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Friday, 7 September 2007

SPECIAL REPORT...

History rerun - Sydney's Radical Past Revisited

Photography, paranoia and police spies

Guilty on the last charge, innocent on the first, I responded.

Perhaps it was because Keith and I had remained friends that he confided this news to me. After all, we had both been in the same class at high school.

Gould and the Percy's were well aware that Resistance might be infiltrated by police spies and they should have expected government authorities charged with maintaining national security to take an interest in fringe political groups, especially those, like Resistance, that were increaasng their public influence. The Cold War had divided the world into opposing Eastern and Western camps. In the West there a was suspicion of leftist groups even if, like the New Left, they distanced themselves from the Eastern Bloc.

Only later did I learn that members of the NSW Police Special Branch kept a watching brief on some Resistance members. The information came from the director of a company I was working for.

Getting into trouble with photography

It was the flags I first noticed, red and black in a diagonal pattern. I had no idea what they represented, so I wandered over to the corner of Hyde Park they where they were concentrated. These flags, I soon learned, were a symbol of anarchism.

On the edge of the park an orderly group of about fifty young people stood below the flags and the banners, some handing out leaflets. Others carried placards denouncing the war in Vietnam.

Approaching the edge of the group, I lifted my camera and made an exposure, wound on another frame and took several more, moving in close and making sure I framed the figures with the banners flying above them.

I was concentrating on getting the images when I became aware of someone standing beside me. "Do you remember me?" the figure asked. "Keith James. We were in the same class at Brisbane State High". I looked, thought for a minute, then recognition dawned. Yes, it was Keith. My hesitation at recognising him was due to his changed appearance. Gone was the clean-cut look of a Brisbane high school student. Keith was now bearded, his hair tousled. Like me, Keith had drifted south to Sydney. We talked awhile about his opposition to the Vietnam war, then he suggested we meet the next weekend at a bookshop on Goulburn Street.

There had been no inkling of an interest in politics when I knew him as a student. Keith did not give any indication that he would become a rebel; he was an average type of character for what was a selective and somewhat pretentious high school. There, we had been more interested in the Beatles and Rolling Stones than is some far-away war starting up somewhere in Asia that we had never heard of. Not that we heard very much of Asia at all, Australia's focus was still on the UK and the only thing we knew of Asia was something to do with indonesian President Sukharno's policy of confrontation with the new state of Malaysia. We knew of that because Australian troops were engaged in combat against Indonesian infiltrators in Borneo.

Australia committed troops to Vietnam in 1966. I had become aware of the war after moving to Sydney. It was getting increasing coverage in the press and the work of war photographers was starting to appear. My father had made me aware that there were such things as photojournalists when he told me about Damien Parrer, the Australian photographer who covered the New Guinea campaign of World War Two. That had been after I developed an interest in photography in high school.

It remains a mystery how those influences interacted to give me the idea of packing a few clothes, cameras and film and taking a flight to Saigon. This I considered but I did not act. Instead, I ended up photographing the opposition to the war.

As arranged, I met Keith the next weekend at the place he had invited me to - the Third World Bookshop, then occupying the small shopfront of 35 Goulburn Street.

I started to go to the bookshop on weekends. Resistance offered the attraction of interesting photographic subject matter. At the time I did not know about the rich history of documentary photography and was not aware that was what I was doing. I started to photograph the life around Resistance and the demonstrations it organised. No-one objected but it was because of this that I came to be suspected of being a police agent.

When Keith broke the news that the leadership suspected me of being a spy, I recalled that nobody asked me what I did with the photos. It would have been a natural enough question in the circumstances. Maybe the question would have been pointless anyway. Had I indeed been gathering information about the organisation I would clearly have denied it if asked. Neither Gould nor the Percy's had any evidence that I was engaged in such activities; if they had I would have been thrown out... maybe they were just unsure. I was told later by a Resistance insider that while they suspected me, my behaviour was never fully consistent with the role of spy.

Third world bookshop versus the censors

My room in the boarding house just down the road from the Goulburn Street premises overlooked the street. Looking out one morning I saw a couple police vehicles parked outside the bookshop.

Something was going on. I grabbed my camera and rushed across the street to find plain clothed police stacking cartons of books into their vehicles. I started to photograph, moving in close, focusing, shooting, winding on. I carried on this way as a few of the people who had been working in the bookshop were marched out to the vehicles. This done, the police thought it a good idea to take me along as well, so into a vehicle I was bundled. Later, when I was handed my camera back at the police station, I found that it had been opened and the film exposed to light. Predictable, I thought, ruining the evidence that they had acted without a warrant.

The raid was the result of Gould's anti-censorship stance. There would be other raids and Gould would exploit them by attracting media coverage. Gould believed that any publicity, as the saying goes, was good publicity. And it was. The state's antedeluvian censorship laws were to be tested and, finallly, liberalised. It would soon be legal to read Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Shadow on Goulburn Street

I had spent the Sunday afternoon at the bookshop and, late in the afternoon I left to go home. Setting off along George Street towards the Eastern Suburbs bus stop at Hyde Park I glanced behind me for some reason. There in the distance was a figure somehow familiar. I moved on, surruptitiously looking back a couple times to see the figure still going in my direction but keeping its distance. Then I realised it was Keith James.

I wondered where he was off to, then it dawned on me that Gould or the Percy brothers had sent Keith to follow me to see where I went. I wonder what they thought when Keith returned to tell him that all I had done was catch a bus rather than make contact with some secretive agency.

I never mentioned the incident to Keith, nor did he say anything about it to me although I think he knew that I had caught him out.

More spies

There were other suspects, of course, and Chinese Jeff was one. On weekends he would put in a few hours at the bookshop at 20a. A young man of Chinese descent, Jeff didn't participate in Resistance activities to any significant extent and was not a core politico, something that might be expected of a police informant.

I became aware that he was suspect - rightly or wrongly - when, one Saturday evening when I was in the bookshop and Jeff was minding the till, Gould took me aside to tell me that Jeff was a spy. Keep an eye on him, he said.

Such was the paranoia of the place. Sure, it was low level but it was constant. I imagine that the real spies went undetected, for surely there must have been informers reporting back to their masters on the activities of a bunch of New Left revolutionaries.

>>> next: Goulburn Street - the place