The Marmalade Files (15 page)

Peter Thompson gathered his charges around him, like an experienced coach delivering a pep talk before a footy grand final. He felt on top of the world, and it was barely 4 a.m.

‘We are making history, broadcasting history! I can almost sniff the Logie, fellas.'

The
Morning Glory
team was used to punishingly early starts but the pre-production for the Catriona Bailey shoot was more complex and gruelling than any before. It would be worth it, though. It was Monday morning, and at John James Hospital dozens of Seven technicians, producers and stars were gathering for the TV event of the year.

Thommo had spent the entire weekend working with Bailey and their encounters had been shot from multiple angles. Then they were edited down, to be rolled in once the show went live at 6 a.m. The best bits would be recycled several times during the morning. The relationship between Thommo and Bailey would
be highlighted, as the program reclaimed the Foreign Minister as a much-loved member of the
Morning Glory
family.

The footage included a montage of happier times: Thommo and Bailey diving on the Barrier Reef, laughing at lame jokes, in serious discussions about the economy. The audience, of course, was part of the family. People would feel like they were at the hospital bed, wallowing in the emotion of the moment and flicking through the family album of mawkish, air-brushed memories. And they would be invited to join the conversation online, sending messages of support and asking Bailey questions.

Thommo's breakfast partner, Janelle ‘Janny' Jeffries, was positioned in the freezing cold in the hospital car park, where a huge screen had been erected and the public invited to attend.

A deal had been cut with the News Limited tabloids, despite the reservations of some at Seven. The tabloids had been given Bailey's first words to run in their second editions, ensuring that as the nation awoke it could watch the seminal moment on TV and have it echoed in the most popular papers around the nation. It was a calculated risk. Some might see the paper before the show, but most wouldn't, and, anyway, Seven had much bigger surprises in store.

Seven had trawled the nation and the world, scooping up prerecorded messages of support from a bevy of politicians and celebrities. The coup would be a live cross to the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, a long-time friend of Bailey's. There were also messages of support from the Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom, India, New Zealand, and the President of China.

Each stage of the three-hour show would be highly choreographed and dramatised. An enormous amount of effort
had gone into staging the ‘first words' Bailey blinked. This, of course, was utter nonsense given that Bailey had barely shut up since she had been taught to use the Dasher eye-movement word processor. She had been issuing a steady stream of instructions to everyone and had strong opinions on how the show should run and even where the lights should be.

The production was costing a bomb. The relatively small space of the hospital suite had to accommodate medical equipment and a mass of automatic and operator-controlled cameras. One camera was needed to get close-ups of Bailey's face and another to get a wider two-shot of Bailey and Thommo. A third was mounted on the ceiling to give an overview of the stricken Bailey on her bed with Thommo perched attentively alongside. Another was set up to show Bailey's words as they appeared on the Dasher computer screen. And positioning the computer monitor had caused all kinds of grief. It had to be close enough to pick up Bailey's eye movements but far enough away to allow the other cameras a clear shot of her face. A small camera was eventually set up on top of the monitor to shoot back at Bailey.

The show began at 6 a.m. with an establishing shot of Thommo outside John James Hospital.

‘It's with a mixture of sorrow and joy that we join you this morning,' Thommo began.

Cut to the ceiling camera showing Bailey lying on her hospital bed, attached to all manner of medical machinery.

‘Part of me is cut up at seeing our mate Cate trapped inside her own body, unable to move.'

The camera begins a slow zoom down towards Bailey's bed.

‘But another part of me knows that her mind is still soaring like an eagle.'

Cut to a close-up of Bailey's face from the camera mounted on the Dasher monitor.

‘She hasn't lost her great wit, her massive intellect or, most of all, her deep concern about us and this country.'

Cut to the wide two-shot of Thommo sitting beside Bailey's bed. (A miraculous feat of speed to get in from outside, but, hopefully, as with all great theatre, no one would wonder how he pulled that off.) The camera comes in for a mid-shot of Thommo.

‘This morning, I guarantee you will shed a tear. But you will also laugh with and be inspired by Cate Bailey. It's been an extraordinary journey to this day … but let's begin by remembering happier times.'

Cue the opening bars of ‘You've Got to Have Friends' and the exquisitely edited footage of Cate rolls out into the lounge rooms of Australia.

The people who watch TV have no idea how labour intensive it is. The director in Channel Seven's outside broadcast van was a master of her craft and she oversaw a team of slick professionals. Everything had been timed to the second, with words and pictures married to tell a seamless story. By the time the montage was finished the ground was tilled for the first big bang.

‘Cate, how do you feel?' whispered Thommo.

The director cut to a shot of Bailey's face, her eyes concentrating on the Dasher screen in front of her, urging the cursor to respond.

‘B-o-n-z-e-r' was spelled out on the screen.

Outside, a small but growing band of hardy locals erupted in a spontaneous cheer. The broadcast cut to a shot of them and Janny leaping to her feet, clapping her mittened hands. ‘Bonzer' was plastered across the giant plasma screen in front of them. The director cut straight back to a close-up of Thommo.

‘That's our girl. That's our Cate,' he said, fighting back tears.

Days of effort had gone into considering that first question and Bailey had toyed with a number of responses. Most of them were ridiculously verbose and littered with medical terms she had imbibed from her specialist. She had been persuaded to keep the first message brief.

And then the single word had taken an hour to record, given Dasher was bewildered by the ancient ockerism.

The program's Twitter feed immediately spat out:

It was re-tweeted by thousands and Bailey began trending around the nation. That chatter would be fed back into the program through the morning, amplifying the circular conversation.

The cynical and astute would note later that the headline ‘BAILEY'S BONZER' was already splashed on tabloids across the nation, even though the papers must have been printed hours before, to be delivered to train and petrol stations, thrown onto lawns and unwrapped at breakfast tables. But they would be drowned out by a multitude who just wanted to believe.

The rest of the show was script-perfect.

The Chinese President announced that a panda cub born just a week before would be named ‘Cate Cate' in honour of a much-loved, fallen friend of the People's Republic.

The half-hour set aside for direct audience questions to Bailey's Twitter account went off, despite the producers' fears it would be dreary TV. Thommo and Janny were at their nonstop chatty best while Bailey dutifully plugged out the answers.

A real highlight had been a question from a young cancer sufferer who asked: ‘Are you still angry at the Prime Minister for taking your job?'

‘N-o. T-h-i-s h-a-s s-h-o-w-n m-e t-h-a-t n-o-t-h-i-n-g i-s m-o-r-e i-m-p-o-r-t-a-n-t t-h-a-n y-o-u-r h-e-a-l-t-h.'

Hillary Clinton burst into tears at the end of her interview with Thommo when he told her that Bailey had been closely following her trip to South Korea and was impressed by her steely determination to bring the errant North to heel.

‘You hang in there, girl!' urged Clinton.

‘I w-i-l-l H-i-l-l-a-r-y,' Bailey said.

Outside, the crowd had grown steadily all morning to several hundred well-rugged enthusiasts. Across the nation the minute-by-minute breakdown of the ratings would show that the audience peaked at one million just after 7 a.m. and, more remarkably, stayed at that level until 9 a.m.

The show had been designed to end with a bombshell. As the clock ticked towards 9 a.m., Thommo leaned in towards Bailey.

‘Cate, you've shown us this morning that you are as sharp and talented as you always were. What do you want to do now?'

‘I w-a-n-t t-o g-o b-a-c-k t-o w-o-r-k.'

A light breeze filtered through Perth's CBD, taming the temperature that was nudging twenty-two despite the winter season. Office workers strode with purpose along streets that bore triumphal evidence of the State's economic boom – construction cranes thrusting silently to the sky.

Harry Dunkley checked his pocket map, turning left into Perth's main thoroughfare towards his destination. St George's Terrace was the epicentre of Perth's commercial district, littered with the head offices of the mega-corporates that were raking in the billions as they clawed ever deeper into the red soil of the Pilbara, hundreds of kilometres to the north.

Ah, the joys of rampant capitalism, Dunkley thought, as he listened for the ghosts of those crooks who had run riot in the '80s, aided and abetted by a WA Labor Government drunk on power and the proximity to great big chunks of cash. All those white-collar criminals – Bondy, Laurie Connell and their ilk –
who had ripped off gullible shareholders before the prosecutors reluctantly exposed their evil deeds. Now it was the mining giants that were scrabbling over indigenous land, reluctant to pay their fair share of tax and cashing in on the billions to be made from gouging precious minerals from the ancient landscape.

But it wasn't BHP or Rio Tinto or Xstrata that Dunkley was pursuing today. Entering the building's foyer, he scanned an index and quickly found his target, taking a lift to level three, before exiting opposite a prominent sign: the Australian Electoral Commission.

First established in 1902 as an arm of the then Department of Home Affairs, the AEC had evolved into a powerful bureaucracy in its own right, responsible for maintaining the electoral roll and ensuring that, roughly every three years, around eleven million voters exercised their democratic right to put either Labor or the Coalition in power.

While most of its records were now available online, the documents that Dunkley wanted – from the 1996 election – were still only accessible in hard copy.

Dunkley introduced himself to a smartly dressed AEC officer who had already done some preliminary work. He was led to a desk where a small pile of documents and files lay in wait.

‘Cup of tea, Mr Dunkley?'

‘No, thanks.'

‘I'll leave you with these, then … yell if you need any help.'

The 1996 election had been a watershed. John Winston Howard, the man once about as popular as herpes, had surged
into office, sweeping away Paul Keating and his dwindling band of True Believers. It was an emphatic victory, one that would usher in another long period of Coalition rule. Labor had lost a humiliating thirty-one seats on the back of a 6.17 per cent swing. But in a rare bright moment for the ALP, Bruce Leonard Paxton had fended off an enthusiastic Liberal candidate to take his seat in the House of Representatives, part of a Caucus reduced to a miserable forty-nine members of Parliament.

And while there had been whispers about the way Paxton had made it to Canberra – who he'd paid off, who he'd fucked over along the way – for the most part the current Defence Minister's past had been left alone.

Until now. Until Dunkley had decided the Minister's history was worthy of exhumation.

He started sifting through the electoral returns for 1995, trying to prise open the secrets of who was bankrolling Labor's WA branch. Nothing looked out of the ordinary: the pages were filled with blue-chip corporates who usually donated $50,000 or $100,000 every year to each of the major parties, seeking to remain scrupulously non-partisan. There were the standard big-ticket donations from the array of unions that stood to lose big time under a Howard Government, even though it was Keating and his sidekick Laurie Brereton who had taken on Labor's industrial wing, introducing enterprise bargaining.

The '95 returns gave way to 1996, a more solid-looking document reflecting the intensity of an election year. Both Labor and the Coalition had scored handsomely, Dunkley thought.

As he scanned page after page of mainly anodyne returns, a small item caught his eye. On 11 January 1996 – just weeks before Keating fired the election starter's gun – the CFMEU had made an $80,000 donation to the ALP. There was nothing sinister about that, but in brackets the words ‘For the purpose of Bruce Paxton's campaign' had been added. And that, Dunkley knew, was highly unusual and needed further investigation.