Golden age of paranoia
- Sunday Herald Sun
- January 02, 2010
ONE of the unexpected pleasures of reaching your 40s is that every New Year's Day brings forth freshly declassified government documents about events 30 years ago that you actually remember.
Last week as we said goodbye to the Noughties - a name that never really caught on - the news was full of stories reminding us of the world of 1979.
These days when people remember "the decade that taste forgot" it is chiefly for how badly dressed most people were.
We remember the loud colours, the flared pants, the fascination with polyester, as well as the sideburns that today make family photo albums such painful viewing.
If you were a child it is easy to look back and think of the 1970s as a more carefree time than the decade just ended.
Few people had computers or VCRs, there were no mobile phones - never mind the internet. Late-night trading was confined to Fridays and the shops were closed on Sundays.
On the plus side, you could smoke anywhere you liked, and, if by some bad luck you ever got pinged driving home with a skinful, all you needed in court was a string of ruddy-faced character witnesses to swear you were only an occasional drinker and the magistrate would probably let you keep your keys.
But to remember the 1970s as a more innocent time is to get the decade totally wrong. It was in fact a golden age of paranoia.
These days discussions of UFOs and the paranormal tends to get confined to internet. Outside the Northern Territory you don't read of interstellar visitors to Earth in the newspaper.
But as a kid I remember the papers being filled with serious discussions of the Bermuda Triangle, ESP, the Loch Ness Monster, and whether aliens had built the pyramids and planted the statues on Easter Island.
Each year there seemed to be a fresh blurry photograph of a man dressed up like Humphrey B. Bear which claimed prove the existence of the yeti.
The mad paranoid flavour of the decade is brilliantly captured in the British journalist Francis Wheen's recent book Strange Days Indeed, which records British Prime Minister Harold Wilson summoning the head of MI5 to Downing St in 1974 and accusing the spy agency of bugging him. (Wilson had a confused an old light fitting with a microphone.)
Australia's politicians were not much better. In 1973 the Attorney-General Lionel Murphy took it into his head that ASIO was hiding information about Croatian terrorism in Australia and raided its headquarters in a vain search for documents.
And to this day many ageing leftists remain convinced the CIA had a hand in the end of Whitlam's government.
There was no shortage of Right-wing paranoia at the time either.
By the time Sir John Kerr stepped in and ended the Whitlam Government, there were plenty of people who would have welcomed anyone - even General Pinochet - who could have delivered the country from the Red menace of Gough.
Since Barack Obama took office a year ago we have often heard how the election of a black man as President of the United States was unthinkable a generation ago.
Perhaps so, but a time traveller from 1979 would find a black president a lot less improbable than some of the other things that have happened in the past 30 years.
The Soviet Union that invaded Afghanistan in 1979 is ancient history. Nelson Mandela, then in his 19th year as a prisoner on Robben Island, is now the 90-year-old retired president of a democratic South Africa.
And what would someone who had skipped the last 30 years make of Northern Ireland today? In 1979 the IRA blew up the Queen's cousin Lord Mountbatten. Today his killers sit in government with the party of the Protestant firebrand Ian Paisley.
(Admittedly some problems would have seemed depressingly familiar. In 1979 the Fraser Government was grappling with the problem of indigenous unemployment, there was trouble in Iran and the Cabinet worried about the consequences of admitting thousands of boat people.)
But as momentous as all the changes in world politics and lifestyle have been in the past 30 years, the visitor might be most surprised by how much more sceptical we are now.
In 1979 the Fraser Government was working out how to respond to the Hilton Hotel bombing of the previous year in which three people died. The bombing was initially linked to members of a religious sect called the Ananda Marga as part of a world-wide campaign against the Indian government.
To this day there are people who seriously believe the bomb was in fact planted by ASIO or some other shadowy government agency to justify its existence.
The extraordinary thing about the Noughties is that, despite living in a state of high anxiety over Islamic terrorism, no one outside of the nut jobs tried to claim that 9/11 was an inside job.
We are more sceptical about the claims of historical conspiracy theories too. Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code is a novel. The book from which he pinched most of his preposterous ideas about a giant Catholic conspiracy stretching for thousands of year (The Holy Blood and Holy Grail published in 1982 but based on documentaries made in the '70s) actually claimed to be true. From fact to fiction in 30 years is progress.
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