Voices from the Air (34 page)

Haydon Lennard was physically and mentally drained by the time he left Singapore after the liberation of the island. In the following months he went to Saigon, Bangkok and Java and briefed his colleague John Thompson for Thompson's assignment to Batavia, but there are no records of Lennard's reporting and no letters. From some time in November 1945, it appeared to the ABC and his family that he had simply dropped off the face of the earth. Early the next year he reappeared in Sydney and returned to work but, after his experiences in the war, Lennard found it hard to adjust to life back in Australia and he was unhappy at the ABC. His daughter Jo and son John believed that, at this time, Lennard was too hot to handle. He had always been argumentative, but after four hard and confronting years as a war correspondent he was also seemingly restless and adrift in the routine of the newsroom. He had yet another argument with an ABC colleague, this time with a famously pugnacious newsreader that ended in a punch up just before air-time, causing the announcer to go on air gasping for breath. It seemed like Lennard was looking for a reason to leave. He gave his manager an ultimatum to resolve a relatively minor grievance and when it wasn't addressed, he resigned. John Hinde remembered the consternation this caused. ‘The commission was scandalised at this because after all Lennard had not only been a senior man
and a war correspondent but he'd been very badly damaged in the service of the commission, and they said he shouldn't have been allowed to resign in this way.'
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Lennard had a daughter with his first wife, Nora, but the marriage didn't last. They had been living apart during the war years and eventually divorced. He married Gwenda Hall in 1946, and they left Australia for the United States and Canada with a warm reference for Haydon from the ABC general manager, Charles Moses. In Canada, Lennard became a senior writer and producer with the news agency British United Press (BUP). Several years later, in 1952, Haydon and Gwenda decided to return to Australia. Gwenda came on ahead with their two children and Haydon went on one final assignment – as a war correspondent covering the Korean War for BUP.

After his return to Australia, Haydon helped to set up the public relations operation for a new service in Sydney for children with intellectual disabilities. He left journalism and became a taxi owner and manager and chairman of the Manly Warringah taxi co-operative on Sydney's northern beaches. Lennard was the first ABC news journalist to become a war correspondent, and the only ABC correspondent to cover the Pacific war virtually from beginning to end. He remained a quintessential newsman, rather than a broadcaster. His time as a war correspondent was sometimes turbulent but his reporting was compelling and was an important part of the ABC's coverage of the war. He was active in the War Correspondents' Association until his death in 1987.

Frank Legg's achievements as a war correspondent were marked by his exceptional skills as a storyteller, and his ability to
engage people. Charming, humorous and generous, he had an easy manner with people from all walks of life. Known as ‘The Digger's Friend' because of his strong kinship with Australian soldiers, he had fought with them in North Africa, as one of the Rats of Tobruk, and then broadcast their stories as a war correspondent in the Pacific. Legg's reporting of some major campaigns was undermined by technical and communications failures – more so than for any other correspondent – and only a few of his original scripts have survived. However, he retained his sense of humour when, just before he returned to Australia, he received the Asiatic–Pacific Service Ribbon, awarded to war correspondents with a letter of thanks from MacArthur, for having added ‘luster [sic] to the difficult, dangerous and arduous profession of War Correspondent'.
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It was addressed to FG Lugg.

After the war, Legg produced and presented documentaries on the war, and returned to the radio airwaves as a popular broadcaster of ABC programs such as
Weekend Magazine
, as well as being the ABC's film reviewer. He became a well-known television compere of the panel discussion program
Any Questions
, and wrote several books – including one on the wartime cinematographer Damien Parer, another on the controversial commander of the Australian 8th Division at Singapore, Gordon Bennett, and a memoir of his own time as a war correspondent.

Frank saw himself as a penniless Englishman who became a ‘dinky-di' Aussie despite the English accent that he retained all his life, and his warmth and light touch as a broadcaster struck a chord with audiences in his adopted country. His first marriage to Eve ended in divorce but the relationship was foundering even before he went to war as a soldier in the AIF in North Africa. The estrangement from his wife also cut
Legg off from his only child, his son Richard, something that must have been a cause of deep regret. He kept a small leather pocket folder containing a picture of his young, fair-haired son which he appears to have carried with him throughout his years as a soldier and a war correspondent. For many years, Richard Legg's last memory of his father was watching him marching off to war.

I recall as a child of five standing on the footpath somewhere in Adelaide watching men in uniform march past. Probably because my father was already a sergeant he was slightly separated from the others, at the back. He gave me a big smile, a wave, and then he and the others disappeared from view.
²⁷

Frank Legg eventually re-married and was re-united with his son only a few years before his death in a car crash in 1966.

After their coverage of the Japanese surrender in Kuching on Borneo, Fred Simpson and Len Edwards would go on to record interviews with POWs in Singapore and elsewhere in the region. In early 1946 Simpson and Edwards covered the activities of the Australian occupation forces in Japan and Simpson, in particular, would spend many months there. Fred had known Japanese friends in New Zealand and his interest in Japanese people and culture had not been erased by his war experiences. He had covered the Japanese midget-submarine attack on Sydney Harbour for the Talks department and remembered ‘the deeply moving burial and cremation' that was provided for the Japanese sailors. When he went to Japan
he took with him a recording of his own report of the burial ceremony to pass on to the sailors' families, so that they might know something of the scene that day when their sons were laid to rest. ‘The scene is one of quiet simplicity. The occasion of the cremation of the brave men who died for their country, a country whose policies are viewed with abhorrence by us but whose brave men in death are honoured as all brave men are honoured throughout the world.' He returned to the field as an ABC war correspondent during the Korean War, giving him the distinction of having served in three wars as either a soldier or a correspondent. One of his letters from Korea showed Fred, now in his mid-fifties, yet again out in the field with the troops, but the weather in Korea was a very different challenge from his time in New Guinea. ‘When you wake up in the morning there is frost on the inside of the tent. I'm using three sleeping bags, one inside the other. On top of this I go to bunk with most of my clothes on. I've promised myself a bath and shower in a couple of weeks.'
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Simpson was a Talks correspondent rather than a News correspondent, and his prolific, personalised reporting of the human stories of Australians at war were the characteristics of his time as a war correspondent. When he finally returned from Japan in 1946, Simpson went back to the Talks department to run the topical program
News Review
, which was the main focus of his later ABC career. Fred spent a year on secondment to the BBC in London, and much later was also seconded to the United Nations media office in New York. All three of his musical daughters fulfilled their potential, and their father's hopes in bringing his family to Australia before the war, and two of them went on to national and international careers.

Fred Simpson died in 1986.

The longest serving of any of the ABC war correspondents, Bill MacFarlane returned to some of the same battlefields the year after the war ended. He travelled to Borneo in 1946 to make a series of historic recordings with a joint Australian and British government mission that tracked down the villagers who had helped Allied POWs along the route of the infamous Sandakan death marches. The local people had hidden escapees and given food to those who were starving, and the government mission was to acknowledge and recompense them. Bill travelled with an ABC broadcaster and together they interviewed and recorded the villagers and later interviewed the survivors of Sandakan for a program that was broadcast in 1947.

In the last, long chapter of his career MacFarlane joined ASIO, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. It's believed that he worked in a technical role for the body tasked with investigating threats to Australia's security, in what seems to be an evolution of his work as a technician for the PMG and the ABC. He did not discuss his ASIO work with his children but his oldest daughter, Anne, remembers him testing phone tapping equipment at home and checking for ways of breaking into their house, and it's likely that his work included electronic surveillance. He also travelled overseas on his work, but his exact role is something of a mystery. When he retired in 1975, a telex message from the ASIO director general thanked him for his ‘outstanding contribution to the work of ASIO, sometimes at considerable personal risk'.
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He remained a practical man, who spent his spare time tinkering in a shed in the garden and reading electronics magazines. His work in the war years had been truly ground-breaking. He was the first technician to work on the frontlines with the ABC and he was a technical pioneer under dangerous
and demanding conditions. Without his skill and perseverance listeners to the ABC and BBC would never have heard Chester Wilmot's reports from North Africa, Greece and the Middle East. Similarly, much of the historic work by ABC correspondents in the Pacific theatre would not have been possible without him.

Len Edwards stayed with the PMG after the war, working as a technician and operator at a radio station in Hobart and as a member of the PMG engineering branch – and he returned to his ham radio activities. Edwards had found some rare peaceful moments on the warfront, listening to music on the disc player or sitting beneath the moon and stars in the night sky. He watched the skies throughout his life and built his own radio telescope, set up in his back garden with a movable array that he controlled with ropes and pulleys. He used the telescope to teach his son Chris and his daughter Suzanne about the stars. In 1957, he listened to the beeps of far-off radio signals as he tracked Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite to orbit the earth. Edwards had a brief collaboration with the pioneering radio astronomer Grote Reber, and also observed and noted the effect of solar flares on radio waves and contributed to technical journals. Later on, he designed and built marine radio aerials as a hobby and after he retired from the PMG he turned it into a company, which he named Moonraker Australia. Edward's life after the war was full of the curiosity and innovation that, as a young man, he had brought to bear on the technical challenges of recording on the frontlines. Like MacFarlane, he was a pioneer in the use of the new recording technology, and his technical dexterity and ability to adapt and modify technology in the worst conditions of the tropical New Guinea jungles was truly remarkable.

John Thompson thought that he was probably the only war correspondent who had never seen a shot fired in anger. The only dead body he saw during his time overseas for the ABC was not in Rabaul, but floating in a canal in Batavia during the post-war violence between Indonesian nationalists and the Dutch.

The war and the Japanese occupation had broken the Dutch hold on Java and Indonesian leaders had declared independence and proclaimed the Republic of Indonesia, two days after the news of the Japanese surrender in August.

Amid the febrile political atmosphere, Thompson filed copy by cable, recorded stories using equipment provided in Batavia by the British, and also broadcast talks to Australia. He wrote to Molesworth at the ABC that providing ‘the fullest information and objective picture is of the greatest national importance to Australia'.
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John Thompson returned to Australia from Batavia to a role as an ABC feature writer. The following year, at home in Collaroy on Sydney's northern beaches, he wrote his book,
Hubbub in Java
, about his experiences and the Indonesian movement for independence. He created the ABC poetry and literature program
Quality Street
, which for some time was presented by the actor Peter Finch, and produced and presented radio documentaries, interviews and biographical programs on leading Australians. During the war, John and his wife Pat had taken a young boy into their family, a close friend of their son Peter. Peter would become a film-maker and later a well-known film reviewer and his adopted brother, Jack Thompson, would become a successful actor. Throughout the post-war years, the ABC occupied a central role in John's life.

One way or another the ABC was very decent to John. In return, or in gratitude, he contracted a bad case of the ABC disease which used to attack those whose work was directly related to the production of programmes. For such employees, and there used to be many of them, the ABC was far more than a job of work; it was an emotive issue, a way of life, a hobby, an ideal.
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While his working life was dominated by his radio work for the ABC, Thompson continued to write poetry and over the course of his life, he published four volumes of verse and three books of prose. As a poet he was cast in a different mould to the other war correspondents but he was an outstanding program maker and broadcaster and his poet's eye gave some of his reporting a thoughtfulness and vivid descriptive strength. His coverage of the early Indonesian struggle for independence was fair-minded, acute and prescient. John was full of plans when he died suddenly in 1968, at the age of 60. He had been an accomplished broadcaster for the ABC and a well-known literary figure, but he was not without regrets: the public knew him best for his radio programs, but his poetry had been closest to his heart.