Old Days, Old Ways

by Alex Nicol

  We said we’d do their interview in the sheep yards, filming mother and daughter at work. However, first we needed to get the sheep in. We did a quick mustering job with the camera car on the closest mob, but as we were pushing them into the yards, I could see that the flies had been well and truly busy. They were in a bad way.

  The director and I had a quick briefing. He started work shooting the two women drafting, pushing sheep about, the sort of cutaway action he’d need for the film. I started work on the sheep with a pair of dagging shears and fly dressing we found in the shed. It was a long day.

  I’ve always had the greatest of admiration for the women who’ve partnered their husbands on the family farm, and I’ve seen the impact that tough times have had on some. I remember one who’d become obsessed with the weather forecast. She knew the times that ABC regional stations would broadcast their forecasts, and she’d turn from station to station, from South Australia across to the east, praying for the first sign of a break.

  Here, we had a cultured lady who’d never worked on the land and who’d been living a relatively comfortable life in Adelaide. She and her daughter were way out of their depth. Their interviews showed two people helpless in a storm of circumstances. Not even the little things were working.

  The place needed water pumped up from the Darling for stock and domestic water, and one of the locals was charging her $10 a week to come and start the pump. Before we left, she at least knew how to prime a pump.

  The other place was away from the river—so far away that we’d had to abandon the luxury of the pub and camp out. It was a rough block and the prolonged drought showed just how hard this country could be. Windmills provided the stock water but, as I remember it, one of them was out of action. That meant part of the block was out of action and any feed there was useless. Dad was working to get the mill going, and that left the boy to do the stock work. He was about ten or eleven.

  Here was a family on the edge. They were hanging on, but just. An older brother was away in a hostel so that he could attend school. Mum was teaching his young sibling by correspondence, and she and Dad grieved that he was not getting the same chance as his brother.

  He was a solemn little boy. We filmed his mother teaching him in their home, a larger version of the meat-safe rooms we’d been enjoying at the pub. Watching him struggle through the reading lessons was a truly surreal experience—half an hour earlier, he’d showed us how to cannibalise an old mustering bike for the part he needed to keep his own bike going. An old head on young shoulders.

  Dad shot roos at night, selling them to the meatworks. We’d been out with him, and even here things were tight: one shot, one roo—and always the biggest in the mob. We didn’t see him miss once, and the brass was carefully collected after every shot. He reloaded every shell.

  We finished filming for the day and were mucking about, waiting for our evening meal to cook. We’d camped just a little way away from the homestead and were playing French cricket: four grown men with a stick and a ball made of rolled-up sticky tape. Four of us fooling around and shouting over nothing.

  I got the feeling we were being watched. Sure enough, up the hill a bit was a mill beside the house, and the little boy had climbed halfway up the mill and was watching us solemnly. It struck me that he had no idea what we were doing.

  TROUBLES AT THE CHOOK HOUSE

  A very well known identity from the Western District of Victoria was president of the local race club. The annual meeting was coming up and the track needed some TLC. They’d let things slide, and so, at the last committee meeting before race day, he gave all and sundry a monumental ‘pull through’.

  ‘There’ll be a working bee next weekend,’ he began. ‘We start at seven-thirty Saturday morning, and I’ll accept no excuses. You’ll all be there, and you’ll be there on the dot.’

  All committee members managed to present themselves at the agreed time, but their president was absent. When his car arrived sometime after smoko, it attracted a crowd.

  ‘Where have you been? It’d better be good.’

  It was.

  ‘There’s been a fox getting at me chooks night after night, and I’d just about had enough of him. I’ve had the shotgun propped up against the back door, expecting him to come back, and last night the dog camp goes up and there’s hell to pay in the chookyard. He’s back again.

  ‘I hop out of bed, grab the gun and me torch, and race down to the chook pen. I’m crouched over inside, bent double. I’ve got both barrels cocked, looking for the bastard, and I see something move in the corner of the shed. I swing the light and the gun around, and as I did, Ben, our old labrador, stuck his warm, wet nose on me bare arse.

  ‘I’ve been plucking fucken chooks—what do you think I’ve been doing?’

  ALL WAYS ON SUNDAY

  It was Neil Inall’s brainchild. This Day Tonight, the ground-breaking television current-affairs program, was just over a year old, and Neil, champion as always of rural Australia, was concerned that ‘the bush isn’t getting any coverage’. The ABC’s Rural Department ‘owned’ a half-hour segment in the mishmash of programs that made up Sunday morning programming on the third network, the programs serving regional Australia. Nothing much had ever been done with this spot. It was filled on a haphazard basis with whatever ‘colour’ stories might be available. Neil’s scheme was to use this half-hour for current-affairs material generated by rural reporters, serving the regions all around Australia. It was a brave idea.

  I was his trainee, and we discussed the scheme. We decided to put a pilot program together and get a reaction from head office. We didn’t call on any other rural reporters, but scoured the extensive 2CR region for the sort of stories we imagined the new program might carry. As I remember it, we had three or four ‘newsy’ interviews, tightly edited after the style of the radio current-affairs program AM, and a nice human-interest story. We still didn’t have a name for the show, but the pilot went off to Sydney for a reaction.

  Graham White was enthusiastic, and much more adventurous than we’d been. ‘Sunday morning radio in the regions is without any coherent form,’ he argued. ‘Let’s take it over and program from 6.30 a.m. to 10 a.m., and broadcast right across the national regional network.’

  That was big-picture thinking. The name for our new program was debated, and All Ways on Sunday—to denote the idea of distance and travel—was decided. Certainly not Always on Sunday—there was no guarantee that the show would last any time at all.

  In retrospect, it’s surprising that senior management gave the project their approval. The Rural Department was known inside Aunty as ‘the rural mafia’, and this surely was a bold attempt to boost its fiefdom. But All Ways on Sunday was blessed from on high, and its broadcast date set.

  Now there was the nuts-and-bolts business of organising reporters, selecting a producer, and deciding, most importantly, who would present the program. That someone must have a profile and be able to meld the combination of light entertainment and serious reporting envisaged for the program. But that was for someone else to worry about. Neil and I returned to Orange, our job done.

  The Rural Department had a stable of reporters stationed in every region across the country. They were specialists. They knew the ins and outs of the farming industries operating in their regions. They were skilled in the business of interviewing, but none of them—none of us—had any skills in producing or presenting what would, in effect, be a light entertainment program. Specialist skills would need to be brought in. A high-profile presenter was duly recruited and contracted to host All Ways on Sunday.

  In Orange, Neil and I were hard at work looking for the stories from our region that would air in the first program. Some two weeks before it was to go to air, Graham rang me with the news that the selected presenter had resigned, and I would be producing and presenting All Ways on Sunday. I thought I was terrified then, but I had no idea of what terror meant.

  Thinking back, my guess is that the Chosen
One took one look at the resources he would have for the program and decided it just wouldn’t work. The material for the program would have to come from the nation’s rural reporters. They already had full-time jobs, and any contribution they made would probably be an afterthought. There was a budget to pay freelance contributors—from memory, $30 a week, which was enough at the time to buy three contributed stories for each program. But where was the network of freelance reporters in regional Australia? And who would pull this network together? Who would produce the show?

  It would be very wrong to describe All Ways on Sunday as a one-man show. At its heart were the talents of rural reporters scattered all over the country—without them and their input, there would have been no program—but in the studio whoever presented the program would be working alone and with minimal resources. They would be the producer, the editor, the scriptwriter and the presenter, and they’d have a store of perhaps a dozen seven-inch cans of recording tape. These would need to be recycled week after week. I suspect no one at that stage had any idea of the value of the material that the program would collect.

  The program would be broadcast from Sydney. I arrived and took up what proved to be quasi-permanent residence in a Kings Cross hotel, in order to be as close as possible to the ABC studios. I’d only seen those studios briefly, during my initial employment interview and during a short formal training session. I’d sat in and watched The Country Hour go to air. So that’s how a big studio operates …

  Music would make up about 65 per cent of the program. I knew nothing about music. ‘That will be programmed for you,’ I was told. I asked by whom, and was told that some nameless women in the record library would do the job. In just about the smartest thing I’ve ever done, I asked if I could meet them and perhaps publicly acknowledge them during the program. They were delighted and took me to their hearts. I owe them. But I had never put a record to air and had no idea of how to ‘cue’ a piece of music—an art to be mastered.

  The rural reporters rose to the occasion magnificently. Stories came in from all over the country. I would have some choice material for the first program, so I got down to something I knew something about: editing and scripting.

  I was whisked away to be professionally photographed—in Hyde Park, which was the most ‘rural’ setting the photographer could find. The ABC’s Publicity Department set about getting me known all over the country. A feeling of inevitability settled on me. This thing was really going to happen.

  In its simplest form, a radio program is a gigantic mental arithmetic problem. It will start at a precise time and it will terminate at a precise time. In between, there will be news broadcasts. They will begin at precise times and conclude less precisely. Your problem for today is to take all your scripted pieces, and all the interviews you plan to use, and all the pieces of music that have been programmed for you, and fit this jigsaw into the precise time allowed. The precise time for All Ways on Sunday was three and a half hours.

  I’d had some experience in amateur theatre; I wasn’t a bad actor. I decided I’d treat the program as a piece of theatre, so the thing to do was to rehearse. The night before the first program went to air, I sat in a dark studio just off William Street and rehearsed and rehearsed. I ran through the whole program three times. The curtain would go up at six-thirty the next morning.

  The ABC studios were, in effect, a radio factory. Three studios sat side by side. One broadcast to the first network (metropolitan Sydney, in this case), the second broadcast to the second network (the serious specialist programs that were broadcast nationally), and I sat lonely in the third studio, broadcasting to people hundreds of miles away from the street outside. Watching over us was the studio supervisor, whose task was to make sure the whole lot worked. Who knows what he thought of me?

  It’s bad enough to be bad. It’s much worse to know that you’re bad, and I knew I was terrible. Apart from anything else, I failed my mental arithmetic. I sat helpless as ten o’clock loomed and a seamless glide into the national news was required. The piece of music I was playing had minutes to run, and I had no idea what to do.

  The studio supervisor strode in, reached across my shoulder, called the time and faded down the music. Every muscle in his body was screaming: ‘Who let this amateur into my studio?’ Like the thief in the night, I picked up my belongings and scurried away.

  I expected to be sacked, but I wasn’t. I went through the torture again the following week, and again the week after that. Then Graham White took me to meet the network controller, who produced a mailbag full of letters, which he tipped onto his desk in a pile. The network controller told me that these were the letters of complaint—about me and the program—that had arrived to date. But the ABC would not be terminating me or the program. He was sure that things would improve in time.

  I pleaded with Graham for a producer, someone who could help me straighten out this mess. At first no one was available; but then came a gift from the gods: a light entertainment producer was about to retire. It was three weeks before his big day. He could perhaps help.

  He had produced the big BBC light entertainment stars. You may never have heard of Dick Bentley or Jimmy Edwards or Joy Nichols, but believe me, they were stars and he’d produced them. ‘You’re in uncharted waters,’ he told me. ‘You used to be a reporter, expert in your field. This is light entertainment, and here everybody is an expert.’

  Radio works with just the one energy source: sound. He told me that most people don’t ‘listen’ to radio, they ‘hear’ it; if I wanted people to listen to something, I’d have to learn how to lead them into doing that.

  ‘Treat the whole program as a piece of music,’ he told me. ‘Make sure that the sound patterns are changing and keeping people interested.’ In a couple of weeks he taught me the difference between the energy generated by the human voice and a piece of music. More than that, different pieces of music generate different levels of energy. A program must be as carefully balanced as a symphony.

  Graham White (left) and Neil Inall, the driving forces behind All Ways on Sunday. No one better understood the value of radio to regional Australia.

  He sat outside my studio in the control booth for three weeks. He relaxed and read the paper and occasionally opened the intercom to coax, correct, praise or scold. He saved me and the program—and, to my shame, I can’t remember his name.

  These days, every regional talk/music program has a producer, someone who does the nuts-and-bolts work of cueing taped interviews or contacting live interviewees. They answer the phone and basically allow the presenter to concentrate on the job of presenting.

  After those initial three weeks, I never had a producer sit with the program. The most difficult task for any presenter is to ‘hear’ the sound of the program they’re presenting, to keep that sound in their head and to ‘play’ the program like a musical instrument. I would have to do it without help.

  I needed to develop a technique that would allow one person working alone in the studio to continually select and cue music for presentation, while putting to air the interviews and stories, which were the heart of the program. The solution was to complete the editing of the chosen stories during the week, and decide on the time at which each would be presented. Then each story would be transferred in turn to a master tape. This simplified the business of cueing the stories to go to air. Sadly, at the end of each program the master tape was erased, ready for use again the next week. Nothing was kept.

  Things were getting better, but I was unhappy. Each week I sat in a studio in Sydney and broadcast to people who were hundreds of miles away. I wasn’t in touch with them. ‘Please, can we do the program from a regional studio?’ I begged. ‘It can be anywhere, but somewhere that I know the people outside in the street might be listening.’

  The idea was preposterous. Broadcast a national program from somewhere in the bush!

  As it turned out, there was no technical reason why the program couldn’t be broadcast from anywhere.
In future years it would be broadcast from a commercial radio station in Alice Springs, before the ABC had a presence there, and even from a caravan promoted by a cigarette company, the Rothmans Special Event Van—a big caravan fitted with microphone, tape recorders, turntables and teleprinter. And the regional ABC stations all over the country that hosted me gave the program its unique flavour. Yes, we could take the program bush.

  The proviso was that a PMG technician should always be on hand, in case the landline connecting whichever studio I was broadcasting from to the nearest capital city studio failed. What exactly that technician would or could do in that event was unclear, but I was always grateful of their presence.

  One regular who sat with me when I broadcast from Wagga used to moonlight as a waiter at the local leagues club, and invariably brought along prawns for breakfast. In Orange, Alan Hatswell—calm, unflappable Alan—did save the day one morning when the lock on the front door to the studio collapsed, denying all access. Alan returned from a trip to the depot with a long ladder over his shoulder and we climbed in through a second-storey window.

  All Ways on Sunday was broadcast from some strange places, but the trips back to the bush gave it its flavour. There were no more mailbags of complaints.

  GIVE ME A HEAD OF …

  I was beginning to hate Sydney. I didn’t recognise the people in the street and the sounds were all wrong. How was I supposed to connect with them? I was sick of the Kings Cross hotel, and I’d long since got over my initial gawking at the oddities crossing my path in the Cross. I was missing my wife and the kids. I wanted to go home. Then Harry M. Miller saved the day—almost. He brought Hair to town.

  Hair was rock and roll, sex and drugs all wrapped up in a slick two-and-a-half-hour show, and Sydney couldn’t get enough of it. Diana wanted to see it, needed to see it, would see it. ‘Go and get tickets,’ I was told.