Reasonable Doubt: Spies, Police and the Croatian Six

by Hamish McDonald

Knock, knock — it’s a hot summer night in 1979 and Roger Rogerson is at the front door with a posse of Sydney’s toughest cops. Sticks of gelignite are discovered, and the family’s young men are taken off for a rough night at CIB headquarters, joined by others arrested in simultaneous raids across the city. For them, and the entire community of migrants from Croatia, it’s the start of a nightmare, ending in 15-year jail terms for terrorist conspiracy. But even during their 10-month trial, holes appeared in the police case. Later the chief crown witness confessed on TV he made up his crucial testimony.
Decades later, a chance reference drew journalist Hamish McDonald to explore this case. He uncovers evidence that authorities took pains to conceal from the court: that the crown witness was an agent of the Yugoslav secret service and had been under ASIO surveillance. This book shows how an unreformed police force, inept politicians, scheming security men, and mutually back-slapping judges contributed to Australia’s biggest miscarriage of justice. It’s Sydney’s underbelly, with a dash of international intrigue and espionage.

339 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 1, 2019

About the author

Hamish McDonald is an Australian journalist and author of several books. He held a fellowship at the American think tank the Woodrow Wilson Centre in 2014.

McDonald has worked as a journalist in mostly Asian countries like India, Japan, Indonesia, Hong Kong and China, where he was a correspondent based in Beijing from 2002 to 2005. He was in India between 1990 and 1997, covering the time immediately after the economic reforms. He was the political editor for the Far Eastern Economic Review and the foreign editor for the Sydney Morning Herald.

In 2005, he won the Walkley Award for newspaper feature writing for his article "What's Wrong With Falun Gong", which is about the brutal suppression of the Falun Gong religious movement in China.

Reviews

[Carly · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story of the Balkans is not easy to wrap your head around. McDonald provides a comprehensive overview of the region and it's tumultuous past, and ultimately how this affected lives on the other side of the world. It's a complicated story I should like to read twice. The book is well researched but poorly edited, with a number of typos throughout, but is one that deserves the attention of Australia.

[Weaponisedfunk · Rating 2 out of 5]

A workmanlike recount of the Croatian Six trial of 1979, padded by multiple chapters on the history of the Austro-Hungarian empire, apocryphal accounts of UDBa espionage abroad, and the author’s own travelogue through former Yugoslavia. The book feels like it’s building to the author’s anticipated exoneration of the Croatian Six, but when this doesn’t eventuate, seems to hang at a loose end.