Afghanistan: Inside Australia’s War looks at our longest campaign

A new documentary delves into the memories of survivors of Australia’s longest military encounter.

Image supplied for Afghanistan: Inside Australia's War Supplied by ABC TV Caption: Helicopters from the 86th airborne, a United States unit, provide eyes in the sky as Australian soldiers patrol in the Mirabad Valley Region. Mid Caption: A major operation conducted by Australian and Afghan National Army (ANA) Forces has experienced success, uncovering a significant number of caches to the east of Tarin Kowt, Oruzgan Province, Southern Afghanistan. Twenty-three caches have been found since the operation began on the 1st of January. The contents included Improvised Explosive Device (IED) components, rocket propelled grenades, mortars, home-made explosive and thousands of rounds of small arms ammunition. MRTF-2 Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Hocking, said like the caches located in December, these latest finds are helping to save lives. Deep Caption: Operation SLIPPER is Australia's military contribution to the international campaign against terrorism, piracy and improving maritime security. Under this operation our forces contribute to the efforts of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) - led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. ISAF seeks to bring security, stability and prosperity to Afghanistan and aims to prevent Afghanistan again becoming a safe haven for international terrorists. Operation SLIPPER also supports the United States led International Coalition Against Terrorism (ICAT) in the broader Middle East. Image supplied by Seven Network

You may remember the controversial documentary Leaky Boat from that elegant but piercingly determined director Victoria Midwinter-Pitt that took us back to the winter of 2001, when the crew of the Norwegian tanker Tampa pulled 438 refugees from a distressed fishing vessel in international waters.

The boarding of the vessel by Australian special forces, on orders from the top, led to the so-called Pacific Solution whereby asylum-seekers were taken to Nauru, where their refugee status was considered rather than in Australia.

Written and directed by Midwinter-Pitt, Leaky Boat is a suave essay on the physics of power, calmly and impassively dealing with ambiguities and political conundrums, a story told through the testimonies of those who were there. The same is true of her latest and certainly most ambitious project, Afghanistan: Inside Australia’s War, a comprehensive three-hour examination of the ground war in that land that sits on the fault line of empires and its successes and failures — as well as a reflection on why we find ourselves today battling terrorism on so many fronts, and why no one seems to have a clue what to do about it.

“Australians carry our memory of war with a special reverence, a passion, yet few of us know little about the longest war we’ve fought,” says her narrator, Dan Wyllie, an astute youthful choice with just the right edge of irony in his voice. “This war is not an event of distant memory — it’s the most recent one, one in many ways we’re still fighting.”

And again, given the divisive nature of the series, its frank expose of political chicanery and moral panic, Midwinter-Pitt gives us a three-hour film that is also unexpectedly moving. This beautifully crafted piece of complex documentary filmmaking will haunt you for days.

Midwinter-Pitt and her producers and researchers embarked on an epic process where about 500 people who fought that war on the ground sat down for long hours to share their experiences, conversation that began with a clear understanding that this would be a warts-and-all portrait of the war and the people who fought it and those who sent them to die.

Most of what we read and hear about the conflict in Afghanistan focuses on politics, strategy and the fruitless outcome, but this series is interested in more than the abstractions, the slogans and self-justification after the fact.

Midwinter-Pitt is more concerned with the men the politicians sent away to do their dirty work and the combatants’ observations in hindsight. (One of the most telling comments in the first episode is from John Howard at the time: “I didn’t want us to be just another name on the list; I was determined that we would have a meaningful role.” A captain’s choice perhaps?) What they tell us is not what one really expects — these are intelligent and observant soldiers. “There are a lot of answers in fighting,” one says. “There’s a lot of powerful information, a lot of emotion; it’s all very honest, very true.” Another says, “I want to remember; instead of trying to forget, instead of having a nightmare, I was going to have a memory.”

Midwinter-Pitt takes us on a series of journeys with the elite soldiers of the Perth-based Special Air Service, there from the start, into a universe so alien to us it may as well be a planet in a distant solar system. As one combatant puts it: “Like a biblical experience with guns, that’s what Afghanistan was like.”

It was a war where the soldiers found it almost impossible to find anyone to fight, where everyone had a gun and anyone could be the enemy, and where, as another soldier says, “all the hills have eyes”. The most common refrain, even from the hardest of grunts, was: “Where are they all?” This was one of the strangest and most surreal conflicts in the history of war, the weirdness and unreality testified to by the cast of ordinary and extraordinary Afghans Midwinter-Pitt interviews as well, from warlords, to ex-Taliban soldiers to mothers and taxi drivers who saw the war from a different angle.

It’s also a privileged inside look at the nature of soldiering itself — real life, that is, not the romanticised fictional version we see so often in movies — those virtues of loyalty, inter-reliance, co-operation that can’t be easily found in modern society. There’s even a sense that some of these men still hanker for the experience of the hard times (all interviewed say they would go back), not the danger or loss but the closeness and emotional support, and the way that personal interest is subsumed into group atten­tiveness because personal existence is not possible without group survival.

Midwinter-Pitt breaks her narrative into chapters, each one tellingly titled — The Message of the Bomb, The Sound of a Proper War, The Next Job and so on — a neat, stylish way to break the story into set pieces, intercut with the highly structured interviews shot in extreme close-up from different perspectives and angles.

She’s expert at what she once called “the quick zap of the sensory experience of confinement, panic, struggle, violence and distress”. Possessing a gift as a director for fine compositions, and with fine collaborators in her camera team of Paul Costello and Mathew Sweeney, ­Midwinter-Pitt always seeks a lyrical quality to the images — even in the most extreme situations of stress and conflict.

The early scenes of the SAS motoring into deadly Kandahar province edited from unique helmet-cam footage — was this Australia’s first self-shot war? — are beautifully realised, leading us into the strategic confusion, individual heroism and massive firepower of Operation Anaconda, the biggest battle of the war.

Ultimately, as Midwinter-Pitt suggests, the story these men and women have to tell is universal: it could be coming from the trenches of France, or it could be Troy. “The pity and the humanity distilled in war are timeless. And this was our guiding principle — mine, the crew’s and the soldiers and Afghans who came to tell their stories: to make a document of what happened, for the sheer sake of bearing witness and remembering.”

There was always a quaint unexpectedness about Ian “Molly” Meldrum — you just never knew just what was going to come out of his mouth. Neither, it would seem, did he. And obviously he still doesn’t know. For all the madness and chaos that surrounded him when he first came to our screens back in the early 1970s on Countdown and quickly became one of the most powerful TV presenters in the world — and one of the most unlikely — there was a saving impudence, a resilient independence. He could bluff his way out of any situation by convincingly assuming the pose of an expert in his craft — though what determined that craft was always hard to fathom. He was the ultimate fan.

As Molly, Seven’s terrific two-part series, celebrated — First Watch’s deadlines and Seven’s withholding the finished edit until the last minute meant I couldn’t review it in concert — he wasn’t merely a funny man with a crowd of three million a week but became a popular hero in his own right, a champion of the local voice in music, a clown who resisted authority and the dull rules of everyday life. To his vast audience he seemed to reside on some distant, happier planet, some giant green room full of famous faces, bodies in various stages of undress, where the liquor never stopped flowing and an orgy was just about to begin.

His secret was that whatever level of sophistication he aspired to in his utterances about music he was always the naive schoolboy to whom mischief meant unlimited joy. His stolid frame resisted the facile pathos of the little man cliche — there was also something priapic about him, a leering lasciviousness he could never quite control — but the air of battered innocence made it inevitable that a sense of pathos always surrounded him.

In this fine production from Michael Gudinski’s Mushroom Pictures, the little used but accomplished actor Samuel Johnson got Meldrum just right, especially that face, that extraordinarily plastic visage: at once innocent as a baby and as astute and devious as the most prosperous of music agents, a face that through the glint of an eye and the slightest flicker of a smile could melt the most frigid audiences.

It was said of the old vaudeville comic Sid Field that he only had to wink with the side of his mouth to be funny, and Molly has the same gift — still, but only just it seems — and Johnson nailed it in an at times absorbingly touching performance.

Afghanistan: Inside Australia’s War, Tuesday, 8.30pm, ABC.