The robbery.
It was too soon for us to relax. There was a wannabe amateur anarchist out there, and he believed that he could sabotage the whole examination process, by stealing large amounts of paper from the ‘confidential waste’ bins in the Government Printing Office. Discarded, spoiled and waste sheets from the presses should have been shredded and pulped each night, but when the boy struck, there was almost a two-month supply of waste, sitting in the bins.
The boy had claimed to be a Year 11 from one school, when he was a Year 12 from another. He had sought a work-experience placement, and wormed his way into places where he should not have been, and learned the weaknesses of the place. He walked in at night, told the only guard that he had a knife (had I been the guard, I would have said “look, please show me the knife, so I can keep my job”) and helped himself to samples of up to 20 separate papers, and then he took off.
His aim was to sabotage the whole system, and for that reason, his first act was to call a Sydney radio station to claim that he had stolen all the HSC papers. My colleague, whose role was media management was alerted, he alerted me, I pulled out my Compendium of Disasters Great and Small, and selected the page relating to a single paper being compromised, then I briefed my pirates as they arrived.
As I had been brought up in hot metal printing, and the Government Printing Office was one of the few places still using that technology, the pirates and I worked out exactly how we would go about production, once the questions were rewritten, and the Compendium had a few notes on how to reset questions to lay traps, and I will come to those later. We satisfied ourselves that we could save the situation, but our plan was to use word processors.
We were well into the technicalities when John Cook stormed in and asked what we were doing, so I told him. The whole theft, he told me was Top Secret, and nobody was to be told anything. “But it’s been on the ABC…” He snarled that he didn’t care, adding that I was to tell nobody anything, so I nodded, he rushed off, and we continued planning and briefing the later-arriving pirates.
So when John rushed back, 45 minutes later, in a panic, I handed him a single page, carefully typed. It was a firmed-up version of the war book page, with bells and whistles: “We make twenty copies of this, and implement them all,” I said. An hour later, the Director, John and I were in the Minister’s office. The floor was handed to me, and I had just started to brief the Minister, when an assistant broke in.
Now here, I need to offer an aside. There had, not long before, been a semi-scandal about how much premier Neville (‘Nifty’) Wran knew about something. The issue hinged on somebody hearing the phrase “The Premier’s on the line”. Now Nifty had, in the recent past, suffered a medical mishap that had made him hoarse of voice. End of aside.
The assistant said with a grin, “Minister, how shall I put this: the premier’s on the line”, and the minister, having seized my single sheet, went out to take the call. He returned quickly, handed the sheet back to me and told “Nifty said don’t worry about it, just handle it!”, the italicised part being delivered in a hoarse voice. We were on!
Meanwhile, the thief’s teacher had recognised the boy’s voice from the radio, so he was never going to escape, but that can wait. Suffice it to say, we had got his photo from the school, and the printers recognised him. He was, as we say, nailed.
And we were prepared.
There is more to this story:
The Great HSC heist of 1985, 1. Prologue.
The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 2. A disabled number-cruncher.
The GreatHSC heist of 1985, 3. Applied anarchy and surrealism.
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