Who bombed the Hilton? (2 page)

As Fred and I nibble away at the set lunch menu, he is questioning (head swivelling to check for other diners' straining ears) why aspects of the security surrounding the inaugural Commonwealth Heads of Government Regional Meeting were so lax. Why were snipers positioned on top of the QVB (he gestures furtively to the right of where we are sitting), yet none of the police stationed across the road, outside the Hilton, were ordered to check garbage bins? The Hilton conspiracy theorists have long pointed to this aberration in what was purportedly standard police protocol as proof positive of the involvement of Australia's secret service (ASIO) and/or Australian military intelligence and/or New South Wales Special Branch
in planting the bomb in the bin themselves. A theory, I find after some robust research, as fanciful and delicate as a Fabergé egg. Is Fred telling me because he believes it has substance? Or is he testing my agenda? Finding out where my allegiances lie? Does he know something? Or is he just another person tugging at the edges of this tatty, fractured saga? Sad to say, despite my heightened expectations, the latter turns out to be true.

Why is this one crime so absolutely maddening? Australians by nature are not known for their excessive discretion, yet Fred is simply one in a long line of people circling the investigation who are wedded to communicating in opaque coded sentences. Half a dozen leading investigative journalists have sworn only to speak to me off the record, then proceeded to point me towards the same prime suspect — a man who was never questioned by the police. Then they warn me to go no further and recount horror tales of being targeted and harassed. Federal government ministers deny that they authored top secret reports now made public in the National Library under the 30-year rule, despite these reports bearing their names. Malcolm Fraser, the prime minister at the time, told me a few years back that it was a stupid topic to research and instead of wasting my time trying to winnow out the truth of the bombing I should be focusing on the contemporary plight of refugees. Even those
individuals suspected of the crime, then allegedly verballed, charged, accused of another crime altogether, jailed then freed, seem committed to joining the chorus of obfuscators. I approach one who says he doesn't want to talk but sends me his own highly ambiguous autobiography. I contact another who is equally wary but then enthuses about how eager he is to see the finished film.

This is what I am supposed to be doing — researching a treatment for a documentary film. A film in which the story is fast metastasising beyond the tidy narrative trajectories beloved by commissioners at our two public broadcasters. I know — I've made a dozen tidy tales for them over the last 10 years. The kind of history documentaries currently in vogue omit the murky and the puzzling or indeed multiple and possibly contradictory versions of what was. One of these commissioners keeps telling me what he wants is a hero's journey! As if he's hoping that some manly, handsome secret policeman now in his dotage (perhaps like my lunch partner, Fred) will step forth from the shadows and simplify the whole thing for us and iron out the wrinkles. But this is what history is — it's a mess. Bits of one event flop into others, things don't end properly. Witnesses misremember, they evade. They say the car was red when it was blue, the man was dead, the man limped away, the man was a woman.

I retreat into the archives. The truth of this story
lies not with the living but with the dead. In bits of papers such as this:

Favell, a garbage collector, was collected from the asphalt on George Street in plastic bags. He had a seven-year-old daughter.

When I first enter the New South Wales State Records building, it's strangely intoxicating to come across stark reminders of what actually occurred. The Hilton bombing records are unique in Australia. In 1995, in order to placate various politicians on the left and the right who were making fervent calls
²
for a joint state–federal inquiry into the Hilton bombing
along with the conspiracy claims (fuelled in part by a 1995 ABC documentary called
Conspiracy
, which you can catch on YouTube), New South Wales Premier Bob Carr and Prime Minister Paul Keating agreed to open the files relating to the Hilton bombing to the public. They have sat in the New South Wales State Records ever since.

Housed in a paddock on the fringe of the city, the archives building looks like a set from a sci-fi movie. It's hard to get a sense of the physical dimensions of the holdings as only one folder is released at a time, and the catalogue descriptions give a poor indication of what is going to emerge from the Tardis-like vault behind the reception counter. A request for a promising item may only result in a slim manila folder containing time sheets. Another innocuous-sounding listing emerges as a large box stuffed full of revelations. By my estimate the Hilton archive is larger than a walk-in wardrobe and smaller than a two-bedroom house.

This book is the story of my journey through that archive, supplemented by research in many other primary archival sources in Australia and overseas, to find answers.

What I found surprised me.

I was a schoolgirl in Sydney when the bomb went off and I remember exactly where I was when I learnt what had happened. Our teacher, Mrs K, an overly dramatic, skinny woman with a penchant for
stiletto heels, recounted the ghastly news and made us bow our heads in a minute's silence. Things seemed very serious and a girl in my class burst into noisy tears, sputtering that her uncle had known one of the deceased. Despite the clarity of that memory, I, like most people who remember the actual bombing, couldn't really explain what had happened in the years that followed or, indeed, who did or didn't do it. It strikes me as odd that such a key moment in Australia's history is so unexplored. If you're too young to have any recollection of the bombing it must be intriguing why such a colossal crime remains unsolved and so saturated in conspiracy theories.

After trekking through the evidence available, it is clear that most of the answers lie in the first 12 months after the bombing. After that, the narrative becomes hijacked by a miscarriage of justice story — a story taken up by activists and an emerging new generation of journalists and papers like
Nation Review
and the
National Times.
This is the story people remember, but it tends to obscure the truth. It's a story that was very much of its time — a sort of impassioned tale of the late 1970s, following in the wake of the anti-Vietnam War sentiment early in the decade and the rage around the dismissal of the Whitlam Government in 1975. It's a story that lives in the public domain as the goodies — counter-culturists, the free press, anti-authoritarian citizens — versus the baddies — the
police, the secret services, politicians, institutions. It's also a narrative arc that Australians adore, that of the underdog fighting for truth and justice and triumphing. The thing is, this story tells you nothing about who might have planted a bomb outside the Hilton Hotel that February night.

The story we tell

The public story goes like this:

13 February 1978. There is a gathering of regional Commonwealth heads of state (CHOGRM) at the Hilton Hotel. This includes leaders from Tonga, Nauru, Singapore and India. Early in the morning, before the summit opens, a bomb goes off when a bin outside the George Street entrance is emptied into a garbage truck. Two garbagemen, Alec Carter and William Favell, are killed, and a policeman, Paul Burmistriw, is badly injured. He will die nine days later. Inside there is pandemonium. Prime Minister Fraser calls out the Army to protect the foreign leaders.

By morning a task force of over 100 is assembled to catch the bomber. In this team are 58 detectives, 15 of whom are experienced homicide investigators.
¹
The Premier and the Prime Minister offer a reward of $100 000. Suspects start to be brought in for questioning, including the feminists and anarchists who had been protesting during the arrival of various leaders the day before. Members of the religious sect the Ananda Marga are also questioned — they are alleged to have been behind attacks on Indian nationals in Australia over the previous six months in protest at India's imprisonment of their leader, Baba. It is thought that India's Prime Minister Desai, who was staying at the Hilton, could have been a target. The Ananda Marga public relations secretary, Tim Anderson, immediately refutes these suspicions in a press conference, stating that the sect is shocked by the bombing and extending the sect members' sympathy to the families of the dead and injured.

The Australian wing of the Indian-based Ananda Marga is made up of a few hundred followers. They practise yoga, meditation, run their own schools and soup kitchens and raise money for disaster relief.

Within days the investigation appears to have ground to a halt. There are repeated newspaper articles reporting a lack of leads, dead ends and appeals for information from the public. Simultaneously, various individuals make claims about it being an elaborate plot hatched by ASIO, military intelligence and New South Wales Police Special Branch (the police charged with looking after VIPs) in order to scuttle any
ongoing investigations critical to their practices and justify their respective futures.

Months crawl by — the papers keep up their rattat-tat of gloom — no new leads and no evidence.

15 June 1978. Three young members of the Ananda Marga sect are arrested: Tim Anderson, 26; Ross Dunn, 24; and Paul Alister, 22. The police say they have caught Dunn and Alister with explosives in a car at Yagoona in south-western Sydney as they were attempting to blow up Robert Cameron, the leader of the Nazi National Alliance. According to the police, Anderson was caught with incriminating evidence at the sect's headquarters in Newtown. All three confess that night to conspiracy to murder Cameron. One of the arresting officers is Roger Rogerson.

July 1978. A few weeks after the arrests it transpires that a man named Richard Seary was with Dunn and Alister the night they were arrested. Seary had been posing as a sect member but was in fact working as an informant for New South Wales Special Branch and had tipped off the cops about the Cameron conspiracy. Seary then thickens the plot by adding (two weeks after the event) that, en route to Yagoona, Dunn and Alister admitted they had committed the Hilton bombing.

Anderson, Dunn and Alister say that the police have planted the evidence — explosives and incriminating letters — and have physically assaulted them
and fabricated the confessions. They say Richard Seary is a liar and a fantasist.

February 1979. Anderson, Alister and Dunn (who will become known as the Yagoona Three) stand trial for conspiracy to murder Cameron. The Hilton bombing accusations are not pursued for insufficient evidence. The jury cannot agree on a verdict and a new trial is ordered.

August 1979. A second jury finds the three young men guilty of a conspiracy to blow up Robert Cameron and they are sentenced to 16 years' imprisonment.

Throughout the trials there is growing public support for the Yagoona Three. Their conviction is increasingly reported as a flagrant miscarriage of justice, as a standout example of police corruption involving police ‘verballing' suspects, i.e. writing their confessions for them. There is also growing suspicion about the credibility of Richard Seary and his role as a police informant. A vigorous movement to free Anderson, Alister and Dunn is mounted.

September–October 1982. Everything comes to a head at the coronial inquest into the Hilton bombing. It's a kind of zoo of competing interests. The Yagoona Three use it to discredit Richard Seary and thus highlight the illegitimacy of their convictions. A policeman injured at the Hilton, Terry Griffiths, embroiled in a highly litigious compensation battle with the state government, uses it to promote evidence that points to
the culpability of ASIO and Special Branch. Richard Seary uses it to reiterate his 1978 claims about Alister and Dunn confessing to the bombing.

The inquest is halted and a prima facie case is put forward for Dunn and Alister to stand trial for triple murder. Again, the most sensational case of terrorist triple murder in Australia is not pursued for lack of evidence. The three young men remain in jail for the Cameron murder conspiracy.

By the early 1980s, the movement promoting the Yagoona Three case as a miscarriage of justice grows exponentially. Evidence emerges suggesting that both Richard Seary and the police were far from reliable and eventually, in response to public and press agitation, the state government agrees to hold an inquiry into the matter. On 20 June 1984, pursuant to the provisions of Section 475 of the
Crimes Act 1900
(NSW), an investigation is launched into the convictions of Anderson, Alister and Dunn for conspiracy to murder Robert Cameron.