Press Escape

by Shaun Carney

  Walking into it for the first time was as close as I would ever get to entering the Daily Planet Building of my imagination. The foyer was not large but it was done out in marble and terrazzo, with brass and dark wood finishes. For security and reception, there was a small and lively older man called Albie, with white wavy hair and metal-rimmed glasses, a member of the Corps of Commissionaires, seated behind a desk. I announced myself and he told me to take a lift to the third floor, where a girl just outside the lifts would advise where to go. On the editorial floor, there was a young woman, probably my age, sitting inside a small marble booth with a window, not unlike the ticketing booths outside old American cinemas. At this time, newspaper offices—like most workplaces—were much more open to the public and it was her job to direct visitors to various parts of the floor. She advised me to head to the end of a long corridor. As I walked past a series of frosted-glass partitions, I could hear typewriter keys being hit with great force. I passed a pair of glass swinging doors bearing large brass handles and the words ‘Reporters’ Room’ in gold leaf. I saw a slightly overweight man in his thirties wearing a crumpled suit throw a small wad of paper sheets held together by a metal clip on to a brown laminate-topped desk before slumping into a chair. I was really here.

  At the end of the corridor was Bill Hoey’s office. His assistant, a gentle-voiced middle-aged lady called Monica, ushered me in to meet Hoey. He was in a light grey suit, craggy-faced, with hooded eyelids behind his glasses. He held up my letter, its cheap, flimsy paper and green writing flapping around above his large green desk protector. I fought back my instinct to cringe.

  ‘You haven’t told me much about yourself here, Shaun. Not much at all. Tell me where you went to school,’ he said.

  I took him through the Kananook and Monterey thing—the whole Frankston experience, really. I was very breezy. He then asked me to tell him about my parents. What did they do? Where did they come from?

  ‘My mother is originally from New South Wales, from a farm in the Hunter region. She went to a one-room school. My father grew up in Clifton Hill and he went to school there, to the Christian Brothers college, went on to be a boilermaker but now he’s a sales rep for the big American company 3M,’ I said. I didn’t realise until later that the Catholic connection would have been a plus; I was told that Hoey was a strong follower of the edicts of Rome.

  ‘Carney. Carney,’ he said a little wistfully. ‘There was a footballer called Carney. He was good. A little wingman.’

  Here, I was shamelessly opportunistic.

  ‘Yes, he’s my uncle. We’re a Carlton family. He went on to be reserves coach under Ron Barassi and is still involved with the club,’ I shot back. It did not matter that this uncle was and would remain a stranger to me.

  ‘Really? Hmmm. Have you read the paper today, Shaun?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Hoey.’

  He asked me what the front page lead story was. I told him. Then he wanted to know what had led the back page. I knew that too. Then we moved on to a quiz about current events. I got all but one of those questions right. He asked me to name the deputy leader of the Victorian ALP.

  ‘Ted Fordham,’ I said.

  ‘No, it’s Bob Fordham,’ he said.

  I had a comeback. ‘Oh, that’s right, Ted Fordham played for Essendon.’

  He stared at me from behind heavy upper eyelids. ‘Yehhhs, that’s right. Do you read the other papers?’

  ‘Yes, I read The Herald and The Age,’ I replied. I was on a roll. ‘I’ve been reading the extracts from Graham Freudenberg’s book. I thought they’d be more revealing.’ Here I was simply trafficking in received wisdom, which is the thing I’ve come to detest most in journalism, but it worked for me here. Freudenberg had long been Gough Whitlam’s speechwriter—a brilliant one—and extracts from his book A Certain Grandeur, about Whitlam, had recently appeared in The Age. Like all of Freudenberg’s books it was very good but I was just channelling some of the downbeat references to it that I’d read in the papers. ‘Did you think that, Mr Hoey?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, I was a bit disappointed,’ he said. ‘He worked here, you know. Interesting fellow. Larger than life. What were the results of the poll on uranium mining in this morning’s Sun, Shaun?’

  I recited them and then said: ‘I found them a bit surprising and thought they were run a bit far back in the paper. Don’t you think that story could have got a better run?’

  Again, he paused. ‘Yes I do, as a matter of fact.’

  All that was left was for me to ask him about his responsibilities within the company and to remark that it sounded like a fascinating, important job, and the interview was over. We shook hands, he undertook to be in touch, and I walked out. I looked to my left and saw a nervous high school kid sitting in a chair waiting to go in after me, then looked to my right, said ‘Thank you, Monica. Goodbye’, (I used her name just in case she might have some influence on the selection process) and took off down the corridor, past the reporters’ room, the girl in the booth and Albie in the foyer and into Flinders Street. I never worried about whether I would get a cadetship after that; I simply took it as read because I had prepared myself for that single interview every day for close on eight years. There was nothing more that I could have done and not a single thing had gone wrong.

  There was a call back interview a month later, this time with the editor-in-chief Lyle Turnbull and former Herald editor Cec Wallace joining Hoey. I don’t recall them saying anything, just a back and forth between Hoey and me, again a quiz about the news. He would shoot a name at me and I would have to say who that person was and what they were doing. I felt completely at home in this environment and was now even more certain that I would succeed. I was too inexperienced, too immature, too self-centred to understand how life-defining this experience was. I should have appreciated it, been humbled by it. I knew that a stroke of good fortune was imminent but I did not comprehend just how gigantic it was. I simply took the train back to the recently opened Kananook Station, which was closer to my home than the Frankston Station, and returned to my dinky room with its stacks of vinyl albums and Golden Breed t-shirts and pinwale cord trousers and desert boots and bottles of beer stacked under the bed and took it all for granted. I went off with my accounting student girlfriend in my 1973 Valiant wagon for a camping holiday in Merimbula, burned through what little money I had, sought no job of any description and counted on the life in journalism to kick in soon enough. And it did. Bill Hoey called on a Thursday night in January to tell me I had a job on The Herald, the single graduate cadet position on the paper, starting on Monday. Could I come in to see him at three tomorrow afternoon just to tidy a few things up?

  12

  ROLLING DEADLINES

  AS I ENTERED the Herald building the following afternoon, I knew I was now part of what went on here. This was the first moment that I felt daunted. This was for real. Hoey handed me a copy of the company’s style book, the bible that set out the rules for the use of acronyms and short forms and honorifics and anything else you could think of that might ever be included in a newspaper, and told me to read it before presenting for work. He explained that he had me slated for The Sun, his old paper, but among the other cadets were two young fellows, John Silvester and Michael Millett, who were the sons of policemen. They were both originally allotted to The Herald but it was feared there might be competition between the two, the fathers could get involved and it could get messy, so I was swapped with Silvester. He also told me that as a graduate I would have to be a cadet for only one year before being graded, as long as I attended weekly shorthand classes. I didn’t have to meet any speed requirement, unlike the school leavers, who had three or four years to get to 120 words per minute; I just had to show up.

  ‘We’ve had a lot of trouble with graduates in the past,’ he said. ‘They expect something more, get disillusioned and leave.’

  I assured him that wouldn’t happen with me. I wouldn’t have cared if they sent me down to the loading doc
k to clean out the boot of an executive’s company car (which during the year actually did happen once). He told me I would be spending most of the year on the paper’s premier source of news, police rounds, working under one of the nation’s ‘top operators’, Ron Connelly, who was also a ‘gun’. The idea was to ‘hothouse’ me—to work me so hard and under such pressure each day that I couldn’t afford to be pretentious. The Herald was an afternoon broadsheet paper, publishing four editions Monday to Friday and three on a Saturday. As each day proceeded, the paper’s news, sport and finance pages would be remade so that by the time the final edition was produced, only a small portion of the first edition remained. The names of the editions and their printing times varied as the paper tried—and failed—to maintain its circulation. Roughly, there was a City edition that came out a bit before noon, a Final edition that ran off the presses around 1 p.m., the Final Extra about 2 and the Final Extra–Late Prices a bit after 3. It was still possible to get late-breaking news into a column of white space on the back page until 4 p.m. Printed in red, this was branded as a ‘Stop Press’ but internally was referred to as a ‘fudge’ for reasons I never discovered. It was important for me to know all this because police rounds was where most of the late-breaking or rolling news came from. But first I would have to spend a week or two in the office getting familiarised with the paper.

  On the Monday, I turned up as arranged at 9 a.m., well after the usual start time of 7.30 (which later that year was brought forward to 7), and presented myself at Hoey’s office. As I waited to see him, a girl of seventeen walked in carrying a tray laden with cups and a teapot. Monica did the introductions: ‘Caroline, this is Shaun, one of the new cadets. Shaun, this is Caroline, one of the new copy girls.’ Caroline got the information she was looking for from Monica and walked out with her tray. Monica asked me if I followed the football and I said I did.

  ‘Well, Caroline’s father is the president of Richmond, Ian Wilson. You might have read about him.’ I realised I was not at Monterey High any more.

  Hoey walked out and took me to a desk in the newsroom just in front of a low-rise corral that housed the chief of staff, the spot for his deputy (known as the sidecar) and the all-important chief of staff’s secretary, an imposing, well-spoken lady called Bea Warren. There were some young blokes sitting around the desk. One of them was a cadet of two years experience, Frank McGuire. Two others were new boys like me: Mark Gillies and the Millett fellow I’d been told about. It’s worth noting here that John Silvester went on to become a celebrated crime reporter and Australian Journalist of the Year, Mick Millett was Tokyo correspondent for Fairfax and deputy editor of The Sydney Morning Herald before going on to a senior position with the ABC, Mark Gillies has had a storied career in Melbourne television news, Frank McGuire won a Walkley Award with the ABC and formed a highly successful media business with his kid brother Eddie before becoming the Labor member for the state seat of Broadmeadows in 2011, and Caroline Wilson won two Walkleys and a Journalist of the Year gong as a football writer. Caroline’s fellow copy girl that year was Robyn Dixon, later the Moscow correspondent for Fairfax and then the Los Angeles Times. The copy boy starting that day was Shane Green, who went on to a host of senior positions at The Age, including a stint in Tokyo. Bill Hoey had an eye for journalistic talent. The sad thing was that the vast bulk of the people to whom he gave entry into journalism did their best work elsewhere.

  Frank McGuire showed us how to do the services shift, which involved a range of dogsbody tasks, from walking four long blocks to the Harbour Trust to collect the shipping times, to monitoring and distributing a précis of the key radio bulletins to senior editorial staff, to checking the program schedules of the local radio stations for any late changes. That was my first ‘story’ on that first day: calling up 3UZ, where a helpful staff member told me that a disc jockey was sick and someone else would be doing his afternoon shift the next day. I was shown how to type up the amendment and was chuffed to see the words appear in the paper in the City edition late the following morning.

  On my second day, I was sent to police rounds to meet my new colleagues, a familiarisation meeting before joining full-time a few weeks down the track. There were three graded journalists assigned to the round: Connelly, a forty-year-old one-time apprentice jockey from New Zealand; John Knewstub, mid-twenties, who’d done his cadetship at The Herald; and Bill Cannon, not much older than me, who did the 5 a.m. shift. It was Bill’s job to try to get an early start on any breaking story or to clean up on something that had happened overnight. On Saturdays, a cadet who had already marked himself out as a high-flyer, Michael Venus, did the early shift.

  I was shocked and relieved by what I saw when I entered the press room shared by The Herald and The Sun in a solid Victorian building at police headquarters in Russell Street. I suppose I’d just assumed that people who wrote for a living would be more like the tutors and lecturers I’d encountered at university—moderate, a bit learned, white collar, middle class. I wasn’t really like that—my Australian accent was twangy and broad, I drank beer for recreation, worked on my car at the weekends; I was an outer suburban bogan before the term came into use—but I figured they might be. It was not something I wanted them to be; it was simply my assumption. Back then, there were no journalism schools to speak of and no requirement, as there is now, for prospective trainees to produce a portfolio of published work at their first interviews. Unless they were the products of the industry’s mild tendency towards nepotism, cadets entered the job cold, with no exposure to professional journalism or journalists. What a joy it was then, to see the way that my new police rounds colleagues conducted themselves. They looked for ‘yarns’ and ‘tales’. A victim of crime would be referred to as ‘some poor fuckin’ bloke’. A burglar who broke into a shop and stole a couple of pairs of jeans but missed the day’s takings was a ‘stupid cunt’. The target of an assault in a lover’s triangle was, in the parlance of the round, ‘Roger the lodger’. A sentence in any conversation was not complete unless ‘fuckin’’ was placed in it at least once. The feeling in the room bordered on riotous. There was, understandably, an adherence to gallows humour as a defence mechanism against the awfulness of the job. At police rounds, most of the time you were covering terrible things—shootings, assaults, accidents, fires, armed robberies—and interviewing people who had either experienced something awful or had witnessed it. Without these events, you didn’t have a job.

  I was excited by the work. Unlike the other cadets, everything I wrote ran in the paper because police rounds was the primo source of news, but I found writing the stories tough. I couldn’t work out a line of communication and even when following the templates set down by generations of previous reporters who followed the paper’s style, my early stuff still came out as a jumble. Then one evening I watched my father in his recliner reading the paper—I would not move out of home until I was sent to the Canberra bureau the next year—and I reflected on how typical he was as a newspaper reader. He went to school until he was fifteen, had a trade, liked papers and worked through them methodically. He would often read out an item he found interesting. I’d seen him going through newspapers thousands of times by then. I knew how to keep him interested. Why not make him my imaginary reader every time I wrote, like I was telling him a story? I tried it the next day and writing seemed easy after that. I rarely got stuck again. This remained my modus operandi for decades to come. I wrote for the qualified welder in his recliner with his smoker’s stand within arm’s reach.

  After I’d been at the Russell Street press room for a couple of months, John Knewstub passed on a piece of police rounds wisdom that had been bestowed upon him by a former roundsman. ‘You know you’re a police roundsman,’ he told me, ‘when you see a plane flying above and you say “Crash, you bastard, crash”.’ This no doubt looks terrible on the page but in the daily context of police rounds back then—and, I’d suggest even now, when sentiment and a sense of tragedy sit much closer to the for
efront of our perspective of events in the media and in our lives—it made perfect sense. If disasters happened, you were there to inform the public about them. What intrigued me most, what impressed me most, was that despite the loose language and the offhand form of inter-office communication (for example, ‘Have you been told?’ ‘Told what?’ ‘To get fucked.’), and the appalling conditions of the room, with grubby phones, bashed-in desks, assorted semi-functioning typewriters and a smelly hopper that I had to sit next to perpetually filled with pizza boxes, newspapers and empty beer cans, everyone was highly professional. They were there to write as many stories as possible and for those stories to get the biggest possible run. Even the smallest item—a car hitting a power pole on a suburban main road, say—would be covered on the basis that ‘a few lines is a few lines’. And when something happened, there was an eruption of activity. Either the full-time driver who took us to crime scenes and interviews in a car used exclusively by the police rounds crew would be pressed into service or we would hit the phones. The emphasis was on a quick turnaround with every story. With editions cascading through the day, it was crucial to gather up everything you could find in a short space of time, work out the first paragraph, and file. In the main newsroom, to file, you were required to put together two small sheets of cheap white paper separated by a sheet of carbon paper and type out your story, two sentences per sheet, then run the lot in two bundles to small wire baskets on the corner of the sub-editors’ table. If you were working out of the office—at police rounds or at the Trades Hall or the Arbitration Commission or at state parliament—you had to call your story through to the phone room, a long space just near the sub-editors in which half a dozen women sat with headsets connected to telephones and typed as you recited your story. If you worked at police rounds, you needed two things: twenty cents in your pocket at all times so that if you went to a job you could use a public phone in order to call your story through; and the ability to write a story off the top of your head. That is, to dictate it without writing anything. There was no time to think about it because the day was just one rolling deadline, which is what all news organisations now deal with in the digital age. Back then, this problem was confined to afternoon papers, which were being cruelled by the rising popularity of television news, problems with timely delivery caused by the extension of the suburban sprawl and the decline in public transport usage.