REFLECTIONS ON THE HILTON BOMBING  

Imre Salusinszky is a journalist and author, most recently of The Hilton Bombing: Evan Pederick and the Ananda Marga? On Wednesday 8 April 2020, Imre Salusinszky recorded a talk for The Sydney Institute for podcast and Youtube and was interviewed by Gerard Henderson after his presentation. What follows is the paper given and the transcript of the interview which followed.

REFLECTIONS ON THE HILTON BOMBING

IMRE SALUSINSZKY

The first thing to say about the Hilton bombing, of course, is that it’s a mystery.

Fully 42 years later, we have no idea who perpetrated this outrage, and with what motive. pullquote]Australia’s most deadly terrorist attack is a puzzle locked inside an enigma.[/pullquote]

What complete and utter bullshit.

We know exactly who bombed the Hilton, and we know exactly why. Evan Pederick, then a 22-year-old initiate of a radicalised Hindu religious cult called Ananda Marga, put a bomb outside the Hilton, intending to assassinate the then Prime Minister of India, Morarji Desai, who was a guest at the hotel.

So how do we know this? Because of the forensic research I’ve undertaken to prepare my book, The Hilton Bombing: Evan Pederick and the Ananda Marga?

Hardly.

We know this because, a decade after the bombing, in 1989, Evan Pederick came forward, of his own volition, and confessed. He gave police a highly detailed account of how he had been brainwashed by Ananda Marga and had become convinced that the assassination of Desai was a regrettable but necessary measure to secure the release of Ananda Marga’s founder, P.R. Sarkar, from jail in India, where he was serving a long sentence for murder. Pederick then gave an equally detailed account of the plotting that preceded the bombing, and his execution of it.

Truly, the prepositions tell the story: Evan Pederick confessed to the Hilton bombing, was charged with the Hilton bombing, was convicted of the Hilton bombing and went to jail for the Hilton bombing.

The English language has a phrase to cover these circumstances. It is, “Case closed.”

More than 40 years on from the bombing, and 23 years after being released from jail, Pederick is an Anglican priest in Perth, and continues to take full responsibility for his part in the atrocity. He has avoided the media, but on the occasion of the 40^th anniversary, he authorised the Anglican diocesan office in Perth to respond to any inquiries with the statement: “At this time I have no comment to make, other than to say how deeply sorry I am for my actions in 1978 as a member of Ananda Marga, and that I stand by the truthfulness of the evidence I gave in 1989.”

So the “mystery” of the Hilton bombing, to paraphrase Phillip Adams on the cover of my book, is how anybody ever got away with calling it a “mystery” in the first place. The conspiracy theories that have come along to exonerate Ananda Marga and place official Australian state and federal agencies, such as ASIO or NSW Special Branch, in the frame for the bombing are not the central focus of my book – it is an authorised biography of Pederick – but they are certainly addressed and dismissed. They received similar treatment four years ago in Rachel Landers’ book, Who Bombed the Hilton?

The answer to Adams’s question, I think, involves a mix of naivety and cynicism. In other words, some people promote these theories actually believing they are true, while others seek to deflect attention away from Ananda Marga, and, quite possibly, themselves.

I was a young cadet journalist at The Age on the night when a bomb exploded in a litter bin outside the Hilton Hotel, on George St, Sydney. It happened at 12:42 am on Monday, 13 February 1978. As a team of garbage collectors from the City of Sydney emptied the bin into the back of their truck, a massive bomb made of gelignite exploded as it hit the hard inside surface of the compactor. Two council workers, Alec Carter and Bill Favell, were blown to pieces. Paul Burmistriw, a young policeman standing guard outside the Hilton, was grievously injured and died nine days later. The bomb injured nine other people.

We should always be sparing with our cultural clichés, but it is fairly accurate to say the bombing changed Australia forever, perhaps even that it was the day Australia “grew up”.

To give an indication of how naïve we were about terrorism in 1978, the police did not even check the rubbish bins outside the hotel where Desai and a dozen other regional leaders were staying for the inaugural Commonwealth Heads of Regional Government (CHOGRM) meeting. This has fact has fuelled the conspiracy theories. But the head of security for CHOGRM, Superintendent Reg Douglass, took full responsibility for the oversight the day after the bombing. “I did not think it necessary,” he said, “Especially as squads of police were stationed near [the bin] all day.”

Within 24 hours, the Fraser Government had called out the army to protect the CHOGRM leaders as they made their way from Sydney to Bowral for a retreat – the first time armed soldiers had patrolled Australian streets during peacetime.

Instead of travelling by train to Bowral as planned, the leaders were ferried by helicopter. The journalists covering CHOGRM were not told of the switch, and were taken to Central Station by bus, as if they were going to board the train (the bus eventually took them all the way). A red carpet was rolled out and food and drink for the bigwigs was loaded on board. For added plausibility, soldiers with guns were positioned along the railway line. All of this folderol evoked a rather dry comment from the Sydney Morning Herald: “Operation ‘Ghost Train’ was carried out with a sophistication that contrasted sharply with the position on Sunday, when a bomber was able to plant an explosive device in a street rubbish bin under the eyes of police guarding the conference venue.”

As a result of the Hilton bombing, the Government commissioned a report from Scotland Yard chief Sir Robert Mark, which led to the establishment of the Australian Federal Police in 1979. At the beginning of 1982, I returned to Melbourne after four years overseas and was astounded at the CCTV cameras that were on virtually every street corner. They were there to guard the foreign leaders who had recently come to Melbourne for a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM). The leaders went but the cameras stayed: this, too, is a legacy of the Hilton.

There was a further immediate reaction from the authorities to the bombing: they focussed all of their efforts on the Ananda Marga cult, and establishing a case that it was behind the attack.

This single-minded focus on Ananda Marga has also fuelled the conspiracists, and endless suggestions the NSW Police were intent on a “frame-up”. Why were the police so focussed on an innocuous religious sect, and ignoring other leads? Let me suggest that for the police not to have focused resolutely on Ananda Marga would have been far more negligent, even, than not checking the rubbish bins outside the Hilton.

Ananda Marga had been perpetrating violent attacks on Indian official targets for the six or seven years leading up to the Hilton bombing. This is all on the public record.  There were incidents in the UK, Denmark, the US and elsewhere, including bomb attacks. Several Margiis, as they called themselves, burned themselves to death to protest Sarkar’s imprisonment. One of them was a young Australian woman, Lynette Phillips, who set fire to herself on the doorstep of United Nations headquarters in Geneva, just four months before the Hilton bombing. At the start of 1977, the British Home Secretary had denied entry to two Margiis who were seeking asylum, declaring, “There is a violent wing to this organisation. I do not believe that this country should be a haven for people who have engaged in violence of this nature.”

And here is what those who want you to think Ananda Marga was “framed” would really prefer we skip over: there were a number of serious incidents right here in Australia, in the second half of 1977. In August, there was an assault on the Sydney offices of Air India in which animal blood was spattered over terrified employees. The following month, the military attaché at the Indian embassy in Canberra, Colonel Iqbal Singh, was stabbed in the chest as he slept. He and his wife were kidnapped, but managed to escape. This was front-page news in the Sydney Morning Herald, on 16 September 1977. The police charged Margiis with both of these attacks. Colonel Singh’s attacker was sent to jail for three years.

Until 1971, Ananda Marga had been a harmless Hindu sect practicing yoga and meditation. How it suddenly became a violent group, culminating in the Hilton attack, is well understood by students of so-called new religious movements. It is established that, with such a group, any attempt to restrict the freedom of its guru can cause radicalisation and a sudden turn to violence. This is exactly what occurred when Sarkar was arrested for murder. Once he was released, only months after the bombing, Ananda Marga reverted to its earlier, harmless form, which it retains even today, although the group is now vestigial. (Sarkar died in 1990.) To this day Ananda Marga runs a couple of primary schools in NSW and Queensland.

The events that followed Sarkar’s arrest are why, at the end of 1977, the Australian Government banned the entry into Australia of Ananda Marga “acaryas” (or monks) who were not Australian citizens. It is also why the Ananda Marga biannual retreat at Galston, in outer north-west Sydney, held just three weeks before the bombing, was under close surveillance. This is the retreat where Evan Pederick later told the NSW Supreme Court he was conscripted to plant the bomb outside the Hilton.

I’ve described Ananda Marga as a fairly standard sub-Hindu sect, but it had some special features. One of these was the status of Sarkar himself among his disciples, which was God-like. They believed Sarkar, whom they called Shrii Shrii Anandamurti—“embodiment of bliss”—understood every human language, and could intervene directly to influence events anywhere in the world.

Second, Ananda Marga had a theory of social revolution, according to which the day was fast approaching when Sarkar and his disciples would stand at the head of a single world government. Because Sarkar’s Progressive Utilization Theory, or Prout, had some mumbo-jumbo about the redistribution of wealth, and each according to his need, Ananda Marga was able to forge alliances with left-wing groups on Australian campuses in the late 1970s.

These alliances were to come in handy when Ananda Marga became the subject of intense police interest following the Hilton bombing, and again a few months later when three members of the group were charged and convicted (but later pardoned) of plotting to murder an Australian neo-Nazi activist called Robert Cameron. (This was the so-called “Yagoona Conspiracy,” named after the suburb where the Margiis were headed, wrongly believing Cameron lived there, when they were arrested.)  The trials of the three Margiis were accompanied by a noisy protest movement; that noise was amplified a few years later when one of them, Tim Anderson, was charged with plotting the Hilton attack alongside Evan Pederick. Anderson was convicted in 1990, then acquitted on appeal the following year.

Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of the legal processes—and I say in the book that the acquittal of Anderson was justified, due to failures by the Director of Public Prosecutions in the conduct of his trial—the mindset of the protest movement that grew up around the Yagoona and Hilton trials was an example of post-hoc reasoning: if Ananda Marga was an ally of the left, then by definition it could not have plotted murder on George Street or at Yagoona. The only point I would make about this is that the left-wing associations of Ananda Marga were illusory. Both internally, in terms of strict lines of authority that controlled every aspect of its initiates lives, and externally, in terms of its ridiculous plans for imminent world domination, Ananda Marga was far closer to a fascist organisation than a socialist one.

This, then, was the organisation of which Evan Pederick, a naïve and idealistic 21-year-old, became an acolyte, in Hobart, in December of 1976. Evan had grown up in Western Australia, the son of a minister in the Methodist Church. His childhood was entirely normal, though somewhat itinerant as a result of his father’s work. He’d been a gifted student of mathematics at the University of Western Australia who, like many young people of the period, including me, had become gradually disillusioned with the values of his parents and the broader society they seemed to represent. Also like many young people of the period, including me, his response to this sense of disillusion and non-fulfilment was unfocussed— until the moment when, unlike me, he stumbled into the maw of a cult that just happened to be entering its most violent phase.

If you read The Hilton Bombing, you’ll find a detailed description of Evan’s initiation into Ananda Marga. To progress to a position as a full-time organiser with Ananda Marga, just six months after encountering the group in Hobart, Evan attended a 12-week training program with about a dozen other initiates in Lewisham. During the program, the young people were forbidden to leave the house without permission. The were subjected to physical and mental duress. Every moment of their lives was subject to control and surveillance.

As I explain in the book, this aligns very closely to standard brainwashing techniques. Those techniques stress the need to isolate targets from their customary contacts and associations. They involve moving their subjects to a new understanding of reality through a series of tiny, carefully gradated steps, so that the distance covered from their original understandings is barely perceptible. And rigid control is employed to create a sense of powerlessness in the subject. All of this was applied to Evan in Lewisham.

Evan emerged from this process as a fully “dharmic” Margii. That’s a word that came up again and again in my research, and like many of the words used in Ananda Marga, it is many-angled. Its associations include: revolutionary, energetic, zealous, proactive. In 1989 Evan explained to the Supreme Court of NSW how he went straight from the retreat at Galston to a flea-pit near Central Station. Disguised as a vagrant in a tatty brown suit, he spent his days casing out the Hilton, gathering and assembling the elements of his bomb, and seeking to establish details of Desai’s arrival on Sunday 12 February, 1978.

 

He told of how he attempted to detonate his bomb using a remote-control device as he saw, or thought he saw, Desai arriving at the hotel late that afternoon. When nothing happened, Evan concluded, with an enormous sense of relief, that Sarkar had intervened from his jail cell in India to prevent unnecessary carnage. He set off to hitchhike back to Brisbane, where he was a full-time Ananda Marga organiser. About seven hours later, the team from City of Sydney arrived to empty the bins.

In the years I’ve been researching Evan’s story, one fact has stood out for me more vividly than any other. If he had succeeded in what he set out to do on George Street that sticky February afternoon, more than 100 people would have died, including him. It would have been the most serious terrorist atrocity of the 1970s.

A few other reflections to close—things I’ve kept thinking about, long after my book has gone to press, without any real resolution.

First, just as I was struck by, if you like, the “innocence” of Australia in the 1970s compared with now, I was also struck by the epochal divide that occurs with the rise of the internet. We worry, with good reason, that the internet can assist terrorist groups in traumatising the community or in attracting and radicalising adherents—we witnessed this with the appalling use of Facebook by the Christchurch attacker last year.

Well, let me observe the internet would have certainly prevented the Hilton bombing. Evan knew very little about Sarkar’s imprisonment, and virtually nothing about the violent acts that had been committed across the world: this use of information silos is another feature of brainwashing programs. Well today, of course, he would have known all of that, courtesy of the internet. And his loving family, instead of wondering what-the-hell kind of a group he’d got himself mixed up with, would have had access to the same information. I am convinced they would have staged an intervention.

Second, back on those conspiracy theories, I’ve been struck that, in response to Evan’s story finally getting told in full, not a single reviewer or interviewer has challenged the truth of his, and my, account. And really, why would you? Evan is a respected and fully rehabilitated member of his community now. Why would he continue to take responsibility for an act of murder he did not commit? Gerard Henderson pointed out 25 years ago that, if official agencies plotted and executed the Hilton bombing, many plotters would have had to be involved. He wondered how a scheme like that could be kept so tight. Nobody ever felt remorse? Nobody every blurted out the truth in a bar after too many drinks? This is even truer now. To state the matter bluntly: more than forty years after the Hilton bombing, not a single shred of positive evidence has emerged to support any of the conspiracy theories.

If my book can lay all that nonsense to rest, if not now then over time, I will be very happy. The Hilton bombing is the most significant public event in Australia of the 1970s, apart from the constitutional crisis of 1975. The community has a right to understand what happened. More important, even, is that these conspiracy theories mock the dead, the survivors, and their families. They have suffered enough.

Third, I have been struck by how much the events described in my book are the result of accident, not fate or necessity. Absent the arrest and imprisonment of Sarkar, there was nothing inherent in Ananda Marga that would cause it to turn dangerous. A young Evan Pederick did not need to wander into an Ananda Marga meditation evening in December, 1976. At every stage of his story, I see sliding doors – and of course that means a very different outcome for the victims, and for Australia.

Finally, I would say that in some sense the years I’ve spent on this book have challenged my perspective on human nature.  For three of his 64 years, as a result of a systematic thought-reform process, Evan Pederick was an entirely unrecognizable human being. He was a good and gentle person until he fell into the clutches of a cult, and he became a good and gentle person again. The depths of his remorse and contrition, and his attempt at reparation and rehabilitation, are, to my mind, the core of this book. I don’t mind saying that I am honoured to call him my friend. Nevertheless, there is a puzzle here about human “nature” here that I cannot say I have resolved.

On that note, I think it’s best to end with Evan’s own words. In the event of any media inquiries coming his way, he wrote the following in response to the publication of The Hilton Bombing:

This is a story that has been long in the telling. When I handed myself in to police in 1989 and confessed my part in the Hilton bombing it was with the hope that the families of those whose lives I had taken would be able to find some peace in knowing what had happened and why. It was important to me, also, to express my remorse and apologise publicly for my part in this crime. I was sorry that with the eventual outcome of the legal processes the victims of this crime were never given the clarity they deserved.

As a young convert to Ananda Marga in 1978 I was acting under extreme emotional pressure and the influence of an ideology and perspective on reality that is difficult for me now to fully comprehend. However, I was not insane, and I was fully morally culpable for what I did.

At this stage, 41 years after the events of 1978, I can reflect that my life was turned around by handing myself in to the police and telling the truth about what I had done. I am grateful to the many people who supported me through these years and enabled me subsequently to contribute to the community. Parts of their stories are also told in this book.

Since my release from prison I have resisted all advances from those who wished to use me to tell the Hilton bombing story. However, when Imre Salusinszky approached me over five years ago I realised that his aim was both more limited and more honest. I have cooperated in his biography of me that does not set out to “solve” the Hilton bombing but simply to tell the story of a life that went tragically wrong and my subsequent attempt to find redemption.

I hope that his book may cast some light on this dreadful event and bring some comfort.

Interview with Gerard Henderson

Gerard Henderson: Imre thanks for that. That was great.

Imre Salusinszky: Thank you.

Gerard Henderson: It’s a very well written book. And a very highly researched book. Tell us first a bit about Evan Pederick. You’ve covered some of that in your talk today. But, he’s a very bright young boy who goes to Wesley College in Perth, he wins a scholarship there, so he’s obviously very able. And he does well at university initially and then it all falls apart. It’s beginning to fall apart before he joins Ananda Marga. So what happened to him as a boy and then a young man before his calamitous departure into Ananda Marga?

Imre Salusinszky: Interestingly you ask because so much of the answer to your question places Evan directly in the group of the type of young people of that period identified as particularly vulnerable to their attraction. Evan was the son of a quite successful Methodist minister who eventually came to lead the Methodists in West Australia up to the point of their union into the Uniting Church. Evan had a rather remote father who provided care but not much in the way of physical demonstration of love or affection. Evan, as I say, felt very distanced from his parents.

He then came to feel distanced from the religious tradition into which his parents had introduced him. He came to feel, and this was something in the air or the water in the 1970s, that it was too dry, it was not ecstatic. It did not engage the entire individual. It was intellectual rather than emotional. And so, as he became more and more disillusioned, he also came to feel that he was just going through the motions of doing what his parents expected of him. Then, suddenly, only six months from the point of completing his degree, he threw it all up and left on a hippie trail, as we called it at the time.

That hippie trail took Evan to Hobart where he first encountered Ananda Marga. Like many young people of that time he was already looking for some kind of spiritual answer to his woes. He wasn’t depressed clinically. He certainly wasn’t deranged. But he was unhappy. And he was looking for a spiritual alternative to this dry as dust religion that he’d been brought up in. Now, studies of kids who fell into cults in the 1970s identified them as overwhelmingly from middle class families, overwhelmingly as well educated, and very frequently as experiencing their childhood home as emotionally distant or cold. So Evan met every criterium.

The critical thing is that the cult should present itself as an option to these vulnerable youngsters at just the right moment. This is exactly what happened with Evan. One thing that struck me is that none of this had to happen. It didn’t have to be like this. Evan didn’t have to hear about Ananda Marga meditation evenings just at the moment when he was most vulnerable to that kind of an approach. Ananda Marga didn’t have to be lurching towards its violent phase just at the moment that he got involved. I suppose all historical researchers, and this is the first bit of historical research I’ve ever done, are struck by this at some point. All of the sliding doors, all of the moments when entirely different outcomes could have eventuated.

Gerard Henderson: But he was a very committed man because as you know, not so much in Hobart but particularly in Sydney, he lived the life of absolute penury. He had no money, he had virtually no accommodation, he was almost homeless; he had little food, he lived then in very rigorous share house where he was told what to do and how to live his life. So, he was prepared to offer it all up.

Imre Salusinszky: I think, Gerard, he was one of those people who was looking for someone to tell him what to do. Who was looking for someone to tell him how to live. I think he was looking for a new father who would perhaps provide more circumferential care and solace than his perceptions were of his own father. He was a naive 21-year old, a young 21-year old, who had never quite successfully completed his adolescence and gotten a separation from his parents. Ananda Marga provided the avenue for that.

And you know, when you think about what it’s like for a young man of that age to become involved in a group like that, you can see that some of the satisfactions are quite instinctual and infantile. As I say, every moment of your day is being dictated to you. You’re being toilet trained again. Margies had different rituals for everything, including going to the toilet, including yawning, including shaking hands just as we are now. And some of these satisfactions strike me as providing a kind of return to infancy for the subject of the cult.

Gerard Henderson: Now tell us a little bit about yourself. Because I think, you’re about the same age as Evan, right?

Imre Salusinszky: Correct.

Gerard Henderson: And you were a bit of an angry young man in your time. Some years ago, I discovered a clipping of a letter you wrote to the Melbourne Age around the time of the dismissal of the Whitlam government where, as I recall, you were advocating riots in the streets turning over and the burning of cars.

Imre Salusinszky: Maybe yeah.

Gerard Henderson: Yes maybe. I think so. So, you were pretty angry but you went in a different way.

Imre Salusinszky: The fact that Evan and I are so close in age in many ways facilitated the book because it gave me a better understanding of what he had gone through. It also allowed us to communicate with each other more easily than if it hadn’t been there. I also fell into a radical counterculture but unlike Evan I took, as you say, a more kind of ratbaggy political route, and never terribly seriously. I was more of a student journo than a student agitator. Whereas he took this utterly different religious path. I was probably too cynical even then to fall into the clutches of a guru. But as I’ve studied his story, I’ve seen just how this might have happened to me or some of my friends given the tenor of the times and also that it was the great age for cult startups. There were certainly plenty of them around in the late 1970s. Now, I took an entirely different path into academia and study and then eventually back to journalism. But as I said in my remarks before, I could not get the story of the Hilton bombing out of my head. When the internet came along and I saw that Evan Pederick had been released from jail and was a priest in Perth, that struck me as so interesting that, as we say these days, I reached out to him.

Gerard Henderson: You reached out.

Imre Salusinszky: When I knew I was heading over to Perth for some work. He, for some reason, accepted my invitation for lunch and, partly because we’d grown up in parallel, we were able to speak to each other pretty freely on a whole range of subjects right from the get go.

Gerard Henderson: I think you said here in your talk today that you had some problems with your own parents. Is that right? You’d come from Hungary as a young boy. You had written a bit about your life and how you settled here. But that didn’t last that long with your parents did it? What, were you sort of alienated from the home?

Imre Salusinszky: I wouldn’t say that. But like so many young people in the late 1970s, I came to feel that they were bourgeois, that their minds were somewhat closed to change and to progress. All of this is entirely unfair of course given what they’d gone through and the extraordinary difficulties they’d face in order to get my sisters and me a good life in Australia. But Gerard, let me stress, I was a pretty garden variety student leftie and my relationship with my parents survived and was always nurturing and strong. Evan’s was ruptured by his entry into Ananda Marga.

Now, a constant theme of the book, and something I was fascinated by, was to think of these poor people over in Perth not knowing exactly what was going on and then, cataclysmically in 1989, learning that this horrific event of a decade earlier had involved their son. They responded to that with exemplary parental love and care, and never abandoned Evan, far from it, welcomed him back into the family fold when he was released from jail, and you know, even in a bad story, a terrible story like this there is some good, eventually had a very strong relationship and still has a very strong relationship with his father.

Gerard Henderson: Well let’s go back to the Hilton bombing in 1978. I was in Sydney on that night. I was working for Kevin Newman who was a junior minister in the Fraser government and, as you know, the senior figures in the government were here for the meeting. On the Monday morning, we woke up to hear about this, and Kevin Newman got called into a Cabinet meeting that was being held, partly because he was a minister in Sydney, partly because he had a background in the army as a lieutenant colonel. As I recall, Kevin Newman went into this meeting and came back and spoke to myself and Tony Ashford who were the senior figures in the office. He said, “Look the PM doesn’t really know what he’s doing. No one knows what they’re doing. We’ve put the army out and no one understands that the army’s not really equipped to handle this kind of intervention in civil society. It’s, as you know, trained to fight wars.” On the other hand, Kevin conceded that he didn’t know what else you would do. So, what happened around the time of that meeting, because to put the army on the Tuesday on the railway lines between here and Bowral when they had absolutely no training in policing, was a very radical step. What did you find about the reaction of Prime Minister Fraser, and Foreign Minister Peacock who was here as well? How do you see their response to this?

Imre Salusinszky: It attracted, predictably, criticism at the time, including from the left, just as I expect it would attract today if we ended up in that kind of a spot again. The handling of the aftermath of the bombing, particularly by the police and also by the government, was fairly inept or it wouldn’t have taken a decade or more for Evan to come forward and confess. I don’t tell this story in my book, but Malcolm Fraser himself was a witness at one of the trials that followed Evan’s confession. And he was a poor witness. He was asked about whether he’d held a private meeting with the Indian prime minister, Desai, at Kirribilli House on the Sunday afternoon. He testified that he was sure that hadn’t happened because it would have been quite discourteous to expect a foreign dignitary visiting Australia to leave the hotel and attend a private meeting so soon after an exhausting trip from India. Documents were then produced which showed definitively that this meeting had taken place. I have to say, Fraser came across somewhat as the sort of rather windy, slightly pompous character that many remember him as.

Gerard Henderson: When he addressed The Sydney Institute about a decade ago, some years before he died, when he had criticised John Howard’s response to 9/11, I recalled for him what he had done in 1978. I didn’t disapprove of what he’d done. I understood what he’d done, and I understood why he had done it. I was happy to defend his actions. But he wasn’t. He virtually denied that he’d ever done this. Like “Army on the streets? Couldn’t happen.”. So, let’s talk a bit about the conspiracy. In your book you mention the program “Conspiracy”. It’s on the ABC surprise, surprise! It’s in the series that are called True Stories‘.

Imre Salusinszky: Yes, no irony.

Gerard Henderson: But, it’s not a true story. And it’s directed by Daryl Dellora and there’s commentary by Jenny Hocking who’s quite big on conspiracy theories, all the way to the Dismissal of November 1975 and the alleged role of Buckingham Palace in that. But I wonder how intelligent people like Mr Dellora and Ms Hocking can get into a situation where they virtually, not completely, ignore that someone has admitted to these murders and seek to blame either NSW Police and/or ASIO for all sorts of reasons that don’t really make any sense and without a shred of evidence.

Imre Salusinszky: Well let’s say first that Evan’s often confused memories of what happened on that Sunday after he came forward in 1989 provided considerable basis for some scepticism or cynicism towards elements of what he was saying. Those confusions are pretty clearly the result of the fact that, at the time he was trying to detonate a bomb on George Street, Evan was in a state of near hysteria and panic. When you think about it, it’s hardly surprising. In fact, psychologists have said again and again that you are likely to experience significant dislocations of memory when the circumstances surrounding what you are trying to remember are highly traumatic.

That said, the documentary of which you speak is an extremely well-made concoction of nonsense. As you say, how could you in an one hour documentary devote less than two minutes to the man, I’ll repeat my proposition, who’s confessed to, convicted of, jailed for the crime and so on. In fact, the documentary doesn’t even mention that, at the time it was broadcast on the ABC, Evan was in jail for the Hilton bombing. Dr Hocking suggests that the Hilton bombing may have been a training exercise gone wrong. In other words, an Australian government security agency, probably ASIO, had placed a device in the bin with a view to heroically discover it before it could cause any damage. On that basis, reinforcing its usefulness to the Australian community and its claims to continued funding increases.

Let’s just think about that one for a moment. Think about the meeting at ASIO where some bright young spark comes up with the suggestion, “Oh I know. We’ll put a bomb in the Hilton outside the hotel when the leaders are here. Oh, we’ll make sure it’s discovered and imagine how good we’ll look. Oh, but hang on, the bomb won’t be able to go off, will it? Oh well look no, I will put a live detonator in the bin along with the bomb just to make it look even more realistic, but we’ll make sure that it’s discovered.” They then do this, and instead of guarding that bin for the 48 hours up to its explosion, and this is documented, they let every passer-by who wants to come over, stuff it with rubbish, stick things into it, sit on it as one character did at a demonstration unrelated to Desai but against Piggy Muldoon, who was also staying there.

Gerard Henderson: Who was the New Zealand leader, right?

Imre Salusinszky: The New Zealand PM. One demonstrator came up and stuck the flag pole of a banner he was holding deep into the bin. The banner reads “Politicians are the puss of a suppurating society”. That’s what the banner read. And these geniuses at ASIO they let all of this happen. And then, God help me, what else do they let happen? They let the garbage collectors come and throw their bomb into the back of their compacter. And, finally, on this notion, Gerard, let’s say it doesn’t go wrong. Let’s say the training exercise succeeds. Do you reckon the government would have been very pleased with ASIO for conducting an exercise with a live bomb while a dozen foreign leaders were staying at the Hilton? I’ve somewhat confused two ideas there. Ms Hocking suggests it was just a training exercise in which case imagine what the government would have said afterwards. Other voices on that program say that it was designed not as a training exercise but by ASIO to be heroically rescued and then make them look great. Both ideas are inherently outlandish.

Gerard Henderson: But they prevail. We had a discussion with Rachel Landers at the Institute and some of the conspiracists managed to get in. It was bizarre. Suggestions were that it was NSW police, it was ASIO, it was virtually everyone except Evan Pederick who I don’t think on the night was even mentioned, or might have been briefly mentioned by the conspiratorists. As you know, Rachel Landers dismissed all the conspiracy theories but she couldn’t convince any of these people. They believed what they wanted to believe. Some of them were highly intelligent. Some of them were very well qualified. These were people who were serious contributors. I guess what you’ve demonstrated in your book, often with these matters there’s a very simple explanation.

Imre Salusinszky: I’ve had some people of similar view turn up to a couple of things I’ve done. It is very difficult to explain. Often, the sort of people we’re talking about have lived a relatively sheltered life. I would include universities in this description because often they have a very naive view of human nature and how things really happen, how organisations think, also how we behave. I’ll go back to what I said during the talk. To believe these theories is to commit to a view of some people as almost machine like in their evil and in their ability never to be discomforted by their own conscience or their own guilt. It’s almost as though there are some people out there who are not really human like us but just, for whatever reason, evil robots. By the way, it’s exactly the same reasoning that is required of you to be a so called a “truther” and believe that George W Bush and Dick Cheney and however many hundred helpers they needed, placed explosives inside the structure of the World Trade Centre. It’s similarly an extraordinarily naive and wrong-headed view of what people are like and what people are like includes carelessly blurting out things that they shouldn’t. And it includes, as Evan’s story vividly demonstrates, the activity of conscience.

Gerard Henderson: Well in conclusion, Imre thanks for that today. Thanks for putting this book together. And for Evan Pederick, who’s a confessed murderer but who has acknowledged his crimes, sought forgiveness, done repentance and is now a practising Anglican minister. It’s important to put this together because, as you said at the start, we have to remember the victims here – three dead and others injured. And the best way to remember that is to tell the truth. And the best effort at telling the truth is your biography as it turns out of the man who did it. So many thanks and hope the book goes well.