The Marmalade Files (14 page)

It was the most powerful television network in the land, controlled by a small clique of ego-driven men. And one token woman. On this crisp Tuesday morning, the board of Network Seven was holding a special meeting in its Sydney boardroom, the chairman ringing in from Venice where he and wife number four were attending the Biennale.

It was the middle of the night in Europe but this hook-up was worth every lost minute of sleep and every euro. Seven was sitting on the biggest television scoop of the year, and it was determined to milk every last opportunity, and advertising dollar, from it.

A team of network specialists had been flown to Canberra from Sydney, taking over a half-dozen suites at the Hyatt. The bar tab alone would be enough to feed a small army. But this was of little concern as preparations began for the
Morning Glory
live broadcast from Catriona Bailey's hospital bed.

The first ‘teaser' for the public was an appearance by Peter Thompson, the darling of breakfast television, making a pilgrimage to the hospital. They had filmed him standing solemnly beside Bailey's bed, patting her hand – the soft touch of a hardened professional.

‘It's great to see you again,' he whispered. ‘Blink if you're happy to see us.'

The camera was tight on Bailey's face. She blinked. The news that night showed what might have been a tear easing from the corner of Thommo's eye. He smiled and whispered: ‘Thank you. The
Morning Glory
family is thinking of you and praying for you.'

It was pure TV gold and it ran, relentlessly, as a network promo.

Seven's ratings were piling ever higher as Thommo, working both ends of the day, reported every detail for the masses. The network's 6 p.m. numbers reached an unheard of two million by the end of the first week. Over at Ten and Nine, executives were having multiple seizures of their own.

John James, a private hospital, had agreed to the Seven Network's request to set up a room for the live broadcast after Canberra Hospital had said no. It was fitted out with the latest state-of-the-art medical equipment, overseen by the best medical staff money could buy. Seven spent an equally obscene amount fitting the room out as a television studio.

Friday night's news devoted several precious minutes to Bailey's transfer from Canberra Hospital to the more luxurious private suite a few kilometres away. But everything was being geared towards the live breakfast broadcast slated for Monday,
1 August. Entertainment pundits predicted an unprecedented audience when
Morning Glory
rose that day.

Medical, technical and computer experts had been hired by Seven to research and understand Bailey's condition, so that come the day of the program the best possible technology would be on hand to let Bailey communicate both with Thompson and, if possible, directly with the audience. The network's head of technology, a geeky spiv known as Spider, had even invented HospCam.

Part of the reason the network had delayed the interview was that Bailey had to be tutored in the use of a miraculous tool called Dasher, developed by David MacKay, a Professor of Physics at Cambridge, using probability to make a computer system that did away with the keyboard. Its humble looks belied its genius.

The Dasher screen showed a simple yellow page with colour-coded letters of the alphabet lined up on the right-hand side: ‘A' at the top and ‘Z' at the bottom. As the cursor moved towards a letter, the letter would begin to jostle forward, as if the cursor was a magnet attracting a pin.

Once the first letter was selected the program began to predict what would come next: combinations of letters would appear behind the first, with the most likely growing in size near the cursor. Once the first word was selected the combinations would grow to include whole words. So if you selected ‘Hello', for instance, the words ‘how' and ‘are' and ‘you' would start to pour from the right of the screen.

Given the program worked by slight movements of a cursor, it was not a huge leap to make it respond to eye movements.

But Bailey had more problems than most in mastering the technology because her vocabulary was so eclectic and her style so verbose. She was a diligent student, though, and after five painstaking days she could write 140 characters a minute.

And then it struck one of the Seven producers. That was enough to Twitter!

It is the dead hour, the time when everything finally rests. Between 3 and 4 a.m. most of those who inhabit the night have gone home and those who begin early are yet to rise. And those who lie awake fill the void with their hopes and fears.

Martin Toohey had few hopes and his many fears often kept him from sleep. So he was familiar with this dead spot in the Canberra night. He strained to hear a single note of human activity outside. But there was nothing: no cars on Adelaide Avenue, no voices in the distance, just the soft breathing of his wife beside him and the creaks of a Lodge that had seen many sleepless Prime Ministers.

Toohey stared across the room to the dim rectangle of light that sketched the bedroom door. He half-expected to see the silhouette of his dad, Alby: cigarette in mouth, holy water in hand, casting some drops towards his bed as spiritual armoury against the night.

Toohey had sometimes fought with his father but always loved him. He had envied Alby's unshakable faith, his sense of certainty about the way things were and the way a man should act. His unfettered belief in the power of his God, the love of his family, the might of his union and the right of his football team.

Alby was a painter, an organiser for the Operative Painters and Decorators Union of Australia and, to his core, Irish Catholic. He was appalled by the rise of Communism in the unions, so when the Labor split came in 1955 he cast his lot with the Democratic Labor Party. It divided Labor for a generation. Martin Toohey remembered leaving church, still dressed as an altar boy, to hand out DLP how-to-vote cards, and being spat on by the ALP faithful.

It was his father's faith that led Toohey to believe he was called to the priesthood. He left home for a Sydney seminary just months after graduating from high school. But, during sleepless nights out of Alby's orbit, Toohey began to doubt the God of his father: a God he couldn't see and didn't feel. In the dark, doubt gnawed at his soul.

It wasn't just by night that Toohey's faith began to take a different path to Alby's. A decade earlier the Catholic Church had been traumatised and revolutionised by the Second Vatican Council and the seminary Toohey joined had embraced the change.

So Toohey was exposed to the unorthodox ideas of Latin American Liberation theology. Priests like Gustavo Gutiérrez would help shape his attitude to how a Christian should act in the world. He became convinced that preaching salvation in the next
life was meaningless without fighting for justice in this one. Had Alby known just what his son was learning at the seminary he would have been appalled by the Marxism at its core.

Happily, Alby didn't know and his pride in having a student priest for a son was unbounded. He adored his oldest boy and wanted the best for him, so he tried to mask the disappointment when, three years later, Toohey came home to Geelong and announced he was leaving the seminary.

Back home Toohey quickly converted to a different faith. At RMIT he immersed himself in Labor politics. The young man who wanted to build a better world found a different set of tools. And politics came easily to him. He had all the natural gifts – he was tall, good-looking, bright, passionate and articulate – and he made an impression early. Martin Toohey was marked for great things.

And he would achieve great things, but he swiftly discovered the original sin that stained his earthly faith was compromise. There was no purity in politics. Alby's faith could remain untainted; Martin Toohey's could not. But Toohey consoled himself that the compromises were small and convinced himself that when he was in a position to make real change he would.

But that day never came.

Toohey glanced at the bedside clock as it ticked off another minute of his existence: 3.35 a.m.

And the last twelve months, when he stood at the pinnacle of political success, had been the worst of all. He had not wanted to kill a Prime Minister to be Prime Minister and he feared the blood of Catriona Bailey would never wash from his hands. He
knew the Australian people could never understand, or forgive, what seemed from afar to be an unprovoked act of political brutality.

The election had been a disaster, leaving him with a stench of illegitimacy he could not shake. And because every government decision had to be negotiated with the crossbench he looked weak. Worst of all, the deal he had signed with the Greens, against the advice of Papadakis, was turning into an unmitigated disaster: all upside for them, all downside for Labor. The only bright spot in the whole sorry mess was that the Opposition was hopelessly divided.

The office of Prime Minister had not hung so low in one hundred and ten years of Federation. The compromises Toohey had to make now were the most painful of his entire political life. And that destroyed his confidence and robbed him of his political gifts.

Some commentators now claimed Toohey was a more robotic and less effective communicator than the appalling Bailey. Worst of all, the party's pollsters had begun to worry aloud that people had stopped listening to him. If that was true, then there could be no coming back.

If the Opposition ever got its act together his government was dead. The only question was when it would be buried.

One clue, just a single clue. Harry Dunkley leaned back in his chair in his Perth hotel room, arms folded behind his head, and laughed. Heartily. It was so simple in the end. A throwaway line from Jimmy Booth, a man more used to industrial extortion than helping pesky journalists, and Dunkley had been able to track down Doug Turner, through Facebook, of all places.

The former union organiser had indeed been in Vietnam, serving with the 2nd Battalion Royal Australian Regiment in the Asian jungles during the latter half of 1967 and early '68.

Christ, he must have seen some shit, Dunkley thought.

He found five of Turner's Facebook ‘friends' – none of the names familiar, but it was still his best chance of locating the elusive veteran. Three Google searches later and he'd tracked down ‘Roy Shelley' to the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, where he was working as a consultant in IT.

Dunkley dialled the number into his BlackBerry. Six rings, and an Australian accent answered. ‘Hello?'

‘Mr Shelley?'

‘Yep.'

‘G'day, my name is Harry Dunkley, I'm a reporter with the
Australian
newspaper, out of Canberra. Sorry to disturb you but I'm trying to track down Doug Turner. Thought you may be able to help?'

‘What do you want with Dougie?'

‘I was hoping to speak with him about Bruce Paxton, the Defence Minister in the Toohey Government down here. They were close a number of years back.'

‘Oh, is that so?' Roy Shelley sounded uninterested and none too trusting. Dunkley assumed Shelley was going to give him the old heave-ho, but instead he seemed willing to help, to some extent, anyway.

‘Look, give me your contact numbers and email, and I'll pass them on to Doug, if I can find him.'

‘You know where he is, then?'

‘I think so, but Turner can be hard to track down, particularly if he's trying to dodge someone. You're a reporter, mate; he's likely to tell you to go to hell.'

And with that, Roy Shelley hung up, leaving Dunkley hoping that Doug Turner, Vietnam veteran and by all accounts a miserable low-life, could be coaxed out of whatever foxhole he was hiding in.

 

Four words that could last a lifetime: ‘Give me a call.' It had taken five days for Doug Turner to make contact via email, but he was willing to chat, from the safe distance of overseas, anyway. Dunkley waited ten minutes and then punched in the number, hearing the familiar ‘ping' of the international dial code. He was armed with a swag of papers: ASIC searches, file notes from his trip to the Association's register and a potted history of Turner's corporate exploits. There were plenty of missing pieces, but at least he would be able to ask some sensible questions.

‘Well, hello Australia. Mr Dunkley, I presume?' Doug Turner sounded remarkably chirpy.

‘Yeah, g'day Doug, nice to finally chat to you. Thanks for giving me your contact details.'

‘No problem, my friend. So, tell me why you've gone to such trouble to find me.'

‘Well, I'm a reporter with the
Australian
newspaper, as you know, and I've been working on a profile piece on Bruce Paxton – the two of you go back a way?'

‘Yeah, you can say that again. I haven't seen or spoken to Bruce in, oh, ten or so years, maybe longer. What exactly did you want to know?'

‘All about his past, how he got into politics, his early influences, those years the two of you were involved in the Mineworkers union together …' Dunkley left the words lingering, urging a response. An eternity seemed to pass before Turner spoke, this time in a more serious tone.

‘Oh, I can tell you about those times, sure. The old UMF, yeah, we were quite a team. Had some fun, did some crazy things … some bad things too …'

‘Like what?'

‘Hmmmhhh, why should I tell you – a journalist, of all people? You guys never helped me in the past; why should I help you now? Besides, my life ain't as simple as you might think. You may be intrigued by the past and my very good friend Bruce Paxton, but I ain't sure there's a good enough reason to dredge all that shit up. Not now, not ever.'

There was a pause as though Turner were thinking about it, though. Dunkley let the moment hang.

‘Tell you what … give me a few days to think this one over … There's something you may be able do for me … My research tells me you're a reporter of some note.'

With those cryptic words, Doug Turner disconnected. Alone and invisible in the wilds of Asia. Again.