Hedley Thomas remembers th e selfless people he has worked with as an investigative reporter, th e ones who work behind th e scenes to keep th e bastards honest. Illustration by Peter Sheehan.

Despite having left journalism for what many practitioners call, the
“dark side”I remain in contact with my sources and confidantes
and with some of thetrue believers who have helped to make a difference.

These are selfless, brave and unflinching Australians who really keep the bastards honest. These heroes will not write books or win Walkley Awards. Many will never be properly acknowledged.

I was reminded of one early on Wednesday morning.

It was 3.20am when my mobile telephone started squawking on the bedside table. It jolted me from a slumber filled with dreams of petajoules of gas, of promising exploration wells and of power-point presentations promoting the virtues of the company for which I now work, Queensland Gas.

The caller was a woman. She sounded very excited, almost breathless, as I croaked out a “hello”.
“Hedley! It’s Beryl,” she exclaimed. “Have you heard the news?”
When I confessed that I was in the dark, Beryl Crosby went on:
“Dr Patel has been arrested at his home in America. It’s just happened.
What great news.”
I think I replied: “Great, Beryl. Let’s talk about it when we know
more in the morning.”

Beryl is a pensioner in her 50s from the sugar town of Bundaberg. At 3.20am morning, I was silently cursing her. But by 6am I was praising her again. Beryl doesn’t have a clock-on or clock-off time, nor holidays or days off. People like Beryl are truly driven.

Beryl is courageous and iron-willed, and also as poor as a church mouse. She rents a modest home, drives an old car, and barely makes ends meet. Yet she would give you her last dollar if you were in need. She has no formal qualifications, and yet she should be the envy of highly educated professionals who lack her commonsense and raw intelligence. She is not a household name, yet she is one of those people toiling for zilch to keep a very important cause on the right track.

She is someone more deserving of recognition than the time-servers who receive gongs for performing wellremunerated jobs in the public service. 

        For journalists, the ideal of “keeping the bastards honest” comes with the promise of word-rates, paid invoices, pay packets and the chance of syndication.

What would we do it if – instead of earning us a living – it cost us our livelihoods, friends, security, health?
Put in Beryl’s shoes, would we cut the mustard? Or would we put our heads back below the parapet and get on with paying the mortgage? For journalists, and I still count myself as one despite my recent decision to carve out a different type of career for a while, people like Beryl are the light on the hill.

I first met her three years ago in the backyard of her elderly parents’ house on the outskirts of Bundaberg when I had begun investigating Dr Jayant Patel. I was struck by her candour and honesty. She had been one of Patel’s patients, and she told me then how she had complete faith and trust in the surgeon as he persuaded her of his abilities.

Back then – when I interviewed her for the first time – Beryl described her first impressions of Patel like this: ”He had a lovely manner,” she said.
“We really believed in him because he was so positive – until something went wrong and he didn’t want to know you. After things went wrong, he never saw any of us. He screamed at me. He passed the buck. Everyone knows someone who had a problem.”

Soon after her botched operation, Beryl began hearing about others who had been harmed by Patel. 

        And just a few hours after meeting Beryl, my infamous Google search disclosed Patel’s appalling record of gross negligence and disciplinary action in the United States, and his lies to Australian authorities who did not bother to check his doctored curriculum vitae against the facts.

Was my Google search investigative journalism? I don’t think so. My sevenyear- old daughter could have done it. It still beggars belief that no-one else had done it in the two years Patel worked as director of
surgery at Bundaberg Hospital.

Until the Patel saga erupted, Beryl knew little of politics, leverage, the media, medical malpractice and that other type of malpractice, spindoctoring. Now she is an expert. Until the Patel saga erupted, I thought I knew a lot about politics, leverage, the media, medical malpractice and spindoctoring. But I was wrong.

I realised that Claud Cockburn, the man described by John Pilger as “that great Irish muckraker”, was spot-on when he observed: “Never believe anything until it is officially denied.”

I can see you wondering: Beryl Crosby? But wasn’t the brave nurse Toni Hoffman the Bundaberg Hospital whistleblower?

Hoffman, without a doubt, had the most crucial role in exposing Patel as a dangerous menace in his two years as the hospital’s director of surgery.

        Her courage and determination to overcome the bureaucrats and the politicians who did not want to hear her complaints saved lives.

Hoffman is another very special hero.

But let me tell you how Beryl has been keeping the bastards honest in the three years since the story broke.

In 2005 Beryl, running on instinct and guided by her moral compass, formed and began to lead a support group of damaged patients, and the loved ones of the dead.

Every day since, she has worked tirelessly for those people. She has consoled grieving families, and witnessed terrible trauma. Her life revolves around the support group, the members and their pain. Her compassion is boundless. I worry about the toll it has taken on her.

She has taken on the most powerful politicians in Queensland, the leading lawyers, the one-eyed bureaucrats and even the Commissioner of Police in her quest to ensure accountability and justice.

Even while wired with heart-monitoring devices after her own breakdown from exhaustion, Beryl was still helping patients and their families.

There is little doubt the pressure Beryl brought to bear influenced former Queensland premier Peter Beattie to order the first royal commission into the tragedy at Bundaberg.

And it was Beryl who made him establish a second inquiry when the first one was disqualified. It is possible that Patel would not now be facing extradition if it were not for Beryl’s constant lobbying.

There are other Beryls – and it has been my good fortune as a journalist to have known and been trusted by several. Some are deep-throat sources. Some, like Beryl, are the dedicated drivers of vitally important campaigns. These are the people who really keep the bastards honest, the ones who have everything to lose, but who fight the cause anyway.

They work to keep drink drivers off the road, the environment clean, the hospitals safe, the government accountable, the business community honest.

When the news desk accepts our pitch, we will write about them, but they will continue regardless. They keep the good fight going when the story has been shuffled from the front page to a strip inside.

         You might call them for an update a month down the track, and find them still campaigning without fanfare.

One of them is known to me as Wolves.

It was the codename she gave herself when she decided to begin unburdening herself of providing inside information about the nefarious activities of Gold Coast property scammers.

The property scams were ingenious, a deceitful web was being spun in a conspiracy of lying lawyers, financial planners and rip-off artists. Hundreds of millions of dollars a year were siphoned from trusting Mum and Dad
investors.

My source was disgusted by what she saw and knew. She was worried about her safety, and about her real name being put into my contact book or mobile telephone, hence the codename Wolves.

Why, I asked, do you want to be called Wolves? She told me that she “dances with wolves” every day. She could live with herself by remaining close to their lair, by telling me their secrets to expose their harmful conduct.

Another of these remarkable people is Stephen Keim, a Brisbane lawyer who could have lost everything because he weighed up the rights and wrongs and when he decided the public had the right to know the truth about the persecution of Dr Mohamed Haneef – the false leaks being perpetrated by the Australian Federal Police, and the political mileage being wrung from the case by the former Howard government and then immigration minister, Kevin Andrews – he acted without giving much thought to his own situation.

Stephen was aware that law enforcement sources had campaigned remorselessly and anonymously to destroy Dr Haneef ’s reputation.

Stephen knew that despite the AFP realising its case against Dr Haneef was “weak to the point of non- existent, the orchestrated leaks continued to appear in the papers stating things that the very sources must have known were untrue or, at best, misleading”.

Dr Haneef ’s reputation was trashed. Kevin Andrews was relentless in briefing against him. As were the AFP. It was a matter of “public safety”, warned the police and politicians. Haneef ’s visa was revoked – he had
“failed the character test”, said the former immigration minister.

It was an unfair fight. Stephen responded by doing something very few lawyers would have the guts to do. He handed me Dr Haneef ’s 142-page police record of interview – a powerful chunk of evidence. I read it late into the night.

Near the end of the record of interview, Dr Haneef, who comes across as a bewildered patsy guilty of absolutely nothing except being distantly related to a bungling alleged terrorist in the United Kingdom, says: “I haven’t done any of the crimes. And I don’t want to spoil my name and my profession.”

When the story was published, the AFP began to look for the source. Mick Keelty was on the phone to my then editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell, at 7am, wanting an assurance it wasn’t anyone from the AFP.

John Howard pronounced on the matter: “Whoever’s been responsible for leaking this document is not trying to make sure that justice is done. Whoever’s responsible for this is trying to frustrate the process and it should be condemned.”

At this point Stephen Keim bravely outed himself. The AFP took a dim view of Stephen’s actions; it did not take long to work out why.

The record of interview highlighted glaring errors in the AFP’s claims in court about Dr Haneef. The interview showed the AFP behaving like Keystone Kops and the politicians as shameless opportunists.

The AFP and the Howard government furiously denounced Stephen; they had to discredit the whistleblower. Phillip Ruddock called his actions: “inappropriate” and “highly unethical”, and hinted at possible legal proceedings. Stephen’s critics accused him of breaching the rules for barristers, an extremely serious charge.

Let’s think about that for a moment. It is acceptable to destroy the life of a professional doctor, to prosecute him by putting false claims into the courts and to charge him with offences with a 15-year prison term. It is acceptable to revoke his visa and take away his livelihood.

But, according to this bizarre distorted logic, it is unacceptable if his lawyer breaches a technical rule to disclose the truth. Stephen was rattled but resolute under the most extreme pressure.

He said: “I do have a very, very strong opinion that this debate is something that could affect the lives of our grandchildren and so I felt very passionate that this debate be conducted on the evidence and not on some skewed version of the evidence.”

It is a matter of public record that Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty pursued Stephen last year to try to have him disciplined for revealing the truth.

Stephen was vindicated after several months of investigation, overseen by the Legal Services Commission of Queensland, a body with the power to launch disciplinary proceedings against him. Happily, one of my last assignments for The Australian in January was reporting how Stephen had beaten the AFP’s vindictive complaint.

And Stephen was not exaggerating when he told a media conference that one person in the room was more relieved than him.

I would like to conclude by borrowing one more line from John Pilger’s book, Tell Me No Lies, a compelling anthology of investigative journalism and its triumphs.

Pilger wrote: “That the state lies routinely is not what the media courses teach. If they did [teach this] – and the evidence has never been in greater abundance – the cynicism that many young journalists believe ordains them as journalists would not be directed at their readers, viewers and listeners, but at those in false authority.”

Hedley Thomas  won last year’s Gold Walkley for his series on Dr Mohamed Haneef in The Australian. He now works for Queensland Gas. This is an edited transcript of his keynote address to the Freelance Journalism
Convention in Brisbane, March 15 2008.

Peter Sheehan is a Sydney-based freelance artist; www.petersheehan.com.