Chapter 15: adventures abroad 1968

Setting out for London via Hong Kong, Macau, India and Russia

After five interesting years with Radio Melbourne 3AW, I felt a need to gain wider experience abroad. Initially, I planned to apply for a Duke of Edinburgh Award which would have allowed Rosemary and me to spend six months in the UK where I could study how the BBC newsrooms operated. 3AW news editor Corbett Shaw agreed to sponsor me but then he told me that first of all I should go to Brisbane to set up a Macquarie Network newsroom there. This never happened and Corbett went cold on sponsoring me for a Duke of Edinburgh Award on the grounds that I had been cheating my overtime claims. I denied this. Eventually he admitted he had made a mistake, but by then it was too late to apply for that year’s Duke of Edinburgh Award.

I remained keen to go abroad but under my own steam and naively believed that there was a job waiting for me with a radio station in New York. Corbett didn’t think this was wise. “You are a good journalist, Ian, but not good enough to get a job abroad,” he told me.

A problem was that I would need a green card to work in New York. A suggestion was made that I should fly to London and apply to emigrate to Canada where I could border-hop to arrange a green card.

So off to London Rosemary and I went. (Much more on this in later chapters.) Then I approached the Canadian High Commission (Embassy) in London and was brutally told to go away. The High Commission was fed up with Aussies applying to emigrate to Canada but with no intention of making it their permanent home.

This required a radical re-think. I decided I would seek work as a journalist for a few months while we decided on our next move. Rosemary was given a job immediately with the UK branch of Costain, the company she had worked for back in Melbourne.

Johan “John” Ramsland, who had left 3AW for London after a broken romance a year or so before, met Rosemary and me for drinks at a London pub. He now held a junior newsroom job in BBC External Services (later renamed BBC World Service) and he suggested that I should apply for a temporary sub-editor’s position there. In doing so, he warned me that the BBC was notorious for taking its time with job applications, and so it proved to be when I applied.

While the BBC took me through interviews and a written examination, I did freelance work for Australia and offered my services as a temp typist. This led to my working for the Institute of Marketing for four months. This was an eye opener. I was able to witness at first hand how the class system worked in the UK. On the top floor and in overall charge of the organisation was a retired admiral of the fleet (Mediterranean). Few people were permitted up there, but I was invited on a few occasions because he liked to talk about the Aussie mates he made during the Second World War.

Next floor down was the male Company Secretary who seemed to spend most of his time out of the office working on charities for his children’s private school. Then on the ground floor were the workers. Those who had been privately educated were called “junior executives” and each had their own office. The state educated staff were designated “clerks” and worked in an open plan area. It seemed to me that they did most of the work.

Soon after I arrived at the institute as a temporary “clerk”, the secretary to the Secretary fell ill and I was chosen to take her place. This resulted in my having my own office with a couple of phones. Every day I would be given Dictaphone tapes containing semi-literate letters and memos from the Secretary. I would type these, turning them into English in the process. This rarely took more than an hour or so. I spent the rest of the day writing freelance stories or the occasional letter home to Australia.

One of my responsibilities was to keep an eye on the Institute of Marketing beneficiary fund. This was another revelation. I would see letters from marketing executives who were unemployed but had not told their families. All communication was to be via their gentlemen’s clubs. Each day these executives would put on a suit and leave home for “work”, in reality mostly going to their club. I also saw one begging letter stating that the writer had received new job offers but these were “beneath my station in life”.

In due course, out of the blue, I received a phone call from the clerk in the External Services newsroom at Bush House offering me a three-month contract as a “summer relief” sub-editor. I was asked if I could “start tomorrow”. I said that wasn’t possible, but the next week (I think) I walked through the grand entrance of Bush House to begin what turned out to be 27 years with the BBC.

****

Let’s go back to when we left Australia, drawing heavily on my diary written at the time…

OCTOBER 18, 1968

Our propellor-driven Electra airliner left Melbourne at 8.45pm, 15 minutes late. There were a few tears from Rosemary, but nothing serious. The plane put down at Sydney at 10.15pm, giving us just enough time to make a comfortable transfer to the Qantas Electra to Hong Kong.

The flight to the refuelling point, Manila, was pretty smooth, even though we passed over a violent storm. For about an hour, bright flashes from the lightning could be seen reflected on the wings, but we remained calm! We were given plenty to eat -- too much in fact. We hadn’t even taken off from Sydney when the stewards began their rounds. Supper was a three-course affair. We tried to sleep, but we weren’t terribly successful, due I guess to a combination of excitement and the artificial environment.

The plane touched down at Manila at 5.00am local time as dawn broke. We stepped outside onto our first foreign soil. The outside temperature was 78 degrees Fahrenheit and the humidity was almost unbelievable.

We felt we could almost wring the moisture from the air. We were shunted into the international terminal while the plane was re-fuelled. The terminal was pretty tatty, but we were assured that it was much better than it used to be. We were glad we’d made no arrangements to stay in Manila. It seemed a pretty unpleasant place.

What a contrast to arrive in Hong Kong. It was a glorious balmy day, and the view as we swept in to the airport was magnificent. And what an experience the landing was! The runway is built into the sea, and this means that incoming planes almost skip across the waves in the final 15 seconds of so before touch-down.

We were met at the airport by someone from our hotel, the August Moon. Our room was a bit jaded but it was okay.

As soon as we’d sorted ourselves out, we went for a stroll through the business sector of Kowloon on the Chinese mainland, with Hong Kong Island across a narrow waterway. The range of goods in the shops is absolutely amazing. Just everything imaginable is on sale. We popped into a hotel bar for lunch, and lo and behold, were served imported Foster’s lager. Just like home, except that we had to pay 45 cents a small can.

Our first purchase in the shops was a movie camera. It’s a Japanese Elmo, very similar in design to the Paillard-Bolex. It is Super Eight, has two speeds, a single-frame mechanism, a power zoom lens, and automatic light meter, a through-the-lens viewer, and a few other fun things. The cost was $A80, and I think I got a bargain.

The shops are neat and tidy and most of the people we’ve seen are well dressed in modern clothes. However, not modern enough to withstand the shock of Rosemary’s mini-skirts and black stockings.

The streets are teeming with all sorts of traffic, most of it tooting frantically. Even the bicycles charge about with abandon, their bells ringing at the slightest provocation.

In the midst of all this prosperity, we were stunned and sickened to see a crippled woman crawling across the road outside our hotel. She moved along on her backside - a baby on her lap and a battered airline bag slung across her back. It was not a happy sight.

Our all-night flight (about 12 hours) has really caught up with us. We’ve had a few naps during the day, but we’re dead beat and are piling into bed early.

OCTOBER 20, 1968:

It’s Sunday, but in Hong Kong it is business almost-as-usual. In deference to God, shops don’t open until 10.30am.

I went into the streets today with the new “toy” camera to get some “mood” shots. Many of the Chinese were shy of the camera, and I was thankful that it had a telephoto lens. By using this lens, I was able to take many shots of people who were not aware that they were being filmed.

We went shopping again, and did some bargain hunting in the little alleyways near the hotel. Rosemary bought a good summer dress for two dollars.

We’re having some funny times with money. Our travellers’ cheques are in US dollars (88 cents Australian) and we’re buying everything in Hong Kong dollars (six Hong Kong dollars equals one US dollar).

This afternoon we went on a tour of Hong Kong Island. The tour cost only $A4 and lasted four hours. To describe the place, one must fall back on such words as “magnificent”, “fabulous” and “beautiful”. The view from The Peak surely can’t be beaten anywhere on our travels.

The only jarring note of the tour was the Tiger Balm Gardens -- a gauche memorial to a brand of Chinese medicine and a sort of Luna Park gone mad. Throughout our visit to the gardens we were pestered by hawkers. To heighten our distaste, across the road was a shanty town perched precariously on the side of a mountain. These towns -- for refugees mostly -- dot the Hong Kong area like sores.

The shacks are literally stacked on top of each other. Anyone with a strong roof rents it out to someone else who builds another shack on it.

A word about Chinese waiters: They’re unbeatable, quick, pleasant -- and best of all -- unobtrusive. None of the grovelling “Yes Sir, No Sir, Anything your say Sir” that one has to put up with in Australia. It worries us though about the long hours people have to work in the colony. For instance, the lift boy in our hotel has been on duty since we went for breakfast at 9.00 am. It’s now 10.00pm.

Tonight, I ordered a new “24 hour suit” to be tailor-made in 24 hours for $A40. It also came with a tailor-made shirt for $A4. Rosemary ordered a pair of slacks to be lined with silk for $A14. The service in the tailors is marvellous, and the range of goods seemingly endless.

Pornography plays a fair sized part of life here. Today a chap offered me a one-hour pornographic film show for $A5. So what, you say! Well, as he tried to make a deal, a policeman stood beside us enjoying the sun!

Listening to accents as we move about, it seems that 90% of the tourists are American. Quite frankly we’re finding the American twang (particularly that of the middle-aged matron) very hard on the ears. Don’t know how we’ll put up with it in America itself.

As we’ve moved around the streets today, we’ve had our most fun in the narrow alleyways where the Chinese sell wares to their countrymen. There are all sorts of strange things offered in the open.

The Chinese seem very big on dried fish. They even have it laid out on newsprint on the footpaths. There are quite a few fruit stalls, but the fruit looks pretty pale and uninviting.

OCTOBER 21, 1968:

Once again the weather is perfect.

Today we went on a tour of Kowloon and the New Territories. It was not as interesting as the Hong Kong Island tour, but it was important for us to go on it so that we got a balanced view of the colony.

The first stop of the tour was to inspect the refugee resettlement flats. They sure make Melbourne’s Housing Commission flats look good. Each family is allotted an 18-square-foot room. The rooms resemble cells, complete with the bars, but I guess the people living in them find them an improvement on the shacks. We found the resettlement flats quite depressing, but our spirits picked up as we were taken through some glorious rural districts where the coolies toiled at intensive farming and duck raising. The highlight of a rather over-long tour was a visit to the Lokma Chaur lookout, from which we had a breath-taking view across paddy fields and the Sham Chun river into what was widely referred to as “Red China”.

This afternoon we went shopping and shopping and shopping. It was great fun, but our feet and legs (and sometimes our tempers) are beginning to show the strain.

OCTOBER 22, 1968

Today we made a tour of Macao. We left Hong Kong at about 9.00am and returned about 6.00pm. The sea trip to and from Macao was made by hydrofoil and took about one hour and 15 minute each way for the 40 miles. Because Macao is Portuguese, we had to have visas and go through customs. Macao was a sharp contrast to Hong Kong. It’s very poor, and apart from a dozen of so modern buildings, everything is as it was last century. Almost all buildings are Portuguese style with beautiful narrow cobbled streets.

We felt we’d like to return to Macao just to walk around the streets absorbing the atmosphere. There was an ancient stone-walled fort, a Buddhist temple, the stone facade of a Cathedral destroyed by fire in the 1830s, another glorious view of Red China, and a floating gambling casino.

I gave Rosemary two Hong Kong dollars (about 30 cents Australian) to play the poker machines. She scored two pay-outs in the first three tries. The profit from her little fling was 15 Hong Kong dollars.

On the ground floor of the casino there was a Chinese opera being performed. It was beautiful to watch, although the sounds were a little jarring. The singers were made up like painted dolls. The make-up was so perfect we almost had the feeling that they were dolls.

Oh yes, we also visited the Barrier Gate between Macao and Red China. For some reason known only to the Chinese, photos of the gate are not permitted. However, this seemed a bit much to believe, and being a newsman, the forbidden fruit was too much of a temptation. As the bus began to pull away from the Gate, I took some good (I hope) movie shots from the back window. The party of American tourists we were travelling with nearly went hysterical. However, I think they’re secretly looking forward to going back to the USA to tell their friends all sorts of hair-raising tales about how they were nearly killed because of some crazy Aussie journalist.

Macao is not nearly as clean as Hong Kong and there were few motor vehicles. Most people travel by bicycle, motor-cycle or pedicab. Being a colony of a Fascist regime, police were everywhere. There is one policeman for every 300 people, compared with one for every 600-700 people in Australia.

Tonight we visited Jack Spackman, an Australian journalist in Hong Kong, and an expert on China to do an interview for 3AW (I’m doing freelance work for the station). It was great to hear another Australian voice say “How are you mate?” after all the “buddies”, ”guys”, ”glories” from the American tourists in this place.

OCTOBER 23, 1968:

Today Rosemary woke up with the “runs” from something she’d eaten. It made her feel pretty sick, so we called the hotel doctor. This fellow would have been worth his fee just for the entertainment. He was hysterically funny, perhaps unintentionally, at times. He found Rosemary was without fever and announced that she would be right “plenty soon” once he’d given her one of his “velly nice” injections. And it was “velly nice” too! Within a couple of hours the sickness had gone and Rosemary was walking about 10 feet above the ground. We suspected the “velly nice” injection was a drug that would have had us arrested if sold on the street.

Actually the sickness was an “ill wind”. To cut a long and embarrassing story short, because of Rosemary’s illness we discovered that we had planned to book out of the hotel a day early. We had our days mixed up. We shudder to think what would have happened if we had booked out and fronted up at the airport on the wrong day.

The trouble is that the Chinese people are so obliging and polite it never occurs to them to question anything one does, no matter how stupid it might appear. So, even though we appeared to be leaving on the wrong day, they never mentioned it.

That near-disaster over and Rosemary feeling “plenty good” once again, we returned to our shopping. In our time in Hong Kong we’ve probably walked down every street in the whole colony. Rosemary has been hunting everywhere for some flat-heeled shoes, but with no luck.

We made an excursion into one of the Red Chinese Department stores in Hong Kong. Rosemary bought a couple of very nice silk scarves at about a third their price in Australia. There were statues and quotations of Mao Tse Tung everywhere. Rosemary took a photo of me standing beside a larger-than-life bust of Mao, just for the hell of it.

Next chapter: India via Saigon and Bangkok.