Aftermath
The spark
I was the only journalist present when the bus was run off the road in Walgett. I had the recordings. I had a scoop. But the ABC didn't want to know. They would suppress the recordings for thirteen years.
When the Freedom Ride began I had been in the ABC less than a year. After some training in radio I was working as the researcher for Four Corners, but still classified as a trainee. I asked to cover the Freedom Ride for radio, and was refused. However I was due three days off and I asked if I could take this leave, plus two days on ABC time. This was agreed - I had five days off, plus the weekends, giving me nine days. The Freedom Ride was to take fourteen.
Shortly after the bus was run off the road in Walgett, I telephoned the ABC newsroom with the story. They were not interested in taking any details from me, but did telephone the police and ran a brief report quoting the police.With ABC News seemingly uninterested, I contacted the ABC Talks Department where I worked. With little enthusiasm, they agreed to take a two minute report from me in Moree, containing actuality recordings of the Walgett events. No one explained the lack of enthusiasm for what was to be front page news for the next ten days, but I finally twigged when my report was broadcast that night. I was described as "one of the students" - the ABC didn't want to own me.
There was a real conflict of interest issue here. I was an ABC journalist and I had gone on the Freedom Ride, albeit mostly in my own time, with ABC agreement. I was also a part time student, and a member of SAFA. I held the biased view that it was wrong to discriminate against people on the basis of race. My real crime, of course, was not being biased against racism, but making my view public. No one in the ABC wanted to face the issue, and find a way of dealing with it. It was felt best to sweep it under the carpet.
Meanwhile the other major news outlets leapt at the story. The Daily Mirror sent reporter Gerry Stone and photographer Neville Whitmarsh to join the bus. Channel 7 sent Peter Westaway and a film crew. The Sydney Morning Herald reporter who joined the bus won a Walkley Award for his coverage. The ABC ignored me. While apparently dissatisfied with my objectivity and professionalism, they did not bother to send a more experienced and more 'objective' reporter.
With my leave running out, I asked to allowed to remain until the conclusion of the bus trip. Absolutely not. I was told to report for duty at 0900 Monday morning without fail. I left the bus at Moree and caught the train back to Sydney.
I returned with a box full of tape recordings. I asked to be allowed to make them into a radio documentary. No, you're too inexperienced, I was told. I read this as code for "your're biased". OK, I said, let someone more experience make a program from the raw material I have collected. No, it's old news now, was the reply.
In my own time I did compile the tapes, more as a chronology of the Freedom Ride than as a radio documentary in the normal sense. The program sat in my bottom draw for thirteen years. Years later, when it was no longer politics, but safely into the category of history, it would become one of the ABC's most often repeated radio programs.
By 1978 I was head of the Talks Deparment in Melbourne. One day one of the broadcasters came to me with a problem. Several items had fallen out of her program at the last minute, and she needed help in finding replacement material. I asked her what she still had in the program. She said she was due to record an Aboriginal activist visiting Melbourne, but that was her only item. We discussed some other story ideas, and then I mentioned my Freedom Ride program. I said that an excerpt from that program might go well with her interview. I gave her a copy, and left it up to her.
When she interviewed the Aboriginal activist, she played an excerpt from the program to him. He said that the Freedom Ride was the event that changed his life. She was speaking to Lyall Munro Jr from Moree. Thirteen years earlier, aged 14, he had been one of the children taken to swim in the Moree baths.
Munro explained the impact of the Freedom Ride on him and his community. They had always realised the injustice of their treatment, but that was all they had ever known. That was just the way things were. You can't fight City Hall. Then the students came, and the ban was lifted. City Hall, in the person of the Moree Council, had backed down. When the students left, the ban came back. But it was too late. Lyall Munro and his friends had seen that change was possible. Now they would lead the struggle. A spark had started a bushfire.
