Chapter 36: A Breath of Fresh Air

Fitzgerald Inquiry

Late July - October 1987

With all the activity of the election campaign behind us, not to mention Tom Domican’s actions against Lisa and myself (and his subsequent demise), it was time to start preparing for the upcoming sailing season. We had set aside Saturday, the 18th, for a training day, not only would it give us plenty of time to work on our sail handling, but I would be able to make a list of things to get checked with the boat before the start of the season. I had booked her in to get hauled out, the bottom pressure cleaned and fresh anti-fouling applied in early August; if there was anything else that needed attention I would get them to fix it then. Ross had obtained several small nylon rollers that clipped onto the top rung of the lifelines on the foredeck, these allowed the foot of the jib to slide down over the lifelines when we tacked. This saved Peter having to fool around forward skirting the sail after each tack.

The rollers worked particularly well, it was amazing how such a small part, only costing a few dollars could make a big difference. We spent most of the day sailing up and down Pittwater, practising tacks, gybes, spinnaker hoists and drops. We were all pretty exhausted, we had worked hard, but I felt we had made some good improvements, by the time we called it a day, we seemed to be much faster than we had been earlier in the morning.

A few days earlier, John Howard had retained the Liberal party leadership, beating Andrew Peacock in a party room vote, but Peacock was elected deputy, and would probably be a thorn in his side. Bob Hawke got his way with his cabinet selections, plus he had told Peter Walsh that there would be no wholesale restructuring of the Commonwealth Public Service at this stage. Walsh was disappointed, but Bob told him that there were far more important things to get done at the moment than making changes to how the public service was structured, and he didn’t want the disruption that making such changes would cause affecting the Government’s program.

I had been speaking with Frank about how best to maintain dossiers on the various activist religious right churches; he told me he would get his nationwide media monitors onto the project to collect newspaper and other media articles of interest and forward them to me. I wrote a simple dBASE III application to manage all of the information that I was collecting, allowing things to be cross-referenced for easy retrieval.

The police had concluded their investigation into the death of Tom Domican, the findings were ‘death by misadventure’, he had tried to set a car bomb under Alan Jones’s car (for reasons they did not know), and it had exploded prematurely, killing him instantly. The speculation about why Domican tried to blow up Jones was that Jones had evidence that Domican was behind the bashing of Peter Baldwin in July 1980. Peter was investigating accounting irregularities of some of the inner city ALP Branches, and at the instigation of Graham Richardson, Domican was going to stop Jones from talking about the bashing, most likely because Richardson was the instigator of the whole event.

Not that Jones was quiet about it; he publically stated on-air how ‘one of the thugs of the Labor Party, one Tom Domican was behind the attempt on my life, because I was going to expose his involvement in the bashing of Peter Baldwin – you remember seeing the photos in the paper of his bloodied face – all because Baldwin had the temerity to try to expose corruption and malfeasance in some of the inner-city Labor party branches’, in his typically bombastic style. I noticed that he still wasn’t prepared to mention Graham Richardson’s alleged involvement in the bashing, maybe he was still worried about a second attempt on his life.

I hoped, for Bob’s sake, none of the stories about Richo came out; Bob wasn’t able to omit Richardson from a cabinet post, not if he wanted to avoid a huge shit-fight with the right-wing. But if Jones – or anyone else – made good with his threat to release more information about the NSW right-wing and corruption in inner-city branches, then the story of Richardson’s involvement would see the light of day. And despite his vows to ‘sue the pants off anyone spreading those stories’, enough of the mud would stick to make having him as a Federal cabinet minister untenable. I didn’t envy Bob’s position if that came about.

The main change to my teaching schedule for the second semester was instead of Computing 1A classes there would now be Computing 1B. The first three weeks would be a crash course on the C programming language; over the break we had redeveloped our C class notes into a concentrated ‘C Conversion’ course. Introduction to Computer Engineering was a continuing subject, this semester the focus would be on what was called ‘Development of organization, communication and research skills in engineering’. That had taken me a while to determine what was meant by all of that, but I had come up with some lectures that I felt would be of value. Part of what I would cover would include document preparation software, like LaTex and what the difference between a ‘Word Processor’ and a ‘Document Processor’ was. I would show examples of document templates that had been developed for thesis documents, status reports and the like.

At the first Computing 1B lecture for the semester, we outlined what would be the first three weeks: the C programming ‘crash course’.

“Now, you may wonder why we spent the first semester teaching you how to program using Lisp, and now we are introducing a new programming language. C is a far better language for what will be some of the more advanced programming techniques later in this semester; some complex data structures, recursion and similar. But you will find a good knowledge of C will be of value to you since some of the subjects you will do in the next years will require an understanding of C,” I said. “Particularly subjects on Operating Systems and Compiling Techniques, those two subjects will test your C programming skills. So, over the next few weeks, we’re going to have an intensive introduction to the C language.

“Now, you already have – or should have – a sound knowledge of how to design structured programs, how to take a problem and break that up into a well-structured design. The design isn’t impacted by the choice of language that you choose to implement your design in. It’s like if you are writing a story; you first have to have a plot, characters, the various scenes and plan out how the story will develop. Once you have the plan of your story, you then ‘write’ that story using the language of your choice – English, French, German, or whatever. Now, the choice of language makes little effect on the story, as anyone who has read an English language translation of a foreign-language story will attest. Of course, some jokes and puns that work in one language may not work in another, but the basis of the story will still be the same.”

Over the next few weeks, there was intensive teaching of C; once we had covered the basics, it was on to some of the more advanced parts of the subject, data structures, program control, recursion, and the perennial bug-a-boo, pointers. Claude moved onto the hardware aspects of the subject; the basic structure of a computer, instruction execution, assembly language, computer building blocks, and the function of the operating system. By the time the mid-semester break came about, we felt the students were back in a fairly good position.

The week before the sailing club annual general meeting, Ron Parker called me, to see if either Lisa or I would be interested in running for one of the committee positions. He was hoping to have new blood serving on the committee, most of the office-bearers had been on the committee for many years, several of them were not running again, and he felt that it was a good opportunity to get some of the younger members involved in the running of the club. I told him that I would have to decline, but thanked him for the offer. Lisa, however, was quite interested in getting involved, and when the AGM came around, she was elected to the club’s committee. Her involvement would be attending one meeting every month, and several times a year, she would be ‘Officer of the Day’ during Sunday racing. The duties of the Officer of the Day was to make sure everything ran smoothly; they were assisted by other club volunteers, manning the start boat, assisting in the canteen, recording finish times and so on. On days when Lisa would be OOD, the rest of us would fill other volunteer roles at the club, and since we wouldn’t be able to race that day, we would be scored an ‘average result’, effectively suffering no penalty for not being able to race. Much better than being recorded as a ‘Did Not Start’ for that heat.

Of course, the major news that dominated events in the country was the Fitzgerald Inquiry, the investigation into police and government corruption in Queensland. I would hope that it would be the end of Bjekle-Petersen, and it was looking more and more like he would be implicated. It all started back in May, with a newspaper article in the Brisbane Courier-Mail about high-level police corruption, followed by a ‘Four Corners’ television report making allegations of illegal prostitution and gambling. Bjelke-Petersen was out of the country, and to address the allegations, his deputy set up a commission of inquiry. After some toing and froing on determining who should head the inquiry, and the original proposal for a rather controversial district court judge, who was a close friend of the Queensland Police Commissioner, was rejected by the Attorney-General. A well-respected QC and Federal Court judge, Tony Fitzgerald was recommended by the President of the Queensland Bar Association as a suitable head.

It hadn’t taken long for the Commission to claim its first victims, a succession of police in the Licensing Branch confessed to corruption, and implicated a succession of higher-ranking police, right up to the Police Commissioner, Sir Terry Lewis. It was only a matter of time before government ministers – and the state premier – were also implicated. And if that happened, it was well past time; the corruption, disregard for civil liberties, destruction of heritage buildings and the use of the police force as a political weapon had been known for years, but no one had been brave enough to do anything. He was well known for aggressively suing anyone who made suggestions of illegal activity by him or his government, and with his total control of the state courts, he always won any defamation cases against the media.

“If he somehow gets booted out, and is no longer Premier, we can reconsider our decision never to tour in Queensland again,” Paul said.

“That would be good,” Mary Beth said. “I’ve had a request to see if we would be interested in being one of the Australian groups to perform at Expo 88 in Brisbane next year. I’ve been holding off replying, because of our ‘Queensland boycott’, but...”

“Well, the rest of his party and government are pretty pissed off with his ‘Joh for Canberra’ campaign, it really screwed things up for them in Queensland, so maybe his days are numbered,” I said. “Can we make a tentative agreement to play at Expo, and confirm or cancel later?”

“I think so, particularly if we go for a date later next year,” she replied. “I was thinking this time next year, during your mid-semester break, Will. Any thoughts, people?”

We all agreed with her approach, playing Expo would be a great opportunity for us, some international exposure. But we didn’t want to compromise our stance of boycotting the State Government while ever Bjelke-Petersen was premier. The Fitzgerald inquiry might give us a way out.

“We need to work out what we want to do if we are asked to do anything ‘bicentennial related’,” she said. “I know some of us are anti-celebration, so ... if we are asked to participate in something that’s obviously bicentennial related, what should we do?”

“Well, from my perspective,” Stewie said, “I’m not going to be a big fan of the bicentennial celebrations. There’s not much cause for celebration for my people.”

“I’m with Stewie on that,” I said. “Technically, 1988 isn’t the two hundredth anniversary of the founding of Australia. It will be two hundred years since the colony of New South Wales was established, but Australia, as a political entity didn’t come into existence until Federation, in 1901. But that’s a bit too esoteric for most people, they’ve been fed the lie about when Australia was established, and for some reason, the Government doesn’t want to publicize the distinction between a bunch of independent colonies and a nation in its own right.”

“Yes, Will is spot on,” Fiona said. “What is being proposed is the adage of distracting the public with bread and circuses. That way people won’t ask questions about other things going wrong with society.”

“We took a stand against all the Australia Day hoopla several years ago with our ‘Invasion Day’ song,” I said. “We need to be consistent, we can’t turn our back on the views we had then.”

“So, the feeling I’m getting is that we don’t buy into anything that is explicitly ‘Bicentennial’ related?” Mary Beth said. “We won’t go into a yearlong hiatus, but we will still do our normal performances. Maybe we just take things as normal, and not even acknowledge that there’s something special going on. Is that what we should do?”

We all agreed with her; that seemed to be a reasonable approach. We weren’t buying into all the hype and carry-on with the supposed ‘bicentennial’, but we weren’t completely going away, either. Stewie suggested that we could see about re-releasing ‘Invasion Day’, Mary Beth said she would have to run that past Alberts since they have the legal responsibility for all of our recordings.

“They might not want to do something as ‘in your face’ like that,” she said. “But I can ask.”

“I know a lot of Kooris love that song, and if it came out early next year would buy a copy,” Stewie said. “Just a thought, it’s not a big issue.”

“I guess we should start to think about another album, too,” Phil said. “We’ve got a couple of tunes a few of us have been working on, nothing even ready for public performance, but give us a month or two, and they will be getting there.”

At my next Friday meeting with Alexa at the Bitola head office, I noticed one of Chris and Paul’s construction crew were working on the floor below Alexa’s office.

“Office space expansion,” Alexa said, explaining the construction noise. “We’ve made another acquisition, a commercial office janitorial company; in fact, they are the people who clean our offices here. That’s something that came out of some of the analytics in J.D. Edwards, just like it did with Printing Corporation. With the printing, the system showed me just how much money we had tied up in inventory; we would have to keep a goodly supply of forms because if we ran out of anything, it took a while to get resupplied. Now with them as part of us, we get a very quick turnaround, so we don’t have to keep as large of an emergency supply. We saw the same with our office cleaning, we can reduce the overheads of that division by amalgamating their accounting and HR functions.

“Which reminds me, I’ll probably need either David or Judy for a week, maybe starting September 14th, once the office construction is finished, to migrate the information into the computer, and get the PCs and terminals set up in the new office. We may need a few extra computers, I think three, but if David can come around and see me next week and we can talk about it.”

“Great, I’ll get him to call you to arrange a time,” I said. “Sounds like your business is doing good, growing like that.”

“Slow and steady, nothing too dramatic, I don’t want to end up over-extended. By the way, I don’t think we are likely to see any more problems from those Lebanese taxi owners, they tried another raid on A-1 Limo last night, and it was a failure for them.”

“How would they get the muscle, now that Domican has gone?” I asked.

“Some of his guys tried to do something, but without his oversight to plan it ... well, let’s just say they decided to visit A-1 at the same time we were having a ‘thank you’ function for the tow-truck drivers that we call upon. And when those towies get threatened ... it’s not pretty. All of the ex-Domican crew ended up in the hospital, as did a few of the taxi owners. Not a single police officer called, either. I had a call from the head of that owner’s group, saying they are burying the hatchet, and apologies for all the trouble. So I think you won’t have to worry about them going after you again, I guess the only source will be Houston and his supporters.”

“Well, without Domican for them to call upon to deal with me, I don’t think there’s much to worry about. Should I keep the gun, just in case? I probably won’t carry it with me all the time, now that it’s getting warmer, I won’t be wearing a jacket to Uni, so it’s harder to conceal the shoulder holster.”

“Keep it, no matter if some people have gone quiet, there’s always another competitor who feels aggrieved, even though we don’t do anything illegal, or even unethical. Those who can’t compete against us think we are cheating them, and rather than try to do better in the market, will resort to violence and intimidation. You never know when someone will step into Domican’s shoes, and try to put pressure on you.”

“Fair enough, I’ll keep it,” I said. “I’ll talk to Frank about using his range every few weeks to keep in practice.”

“That will be good; if you are carrying a gun when we are together, then you can protect me,” she said.

“I doubt you need any extra protection,” I said. “Especially from me!”

“I wouldn’t be so sure; that might be rather ... exciting, knowing you are armed and prepared to protect me. Ask Lisa how she would feel in the same situation, I bet she would get aroused knowing you’re ready to fight for her.”

“And would the same apply to you?” I asked her.

“Hmmm. It might, but then again, I’m almost always aroused when I’m with you. So who knows if you carrying a gun would be the cause? Now, there is one ‘gun’ that you have that I am always interested in; maybe you’ll ‘shoot’ me with that gun one day...”

“Rapid-fire?”

“I wouldn’t want it to be too rapid ... Maybe you could make it slow, long and lingering? I want you to empty your magazine into me...”

“You are bad, Ms Ramos... ‘Empty my magazine into you’ ... I’m sure I can hit the target every time.”

“I have several targets that I would like you to hit with your gun,” she said, unbuttoning her blouse.

We then spent a rather enjoyable hour, concluding with me sliding my ‘gun’ between her breasts and emptying my ‘magazine’ all over them.

“That was so much fun,” she said, after cleaning herself up. “Playing with you is always fun, and very satisfying.”

“You are your Baba’s granddaughter,” I said. “She taught you well.”

“That she did,” Alexa said, “that she did. You know, one of her regrets was never having the chance to have sex with you.

That evening at home, I told Lisa and Fiona about the message from Alexa, that there wasn’t likely to be any more problems from those taxi owners, since they tried to cause problems at A-1 Limo, but ran into a bunch of angry tow truck drivers.

“Maybe I’m being a bit judgmental, but trouble seems to follow Alexa, and her companies around,” Fiona said. “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”

“Does it worry you, Will, about the level of ... I’m not sure of the right word, violence maybe ... associated with her?” Lisa asked me.

“Well, I first saw that back when we were threatened by Domican, after our song ‘Don’t Hurt Me, Father’, came out,” I said. “Chris and Paul had some of their guys protect our place, and when they caught one of them ... it wasn’t pretty. There’s been some of the stuff that Alexa has told me she’s had to do, and I’ve seen some things first hand. And, well, they’re not a church choir, some of the stuff she does or orders is pretty brutal.

“But I don’t put Alexa and the others there in the same category as the Mafia or other organized crime groups. If you look at the things they do, sure they tend to take the law into their own hands, but they only act to protect their businesses or family members. It’s sort of like how I shot at those guys trying to kidnap you, Lisa. I was prepared to shoot, even kill them, to protect you and keep you safe.

“That’s the complete opposite of someone like Tom Domican, he had no scruples at all, as long as someone would pay him, he would do anything. A complete lack of any sort of morality, he would injure or kill if someone paid him to do that. With Alexa and Bitola, and the others in that group, they don’t do anything illegal, and even if they do push the limits a bit, it’s not to hurt anyone else.”

“So, they are ethical mobsters?” Fiona said. “Not that I think they are mobsters, not in the traditional sense of the word.”

“I guess ‘ethical’ is a good description,” I said. “Of course, ‘ethics’ is in rather short supply these days, and it tends to be misunderstood, with people assuming that ‘ethics’ can be equated to ‘morality’. Now, consider the other month, when Domican’s guys tried to kidnap Lisa, and I fired my gun at them. I would have aimed for the one holding Lisa, even if that meant killing him, but I was worried my aim might be off, and I would hit Lisa. Now was that legal? Probably, under self-defence rulings. Was it moral? Depending on one’s moral code, maybe so, maybe not. Was it ethical? According to my ethics, it was; you threaten me, my property or my family, then you have to face the consequences.”

“Makes sense to me,” Lisa said. “And from a personal perspective, I’m very glad you decided it was right to shoot at those kidnappers.”

“That’s the reason behind my decision to shoot at them,” I said. “If I had hit that guy and killed him, I don’t think I would be losing any sleep over it. Had I gone to trial – and that would be rather unlikely – I would have claimed self-defence; there’s plenty of precedences supporting a defence in that situation.”

“What do they call that – the ‘Castle Doctrine’?” Fiona said. “That allows you to use reasonable force to defend your life, your property or that of your family?”

“That’s pretty much what Frank told me; self-defence,” I said.

“Does protecting me count as self-defence?” Lisa asked.

“Yes, persons or property,” I said. “But the bottom line is there’s no chance of me turning into some crooked underworld figure, consorting with similar crooks!”

“Just as well, otherwise we would have to visit you in the Big House,” Fiona said.

“They wouldn’t give us conjugal visits either, I bet,” Lisa added.

I arranged for ‘Young Lovers’ to be hauled out of the water during the first week of September, the hull pressure washed to remove all of the barnacles and weed growth before a fresh coat of antifouling was applied. While she was up on the hardstand I had a rigger give everything a once-over; the lines, exit blocks on the mast, deck hardware and clean and lubricate the winches. Everything should still be in pretty good condition, but better to have things checked and serviced now, rather than have something fail or break during a race. We had spent several Saturdays over the winter break practising our sail handling, starts and mark rounding drills, and we felt that we were working better as a team. With three other Young 88s in the club fleet, we would be up against some stiff competition this season.

My prediction of some tough competition from the other Young’s proved to be true in the Opening Day race, after the formal ‘sail past’ and salute to the Commodore on the start boat, there was a short race around Pittwater. The wind made it challenging, a fifteen-knot nor-easter, but there were stronger gusts, or ‘bullets’, which we had to watch out for. A few of the other boats weren’t quite as observant, and several of them got into difficulties at the Stoke’s Point mark – I saw several of them doing penalty turns. We avoided problems like that, but we had to be content with being third over the line, behind Jeff Ogg on ‘Forerunner’ and Don Silver on ‘Hetaira’. Norm and Wendy Field were about thirty seconds behind us on ‘Young Generation’, meaning all of the Youngs filled out the first four places. At the post-mortem on the mooring afterwards, we felt that we made a mistake using the large number one genoa, we were a bit overpowered with the big sail up. Lisa said she was constantly battling weather helm, having to use the tiller to correct the course; and as a result, slowing us down.

“I guess that was my mistake, calling for the number one,” I said. “At least we will know for next time, fifteen knots is probably the upper limit for that sail.”

“Well, any of us could have disagreed with your sail selection, Will,” Ross said. “I thought it was a good call, so, don’t beat yourself up. At least we handled the conditions without making any mistakes, not like some of the others at that first mark rounding.”

“Okay, did anyone notice anything on the boat that needs attention?” I asked. “I had the shipwrights give all of the fixed and running rigging a good check, they didn’t find anything that needed fixing, but...”

No one had any concerns about things on the boat, so we finished packing things up, then it was back to the rigging deck for the post-race barbeque. There was lots of good-natured joking and teasing between the four Young 88 teams, I told both Don and Jeff I was impressed with how quickly they had got their new boats competitive. All of us looked forward to some good, competitive racing over the coming season. The club handicapper had decided that the four boats would share the same handicap, since our raw performance should be the same, the only difference being determined by individual crew ability

This was pretty much how the races over the next three weeks panned out; we got a second in the first heat or the Retriever Trophy, then a first the following week for the Quartet Bowl. It was like there was a race between our four boats within the main race, and it was enjoyable and challenging all at the same time. Since all four boats were identical, any advantage we would get would have to be by superior sailing and tactics. By the end of each race, we were exhausted both physically and mentally, we had to concentrate for the complete duration of the race, looking for wind shifts, making sure the sails were trimmed perfectly, trying to anticipate what the other boats would do. As exhausting and challenging as the races were, they were immensely satisfying; it was a test of our sailing skills, and so far, we had performed pretty well. The Family Race at the end of the month was a welcome break, it was a relaxing, fun race. We finished somewhere in the middle of the field, with the other three Youngs, but were happy enough to enjoy the barbeque afterwards.

The next weekend was the Labor Day long weekend, Lisa and I were off to Canberra, as Bob Hawke had called me earlier to invite us to stay at the Lodge. On Saturday there would be a meeting with some of his senior Cabinet members, as he said ‘to discuss strategy and policies’. Lisa took the Friday off from work and travelled to the University with me. Once I had finished my Computing IIC lecture and tutorial, we headed down the highway to Canberra, stopping at Goulburn for lunch, and the Paragon Café. There was no hurry, we took our time since we weren’t expected to be there until close to dinner time. Once we arrived in Canberra, we drove around Capital Circuit, seeing where the new Parliament House was almost complete, onto Adelaide Avenue, then the first left into National Circuit, and pulled up at the security gate to the Lodge.

I told the Federal Police security officer our names, and that we had been invited to visit; he checked a log sheet, asked us for identification, and had me open the back of the car, so he could have a quick search. I noticed his partner using a mirror on a long pole to check underneath the car, they seemed happy and told us to drive in, and park next to the main building. I drove up the gravel drive to where the visitors’ car parking spaces were, a man was waiting, one of the staff I assumed.

“Dr Morris? Welcome to the Lodge,” he said. “I’m Stuart, the butler for the Hawkes, let me show you to your rooms. The Prime Minister and Mrs Hawke are both out at the moment but should be back around 5:00 p.m. Once you’ve settled into your room, there’s an attached bathroom should you wish to take a shower, you can come down to the sitting room and wait for them. Dinner should be served at 7:00, and there’s no need to dress formally for it; unless they are entertaining dignitaries the Prime Minister and Mrs Hawke prefer a rather informal style.”

He let us upstairs to the upper floor, and down a hallway past some closed doors. At the end of the hallway, he opened a door and showed us the room that would be ours for the weekend. Stuart pointed out the intercom, which we could use if we needed anything. There were towels provided, and the bathroom, while small, was well-appointed, with a large walk-in shower. He left us to get ready for dinner, and we looked around the room. Lisa opened the curtains, and we could take in the view of the gardens and the tennis court in the back of the yard. The room was tastefully decorated, a painting on the wall opposite the foot of the bed, which appeared to be a McCubbin.