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WHAT CHINA DID TO ME — AND WHAT THE COVER-UP DID TO EVERYTHING ELSE

What I endured in Communist China was not an isolated incident; it was a harrowing experience that continued to haunt me long after the Red Guards forcibly marched me away from the 'Hopepeak' at gunpoint. My ordeal didn’t conclude when I was coerced into signing a confession that labelled me as an “American aggressor.” It didn’t end when I was placed under constant surveillance, under the watchful eyes of guards who monitored my every move, leaving me engulfed in a crippling fear that I might not survive to see another day. This dark chapter carved itself into the very fabric of my being, rewiring not just my body but also transforming how my mind reacts to danger, silence, authority, and betrayal.

From an analytical perspective, if one were to visualise my life as a graph, China represents a cataclysmic point at which everything changed. It’s the moment the trajectory plummeted sharply downward, and nothing ever returned to its previous state of equilibrium. The fear, humiliation, and the overwhelming sense of being utterly powerless beneath the iron grip of a foreign regime didn’t simply fade away; they embedded themselves deeply within me, integrating into my very operating system.

Then came the cover-up.

This is what turned my trauma into a lifelong, festering wound. When the Australian government willfully concealed the truth about what transpired on the Hopepeak, when bureaucrats went to great lengths to hide the reality of the wheat shipments, when they dismissed the testimonies of those who stood witness to the horror, they didn’t merely silence a story. They siphoned away my sole chance to begin the healing process. They imprisoned an already shattered memory deep within me for decades, compelling me to bear that heavy burden in isolation.

Every time Telstra intercepted a crucial fax, every instance when an arbitrator turned a blind eye to undeniable evidence, every occasion a document was mysteriously scrubbed, redacted, or vanished altogether, and every time a threat was casually dismissed, these acts were not merely examples of corruption. They reopened the same wound that China had inflicted upon me. The familiar pangs of fear returned, the feelings of helplessness resurfaced, and I was once again reminded that powerful individuals had the ability to determine my fate: whether I lived or died, whether I would be believed, and whether my truth held any value at all.

In terms of pattern recognition, the cover-up evolved into a relentless feedback loop, a cycle that continuously fed my original trauma back into my life, again and again, until it influenced every facet of my existence: my health, my relationships, my work, my sense of security, and my identity itself.

China shattered me. The cover-up sustained that brokenness.

For fifty-six years, I have grappled with the consequences of these experiences: the nights spent tossing and turning in sleeplessness, the hyper-vigilance that has become second nature, the exhaustion that clings to me like a relentless shadow, and the ever-present sensation that danger lurks just outside my door. I have fought a never-ending battle to validate what I witnessed, what I endured, and what was done to me — all because those who had the responsibility to protect me instead chose to shield their own interests.

Had the truth been acknowledged back in 1967, my life would have taken an entirely different trajectory. I would have emerged carrying scars, undoubtedly, but not this ceaseless struggle. Not this long, wearisome war against silence, bureaucracy, and corruption. Not this compulsion to defend my own sanity from institutions that opted for a convenient lie over a challenging truth.

In that analytical framework, China represents the initial trauma event while the cover-up stands as systemic reinforcement. Together, they forged the architecture of my existence → British Seaman’s Record R744269 -  Open Letter to PM File No 1 Alan Smith's Seaman.  

And that is precisely why I expose these truths. Because the devastation wasn’t confined to the soil of China; it echoed through every subsequent year, inflicted by those who were aware of the truth and made a conscious choice to bury it.

Murdered for Mao: The killings China ‘forgot’

The Letter, the Truth, and the Waiting

In August 1967, I found myself in a situation so precarious, so surreal, that it would etch itself into the marrow of my memory. I was aboard a cargo ship docked in China, surrounded by Red Guards stationed on board twenty-four hours a day, spaced no more than thirty paces apart. After being coerced into writing a confession, declaring myself a U.S. aggressor and a supporter of Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader in Taiwan, I was told by the second steward, who handled the ship’s correspondence, that I had about two days before a response to my letter might reach me. That response, whatever it might be, would be delivered by the head of the Red Guards himself.

It was the second steward who quietly suggested I write to my parents. I did. I poured myself into 22 foolscap pages, writing with the urgency of a man who believed he might not live to see the end of the week. I told my church-going parents that I was not the saintly 18-year-old they believed I was. I confessed that the woman they had so often thanked in their letters was my landlady. Was in fact, my lover. She was 42. I was 18 when we met. From 1963 to 1967, she had been my anchor, my warmth, my truth. I wrote about my life at sea, about the chaos and the camaraderie, about the loneliness and the longing. I wrote because I needed them to know who I really was, in case I was executed before I ever saw them again.

As the ship’s cook and duty mess room steward, I had a front-row seat to the daily rhythms of life on board. I often watched the crew eat their meals on deck, plates balanced on the handrails that lined the ship. We were carrying grain to China on humanitarian grounds, and yet, the irony was unbearable—food was being wasted while the people we were meant to help were starving. Sausages, half-eaten steaks, baked potatoes; they’d slip from plates and tumble into the sea. But there were no seagulls to swoop down and claim them. They’d been eaten too. The food floated aimlessly, untouched even by fish, which had grown scarce in the harbour. Starvation wasn’t a concept. It was a presence. It was in the eyes of the Red Guards who watched us eat. It was in the silence that followed every wasted bite.

A Tray of Leftovers and a Silent Exchange

After my arrest, I was placed under house arrest aboard the ship. One day, I took a small metal tray from the galley and filled it, not with scraps, but with decent leftovers. Food that would have gone into the stockpot or been turned into dry hash cakes. I walked it out to the deck, placed it on one of the long benches, patted my stomach as if I’d eaten my fill, and walked away without a word.

Ten minutes later, I returned. The tray had been licked clean.

At the next meal, I did it again—this time with enough food for three or four Red Guards. I placed the tray on the bench and left. No words. No eye contact. Just food. I repeated this quiet ritual for two more days, all while waiting for the response to my letter. During that time, something shifted. The Red Guard, who had been waking me every hour to check if I was sleeping, stopped coming. The tension in the air thinned, just slightly. And I kept bringing food—whenever the crew was busy unloading wheat with grappling hooks wrapped in chicken wire, I’d slip out with another tray.

To this day, I don’t know what saved me. It was certainly not the letter declaring myself a U.S. aggressor and a supporter of Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader in Taiwan. Maybe it was luck. Or perhaps it was that tray of food, offered without expectation, without speech, without condition. A silent gesture that said, “I see you. I know you’re hungry. I know you’re human.”

And maybe, just maybe, that was enough. 

I needed to tell the above story because, like everything else in my life, even my 20-year marriage, what happened to me in China never left me. It stayed inside me like a shadow that refused to loosen its grip. It was the beatings I witnessed, the Chinese Red Guards turning on their own people in the streets, on the wharf, in the hospital. It was the moment I refused to let them inject me with an unsterilised needle, and the violence that followed, the smashed face, the split nose of the nurse who dared to smile at me for resisting while two guards pinned my arms so that whatever lethal substance they intended could be forced into my body. Those images never faded. They became the dreams that stalked me for decades.

And then, years later, during my arbitration, I saw a Telstra FOI document, a memo that should have contained the details of what I had discussed with former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser about my time in Communist China. But those details were gone. Redacted. Removed. Erased as if my experience, my trauma, my truth were an inconvenience Telstra needed to scrub out of existence. That April 1993 document proved something devastating: my 1967 China episode wasn’t haunting me because of memory alone. It was haunting me because Telstra, and those protecting Telstra, had buried the truth, and the cover‑up itself became part of the trauma.

My past wasn’t resurfacing in 1994 because I was fragile. It resurfaced because someone had tried to erase it.

And nothing is more haunting than seeing your own life, your own suffering, deliberately wiped from the record by people who had the power to decide what version of your story was allowed to exist.

It was not in Mr Joblin's hand 

It bore no signature of the psychologist

As shown in government records, the government assured the COT Cases (see point 40, Prologue Evidence File No/2) that Freehill Holingdale & Page would have no further involvement in the COT issues; the same legal firm which, when they provided Ian Joblin, clinical psychologist’s witness statement to the arbitrator, where Mr Joblin stated he would highlight my concerns about Telstra recording my telephone conversations with Malcolm Fraser concerning my claims regarding China when he was the Minister of the Army in 1967, when I exposed to him what was happening in China, had removed that witness statement discussing that concern. The witness statement was only signed by Maurice Wayne Condon of Freehill’s.

I reiterate: it bore no psychologist's signature.

Did Maurice Wayne Condon remove or alter any reference to what Ian Joblin had initially written about me being of sound mind?

On March 21, 1997—twenty-two months following the conclusion of my arbitration, John Pinnock, the second appointed administrator for my case, formally reached out to Ted Benjamin at Telstra (see File 596 → ). He raised two crucial inquiries:

asking:

1. any explanation for the apparent discrepancy in the attestation of the witness statement of Ian Joblin (clinical psychologist);

2. were there any changes made to the Joblin statement originally sent to Dr Hughes (the arbitrator) compared to the signed statement?

The fact that Telstra's lawyer, Maurice Wayne Condon of Freehills, signed the witness statement without the psychologist's signature highlights the significant influence Telstra lawyers have over the arbitration legal system in Australia.

“I note in your letter’s last page you suggest that the matter of the alteration of documents attached to statutory declarations should be dealt with by the relevant arbitrator. I do not concur. I would be grateful if you could advise why these matters should not be referred to the relevant police.” 

It is 2026, and I still have not received any response to Pommock's letter , even though my appeal advisors needed this information in 1997 to assess the chances of success on appealing the arbitrator's findings.

Echoes of Betrayal: Wheat Sales to China - and the Government bureaucrats who continued to tell Australia's politicians what several other seamen and I had witnessed in China was a lie. The following information shows we risked all to expose the truth.  

• Frog‑marched off the ship under armed guard by Red Guards, accused of being a spy.

• Forced to write letters under threat of execution.

• Commonwealth Police met the ship in Sydney on 18 September 1967, confirming the seriousness of what had occurred.

• British crew members refused to sail the ship back to China, fearing for their lives.

• Wheat shipments had gone ahead despite warnings.

• Australian conscripts had fought and died in Vietnam.

• Bureaucrats and ministers had ignored both political foresight and lived testimony.

Vol. 87 No. 4462 (4 Sep 1965) - National Library of Australia https://nla.gov.au › nla.obj-702601569 

"The Department of External Affairs has recently published an "Information Handbook entitled "Studies on Vietnam".  It established the fact that the Vietcong are equipped with Chinese arms and ammunition"

If it is right to ask Australian youth to risk everything in Vietnam it is wrong to supply their enemies. The Communists in Asia will kill anyone who stands in their path, but at least they have a path."

Australian trade commssioners do not so readily see that our Chinese trade in war materials finances our own distruction. NDr do they see so clearly that the wheat trade does the same thing."