As the Cold War enters the 70s, it becomes clear that Pine Gap is actually a spy base with eyes on the Soviets – and it's putting Alice Springs in the nuclear crosshairs.
As a Prime Minister is brought to his knees, protesters speak up and tensions flare in the town. Rumours swirl about just how far the US government will go to keep the secrets of Pine Gap.
To get in touch confidentially, please visit abc.net.au/news/confidential-tips
Credits
Alex Barwick: What did you all do at school today?
Alex's son: Um, did some maths, we did Arrernte.
Alex Barwick (VO): There’s a bowl of teriyaki chicken, some corn, avocado and noodles in the middle of our wooden kitchen bench. It’s dinner time, it’s chaotic but my sandy haired eight-year-old is always up for a chat, often while chewing.
Alex Barwick: So what did you learn in Arrente?
Alex Barwick (VO): He learnt a song, Arrernte is the local Aboriginal language.
The three kids know what I’m working on but we don’t really talk about it, so my husband cheekily asks them a question.
Rohan Barwick: What does everybody think about a Pine Gap?
Alex's son: I think that's really good.
Rohan Barwick: Do you? Why's that?
Alex's son: ‘Cause like, it's an army force kind of.
Like, some island is, um, aiming a missile there.
Alex Barwick: Who told you that?
Alex Barwick (VO): My son names a boy from his Alice Springs primary school around the corner from our house.
Rohan Barwick: Does your friend's dad work at Pine Gap?
Alex's son: Yeah.
Alex Barwick: And why is the missile aimed at us?
Alex's son: Cause like, we are spying on countries.
Alex Barwick (VO): This could be a tall tale, but I suspect some of it’s true. He thinks nothing of it as he reaches for some more avocado, he’s crazy for it.
I’m honestly a bit thrown by how casually my kids are discussing the possibility of a missile attack on their little town in the middle of outback Australia.
We’ve never had this conversation before. No one talks about Pine Gap, even though a huge chunk of the town works there.
Life feels pretty carefree here.
But back in the 70s, the nuclear threat was considered real for kids growing up in the Cold War.
Which is why, when that red wine soaked the desert earth sealing the deal between Australia and America for a secret place on the fringes of Alice Springs, it wasn’t necessarily seen as a bad thing. People could turn a blind eye to the disappearances and strange happenings.
It gave the US the edge over the Soviets, gathering information about their missiles.
But when one rising politician in Australia wanted answers about what exactly was going on there, promising to reveal everything to the Australian public, rumours began to swirl about just how far folk in Washington would go to protect the secrets of Pine Gap.
I’m Alex Barwick and I’m trying to find out; what on earth is happening in my backyard?
This is Spies in the Outback, Episode Two: Politics, Pressure and Protest.
Gough Whitlam (archival): It's clear that we won handsomely in New South Wales and Victoria.
Alex Barwick (VO): There’s a glass vase full of flowers on the shelf behind Gough Whitlam’s head. Paintings hanging on the bare yellow brick walls of his lounge room, currently crowded with reporters.
It’s election night.
News reporter (archival): Mr. Whitlam is now going out into the garden to join the hundreds of supporters who are just clamouring to congratulate him.
Alex Barwick (VO): The brand new Prime Minister of Australia, Gough Whitlam, has presence.
News reporter (archival): Women are now kissing him, men shaking his hands.
Alex Barwick (VO): Wearing a button up shirt and patterned tie, he towers over the gathering in his front yard.
It feels casual, very Australian, but it’s a big moment for the country.
December 2nd, 1972 saw Australians vote in a Labor government after decades of conservative rule.
And this progressive leader had a big agenda
He wanted to end conscription to the Vietnam War, introduce free education, and of course...
Brian Toohey: He gave a promise that he would tell the Australian public a lot more about what Pine Gap did.
Alex Barwick (VO): That’s Brian Toohey, who was working out of a shoebox office for the man who would become Whitlam’s Defence Minister, Lance Barnard.
Toohey was preparing papers and writing speeches.
Alex Barwick: What were his worries about Pine Gap?
Brian Toohey: You couldn't pretend you're a sovereign nation if the leaders didn't know what this base did and weren't able to tell the Australian public basically what it did. They had no clue about whether it might become a target or whatever.
Gough Whitlam (archival): There now need be no secrecy because, uh, Mr. Barnard and I can find out whatever we want to.
Alex Barwick (VO): Step one for the incoming PM; Whitlam would get a briefing from his Defence Department, and a key agenda item was the secretive Pine Gap base.
Brian Toohey: There is an absolute and complete requirement in the Australian public service that you can't lie to prime ministers.
You can't take it on yourself to say 'I'll decide what's going to be kept secret', and that's what happened with that briefing.
Alex Barwick (VO): Freshly elected Gough Whitlam met with Brian’s boss Lance Barnard and a man Brian didn’t have a lot of time for named Arthur Tange, the head of the Australian Defence Department.
Brian wasn’t in the room, but he heard the details after.
And this meeting happened almost immediately, before all the votes had even been counted.
This guy Tange wanted it done.
Brian Toohey: He was very keen to have them so early, so there was no time for staff to give any background material to them.
Alex Barwick (VO): See, he didn’t want Whitlam coming in prepared with awkward questions about Pine Gap.
Brian Toohey: Tange came along and, he said basically that there was nothing they could be allowed to say.
And that was just ridiculous.
He said, the one thing he could tell them was the bases could not be used in any way to participate in a war.
Well, of course they do.
Alex Barwick: As a result of these briefings, what did Gough Whitlam tell the Australian public?
Brian Toohey: Nothing.
Gough was left with being unable to tell the Australian public what happened at Pine Gap.
Alex Barwick (VO): So, Whitlam had nothing to say. Meanwhile in Alice Springs, everything rolled on, most people oblivious to what was really happening just over the range in that American base.
The once-sleepy town was growing, the population had doubled since the base was announced.
But this new prosperity came with strings attached. Suddenly, there were hostile eyes on the other side of the world fixed on a small community in the middle of Australia.
And what happened thousands of kilometres away suddenly raised the stakes for Alice Springs.
News reporter (archival): And now to the Middle East, where the bitter fighting between Israeli and Arab forces has entered its fourth day, with conflicting reports of which side is winning.
Alex Barwick (VO): Israel and the Arab states had been in and out of conflict for decades as the peace brokered after World War II crumbled again.
1973 saw more bloodshed as tensions rose.
The US and the Soviets each backed in their opposing allies.
US President Richard Nixon believed a nuclear strike on Israel from the Soviet-backed Arab states was imminent.
Pine Gap’s intelligence on the Soviet Union’s missiles was more important than ever, making it a serious target.
Nixon put Pine Gap on red alert.
Suddenly the threat of a nuclear bomb being dropped on Alice Springs wasn’t theoretical.
It was an actual possibility.
And there was one more problem.
Brian Toohey: Whitlam got upset that he hadn't been told in advance.
Alex Barwick (VO): He was blindsided, he should have been told, it was in writing...
Brian Toohey: Knocked out by Australian officials with their American counterparts, that Australia would be given advance warning.
Alex Barwick (VO): So, Alice Springs was a real and active target for nuclear obliteration, on red alert, and Australia had absolutely no idea.
Oops.
Brian Toohey: They didn't even do what they promised they'd do in this agreement.
Alex Barwick (VO): This base, spying on the Soviets was seen as so valuable, so strategically important America’s enemies might wipe it out?
So while Alice locals were cruising the grocery aisles of the new American supermarket Piggly Wiggly, they and the town were a red button push away from-
(Sound of a bomb explosion)
Brian Toohey: The effects of a nuclear weapon explosion, the immediate one is heat and force of the explosion itself, and then you'd have the fallout in those dusty, arid areas, winds can blow radioactive sand a long way, so what they can do is blow big nuclear clouds.
And then later on, the long term radiation effects.
Alex Barwick: What would be the damage to Alice Springs itself?
Brian Toohey: Well, a fair bit.
It'd kill you in most cases.
Alex Barwick (VO): This is my outback town Toohey’s talking about; the oval where my son plays soccer, the bakery in the mall where I meet friends for coffee.
It’s hard for me to imagine, but Australia was now tangled up with the US in an all too real Cold War.
And Whitlam was sick of the secrets.
By now Brian Toohey, had moved on from his shoebox office in Canberra.
Turns out he wasn’t fated for a long political career.
He and his boss, Defence Minister Lance Barnard, parted ways just seven weeks into government.
But Brian’s interest in Pine Gap didn’t end there. After basically being told not to ask questions, he became a journalist, who did nothing but ask questions about Pine Gap.
And he followed what happened next very closely.
Brian Toohey: Whitlam greatly alarmed the Americans in 1974.
Alex Barwick (VO): After all this secrecy from the United States, Whitlam decided to shake things up on the floor of parliament.
Brian Toohey: There was a question about would a Soviet base be allowed to set up in Australia
Gough Whitlam in Parliament (read): The Australian government takes the attitude that there should not be foreign military bases, stations, installations in Australia.
Alex Barwick (VO): Yeah, that’s not Whitlam’s voice, it's straight from Hansard though - the official record of what is said in the Australian parliament.
It wasn’t just about a possible Soviet base, he was also raising questions about Pine Gap’s future.
He refused to commit to extending the Pine Gap agreement, that Australia would continue to host this outback spy base.
Brian Toohey: The Americans were incredibly alarmed about that.
As contingency planning there, the embassy, the whole of the U. S. Defence Department said that they would, they’d shift it, to Guam, a Pacific island that America owned,
Alex Barwick (VO): The Americans were so worried they started to look at relocating Pine Gap.
Heated messages started flowing between the two countries of this so-called joint base.
And this is where political history all gets a bit murky, there's a lot going on for Gough Whitlam outside of the Pine Gap mystery.
I’m not going to cover it all here but if you look up Whitlam and ‘loans affair’, ‘supply blockage’ ‘constitutional crisis,’ you’ll get a sense of the drama that unfolded.
It’s complicated.
But the Australian Prime Minister’s push to publicly reveal the truth about this secret place in the outback coincided with his political death.
Here's what happened over nine fraught days, involving three little letters: C.I.A.
Brian Toohey: I wrote up, in the Financial Review, that Pine Gap was run by the CIA.
Alex Barwick (VO): The paper came out on November the 3rd.
This is big.
It’s the first time a national publication has revealed that Pine Gap was run by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States government.
To be clear, the CIA is America’s spy agency, the ones placing people undercover in places like Moscow.
All very James Bond.
Not only that...
Brian Toohey: The head of Pine Gap was an American called Richard Stallings who worked for the CIA.
Alex Barwick (VO): Yep, Brian prints the name of a CIA spy who ran Pine Gap.
How did he know?
Brian: I discovered in the middle of 1975 from an American source.
Alex Barwick (VO): Remember Brian was well connected, he'd worked inside the halls of power.
Whitlam is stunned.
Again.
Brian Toohey: He was very shocked that, basically, Tange had lied to him in the original briefings.
Alex Barwick (VO): Whitlam had been repeatedly assured it was the US Defence Department running the American side of the base, not spies.
But that article unleashed a political shit storm.
The leader of the national party is also outraged.
He’s a mate of this former Pine Gap head Richard Stallings and demands Whitlam put an end to the whispers and prove that Stallings worked for the CIA, or deny it in Parliament.
Brian Toohey: So Whitlam said, well I am going to prove it.
Alex Barwick (VO): Three days have passed, it’s now November the 6th.
Parliament will sit again in five days.
The countdown is on.
Whitlam puts the screws on his secretive Defence Chief Arthur Tange.
Brian Toohey: Tange was forced to reply.
He said that Richard Stallings had worked as the head of the CIA-run base.
Alex Barwick (VO): Finally, Whitlam had the truth.
According to Brian, Arthur Tange went berserk at the prospect of it all coming out in parliament.
Brian Toohey: Tange then said things like, this is the greatest security crisis ever facing Australia.
And puts in writing to him, you must under no circumstances give this answer.
Alex Barwick (VO): It’s November the 11th, 1975 - nine days since Brian’s original news story, and one of the most infamous dates in Australian politics.
Whitlam heads back to Parliament.
Will he reveal what he knows about the CIA, Richard Stallings and Pine Gap?
Brian Toohey: There was no question whatsoever that Whitlam would have answered and that would go on the record.
Alex Barwick (VO): But he never got that chance.
News reporter (archival): Political sensation in our national capital.
The Prime Minister, Mr. Whitlam, has been sacked.
The opposition leader Mr. Fraser is the new Prime Minister of Australia.
Alex Barwick (VO): Just after lunch on November the 11th Gough Whitlam is handed a letter from the Governor General, John Kerr.
Brian Toohey: Kerr sacked him before he could answer the question and before he could do anything about saying that he'd asked Pine Gap to go.
He was very, very angry about what was happening then.
Alex Barwick (VO): With the Queen’s authority, the Governor General of Australia can technically give the PM the boot but it’s something that had never happened before or since.
It led to a major national reckoning that a democratically elected leader could just be sacked.
Whitlam’s promise to reveal the secrets of Pine Gap was stopped dead in its tracks.
Russell Goldflam: Well, it was shocking.
You know, we knew that there'd been all sorts of scandals.
But we weren't expecting he was going to be dismissed by the Governor General.
Alex Barwick (VO): Russell Goldflam was a bit of an anti-war hippy and had been inspired by this progressive leader.
Russell Goldflam: I thought Whitlam was a bit of a demigod really.
Alex Barwick (VO): Russell was interested in the whole debate around nuclear disarmament.
Russell Goldflam: I was becoming aware of the threat of all of us being obliterated in a nuclear war.
Alex Barwick (VO): And it sounds like he cut quite a figure at street marches and protests.
Russell Goldflam: I had beautiful, long, curly, hair down to my shoulders with lots of split ends. You probably can’t see me now but I don't have any hair at all on my head.
Never mind, those were the days.
I would dress from op shops.
So, my standard outfit was a long, tweedy, sort of, moth-eaten overcoat, a pair of jeans, underneath that a singlet, and one of my favourite singlets had the United States flag on it.
It was ironic.
Get it?
Alex Barwick (VO): Got it. The long term Alice local has a different wardrobe these days.
He’s wearing comfortable blue jeans, a green checked shirt and sandals as we chat in the dappled light of his backyard, a few blocks from my place in Alice Springs.
Anyway, when Whitlam was ousted it crushed a generation who saw him as the face of change.
Russell Goldflam: Stories began to emerge that in retaliation the CIA had had a role in Whitlam's downfall.
Alex Barwick (VO): Russell remembers the rumours that began to swirl.
Russell Goldflam: It's all very vague and who knows whether there's anything in it or not.
There were a few journalists around like Toohey, and they would write some pretty hair-raising stuff.
Alex Barwick (VO): Rumours suggesting the CIA was somehow involved in removing the Australian Prime Minister would live on for decades.
Brian Toohey: It's an immensely complicated thing.
I think that the CIA was certainly taking steps to undermine Whitlam.
There's plenty of evidence about that.
Alex Barwick (VO): This seems pretty wild, right?
To be clear though, no one has produced conclusive evidence that the CIA got Whitlam booted but everyone’s got an opinion.
Kim Beazley: Oh, that's bull dust.
Alex Barwick (VO): That’s Kim Beazley.
He would end up Australia’s Defence Minister in less than a decade and would go on to become Labor leader in the mid 90s.
Kim Beazley: I'd heard that stuff about the Americans getting frightened and therefore getting involved.
I put the matter to study.
I got a couple of senior public servants to have a look at it - nothing there, nothing there.
Alex Barwick: So you don't think the CIA was in any way involved in Whitlam's dismissal?
Kim Beazley: No, not at all.
That's a piece of baloney which we all dance about, but which was not there.
Alex Barwick (VO): Maybe it’s no surprise that Kim Beazley thinks it’s ‘baloney,’ he’s been in and around politics for a while.
Alex Barwick: You've clearly had a huge interest in the military and in defence over the years.
Do you remember when that sort of first started when you were younger?
Kim Beazley: ‘Round the dinner table with my father.
Three kids, two adults, and we don't have Dad home all that much,
Alex Barwick (VO): Kim’s dad was actually Gough Whitlam's Education Minister.
It fuelled his son’s interest in politics.
Kim Beazley: As kids, we used to have enormous amounts of discussion with him whenever he returned from Canberra.
As we were sitting around the table he said, ‘This is like a Gestapo interrogation.’
Because we just want to grip more information from him.
I don't think there are terribly many Australian families like that.
Alex Barwick (VO): So the whole Whitlam dismissal affair was well covered in the Beazley household, you could say he had a front row seat to it all.
It sounded a bit more intense than the banter around our family dinner table, even if there were similar themes.
And no one will ever convince Kim Beazley that the CIA were responsible.
Back in the suburbs of Alice Springs, there was another young man who’d been buoyed by Whitlam until it all fell apart.
Philip Nitschke: There was the enthusiastic joy that everything was going to change.
Alex Barwick (VO): Philip Nitschke sounds like an eccentric character.
He was printing posters like the world depended on it.
‘Close Pine Gap,’ they read, ‘No nuclear targets’.
Young Nitschke was on a mission.
Philip Nitschke: We saw Pine Gap as being instrumental as a sort of a necessary part of any kind of global conflict, which would lead to the annihilation of the human race.
Alex Barwick (VO): He was part of a growing group of locals unhappy about the spy base on the outskirts of Alice Springs.
Philip Nitschke: Australia just seemed to adopt this slavish adoration and acceptance of everything the US did.
Alex Barwick (VO): Pretty heavy right?
But let’s back up for a minute, Philip is that kind of guy.
He’s sometimes referred to as 'Doctor Death' for his advocacy of euthanasia.
In 2015 he burnt his medical registration certificate, ending a 25-year career in medicine because he wasn’t prepared to compromise his principles in a fight with the Australian Medical Board.
He now lives in Amsterdam.
Philip Nitschke: I'm on a houseboat.
I'll swing the camera around and you can have a look right down the canal.
Alex Barwick (VO): Before Philip became a troublesome doctor, he was a troublesome university student studying physics.
Philip Nitschke: I'd come out of university and I'd been pretty disenchanted with my research work.
It's never been absolutely proven, but there was a fair amount of evidence that much of my research into lasers was being funded by, as I saw it in those days, the US war machine.
Alex Barwick (VO): So, he packed that in and became involved in the land rights movement.
When’s he’s focused, he is all in.
Philip Nitschke: I wanted to be where I saw was the cutting edge of social issues and the Territory was where it was to my mind all happening.
Alex Barwick (VO): In 1976, that place was Alice Springs.
Philip Nitschke: I discovered this advertisement for a ranger at Simpson's Gap.
Alex Barwick (VO): A popular spot for tourists to the west of town, home to black footed rock wallabies and a permanent waterhole.
Philip Nitschke: I remember the interview was a little strange.
Well, they said, ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
The PhD in physics wasn't considered to be of any use whatsoever.
Alex Barwick (VO): But he got the job anyway.
Philip Nitschke was now an over-qualified parks ranger.
As he learnt more about it, his focus shifted to Pine Gap, and that’s why we find him living in a share house, building a secret laser in his bedroom to use on Pine Gap.
I have no idea how, but he did the PhD in physics not me, and there’s paper all over the lounge room.
Russell Goldflam: He had a printing press in that house at Chilpa Street.
Alex Barwick (VO): Yep, in the lounge room.
Russell Goldflam with the long curly locks had left the comfortable suburbs of Perth for Alice Springs and he remembers Philip well.
Russell Goldflam: Nitschke was the archetypal rat-bag.
Alex Barwick: What do you mean he was a rat-bag?
Russell Goldflam: He struck me as not using conditioner, or possibly even shampoo.
So, he had that scruffy look about him on purpose.
You know, he didn't suffer fools gladly, and he didn't go out of his way to be charming.
And he called a spade, all sorts of things, in strong language.
One thing about Philip which was always there was he was obviously an extremely smart guy.
Alex Barwick (VO): So this extremely smart guy, with questionable hygiene, was busy planning and printing.
Broadly the town had welcomed the base and its boost to the local economy but now, Philip wasn’t the only outsider stirring the pot on Pine Gap.
Philip Nitschke: I met up with a lot of other people in Alice who were of the same mind.
And then of course, John Reeves said he thinks it should be a bit more formal.
So what about this organization?
Alex Barwick (VO): John Reeves was a local lawyer and together they hatched a plan.
Philip Nitschke: We started to print letterheads and put out statements from the Concerned Citizens.
Alex Barwick (VO): The first official Alice Springs anti-Pine Gap group had formed; the Concerned Citizens of Alice Springs.
Philip Nitschke: We were living in various places around Alice Springs.
No one had much money.
Alex Barwick (VO): Except Reeves, he was a lawyer remember? So obviously meetings were at his place.
Philip Nitschke: I've got a sort of an image in my mind of a room, which is a very nice room.
About six of us or seven of us sitting around
He immediately wanted to put out a press release and that was immediately picked up.
Alex Barwick (VO): By ABC’s flagship current affairs radio program AM, no less.
Philip Nitschke: I was pretty impressed, frankly. The fact that, the fact that he was able to get national publicity.
Alex Barwick (VO): And from then on, that lounge room printing press was kept pretty busy.
And the group started hitting the streets.
Alex Barwick: There's one reported in the local paper.
I don't think the local paper liked you very much, by the way, the local paper reports on, Thursday, May the 29th of 1976, “The first protest at Pine Gap has happened, and it was a flop”.
Philip Nitschke: That's us.
Alex Barwick (VO): This great debut protest action; they drove out to the gates of Pine Gap at shift changeover to hand out their specially printed anti-war pamphlets.
Philip Nitschke: No one wanted to take our pamphlets.
We didn't achieve very much at all, obviously the Centralian Advocate thought it was a flop.
Alex Barwick (VO): The first protest might have been a flop, but the anti-Pine Gap movement was only warming up.
Philip Nitschke: I was now living out at Temple Bar.
It was an old station there in the shadow of the ridges, so it was a lovely old homestead.
Alex Barwick (VO): Philip was now the caretaker on a property awfully close to Pine Gap.
Philip Nitschke: I realised, oh this is pretty interesting, I get some good views of the base from the ridge.
And I started not exactly offering tours, but certainly everyone who was a bit interested in having a look at those mysterious domes.
Alex Barwick (VO): And so Philip Nitschke's unofficial Pine Gap tours began.
Philip Nitschke: The best time was in the morning.
You get up early in the morning and climb up the ridge.
You'd pick your way through the low vegetation, and mostly as you got closer and closer to the top it becomes more and more rocky, very red rock, outcrops of rock there.
And you would come over the ridge, and then you would sort of look down onto this valley.
Just as the sun was getting up, you got a spectacular view of the base.
It's kind of chilling, I found it chilling.
I mean, you come through this beautiful landscape.
Out of this beauty comes this obscenity.
Alex Barwick: What could you hear?
Phillip Nitschke: The silence.
There's just silence.
As far as I recall, the silence was one of the more chilling aspects of that view.
Alex Barwick (VO): As Philip spread the word about Pine Gap, one tour group at a time, the enormous grey military cargo planes roared overhead making their regular round trip to Alice Springs.
Alex Barwick: In one letter in May of ‘77 you write scathingly about the arrival of a giant Galaxy transport aircraft that around a thousand locals had gone out to see.
Philip Nitschke: Yeah, I went out there.
It was unpleasant.
We were angry with the news that this was causing such enthusiasm in the town that there was to be the arrival of this plane.
Alex Barwick (VO): So the Concerned Citizens got organised, all half a dozen of them.
Philip Nitschke: Would have had banners, always had banners.
Peace banners, “Close Pine Gap, close Pine Gap, close Pine Gap. No nuclear targets,” that was the standard chant.
But, there was no sympathy that day, because there were so many people there totally in favour of the arrival of the Galaxy.
Alex Barwick (VO): This was a potent mix.
Tension was rising in Alice over Pine Gap.
This group genuinely thought Pine Gap was a nuclear target in the Cold War.
And well, it was, but saying it out loud just wasn’t the done thing.
Philip Nitschke: They didn't think we were giving the right sort of welcome to our American friends by trying to hold up banners saying, ‘Go Home Yanks,’ and things like that.
Alex Barwick (VO): And that's when he felt it.
It came from over his shoulder.
It was wet but not cooling wet.
Philip Nitschke: Yeah, I got spat on that day.
Alex Barwick: Who spat on you that day?
Philip Nitschke: Don't know.
I remember it pretty vividly, having to clean myself up.
And someone said you've just been spat on.
Alex Barwick (VO): Ever since the base opened Alice Springs residents had been making an effort to welcome the yanks with their neighbourly food parcels.
And now there were people like Phillip pushing back. Lines were drawn; those that supported the base and those that wanted it shut down, and this was just the beginning.
Philip Nitschke: Living with a gun pointed at their head seemed to be something that they were well and truly able to live with.
I don't know how people were so readily able to dismiss what was an obvious threat.
It was a sort of a ‘them and us’ kind of sentiment.
There was a sort of an idea that we were kind of smarter and better than everyone, I don't know about better than everyone else, but we understood the problem.
And the town itself was sort of sleepwalking into oblivion.
Alex Barwick (VO): You might have noticed something missing in all this so far.
The women. It’s all been pretty blokey.
And that’s because, well, Australia in the 60s and 70s right?
But the men made a mistake dismissing the women as housewives with nothing to say.
They had a lot to say.
Around the country they started to gather and plan.
They had their eyes on Alice Springs.
And they would come in numbers too big to ignore.
(Women chanting 'Close Pine Gap')
Russell Goldflam: It was a feral bunch, which was pretty exciting to me.
Jenny Taylor: We looked a little wild, I think.
Fran Kilgariff: I think people were horrified.
(Women chanting 'Close Pine Gap')
Alex Barwick (VO): This is Spies in the Outback.
Season three of the ABC’s Expanse podcast is hosted and produced by me, Alex Barwick; supervising producer Piia Wirsu, sound engineer and producer Grant Wolter; executive producer Blythe Moore, with thanks to Elsa Silberstein for additional production and research and to ABC Alice Springs.
Acknowledging the traditional owners of the land this podcast is created on: Arrernte land, Awakabal land and the land of the Stoney Creek Nations.
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