Photo: Michaela O'Neill
25th May 2008
Paul Alister stretched his injured leg out across the bench in his Maleny film studio office, on the grounds of the Ananda Marga River School.
“I over-extended the leg muscle playing AFL masters for Maroochydore,” the 52-year-old said. “I still surf whenever I get the chance, too.”
Alister is pretty fit for his age, which is a lot to do with clean living – and that’s something to do with the diet and life codes he follows as a long-time member of the low-key Ananda Marga spiritual sect.
He is busy on his next documentary, having not long finished working on the edit of the Ma and Pa Bendall doco, which highlighted the famous Moffat Beach pair’s surfing career – one reason why he now surfs at Moffat rather than Point Cartwright.
Not long before that, he edited another doco on the 2004/5 Maleny battle with Woolworths, presenting it the US to an appreciative audience.
It’s a long way from where he started out as an angry, abused teenager in Perth with a penchant for wave-riding.
His journey took him into the arms of the “Margis” in Sydney, where for the first time in his life he found some peace and life direction.
But the price Alister paid was enormous, as the Daily discovered when we first interviewed him back in 1998, and again today, 10 years later.
In 1978, Alister was practising meditation and helping Sydney street people through the Margis’ soup kitchen.
And his life was about to change dramatically.
In that year, spy organisation ASIO and the NSW police Special Branch division were under critical review, while at the same time, the Ananda Marga organisation had been garnering unfavourable public attention.
Then, as now, a debate concerning the increased powers of national security organisations was in full force.
Some Margis had been demonstrating against India in that country, which had been holding the group’s spiritual leader in jail. Over some months, Indian Government members based in Canada had claimed acts of a terrorist nature had been carried out by Margis, as part of a campaign to have their leader released.
In January, the Fraser Government had placed a ban on entry of non-Australian Margi members to the country.
In February 1978, Indian prime minister Morarji Desai visited Sydney as part of the inaugural Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), staying at the Hilton Hotel.
At 12.40am on February 13, a garbage truck arrived to empty an over-full bin out side the hotel in George Street. As the garbage was compacted, a bomb inside it exploded, instantly killing two of the workmen, and seriously injuring several police and bystanders. A policeman died of his injuries a week later.
The explosion was widely believed to be politically aimed at Desai, who openly speculated that Ananda Marga was behind it.
Despite a major inquiry and the offer of a $100,000 reward, no progress was made on the capture of the bombers; detectives said they knew who had done it, but they had no evidence.
But police had recruited a man called Richard John Seary, who infiltrated Ananda Marga and kept police informed about the organisation’s goings-on.
He had nothing to report until June, when he warned that a bombing was to occur, to murder then National Alliance neo-Nazi group leader Robert Cameron.
What was not known – or divulged – at the time was Seary was a paranoid schizophrenic, who not only provided and drove the car for the proposed assassination of Cameron, he had put ingredients for a bomb in the back seat.
Police intercepted Alister, Tim Anderson and Ross Dunn, along with Seary in the car and arrested them on charges of conspiracy to murder Cameron.
Seary had also told police the three had confessed to him that they carried out the Hilton bombing, but they were never convicted for that event.
Alister, for example, was probably in Adelaide at the time of the bombing, with 16 witnesses available, although his alibi was never tested in court.
In what was to become one of the most outstanding cases of miscarriage of justice in Australia the three were handed down jail sentences of 16 years each for conspiracy to murder Cameron, with no parole.
And in one of the many ironies in the trio’s story, the magistrate who initially charged them, Murray Farquar, was later to occupy a cell next to Alister as a result of a sensational corruption case in NSW.
During that time, Farquar encouraged Alister to write his book, Bombs, Bliss and Baba.
The three served seven years of their sentences before being pardoned after a NSW government inquiry and released in 1985. Inquiry head Justice Woods declared Seary’s and other evidence to be completely without foundation.
By then, the Azaria Chamberlain disappearance case had undergone its bizarre journey, highlighting the yawning gaps in the credibility of the Australian justice system.
The three went their separate ways, Alister coming to the Coast hinterland town of Maleny. He married one of his lawyers, but subsequent depression following the years of incarceration saw the marriage fall apart and he has since happily remarried, now having fathered four children.
The pardoned trio received compensation from the NSW Government, with Alister ploughing his into land on Bridge Creek Road which would become his home, and also the grounds for the Ananda Marga River School.
Today, as he looks from his office window across the grounds of the hugely successful school, Alister said he has trouble recollecting many of the case’s facts without referring to his own or one of the many other books written about the Hilton bombing.
He accepts that the whole experience will never leave him, and that media groups and writers will forever dog him about the bombings.
He is also tired of correcting, or even threatening to sue, the same people who refer to him as “one of the Hilton bombers”.
Alister is comfortable in his belief that the bombing was a case of the security forces making a major blunder in not informing the garbage collectors to stay away from the bin on that fateful day.
“The whole affair was a ploy to maintain the existence of the security organisations’ strength by proving their worth,” he said.
“In particular, Special Branch, which was operated by each state’s police, was in the spotlight for keeping vast records on left-wing activists, judges and politicians.
“The South Australian Special Branch operation was being disbanded, with NSW the next in line.” He said Terry Griffiths, a policeman seriously injured in the blast, had told him he had done his own investigation, and put the bombing down to Special Branch.
“There were three Special Branch sitting in a car round the corner when bomb went off.
“The speculation was it was meant for them to come in to front the world media and say ‘we saved the day’.
“But someone had forgotten to tell the garbagemen not to come; that’s Terry Griffiths’ conclusion.”
He also said he spoke to a police sniffer dog handler, who told him he’d been withdrawn from service a few days before the CHOGM. The dogs can “sniff gunpowder at 100 metres”.
Alister also said Seary, who had worked extensively with explosives at Lightning Ridge, had also said he had infiltrated the Hare Krishnas and tried to get them to bomb an abattoir.
The truth may never be fully known – but Alister is getting on with his life.
His spirituality sees him through, and he has also seen some of his own children through the River School.
“I believe in karma.
“We don’t have control over what happens to us, only how we respond to it.
“In the end, I’ve ended up the better; I have a happy life, I’m not twisted in anger.
“It wasn’t pleasant – the jailing – but I got a lot out of it.
“I learned skills, and have helped a lot of men with their anger since.”
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