50 years of the Lost Patrol

FOUR Corners notches up a half century of holding a mirror to Australian society. The results reflect well on the original vision.

Four Corners

FOUR Corners notches up a half century of holding a mirror to Australian society. The results reflect well on the original vision.

FOR an audience, watching the social changes unfold is fascinating, but also the way the reporters dug so deep to discern the way things were changing, and the way they reported them; their investigations into what was happening, things we didn't know about." Producer Deborah Masters is talking about her special 50 Years Four Corners, which celebrates the anniversary this week of the flagship program that first appeared on Saturday, August 19, 1961.

With veteran Four Corners editor Alec Cullen, Masters had the task of selecting and editing highlights from among the 2000-odd programs Four Corners has broadcast, finding broad themes to sort through some extraordinary archival material. They came up with crime and corruption, social change, indigenous affairs, war and conflict, immigration and politics, with cultural change threaded through them all. Hundreds of thousands of images had to be found, watched, assessed and somehow assimilated.

Cullen, who has been working on Four Corners footage for more than 30 years, seems to recall every moment of every show, still has a kind of logbook, and even knows why certain segments were cut from the show at different times.

Four Corners has detonated controversies, and been loathed by both main political parties for its iconoclasm and usually rigorous clear thinking, and also for its obsessive, maverick, smartarse reporters.

Cullen says the program's musical theme for the first decades was called Lost Patrol, recorded as a B side by British group John Keating and the Z Men -- the A side being the theme for television series Z Cars. For many years, the team of ABC journalists, after a few beers, liked to refer to themselves as "the Lost Patrol", such was the antagonism they faced inside and outside the public broadcaster. The wall facing Cullen's editing suite is lined with decades of fading colour photographs documenting their obvious long and emotional parties and their story is a separate narrative of excitement, distress and manic anxiety.

The 50-minute program highlights the passion of Four Corners, its determined current affairs journalism and the way the long-running show has created so many stories that have found their way to the centre of public life in this country.

"The most extraordinary thing about this opportunity to look at 50 years is the social mirror aspect of the journey, and it's really visible here, unlike many programs that trace history," Masters says intently. "Because it's investigative journalism, you are right in there, the images so stark and arresting." And she's right; you watch her special a little astonished at the intensity of the social reporting, as well as at the sheer guilelessness of those being reported in the first decades.

"TV was only six years old, so people said what they thought; there was no spin," Masters says, a sense of astonishment in her voice at the artlessness of 1960s Australia.

She believes the focus on investigation has made Four Corners an important document of Australian social history because it asked questions that couldn't be asked in a documentary format: "The program has never gone to places as a documentary-maker objectively recording but as an investigator driving questions, trying to answer something for the audience."

But the Four Corners journey was often difficult and almost didn't happen. The program somehow emerged from a management culture that was almost paranoid in its fear that the ABC's integrity might be corrupted by the glamour and magnetism of visually illustrating news stories. The issue quickly refined itself into one about subjectivity and the nature of interpretive investigation, which continues, often viciously, to this day.

Myths still surround Four Corners' beginnings but the program was the brainchild of humanist left-winger Robert Raymond, who became the first executive producer, and Michael Charlton, with managerial support from ABC TV boss Clem Semmler.

Their concept was to create a weekly TV program that would reflect events within Australia and the wider world. Raymond became the first executive producer and former cricket commentator Charlton its first reporter. And their constant shadowy companion through the first years was ASIO, galvanised by a government, which loathed Four Corners, to investigate and monitor subversion in the ABC.

Four Corners went to air at 8.30 on that first Saturday night, with one production assistant, a sound recordist, an editor and an assistant. Charlton was in full flight, urbane, detached and resonant, talking to astronaut Scott Carpenter on his way to Western Australia for an Atlas Mercury test, followed by a report on the anniversary of the Japanese surrender in 1945, Panorama's Ludovic Kennedy on the closure of the East Berlin border, and an interview with harmonica player Larry Adler.

It closed with the ABC's ubiquitous street interviewer Keith Smith, who wandered around, microphone in hand, asking people how they felt about things.

Four Corners quickly built up an accurate index to the issues of the time: the bomb, the UN, the Australian expatriate, Italian migrants, space, the pill, teenagers (very popular), gang bangs (also very popular) and the sound of the Australian accent. "The way we saw ourselves began to be shaped through the eyes of journalists and even though it was a magazine program with very many items and was still derivative of British programs, it began to create its own dynamic," Masters says.

Three weeks after the show went to air, in August 1961, Raymond and Charlton took Four Corners' cameras to an area few white Australians had seen: the appalling conditions at Box Ridge Aboriginal reserve near Casino in northern NSW. An elderly man living there made the observation that they weren't living in a democracy: "An Aboriginal kiddie born here is not a citizen of Australia." It was a shock and a revelation; such images had never been brought to the living rooms of middle Australia.

"That was what really changed the program from going out on the streets and doing stories on teenage idols and pop music and Russian astronauts to an investigation into what mattered," Masters says. "We had no idea whatsoever that these things went on."

Soon the direction of Four Corners altered, evolving a form of TV investigative journalism that so often has given voice to those with few opportunities and the most to lose, and developed stories that awakened public interest, which in some cases led to changes in public policy and the law.

And, as Masters's and Cullen's program shows, it went on, somehow, for five decades. There is no narration as such, though the program is elegiacally introduced by Kerry O'Brien. Instead images and clips are overlaid, one on the other, a cumulative and kaleidoscopic sense of a narrative unfolding, quickly and viscerally, as we zigzag through time following Masters's themes. The talking heads, all of whom have a personal connection to the featured stories or are, in fact, the protagonists, add to the rhythm of the narrative rather than impeding the flow, in an alternation of history and immediacy.

In its way it's a meditation about nationhood, nostalgia, morality, loss and politics, often funny, frequently moving and occasionally shocking, particularly in its revelations of the state of indigenous life in the early 70s, showing how we have changed and how TV journalism has evolved.

As viewers, many of us love Four Corners; we've lived with it almost since TV started. We've grown up with its investigations and their often toxic political and legal fallout: all those stories that have reflected and shaped our collective memory.

I can still remember Chris Masters saying that successfully defending the defamation actions arising from the Moonlight State program in May 1987 that investigated Queensland police corruption and ended the reign of Joh Bjelke-Petersen had taken longer than the reform process the program instigated. Chris Masters never seemed to be out of court throughout his years there. But I remember, too, him saying, in that exasperated fashion of his, that after six weeks' work on a story, hoping to convey layered nuance on the complex politics of water salinity, a viewer would complain about his shirt.

As viewers we voyeuristically delight in the legal and political stinks the program has endured, the heavy-handed interference, the shrill, almost comic, conservative commentary that still sees ABC reporters as Bolsheviks; we remember past controversies and remain protective of Four Corners' legacy.

Four Corners is still chasing stories that embarrass influential people and institutions and it's a show that gives a sense as we watch that we can have some revenge through its investigations for the indignities thrust on us by the powerful. Up to a point we can appreciate how those senior managers or the politically appointed ABC board are often uncomfortable about Four Corners' maverick reporters of the Lost Patrol but still hope they will have the courage to be disliked from time to time and stand up for crusading journalism. God knows we are living in times when journalism needs its good name back.

DOING investigations of a different kind is English writer Jimmy McGovern, author of Cracker and The Street, and now Accused, in which he examines why so many working class lives seem only a few short steps from tragedy. McGovern turns his hard eye on six individual defendants who are each facing a judge and jury, but for very different reasons.

As each hour-long episode unfolds, viewers learn about their alleged crime and get the chance to decide whether they are innocent, guilty or somewhere between. The series is compelling, confronting and unremitting in intensity, as you expect from this grim, politically committed writer.

The Street was certainly full-on, even from a writer such as McGovern, who has left few social issues untouched in a long career, whether it's the demise of socialism, the decline of religion or the terrors of the Irish Troubles. Stylistically, McGovern blended the serial structure of soap opera, and its seemingly eternal suspension of narrative resolution, with the voyeurism and intuitive awkwardness of reality TV. He does a similar thing in Accused, the style at times almost observational documentary in director David Baird's hands.

McGovern says The Street was based on the idea that you can walk down any road full of houses and knock on any door and there will be a story. Accused is just as abrupt in its storytelling; no one punches into the heart of a scene like McGovern.

"In the time it takes to climb the steps of the court, we tell the story of how the accused came to be there," he says. "We see the crime and we see the punishment; nothing else." He resolutely, almost defiantly, eschews all the traditional cliches of police and courtroom dramas. "No procedure, thanks very much, no coppers striding along corridors with coats flapping. Just crime and punishment, the two things that matter most in any crime drama."

Writing from harsh Liverpool Catholic roots, he's more interested in the moral dilemmas and the consequences of mistakes, unwise choices and personal weakness.

In the first episode, Willy's Story, plumber Willy Houlihan (Christopher Eccleston) is all set to leave his family for his girlfriend Michelle (Emma Fensom) but, after finding pound stg. 20,000 in the back of a taxi and doubling it at the casino, he's determined to return it. He learns, however, that the owners of the money beat up and killed the taxi driver, the notes are counterfeit and no one believes him. Now he's in the dock waiting for the jury to decide his fate.

"All good writing comes from an examination of conscience," McGovern said at a screenwriters conference I attended recently. "Examine your conscience as finely as a Catholic does: you'll find evil in everything." And this: "Every writer should be accused of needing a psychologist; to write about a rapist, find the rapist in you, the child abuser, the killer."

Watching him speak was a much of an ordeal as watching his dramas; no one dissects with such chilling authenticity the sheer fragility of our lives. Few TV writers can awaken that shiver of self-recognition: the "there's-a-bit-of-me-in-this" that comes from the most perceptive writing.

His characters expose their betrayals, uncertainties and self-mistrust with sincerity, painfully at times, sometimes comically, though there are few laughs in Accused. Whenever I steel myself to watch him, I always think his writing is like the reverse of that set of Chinese boxes that you keep opening, only to find a smaller one inside. He starts with the small -- the package of flaws, the impulsive responses and personal weaknesses -- and finds a larger container that slowly fills with a sense of terrible domestic tragedy.

50 Years Four Corners, Monday, 8.30pm, ABC1 abc.net.au/4corners/50years
Accused, Friday, 9.30pm, ABC1