that was just beginning. In the anti-war ranks I had found
new friends and new values, in both Canberra and Sydney.
But by 1969 the debate had become fossilized. The LCP coalition
was firmly in power, thanks largely to the ruthless way it had been
exploiting alleged China and Vietnam War threat issues. The US
atrocity in Vietnam had escalated, and was spilling over into
Cambodia and Laos.
Not just the rightwing DLP but even the Liberal Party was into the
red arrows from China pointing towards Australia. And the public
showed every sign of wanting to continue to believe this nonsense
for some time to come.
The organs of the Right - the covertly CIA- financed Cultural
Freedom people and its literary organ, Quadrant magazine,
especially -were in full cry. Most of my anti-war friends from
those earlier heady days had lost jobs or given up.
Meanwhile, Whitlam had consolidated his position in the ALP and
was determined to keep Cairns and people like myself very much
at a distance. He had become mealy-mouthed on Vietnam, and at
times strongly anti-China.
Partly he may have been acting opportunistically; Labour had
stumbled from one electoral defeat to another because the great
Australian public believed the party was weak on Yellow Peril
threats. But Whitlam himself, and many in the ALP, went along
with Yellow Peril fears.
I tried to find out the basis of Whitlam’s anti-China bias. From
Cyril Wyndham, then ALP federal secretary, I learned that like
many others (including Kissinger) he had been greatly influenced
by the false version of the 1962 Sino-Indian frontier war pumped
out by Western propaganda agencies then and later.
India in those days was being seen by Whitlam and other centrist
progressives as a model of peaceful, socialistic development. So if
even harmless India had become a target of unprovoked military
attack, then China was clearly a menace to the rest of the world.
In 1964 Whitlam had spoken openly about China’s ‘invasion’ of
India.
A key player in spreading the ‘invasion’ myth was the rightwing,
Canberra-based historian, Geoffrey Fairbairn. Personable, an
expert on India and a favorite of the Quadrant crowd, his views
carried clout.
I knew Fairbairn quite well, and once took some time to give him
the facts of the dispute. He did not try to deny them. But he made
no effort to correct the distorted version he had been propagating,
and continued to propagate.
Fairbairn had also been very influential in creating the myth of
guerrilla war as the dangerous and sinister tool for spreading global
Communism. Here I did not even try to argue with him.
In 1967 Whitlam had returned from a Vietnam visit, bringing one
of the more unusual reasons for criticizing Canberra’s involvement
there. He said the US top brass there had personally briefed him,
and it was clear that the war on the ground had already been won.
From this it followed that Canberra had got it wrong in wanting to
send more troops there. What was needed was material aid to help
rebuild the countryside, he concluded triumphantly.
As his aide Graham Freudenberg admitted to journalists at the
time, an arrogant and all-knowing Whitlam had been thoroughly
snowed by the US military establishment.
Many others in the ALP establishment went along this particular
piece of Whitlamesque nonsense - the deputy ALP leader, Lance
Barnard, in particular. Their other favorite theme was that
Australia could not abandon the US in its Indochina adventure.
In effect, the anti-war camp had been narrowed down to
doctrinaire leftwing ideologues and a very few sensitive, informed
progressives who had survived the dumbing down of Australian
foreign affairs thinking. Even Cairns was starting to get flaky.
His earlier book, Living with Asia, had given a good outline of
the revolutionary dynamic in Vietnam and elsewhere (it also
provided something that few have seemed to notice— a brilliant
account of the twists and turns of Communist doctrine and the
Soviet Union in their early days. For someone with his limited
background to be able to produce something of such quality said a
lot about the man.)
But he had his weaknesses too, some of which were to become
apparent with the Morosi affair of 1975.
I had had an earlier encounter with him in Sydney. I had gone there
at his request to spend a weekend working with him on a promised
definitive, in-depth document setting out the anti-Vietnam War
argument in full detail. But when I arrived, he made it clear that he
was more interested in spending the weekend at the house of a
young female student he had just met.
Most have forgotten that Cairns was also a member of the
February 1975 ALP Parliamentary Foreign Affairs committee that
endorsed US bombing of Hanoi on the basis of the phony Tonkin
Bay attack. He could turn hot and cold on issues as the occasion
demanded, even if he was far more solid than most others on the
so-called Left.
There were a few others in the ALP who were good on Vietnam.
Bill Hayden was one (his subsequent gallop across the ideological
spectrum to become a darling of the Right is one of Australia’s
more remarkable political conversions). But the only one fully to
share my feelings about that war, and to realise that the ALP had to
try to come up with a solution acceptable to the ignorant Australian
public, was the now quite forgotten Tasmanian peace activist
turned politician, Neil Batt.
In 1967 he was able to push through a Federal ALP Conference
resolution advocating something very similar to the ‘enclave
solution’ I had had published in The Australian earlier that year. In
other words, Australia would agree to join in a holding operation in
Vietnam, but no more.
He had picked up my idea and run with it.
Whitlam, who had ignored my idea when it was put to him via
Menadue in 1966, was finally forced to think about it. His
response? That Australia had no right to impose conditions on its
US ally. His rightwing ALP friends went along with this
particular piece of wisdom.
Their other favorite wisdom was the ‘obligation’ to support
Australia’s big and powerful friend. In the rightwing media the
same mantra was repeated endlessly.
The implication - that you have to support someone bent on a
murderous war, regardless of rights and wrongs, just because he
says he is your friend — was frightening.
At times I used to wonder whether Whitlam had been bought by
the CIA, via his Cultural Freedom friends. More likely though was
his desire to seem respectable in Sydney circles by not seeming to
associate with ‘leftwing extremists’
Ultimately the problem came down to yet another ‘Japanese’
aspect of the Australian psyche — a particularism that makes people
quite unable to focus in on the details of events far removed from
their immediate experience. Mouthing empty slogans is much
easier.
The Japanese area similar. They too can show an intense
sensitivity to immediate events and direct human relationships.
But they remain quite unable, even today, to grasp the extent of
their wartime atrocity towards other Asians, the Chinese
especially.
They too are easily hung up on empty slogans about the
importance of the US relationship etc. etc., regardless of the real
and often frightening implications for Japan’s situation in Asia
and the world.
So why was I, as an Australian, not part of the same syndrome?
Largely because of my China experience. It had forced me to learn
how to extrapolate, to try to imagine situations beyond the range of
immediate experience. It had become impossible for me to ignore
the sufferings of the Vietnamese.
Australians, both then and now, seem unable to extrapolate like
this. For them it is the immediate experience only that is relevant.
The pathetic post-Vietnam War efforts by the Australian
rightwing, Quadrant and much of the establishment to justify that
war, even as almost the entire civilized world has turned against it,
is typical. Abstract concepts of war guilt do not impinge. Once
again the Japanese connection should be obvious.
Even as Australians do business in today’s Vietnam and Canberra
claims a good relationship, the idea of having to apologise for not
only joining in but actually instigation the past atrocity does not
seem even to cross the minds of our elite.
True, the US shows much the same amnesia and repentance
reluctance over Vietnam. But it has at least thrown up a
McNamara, something we have yet to find among Australia’s
Vietnam War policy planners.
And the US position was much more ideologically, ie
intellectually, even if warped intellectually, based than was
Australia’s.
One aspect of this particularism was what I call the Fairbairn
syndrome - the strange inability to understand the basis of guerrilla
warfare, namely that people confronting a vastly superior power
have no choice but to fight in the jungle or underground tunnels,
and to rely on surprise tactics.
Far from having to suffer extra condemnation for using such
tactics, they deserve deep praise and understanding for their
bravery and willingness to endure hardship.
Somehow in the minds of most Australians, including many who
should have known better, that incredible bravery and endurance is
turned round into proof of incredible deviousness and evil.
Alan Watt, a former EA head, once produced one of the less
memorable books about Australian and Vietnam. In it he spoke
darkly about the evil Vietcong enemy refusing to come out in the
open and confront its enemies.
And leave itself open of yet another B52 bomb attack?
This inability to think of the other side even as human beings with
legitimate desires and goals was probably ugliest aspect of the
Australian approach to Vietnam.
I remember an evening, probably back in 1968, with two
progressive or even mildly-leftwing Canberra academics — one of
them was Don Aitkin of the ANU I recall. The Australian military
had just released a gushing press notice about Rover, a guard dog
sent to Vietnam.
It seems that Rover had been sniffing in some bushes and
discovered a local Vietnamese woman who probably had been sent
to scout for the anti-government forces. She had been shot and
killed immediately. Well done Rover. One up for the dog, was
the jubilant press notice message.
I tried to tell my two friends just how disgusting all this was —
praise for a dog responsible for the killing an unarmed and
unnamed woman, on suspicion for having had the courage to assist
her brothers trying to resist foreign attack in her native country.
The two of them were completely taken aback by my anger.
Aitkin politely tried to suggest that I was getting a bit over-heated
on the Vietnam issue.
I used to get the same message from so many other so-called
progressives. Be more gradualistic, I was told. But how you can be
‘gradual’ when at that very moment your own government and tax
monies are assisting the slaughter of thousands for a totally
worthless cause?
Protest is meaningless unless it happens at a time when the
atrocities are in progress. There is no point protesting afterwards.
And to be effective it has to be accompanied by action — marches,
writings, refusing to pay taxes.
In retrospect, I often think the most effective thing the anti-
Vietnam War camp could have done was to have set up booths
outside Parliament House, government offices and the embassies
of pro-Vietnam War nations.
There the protestors could sit quietly, day after day, year after
year, handing out anti-war materials to those who were interested,
arguing with those who thought the war was justified, and getting
to know other anti-war protestors.
With something like that in place even I might have been
persuaded to get off my futile, ego-boosting pedestal at the time
(semi-joke).
Gradualism was simply the code word for allowing most of our
progressives to keep their heads down and their noses clean. They
would weigh in much later, when it was safe and respectable to do
so.
In the process they would leave it to others to take the brunt of
establishment hostility, while they consolidated their own
comfortable positions in academia and elsewhere.
THE AUSTRALIAN RIGHTWING
Dealing with Australian progressives was difficult enough. Worse
was the public hectoring I was getting from rightwing fanatics.
There was the hard-line journalist, Peter Samuel, who wrote for the
Canberra Times and the Bulletin. Another was Malcolm Mackerras
who in later years would probably have been embarrassed if
reminded of his pedantically rightwing views in those days.
In a breathless article Samuel once said that the US was keeping its
Vietnam victory so secret that even its allies there, including
Australia, were not allowed to know. The glad news would only be
revealed when it had thoroughly subdued the countryside.
Mackerras shared the rightwing ability to fuss over small details,
such as Hanoi’s alleged inability to play by the rules, while
ignoring the far more significant US, and Australian, refusal to
abide by the far more important 1954 Geneva Agreements that had
in effect promised reunification of Vietnam largely on Hanoi’s
terms.
As in the US, the Australian rightwing took great comfort and
support from the alleged failure of the 1968 Tet offensive. That
was supposed to prove lack of popular support for the pro-
communist cause.
It never seemed to cross their simple minds that the fact that the
offensive could be launched, and could only be suppressed by
massive US intervention, totally discredited their earlier anti-
communist fictions about the Vietcong being simply a bandit
rabble hiding out in the jungle.
Over China, a favorite gambit among people like Samuel, the
Santamaria/DLP crowd, The Bulletin and other right-wingers was
constant reference to a CIA circulated map of Chinese-controlled
territories in Ching dynasty times, with much of Southeast Asia
included.
Beijing was allegedly holding up this map as the goal for its future
territorial expansion, with Australia as the target after that. (see
page 153 of my In Fear of China book for details)
Yes, the map did exist. It was included, once and once only, in a
1954 Chinese school history textbook which was withdrawn a year
later.
By the 1960’s Beijing was negotiating very generous border
agreements with many of its neighbours. Not only were those
agreements completely different from anything shown in the Ching
dynasty map; Taiwan was even attacking them as sacrificing
territories that it (the Nationalist government) had long insisted
were Chinese territories.
In short, the claims about the map were a blatant lie and one of the
bright shining variety. But ignorance of facts, and acceptance of
doctored spy information, was par for the course in Australia at the
time.
At the time an ASIO-spoon fed, Melbourne Herald writer, Denis
Warner was warning the world about Chinese roads being built
deep into the heart of Laos. Beijing was already expanding
southwards, he intoned. To date no one has been able to find the
roads for some reason.
If the Left was to come up with the same kind of lies and
distortions over issues as important as this, imagine the outcry
from the Right.
Lies and exaggerations in alleged defense of the nation are
different from other lies and exaggerations, it seems, even if it
means killing the citizens of another nation in large numbers.
Another lecture I use to get from the rightwing ideologues was the
need to realise the evils of the KGB and Soviet communism. For
someone like myself, who had had first-hand experience of both, it
was a lecture I did not need.
Here, the role played by anti-communist east European refugee
intellectuals such as Frank Knopfelmacher was especially ugly. In
effect they were saying that because they and their friends had
suffered, some deservedly, under Soviet-imposed communism
back in the forties and fifties, it was quite right for Australians and
Americans to go out and kill Asians in sixties and seventies.
For me, this was a new form of obscenity.
Neither Knopfelmacher nor any of the other east European, anti-
communist émigré crowd so active in Australia at the time, knew
anything about Asia, Vietnam especially. But that did not stop
them talking, and being accepted by the conservative and
rightwing media, Quadrant especially, as experts on the subject.
Quadrant once ran a poem by the virulently anti-communist poet,
James McCauley. It spoke of the bravery and restraint of the US
and its friends as they sought to battle the dark communist menace
hiding away in the Asian jungles.
At around the same time US pilots were wiping out entire towns
and napalming villages from the safety of their high-flying B 52’s
or fast flying jets. Not much bravery or restraint there.
But for all their faults, the Quadrant/Cultural Freedom crowd did at
least show pretensions of intellectual integrity. They at least had
the honesty to admit there might be other views, and to listen to
them, even if they were not going to be persuaded.
They even managed to include me in some to their debates at the
time. My experience with the ALP had been far more
discouraging.
AN ALP EXPERIENCE
I had joined the Labour Party in the mid-sixties, in the naïve belief
that this was what an honest citizen had to do if he or she wanted
to see policy changes.
At the time the Canberra ALP branch was split fairly evenly
between left-wingers and right-wingers. But thanks to the growing
numbers of concerned anti-Vietnam War activists, the leftwing
was starting to get a majority.
Returning to Canberra after my year in Japan, I found myself deep
into branch factional politics. A national election was due. The
well-organised leftwing in the branch was determined to oppose
pre-selection for the sitting ALP member for Canberra, "Big’ Jim
Fraser, a typical ALP rightwing conservative and covert supporter
of the Vietnam War.
A key branch voting requirement had long been the need to have
attended at least three branch meetings in the year before the pre-
selection vote. Unlike the progressives and the left-wingers, most
of the right-wingers had been too lazy or apathetic to make the
three attendances. So they would automatically be disqualified
from voting. A victory for the leftwing candidate, Geoff Walsh,
seemed imminent.
But as the struggle over numbers heated up, the rightwing New
South Wales ALP executive decided to exercise its control to make
sure Fraser got re-nominated.
How? The branch also had a rule that said those members living
more than three miles from where branch meetings were held
could be exempted from the three meeting attendance quota.
Normally three miles means just that, three miles. But according to
the NSW executive, Canberra was an exception.
Why? Because in Canberra, the bus routes are notoriously
circuitous. The NSW executive promptly decreed that three miles
did not mean three miles as the crow flies but three miles as the
bus runs. Thanks to this piece of simple skullduggery, many of the
negligent right-wingers found themselves entitled to vote.
Even so, the numbers were very evenly divided. This raised the
problem of myself and Bob Gollan, an eminent leftwing ANU
political historian who was also a branch member. Both of us had
been out of Australia for much of the year, so we too had failed to
make the required three attendances.
In our cases, the bus ride would have been a lot more than three
miles. Surely we too should be allowed to vote?
Of course not. In the logic of the NSW executive, being 10,000
miles away as the airplane flies was nowhere as significant as
being more than three miles away as the bus runs.
So those apathetic right-wingers could vote, but we could not. At
around this point I decided that I did not need to waste any more
time on ALP politics.
THE LAST STRAWS
A 1969 run in with the SMH editor - the Englishman, John Pringle
— was a psychological last straw helping greatly to push me out of
Australia and its futile Vietnam debate.
Pringle had a reputation as a genuine liberal. He had published
prominently a long and agonized thinkpiece by himself in which he
called for open debate on the great issue of the day, namely
Vietnam and China.
In it he said how he too was horrified by the ugliness of the
Vietnam War. But he had then gone on to argue point by point how
Beijing’s ominously aggressive behaviour gave the world no
choice but to intervene in Indochina.
Concerned liberals had to accept this reality, he concluded. Sure
enough, the Sino-Indian dispute had pride of place in his
arguments.
I mustered all the authority and information I had to write
something that would rebut his arguments about China, point by
point. It was a topic on which I was bound to be more informed
than he was.
I told myself that if he had the integrity he claimed, he would be
willing to publish my piece. He could, of course, run his rebuttal of
my rebuttal. As I told myself at the time, if I could spark that kind
of debate in the pages of the media, there might be some point in
staying on in Australia.
But all I got was a letter, polite enough, but refusing blankly to
publish.
When Pringle retired, he went on to become the darling of
Australian progressives, with his agonizing over the environment
and other trendy leftwing issues. The Australian was to publish a
lot of his mushy wailings.
What one saw in minds like Pringle’s was the drip-drip effect of
the relentless black information activities underway at the time.
That China had attacked India in 1962, for example, had become
an item of gospel truth.
Indeed, the implication in Pringle’s letter to me was that only a
nutter or a pro-Beijing fanatic could suggest the opposite.
I blame the Current Affairs Bulletin being put out by Sydney
University for much of this black information campaign. It had
every appearance of being an impartial outlet for views and
information prepared by concerned Australian scholars. Many,
ABC commentators especially, liked to rely on it for facts and
opinions.
At the time I was puzzled by CAB’s persistent anti-communist
slant. I had no illusions about Australian scholars knowing much
about the realities of world affairs, Asian affairs especially. But
why were so many of these people so seemingly willing simply to
rehash in nicer words the crude anti-communist venom of the US
and Australian establishment?
Only later did we find that, via some anti-communist plants in
Sydney university, the CAB had become a willing channel for
covert intelligence disinformation.
Another technique was the seemingly impartial fact and
background sheets sent out privately to inform concerned
journalists and academics about Asian developments. The slanted
material would soon start appearing in allegedly objective articles
about Chinese intentions, Vietnam events, the Sino-Indian dispute
and so on.
For some reason the UK disinformation agents were especially
active and effective in this kind of activity. The British skill at
measured understatement gave their material the cloak of seeming
objectivity.
One of their larger coups was the phony Forum Features operation,
which for years was able to feed articles directly into conservative
media — the Fairfax Press in Australia especially — until it was
eventually exposed as the spy outfit it was.
Another last straw so to speak was the orchestrated persecution of
Wilfred Burchett.
That an Australian who single-handedly had made it out into the
world of international journalism and who had been on the inside
of so many crucial Cold War events, could be treated so shabbily
by his own country was for me the final proof I needed of the bias
and ignorance of what passes for informed opinion in Australia.
(for details of Burchett’s feats and sufferings, see that excellent but
largely ignored book "Burchett" edited by Ben Kiernan. Also
Burchett’s own book "At The Barricades.")
Burchett once asked me to come to Sydney testify in a defamation
case he was running against a grubby right-winger who had said he
was a KGB agent because he had lived in a luxury Moscow
apartment for a time. I had seen the apartment and I knew it was
not luxury.
Burchett was also able to find the evidence needed to refute the
other allegations of KGB agent activities.
But the right-winger was able to win the case by claiming
parliamentary privilege. The burden of court costs was unfairly
imposed on Burchett. This forced him to become a refugee from
his own country, till his death in 1980.
One of Burchett’s bitterest enemies and public critics was the
journalist, Denis Warner. He liked to pillory Burchett for help he
got from the communist side in covering events — help that was
often the only way the world could get to know something about
the other, and often the more legitimate, side of the many Cold
War disputes and wars raging at the time.
But the same Warner himself made no secret of the help he got
from the US and Australian side in providing us with his gung-ho
accounts of Vietnam.
While working in EA I had noticed a strange thing about Warner
and the several other conservative journalists claiming to cover
Asian developments and dominating the media mainstream at the
time -Peter Hastings of the SMH, for example.
Often memos from the spies in Melbourne would cross our desks
saying that a reliable Australian contact would be visiting such-
and-such Asian country, and did we have any intelligence requests
for him.
Sure enough, a week or so later one or other of these worthies
would turn up in said country and begin filing his allegedly
objective reports for his media outlets.
But I divert, again.
As the autumn colors began once again to creep over Canberra, I
found myself still chained to a desk, still trying to finish up a
thesis, and still trying single-handedly to fight the anti-Vietnam
War war.
I was exhausted. In a bit over four years I had taught myself
economics and Japanese. I had published what even the critics
conceded was a serious and important book. I had organised
myself into Japan. I had almost completed a difficult PhD thesis. I
had done everything I could possibly do to follow my conscience
over Vietnam.
And the net result? Being increasingly labeled as a dangerous
activist and trouble-maker (another favorite Australian term with
strong Japanese overtones).
A key memory at the time was a warm, late summer’s day at a
South Coast beach. I was with R, who had helped me so much, not
just to get the book written and type up my thesis, but also to
adjust back into Canberra after Japan.
A few people were swimming and sunbathing happily on the beach
below us. As I looked over the bucolic scene, I could not help
thinking of the people in Vietnam who had just suffered another
gloating US B.52 bombing the night before.
Did those sunbathers feel the slightest responsibility for the
destruction and killing their nation was helping to cause to the
people of another nation? . Did they know or care? Of course not.
They were too busy enjoying Australia’s natural beauty, and
indulging in the great Australian apathy.
At that moment, the beauty died, and with it something inside me.
On the drive back to Canberra I tried to explain it all to R. But
even she could not understand. I knew then that I had to get out of
this country.
The one thing that worried me was how Heinz would react to my
leaving. He had done everything he could to encourage and defend
me over the years. In a sense I would be betraying him, despite my
promise to try to finish the thesis in Japan.
He was abroad when I told the ANU of my plans. I am told he was
furious when he learned what I had done.
But years later we got to see a lot of each other, both in Australia
and Japan. We stayed friends and often corresponded.
For some reason, he was especially keen to write about my father’s
contribution to early economic theory. As a European intellectual,
maybe he at least was able to feel twinges of guilt over past
behaviour?
************************
And so, on a bright early winter morning in mid-1969 I set out by
car from Canberra to begin a new career in the offices of The
Australian in Sydney. Just how new and different that career was
to be was something I was soon to discover.
Next: Part Five: Trying to Become a Journalist in Japan
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