Interview #223 — Helene Chung

by Elizabeth Flux

Helene Chung is an author and journalist who grew up in Hobart, Tasmania. Her work has been groundbreaking in many ways: she was the first non-white television reporter in Australia and the first woman posted abroad by the ABC. Her first book, Shouting from China, was published in 1988 and, since then, she has published three more books, the latest of which is her memoir, Ching Chong China Girl (2008).

Helene speaks to Elizabeth about working at the ABC in the 60s and 70s, how it feels to have been “the first” in many endeavours and the thin line between the public and the private when writing memoir.

This interview was conducted in 2021, for Liminal Volume II.

How did you get started in journalism, and what drew you to it?

I fell into journalism as a postgraduate Master’s student at the University of Tasmania in Hobart in 1968, when an ABC advertisement distracted me from my research on my thesis. My application led to the first of three decades of ABC rejection slips. When I mentioned this to my stepfather, Egyptologist and broadcaster Leslie Greener, he said, “Why didn’t you tell me you were interested in the ABC? I’ll call Arthur.” As a freelance ABC commentator, my stepfather didn’t earn much money—but he did earn the right to call the Tasmanian manager by his first name.

Next morning, I was seated in Mr Winter’s office in the gleaming new television building. After drawing me out on my academic background and active role in student theatre, he picked up the phone to David Wilson, head of the Talks division (the precursor of News and Current Affairs) … Within ten minutes, I alighted from the lift in the dreary, brownish-hued radio building opposite the GPO. A cheerful David Wilson suggested, “Let’s look at The Mercury … This will do. You can go and interview him, the butcher who claims to have sighted the Tasmanian tiger. Everyone knows the tiger’s extinct.” He gave me a two-minute lesson on how to use a Nagra tape recorder and two taxi vouchers, then wished me luck.

On the other side of the counter, the butcher wiped his hands on his bloodied, once-white apron and then came around to my side. I held out the microphone and interviewed him until the 15-minute tape reached its end. Back at the studio, I watched as David performed like a magician. “This is called dub-editing,” he explained. “Now we’ll shoot it up the line to Sydney.” Next morning, I listened in disbelief to my interview being broadcast on the national flagship AM program.

A new world opened up. Like a stray pup, I’d been tossed a ball by a stranger, caught it in my jaw and now, tail a-wagging, I wanted to run with it. I’d gone to the ABC not sure of what I wanted, yet, within 24 hours, tiger luck had me addicted to the adrenaline of broadcast journalism. Like the stage, it combined the thrill of production and performance; unlike postgraduate research, it instantly gave a sense of success or failure. Academia couldn’t compete with the surge of blood, the feeling of intoxication that came from chasing and snaring a tiger.

You’ve worked on a lot of interesting stories over the years, but what are the three that you think about most often and why?

The Tasmanian tiger interview of October 1968, because it was my first interview and my first broadcast as a reporter.

My interview with Princess Anne at Buckingham Palace in London, October 1971, because it was a scoop (she’d never been interviewed on radio before) and the royal family was then highly respected, if not revered. Commissioned by Radio Hong Kong, the interview was also broadcast in Australia, Britain and Canada, while news coverage, including on the front page of the London Times, eased my way as a freelancer from Down Under who’d just landed in the competitive world capital. Press revelations on Diana and Charles over recent decades have reminded me of this interview because the palace demanded that I delete some of Anne’s comments, even though her media adviser had insisted on questions in advance and sat through the entire recording without objection. This and other royal scandals obtained by deception take me back half a century, when media ethics applied, when it never occurred to me to try to make a quid from what the palace demanded I delete.

The third interview took me months to negotiate: a group interview for all four Australasian China correspondents with Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang on the eve of his visit to Australia and New Zealand in April 1985. At the time, the ANZUS Alliance was in disarray because Washington refused Wellington’s request to say whether or not particular American ships carried nuclear weapons. Hu revealed there was “an agreement” between Washington and Beijing for the US to send only non-nuclear armed or powered vessels to China. Washington immediately refuted this astounding claim. Whether it was a genuine misunderstanding, a slip of the tongue by the garrulous Hu or a deliberate attempt to sabotage the visit of American ships remains unclear. Nonetheless, the interview led to the cancellation of the ships’ visit to Shanghai in May 1985. Fourteen months later, Britain become the first nuclear-capable power to make a naval visit to communist China. Three months later, three American warships docked in Qingdao. In China, truth is whatever the ruling faction decrees.

What was your life like when you freelanced overseas? What was a normal month for you during that time?

In my 20s, I freelanced in Singapore, Hong Kong, London and Cairo, with additional interviews in Paris and Ottawa, but I’ll concentrate on London.

I landed at Heathrow at the end of August 1971 with enough savings to cover my return fare to Australia and living expenses for a few months. Although I consoled myself with the thought that I could wash dishes if necessary, I hoped my Uher tape recorder would bring me luck. My preparations included a commission from ABC Hobart to record a series of 15-minute interviews with other young Tasmanians in London and a commission from Radio Hong Kong to interview a series of former governors. Those enabled me to start immediately, travelling in and around London and out into the countryside. Also, my British stepfather had written to his old friend who happened to work for the BBC Overseas Service, and he had circulated my CV among his colleagues, so my initial BBC broadcast was as an interviewee: the Tanzania service quizzed me about being a Tasmanian. One contact led to another, which let me propose stories to the BBC and, soon, other organisations, too.

I shared a basement flat with another Tasmanian in Kensington. My flatmate, with whom I had nothing in common other than our Down Under heritage, worked selling trucks by day, so I had the place to myself. In my own room, I set up my Uher to cut-edit tapes. I used a telephone answering service so as not to miss any calls, and kept a stash of coins to make any telephone box calls as necessary when on the road. I needed at least one interview five days a week to cover costs: half of the rent of £29 and our French cleaner, plus other expenses. The BBC paid £7.75 for an interview; the British Forces Broadcasting Service, £8.40; and the Central Office of Information, £8.50. All paid more for more complex work and reimbursed transport, usually for the Underground or British Rail, but also for a hire car if required (as for my interview with John Cleese on Monty Python’s Big Red Book, labelled ‘VERY URGENT’).

What are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced over the course of your career?

Being who I am, namely Australian Chinese and female—two distinct drawbacks in mid-20th-century Australia, especially in the small apple isle of Tasmania—I grew up totally outside the norm in white assimilationist Australia, when those with non-Anglo-Celtic backgrounds were expected to merge with the majority and forget their own cultural backgrounds. I went to a school where, for almost all my years, my sister and I were the only two Asians among the 500–600 girls. If our mother spoke to me in Chinese in front of my friends, I wanted to die, to disappear into the ground. People gaped as though watching freaks perform under the circus tent. Our parents’ divorce when I was but one year old confirmed me as an outsider. This, the only divorce I knew of, had to be kept hidden from the nuns and other girls at school: mostly blond- or fair-haired girls from ‘happy families’, living in homes with a front lawn and a swing out the back, who enjoyed Sunday drives in a Holden. I lived with my mother and sister and her extended family, who chattered away in a mixture of English and Chinese, over our fruit shop; I only saw my father when charged to deliver bills to him as he sat aloof in the office of his restaurant-nightclub, Golden Dragon.

The isolation of Tasmania from the mainland heightened my sense of being different and not fitting in, especially as there were so few Chinese in Hobart—under 100 in my formative years. They mostly belonged to either the Henrys on my mother’s side or the Chungs on my father’s side. Due to the rift caused by my parents’ divorce, my Chinese world was largely confined to the Henrys. Had I grown up in Melbourne or Sydney, maybe even Brisbane, with their much larger Chinese populations, I may have felt less cut off from ‘normality’, less alien.

Being female proved a challenge in my first job interview, to be a trainee reporter at the outset of 1969. Seated opposite an ABC bigwig from the mainland, I was told: “You have to understand that, all things being equal, if we have to make a choice between a boy and a girl, we’d have to give preference to the boy because you’re going to go and get married, and all the training would be wasted.” No girl was appointed. Yet Hobart happened to have a vacancy for a ‘reporter grade one’, so Talks’ David Wilson suggested I could fill in. As a trainee reject, I then began full-time as a reporter grade one, a level above a trainee. So set a pattern: I would not once waltz through Aunty’s front door, only slip in through the side.

In answer to your question, however, I must reluctantly refer to another episode, which I only spoke of after the publication of my memoir 30 years later—when the world had changed. By July 1978, I was in my fourth year as a television reporter on This Day Tonight (TDT, a precursor of 7.30), first in Tasmania, then in Victoria. As TDT was to be replaced by Nationwide, each reporter faced a scheduled private meeting with the new head of Current Affairs and our Melbourne boss. I entered their office curious and optimistic but left stunned. Only at home that evening could I unburden myself to my partner, John Martin. Apart from speaking to him and phoning the Australian Journalists’ Association, I kept quiet.

A week later, when I slipped out to buy the milk and morning papers, I was shocked by the sight of my own face staring up at me from the counter of the milk bar. On the front page of the scandal rag Truth, the headline screeched: ‘Girl Reporter Complains’. Below, to right of the image of my face: “Race row at ABC – page 3.” On that page ran the headline: ‘TDT Girl Claims ABC Race Slur’, subheaded ‘Television Reporter Complains to Union’, with another photograph of me. “A reporter on the ABC’s This Day Tonight show claims an ABC official told her she has no future in television because of her Asian appearance,” it ran. “Helene Chung, 33, also claims that a high-ranking official told her to stop wearing make-up because it accentuated her narrow eyes.” The ABC took six months to resolve the issue, while I soldiered on nightly on television. Settlement would have taken longer had the flamboyant Commissioner for Community Relations, Al Grassby—an advocate of multiculturalism—not rattled his sabre for me. The white plan to banish me disappeared.

Helene Chung and Lehene Chung at home, 1967 / Supplied

You’ve broken down a lot of barriers and have been the first in many arenas. It’s a huge accomplishment and a great legacy, but how has this impacted you as an individual along the way?

Generally, as I’ve moved through different stages of life, I’ve not been conscious of the hoops I’ve had to jump, the specific ‘barriers’ or ‘obstacles’. Obviously, they were there, but I didn’t see them or name them. I’ve never had a personal strategic plan or set of life goals; I’ve just taken opportunities as they arose. For example, after I’d freelanced overseas and returned to Australia to report on AM and PM and compere Correspondents Report from ABC Sydney, I thought I’d like to switch from radio to television, and so negotiated a transfer. Only decades later, maybe when forced to reflect when writing Ching Chong China Girl, did I realise that my move to TDT in October 1974 made me the first non-white reporter on Australian TV.

Similarly, when I first applied for an overseas posting—to join the London bureau within a year of returning from freelancing abroad—my gender was raised as a hindrance, though I’d not considered it. I’d only thought of the job, as one of several London correspondents in a city where I’d already lived, who might also need to cover the Middle East, where I’d already reported (from Egypt) for the ABC. When I didn’t land that job, rejection didn’t deter me from continuing to apply for overseas posts over the next decade. As it turns out, an application for the position of Tokyo correspondent in late 1982 (followed by the usual rejection slip) led to my sudden appointment—without an interview—as Peking correspondent in 1983. Only the ABC and other press publicity surrounding my appointment made me aware that I’d become the first female ever posted abroad by the national broadcaster. But 1983 proved a nervous time for the male-led ABC, and I realised I carried the weight of my gender: I had to ensure I didn’t stuff up and ruin the chances of other females.

As an experienced memoirist, how do you decide where the line is on how much of your previously private life you are willing to share with readers? And why is it important to hear people’s stories firsthand?

The line depends on the circumstances and context. Like most individuals, I’m probably a product of my time and I’ve changed with the times. What was shocking in the 1950s, such as my parents’ divorce, was less so in the 1980s, when I wrote my first book. And less again by 1993, when, before an audience of the archbishop, nuns and former classmates, I spoke of being raised by a single mother who insisted on being called “Miss Henry” and was an artist’s model—a fact that tormented me as a child. By then, not even Catholics blinked an eye at divorce or ‘living in sin’.

Generally speaking, on sensitive issues regarding family members, I consult them and restrict myself to the limits they impose. As to intimate relationships, the details remain private, especially if revealing them could violate the privacy of others.

But you ask: why is it important to hear people’s stories firsthand? Probably because stories enable us to relate to one another, to the human condition. We recognise aspects of ourselves in the lives of others: admirable aspects, enviable aspects, dreaded aspects, negative aspects. We can live through their lives, empathise with their hopes, dreams, fears and fortunes.

Do you have any advice for emerging writers?

Most first books, including novels, are really memoirs, as we need to write from experience. As it’s said (but not by Oscar Wilde), “Be yourself: everyone else is already taken.”

What does being Asian Australian mean to you?

It means simply to be Australian. Living for three years in 1980s China taught me that. Before being posted to Beijing, I didn’t belong—anywhere. But being treated as a foreigner, charged as a foreigner, living in a foreign compound, separated from the Chinese and looking so different from them in that no-make-up, uniformly Mao-suited era constantly reinforced the fact that I wasn’t Chinese. I never felt less Chinese than when living there. I was an alien in the motherland.

Today, I feel part of a growing visible and vocal minority that excels in almost every field of endeavour, so much part of mainstream Australia that, compared with my childhood, being Asian in Australia today is not necessarily to be hyphenated. From my perspective, as someone who has experienced the narrow assimilationist white Australia transform into the world’s most successful and tolerant pluralist society, being Chinese in Australia is simply to be Australian. Just another Australian.