The last plane out of Sydney’s almost gone and it’s really got me worried.
– Cold Chisel
I’m going nowhere and I’m in a hurry
Sydney – 1998
From early 1998, I was living in Sydney at the taxpayer’s expense. My job was to act as the liaison officer between the Australian Defence Force’s (ADF) overall headquarters (HQAST) and my office back in Canberra. The job itself consisted mostly of shuffling reports from Canberra to the military planners at HQAST. I also peered over people’s shoulders to make sure that they weren’t about to start World War 3. Any time an illegal Indonesian fishing boat got accidentally “lost” in Australia’s territorial waters, some of the ADF thought it was D-Day.
Australia had an interesting relationship with its northern neighbour. Separated only by the relatively small Timor Sea, both countries may as well have been at opposite ends of the Earth. Geographically, they were completely different. One was an island continent, while the other was an archipelago of ten thousand islands. Australia was brown and barren, while Indonesia was tropical. Culturally, the same differences applied. They shared no common language, history, customs, traditions, or outlook. Australia looked over Indonesia and saw the rest of the world, while Indonesia looked inward and never to its south. Darwin, Australia’s northernmost city, was nearer to Jakarta than to another Australian city. And Darwin’s population of ninety thousand faced Indonesia’s hundred million. It was only the odd stray fishing boat from the north or drug smuggler from the south that reminded each country of the other’s existence.
But there was not much chance of anything else exciting happening between the two nations in 1998. We both seemed happy to go on ignoring each other until the end of time. Australia had also been effectively at peace for almost twenty-five years. Australians hadn’t fired a shot in anger at foreigners they disagreed with since the last boat left South Vietnam in 1975. The admirals and generals of the ADF were once young men and had fought in that war. But as the century drew to an end, from their exclusive clubs overlooking Sydney Harbour, both conflict and Indonesia must have seemed very far away.
HQAST itself sat on a very exclusive site high on Potts Point. Potts Point overlooks Sydney Harbour, which is what most people think about when they think of Australia. When they built the HQ one hundred years earlier, it no doubt made sense that it should be as close to the nation’s fleet and in its biggest city. If Australia went off to fight in a war, most of the army and navy would leave under the very noses of the generals and admirals drinking sherry from Potts Point. But by 1998, modern communications made that argument increasingly difficult to justify. The brass at HQAST continued to make every argument they could to stay in such plush surroundings at taxpayer expense so they could keep living in Sydney. But it was only a matter of time before the government found somewhere less picturesque and cheaper and a large, modern, soulless HQ was built. Hello Bungendore.
Now, I was a beneficiary of this historical largesse. My job required me to be within one hour of work. Given what Sydney traffic was like, my employer put me up in the very pleasant nearby suburb of Rose Bay. Rose Bay looked out onto Sydney Harbour from the south. It is just a stone’s throw away from the more famous Double Bay–think Rodeo Drive on the water–in the city’s part known as the Eastern Suburbs. As a sometime visitor, I’d never really liked Sydney. It was busy, noisy, concrete-y and had too much traffic. But after living there for a while, I came to appreciate that paradoxically, for such a large city, it could be quite pleasant at a local level. If you could walk to where you needed to go, then a slow stroll along the shoreline, under Sydney’s abundant and massive trees, was no bad thing.
Rose Bay is a long walk to work but a fast ten minutes in a car along New South Head Road that leads to the city proper. Few people with my income could live in such a style in Sydney and also have free parking at their place of business. So, on one hand, I could say that I had landed on my feet. But because of all that had preceded my move, my life felt hopelessly empty.
I have already said that the regular army (and navy) despised the reserves, so I didn’t advertise my double life as a soon-to-be ex-army captain to my new workmates. I was content to have them all think of me as a simple civilian. That had its advantages, the biggest of which was that the military people would be quite honest with me about their plans. They mistakenly thought that I would be too naïve to understand the implications of what they were sharing with me. In their minds, they were covering themselves because they had told me and could say so under oath if anything went wrong. They just didn’t know that I understood what they were talking about.
On the plus side, I’ve learnt that the liaison officer in any organisation occupies a special place in the hierarchy. First, you are representing your entire agency. So, you are effectively considered your head of that agency by the people you are now working with. You might be a middle management nobody when you go home, but at HQAST I was minor royalty.
Second, the military loves to showcase the fact that they weren’t all kill-bots from central casting. So, whenever they organised any kind of function, or show and tell for a visiting dignitary, I would get an invitation. Most of my weekly protein and carb intake came from eating posh finger food at those parties and presentations.
Between cocktail parties with visiting big-wigs, they shuffled me back to my windowless office. That was in the middle of a hideous office block on the dockside of Sydney Harbour. There, I read through reports and tried not to fall asleep. Not that anyone would have caught me if I had. Locked behind a cyphered steel door that could have survived a nuclear warhead, surrounded by computers, printers and every communications device known to man, no one could see me and only I had the combination.
All of this would have amounted to a small anecdote in a forgotten blog if my world hadn’t dramatically changed again in the middle of 1999.
Love the story? Keep a Copy at Home.
Other Reads This Week
Leave a Reply