Wherefore Art Thou Hughie?
The Year of Living Soberly
In 1969 Reuters sent me to Indonesia as their foreign correspondent – a place the British international newsagency described as “the most wide-ranging beat in the world”.
I would be covering, by myself, 6,000 islands spread across more than 3,200 miles in the biggest Muslim country in the world.
Population: 120 million.
When I landed in Djakarta that February, aged 28, I’d never been there before. Didn’t speak the language. Didn’t know a single person in the whole country.
Fortunately, Reuters employed a smart local Indonesian journalist, Harjono, as my assistant.
Harjono met me at the airport and took me for an orange juice, this being a Moslem country, and that first evening we sat in a large timber-floored shop at a nailed-together wooden table as the only customers.
Things had to improve.
Harjono took me to the Reuter house in the suburb of Menteng in Djalan Lembang, where he introduced the three Indonesians who lived there … and one who didn’t.
“These are your servants, and here is your driver, Tatang,” Harjono explained. “Your car is in the driveway.”
It was a beige 1966 VW Beetle ... not a vehicle usually driven by a chauffeur anywhere else in the world.
I said I didn’t need servants – in any case not more than one – but Harjono insisted that employing live-in servants was part of being a good citizen in Indonesia.
One of my servants, Sadri, was the djaga – the night watchman.
Since I didn’t need a guard, I appointed him my cook.
While the Reuter house was large enough for all of us, the Reuter office was less than a hole in the wall; just a room within the Indonesian Antara Newsagency office.
Eight foot by ten foot, with no windows looking out to the outside world.
Harjono introduced me to my translator, Sutardjo and these two round-faced serious Javanese men sat facing me from their shared desk pushed up against mine.
Awaiting my instructions.
That was when they told me that the only way to send a story out of Djakarta to the world was by Morse code. And only after it had been stamped at the Censor’s Office.
This wasn’t what I was expecting when I joined Reuters at 85 Fleet Street London in 1965.
There weren’t any movies to go to in Djakarta, no TV that I could understand, and worst of all for a reporter, no telephone book.
No such thing, of course, as air-conditioning in the office … or even in the VW Beetle.
No wonder the Governor of Djakarta had recently described this city of 4.6 million as “the biggest kampong [village] in the world”.
For the first time since I’d left Brisbane in 1964, I was lonely, dusty, and miserable. I felt lost. And hot.
Djakarta was so hot that after a while my night-watchman/cook Sadri nicknamed me air dingin because every time I burst into the house I yelled out “Air dingin! Air dingin!” – a glass of cold water!
They were the first Indonesian words I learned.
Indonesians knew how to live sensibly in the climate. No one, not even the President, wore a suit and tie. And most offices shut at 1 o’clock every afternoon.
Even the leaders knew you couldn’t survive without a drink.
On one occasion, Adam Malik, Indonesia’s Foreign Minister and one of the most powerful people in the world, was delayed, leaving half a dozen journalists waiting outside his office.
He sent out a glass of orange juice for each of us, to be going on with, before he emerged.
In 1969 there was only a tiny international community … a sprinkling of people from a score of countries. And they all missed going to the movies.
Hollywood claimed that Indonesia hadn’t paid up when they imported American films, so no more movies for them.
Which meant no movies for us.
This didn’t affect the locals because a big evening out on Java was a puppet show featuring beautifully crafted, colourfully painted wayang dolls.
Such performances could go for six hours.
I never went because I hated Punch & Judy shows as a child.
But their wayang dolls are such a work of art that I still have two on my office shelf today: exaggerated ears, nose, and eyes; hand-made, elaborate; adorned with beads and jewels; complete with headdress and tassels.
Wayang dolls have moving elbow and shoulder joints with long thin sticks attached to the hands to control each gesture.
The head turns freely from side to side, and the puppet, of course, can lean forwards, backwards or sideways – all controlled by a hand underneath the long traditional costume.
Such shows had been around for a thousand years … back to when royal families ruled parts of Java and Bali. Locals know these stories just like we know the Knights of the Round Table or Batman and Robin or King Lear.
The small international community – not being fans of puppetry, and generally not understanding Bahasa Indonesia (the official language) – in desperation, as a once-off, banded together to get hold of a copy of a Hollywood film.
They came up with Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 movie Romeo and Juliette … starring 15-year-old Olivia Hussey as Juliette.
There was no cinema, so they strung up white sheets in the dining room of the only international hotel in town, Hotel Indonesia, which everyone called “the HI” pronounced “the High E”.
Every expat in town turned up to see that movie, so the dining room was bursting.
At drinks afterwards I sauntered over with my cold juice to a group of Scandinavians – including several Danes and three Norwegians.
“So … what did you think of England’s Shakespeare?” I asked.
A tall bleary-eyed Norwegian named Thor – sent by the United Nations to build roads in Indonesia – replied in bewilderment: “I thought I spoke English … until tonight!” The others heartily agreed.
Wherefore art thou Romeo? was way beyond them.
Another expat sidled up to our little group and in a smooth Middle European accent introduced himself.
It was Sergei, the correspondent for Radio Moscow.
“You are so right, Thor,” Sergei told the Norwegian road-builder, “the play is unnecessarily and artificially contextualized. Not his best; a mere bagatelle, I think you would agree?
“Whereas give me King Lear: here you can enjoy a demonstration of the corrosive effect of hereditary autocracy, don’t you think, Hugh?”
I couldn’t answer because my mind was elsewhere.
I was concentrating on the three Norwegians: Thor and his wife and the wife’s younger sister, a fragile 20-year-old with large eyes, blonde shoulder-length hair and the cutest up-turned nose I’d seen.
In a burst of enthusiasm, I invited the three weary Norwegians for dinner at my Reuter house, along with the gregarious Sergei and two visiting Australian ABC reporters.
I thought it would make an interesting night.
And it did.
To start the ball rolling I asked one of the Aussies how things were going back home.
“Ohhhh I toddled down the old Gold Coast in Betsy with another bloke the other week and I’d just left the Sufferers Paradise Beer Garden, when I fair tripped over this beaut sheila coming up Cavil Avenue in a Paula Stafford bikini, a good sort, a bit of alright, and I said to me mate Struth! listen to this sport … ”
It was marvellous to hear the patois of Australian voices again; the familiar places I hadn’t heard mentioned for years.
We swapped stories across the dinner table until I noticed the Norwegians were not similarly fascinated.
We needed the food!
In the kitchen saucepans were boiling but Sadri was guarding seven empty plates. He was clearly struggling to cook for a party of Europeans (if you counted the Australians and the Russian).
The tall thin road-builder, Thor, followed me with purpose: “What are those two Australian men in there talking about? We cannot understand nothing. They sound like Shakespeare!”
When we got back to the dinner table, I had a plan to involve everyone in the conversation. I would draw Sergei in, to get a different view of the world, a Russian view.
“Sergei, does modern Russia think of itself more as European or as Communist?” I asked.
“We love our European neighbours,” Sergei responded, smiling inappropriately around the table, “they are good neighbours, we have cordial relations. When I think of the bourgeois refinements of Paris, frivolous, but so charming. And the Altstadt, the old city in Hamburg. Beguiling.”
One of the ABC reporters commented wryly: “So is the Berlin Wall no longer necessary then?”
Sergei kept on smiling. “As one of America’s eloquent, or should I say ironic, philosophers once observed, good fences make good neighbours.”
The young Norwegian lass was now staring at Sergei, as if enthralled.
So I asked her: “What’s your opinion then?”
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
Sergei continued his palaver until a woman’s voice cut the dining room in half.
“Get your submarines out of our Fjords!!!!”
It was the Norwegian lass.
Sergei tried to head off an international incident with a wave of a hand, saying: “So charming. My dear, the world is an imperfect place, and when you are grown up you will enjoy …”
But the Norwegian was now a Viking who would not be dismissed or patronised.
“That has nothing with it to do!” she said. “We know your submarines are there!”
I stood up and announced: “Anyone like a drink?”
Everyone cheered yes.
Counting on my fingers I said, “I’ve got mango juice, or air dingin or … durian juice! I know the fruit stinks, but the aroma of the juice itself is to die for, such a delicate flavour on the palate.”
That was my last attempt to hold a dinner party in Djakarta.
Meanwhile at work, Reuters had warned me to watch out for any coup d'état because it would change the political and economic landscape of South-east Asia.
The biggest story in the world a few years earlier had been the so-called October 1 Communist Coup Attempt when it was said that a million Indonesians were killed.
Reuters had a secret code to get such a story out in the event of coup d'état censorship … so I was always ready for anything. (It all had to do with a deck of playing cards.)
A month after arrival, in the middle of the night I was awoken by the noise of shooting.
There was no one to phone to ask what was happening. No TV news to watch. No government people I could trust implicitly … so I jumped in the VW Beetle and drove around town to all the main places, but never saw any action.
I needed to know people who knew more than me.
I decided on three other Djakarta correspondents who were my age but had been there for years … even though they were my deadly competition.
One of these was Joe Galloway, an American who, like me, had been a war correspondent in Vietnam.
Joe represented United Press International (UPI), the wire service that instructed their staff “when writing a story always think of the Kansas City milkman”.
In other words, keep it simple.
Reuters, which was proud of its reputation for getting things right, and fast, referred to UPI as secondary opposition: adding somewhat pompously “they’re not always first, but they’re often inaccurate”.
Big and freckle-faced and always able to laugh in a bad situation, Joe Galloway had been a fearless war correspondent a few years before I reached Vietnam.
He had been in the infamous Battle of the Ia Drang Valley which shocked the world in 1965 … when two American battalions were ambushed by the North Vietnamese and 50 percent of those Americans were wounded, killed, or missing.
Joe Galloway wrote a book about it, We Were Soldiers Once … And Young, which was made into a Hollywood block-buster starring Mel Gibson.
Barry Pepper played Joe.
Joe also won universal respect among reporters in Indonesia when he imported an ice-cream-making-machine to a country where ice cream and milkshakes simply didn’t exist.
And he invited us all around.
As I wound the handle when it was my turn, I asked Joe how on earth he managed to get this fantastic ice-cream-making-machine through Indonesian Customs. I had imported my MGTF from Singapore but couldn’t get it released from the dock at Tanjung Priok.
In Vietnam you had to pay “coffee and tea money” to underpaid civil servants to get things done, and apparently they had a similar system in Djakarta.
I had refused to pay and rang the Australian Embassy for help but was told: “We have to pay corrupsi ourselves at Tanjung Priok to get our cars released!”
Joe Galloway volunteered to come with me to sort it out.
He got us a meeting with a top Customs official in a large office above the wharves where Joe said he understood why people on low wages had to be paid … but Hughie here was just a journalist who needed his car to do his job.
The official replied: “I’m pleased you understand our systems Joe” … and I got my car.
Joe was so impressed with my 1954 British Racing Green MGTF that he later bought it from me and took it with him when he was transferred to India.
We stayed friends for the rest of his life.
The second correspondent competitor was the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) Bureau Chief Mike Carlton, who also had been to Vietnam.
I’d met Mike in Singapore the previous year at the Tanglin Club when he told me upfront that his nickname was “the wonder boy” because he was only 22 when made a foreign correspondent.
At first, I was cynical about his descriptor: but I soon learned Mike Carlton truly was a wonder.
Mike could imitate anyone’s voice perfectly and would confuse visiting Australian politicians by asking questions in different voices from different parts of the press pack.
After a while the politician would start doubting himself.
Indonesia was especially perplexing for visiting Australian politicians because the names of the leaders were difficult to pronounce and therefore remember: such as West Irian Affairs Minister Dr Sudjarwo Tjondronegoro.
Also, in a country ruled by the military, most leaders were Generals.
So much so that the joke in 1969 after America landed on the Moon was: “Why’s everyone so impressed? If Indonesia put all its Generals end to end then they would reach the Moon too!”
When Australian Prime Minister John Gorton visited Indonesia, he was asked at a press conference: “What do you think of the general S.E.A.T.O. arrangements?”
Gorton was heard to turn to his protocol officer and ask: “Which one’s General Seato?”
Mike Carlton was not just a correspondent, he was the local rock star … and he had the hair to prove it. Thick, curly, dark Afro hair that swayed in all directions as he moved around the stage with his guitar: Mike on mike.
His band of English, Aussies, and Indonesians performed around town and, in my opinion, Mike Carlton sang The Ballad of John and Yoko better than John and Yoko.
At one of these shows I befriended Mike’s red-bearded lead guitar Ed Blanche, an Englishman.
Ed was the correspondent for the AP (Associated Press), America’s leading wire service which Reuters always referred to as primary opposition.
But we were far from London or New York.
The Norwegian lass had a tall beautiful Danish friend her age and next thing Ed and I were driving them around Djakarta crushed up in the MGTF on double dates.
There was an informal Foreign Correspondents Bar on the top floor of the High E.
It was there that I told Joe, Ed, and Mike how I’d heard shooting one night at 2 a.m. and drove around the deserted city looking for another coup d'état. What if there had actually been a coup, and I didn’t find it?
They assured me we were all in the same boat: we would only know when the Indonesians told us.
So, just for fun, we stood at the bar composing a story as if a coup had occurred.
It had to be as cliché-ridden as possible, because that’s what news editors love: stories they recognise.
Definitely not something brand new.
Mike took the sheet of paper we eventually came up with and read it out to the bar like a BBC Announcer:
Tanks and armoured cars rolled through the streets of this hot dusty tropical capital tonight in a last minute bid to uphold the shaky regime of President Ibnu Suharto, 48.
A few months later I was elected president of the Djakarta Foreign Correspondents Club – no one else wanted it – and put on a lunch to welcome the arrival in town of the ABC’s boss Sir Talbot Duckmanton – with Indonesian Foreign Minister Adam Malik the guest.
Since the ABC always demanded their correspondents appear on screen in a jacket, whatever the situation, Mike Carlton was panicking.
Mike hadn’t worn his suit for two years, and he was sure he’d no longer get into it.
Others suggested Mike give his Afro a trim.
With a suited Sir Talbot smoking a pipe, Mike appeared late with his Afro chaotically plastered down with hair oil and his blue suit bulging, the coat button threatening to explode … and still wearing the brown leather riding boots he starred in on stage.
I had the unenviable task of saying: “Sir Talbot please meet your ABC Indonesian Bureau Chief Mr Mike Carlton.”
Sir Talbot’s pipe seemed to momentarily tremble in his mouth, but, noblesse oblige, he shook hands.
Mike never wore that suit again.
He never had to.
Instead, Mike soon returned to Australia and very quickly became Sydney’s top-rating radio announcer.
Sixteen years later, in 1985 in Sydney’s Botanic Gardens, Mike launched my first memoir VIETNAM: A Reporter’s War in front of an audience which included my wife Helen, her Aunty Trixie, and Trixie’s girlfriends Dulcie, Maggie and Alice: all in hats, gloves, and crystal-bead necklaces.
Mike demonstrated he was still a wonder boy with words: “I worked in Vietnam for a bit myself ... Hugh has written about it, and he has written about it truly. Even the lies are true.”
Back in the 1960s, a foreign correspondent went and lived in some strange country for years.
Occasionally, if the story was world-shattering enough, they would be sent in for a week or so. But it’s always difficult for a four-day foreign correspondent to arrive in a new country and understand immediately what’s going on.
So they have their methods.
Like when the London Daily Mirror’s famous war correspondent Donald Wise arrived in Saigon during the 1968 Tet Offensive.
There was a conga line of journalists trying to get in to Vietnam, but no one had been able to get in or out because of the street-fighting in Saigon as the Viet Cong captured the American Embassy and key installations.
No planes could land or take off … yet this was (officially) the biggest story in the world that year and we who actually lived there had been covering it night and day.
After a week Donald Wise finally got in.
Tall and thin, with a handlebar moustache and a wide belt, Donald arrived from the airport and strode past me confidently through our Reuters office to the Telex Room at the back.
He ignored our telex operator, sat at one of the machines and started typing:
PRO LONDON DAILY MIRROR. EX WISE.
SAIGON, FEBRUARY 5 – I STOOD AGHAST AS … PICK UP NEWSAGENCIES.
We were the newsagencies.
In Djakarta just over a year later, I was sitting in our little office when a handsome fair-haired strongly-built Englishman, a year or two older than me, appeared at the door.
“Brian Barron, the BBC”.
Brian took me out to lunch as I was eager to hear about Swinging London after three years away.
The biggest story in Indonesia that year was the upcoming vote by the 800,000 Papuans in West Irian (the former Dutch New Guinea, now called Papua) whereby they would decide their future.
Whether to be independent, or become part of the Republic of Indonesia.
The United Nations was charged with overseeing what they officially called an “Act of Free Choice”.
I’d been writing preview stories about this twice a week as details very slowly came to light.
Despite the presence of a UN team, there would be no secret ballot; there would be no one-man-one-vote; only 1,025 Papuans would be chosen to make the decision.
No one yet knew who would choose them.
I had been living, eating, and breathing this story for four months.
“Hugh!” the charming Brian Barron exclaimed. “I can’t get my head around this Act of Free Choice. You say it will not be a one-man-one-vote and yet the UN are supervising?”
I told him Indonesia was doing it their way and the United Nations said they were only there to “advise and assist”.
His BBC listeners should know that, although West Irian is only half of the island of New Guinea, it is the size of France. “There are mountains so high that they are ice-capped, even though they are on the equator!”
I told him all that I knew, grateful to find someone interested.
Brian thanked me profusely, flew out for Singapore, and two days later I received a rebuke from Reuters in London:
PRO LUNN EX LONDON DESK
BBC HAS BRILLIANT BREAKDOWN ON WEST IRIAN SITUATION SUMMING UP WORLD IMPLICATIONS AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT.
NEED MATCHER URGENTEST.
How was I to know that Brian Barron would do such an outstanding job?
[I tell the full tale of the Act of Free Choice here: The Dark Side of the Moon]
Dear Gay, That's the problem with leaving home for seven years --a few letters can never tell the family all that is going on. That's one of the reasons I'm typing them out now so everyone can see and feel what it was like to be where I was when I was. I'm doing it because there's an awful lot of power in writing things down. love Hughie
Not all areas of Indonesia were against alcohol. Borneo, from mid 1968 till late 1969. At a christian (Lutheran) village, we got Bintang Baru, in 26oz bottles. (New Star) We were living on houseboats so we did move around quite a bit. (Seismic oil exploration)
When I first arrived the outfit was tied up just below a muslim village. A couple of days later I borrowed a company canoe and paddled up river. The first store I came to was built on floating logs, with access from the river or the bank side. I picked out some fishing gear and placed it on the counter. The store owner had no English, and I had no Indonesian. He reached into the till and pulled out four pieces of colored paper, money, and laid them down side by side. I matched them. We both smiled.
Got back to the houseboats. "Fishing? You did notice that all the outhouses are out over the river." Never did fish.