In 1978 I received a summons from the Prime Minister to join his advisers at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting at the Hilton Hotel in Sydney. The Prime Minister of India was Morarji Desai, and Fraser was apparently aware that I had got on well with him in New Delhi and could provide a useful contact if needed in Sydney.

I arrived at the hotel to find that a bomb had exploded in the street, killing a worker in the vicinity. The Prime Ministers were due to travel the following day, for the traditional ‘retreat’, to be held at Bowral. Sir Geoffrey Yeend, the Secretary of the Prime Minister’s Department, and the small group of advisers were told by Fraser that he wanted the Army to provide protection along the route, lest the bombing be followed by a terrorist attack on the visitors. He spoke to Neville Wran, the Premier of New South Wales, and it was agreed that the police would not be capable of providing adequate protection against such an event. I was charged with the initial moves to get an Army detachment organised. I recognised that it would be necessary to have legal power vested in the Army detachment to take any necessary steps, such as control of movements of civilians along vulnerable points on the route and the use of military force against any actual threat of violence.

The first was easier to achieve that the second. My colleague back in Canberra, the Chief of Defence Force Staff, General Sir Arthur MacDonald, issued the necessary orders through the Army Chief to the chosen unit at Holsworthy, after establishing what military presence might be needed, the details of timing of movement and so forth. Brigadier John Coates (later a Chief of Staff and scholar)^[9] came from Holsworthy to our little office in the hotel to discuss final details of the intended travel, and to indicate the capabilities of his men.

What still remained to be established was their legal power to act against civilians. I was no expert on procedures for authorising military action in support of the civil power (that being the police). Nor, after several telephone calls to the Department and legal advisers, was useful information easy to find. The legal procedures had not been dusted off in several generations. My memory told me they were based on archaic British Army doctrine in British India. The need of legal cover was real. A soldier manhandling a civilian, or in the worst case shooting him without legal cover, could end up in goal. I knew something of the Indian experience where riots from time to time required the Army to be called in to support the police. Indian histories record the notorious case of the wretched Brigadier Dyer, blamed for the massacre of rioters in the Punjab (although most died not from gunshot but by being crushed in a panic).

Instead of squiring Morarji Desai, I was given the problem of providing legal protection for which, together with Yeend, I tried to find answers far into the night. Telephone calls to colleagues in the Attorney-General’s Department yielded nothing useful. My memory told me that it had been British practice after a call-out in India to require a magistrate to survey a riotous situation. If the police were unable to cope, he was required so to certify, whereupon warning shots could be followed, if necessary, by open fire upon perceived ringleaders. But, where to find this quasi-judicial process at night in the middle of Sydney? Our small group of officials pondered briefly on the idea of finding a magistrate, possibly in bed or watching television, and presenting him with a bewildering request to authorise a Commonwealth agency to use force if necessary against a resident of his State. The notion collapsed into hilarity while we searched our minds for a more practical solution. One was produced by the Army itself. After formal call-out action in Canberra, Brigadier Coates deployed his detachment along the road to Bowral. For those travelling this route by car rather than choosing to be uplifted by Chinook helicopters, he arranged for police to be available at points where any suspicious action might require a response, the soldiers being a deterrent.

While some citizens of the Southern Highlands might have been alarmed by the appearance in their midst of armoured personnel carriers (needed solely for their communication systems) nothing ever threatened the Prime Ministers, as I was to learn later when back in Canberra.

Thus I returned to Canberra without ever meeting Morarji Desai.