Press Escape

by Shaun Carney

  When I joined The Herald in January 1978, it was selling 432 000 copies a day. By the time I left eight years later, those numbers had halved, with no sign of a sustained upturn. Four years after my departure, the paper was folded into The Sun to create the Herald Sun, a paper that looked like The Sun and landed on doorsteps in the morning, like The Sun. The thing to bear in mind in looking at the career decision I was to make as I approached the modern economy’s worker use-by date of fifty-five is that I had spent my earliest years as a journalist working for a paper that was headed for the knackery because of social and technological changes. As I was moving from round to round in my twenties at The Herald, picking up experience, gathering contacts, trying to get as much of the bad writing and clunky judgement out of my system as I could so that I could arrive at the halfway decent stuff, I knew that my paper had little hope. I saw it losing not only sales but influence. After doing my cadet year at police rounds, I was sent to Canberra, where I spent another year, watching the Fraser Government cruise towards its third and final election victory. I saw how little influence and presence my paper had among politicians and the rest of the media. Afternoon papers just didn’t matter. They were on the way out. When I returned to Melbourne, I was given the arbitration round. That meant operating out of the thirty-ninth floor of Nauru House where the Arbitration Commission was based, covering the commission’s proceedings, including national wage cases. More than half of the workforce then belonged to unions and almost all workers were covered by awards. It was a rewarding, intellectually challenging job that gave me contacts that were still valuable thirty-five years later. Within a couple more years, I moved to the press room at the grand, crumbling bluestone and concrete Victorian Trades Hall Council building in Lygon Street, Carlton to oversee our industrial relations coverage, which meant writing about strikes or the threat of strikes, because strikes were so common then. There were beer strikes, rail strikes, petrol strikes, tram strikes, power strikes, teacher strikes. In a way, it was not that different to police rounds—same grimy surrounds and accoutrements in the press room, same chasing up of people who weren’t happy. I was charged with covering important, far-reaching institutions that are nowhere near as influential now. I experienced that erosion of standing and viability happening gradually to my first paper, and in my job as an industrial reporter I’d seen it up close when it happened to other people in much more brutal and life-changing ways.

  In 1982, the secretary of the metalworkers’ union, John Halfpenny, asked me to spend a day with him as he took me around to half a dozen factories in the middle suburbs where thousands of his members had recently lost their jobs. This was in the depths of the worst downturn since the Great Depression, fifty years earlier. We visited enormous darkened factory spaces, full of machinery with no-one there to operate it. A photographer took some terrific, atmospheric shots and we ran a picture package under the heading ‘Melbourne’s Ghost Factories’ across page three the next day. Most of those lost jobs never came back.

  And the company was, like newspaper companies all over the world, engaging in its own act of job-destroying disruption, bringing in computer typesetting in place of the old hot-metal process. For the journalists, typewriters were on the way out and visual display terminals (VDTs) were on the way in. This would prove to be devastating for many printing workers. Computers were supposed to speed up production but they also, after the initial capital outlay, made it cheaper. In preparation for the phasing in of VDTs in the early 1980s, the company ran training sessions for its journalists. Working up at the Trades Hall, I would still be phoning my stories in but I was required to attend at least one class. One of the paper’s production guys was in charge of the training session I attended. He gave us some exercises and then asked if we had any questions. My friend Michael Venus, who worked in the newsroom, said he was still having a bit of trouble working out how to use the hyphenate-and-justify command, which measured a story’s length, and asked our instructor to take him through it. I was bamboozled by the keyboard, with all of its short forms and symbols. One button in particular fascinated me, the one at the top left-hand corner. ‘What’s the Esc key for?’ I asked. The instructor shook his head reassuringly: ‘Oh, that’s the Escape key. It’s a computer command you press to get out of a program. You won’t need that’.

  The Herald made one big attempt to revive its fortunes when I was there. In 1984, Harry Gordon, one of the greatest journalists to ever work for the Herald & Weekly Times, had been installed as editor-in-chief and tasked with reviving the company’s flagship publication. It was, after all, a broadsheet and had once been all-powerful. The decision was made to try to move it a little bit up-market without spending too much. Harry hired Les Carlyon, one-time editor of The Age, as his deputy. At the beginning of 1985, Neil Mitchell, then the sports editor of The Age, was brought across as The Herald’s new editor. A talented and spectacularly ambitious reporter in the newsroom, Steve Price, was installed as chief of staff. I was brought back to the office from the Trades Hall to also work on the chief of staff’s desk. Two reporters from The Age, Andrew Rule and Andrew Bolt, were recruited to do features and general news. The paper looked better. We tried to plan ahead to generate material that would cover for slow news days. We used pictures better, got in some talented contributors for the opinion page. We even converted the Saturday paper to a tabloid. But having an early deadline of 8.30 a.m. and a final deadline of 2.30 in the afternoon was just too restrictive.

  I had loved my time at The Herald. I owed the place everything. It had made the dream come true. The disciplines I learned there—writing tight and fast, taking account of every word, sticking to the style—had made me a viable, if limited, journalist. Having watched from afar how free-form the training of my contemporaries at The Age was, I was sure I’d have been roadkill if I’d started there. But I definitely wanted to be able to stretch out and follow stories through to the end of the day and beyond. Janne Apelgren, the wife of my Herald colleague Bruce Guthrie, was a rising star at The Age and had told me earlier in the year that if I wanted to cross over to just let her know. In late 1985, I asked Bruce to tell Janne I was ready. He said Janne would pass it on to The Age’s news editor Steve Harris. The next afternoon, I was sitting in the deputy chief of staff’s chair when the secretary Bea Warren, with her telephone receiver held up high to indicate there was a call for me, all but shouted across the corral: ‘Shaun, Steve Harris for you on line two’.

  13

  DISNEYLAND FOR JOURNALISTS

  IT WAS ONLY a fifteen-minute tram ride west along Flinders Street and then north up Spencer Street to get from the Herald building to The Age’s awful late 1960s dark brown brick brutalist pile. But in terms of sensibility, confidence and power, it was the equivalent of travelling across the Pacific and arriving at Disneyland. The editorial floor was the biggest in Australia—the paper’s boast in the 1970s was that it was the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, that classically Australian distinction. Services and support were laid on for reporters. There was a team of assistants who answered your phone and took a message if you were out or didn’t feel like picking up, and who organised couriers to collect documents for you. Cab chits were cast around the office in the manner of a ticker-tape parade. Few questions were asked about expenses. And when you called anyone and said you were from The Age, in nearly every case they stopped what they were doing and responded to your questions. The tempo of the place was vastly different to The Herald, too. At The Herald, on most days you’d start writing your first story around 8 a.m. and when you’d filed, you’d move on to your next story and then the next one. Quite often, you might file five pieces, big and small, in a shift. At The Age, there would be multiple-story days but it was acceptable to just write the one 400-word piece a day. Some in the newsroom didn’t even do that.

  On my first day there, the chief of staff Lindsay Murdoch, who I knew from my time at police rounds and who went on to be a brilliant long-serving correspondent in
South-East Asia, came over to my desk and said: ‘Hey, mate, how’re you going? Do you feel like doing a story today or would you rather just settle in? Whatever you want to do, I’m fine’. I said I was happy to do something, and took the assignment, which involved some business aspect of the VFL. I made one call, to the then owner of the Sydney Swans Geoffrey Edelsten who, naturally, given that he was a publicity hound and I was from The Age, gave me what I was looking for. I took my time typing the story up and it ran on the back page the next morning—my one sports story in my career. I did think, as I reviewed my first day, ‘How easy is this?’

  I joined The Age at twenty-eight, driven chiefly by the desire to stretch my abilities but also because eight years at one workplace seemed long enough. How then to explain my decision to spend the next twenty-six years in one place? I was even given an engraved gold watch after twenty-five years, for God’s sake. It wasn’t as though I didn’t have opportunities to leave. In the late 1980s, I was offered a job on a TV current affairs show. In the 1990s, the editor-in-chief of The Australian, Paul Kelly, flew me to Sydney and put me up in a hotel so that we could have dinner and discuss a job. He wanted me to join the paper’s Canberra team with a view to becoming the political correspondent. Not long after, his counterpart at The Sydney Morning Herald, John Alexander, offered me a choice of reporting jobs in Canberra or Sydney. In all cases, I said no. I can see that I probably could have said ‘yes’ to one of the offers without any damage at all to my career trajectory and my enjoyment of the work. Should I have done so? Who can say? Kelly told me during our dinner that the one way to ensure that your value is fully appreciated by your employer is to go and work for someone else. He smiled knowingly as he said this. He’d left The Australian in the 1970s for senior roles with Fairfax and returned triumphantly several years later. I had no doubt that he was right. But I enjoyed my work at The Age. It was a dream job. I was in a comfort zone, yes, and I was in that zone for a very long time. Isn’t ‘comfort zone’ another way of saying, in this context, that the work was mutually rewarding for me and my employer? That’s how it seemed to me. This creates problems for me in telling this part of my story because happy and secure is not that interesting.

  One of the first things I learned at The Age was that it was regarded as a ‘writer’s paper’, meaning that stories weren’t heavily edited. The subs griped about it but seemed to accept it. This contrasted strongly with the way The Herald had been run. There, it was a rare story that wasn’t substantially rewritten on the production desk before publication. As someone who regarded himself as a complete hack when it came to writing, I saw this ‘writer’s paper’ thing as a challenge. I had never viewed myself as much of a writer and hadn’t aspired to become one. I’d fallen in love with the potential of words at the age of ten when I read that Thor story but I’d only ever had the intention of using my writing in the service of straightforward journalism. The Age was the place to go beyond that, so I set about writing lead features for as many sections of the paper as possible in my first year: on ice-cream in the food lift-out, Epicure; on changing tastes in radio for the TV lift-out, Green Guide; on the English musician Elvis Costello in the entertainment section, EG. I tried my hand at a long-form piece on the unions for the paper’s premier features section, Saturday Extra, but it was so awful that the section’s editor Alan Morison couldn’t bring himself to tell me everything that was wrong with it and it was spiked. It is probably either a sign of my rapid improvement or the paper’s incredibly generous and benign attitude to its employees that within a couple of years I was appointed editor of Saturday Extra.

  In the late 1980s, The Age put considerable time and resources into an examination of political, social, intellectual and commercial power in Victoria. It surveyed and interviewed scores of influential people and asked them to nominate the most powerful institution in the state, publishing the results in a special lift-out. The respondents nominated The Age itself as the most influential institution. It was an accurate result, as far as I could see. The Age was plugged into just about everything in Melbourne at this time, the culmination of the course set by chief executive Ranald Macdonald and editor Graham Perkin in the mid-1960s, although its blind spot could fairly be said to have been the internal debates and workings of the state Liberal Party—a substantial oversight. What made being on the paper so fulfilling at that time, and well into the current century, was that there was a shared sense of doing something worthwhile and of a high quality, of all of us playing a part in producing a commercially and editorially relevant product. Since The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald lost their dominance of classified advertising due to the rise of the Internet and some bad choices by Fairfax’s managers, the pocket analysis of the papers has been that their editorial content and orientation were always irrelevant to their past profitability. It is not true. While the classifieds provided the bulk of the profits, the other important contributor was high-end display advertising for well-heeled consumers. They were the people who bought the papers because of their ‘upmarket’ editorial content. Wherever you went in the Age building, people in the various departments—support staff, the librarians, advertising, personnel, the switchboard ladies, the printers—would talk to you about the paper. They were proud of it. The most negative stuff about it always came from the journalists. In fact, to listen to any of us at any time of day or night, the paper was dreadful, nowhere near as good as it used to be, every editor was pretty much useless and morale had never been so low. That’s journalists: we are hard-wired to moan but we keep turning up the next day determined to try to outdo each other.

  During my time at The Age, I got to do a lot of things I’d wanted to do, but not all of them. In 1996, Bruce Guthrie, recently installed as editor of The Age, asked me to take over the Saturday national political column. He liked the idea of it being written from outside Canberra, to provide a perspective on politics from the city where our readers lived, worked and voted, rather than from the press gallery. I happily agreed; this was the column space that had excited me when I was a fifteen-year-old kid, flicking through the paper in my thongs and green grandad shirt and grey Levi’s Californians. Except for an interruption of a couple of years around the turn of the century, I wrote that column every week under four successive editors until I left The Age in 2012. While at The Age, I wrote two books. The first was about the industrial relations changes brought about by the Hawke Government via its prices and incomes accord with the unions. Essentially I just tipped out everything I’d learned as an industrial reporter into a series of chapters. It was not a very good book but it showed me that I could do it. Later, I wrote a better book, a biography of Peter Costello, who I’d been observing since we were in the same second-year politics tutorial group at Monash. I had got to know him in the late 1980s and liked him. I was attracted to the idea of charting the life of a talented, ambitious contemporary. I also developed a sideline as a music writer, reviewing many hundreds of albums. You have to put yourself forward when things interest you, even if it can be awkward. I wrote my first book after a former colleague who had taken up a job with a publishing house called me with the idea of a book on the prices and incomes accord and wanted to know if I could suggest anyone who could do it. I suggested myself. The same thing led me to become a music writer. A newly appointed sections editor consulted me about getting a new record reviewer, a livelier voice, for the Green Guide. I just said why not me?

  With The Age picking up the tab, I wandered the streets of Paris and Los Angeles and New York and Washington for weeks at a time looking for stories. I sailed a yacht on the Adriatic Sea. I went to the Birdsville Races. I took Paul Keating to the famous Pellegrini’s café at the top of Bourke Street so that he could tell me that he was about to launch a second, this time successful, challenge against Bob Hawke for the prime ministership. I had two lunches with Gough Whitlam who even in his final years was an irresistible presence. I spent several lunchtimes with John Howard who, unlike just about e
very other major politician I’ve met, was full of questions rather than statements. He was always gathering intelligence. Because I worked on The Age, I interviewed Elvis Costello twice, and the comic actor Rowan Atkinson, who was painfully shy and spoke with a stutter that vanished when he gathered himself together for his performances. He insisted that he was an actor, not a comedian, and told me that the trick to being funny was to rehearse so comprehensively that there was no prospect of making a mistake. As I left the interview, the photographer who’d accompanied me to the job said: ‘That was weird watching you two talk. You seem a lot alike’. Although my chief professional preoccupation was politics, the biggest thrill I’ve ever had in my work was meeting and interviewing Ray Davies, the lead singer of The Kinks and the man who wrote one of the great postwar pop songs ‘Waterloo Sunset’, a piece of art that will live on well beyond any policy created by any of the politicians I’ve met. And all of my journalism. None of these experiences are extraordinary; a lot of people travel in their work and meet interesting people. But this was the life I had wanted and it rolled out pretty much as I had expected when I set my cap for it as a kid. That’s the bit that still shocks me.