A Job For The Dogs 
by
Haydn Keenan
Check this,’ he said, handing me a ratty file with a few hundred photocopied pages in it. A warm Saturday afternoon, an anonymous, suburban, backyard five years ago. We’d been plotting the takeover of the world, the next film project, political revolt. The usual. I opened the file and nothing happened. No particular sense, bureaucracy, possibly a government department, formal syntax and my mate’s name mentioned on every page. Height, eye colour, parents names, then – hello? A terrorist plot, gelignite, and on the top of the page – ASIO – top secret.
‘What is this’? ‘It’s my ASIO file’. ‘You’re kidding’. ‘Narr a mate of mine discovered you can get these things once they’re thirty years old. They come out every year just like Cabinet papers – they just don’t advertise it.’ I read on. There were flight details, hotel room numbers, meetings attended and what happened, précis of phone conversations, hilarious suppositions that everything related to a communist plot for world domination. ‘Mate when I write my memoirs this is going to be so useful. I owe ASIO a big one for recording all this. I was so stoned in the seventies I can’t remember half of it.’
Suddenly the file was riveting, Vietnam, black power, feminism, the counter culture and revolting students. Pages turned, the sixties came back to life and turned into the seventies. Whitlam’sLabour Government arrives and ASIO’s Coalition bosses of 23 years are thrown out. Now there’s a Government made up of politicians ASIO has been spying on for ages. I turn the pages more quickly to see what happens next.But suddenly the file stops. Come back on January 1st for the next annual instalment’ he says.. At the back of the file there’s a pile of photographs. Surveillance pictures taken of my mate by ASIO. All hair, bad fashion and skinny. A great laugh.
Edgar Allan Poe wrote a story called The Descent Into The Maelstrom. It’s the story of a sailor whose boat is caught on what started as the gentle turning of the tide and over hours is gradually and inexorably drawn into the maw of a gigantic maelstrom. I didn’t know it five years ago but the tide had turned for me and I was about to descend into the maelstrom
Months pass and in the desperation of a search for a film project I realise that I’ve seen one and not noticed it. What if I got a number of people and presented them with their files and asked them to explain the contents to us. Choose the people correctly and you’ll get a cross section of Melbourne/Sydney, old/young, communists and non-communists. It was the easiest sell I’ve ever made to a TV station. Secret Intelligence files. The story of how history really happened. People love it. It’s secret, salacious, and threatening – they can’t get enough of it.
Next thing I know I’m in the reading room of the National Archives of Australia (NAA) checking ASIO files. Look through the NAA database, see who’s got files that are available and request them. Before you know it you’re in a ‘youtube’ world where a name mentioned in one person’s file leads you onto to a second person and then a third. You start out reading feminist Anne Summers’ file and eight hours later you’re reading Nazi Ross May’s and staff are asking you to pack up as it’s closing time. The banality of the files is mind blowing and yet you pass through the boredom and start to get to know the people in question. You start to experience their lives through someone else’s eyes. Someone who neither likes nor trusts the Person Of Interest. And then the strangest thing happens. You start to hear a voice. It’s off in the distance and you can’t make out what it’s saying but gradually it draws near and it speaks to you clearly. It’s the voice of the files. The voice of ASIO itself. It’s a dark narration of a person’s life, suspicion of everything they do and interpretation of all their actions as proof of guilt. Guilt of charges which remain unstated. If hagiographies are fanciful praise of a person these are the opposite. These are dark biographies ascribing malice aforethought to everything they do.
In the course of research we start to check what’s available in terms of photographic records. It’s a gold mine. There are thousands of photographs and we discover a spectacular trove of movie film that no one’s ever seen before. For a filmmaker it’s lifeblood. I’m not one for historical recreation in documentaries and now I don’t need it. I’ve got the real thing. Images of events, of organizations, of targeted people.
What’s the purpose of surveillance? ASIO’s first intention is to positively identify a person of interest. A photo team will be sent to record a good 
likeness. This is shown to volunteer agents/informers who are attending meetings and befriending the POI and then reporting back to their agent handler in ASIO. What’s needed is a concrete identification that everyone agrees on. This photo becomes the master and is placed on the id book. So if there’s any doubt about an observation in the future this is the picture that they refer to. The second purpose of surveillance is to make connections. To connect one person with another suspect or place. In this way a network of connections starts to build a grand picture of who knows who.
Surveillance secretly records an image of someone so that the recorder can have advantage over the subject. Sometimes it’s political, sometimes social, but the very essence of surveillance is the secret theft of the image. It’s this secret element that adds a thrill for the viewer. There’s an element of voyeurism especially as one gets to know the person of interest without them every knowing you. Many of the ASIO officers we met in the course of our production still knew the personal details, addresses, parents’ names and ASIO file numbers of their targets decades after they’d last seen them. Everyone says, ‘is it like that film The Lives Of Others’? Yes it’s exactly like The Lives Of Others.
Sometimes the films and stills have a feel like a Warhol movie where ASIO records a doorway, the entrance to Communist Party HQ, for twelve hours. It’s so boring that it becomes mesmerising as you watch the comings and goings and the only thing that really
changes is the angle of the shadows. The door stays the same but everyone who passes through it looks suspicious. That’s the Communist Party HQ – they must be suspicious. If this is intelligence surveillance then they must all be spies. A man exists, looks left, looks right, flicks his cigarette into the gutter and walks off. He’s suss. That woman carrying a parcel hurrying in to the doorway she’s suss. By being recorded they are suspect. Sometimes ASIO records a soundtrack on the film of an officer who says the name and Communist Party branch the person of interest is a member off. Every now and then the camera photographs a clock. Now it’s 10.56, now 12.08. It’s like High Noon, time passing as recorded by an amateur. I asked an officer what they would do with these little gems. ‘They show them to staff every Monday. Over and over so that when you pass that person in the street you will know who they are.’ Identify, connect – that’s what it’s all about.
There are three types of photographic surveillance. There are photographs taken by ASIO agents who are known to the person of interest. These are extraordinarily disconcerting because they are the sort of intimate photos that you would see in a family album. Teenagers clowning, kids up close playing, groups posing for someone they know, someone who is deceiving them and passing these moments on to ASIO. The second sort is taken by an ASIO photographer not hiding himself but openly taking photos in public. At demos, public meetings and gatherings they pass themselves off as photography enthusiasts. There are always hobbyists taking photos of mass events. I used to do it myself. Up close pictures of protesters passing a street corner the crowd slowly moving from right to left, the photographic sequence replicating cinema. These public places where a photographer pointing a lens at the subject wouldn't cause suspicion. Most of the examples I have seen were taken in the customs or waiting area of airports. These often create cinematic sequences when a number of frames were exposed over a short period. There’s a sequence of Ted Hill, a member of the Communist Party central committee who split to create a Maoist- inspired group, in attendance with Norm Gallagher of the Victorian Builders Labourers Federation passing through customs at Mascot.
Particularly disturbing are butterbox photographs where the suspect person looks right at the lens but doesn’t see it because of it’s disguise. This can produce photos in which the person of interest seems to be looking straight at the viewer.
Having trawled the ASIO archive we’ve now got films and still photographs of people and places in some cases over a period of thirty years. Very often the camera position is the same and whilst the background stays pretty much the same the subjects change as ASIO records, unwittingly, the social history of political dissent in Australia. They record May Day marches in Melbourne and Sydney every year. They record the entrance to the communist party and the BWIU for years. Put the records in chronological order and what you see is not the great Communist plots so much as braces going out of fashion, skirts getting shorter, the ubiquity of smoking. Feminism arrives, youth culture appears in the 60s, along with the issues that were perceived as a threat to Australia – anti apartheid, Aboriginal land rights, equality for women, public education, anti Vietnam, wages and conditions for working people, the peace movement, anti nuclear groups.
Many of these threats have moved from the edges of society, not just to the centre but have been so integrated into our culture that a younger generation needs careful explanation of how they could be seen to be a threat to our country. But ASIO, as the commonwealth bureaucracy that it was and is, faithfully recorded it’s targets for posterity never understanding what they had – a unique record of Australian social history. To that end in the late 1990s in consultation with the National Archives of Australia in an act of criminal stupidity ASIO was advised that because its film records were no longer of security interest they could be projected one last time and copied using an amateur VHS video camera then destroyed. So some of the films we have are the shadows of what they once were but in them are the ghosts of the secret history, still attending meetings, still walking through doorways still inhabiting the dream world of stolen images.
It’s easy to sit and look at these movies and photographs and become entranced by the way the lights falls in dusty Market Street or on children playing with a dog outside a doorway under observation. Some of the material strikes me like De Chirico’s haunting surrealist landscapes, but what, should not be forgotten is that these were the identifications used to have Persons Of Interest sacked from jobs, careers destroyed, lives turned upside down by an intelligence agency that gradually ran out of control in the late 1960s. An aesthetic divorced from the political consequences can never be what these images, at times mysterious, beautiful and tense, are solely about.
Having spent five years working on my Persons Of Interest documentary series, I know the pictures and movies so well that walking up a city street someone else’s life flashes before my eyes. I know that doorway, that corner, that bit of footpath. It’s the door, corner, footpath they shot forty years ago now made concrete. I can see spectral persons of interest passing through columns of dusty light, passing through me as I stand trying to focus. My eyes look up to windows where ‘dogs’ sat quietly recording their targets and sense the secret history that lives quietly in our streets..
© Haydn Keenan 2011