Zen Music Studio

1976 - covering Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser’s visit to both Japan and China.

Here’s some pics from that momentous trip. We were the only westerners in the whole of the People’s Republic of China at that time. We got a lot of stares. On Lake Ashi in Japan, I accompanied the PM’s wife Mrs Tammy Fraser on a boat trip across the lake. As I filmed her, she held up her little camera and snapped me… if you look closely, you can see her face and camera reflected in my lens.

Several weeks later, back home at our Nine Network office at Parliament House in Canberra, I received an envelope addressed to me. The outside of the envelope said: From the Office of the Prime Minister. I thought, oh geez!… what have I done? On opening it I found this wonderful pic that Tammy Fraser took of me… signed by the big man himself “Malcolm”. Very generous!

Great times… good memories!
Blessings.

Peace & Love,
Pete
Zen Music

Hey friends… more from the past…

Film & TV Days - 1970s

After several years training at CTC-7, in the early 1970s - from daily studio camera and audio operations, to stills photographer, to photochemistry processing and printing, to news cameraman, to commercial cinematographer, to film editing and program production - all for which I am very grateful - I was ready and itching to move into the big-time.

Fortunately for me, the newly appointed Chief of National Nine Network’s Political Bureau, Peter Harvey, heard about my plans and dropped into Channel 7 and asked for me by name. He offered me a role on his team that was too good not to accept, so I accepted. In so doing I became his Chief Cameraman based at the Federal Parliament Press Gallery (and apparently, the youngest Chief Cameraman in the world at that time, at just 22). Although Harvey was a very experienced newspaper and radio journalist, he was new to television, so the two of us became quite a team for a couple of years. I enjoyed his friendship as well as working under him. He is the best ‘boss’ I ever had.

Soon after I joined the team, Nine produced a tv documentary on which I worked, about Jim Cairns, Deputy Prime Minister in the then Whitlam government. It immediately won a Logie Television Award, which was a great start to my career in the big-time (and the first of many awards to follow over the years). But that was just the beginning… for the next two years we hardly stopped for breath, as one big story followed another.

Following the dismissal of the Labor Gough Whitlam government by the Governor General in 1975, Liberal Leader Malcolm Fraser was appointed caretaker Prime Minister until a new election could be held. What followed was literally weeks of daily public protests at the Parliament, and in the city of Canberra, and in cities across the nation. Always very heated rallies, some of these became quite violent and I was often in the middle of the angry mob with my camera rolling… and sometimes I became the focus for their anger, which was frightening now that I look back on it… but I was always cool and focused on filming; it became my first encounter with mindfulness meditation… being there, at the centre of the violence, yet coolly going about my work, with no attachment. It would be many years before I studied mindfulness meditation, and became a teacher, but little did I know that I was being given a great opportunity to practice it in my daily duties as a news cameraman.

After a successful election win, newly elected Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser announced that he wanted to visit neighboring nations in our region and elsewhere in the world, and we were off on tour with the PM. In the first two-year period I accompanied the Prime Minister on 5 international visits - Japan, China, Indonesia, the UK, and the US.

We were the only westerners in the People’s Republic of China, in 1976, as China was still closed to the west. I became the first western cameraman to film the famous Children’s Acrobatic Theatre in Canton. In Indonesia, Peter Harvey and I discovered the massed grave of the five murdered newsmen (our colleagues) in the Timor massacre.

I was personally invited to meet the US Vice President, Mr. Nelson Rockefeller, in the Gerald Ford administration (1975), covered stories and events such as HM Queen Elizabeth II’s Silver Jubilee celebrations in London (1977); received a personal invitation to meet Her Majesty and His Royal Highness, Prince Phillip; visited Washington to cover Cambodia discussions with President Jimmy Carter; attended a Press Briefing session with President Carter’s Press Attache’, Jody Powell, in the Press Briefing Room at the White House (1977), and was for a time, a temporary guest member of the National Press Club of Washington.

It was a quite a time!

Peace & Love,
Pete
Zen Music