During the dawn of Tuesday 14 February 1978, around 800 Australian soldiers, kitted out in the full paraphernalia of war, and their armed personnel carriers, moved into the small town of Bowral, population about 7000, some 128 kilometers south-west of Sydney. For three days the military patrolled the area. The occupation occurred in the wake of the Hilton Hotel bombing. It was justified as a legitimate response to the perceived threat posed to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Regional Meeting (CHOGRM) – being held at Berida Manor, Bowral – by a possible terrorist attack. This paper analyses the response of civilians to the peace-time occupation of Bowral. In light of recent federal legislation in Australia which, under the justification of fighting the 'war on terror', potentially extends the basis upon which military force may legitimately be used against the civilian population, we examine the implications of the Bowral call-out episode for contemporary labour movement and progressive activists.

Early during the morning of Monday 13 February 1978, a city council garbage truck stopped in Sydney's George Street, outside the Hilton Hotel, to collect the weekend contents of an overflowing litter bin. Two council workers began to empty the bin, and as they did, a bomb hidden in it exploded, killing them both; a nearby policeman later died in hospital from injuries received, and seven other people were seriously injured. Inside the Hilton Hotel were 11 visiting heads of government; the Commonwealth Heads of Government Regional Meeting (CHOGRM) was due to start in Sydney later that day. On Tuesday 14 February the Sydney Morning Herald announced that Australia was no longer 'immune to the international disease of terrorism and violence'.¹

Soon after the explosion, Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser was being briefed about the situation by his closest advisers and security personnel. It was the first of a hectic round of emergency briefings and meetings that day, including a meeting with New South Wales Premier Neville Wran, and a Federal Cabinet meeting. Amongst decisions reached during the day were to continue the CHOGRM program as planned, but with dramatically altered travel arrangements to a conference retreat in rural Bowral; and in relation to this, to call out the Army.²

Late that night (13 February) in Admiralty House, Sydney, Governor General Sir Zelman Cowan signed an Executive Council minute to call out the Defence Force to safeguard 'the national and international interests of the Commonwealth of Australia' from what were claimed to be 'terrorist activities and related violence'. With a few strokes of his pen, Cowan effectively overcame a long standing Australian cautionary emphasis on the primacy of civilian authorities in maintaining peace-time domestic order.³

The Bowral call-out

During the afternoon of 13 February 1978, four army helicopters reconnoitered the Bowral township for two hours, landing on local sporting fields, and utilising a private airstrip on the property of industrialist Sir William Tyree on the outskirts of town. The following day the military occupied the town. Establishing a temporary command post just inside the Sydney end of town and opposite the small war-memorial park, troops spread along the main street and positioned themselves in twos at each street corner, secured the railway station, the nearby railway tunnel, and each end of the town. Camp was set up on a local football field. By 6.30 am everyone was in place and residents wakened to the sound of Kiawa helicopters from the 161 Reconnaissance Squadron circling over town, the sight of about 800 fully armed troops, magazines in place, while teams of soldiers scoured drains, garbage bins, hedges and shrubbery.

Closer to Sydney, armed troops, bayonets fixed, established a presence in neighbouring Mittagong on the Hume Highway, patrolling the streets and the railway line. About five kilometres north of town along the Highway, partially obscured by roadside bush, another military presence was established. Between Bowral and Sydney, troops were strategically deployed along the Sydney-Melbourne railway line, with particular attention given to tunnels, bridges, overpasses and stations.

All up nearly 2,000 military personnel were involved under the command of Vietnam veterans Brigadier David Butler and Lieutenant-Colonel Murray Blake; the troops, all based at the Holsworthy army base (NSW), were drawn from the 2^nd Cavalry Regiment, the 5-7^th Battalion Royal Australian Regiment (RAR), and the 12-15^thMedium Regiments Royal Australian Artillery.⁴

The troops were deployed in a manner that exposed them to civil prosecution; as a consequence they were uneasily conscious of this and aware that if required to fire, there was the possibility of a lack of 'official backing'. Contributing to a sense of unease, which went to senior levels, was confusion about the 'threat' they were countering, about procedures to be followed in the event of trouble, and the exact nature of their power.⁵ Externally, from a Bowral civilian viewpoint, the deployment gave the appearance of martial law; in the absence of local information to the contrary from either military or civil authorities, rumours circulated in the district to the effect that martial law was in operation and that a curfew was in force during the night of Tuesday 14 February.⁶

Bowral 1978 as a precedent

The government's motivations in calling out the troops in 1978 are unclear. Also unclear are the identity and motivation of the person (or persons) who planted the bomb outside the Hilton Hotel which provided the pretext for the military call-out. As Jenny Hocking points out, there is a 'continuing suggestion that the security services were in some way involved in the Hilton bombing'.⁷ Certainly, there is little, if any, evidence that 'terrorist activities and related violence' posed a threat to the CHOGRM conference. Such absence of threat belies the far reaching implications of the 1978 military occupation of Bowral.

The Governor General's minute was open ended, to remain 'in force until revoked'.⁸ According to A.R. Blackshield, in an early discussion of the militarised response, it 'raised more questions than it answered'.⁹ No attempt was made to specify the units or sections of the armed forces to be used, the number of personnel to be involved, the geography of their deployment, nor the 'degree of intervention in civilian life they might undertake'. And no attempt was made to establish a claim 'to legal validity on any precise constitutional ground'.¹⁰

The Hilton bombing and the militarised response placed security firmly on Australia's national agenda and helped to strengthen the power of the federal government in domestic affairs. The bombing was also a major factor leading to the formation of the Australian Federal Police, which came into operation in 1979. Importantly, as Hocking argues, 'the ambivalent concept of "terrorism" as a specific legal entity', capable of political definition and manipulation, was introduced to Australian law; and 'a precedent for the use of the Army in the name of "counter terrorism"' was established.¹¹ Blackshield sees wider ramifications, arguing that the call-out 'strikingly demonstrated the vulnerability of our democracy under existing law', an implication being that should a future Australian government seriously embark on a military coup, it 'would encounter no constitutional obstacles or restrictions at all – at least as far as the black letter constitutional text is concerned'.¹²

The Hilton bombing and the militarised response invigorated political, strategic bureaucratic, and legal reform processes, leading to the development over the next 25 years of what Jenny Hocking has described as:

a comprehensive strategy and organisational network of domestic counter-terrorism according to an adaptation of a counter-insurgency approach which is not only inappropriate to our own political context but which also carries significant dangers for political and civil liberties in
its application.¹³

Recent codifications by the federal government of the definition of terrorism as well as extensions of the range of activities for which the military can be used to suppress civilian unrest are the latest aspects of this strategy, which, in some circumstances, could be applied against militant labour movement protests.

While the future is in the making, the historical record shows that Labor and non-Labor governments have variously used the armed forces against the trade union and protest movements. The armed forces generally were mobilised as back-up during the 1923 Melbourne Police Strike and also provided strike breaking assistance; troops were used as strike breakers during the 1949 Coal Strike in New South Wales; army and naval personnel were used to variously break bans by the Seamen's Union of Australia (SUA) and the Waterside Workers Federation in 1951, 1952, 1953, and 1954; the navy was used to break an SUA boycott against the Vietnam War in 1967; the air force was used to break union bans on Qantas in 1981; and the navy and air force were used to break the 1989 industrial campaign by the Australian Federation of Air Pilots. Also that year, the dispatch of troops was authorised to back-up South Australian police against demonstrators at the Nurrungar joint Australia-United States military satellite base. A significant political/industrial role was envisaged for the army during the Cold War in the anti-union Operation Alien (1950-1953); the nature and extent and of involvement of defence force personnel in the 1998 War on the Waterfront is yet to be fully understood.¹⁴

Bearing in mind these past uses of the armed forces, along with the precedent established by the 1978 call-out, the changed legal environment of counter-terrorism, and the vulnerability of 'our democracy' suggested by Blackshield, it is fitting to look at the 1978 call-out and the brief occupation by military forces of the country town of Bowral south of Sydney, not as a piece of geography that was the objective of the call-out, but as a population of some 7000 people caught up in a historical precedent.

Civilian responses to the occupation

Newspaper reports and our own interviews provide the sources for identifying civilian responses to and experiences of the occupation. The usefulness of newspapers in this process is twofold. First, in their 'on the ground' reports of the occupation, they provide insights into the reactions of Bowral residents to what was, for most, an unprecedented experience of military occupation. Second, newspapers provide one of the major mediums through which the occupation itself was experienced and interpreted by civilians – whether in Bowral or elsewhere throughout the country.

National/Sydney newspapers

Newspaper coverage of the occupation expressed a mixture of concern at the implications of the government's use of security powers and bemusement at the striking contradiction of armed troops patrolling the normally sedate streets and environs of Bowral. On Friday 17 February, after the occupation had ended, the Sydney Morning Herald editorialised that 'There was a strong element of over-reaction in Mr Fraser's invocation of emergency powers to direct the Army, using a battalion of troops to clear the way to Bowral'.¹⁵ The Australian's Philip Cornford, covering the occupation, asked 'Is this Australia?',¹⁶ while the same newspaper's Defence Correspondent was clearly troubled by the events:

[T]he deployment of the military on this scale can only be described as an over-reaction … to deploy a force of the size that is reported in the role given it is to make a mockery of the whole concept of security in a free country unless there is evidence of a threat serious enough to merit calling out the military on this scale.¹⁷

Tim Dare in the Sydney Morning Herald explored the ambiguity and confusion surrounding the powers, in relation to civilians, of the occupying troops.¹⁸

From the time CHOGRM delegates were secreted to Bowral during the early evening of 14 February, aboard two Chinook helicopters (landing on an exclusive golf course adjacent to Berida Manor, the CHOGRM venue) and in three heavily escorted motorcades, rather than by train as originally planned, the print media demonstrated an interest in the logistics of the occupation. Photographs of the Commonwealth leaders leaving Sydney, arriving in Bowral, and of the troops stationed in Bowral, were carried during the week in the newspapers surveyed. The contrast between the military presence, on the one hand, and the peaceful scenes of rural life was captured by a number of reporters and photographs. Philip Cornford, for example, wrote:

In Mittagong, a few kilometres from Bowral, a football team in early training jogged past young men patrolling the footpath with loaded rifles. In Bowral there were more soldiers than citizens on the street and, mixing with them, the blue uniforms of NSW police.¹⁹

Beneath a photo from Bowral The Australian ran the caption 'Troops search Bowral as local teenagers wait for their school bus'.²⁰ Adding to this contrasting image was that the conference itself was presented as a peaceful sojourn in the country. Prime Minister Fraser was pictured half-clad on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald at Berida Manor 'after a workout in the gymnasium'.²¹ The Commonwealth leaders' wives were reported to have gone shopping and 'sipped morning coffee' in the nearby tourist town of Berrima.²² Similar coverage framed CHOGRM's departure from Bowral: 'Some had spent the early part of the morning playing yet another game of golf, while others went shopping or strolled around the grounds of Berida Manor'.²³

Nonetheless, the major commercial papers, without exception, represented the occupation of Bowral as a response to a terrorist attack carried out on Australian soil. Defence Minister Jim Killen's description of terrorism as a 'new kind of warfare'²⁴ framed much of the media's portrayal of the issue. Headlines from the week give a sense of this: 'Terrorism now 'fact of life' – All Australians should mourn: Wran';²⁵ 'Troops Placed on Anti-Terror Alert';²⁶ 'The timetable of terror…';²⁷ 'Now is the time to reject terror'.²⁸ The Sydney Morning Herald editorialised:

Australia is not immune to the international disease of terrorism and violence … At least the arrangements announced for the Bowral visit suggest that the lesson of yesterday morning has been learnt.²⁹

An editorial in The Australian the same week argued: 'Today Australia is part of the ugly world of terrorism. Today the Australia-initiated regional conference can speak out to make the world a safer place'.³⁰ On the Saturday after the bombing the Sydney Morning Herald's 'Good Weekend' carried a one page special written by Congress for Cultural Freedom member, Walter Lacquer, with the title 'Terrorism' appearing below a menacing cartoon of a stocking masked man carrying a grenade and machine gun.³¹

Local newspapers

By far the strongest of the hostile interpretations of the occupation was in the local press. There were, at the time, two local commercial newspapers: the Southern Highland News (based in Bowral) and the Berrima District Post (based in the neighbouring town of Moss Vale). In the weeks prior to the occupation the Southern Highland News foreshadowed the CHOGRM visit, detailing preparations underway and the luxurious features of Berida Manor (at the time, an innovative luxury resort, opened in 1977) to be enjoyed by conference delegates. Both local papers conveyed a sense of excitement around the impending visit, with particular interest in the increased tourism likely to be generated as a consequence. The Berrima District Post began its coverage of the CHOGRM visit on Friday 13 January, announcing with a front page headline 'World leaders to holiday at Bowral', introducing a story about how the visiting leaders would have two days of 'play and relaxation'.³²

For the Southern Highland News, such enthusiasm proved short-lived. On Wednesday, 15 February the paper devoted its entire front page to the occupation. The commentary was highly critical. Mentioning the 'secrecy' involved in the occupation the paper described 'the virtual siege conditions in Bowral (and to a lesser extent, Mittagong)' and commented:

[T]hose who remember Franco's Spain could see a parallel in the pairs of uniformed men, all heavily armed, steadily walking their beat, always in sight of each other … A phase of darkness passed over Bowral yesterday and few will forget it or the alien act of infamy which made it necessary.³³

The following week the editor referred to the occupation as a 'tragi-comedy'.³⁴

Concurrently, however, the Berrima District Post presented a far more benign image of the occupation. In the Friday issue of 17 February, the first issue the Post had on the actual event given its production schedule, thefront page headline acknowledged 'Two Days of Drama', but conveyed in the text little sense of that drama. The logistics of the event were summarised, and while there was reference to town tension, this was put down to 'the people of the district who were concerned at the possibility of something happening to their distinguished guests'. On page two of this issue there was an account of the activities of these guests over the two days: the report was headed 'Just like schoolboys on holiday'.³⁵

Resident responses

Journalists from most papers noted both fear and confusion from local residents at the presence of troops. According to their reports, some residents viewed the troops as a source of menace and expressed their unease. Eleven year old Mandy Tutt said 'I don't like them 'cause it's sort of scary … Dad said it's like Belfast and that's all bombs and soldiers'.³⁶ Other residents commented 'If two men hadn't died in Sydney, al [sic] this would be really funny'; another, 'Now we have some idea what life in Northern Ireland is like. This is frightening'.³⁷ The Southern Highlands News referred to 'tense, grim-faced soldiers', and a sense of tension between troops and townsfolk which eased 'later in the day [Tuesday]'.³⁸ Pervading everything was the unfamiliarity of troops in town, and constant helicopter activity over town; people talked of their inability to relax, and of tension headaches.³⁹ For food writer, Margaret Fulton, one of the owner/operators of Berida Manor, the strain of the 'retreat', the sense of siege, the 'enormous responsibility' of hosting the heads of state, their partners and entourages, the tension of being under constant suspicion by security personnel, created 'a state of shock' she found personally and deeply disturbing, even traumatically so.⁴⁰

A general lack of communication was conducive to fear and rumour. Some young mothers spoke of their fear of being caught in cross-fire. Uncharacteristically, parking spaces were easy to find in the main street of townduring the first day of the occupation.⁴¹ Rumours were rife, and during the occupation there were spurious reports of gun-fire and arrests, including that of an armed man in the grounds of Berida Manor.⁴² There was talk of martial law, of curfews, of various roads being sealed off, and the comforting rumour that the soldiers were only play acting and there was not an Army bullet in town.⁴³

Bowral Shell service station proprietor at the time, Colin McPhedran, was the designated Commonwealth fuel supplier during the occupation, but neither his company nor any occupation representative officially informed him beforehand. The service station was staked out by troops, pumps and drains in the complex were rigorously examined, and he and his staff were left to their own devices to work out what was happening. According to McPhedran, 'the strange part was that no attempt was made to communicate what was happening', leaving he and his staff 'on edge and nervous'.⁴⁴

Similarly no attempt was made by any Commonwealth representative to brief the town's main organ of local news, the Southern Highlands News. The paper, and its meager resources, was left to its own devices. Managing Editor at the time, Mac Cott, recalls being given the impression 'we would not be welcome at Berida Manor'; his newspaper was not invited to join the journalists who took the group photo shoot of the town's distinguished guests.⁴⁵ Perhaps the front page News story of Wednesday 15 February, before the photo opportunity, had not adopted the correct political tone.

Bowral's Mayor during the occupation, a high profile local conservative political identity, Alderman David Wood, was briefed by an Army representative around midday on Tuesday 14 February. He was told that the town would be occupied for an unspecified length of time because of events in Sydney and that all care was being taken to ensure everyone's safety. Wood accepted this as being necessary in the national interest, but was later surprised when, following the occupation, the same Army officer told him his home phone had been tapped during the operation and his responses to national and international media inquiries, about two-dozen in all, monitored. 'It surprised me, I can tell you', recalled Wood, adding that '[n]ational interest comes before anyone else's'.⁴⁶

The overwhelming sense is of residents going about their daily lives, relatively uninterrupted, but somewhat puzzled, bewildered, tense, even excited, by the unusual happenings around them. Cornford reported '[t]heir invasion was greeted with a mixed sense of outrage and curiosity'.⁴⁷ Carolyn Parfitt of the Sydney Morning Herald presented contrasting reactions of townspeople to the presence of soldiers: 'Children finishing school for the day ran up to some of the soldiers and asked for autographs' while '[the] air in the town was one of intrigue and mystery as everywhere the conversation turned to soldiers, bombs and conferences'. However, '[the] normally quiet atmosphere of the town was turned to one of excitement, partly because of the war mood and partly because of the honoured guests soon to arrive'.⁴⁸

Conclusion

Further qualitative and quantitative research would, of course, be useful in building a comprehensive picture of civilian responses to the 1978 Bowral call-out. Extensive surveys and/or interviews with witnesses as well as interviews with military personnel would supplement our findings. This, however, is beyond the scope of the present paper. Nonetheless, the indicative evidence presented here offers valuable insights for contemporary labour movement and progressive activists.

Two points arise out of our survey that bear directly upon the contemporary political milieu. First, from newspaper reports and from our own interviews, it appears that most residents of Bowral responded to the unprecedented events during the 13 –16 February 1978 with a mixture of confusion, fear, and excitement. Although there were dissenting voices to the occupation (and the Franco image mentioned in the Southern Highland News was pointed), we found no evidence of organised opposition.

The second point is how readily the majority of the mainstream commercial press adopted the 'terrorism as a new kind of warfare' discourse. The framing of the issue in terms of a response to the threat of terrorism bears a striking resemblance to the contemporary media discourse surrounding the 'war on terrorism'. Indeed, if the specifics were changed but the discourse retained, the reports would not be out of place today. Despite some disquiet about the occupation in the commercial press and despite some journalists questioning its legality, by framing the occupation in terms of a response to terrorism the press helped to legitimise it.

These findings may not be surprising, but they are certainly noteworthy. Of greatest note is how easily civil liberties were, potentially, dispensed with.

Of course, there are many reasons why the local community response to the occupation was muted. A conservative rural hegemony dominated the politics of the town, a feature of which was, and is, a high degree of support for the Liberal Party, and the occupation was visibly the response of a Liberal Prime Minister and his government.⁴⁹ Residents are unlikely to have been aware of the occupation's constitutional implications, something they shared with the Australian population generally. Few visible restraints on movement or association were experienced by residents and the occupation itself lasted only a few days. Further, the national press of the time responded to the event within the framework of 'national interest' and helped legitimise the martial response. But the fact remains that for three days in February 1978, armed Australian military personnel occupied the town of Bowral and its surrounds and, in so doing, helped to establish a precedent for the future use of the military against civilians in the name of counter-terrorism.

It would be foolish, we submit, to dismiss the possibility that emergency powers and military force could be used by the federal government against civilian dissenting groups in Australia in the near future. Using the 'war on terror' as pretext, the Federal Coalition Government, with the support of its Labor Opposition, has extended the range of civilian activities against which the use of the military by the government might be legally permitted. Such activities include, potentially, numerous actions likely to be undertaken by trade unions and labour movement activists. Analysing the responses of Australian civilians during the precedent setting 1978 call-out is thus a useful exercise. At the very least it throws into doubt the notion that 'it couldn't happen here'.