There were only three full-time special writers on the Post and I was the youngest of them and the only one who worked in the reporters’ room – Gavin Turley,7 who was young, too, but several years older than I, had an exceptional analytical mind and as he wrote second editorials as well as feature articles, and book reviews as well, he worked in a little room that was an annexe to the editor’s office: and ‘Gunner’ Bannister was a crusty old man in his sixties with a room of his own from which he turned out a turgid and interminable stream of articles about pioneer families, for he was a dedicated snob, and was spurred by a fanatical desire to make of the State of Victoria, because it had had no convict settlement, the ‘superior’ and aristocratic territory of the Commonwealth. He saw Melbourne as a kind of better Boston, spiritually ruled by a social aristocracy of antipodean Lodges and Cabots, who had mansions in Toorak and rich homesteads in the Western District, which his articles would delineate in much the same terms as modern guide-books might describe the stately homes and palaces of England. He truly believed that there was a racial distinction between the inhabitants of Melbourne and the people of Sydney or of Tasmania, whom he still saw as branded with the marks of manacles and leg-irons. Gunner Bannister also wrote ceremonial odes and sonnets for special occasions, and he was the author of a Saturday column which was erudite, immensely dull, and largely written in bad verse, of which he was a masterly exponent. Eventually he, too, died in his swivel chair, staring fixedly down at a half-finished parody of Keats, but in his case his death was quickly detected because a copy-boy distributing proofs observed that the old man was not twitching. (At the time of Mr Farnsworth’s death the very same copyboy had continued delivering proofs to the chief sub’s spike all through the afternoon without suspecting anything, so perhaps he had finally become suspicious of immobility.)
At any rate, being the youngest of the special writers, and the one most vulnerably placed, it was I who had to bear the brunt of the staff jealousies. My success at the Morning Post, although in a technical sense it had come easily, had not been achieved without certain personal frictions. The news reporters were always inclined to resent the special writers, and in my case there were some of the younger reporters who quite openly talked of personal favouritism. There was, admittedly, a certain validity in their charges, for Bernard Brewster had by this time become editor-in-chief, and as he continued to regard me as his particular protégé, this meant that rather special attention was paid to my progress. Certainly promotions seemed to come more easily for me than for the others, but I think what rankled with them more than anything was that I got an utterly disproportionate share of the choice assignments.
All the special shipping assignments naturally fell to me, and these were often glamorous and exciting jobs, like the annual cruise of the Government lighthouse-tender to the isolated lighthouses around the coast, or a foray into the Antarctic with a Norwegian whaling fleet, or the laying of a new submarine cable across the Tasman Sea, or naval manoeuvres, or a hydrographic survey, or a ‘race’ in ballast between two old square-rigged windjammers from Melbourne to Spencer Gulf. But Mr Brewster also insisted more and more that I should handle the ‘atmosphere’ or ‘colour’ pieces on big general stories, often with a byline, and this was not always well received in the reporters’ room.
There was a row about it one day between Brewster and Curtis Condon, who was the chief-of-staff and who detested me. Gavin Turley, who heard it all from his adjacent room, told me about it later.
‘He’s superficial … he’s always skating on thin ice!’ Condon stormed. ‘You simply cannot trust his facts, he just dabs things in to make the picture seem complete! He’s never reliable!’
‘Whether he is reliable or not, Mr Condon, he happens to be the best descriptive writer you have on your staff,’ Mr Brewster retorted. ‘The only evocative writer you have, Mr Condon. He can make you see a thing. You read his piece and you are there, Mr Condon. He has this trick of making you see what is happening, or what has happened. You feel it. You smell it. Sometimes you can touch it, Mr Condon. You’re not suggesting, surely, that this extraordinary knack he has for evoking the very essence of a thing is valueless?’
‘I’m suggesting that one of these days he’ll go too far,’ said Condon coldly.
‘Indeed yes, he may go a great deal farther than either you or I can imagine.’
‘That isn’t what I meant.’
‘No, but it is what I meant. If you are worried about his facts, Mr Condon, send a hack along with him to jot down the corrective figures and statistics. But let young Meredith continue to supply us with the atmosphere and the colour and the feeling of things. He has attributes not at all common in this game of ours. I do intend to cultivate these attributes, Mr Condon.’
And since Mr Brewster was, after all, the editor-in-chief there was nothing very much that Condon could do, except to bide his time and to nurture the deep personal animosity he felt for me.
Anzac Day was always one of the big ‘colour pieces’ that fell to me after this, and this was one of the emotional set-pieces that could always move me and embarrass me and upset me, and even wound me in some queer way, and to this day whenever I think of it I can smell eucalyptus and tea-urns and salmon-sandwiches and the smell of beer and tobacco smoke at battalion reunions, and I can hear thousands and thousands of voices singing Kipling’s ‘Recessional’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, and a metallic amplified voice intoning to acres of hushed figures the last verse of Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’, and the school children with their little square flags chanting:
On the twenty-fifth of April, far across the sea,
Our brave Australian soldiers stormed Gallipoli…
And all this is tied up with the dawn service at the Shrine of Remembrance, and then the great public march down along Swanston Street and across the bridge, and it was always, for me, a day of mixed feelings, but whatever I felt about it would have to be buried away in the stipulated chauvinisms of the story. Dad and Bert would always be there marching along in their old uniforms, which looked very shabby and far too small for them, with their big medals clinking on their chests, Dad behind the purple colour-patch of the engineers, and Bert with his old infantry battalion; and Paul Klein was a regular marcher, too, with the handful of veterans who had warred against the German Pacific Colonies, in a bowler hat with miniatures pinned to his navy-blue suit and carrying kid gloves, limping along as jauntily as ever and waving to me with his cane; and sometimes my mother would be in the parade, too. She would always appear in a thunder of hand clapping, because she would march with the little group of nurses and VADs who would push along, in wheel-beds and invalid-chairs, some of the hospital patients from Caulfield, and Mother always looked very small and round to me, with her long veils blowing and her medals bright on her starched bosom, and blinking around behind her spectacles as if she was not at all sure what was happening.
When any of the people who knew me came along towards the flag-draped saluting-post they would all begin to twist their heads this way and that looking for the press-box to catch a glimpse of me sitting up there among the generals and the admirals and politicians and the city dignitaries, wearing my brown pork-pie hat and a red paper Flanders poppy in my buttonhole. If they caught my eye they would call and wave, and then pull themselves together in time for the ‘Eyes left!’ of the salute, but after they had marched on they would nudge those near them in the ranks, and they, too, would turn to try to catch a glimpse of me.
I was always grateful that Mother seemed too bewildered by everything that was happening ever to do this.
Curtis Condon was a quick-witted, formidable, irritable, intelligent man approaching his forties, with the sort of face that never looked as if it had been young. He was a good newspaperman and a frustrated writer – which is a bad combination – and he liked to consider himself a martinet. His role in the Literary Staff was an important one, for he was the executive go-between linking the management, the ed
itor, and the sub-editors with the working journalists of the organization. He marked out the daily duty-book, decided assignments, forced cadets into shorthand tests, laboured points of discipline, constantly contested overtime claims, and believed in the sanctity of the Morning Post as if it were the only true and established religion, and he, Curt Condon, its high-priest. He was an old public schools man with a good University degree (it was said that he had failed by a hair’s-breadth for a Rhodes scholarship), and I am pretty sure that his dislike for me began as a resentment that I was the first to have insinuated myself into the sacred precincts of the Morning Post’s Literary Staff with virtually no education at all. (Thank heaven, neither he nor anybody else ever discovered about that Intermediate Certificate!) I think he genuinely believed that I represented a lowering of standards which in the long run could only bring harm to the newspaper and an undermining of all the traditions he believed in. And, in a way, his fears were perfectly justified.
Condon’s was a systematic and unrelenting chastening, and always designed to make me feel slightly persona non grata. It was not that I was to be made to feel actually objectionable; only that I was constantly and subtly to be reminded of my social and intellectual inferiority. If he ever encountered me in the street it was inevitable that that afternoon I would be summoned to his glassed-in box to be privately reprimanded. ‘Post men don’t slouch along the public thoroughfares, Meredith, with a cigarette drooling idiotically from their lips!’ he would inform me contemptuously, or: ‘A gentleman, Meredith, does not loiter around street corners with his hands in his pockets. Post reporters are presumed to be gentlemen!’ Or: ‘Do try to wear your hat like a Post man, Meredith, not like some cheapjack larrikin from Collingwood who doesn’t know any better!’ I knew that his charges were invented, and no more than expressions of a violent personal antipathy, but there was never anything I could say in rebuttal.
He had another little trick of writing out my instructions for some involved assignment, or querying some of my copy in proof, in his own advanced and faultless shorthand, knowing full well that I hardly understood even the most elementary Pitman’s. Sometimes he would leave memoranda in my pigeon-hole with the point of the message written in Latin, so that I would have to try to look it up or be obliged to ask somebody to explain the meaning of it. But these, after all, were his petty goadings.
Our mutual enmity moved to a different plane on the night the River Tamar foundered.
She was a little coastal freighter of around 1000 tons that generally traded between Melbourne and Coff’s Harbour, and she went down somewhere in Bass Strait on the first day of a tempest which eventually caused immense damage throughout Victoria. I had just been to the Marine Board offices to get the crew list, and in the lift going up to the third floor some of the night subs were just coming on duty and one of them said to me, ‘What’s the dope on that missing freighter?’
‘She’s gone down; she’s lost,’ I said. ‘The Marine Board’s just officially posted her.’
‘Any survivors?’ he asked.
‘No. Well, the posting is lost with all hands. Twenty-one including the captain.’
‘Great story!’ he said approvingly. ‘We’ve got a cable-page lead then.’ And, as an afterthought: ‘Bad luck for those poor beggars, though. Twenty-one of them, eh? Heaven help the sailors on a night like this.’ They chuckled.
I worked through on the general story until after eleven, piecing the story together by phoning lighthouses and fishing villages and checking with other ships that had battled through the storm, and I had most of the conjecture and the few known facts assembled into a good, coherent story when Condon called me into his box and said, ‘Ah yes, Meredith, you do have the names and home addresses of all the ship’s company?’ I nodded, waiting; he knew I had because the list had already been set and proofs pulled, and one of the proofs was there on the spike right in front of his eyes, and it was distinctive enough because it was set in black and in a box. So I guessed he was up to something. ‘Where do they come from?’ he asked.
‘Williamstown,’ I said. ‘The captain from West Footscray and all the rest of them from Williamstown.’ The River Tamar had been a poor parsimonious little ship, but there were quite a few coasters laid up in those days, and beggars couldn’t be choosers when you were as near the end of the road as the Williamstown slums.
‘Ring for a taxi,’ said Condon crisply, reaching for his pad of pink cab-vouchers. ‘Grab a photographer and get out to Williamstown as fast as you can. I want concise, powerful little interviews with next-of-kin – widows, mothers, relatives, whoever you can get. Tell the photographer I want to run a strip of half-column blocks across five or six columns, with this human interest stuff below.’
I waited a moment or two, and then, ‘I’m sorry, Mr Condon,’ I said quite clearly, ‘but I won’t do it.’
‘You won’t – what?’ He looked at me incredulously.
‘I won’t do it,’ I repeated. ‘You’ll have to get one of the emergency men. I … I’ve put in the lead story, sir, and I think I’ve tied up all the ends. But I’m not going to do this.’
‘Would you regard it as an imposition if I asked why?’ he said sarcastically.
‘No. It’s just that those people don’t know anything about this yet.’
‘Is that your concern? They’ve got to know some time, haven’t they?’
‘Well, it’ll be bad enough for them, anyway, reading about it in the papers tomorrow … because I don’t suppose the Marine Board notifications will get to them until after the papers come out. But I know I’m not going out there in the middle of the night to knock at their doors to get them out of bed in the dark and the rain to tell them that their husbands or their sons or their fathers are dead. Drowned. Out there in Bass Strait in this sort of weather … I – I just couldn’t do it, Mr Condon.’
‘I hope you realize what this attitude of yours implies. This is a direct refusal of duty, and —’
‘But what would I do, Mr Condon? Do you mean I should ask them how they feel about it? These people are very poor, Mr Condon, and they live in a terrible part of Williamstown, the slummiest part, and they’ve had a rotten time already with the Depression, and this’ll be the end for most of them … and I can’t go out and tell them that. It – it just wouldn’t be fair, Mr Condon.’
He looked me up and down as if I were some sort of strange, unpleasant animal, and then deliberately looked past me and called, ‘Strang! Dudley Strang!’ and one of the cadets on emergency came running to the box, and Condon ripped off the taxi-voucher and tore the proof from the spike and shoved them both at Dudley Strang. ‘This is the River Tamar’s crew-list,’ he said snappishly. ‘This is a job for you, since Mr Meredith here seems to have gone queasy on it. You’ll find most of the victims come from Williamstown; the addresses are given there. Get a taxi. Ring Bailey for a photographer. Get out there smartly and bring back warm human interviews with all the next-of-kin you can run to earth. And photographs. Come on, look slippy now!’
‘Yes, Mr Condon,’ said Strang, and bolted.
Condon waited until he had left the reporters’ room and then he turned to me. ‘You know, you’ll never be a newspaperman as long as you live, Meredith,’ he said equably. ‘You just don’t have what it takes, do you? Why don’t you go back to your billboards and your jam labels? That’s where you really belong, Meredith. It is, you know.’
But the morning editions carried my lead and my story, practically word for word as I had written it, and there were no half-column blocks of the bereaved women nor any ‘warm human’ interviews. I heard later that Strang and the photographer were working until one in the morning, getting women out of bed and breaking the grim news to them and popping flashlight bulbs in their twisted faces, but by the time they got back from Williamstown the first edition cable-page was already made up on the stone and old Farnsworth ruled that there was no space for special ‘angles’. So it was all a waste of time, anyway.
> The loss of the little steamer ushered in a very newsy time, for the storm grew in violence over the next few days, and rivers burst their banks and towns were flooded or threatened, and there was chaos everywhere and over most of the State great damage and a quite considerable loss of life. During nearly five days and nights I never got home at all, and in all that time I was able to snatch only a few hours of fitful and uncomfortable sleep underneath a leaking tarpaulin on the floor of an empty goods truck on a flooded railway siding somewhere down in Gippsland. Doing the ‘atmosphere’ on these big news stories was not always a sinecure.
Before this, though, on a long-deserted beach on Phillip Island, on the far side of Seal Rocks, grey and wet under a scudding sky and hissing with the gravelly sting of windblown sand and the harsh rasp of the tossing marram-grass, I ran down the first clues that were found to the loss of the River Tamar. I had been sent to Phillip Island to check, and it was some sort of hunch that took me to this particular stretch of beach, although there was a certain logic, too, because I’d tried to work it out from what was known of the steamer’s course and the prevailing wind and the set of the currents through the Bass Strait islands. Anyway, there at the edge of the wet sand one of the ship’s lifebuoys was lodged in a tangled mat of kelp and bladderwrack and sea lettuce and old tarry slabs of cork. It looked quite fresh and new with the neat red lettering on the white round curve of glossy paint – River Tamar – Melbourne; at least it looked as if it could have saved somebody. This thought stuck in my mind, so that I didn’t feel as elated about the find as I should have, and I remember trudging on along the cheerless, empty beach with a feeling of futility and depression, but past the next ridge of sand-dunes there was quite a lot of driftwood washed up with the storm-wrack. Most of it was sawn hardwood planking, which had probably been the ship’s deck cargo, but among it I found the ship’s clock, still screwed to a piece of smashed rosewood panelling, and stopped at ten-past one, and another lifebuoy and a chicken-coop and what looked like part of the wing of the bridge, and all this did make me excited, and then about sixty or seventy yards farther on I saw something big and dark and soft-looking that was rolling around in the foam on the slope of shingle where the seas would fan out and run back, just a little out of reach of the suck of the surf and the undertow.
My Brother Jack Page 24
