Voices from the Air (33 page)

Dudley Leggett had started out in the ABC as secretary to Charles Moses and had gone on to prove himself as a sporting broadcaster and supervisor of field broadcasts, and now also in the field as a war correspondent.

He had undertaken the demanding assignment on the Kokoda Trail and at the Papuan beachheads, he had recorded many reports and interviews in New Guinea and had shouldered the unglamorous administrative burden of overseeing the field unit. He stayed on in Port Moresby until
December 1943, but before he left, he went back into hospital. He had been suffering from nausea and extreme headaches for several weeks and the doctors diagnosed physical debility and eye strain, aggravated by the effects of the malaria attacks of the previous twelve months.
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The following year, after a break at home with his family, Leggett returned to New Guinea with the Army, but he soon became very ill. He was brought back to Australia and diagnosed with torulosis or cryptococcosis, a fungal infection he contracted during his time in New Guinea – possibly during his work for the ABC. Dudley would spend the next 16 months in hospital. The once superbly fit athlete became paralysed and could no longer walk. He then underwent fever therapy, where his body temperature was raised in steam baths in an effort to combat the symptoms. A diagnosis of meningitis was confirmed and in 1945 he also contracted tuberculosis.

Dudley's wife Dawn was looking after their three children, Lorelei, Dudley and Robin, but she took him out of the hospital to care for him at home, where he underwent a slow rehabilitation. He was a big man, just over six-feet tall, and it was a painful process as he forced his body to move again after the long months in hospital. His children remember their father careening around the house on crutches as he willed himself to become mobile.

Dudley's determined battle with illness ended in a truce of sorts. He remained partially paralysed and would never walk again without the aid of crutches, but with Dawn's help he was no longer an invalid and could even drive a modified car using hand controls instead of pedals. He returned to full-time work at the ABC, as the manager in charge of ABC sporting broadcasts, and later travelled overseas to manage ABC test cricket broadcasts in England. But his partial recovery was just
a temporary reprieve. Dudley died from his illness in 1949, less than four years after the end of the war. He was 38 years old.

Bill Marien returned to Sydney from New Guinea in mid-1944 having battled with Army public relations over his independence as an ABC war correspondent and in defence of his own reporting. His temper may have frayed but his record as a correspondent was intact. He now moved from News to the Talks department, using the voice-reporting skills he had developed in the field, and he compiled a major radio documentary program called
Five Years of War
. However, he seemed unsatisfied by the work now ahead of him at the ABC. Fellow war correspondent, John Hinde, believed that some ABC correspondents, like Marien, felt that their experiences counted for little once they were back home. ‘Bill simply resigned in disgust because he seemed to be covering school breakups and women's parties and things.'
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It was a fact of life that few jobs back home could compare with the consuming challenges and achievements of war reporting, and while Marien wanted to return to the field, he had found it difficult to work within the constraints of the ABC's relationship with Army public relations.

In September, once he had completed his radio war documentary, Marien resigned from the ABC to become a war correspondent for the
Sydney Morning Herald
. As a correspondent for the
Herald
in the last year of the war, Marien sailed with the US Third Fleet during the American campaign to re-take the Philippines, covered the landings on Okinawa and Iwo Jima and the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay.

In the post-war years, he became public relations officer
for the Chamber of Manufactures in Sydney, and he and Peg eventually had four children: Elizabeth, Frank, Merrick and Moira. Marien sometimes appeared as a panellist on television discussion programs and he found more outlets for his loquacious love of words and writing – he had a weekend radio session helping people to do their crosswords, and on Fridays he had a book review segment on Gwen Plumb's program on the Sydney station, 2GB.

Bill was only 43 when he died of a heart attack in 1959. Away from the chaos of the war years and his time as a war correspondent, his passions were for his rugby team, Randwick, and for gardening. The family had just moved to a new home in the green garden suburb of Lindfield on Sydney's north shore the week before he died. When he left the ABC he had departed with its thanks for his service as a war correspondent – ‘the dark, fattish chap' with the Italian-Irish bloodline and the determined streak had covered some of the hardest campaigns of the New Guinea theatre for the ABC, and his reporting had touched a chord in the listeners to ABC radio.

Dear Sir, Kindly accept my thanks for forwarding me a copy of the script of the field unit recording ‘The Australian Soldier.' I have made two copies of it which I am forwarding to my two sons in New Guinea & who will enjoy it just as much as we did.

– Listener letter to the ABC, 13 December 1943,

Many years after the war, John Hinde reflected about the effect of the war on correspondents and just how desperately he had needed a break when he returned from the Philippines.

One of the problems of being a correspondent was that you didn't get rest. If you were an active soldier you'd be in a landing, you'd be trained for six months beforehand and you'd be stuck there for months afterwards, whereas ancillary people tended to skip from one hot area to another and I think a lot of us got a bit fed up with this. I saw less action than many of them, and some of them stood up to it remarkably well and some were slowly broken down by it. Some of them became quite obsessed with action or with their work.
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To complete his coverage of the Philippines, Hinde spent some time in Melbourne, home to Navy Headquarters, preparing a documentary on the naval battle for Leyte Gulf. When he returned to Sydney he was so ill, he went into hospital. He did not go overseas again for the remainder of the war and was back in hospital for VP Day, the day of the news of the Japanese surrender.

Some correspondents did not stay with the ABC after they finished their time in the field covering the war. ‘There were no particular honours going, not for newsmen who'd been there,' said Hinde, but he stuck with the broadcaster. ‘It wasn't easy to accept for a while. There was a time when I thought I might move back to a newspaper but I had a very deep affection for the ABC.'
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Hinde was with ABC News when it finally launched its independent news service in 1947 and recalls writing the script for the News announcement on the first morning. In 1956, with the introduction of the television news service, he worked on the link between television and the existing radio news service, and also reported for some of the early broadcasts of the ABC's radio current affairs programs. Hinde thought
he probably remained working in news as long as he did, in part simply because of a sense of inertia after the war, but he loved the fun of handling a major running news story. ‘There's nothing more exciting . . . than really handling it, and knowing your medium and getting it on air as it goes.'
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After a stint freelancing, he replaced Frank Legg as the ABC's film reviewer, when Legg was killed in a car crash, and he found a new calling, as a film reviewer on radio and television. His skills as a story teller honed during his time as a war correspondent were evident in the engaging narrative and gentle raconteur persona of his film reviews. Much later in life, Hinde developed almost cult popularity as a guest on comedy sketch programs such as Libby Gore's
Elle McFeast
. In 2004, John Hinde was the guest of honour at the launch of an exhibition on the history of the ABC's foreign correspondents and war correspondents. Hinde's wife Barbara Jefferis died that year. John Hinde died two years later in 2006.

Ray Paull was ill with malaria when he came home from New Guinea in March 1945, and he also had later relapses. ‘I remember him being unbelievably ill,' recalls his daughter Vivienne. ‘I remember the lights being on all through the night while Mum rushed in and out, and he'd throw all the blankets off and then he'd pull them back on.' Once he recovered from the initial bouts of malaria Paull returned to work as a news journalist in Melbourne. He hoped to go back into the field again as a war correspondent, but the war was over within a few months and his public role in the dispute with Army public relations would have also counted against him.

He continued for many years as a senior journalist with the ABC, became the editor of shortwave news serving the regional areas of Australia, and made private trips into the outback exploring the country and studying Aboriginal art and culture. In the 1950s he was a critic of the discriminatory laws applying to Indigenous people when the artist Albert Namatjira was controversially jailed for supplying alcohol, and he supported the rights of Aboriginal people to their own system of tribal justice.

As a war correspondent in April 1944, on board the Australian ship HMAS
Manoora
off the northern New Guinea coast, Paull overheard two Australian Army officers discussing the Kokoda campaign. ‘Their ignorance of the issues involved, their belief in the superficial appearance of defeat, had the ring of an official view, or at best, of a misinformed view that had been allowed to persist.'
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Despite the reporting of correspondents like Chester Wilmot – some of which was barred – several years after the war, the full story of the Kokoda withdrawal had still not been told. Paull spoke to Wilmot, who he felt was best qualified to write the history, but at that time Wilmot was writing his own military history of the war in Europe and had other projects on the go, so he welcomed Paull's interest in writing the story.
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The story of the retreat by the Australians along the Kokoda Trail became Paull's project for much of the 1950s. His daughter Vivienne remembers that Ray did not talk much about his own experiences during the war, but the story of Kokoda became his passion. ‘I remember hearing the typewriter at night and seeing him at work, and in my young imagination I saw mist and soldiers coming out of the mist around him.'
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Paull's book,
Retreat from Kokoda
, published in 1958, was an acclaimed telling of the campaign and the
first proper history of the Australian withdrawal along the Kokoda Trail.

Ray spent time in Fiji, helping to organise the press and radio facilities for the first South Pacific Conference, and later covered the conferences as a reporter for Radio Australia and worked with the Fiji Broadcasting Commission. Ray and Chris were eventually divorced and Ray was in poor health for many years. He was 66 when he died from a heart attack while working in Fiji. He was buried in the Suva cemetery and his funeral was attended by many of the chiefs from Fiji's ruling political elite.

Ray Paull's innovative reporting and recording from the field with Len Edwards pushed the boundaries of the use of actuality and storytelling from the field of battle. He extended his skill for storytelling to his work as an author and in writing about Kokoda he also provided a fitting epitaph for his career as a war correspondent. ‘My work has been little more than that of a reporter,' he wrote, ‘gathering, sifting, comparing the facts and impressions of an incident in history . . . I have confined my horizon to the chronicling of the significant events, enriching them with the comradeship and irrepressible humour of the troops, and above all, acknowledging the courage and fortitude of everyone who served.'
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With the death of John Elliott at Balikpapan, the ABC passed the news to his next of kin in Australia, the mother of his late wife, Helga. The obituaries broadcast by the ABC came from friends made in the Australian periods of his life – Ken Slessor, with whom he had worked in the Middle East, and his longtime friend, the boxing writer, Jim Donald.

‘Adventure was in John Elliott's blood,' wrote Ken Slessor. ‘But his gentleness of manner, his habit of self-effacement and his quiet speech would have led few people to guess that he had once fought, for the love of fighting, with the Finnish Air Force, or that, as the best amateur boxer of his weight in England, he had been runner-up in the light-heavyweight championship of the world at the Olympic Games.'
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Jim Donald knew Elliott as a man of courage and strength of character, and recalled that Elliott had come to see him on the eve of his departure overseas as an ABC war correspondent – ‘He was in quiet spirit and full of high hopes for the future. Alas those vaulting hopes and ambitions are buried with him on Balikpapan.'
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In a war in which so many died, the tragic irony of the circumstances of Elliott's death did not make it exceptional. The risks being taken by war correspondents at the time were clear, necessary and largely unavoidable, and there is no sign that it led to any change in the way the ABC managed its correspondents in the field. Given the number of correspondents covering the war for the ABC and the nature of reporting from the field, it was not surprising that so many others had close encounters with death, injury and illness.

One morning, early in the Philippines campaign, John Elliott attended the funeral of fellow war correspondent, Frank Prist, an American photographer, who was killed on Leyte and buried in a small graveyard of white wooden crosses. His story about Prist may also reveal something about Elliott himself. ‘It would be foolish to use that other old tag about he died as he would have wished – in his boots on a battlefield – for Frank Prist was in love with life.' But Elliott also recalled that Prist had probably been under fire more than any other correspondent, and had hit more invasion beachheads with the
first wave than any other. Like Elliott himself, Prist had chosen to stay on and cover the fatal campaign that would prove to be his last. Elliott's admiring epitaph for Prist could have just as easily been his own. ‘To use an Americanism,' he wrote, ‘Frank Prist was “some fellow.”'
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