I confess to harbouring a nerdish streak about foreign policy matters, which has kept me occupied now for 25 years. But unlike Australian Defence Minister Richard Marles, who boasts an impressive collection of snow globes drawn from travels around the world, souvenirs and keepsakes are not really my thing.
Or so I thought. Having traipsed here and there as a reporter, think-tanker, university researcher, and intelligence analyst, I’ve evidently picked up a few.
So, for a bit of silly season fun, here’s a sampling I recently discovered whilst unpacking boxes after moving house. The collector’s edition, if you will.
“Analyst Daniel on three day visit to India.”
This was awkward. See, when working for an intelligence agency, the bosses like it best when things are kept on the Q-T. Appearing in newspapers isn’t part of the job description.
It wasn’t my fault, honest.
Arriving in New Delhi for a series of official meetings, the Australian High Commission had arranged for me to see aspiring local politicians. Through we go, past a grimy suburban office with three sets of computers, each displaying a different language on the screen, and out the back to a curtained-off room. An obligatory photo with the guests, as is often the local custom, and then chat, chat, chat.
Next morning, back at my hotel, an envelope is delivered. Inside, three newspapers in three different languages, and this gut-emptying headline.
Mercifully, the “story”, which we had no idea was coming and I’ve since kept in a scrapbook, was simply my biographical note sandwiched together with a few descriptive paragraphs taken from the website of what was then known as the Office of National Assessments. No reporting of the conversation. Not that we talked about any secrets. Honest.
Bookends to America’s unipolar moment
For a long time, every foreign-policy story seemed to begin with “Since the end of the Cold War…”, only to be replaced by “After September 11…” or “Following the invasion of Iraq…” Foreign Policy magazine even took steps to warn would-be writers not to bother submitting if they opened this way.
My chip of the wall comes from a tourist trap in Berlin. Holding it now feels like cultural appropriation, although only Vladimir Putin seems to want to see the wall resurrected.
In 2005, a friend from the Australian Army deployed to Al Muthanna, Iraq. He brought me back a pack of “Most Wanted” cards that had been distributed to US troops with photos to identify and hunt down missing members of Saddam Hussein’s regime.
Timor’s triumph
It cannot be overstated just how unlikely independence for Timor-Leste seemed during the 24 years of Indonesian occupation. Or how little support this prospect found among Canberra officialdom. The Timorese themselves never surrendered hope, despite the awful cost. These stamps commemorated formal independence in 2002.
Hat-trick
The MAGA hat was given to me by a member of the original Clinton team as a wry joke in 2015, but I get more wear out of my Nauru Game Fishing cap that I picked up when covering a riot in the Australian-run asylum seeker detention centre.
Reporters are often given goodie bags at big international summits. The gift of a delightful floral tote bag at the Cook Islands Pacific Islands Forum in 2012 still comes to the beach with me, and was a stark counterpoint to a bright red APEC raincoat that same year in Vladivostok, Russia, although that does come out on fishing trips.
Mumbai Mounty
An earlier India trip saw a different brush with fame, one I’ve written about before and bored a few mates with. You see, the beloved and I got tapped to be extras in a Bollywood film …
Big stars, they promised. Sunny Deol, Priyanka Chopra. Helicopter stunts. But no one mentioned anything about me delivering the opening speech of the movie on behalf of the “Canadian Security Intelligence Service”.
Former Australian diplomat in Delhi and now head of the National Security College, Rory Medcalf, with his unrestrained love of Hindi music, later gave me the cassette tape of the soundtrack, along with the DVD.
