Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Sue Lawley
Foreign correspondent for Daily Mirror, known for his harrowing reports from Cambodia on Khmer Rouge that raised millions for victims.
Eight records
I saw Buffy St. Marie sing this moving song in Los Angeles when I was working in the United States and in Vietnam in nineteen sixty eight. And uh I've spent a lot of time with soldiers, young soldiers, in trenches and uh no matter the uniform they were wearing, I always had an affinity with them and uh I think she expresses this rather well.
Academy of St Martin in the Fields
My father loved overtures from operas of which the body of the music had long been forgotten. Thieving Magpie is one of those. And he would play it on a wind-up gramophone and we would all listen to it. And it would give him great joy. I must say that the story to this was that his grandfather, who started an orchestra in a small outback town in Australia, played also The Thieving Magpie to his pet magpie. And the magpie used to go for his grandchildren's legs as they were made to listen to it. But otherwise, the memories are sweet.
Blue Moon of KentuckyFavourite
The Elvis song that uh helped me uh not quite win, but uh I think I got third place in a jive contest at uh the Paddington Town Hall in Sydney. My girlfriend and I were enthusiastic jivers and uh like surfing. I still like jiving. So he's Elvis.
The song itself is about the uprising of seventeen ninety one. I've chosen it because my origins in Australia are thanks in part to one Francis McCarthy and Mary Palmer, both of whom were transported... They were my great great grandparents... They came from County Roscommon.
It means they shall not pass. And I suppose I've chosen it because I've always felt that as a reporter that too often we report most of humanity, which we call the third world, only when a disaster strikes... A Nicaragua in nineteen seventy nine broke that stereotype... under great barrage from the United States has maintained some fundamental decent human principles... And this song, They Shall Not Pass, I heard sung in a small place called El Regadillo in Nicaragua, and it was a moving occasion.
My Son, Sam ... almost seventeen and I share a love of Motown music. A little while ago we went to New York, the two of us, for a week. And the highlight of this was to go to Radio City Music Hall. And see the temptations, sing my girl. ... I suppose it's in there because um Sam is uh of my two children, I also have a daughter, Zoe, who is five. Sam has been very central in my life. In being away a great deal, in having sometimes difficult times, Sam has been a constant. And so this song is for him.
It's There Because My Mother. who, like my father, died only last year, And She was a great ally of mine. She was a French teacher. A very courageous woman who gave up uh a lot in her life, perhaps foolishly. for principle and love I took her to Paris when she was seventy. She'd never been to France before. She showed me Paris. She knew where everything was. She also engaged Parisian taxi drivers in French that had a wonderful Australian accent to it. They loved her for that and uh She loved anything sung in French, and so this is for her.
I was first introduced to Robert Cray by somebody who is very important in my life and who has given me and return to me happiness during a difficult time. And uh for whom I feel a great deal.
The keepsakes
The book
Joseph Heller
I take Joseph Heller's Catch Twenty Two... Having made my way through the many theatres of the absurd... Heller in his wonderful book did it for me and I could read it many times.
The luxury
I think my typewriter... I think I'd want to write... not to write would make life on the desert island pretty unbearable, so that's my luxury.
In conversation
Presenter asks
A lifetime travelling the world more or less on your own as a foreign correspondent must mean that you're entirely self-reliant and very resourceful, yes?
No, no, I'm not self reliant. I depend, as you do and everybody does, on on other people. But I suppose I've developed the skills of being self reliant, of having to go to difficult places, of places of great upheaval. and take care of myself, and also at the same time do a job as a journalist. Uh in the early days that was very difficult, because I was terrified. Indeed, uh when I started as a young journalist in Australia I became known as the young cadet reporter who passed out at virtually uh every story he went on. I passed out in the morgue, I passed out when a bee stung me. ... I had to get over this this problem of uh the sight of blood. which uh I think I did, uh not entirely.
Presenter asks
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Speaker 2
Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
Speaker 2
The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.
Presenter
My Castaway this week is a journalist. For twenty years he was a foreign correspondent of the Daily Mirror, where, under the encouraging eye of a newspaper anxious to be both serious and popular, he sent back harrowing reports from all over the world.
Presenter
Unafraid of emotion and never slow to take sides, his campaigns have sometimes been criticised for being too partial and unobjective. He's refuted this. For him, a good cause is a good story, as he proved in Cambodia. Here, in his articles and his films for television, he so vividly recounted the activities of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge that millions of pounds were raised to alleviate the sufferings of their victims. He is John Pilger.
Presenter
You're also John Australian, which we Brits always presume to indicate, among other things, that you're very good on the beach. I mean, is that right?
John Pilger
Is that right? Oh, absolutely. My great pleasure is lying on a beach. I'd I'd be delighted to be a castaway. Uh I've tried to spend a lot of my working career, in fact, not working, but lying on a a desert island, which I've done occasionally.
Presenter
So it means you're good at barbecues?
John Pilger
No, I'm not good at any kind of cooking really, but uh I am good at lying still, perhaps reading occasionally.
Presenter
And the surf? Are you at home in the surf?
John Pilger
I'm a surfer, yes, I'm a a
John Pilger
A surfer who never stops surfing. Bondi where I grew up still has possibly the best surf in the world. Unfortunately, there's a sewer outlet pouring into the middle of Bondi Beach and so pollution has now grabbed the imagination of Australians and they dare not swim there so I find on some days I'm the only one surfing at Bondi and that's entirely appropriate.
Presenter
And a lifetime travelling the world more or less on your own as a foreign correspondent must mean that you're entirely self-reliant and and very resourceful, yes?
John Pilger
No, no, I'm not self reliant. I depend, as you do and everybody does, on on other people. But I suppose I've developed the skills of being self reliant, of having to go to difficult places, of places of great upheaval.
John Pilger
and take care of myself, and also at the same time do a job as a journalist. Uh in the early days that was very difficult, because I was terrified.
John Pilger
Indeed, uh when I started as a young journalist in Australia I became known as the young cadet reporter who passed out at virtually uh every story he went on. I passed out in the morgue, I passed out when a bee stung me. Uh
John Pilger
And uh
John Pilger
I had to get over this this problem of uh the sight of blood.
John Pilger
which uh I think I did, uh not entirely.
Presenter
What about people? Do you need them or are you a loner through and through?
John Pilger
I'm both.
John Pilger
I am a loner, but I need people very much.
John Pilger
That has sometimes led to difficulty, but uh I think uh as I've got older I've needed people more.
Presenter
That's an enigmatic answer, which we shall explore later.
John Pilger
Thank you.
Presenter
But right now, we shall have your first record, what is it?
John Pilger
But right now
John Pilger
It's Buffy Ste. Marie, the American Indian singer singing Universal Soldier. I saw Buffy St. Marie sing this moving song in Los Angeles when I was working in the United States and in Vietnam in nineteen sixty eight.
John Pilger
And uh I've spent a lot of time with soldiers, young soldiers, in trenches and uh no matter the uniform they were wearing, I always had an affinity with them and uh I think she expresses this rather well.
Speaker 3
The Universal Soldier, and he really is to blame. His orders come from far away, no more. They come from him and you and me. And brothers, can't you see?
Speaker 3
This is not the way we put an end.
Presenter
Buffy Saint-Marie singing Universal Soldier, a song very redolent of the sixties, John, which is when you set out on the road for the Daily Mirror, really, wasn't it?
John Pilger
Yes, I I came to this country in the early sixties and I set out on the road first in the north of England where I was sent with the brief to uh just really write what I saw. And I fell in love with the north. I liked the people, I was fascinated by the industrial history of the north and uh I spent several happy years there. And then I went on the road
John Pilger
In the wider sense, and was sent by Hugh Cudlip very early to Vietnam in 1966.
Presenter
But when you did that sort of thing and before we get to Vietnam, I mean, you went to the States, you went to South Africa, the Pacific and so on. Did you model yourself on anybody? Did you have an image of what a foreign correspondent was?
John Pilger
Well, I admired a number of foreign correspondents. I don't think I model myself on anybody, no. I
John Pilger
James Cameron was then at the height of his talents, I think, and Ranny Cutforth and others, who I admired.
Presenter
But you mentioned the exceptions there, Cutforth and James Cameron. Uh I mean, on the whole, journalists abroad, as I understand it, hunt in packs, don't they?
John Pilger
Mm.
Presenter
They don't want to miss the story, and therefore they cover each other by making sure they all get it together.
John Pilger
Therefore
John Pilger
Well, you have to be in a pack at some point. I mean, if you're all if you're reporting a war and there's only one place where you can be. But uh I've tried to stay away from packs. I found interesting that which many of my colleagues don't report. I've never in wars, for instance, been interested in writing about cricket scores of uh aeroplanes shot down and uh
John Pilger
And bombs fallen. I've been rather more interested in the victims of the war, the people running the other way, perhaps, from the war.
Presenter
So you would attempt in most of these situations to get yourself a photographer as well, yes, and go off.
John Pilger
I'm going to go.
Presenter
and find the human story.
John Pilger
Well, I travel with a photographer a great deal, and uh dear friends of mine have been photographers. One, Eric Piper, I worked with for ten years he and I were a team.
Presenter
But you must, um, in doing that, have got yourself fairly disliked by by the pack, by other journalists, because you would be inevitably rocking an otherwise comfortable boat, surely.
John Pilger
I don't know. I'm not sure about that. I've always had such good friends amongst my colleagues not all of them, and those that aren't my good friends, and perhaps are my enemies, are those
John Pilger
who uh I'd be proud to have as an enemy, for all the right reasons, I think.
Presenter
But they came to envy you, didn't they? The journalists I mean Fleet Street journalists, I think, in the end envied you the freedom that you got when you worked for the Daily Mail, the space, the time, uh rare freedoms that you won for yourself.
John Pilger
Yes, sir, but a freedom fought for.
John Pilger
I was given a great freedom by Hugh Cudlip and Lee Howard at the Mirror.
John Pilger
Tony Miles, Mike Malloy and others, but it was a freedom that, with every article, I had to fight for for the space.
John Pilger
And
John Pilger
I think perhaps with some of my colleagues I was doing the stories that many of them wanted to do.
John Pilger
and perhaps amongst a very few of them that excited an unfortunate emotion.
Presenter
In that sense, though, you were the right man in the right place at the right time, weren't you, on the Daily Mirror, in the mid sixties.
John Pilger
Deep.
Presenter
A time uh at which the the Mirror would think nothing of devoting ten pages to Vietnam if that's what it decided. It was issue journalism at its height.
John Pilger
The Mirror would have in it, on in some weeks, a more analysis of foreign news and of issues, let's say, than the Guardian.
Presenter
Whatever happened to Essea Journalism?
John Pilger
I don't know what's happened to issue journalism. I think that uh we suffer very much from having one of the most disgracefully narrow presses in the so called free world. We most of well, all the newspapers now that most people read are hardly newspapers at all.
John Pilger
And uh the so-called quality press, I think uh
John Pilger
Would be described, if I may paraphrase, A.J.P. Taylor as
John Pilger
a sort of interdepartmental memoranda for the elite.
Presenter
More of that later. Let's have your second record. What is it?
John Pilger
My second record is Rossini's overture, The Thieving Magpie. My father loved overtures from operas of which the body of the music had long been forgotten. Thieving Magpie is one of those. And he would play it on a wind-up gramophone and we would all listen to it. And it would give him great joy. I must say that the story to this was that his grandfather, who started an orchestra in a small outback town in Australia, played also The Thieving Magpie to his pet magpie. And the magpie used to go for his grandchildren's legs as they were made to listen to it. But otherwise, the memories are sweet.
Presenter
Part of Rossini's overture The Thieving Magpie, played by the Academy of Saint Martin in the Fields, conducted by Neville Mariner. Is journalism or writing in your blood, John? Did you always know it was what you should do?
John Pilger
Oh yes. Uh although I did start out wanting to be an artist for some curious reason, because I wasn't very good at it. But I gave that up very quickly, especially when I started at Sydney High School, its first student newspaper called The Messenger. And I had the bright idea of writing to famous people asking them would they contribute and this was poo-pooed by the teachers. They'll never have anything to do with you. But it was interesting. Most of them wrote back and said they would. So The Messenger prospered until its main benefactor, the father of a friend of mine, decided to stop financing it, introducing me very early on to the Robert Maxwells of this world.
John Pilger
And from there on I was passionately interested in newspapers and in news. It was it's a lot to do with being an Australian. I was interested in the world because the way I'd been brought up was that I
John Pilger
Brought up with with somebody else's history, almost with somebody else's culture. Ours was a sort of second-hand Europe, and that somehow we were.
John Pilger
Not quite on the planet.
John Pilger
We are a long way away from where we ought to be.
Presenter
But what were you supposed to be? Are you supposed to be more British than the British?
John Pilger
Well, yes, we were you know, Australians are the most colonized of people and still are, Australians in New Zealand. Others have had uh wars and revolutions. They've been able to chuck the British out, but uh they've we've never really been able to chuck them out of our
John Pilger
So how does it affect?
Presenter
So how did it affect your life then? I mean, did it affect the way you lived, the way you dressed, the way you were?
John Pilger
It it affected even, well, the way we dressed. Uh in a sweltering Sydney summer people would go to their offices in grey serge suits. Our architecture was uh had bore no relation to the climate, all our houses point the wrong way. The great veranda was something for the outback, but when suburbia took over so much of our cities we had uh terraces and uh
John Pilger
And English style houses. That's all changed now.
Presenter
But did you then feel a resentment about that, and was it was it talked about at home with resentment?
John Pilger
Would you then
John Pilger
We discussed, I suppose, the absurdity of our leaders, such as one Robert Gordon Menzies, who was the most inflated, absurd so-called statesman. We call him our statesman. He brought the Queen to Australia so many times. The poor woman must have been exhausted.
John Pilger
He embarrassed us all when on television he uh quoted the ancient the words of the ancient poet.
John Pilger
I did but see her passing die, and I shall love her till I die. And if you look carefully at the Queen's face when Menzies is saying this, it is uh
John Pilger
Uh a look I don't think perhaps she's ever had, a look of embarrassment and we, the Australian nation, felt it with her. We had to suffer people like men.
Presenter
More pretty.
John Pilger
More British than the British.
Presenter
So why did you choose to escape um the men's ears, as it were, uh and come to Britain, this place that you'd been taught about, but obviously resented terribly?
John Pilger
But I think I left because the great moving belt of my generation was leaving. I was sorry to leave, and when I arrived in London it was the I remember it was the the worst winter since seventeen ninety two. There were snow drifts in Hammersmith, and I had just two pairs of shorts.
John Pilger
And I had mixed feelings about this country for some time. I think the reason was that I had no money. But it was it was the world, and it really, I suppose, said much about the the restricted view that my generation had of ourselves, that we should regard another part of the planet as really our world, when it wasn't at all.
Presenter
What happened to you then we shall hear about in a minute, but first let's have your third record.
John Pilger
My next is uh King Elvis singing uh Blue Moon of Kentucky. Uh it was the
John Pilger
The Elvis song that uh helped me uh not quite win, but uh I think I got third place in a jive contest at uh the Paddington Town Hall in Sydney. My girlfriend and I were enthusiastic jivers and uh like surfing. I still like jiving. So he's Elvis.
Speaker 3
I say blue movement Okay, they keep motion
Speaker 3
China under my best goal and levels
Speaker 3
I said I've been talking to keep on shining
Speaker 3
Shine on the morning, gone and left me blue. Oh while I hit the zone, one more light night star shining brightby. The more I've got shining.
Presenter
Elvis Presley singing Blue Moon of Kentucky.
Presenter
So, John Pilger, how did you get on to the Daily Mirror? You went straight to it, didn't you?
John Pilger
No. I worked for Reuters at first, because I was then anxious to be a foreign correspondent. I wanted to travel. I wanted to leave again very quickly. The whole purpose of leaving was not to sit at a desk, and I thought Reuters might help me. But Reuters meant doing
John Pilger
A time of several years in the office in Fleet Street. I didn't want to do that. I wrote to all the editors in Fleet Street. They were very kind. Uh in those days you could go in, they would buy you a drink, uh but they wouldn't give you a job. The one I didn't write to was the Daily Mirror. I heard they had jobs for sub editors. I turned up one day, I met a very nice man called Michael Christensen, who
John Pilger
Unhappily is now dead, and uh Michael
John Pilger
said the first thing, Can you play cricket? and uh
John Pilger
Quickly lying, I said,'Yes, I could,' and'What do you do'? and I said,'I'm a medium fast bowler, or something or other' and he said,'Splendid' because next Saturday we're playing the Daily Express, and on that basis I was hired.
John Pilger
And uh I had to in the days before.
John Pilger
The days left before they played the Daily Express composed a memorandum which said, I'm sorry, but I lied. I can't play cricket. I just want to be a journalist, and they kept me on.
Presenter
Anyway, you got out from under and as you were saying earlier they sent you off up north. And you started, I think, almost immediately, didn't you, to home in on this kind of human interest journalism, the feature about the individual, the underdog usually.
John Pilger
Uh
John Pilger
Um
John Pilger
Well, I think journalism is nothing if it's not about humanity. It has to be about people's lives.
John Pilger
and I believe very strongly in the the microcosm as a way of telling some broader political story, some broader social story, of just telling the story as it is. And it was a style that I developed perhaps instinctively.
Presenter
But undoubtedly in doing that you lay yourself open to the criticism which I know you've suffered that uh that you're just going for the emotional heart of a story, you're you're creaming off the heartache.
John Pilger
Well, I don't I've never I've never done that, you see. So I the the criticism is answered very simply. I've never creamed off the heartache. What I've done is I've put the heartache, as you put it, in a political context. I've tried to explain why hearts ache. I've tried to explain why people are poor. I've tried to explain why wars people are caught up in wars. And I think w you know what I did try have to find out very early was that people when they criticise you don't say what they really mean.
John Pilger
And uh
John Pilger
I found out very quickly, for example, my first Cambodia film, Year Zero, was attacked for being too emotional. But in fact, what they were attacking it for was to explain to try to explain why, for instance, Western governments hadn't brought assistance to the Cambodian people after Pol Pot was overthrown. In other words, it was the political context more than the emotion, I think, that was the object of that criticism.
Presenter
Record number four.
John Pilger
The Dubliners, an Irish group, singing Kelly the boy from Kellarne, and the song itself is about the uprising of seventeen ninety one.
John Pilger
I've chosen it because my origins in Australia are thanks in part to one Francis McCarthy and Mary Palmer.
John Pilger
both of whom were transported, Mary Palmer for the term of her natural life, and Frances McCarthy for fourteen years for uttering unlawful oaths.
John Pilger
They were my my great great grandparents. They they came from County Ruskommon. They were members of a luckless tribe that didn't want to go where they were sent, but when they got there they survived and they had a family of nine children.
John Pilger
I have to say later on they were disowned by my mother's family, who by that time had become Irish snobs. And it was only my own discovery of the fact that both Mary and Frances were convicts that reveal this rather rich bit of Australian history. It was something that my numerous aunts and uncles wanted to cover up, because to have the convict stain upon you in those days was to have some congenital disease. But now, of course, it's very trendy, it's very fashionable to have come from convict background.
Speaker 3
What's the news, what's the news, Omefa Shelbanier, with your long barrel gun of the sea? Say what wind from the south blows your messenger here, there's a single dawn for the free. Goodly news, goodly news, do I bring you the force? Goodly news shall you hear, Bergie Man? Or the boys march it done from the south to the north, led by Kelly, the boy from the
John Pilger
I
Presenter
The Dubliners and Kelly the boy from Killan. We were talking about your travels, John. You were sent off, um, weren't you, early on to the United States, I think.
John Pilger
Yes, I sent to the United States for eighteen months. I
John Pilger
Didn't really base myself anywhere, although I
John Pilger
Travel with the politicians who were then campaigning for that sixty-eight.
John Pilger
presidential election uh
John Pilger
and uh spent quite some time with uh Robert Kennedy just before his death.
Presenter
But you actually witnessed his assassination, didn't you?
John Pilger
Yes. I'd interviewed Kennedy two days before, and uh he invited a few of us to go with him after the California primary, which he won.
John Pilger
In june sixty eight,
John Pilger
And we were after he'd made his uh victory speech in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he was moving out through the kitchen with those of us who were going to uh a disco with he and his family.
John Pilger
when Sirhan Sirhan leapt from behind.
John Pilger
a serving area, and shot him.
John Pilger
This has always haunted me in many ways because I saw Sir Han Sirhan before Kennedy was shot.
John Pilger
In fact, somebody pointed him out to me. So look at that strange man. He was waiting. He was moving about. He was obviously getting a position in the kitchen to shoot Kennedy. He knew Kennedy was coming through there. Now I didn't know Kennedy was going to walk through the kitchen. In fact, that was the way out to the back door where he could escape the crowds. I thought he would walk through the ballroom. Serhan Serhan clearly had spoken to somebody in the K Kennedy camp, and I remember seeing him.
John Pilger
And I remember his hand inside his shirt, and it was clearly holding the gun.
John Pilger
And this was some time, a good half an hour before Kennedy was shot.
John Pilger
And when he was shot, four or five shots rang out, and Kennedy was then on the floor, and then it was Mayhem.
John Pilger
It was an extraordinary tragedy, because Kennedy would have become President.
John Pilger
I don't know how good a President he would have been if he would have been any different from all the others, but he would have changed the course of recent American history, and certainly the history of much of the world which the United States influences, because we wouldn't have had Nixon, we wouldn't have had Carter and we wouldn't have had Reagan.
John Pilger
It's an interesting thought.
Presenter
It was in um Vietnam and Cambodia, really, that the were the scenes of your most memorable reporting. I think you became Journalist of the Year in nineteen sixty seven, didn't you?
John Pilger
Yeah.
Presenter
I suppose, ironically, it was your heyday, wasn't it?
John Pilger
It was a time of development for me.
John Pilger
That's how I look back on it.
John Pilger
You know, I was in my twenties. Uh I was uh allowed to do a great deal in journalism and I tried to exploit these opportunities. And
John Pilger
Vietnam really was such an important event. It was a frightening event, but it was so important because it was an assault on a small country that was trying to present an alternative developmental model in that part of the world, and failing in some way, but it was also the resistance of a small country against attack by a great power.
Presenter
Record number five.
John Pilger
It's a Nicaraguan song, no passeran, it means they shall not pass.
John Pilger
And I suppose I've chosen it because I've always felt that as a reporter that too often we report most of humanity, which we call the third world, only when a disaster strikes, when there's an earthquake, when there's a war. Then we want to regard them as victims and we really only accept them, I think, when they comply as sort of recipients of international charity.
John Pilger
A Nicaragua in nineteen seventy nine broke that stereotype.
John Pilger
and under great barrage from the United States has maintained some fundamental decent human principles, such as trying to give literacy to most of its population, of seeing that its children don't die from diarrhoea, and so on and so forth. And this song, They Shall Not Pass, I heard sung in a small place called El Regadillo in Nicaragua, and it was a moving occasion.
Speaker 3
Pasará, los penceremos avondo pasarán Simaníana que rumbal nuevo día con su fiesta de parmaros iniu dri. Aun que no es pemos tuntos teros.
Speaker 3
Los Meze mosa mor no pasara.
Speaker 3
Simaguiana, que tum val nuevo guillar
John Pilger
Yeah.
Speaker 3
Consufiesta de Pamaros finio.
John Pilger
What?
Speaker 3
Aunque no es demos unos de lo puro.
Speaker 3
You pass.
Presenter
Five.
Presenter
The Nicaraguan song No Passeran, sung by Carlos Mechia Godoy.
Presenter
You were, John, as we've said, twenty years with the Mirror, but you lost that platform in nineteen eighty five when Robert Maxwell took over. I take it you didn't appreciate each other's style.
John Pilger
That that just about says it, I think.
Presenter
Uh
John Pilger
What?
Presenter
Happy.
John Pilger
I think my horror on this desert island would be who might pick me up, and if I saw a
John Pilger
A ship arriving with Captain Bob at the helm, I think I would hide under the palm tree.
Presenter
I don't think it's Dr. Pick You After.
Presenter
But what happened between I mean it can you sum it up?
John Pilger
It probably happened before Max will arrive.
John Pilger
I think I'd stayed too long on the mirror. The mirror had changed. It was locked in a circulation struggle with the sun.
John Pilger
A paper I abhor.
John Pilger
When Maxwell arrived, the days of the mirror
John Pilger
being the paper where a journalist like myself had freedom.
John Pilger
We're over.
John Pilger
They were taboos.
John Pilger
There was also the question of supporting some of Robert Maxwell's particular interests. When the Ethiopian famine happened in nineteen eighty five,
John Pilger
I was asked to go, and uh
John Pilger
got out of it, as they say in the trade, fortunately, because uh I didn't quite realize then that Robert Maxwell himself was going.
John Pilger
with a number of photographers, and he was duly photographed arriving. So I mean that kind of personal uh proprietorship of a newspaper was something I hadn't experienced. Hugh Cuddler had run the mirror in a very personal way, but he was a great journalist is a great journalist.
John Pilger
Robert Maxwell had interest in other matters.
John Pilger
The paper in those first few months was often peppered with photographs of Robert Maxwell and his family.
John Pilger
and his quotations.
John Pilger
And this really wasn't the paper I wanted to work for. That's my side of the story. I'm sure there's another side of the story.
Presenter
So you've been several years now without a a newspaper, a popular platform.
John Pilger
Hmm.
Presenter
You must have been courted by other newspapers, or is there simply not one that you'd really like to um ally with.
John Pilger
There isn't a popular paper, of course. No, there is not. For the others I've written occasionally, for The Independent, and now and then for The Guardian.
John Pilger
I'm not quite sure that I ever want to really work for anybody. Again, I'm happy being a freelance journalist. I still like my freedom.
Presenter
Record number six, please.
John Pilger
Are this of the Temptations, singing My Girl and My Son, Sam.
John Pilger
Who is?
John Pilger
Almost seventeen.
John Pilger
and I share a love of Motown music. A little while ago we went to New York, the two of us, for a week.
John Pilger
And the highlight of this was to go to Radio City Music Hall.
John Pilger
And see the temptations, sing my girl
John Pilger
Uh I suppose it's in there because um Sam is uh of my two children, I also have a daughter, Zoe, who is five.
John Pilger
Sam has been very central in my life.
John Pilger
In being away a great deal, in having sometimes difficult times, Sam has been a constant.
John Pilger
And so this song is for him.
Speaker 3
For a crowd a day.
Speaker 3
When it's cold outside I've got the month of May
Speaker 3
I guess you say what can make me feel this way.
Presenter
Wait my
Presenter
The Temptations and My Girl. So you have two children, you say, John, um but no wife at the moment.
John Pilger
Uh no, I don't have a wife.
Presenter
Are you
Presenter
Not particularly good at personal relationships.
John Pilger
In the early days, being away, a great deal.
John Pilger
and leading another life.
John Pilger
Somewhere else in the world.
John Pilger
undoubtedly affected my relationships as certainly affected my first marriage.
Presenter
And does Sam, the child of your first marriage, I think, isn't he, does he want to follow you? Does he want to be a a roving reporter?
John Pilger
Yeah.
John Pilger
I don't know whether he'll be another journalist.
Presenter
But is it something is it something you'd advocate? You must get hundreds of letters from from schoolboys saying, you know, How can I be like you?
John Pilger
But is it something
John Pilger
Svim.
John Pilger
I'm
John Pilger
Ha ha ha ha.
John Pilger
Well, yes.
John Pilger
It's just a great privilege being a journalist, and I'm always reminding myself of that. You are allowed into people's lives.
John Pilger
You are allowed access to events.
John Pilger
And to perhaps movements in contemporary history, you are allowed the opportunity.
John Pilger
of insight.
John Pilger
From there springs my love for my craft.
John Pilger
Uh and if Sam becomes a journalist.
John Pilger
I'll be happy, and it's one that, yes, I would recommend to any young enthusiast.
Presenter
So we have record number seven.
John Pilger
Yes, this is uh
John Pilger
Edith Piart singing La Vien Rose and It's There Because My Mother.
John Pilger
who, like my father, died only last year,
John Pilger
And
John Pilger
She was a great ally of mine.
John Pilger
She was a French teacher.
John Pilger
A very courageous woman who gave up uh a lot in her life, perhaps foolishly.
John Pilger
for principle and love
John Pilger
I took her to Paris when she was seventy. She'd never been to France before. She showed me Paris. She knew where everything was. She also engaged Parisian taxi drivers in French that had a wonderful Australian accent to it.
John Pilger
They loved her for that and uh
John Pilger
She loved anything sung in French, and so this is for her.
Speaker 3
Demo the
Speaker 3
There's something kind of
Presenter
Edith Piaff singing La Vien Rose.
Presenter
It's nearly twenty eight years, John, since you set out in that boat for Europe, so you've spent really more than more than half your life on uh this side of the equator.
John Pilger
Hmm.
Presenter
Um and yet you're still, I sense, fiercely Australian?
John Pilger
I'm drawn back to Australia, at least every year. I suppose I now suffer this dreadful
John Pilger
painful ambivalence of the expatriate.
John Pilger
What to do
John Pilger
I just love the place, I love it's a physical paradise, I like its friendliness.
John Pilger
I think one day I shall
John Pilger
spend more time in Australia than I'm spending now.
John Pilger
There are problems with uh
John Pilger
children and uh whether people would want to accompany me to Australia or whether I would want to even work there. I don't know.
John Pilger
But uh
John Pilger
Australia has a large part of my heart.
Presenter
And the surf is better than in Cornwall.
John Pilger
The surf in Cornwall's pretty good. I've done it. It's all right.
Presenter
So providing you escape from this desert island, what's your next assignment? Where does Pilger hold up next?
John Pilger
I suppose
John Pilger
My next assignment is the part of the world where I've spent a great deal of time, and that's Indochina.
John Pilger
Vietnam and Cambodia.
John Pilger
I find it very difficult to break the relationship.
John Pilger
As if I should with that part of the world.
John Pilger
I'm going back to Cambodia this year.
John Pilger
And I'm going to make another film and write some more articles. That's my next assignment.
Presenter
Your last record, please.
John Pilger
It's a young black American singer with a fine band. His name is Robert Cray.
John Pilger
And he's singing Nothing But a Woman.
John Pilger
I was first introduced to Robert Cray by somebody
John Pilger
who is very important in my life and who has given me
John Pilger
and return to me happiness during a difficult time.
John Pilger
And uh
John Pilger
for whom I feel a great deal.
John Pilger
And uh this particular record.
John Pilger
This photo.
Speaker 3
You can give me an hour loan in a plane.
Speaker 3
Pay all my tickets, wipe the slate blank. You can buy me a car, fill up the tank.
Speaker 3
Tell me a boat full of lawyers just sank, but it ain't nothing but a woman, nothing but a woman, no, no.
Speaker 3
Don't need nothing but a warm honey
Speaker 3
Anytime I feel
Presenter
Robert Craye, Nothing But a Woman. So, John, which of those eight records is going to give you greatest comfort?
John Pilger
It's very difficult, isn't it? But I think
John Pilger
I should have to take Elvis with me, singing Blue Moon of Kentucky, although I I know my uh luxury uh must be inanimate, uh, so I'd have to be driving all by myself on the beach.
John Pilger
But uh
John Pilger
A little bit of rock and roll, I think, is going to see me through those long, hot days.
Presenter
Right. And and the book. You have, as you know, I'm sure, the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare.
John Pilger
Okay.
John Pilger
Hmm.
Presenter
What else would you like?
John Pilger
I take Joseph Heller's Catch Twenty Two.
John Pilger
Having uh made my way through the
John Pilger
Many theatres of the absurd.
John Pilger
uh Heller in his wonderful book.
John Pilger
did it for me and uh
John Pilger
I could read it many times.
Presenter
And the luxury, no dancing partner. What's it gonna be?
John Pilger
I think my typewriter, which
John Pilger
is as old as
John Pilger
Almost as old as my journalism. A small baby herm is.
John Pilger
I think I'd want to write.
John Pilger
And I don't know whether paper is allowed, but uh I could possibly use palm leaves and uh
John Pilger
I think not to write.
John Pilger
Would uh make uh life on the desert island pretty unbearable, so that's my luxury.
Presenter
John Pilger, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.
John Pilger
Thank you.
Speaker 2
You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk/radio four.
But they came to envy you, didn't they? The journalists, I mean Fleet Street journalists, I think, in the end envied you the freedom that you got when you worked for the Daily Mail, the space, the time, rare freedoms that you won for yourself.
Yes, sir, but a freedom fought for. I was given a great freedom by Hugh Cudlip and Lee Howard at the Mirror. Tony Miles, Mike Malloy and others, but it was a freedom that, with every article, I had to fight for for the space. And I think perhaps with some of my colleagues I was doing the stories that many of them wanted to do. and perhaps amongst a very few of them that excited an unfortunate emotion.
Presenter asks
Is journalism or writing in your blood? Did you always know it was what you should do?
Oh yes. Uh although I did start out wanting to be an artist for some curious reason, because I wasn't very good at it. But I gave that up very quickly, especially when I started at Sydney High School, its first student newspaper called The Messenger. And I had the bright idea of writing to famous people asking them would they contribute and this was poo-pooed by the teachers. They'll never have anything to do with you. But it was interesting. Most of them wrote back and said they would. So The Messenger prospered until its main benefactor, the father of a friend of mine, decided to stop financing it, introducing me very early on to the Robert Maxwells of this world. And from there on I was passionately interested in newspapers and in news. It was it's a lot to do with being an Australian. I was interested in the world because the way I'd been brought up was that I ... Brought up with with somebody else's history, almost with somebody else's culture. Ours was a sort of second-hand Europe, and that somehow we were. Not quite on the planet. We are a long way away from where we ought to be.
Presenter asks
So why did you choose to escape the Menzies, as it were, and come to Britain, this place that you'd been taught about, but obviously resented terribly?
But I think I left because the great moving belt of my generation was leaving. I was sorry to leave, and when I arrived in London it was the I remember it was the the worst winter since seventeen ninety two. There were snow drifts in Hammersmith, and I had just two pairs of shorts. And I had mixed feelings about this country for some time. I think the reason was that I had no money. But it was it was the world, and it really, I suppose, said much about the the restricted view that my generation had of ourselves, that we should regard another part of the planet as really our world, when it wasn't at all.
Presenter asks
But you actually witnessed [Robert Kennedy's] assassination, didn't you?
Yes. I'd interviewed Kennedy two days before, and uh he invited a few of us to go with him after the California primary, which he won. In june sixty eight, And we were after he'd made his uh victory speech in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, he was moving out through the kitchen with those of us who were going to uh a disco with he and his family. when Sirhan Sirhan leapt from behind. a serving area, and shot him. This has always haunted me in many ways because I saw Sir Han Sirhan before Kennedy was shot. In fact, somebody pointed him out to me. So look at that strange man. He was waiting. He was moving about. He was obviously getting a position in the kitchen to shoot Kennedy. He knew Kennedy was coming through there. Now I didn't know Kennedy was going to walk through the kitchen. In fact, that was the way out to the back door where he could escape the crowds. I thought he would walk through the ballroom. Serhan Serhan clearly had spoken to somebody in the K Kennedy camp, and I remember seeing him. And I remember his hand inside his shirt, and it was clearly holding the gun. And this was some time, a good half an hour before Kennedy was shot. And when he was shot, four or five shots rang out, and Kennedy was then on the floor, and then it was Mayhem. It was an extraordinary tragedy, because Kennedy would have become President. I don't know how good a President he would have been if he would have been any different from all the others, but he would have changed the course of recent American history, and certainly the history of much of the world which the United States influences, because we wouldn't have had Nixon, we wouldn't have had Carter and we wouldn't have had Reagan.
Presenter asks
You were twenty years with the Mirror, but you lost that platform in 1985 when Robert Maxwell took over. I take it you didn't appreciate each other's style.
That that just about says it, I think. I think my horror on this desert island would be who might pick me up, and if I saw a [ship] arriving with Captain Bob at the helm, I think I would hide under the palm tree.
“I passed out in the morgue, I passed out when a bee stung me.”
“I've never in wars, for instance, been interested in writing about cricket scores of uh aeroplanes shot down and bombs fallen. I've been rather more interested in the victims of the war, the people running the other way, perhaps, from the war.”
“I saw Sir Han Sirhan before Kennedy was shot. In fact, somebody pointed him out to me. ... I remember his hand inside his shirt, and it was clearly holding the gun.”
“I think my horror on this desert island would be who might pick me up, and if I saw a ship arriving with Captain Bob at the helm, I think I would hide under the palm tree.”
“It's just a great privilege being a journalist, and I'm always reminding myself of that. You are allowed into people's lives.”