The Rotorua Circus

FOREIGN CORRESPONDENCE being rather a new line of business for me, and having survived, if barely, last week’s South Pacific Forum in Rotorua, New Zealand, I was interested to read a few days later Anyone Here Been Raped and Speaks English? [1978] This is a book of memoirs by Mr Edward Behr, a foreign correspondent for some thirty years and now* European editor for Newsweek.

In describing bizarre activities behind the lines in such places as Algeria, India and Vietnam, Mr Behr makes a number of points that struck me as quite pointedly relevant to the Rotorua experience. Among them:

• What really happened is not always reported. Because of pressures of space and time, reporters are compelled to deal in essentials.

• But reporters, relaxing and drinking together, are always swapping stories, and these are funnier, truer and more revealing than anything they write for the media.

• Even the most trivial, nonsensical anecdote can illustrate a general truth and more aptly reveal a climate than any careful marshalling of facts.

• It is these ‘non-essentials,’ often unprintable, but more entertaining and, ultimately, more significant than the essentials, that makes any gathering of newsmen an hilarious and memorable occasion.

• Ruling elites tend to have an innate conviction that all reporters belong to the servants’ hall, and that their function is merely to report under the closest control and supervision what the elite considers useful for the implementation of current policy.

Mr Behr also mentions a group of reporters who were known, ‘in part envy and part derision,’ as the Maghreb Circus, and who operated, more as a cartel than a club’ during the Algerian war. To be accepted into the Circus, a reporter had to be a specialist in the area, and he had to be able to supply information to the common pool.

Among those who constituted what we might call the Rotorua Circus were such specialists in the South Pacific as the doyen, the white-haired and avuncular Mr Stuart Inder, formerly of Pacific Islands Monthly and now reporting for The Bulletin, chubby Mr Peter O’Loughlin, of Associated Press of America, red-haired Mr John Coomber, of Australian Associated Press, and Mr Timothy Birch, of the BBC, who looked as if he’d been a wingco in the RAF, along with others, male and female, of the thirty-odd Press and television contingent.

I had no specialised information to contribute, but the Circus kindly admitted me to honorary membership anyway. I noted that, as a rule, no breath of alcohol touched their lips during the often tedious working hours – ‘I’ve been twenty years in journalism,’ Mr O’Loughlin said, ‘and I estimate that ten of those have been spent waiting around’ – but by about 8.30 pm, after they’d filed and had a shower, or a plunge in the thermal baths, the Circus was ready to go into plenary session.

This took the form of a preliminary discussion at the bar followed by a late dinner at which they made short work of several bottles of Australian red wine, the New Zealand variety having been early tried and found wanting, followed by further discussions at the bar to a late hour. I can confirm the hilarity of these memorable occasions: never have I spent so many hours on end in a condition of helpless laughter.

There is room for only one anecdote, sworn to be true. that of the former distinguished person [ex-Prime Minister Sir John Gorton], given to having the odd drink, who boarded a plane and promptly chundered. A hostess rushed to mop up the mess.

‘It always happens,’ the distinguished person explained. ‘Although I was a fighter pilot in the war, I always get airsick.’

‘But. sir,’ the hostess said, ‘we haven’t left the ground yet.’

On the other aspects of Mr Behr’s thesis we can mention a couple of incidents during the forum that, so far as I know for one reason or another didn’t get reported. but are revelatory in their way of the ruling elite’s handling of the media.

In the first, the New Zealand Prime Minister, Mr Robert Muldoon, for some reason insisted on holding a press conference in his bedroom, rather than in the area where the television cameras were set up. Thirty-two reporters crammed into the room, including the television reporters who, however, called his bluff by declining to bring their equipment. Mr Muldoon then gave in, and everyone went back to the television room.

In the second, the Australian Prime Minister, Mr Malcolm Fraser, held a press conference on the Israeli matter late in the New Zealand evening, too late for Australian television to cover it.

The rationale for this, it was suggested, was that, in the absence of television coverage, the morning newspapers would be inclined to give the story a big run, and the television people would grab him on the subject again when he got off his plane in Australia next morning.

The Circus was no more than mildly amused at the devilish cunning of getting two media hits for the price of one.

17 August 1982 From Amazing Scenes: Adventures of a Reptile of the Press (Fairfax Press, 1987). *Then