My experience aboard The Hopepeak shaped how I understand humanitarian aid, military sacrifice, and government accountability. The events of 1967 left me with the enduring belief that humanitarian assistance must never be considered independently of the political and military circumstances in which it is delivered.

As a young man of 25, after signing on board the British-manned ship Hopepeak, I found myself on my way to Communist China in 1967 during the height of the Vietnam War—and not to Canada, as I had been falsely promised. This journey would morph into a surreal nightmare when I uncovered a devastating truth hidden within the cargo hold: the Australian wheat we had brought to China on supposedly "humanitarian grounds" because China was starving was actively being redeployed straight to North Vietnam. There, in the dense jungles, that very wheat was sustaining the communist forces who were killing and maiming Australian, New Zealand, and American troops.

For uncovering this illicit diversion, I was marched off the Hopepeak under armed guard by Chinese Red Guards, facing certain charges of spying. What followed was a period of terrifying ship's arrest. Trapped under constant surveillance by Red Guards stationed thirty paces apart day and night, I was pressured into writing a forced confession describing myself as a United States aggressor and supporter of Chiang Kai-shek. It was during this agonising wait, not knowing whether my forced letters to the People's Republic of China would save my life or end it, that the second steward quietly suggested I write to my parents.

I followed his advice and wrote a 22-page foolscap letter, believing I might not survive the week. In it, I chose to speak with absolute honesty. I confessed to them that the woman they believed was my landlady was, in fact, my 42-year-old lover, who had been my primary source of stability between 1963 and 1967. I wrote about the profound loneliness, the confusion, and the claustrophobic terror of my detention.

While under house arrest on the ship, I also witnessed severe local deprivation. We routinely discarded half-eaten sausages, steaks, and baked potatoes from our galley into a sea devoid of seagulls or fish. Seeing the desperate hunger in the faces of the people watching us eat, I began filling a small metal tray with edible leftovers, placing it on a deck bench, patting my stomach to show I was full, and walking away. Within ten minutes, the tray was empty. I repeated this for two days. Miraculously, the Red Guard who had been waking me every single hour on the hour suddenly stopped. Perhaps a small, silent act of human compassion had broken through the political madness of the Cultural Revolution.

On 18 September 1967, after the ship's Captain used the radio to alert Australia to my ordeal, we finally returned. I immediately reported my concerns to the Commonwealth Police and wrote a formal, handwritten letter to the Hon. Malcolm Fraser, then Minister for the Army, which I signed and which one of the visiting Commonwealth Police officers countersigned. The crew explicitly told the Captain that they were terrified and entirely unprepared to make another trip to China with more paid wheat.

This defining trauma became the hidden anchor of my entire absentjustice.com story. Decades later, during my 1993 and 1994 telecommunications dispute, I telephoned Malcolm Fraser to discuss that original 1967 letter and why its contents were still haunting my life. Under Freedom of Information (FOI) in 1994, I finally extracted the official records of those 1993–1994 telephone conversations with Mr Fraser to present to the Commonwealth Ombudsman, the arbitrator, and the Australian Federal Police.

To my horror, the documents were a farce. Although both records were a page long, the government had completely redacted the substantive content of both conversations. Seeing those clean, state-sanctioned blackouts instantly fractured my reality, triggering a massive, visceral flashback of the absolute terror I had suffered at the hands of the Chinese Red Guards.

This site preserves the primary documents, footnotes 83, 84, and 169 from Dr Tianxiao Zhu’s University of Minnesota thesis, and the courageous accounts of the British and Canadian merchant seamen who later quit their ships in protest. They verify a brutal historical ledger: the Australian Government consciously traded the lives of its frontline soldiers against wartime commerce with a communist regime.

You can download every exhibit, every file, and all 36,000 damning documents supporting this decades-long forensic archive of institutional betrayal from this website, free of charge. Explore the evidence trails below, follow the file numbers, and see firsthand how the machinery of state power systematically erases the truth to protect its own corruption.

When a state-backed monopoly formally codifies document starvation as a defensive legal strategy, the thin veneer of an independent, rules-based tribunal completely dissolves.

The Corporate Admission of Extortion

When the Commonwealth Ombudsman formally investigated the unlawful withholding of discovery materials, Telstra’s executive hierarchy offered a chillingly candid, written admission of obstruction. Confronted by the Director of Investigations, John Wynack, regarding why critical technical files, network logs, and engineering reports were being systematically withheld from the claimant, Telstra explicitly stated that they were:

"...concerned at the publicity and significant diversion of Telecom resources caused by the recent release of certain information by Mr Smith and that the delay in release of documents was due to the need for Telecom to check all documents prior to release so that Telecom is alert to the possible use or misuse of sensitive information."

This is the smoking gun of the Casualties of Telstra (COT) arbitrations. It is not an administrative excuse; it is a formal confession of an unlawful, bad-faith campaign of evidence suppression. A multi-billion-dollar corporation, fully owned by Australian taxpayers, openly admitted it was weaponising the Freedom of Information (FOI) process to vet, stall, and block critical forensic evidence. They did this simply because they were terrified that my exposure of their defective infrastructure, including their rogue call-intercept hardware—would enter the public domain.

The Ombudsman’s Indictment: Refusing the Gag Order

Commonwealth Ombudsman Philippa Smith saw entirely through this corporate extortion. She recognised that Telstra was using its immense institutional power to run a secondary, clandestine clearance gate on legally requested documents, explicitly to gauge how "sensitive" the data was before allowing it to reach the arbitration chamber.

In her final evaluation, the Ombudsman directly condemned this conduct, concluding that Telstra's decision to hold the statutory arbitration rules hostage was entirely unreasonable. She made it clear that a defendant cannot deny participants their legal rights, starve them of the documentation necessary to prove their financial losses, and demand absolute silence and submissiveness as a prerequisite for document release (See AS-CAV 64).

The paradox was entirely Kafkaesque. As an Australian citizen, the state gave me strict written and verbal directives to fulfil my civic duty by providing the Australian Federal Police (AFP) with every piece of forensic evidence proving that Telstra was systematically intercepting our private telephone lines, faxes, and legal strategies. I obeyed the law. Yet because I carried out my duty to the Crown, the state-owned telecom monopoly retaliated by freezing my access to the technical data required to build my claim, while the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO) and the arbitrator stood by and let the extortion succeed.

The weaponisation of state power against a private citizen peaks when corporate espionage, bureaucratic paralysis, and historical political retaliation converge into a singular, structured trap.

During my high-stakes 1994 arbitration, the boundaries between past whistleblowing and present commercial warfare dissolved entirely. I made it clear to National Party Senator Ron Boswell, who was aggressively fighting for the Casualties of Telstra (COT members), and to AFP Superintendent Detective Sergeant Jeffrey Penrose, that the federal executive was systematically victimising me. The state-owned telecom monopoly had seamlessly absorbed my 1967 China wheat disclosure into its corporate agenda, turning a statutory commercial tribunal into a covert intimidation environment designed to enforce my absolute silence.

The Intelligence Pipeline: Exploiting the Over-Forty Singles Club

As I combed through the fragmented Freedom of Information (FOI) documents Telstra routinely delayed, a chilling reality surfaced: the corporation hadn't merely been intercepting my business lines; it had been mapping my commercial existence for years. They held illicit logs detailing the operations of my weekend "Over-Forty Singles Club", a vital revenue stream I had engineered to keep the Cape Bridgewater Holiday Camp financially afloat while the phone network failed. They held my female patrons' private names, phone numbers, and cross-strait transit patterns, harvested raw technical data, and distributed it to external legal advisors and third-party telecom crawlers.

When I presented this systemic wiretapping to the AFP, evidenced in Australian Federal Police Investigation File No/1, the corporate retaliation was swift, blunt, and clinical.

Under Siege: The Rumble Ultimatum and Procedural Betrayal

By July 1994, the arbitration process had degenerated into pure extortion. Paul Rumble, Telstra’s senior arbitration official, unleashed a series of severe, overt threats. Telstra was playing with a marked deck; in a gross breach of protocol, the independent arbitrator had covertly leaked my confidential interim claim documents to Rumble five months before Telstra was legally permitted to view them. Armed with my complete legal strategy, Telstra executed an engineered campaign of document starvation.

Navigating this minefield required agonising precision. To buy breathing room and prevent the immediate disconnection of my telephone network, I was forced under extreme duress to author a literal hostage note on 4 July 1994, writing:

"I gave you my word on Friday night that I would not go running off to the Federal Police etc, I shall honour this statement, and wait for your response to the following questions I ask of Telecom below." (File 85)

This forced capitulation was my only alternative. Days earlier, Telstra arbitration liaison officer Steve Black delivered a ruthless ultimatum over the phone: if I continued providing forensic evidence of network interception to the AFP, Telstra would permanently cut off my access to the technical documents I needed to build my case. They weaponised my lack of telephone service as operational leverage.

When AFP investigators returned to Cape Bridgewater on 26 September 1994, they zeroed in on this forced letter. Page 12 of the official transcript recorded the investigator's sharp intrigue:

"The thing that I’m intrigued by is the statement here that you’ve given Mr Rumble your word that you would not go running off to the Federal Police etcetera."

At that precise moment, the façade of an independent tribunal collapsed. It was no longer a legal process; it was an ambush. They stripped me of the evidence the arbitrator needed to assess my losses, ensuring my final submission was judged on a poisoned, incomplete record.

The Ombudsman's Discovery: Actively Shielding Sensitive Misconduct

The systemic nature of this obstruction was formally cemented on 25 March 1995. Facing relentless investigation by the Director of Investigations, John Wynack, the Commonwealth Ombudsman, Philippa Smith, fired an explosive letter directly to Telstra’s executive hierarchy. She demanded an immediate explanation for an extraordinary admission of corporate guilt. Telstra explicitly told her office it was deliberately stalling, vetting, and withholding my discovery documents because it was concerned about a claimant's "possible use or misuse of sensitive information" during a live legal proceeding.

The state-backed monopoly openly held the statutory rules of arbitration hostage, penalising a citizen for performing his civic duty and demanding total submissiveness—a letter that stands as a primary, unassailable exhibit of institutional malice.

The Senate Exposure: Unmasking the Automated Lie

Faced with total bureaucratic paralysis from an administrator who refused to intervene, I triggered an emergency escalation through Senator Ron Boswell. On 29 November 1994, Boswell stood in the Australian Senate, turning the Hansard record into an indictment of corporate tyranny:

"Why did Telecom advise the Commonwealth Ombudsman that Telecom withheld FOI documents from Alan Smith because Alan Smith provided Telecom FOI documents to the Australian Federal Police during their investigation?"

Slicing through Telstra’s hollow, manufactured corporate denials, an incensed Senator Boswell demanded answers from the floor of the Parliament:

"...Why would Telecom withhold vital documents from the AFP? Also, why would Telecom penalise COT members for providing documents to the AFP which substantiate that Telecom had conducted unauthorised interceptions of COT members’ communications and subsequently dealt in the intercepted information by providing that information to Telecom’s external legal advisers and others?" (Senate Evidence File No 31)

The Absolute Reality of Corruption

What remains most damning about this state-sanctioned sabotage is the total, absolute impunity that followed. Telstra was a government-owned asset. The arbitrator was bound by statutory law. Yet the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman (TIO), the Federal Government, and the tribunal team stood entirely idle while an ordinary Australian citizen assisting the Federal Police was systematically blackmailed, financially ruined, and legally silenced.

Neither the TIO nor the executive ever investigated the catastrophic impact this document starvation inflicted upon my final submission. The threats were public; they were lethal to the rule of law, and they showed how far a corrupted bureaucracy will go to absorb and crush a whistleblower who knows too much.