Redeeming the Bomber Who Killed Alec Carter

There is no mystery about this murder story. Evan Pederick killed Alec Carter. He also killed William “Bluey” Favell and Paul Burmistriw, and he wounded others. Terry Griffiths was one of his victims and has suffered appallingly:

I had part of the top of my right foot blown out. The top of my right fibula bone blown out. A wound to the right side of my right thigh. Shrapnel punctured the right side of my abdomen and perforated my large colon which was exteriorised for two months. The shrapnel is still inside my abdomen.

The self-confessed killer is the subject of an “authorised biography” by Imre Salusinszky: The Hilton Bombing: Evan Pederick and the Ananda Marga.

I had a friend whose life was affected by what Pederick did. A person who never sought media attention and attended some of the court appearances this book narrates without being noticed by the media or screeching mobs brought onstage to support Tim Anderson, the person Pederick accused of having instigated the violence and provided the explosives. This is not ancient history. When Terry Griffiths spoke to Rachel Landers, who has also written about the Hilton bombing, she found a man who “wakes up every single night thinking about the bombing and the lies that were told and are still being told. ‘Imagine you are me,’ he says. ‘My heart has been broken.’”

Salusinszky comments on Pederick:

Here was a man who had done a terrible thing, paid the price, and rehabilitated himself as a pillar of his community. Despite this, as he would eventually remind me, there are no happy endings: the pain continues, in Sydney and Perth [where Pederick lives]. The story that mattered was this one, the story of Evan’s life. And eventually I realised that a proper understanding of that life could be consequential in ways that might be truer than of any other living Australian. [My emphasis]

Perhaps we could write an authorised biography of Alec Carter, except he is not around to give his permission. The price Pederick “paid” for killing him included cell-cooked toasties, daily episodes of The Bold and the Beautiful, and tending the “gorgeous dahlias” outside the walls of Berrima jail. Front and back cover quotes by Helen Garner and Phillip Adams (both mentioned favourably in the book) describe the text as “moving” (Garner) and “brave” (Adams).

Brave? Brave are the people who suffered. Brave? Brave too were the dead men’s mates, union members and workers on the night of a benefit concert for the broken families at the Revesby Workers’ Club who ignored a bomb scare and kept their applause and money flowing until 3 a.m.

Evan Pederick is now an Anglican priest. In February 1978 he was the member of the Ananda Marga who made and placed a powerful bomb in a garbage bin outside the George Street entrance to the Sydney Hilton. When he tried to detonate it from a remote device in his airline bag, hundreds of lives were saved because a cheap Tandy transmitter failed to work—three times. Pederick walked away. While Salusinszky includes the brutal clinical details of what happened to the victims when the bomb finally did explode, the images are wired into the memories of those who were there—to be replayed over and over again in their minds. Pederick never saw what he had done. He learnt of the success of his creation from radio news reports when hitchhiking towards Brisbane. Later, at Anderson’s trial, Pederick alleged the two men had met several months later and talked of the bombing, “And he [Anderson] said words to the effect of, ‘It’s not a bad result. There were only three people killed. One of those was a policeman and nobody cares about policemen, anyway.’”

It was in Balmain, I think, in the later 1960s. A section of road was torn up and behind clumsy barriers council men were more or less at work, and talking. Their loud Sydney voices were confident, assured and a bit cheeky. The sound of blokey equality on a clean sunny morning. I don’t remember what they were talking about, or what they looked like, it was that likeable sound of equality I overheard and remembered, the same sort of thing I noticed later between working-class boat-builders and their wealthy male boating customers. It was my first visit to Sydney, from Victoria. I briefly explored the city, so different from Melbourne, from a cleanly polish-smelling room in the Pitt Street People’s Palace—wide entrance steps, a pile of cold rooms, an old lift, and Salvation Army distant hospitality.

When the gelignite exploded in George Street it was if Pederick and his cult were murdering C.J. Dennis and maiming working-class Australia—Alec Carter and “Bluey” Favell were City of Sydney garbos. Paul Burmistriw and the wounded Terry Griffiths were New South Wales cops. A long eleven years later Evan Pederick came forward and confessed to the murders when Tim Anderson, his fellow Ananda Marga adherent who Pederick claims had suggested the plan and provided the explosives, was arrested for the bombing. Anderson claimed innocence and was viciously supported by Left activists.

Pederick wanted to kill Indian Prime Minister Morarji Desai, who was responsible for the imprisonment of Baba (Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar), the founder of Ananda Marga. The opportunity to do so was a Commonwealth Heads of Government regional meeting convened by Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser. Obliterating Fraser and scores of onlookers was incidental to the primary outcome.

When Salusinszky’s book was published, Pederick issued a statement in which he said:

When I handed myself in to police in 1989 and confessed my part in the Hilton bombing it was with the hope that the families of those whose lives I had taken would be able to find some peace in knowing what had happened and why.

For eleven years before his confession he had done nothing and possibly he only came forward because he feared being implicated by Anderson—which would also reinforce the claim that he has told the truth, or some of the truth. Anderson, not an impartial witness, alleged in 1992 that a leaked file from the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions showed, “Pederick had unsuccessfully attempted to gain an indemnity from prosecution, in return for testifying against me.”

Pederick was tried some months after turning himself in, found guilty of murder and conspiracy and set a non-parole period of thirteen and a half years. Sentenced in 1989, he was released in 1997. When Anderson was in his turn tried and found guilty his sentence was overturned on appeal because of the confusion and contradictions in evidence given by Pederick. Much of Salusinszky’s book is devoted to unravelling the right memories and wrong memories which confused his testimony and led to the situation in which the confessing bomber was in prison and the man he said suggested the violence and provided the explosive was free.

Salusinszky presents Pederick as thinking about a legal appeal in 1995 and 1996: “Evan had gone to God for forgiveness, and to the community for punishment and redemption.” And now, according to Salusinszky, he sought “vindication”. Perhaps he just wanted to get out of jail, as he had seemingly attempted to do in January 1992. Just seven months after Anderson was released, Pederick wrote a letter to Anderson’s supporters’ group, Academics for Justice, asking for their help in having an inquiry held, and to get himself freed. Maintaining that his evidence was truthful, he said in his letter—an edited version was published by Anderson to undermine his accuser’s credibility:

I don’t see why, if my evidence is unsafe and unsatisfactory when it comes to Tim Anderson, it should be good enough against me. I don’t see that my continued incarceration serves any particular purpose … It is hardly satisfactory for the government to hold me for a crime it does not believe I committed.

Conspiracy theories around the bombing shelter the guilty. When Pederick came out of prison he said, “As far as I am concerned the Hilton bombing belongs to history. There is no mystery about it. I guess I was quite unique in the prison system in that I had to keep proving my guilt, whereas everyone else said they were innocent.” In 1995 the ABC produced a documentary they called Conspiracy, alleging conspiracy by their usual enemies even while the man who had been convicted of the murders was still in prison. Salusinszky also recalls a George Negus television program in 2004 which presented the bombing as “one of the country’s great historical mysteries” and never mentioned the man who had confessed. It was the combination of conspiracy and amnesia about the crime which led Salusinszky to contact Pederick and then write this book: “I wondered: in what sense is a crime a ‘mystery’ when a man has confessed to it, been charged with it, been convicted of it, and gone to jail for it?”

In Who Bombed the Hilton? (2016) Rachel Landers set out the documentary evidence about the case which she framed in terms of an investigation into an unsolved crime. Forcefully demolishing the conspiracies, she is dismissive of Pederick and his confessions, describing him and another player in the complex story as “spectacularly bizarre characters … of such astoundingly similar oddness and, let’s face it, unreliability”. Even so, she admits “there are nevertheless things in his confession that are bizarrely and inexplicably accurate”. The accurate things are neither bizarre nor inexplicable if he was the bomber, as Salusinszky persuasively argues.

The Hilton bombing deserves clarity and truthfulness and a royal commission. It is heart-breaking to see the confusion honest people have been left with. At the fortieth-anniversary memorial service held at the Hilton in 2018 (there is a video recording on YouTube) Graeme Kelly of the United Services Union said that there were “still many unanswered questions” and that survivors and families “still don’t have closure. They still don’t know who planted the bomb that day or what their motivations were.” Terry Griffiths, who passionately believes in the involvement of ASIO, also spoke: “I am going to try to find the bastards who did it and get them locked up.” Before the audience of victims and their families, witnesses and first responders, appeals were made for those who knew something to come forward and provide answers. And only a royal commission could ask the right questions and, hopefully, find truthful answers.

Pederick summed up Salusinszky’s book about him as “simply to tell the story of a life that went tragically wrong and my subsequent attempt to find redemption”. His life is traced from childhood in Western Australia, the son of a Methodist minister, a Wesley College student and university drop-out, his involvement with the Ananda Marga which began with craftily smiling companionship for a lonely young man and his passage into a “cult spinning into madness”. And then after trials and prison, a remade life as an intellectual Anglican priest. Last year he wrote an academic paper titled “Sacrifice and Creation”: “Beginning from a consideration of sacrifice in the Old Testament cult and New Testament sacrificial themes in Christology, the paper proposes sacrifice as a theme that weaves both human and non-human life into the life of God.”

The “authorised” youthful Pederick is, bombing aside, a gentle, naive idealist. I wonder. After he was freed from jail, journalist Ben Hills published an article, “The Hilton Fiasco”, in the Sydney Morning Herald. The article is not referenced by Salusinszky. Hills cites a Commonwealth Police report from the day after the bombing:

A disenchanted Ananda Marga member from Queensland, who described Pederick as the senior Ananda Marga member on the Redcliffe Peninsula, had reported him saying, “Do not worry about killing people, you kill flies and ants and cockroaches, so don’t worry about people.”

Is that a glimpse of a darker Pederick, a natural choice for the job to be done? Or is it a young man under cult influence? Despite a recommendation that the Commonwealth Police interview him, “because of his reported tendency towards violence”, there was no follow-up. As reported by Hills, Pederick’s response to these reports was cynical and evasive of responsibility: “That was just incredible incompetence. It wouldn’t have prevented the bombing, but if they had leant on me then they might have solved the case much sooner.”

A man who could have been known as our greatest mass murderer killed two garbos and a policeman who had probably never heard of Ananda Marga. He was a reader of Kafka and Hesse, and also I would imagine Colin Wilson and Albert Camus—his life when young suggests the absurdist anti-hero and outsider: supremely egotistical and uninvolved with the consequences of his actions. Tim Anderson wrote cattily of his nemesis: “Pederick is nothing if not a person full of contradictions. A self-professed killer, he presents as polite and articulate, if somewhat pompous.”

When the bombing is written about, Alec Carter, “Bluey” Favell and Paul Burmistriw are often simply referred to (as above) by reference to their jobs. Pederick’s bomb erased their individuality, and their lives. On the famously burning hot sands of an Algiers beach, Meursault, the narrator of Camus’s L’Étranger, killed a man he thereafter only ever referred to as “the Arab”. Salusinszky provides brief descriptions of the men who died and their families, but in Tim Anderson’s own self-justifying book, Take Two (1992), the men he was once convicted of murdering are never named, simply indicated as “two council workers and a policeman”. Algerian writer Kamel Daoud’s Goncourt Prize-winning novel Meursault, contre-enquête (available in English as The Meursault Investigation) returns to the murder and gives name, family and identity back to Camus’s Arab. His book is narrated by the dead man’s brother for whom, seventy years later, the brutal moments on that sandy beach are not yet history. Neither is what happened on a Sydney street in February 1978.