Tony Jones, one of Australia’s most admired journalists, has written a brilliantly compelling thriller, taking us from the savage mountains of Yugoslavia to Canberra’s brutal yet covert power struggles in a novel that’s intelligent, informed and utterly suspenseful. Jones was still at school when Lionel Murphy raided ASIO. After an ABC cadetship, he joined Four Corners as a reporter in 1985, and then went to Dateline at SBS in 1986. He subsequently was an ABC foreign correspondent, for a time in London and later in Washington. Inter alia, he covered the war crimes in Bosnia. Today he hosts Q&A on Monday nights. He is married to fellow ABC journalist, Sarah Ferguson. This is his first novel.
Excerpts:
You’ve waited a long time to write your first novel, The Twentieth Man. What was the story that inspired it and what made you want to convert it into fiction?
It has brewed for three decades. The seeds were planted in 1986 when I first went to Yugoslavia, as a Four Corners reporter, looking for evidence of Nazi war criminals who’d concealed their dark history and come to live in Australia. Had they remained underground and kept their secrets they might not have been detected but some of them chose to cause trouble here. One such character was a Melbourne man called Srecko Rover. A wartime officer in the murderous Ustasha, Rover founded the Croatian Revolutionary Brotherhood in Australia. That highly secretive brotherhood organised terrorist activities in Australia, including bombings, intimidation, extortion and the training of foreign fighters for armed incursions behind the iron curtain. In archives in Zagreb and Sarajevo we found documented proof of his war crimes in 1941.
Back then, the Nazi-backed Ustasha regime was run by the self-styled Poglavik, a Croatian fuhrer, called Ante Pavelic. The Pavelic regime was so pathologically brutal in its campaigns of ethic cleansing and religious persecution that even their SS military advisors were appalled. Rover had commanded a so-called mobile court martial, which roamed the Bosnian countryside murdering opponents. The Ustasha in Sarajevo, Rover’s hometown, were active participants in the Holocaust, working with the German Nazis to round up and exterminate that city’s long-established and thriving Jewish community.
It struck me as extraordinary that such a person could have been allowed to settle here and then create an Ustasha-style brotherhood. I thought a great deal about the young men he had indoctrinated, some of whom were sent to their deaths in the 60s and 70s on missions to stage armed rebellions deep inside Yugoslavia, against Tito’s communist regime. I thought that, getting inside the heads of these men would best be accomplished in a novel. So, these were the seeds of The Twentieth Man. They would take root five years later when I went as a correspondent to cover the collapse of Yugoslavia and the brutal wars that resulted.
Who is the Twentieth Man and was it tricky coming up with a sexy title for your thriller?
Not so tricky really. History tells us that in June of 1972, 19 heavily armed men hiked over the Austrian Alps and crossed the iron curtain into Yugoslavia. Eleven of them were Australian citizens or residents, trained in this country for their mission to stage an uprising against Tito’s communist regime. They were detected by the Yugoslav military and eventually trapped on a mountain called Radusa, in southern Bosnia. After a series of running battles they were all either killed or captured. The survivors were tried in Sarajevo and executed. It was rumoured at the time that there was a 20th man who escaped that fate. This imagined figure is the subject of my title.
You’re such a familiar figure on Q&A and Lateline, but you had a long career as a reporter and foreign correspondent. How did the years on the road help you in writing this novel, and what experiences did you draw on?
I became a London-based foreign correspondent soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and spent much of the next three years reporting the collapse of communism in eastern Europe. The longed-for freedom had unforeseen consequences, especially in the former Yugoslavia where nationalist aspirations and old religious animosities fired up conflicts on Europe’s border more brutal than anything since Second World War. I was plunged into it as a journalist just five years after travelling there for Four Corners and I watched as young men flooded in, drawn to this conflict from the Yugoslav diaspora in Australia, Canada, Britain and the United States. Some were incredibly brave and noble in their aspirations but others, including both Serb and Croat Australians, would commit terrible war crimes. Mark Twain once said that history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes. I saw, or rather heard, those rhymes during that terrible conflict and the idea of writing this novel, and its sequel, really began then to form in my head.
Fellow ABC journalists Michael Brissenden and Chris Uhlmann and News Corp journalists Steve Lewis and Caroline Overington have also had novels published. What is the attraction in writing a novel for a seasoned journalist?
I can’t speak for those others except to say that I imagine, like me, they have been reading novels all their lives and love them. I make no claim here to any literary comparison (obviously) but one of the greatest novelists of all time, Leo Tolstoy, began his writing career as a war correspondent, setting out his terrible experiences in the Crimean war in a slim volume called The Sevastopol Sketches (it makes a fleeting appearance in my novel when the protagonist Marin Katich pulls it out of his backpack). I understand why Tolstoy was inspired to shift from journalistic reporting to fiction. Fiction frees you from the constraints of journalism, it allows you to enter the minds of your characters and gives you an unlimited canvas on which they can live and act.
Did you purposely choose to make your central figure a female journalist, Anna Rosen, to balance out the male-dominated world of the 1970s ABC? Anna’s experiences certainly paint a picture of a pretty sexist working environment.
Yes, but if you put her on the scales she probably outweighs all of the male characters put together. I once joked that I was tempted to call my book “The Girl With the Hammer and Sickle Tattoo”, although in truth, despite her admiration for her communist father, Anna would have scoured that emblem off her flesh after the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968. She is a young, Jewish, radical thinker, an early adopter feminist, a leader in the anti-Vietnam war movement and an accomplished student newspaper editor. When recruited into the ABC she is forced to confront misogyny in the boy’s clubs that the news and current affairs divisions were in the 1970s. Ask any of women who worked there at the time and I’m sure they will confirm that they confronted a male-dominated world and an often hostile one. Some of the terrible indignities suffered by Anna are based on the reminiscences of my female colleagues. We are not like that anymore, thank God, as you can see from the ranks of our on-air presenters and senior editorial staff in today’s ABC, but back in the dark ages of steam-radio, well, the past is a different country.
Did you travel to the former Yugoslavia for research? And what did you uncover that surprised you?
Since 1986 I’ve been back and forth to what was once Yugoslavia many times. During and after the conflict in the 90s I travelled to many regions as a reporter. I lived for some time in 1996, with my wife Sarah and our two-year-old son, in a town called Rovinj, on the Croatian coast and it was there that I began to write and research this novel and its sequel. The war was not over then and that beautiful fishing port was a place of rehabilitation for Croatian soldiers, damaged both physically and psychologically. I went back there again recently, and while I’m not surprised by it, I felt that the redolence of violent conflict still clings to the place, despite its incessant summer partying. It seemed to me there was a kind of desperation to prove that the past is forgotten and all is well with the present.
Will you be appearing on Q&A as a panellist to promote your book? And what is it like being on the other end of the microphone in publicity interviews?
No, I won’t be appearing as a writers’ festival panellist, we have far more accomplished people to choose from. As to being on the other side of the microphone and answering the questions of smart readers, I felt rather exposed. As the book tour progresses, I’m getting more used to it but I’m far more comfortable asking questions than answering them.
You’ve featured real historical characters in your story, such as Lionel Murphy and Gough Whitlam. In studying the political intrigue of Canberra the 1970s, how does it compare with today’s shenanigans?
Ah, Lionel Murphy! Now there’s a character you’d be unlikely to see in modern politics. As attorney general Murphy was a radical reformer who changed the country in fundamental ways — no-fault divorce, the Trade Practices Act, freedom of information legislation, the Senate committee system — these were just some of the changes he inspired. But he was also responsible for the most reckless act in the early days of the Whitlam government, one that gave his conservative opponents much-needed momentum after their demoralising defeat. Murphy’s fabled “Asio raid” in March of 73 is a key part of my narrative. We go with Murphy, and his confederates, commonwealth police and staff, on the wild ride that ends up at the St Kilda Road headquarters of Asio. It was an act that resonated all the way to Langley, Virginia where the CIA’s counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton became convinced that the Australian Labor government were a bunch of socialist renegades, prepared to put at risk “the crown jewels” of western intelligence. History has largely forgotten that Murphy was trying to foil an assassination plot and believed that his security service was concealing vital information from him. That assassination plot is what drives my novel to its conclusion.
Is there another book in you and will your passion for writing lead you away from your day job?
There is, as I’ve forecast, a sequel to The Twentieth Man so if you are engaged by Marin and Anna, and their most unlikely romance, you’ll find that their history is far from over. Hopefully, that’s also true of my long history with the ABC.
–Guardian News & Media Ltd
The Twentieth Man by Tony Jones is published by Allen & Unwin.
