Press Escape

by Shaun Carney

  I travelled to the United Kingdom to cover the 1997 election that swept the Labour Party under Tony Blair into power—all because a few months out from the election it looked like it would be a good story and I casually suggested to deputy editor Paul Austin one day that I was interested. The next day, Bruce Guthrie walked over to my desk and started telling me all the plans he had for the way I’d cover the campaign, right down to his idea for the stories to carry a headshot of me against the backdrop of a London bus alongside the legend ‘Carney in the UK’ (which happened). This was at a time when the paper shared a full-time London correspondent with The Sydney Morning Herald. But that didn’t matter. That’s what working there could be like—back then, at least, when the Internet was new and the papers still made a lot of money and were holding on to readers.

  The way we looked at the Internet in the mid-1990s was as a terrific and fascinating opportunity, a new platform—although we did not yet use that word—with which to pick up readers. Even better, it gave us access, through such long-lost search engines as Dogpile, Lycos and Infoseek, to journalism from all over the world. All for free. Not enough of us, including me, understood what that meant. If we could get someone else’s stuff for free, everyone could get ours for free too. In a stroke, the commercial value of what we did was reduced dramatically and, as it turned out, irrevocably. The possibility of this wonderful innovation—which we were given access to on our desktop PCs by the company—rendering our business marginal, ultimately killing our paper and putting many of us out of our jobs was beyond our comprehension. And the creation of email accounts put us directly in touch with our readers, which was seen as a boon. In 1998, the paper adopted a policy of appending journalists’ work email addresses to as many stories and columns as possible. We were instructed to reply to every email. Again, we did not know what we were doing and did not foresee the implications of this approach. We did not insist on knowing the identities of the people emailing us, which was quite different to the paper’s policy on correspondence from readers for the letters page. Because the letters were for publication, a full name and address was required. This would be checked and confirmed before a letter was placed in the paper. Similarly, it was agreed that if reporters were sent anonymous letters, unless they contained a threat they should be thrown out. It was not obligatory to reply to letters from readers who included a name and address but I generally did. Now, we had to write back to everyone who emailed, and even from the earliest days of email, those writing to us often took little care with spelling, grammar and maintaining a civil tone. Before email, about three-quarters of the readers’ letters I received were either complimentary or were respectful attempts at putting a different point of view. After the advent of email and the near-death of correspondence by mail, the proportions reversed. And we were obliged to be polite in return. It soon became clear that it did not pay to reply in any detailed way because it only attracted more abuse. Fortunately, after a few years, the policy of mandatory replying quietly faded away. Before that, I’d already embarked on my own way of dealing with it by very politely thanking the most abusive anonymous emailers for offering such strong support. Presumably convinced that I was off my rocker, they generally didn’t write back. But it still seemed the polite thing to do to acknowledge most emails, whether they were friendly or not, and I tried to do that, although on occasions it took up quite a bit of time.

  Another early development in the Internet presentation of, first, comment pieces, and eventually news stories, was the attachment of reader comments. There appeared to be two reasons for doing this. One was because the technology allowed it. The other was that it encouraged interactivity, seen as one of the great early benefits of Web-based technologies. Theoretically, it seemed like a good idea. It offered feedback and put journalists in touch with the thoughts of readers. In practice, that’s not what happened. Comments were supposedly moderated but in reality they were subject to the most rudimentary, passing scan for legally actionable material, were never checked for their grammar, spelling or punctuation and then plonked on the website, right under the paper’s own articles. Worse, in my view, there was no requirement for people posting comments to give their names, which gave rise to comments from Wisepantswearer from Planet Earth or truthteller from The Other Side. Most weren’t like that, of course. But very few commenters ever give their real names. At first I used to read the comments attached to my pieces but gave up within a few years. From what I can see, that’s standard practice for columnists and reporters now, unless they’re masochists. Once we went down the ‘free’ path, giving our content away for zip, and then encouraged anyone to have their say, unmediated, unedited and unaccountable, the horse had, as far as I could see, bolted. The signal to our readers, who were also customers, was this: not only is what we produce not worth anything, we regard the contributions of people writing under pseudonyms, who often want to decry our work, as having equal weight to our own journalism. What other business did that? Did restaurants allow anyone to just come in to their kitchens to abuse the chef within earshot of the diners? You could feel things getting shaky but I still thought we could find a way through. Eventually, Fairfax and News Corp, like most other media companies around the world, established paywalls and this slowed the revenue losses. But the idea of getting news and comment for free had taken hold, as it had with music and movies and TV shows. Technological developments—chiefly through social media applications such as Facebook—keep coming along to undermine legacy media’s attempts to slow or even arrest the financial decline. And the free-for-all nature of digital communications—sometimes I feel as if watching commenters turn on one individual in a comments thread is just like watching a gruesome nature documentary when a family of lions feast on an antelope—is here with us for good.

  _______________

  Away from work, my life experienced its own disruptions. During my time at The Herald, I had got married and started a family. That relationship ended in divorce. My conclusion is that no matter how much you manage to rebuild your life—and I subsequently started another family with a colleague, Caroline Milburn—this always leaves you feeling gutshot, with a wound that will never heal fully. I will write about only one of my children here because her experience had a direct effect on my attitude towards my career in journalism. I will not use her real name. My children might one day want to tell their own stories in their own way and in their own names. I won’t take that right away from them.

  As the 1980s progressed, there was no change in the situation between my parents. My mother was unhappy but found enjoyment in reading her magazines, chief among them The Australian Women’s Weekly and New Idea, and the papers and listening to current affairs on the radio. She was a Keating fan but had to hide this from her arch-Liberal sister Olive in Newcastle. I talked to my father about treating my mother with more respect and he fobbed me off. He was set to retire at the end of 1989 and I was worried about what that meant for my mother. I was considering moving her out of the family home and installing her in a flat close to my home near the city. I think she would have liked that but only a few days after my father retired, she got cancer. It took just six months for her to die. The glioblastoma in her head first made her disoriented, then confused. Radiation did nothing but cause most of her hair to fall out. Within two weeks of diagnosis she could barely speak and was bedridden. I spent as much time as I could with her but I don’t think it was enough. She died when I was thirty-three which, as I write this in my sixtieth year, I now know to have been a time when I was still emotionally a child. I’m not sure that I ever told her that I loved her. We were close, there is no question. There might have been things we did not say to each other but I don’t believe that we failed to show how we felt. I would feel better today if I had said it as well as showing it.

  On her last full day, ravaged by her cancer and having for several months been unable to talk, she rallied. Lying flat in her hospital bed, with the side grilles pulled up in ca
se she suffered a leg spasm that would have caused her to fall out, her skin colour was pink, not the grey it had been for weeks, and her blue eyes, those prominent eyes that the boys had made fun of when she was little, were a burning azure. She looked at me, fixed her gaze on my eyes, saying goodbye. Because things had been good between us for so long, I did not feel that we had unfinished business. My father? He nursed my mother through her illness, waited for a year after her death and then moved in with his woman on the other side of Frankston. He wanted me to meet her. I refused. I did not hate her but I could not in all good conscience spend any time with her. I did not resent my father being with her. Perhaps this was meant to be. But no. It lasted a couple of years and they broke up. He later repartnered, to use one of the uglier modern words, with another woman and after a dozen or so years that relationship would founder too. He eventually moved back into the house in Boonong Avenue, living on his own. We kept talking a couple of times a week, getting along—I valued having him in my life. But we never sat down and had it out about the thirty years of awfulness.

  Meanwhile, things just seemed to slide slowly downhill at The Age as the first decade of the twenty-first century reached its midpoint. Fairfax tried defensive measures such as buying up more newspaper titles in Australia and New Zealand. But everything was tightening. There were freezes on hiring, the stream of outside talent coming in to revitalise the place and generate internal competition was no longer constant. Travel was cut. A lot of the analysis of Fairfax’s decline has been wise after the event, as if the bad choices made by its managers were obviously seen as bad choices at the time. The fact is that the entire newspaper industry has been mugged repeatedly by the Internet although some companies have suffered worse muggings than others, and Fairfax probably fits that category. I still liked my job. I didn’t know what was going to happen but I just put my head down and tried to keep working.

  14

  PETECHIAE

  WHEN PETECHIAE STARTED appearing all over my daughter Jane’s body within a few days of her sixth birthday, I knew what they were but not what to call them. A petechia is a tiny red or purple spot caused by bleeding into the skin. Over several days, hundreds of them had shown up on her torso, adding to the bruises that I’d assumed were the result of some over-excessive activity on the school monkey bars. She’d started school a few months earlier and loved it. She’s the female, blonde version of my father—loves an audience, revels in attention, highly competitive. On their first meeting, reciprocal gazes signalled recognition of these common qualities. But she’d been quieter than usual in the month leading up to her birthday. One afternoon, during the walk home from school, she’d had to stop for a moment, offering with mild bewilderment: ‘My heart’s beating really fast!’ Then these little red spots like old mosquito bites were proliferating on top of the bruises that wouldn’t heal. There is a place your mind goes in these circumstances, a pocket-sized intellectual and emotional universe in which you’re able to countenance anything and entertain all possibilities as a real prospect. Obviously this was serious. But because it had not yet been measured and given a name, I was still open to the possibility that it might not be. That is what enabled me to get a decent night’s sleep after I made an appointment with my GP, David, for the following morning. David had been my doctor for twenty years. He’d burned things off my face and groin, insisted I see a counsellor when I developed insomnia, inspected my suppurating backside and then sent me off to a surgeon to have a fistula laid open (look it up, or maybe not). I trusted him. He had never treated Jane and in fact he met her only that one time, a week after she’d turned six.

  After examining her, he professed to not being sure what was wrong. ‘I’m going to ring a paediatrician, a brilliant guy,’ he said. ‘He’ll be able to sort this out. He’s a bit banged up at the moment; he broke his ankle.’ David made the call from his desk. From our end, the conversation went like this: ‘Michael! It’s David! How’s your ankle? Oh, okay. Just got to take it slowly, yeah. Listen, I’ve got a six-year-old girl here, a lot of bruises on her body and she’s covered in petechiae. Uh-huh. Right. Okay. Tonight? What time? Will you be at Masada? All right, so that’s an FB and eight o’clock tonight at your rooms at Masada. Okay, thanks a lot, Michael. Yeah, hope to see you soon.’ After hanging up, he explained that I should take Jane to get a full blood test straight away—there was a pathology place not far from his clinic—and that we should present ourselves to Michael at the Masada Hospital in St Kilda East that evening. I asked if I needed to get hold of the test results ahead of the meeting. No, David said, Michael will have them. I took Jane to a claustrophobic little room a few hundred metres along the street at which a young woman extracted two enormous vials of blood. Driving to our home in Melbourne’s inner north, the car was stuffy. The procedure at the pathologist’s had been stressful for Jane. My mind wandered as I drove along Smith Street, the long, narrow strip that separates Fitzroy and Collingwood, and where once a photographer had placed in his shop window a colour portrait of my father taken around his nineteenth birthday. Distracted, I pulled my car up short when I noticed too late a set of pedestrian lights turning to red, throwing Jane around in the back seat. Feeling that she might be in need of a reward for handling all this confusing treatment, I pulled over a little further along and took her to a Mattel outlet store where she chose a toy dog that barked when its back was stroked. As I took it down from the shelf, Jane bent forward and vomited on to the polished concrete floor of the store. I could feel my sense of control over the basic events of my life slipping away.

  At eight o’clock, we met Michael, whose stillness and directness were reassuring at the time. All these years later, I regard them as inspiring. If you’re going to be told that your little girl has cancer, his way is the way to do it. After Jane, Caroline and I introduced ourselves and were seated, he hobbled around from behind his desk and sat down in front of Jane. He placed her left hand in his, looked her in the eyes and stroked her cheek lightly with his other hand.

  ‘Hello, Jane, I’m Michael. I’m a doctor and I’m very pleased to meet you.’ He paused and smiled. ‘You’re a really beautiful girl. You’ve been getting bruised lately, is that right?’

  After she explained that yes, this was true and the bruises wouldn’t go away, he asked if he could take a look. After he examined her, he said: ‘Thank you, Jane. I’m going to go back behind my desk and have a talk to your mummy and daddy for a moment, okay?’ His tone in speaking to Caroline and me was one of sorrow. He spoke quietly. ‘Well, the tests suggest very strongly, very strongly—99 per cent certainty—that Jane has acute lymphoblastic leukaemia. There is some good news. This is the most common form of cancer in children. A couple of generations ago there was nothing that could be done but that’s not so now. In fact, the survival rate now is 80 per cent. You must never forget those numbers. The treatment is chemotherapy. There is no other initial treatment and that will have to start now. I’ve already alerted The Royal Children’s Hospital and they’re expecting you in the emergency department, so you have to go there immediately from here. They’ll test Jane once more just to be 100 per cent certain that it is ALL but I don’t have any doubt that that is what we are dealing with.’ He seemed to sort of deflate at this point. He had been above us, telling us what to do, but now he was just another human being, existing at exactly the same level as us. ‘I am so sorry to be telling you this, so sorry. You are entering a terrible place and you’ll be there for probably the next nineteen months. I wish this wasn’t happening and we weren’t here dealing with this. You have my deepest sympathy for what all of you are going to go through.’

  We thanked him, walked out into the darkness, found our car and headed for The Royal Children’s. Pulling into the hospital’s vast outdoor car park twenty minutes later, we were entering a world from which we would emerge only intermittently and briefly during the next two years. It was a world of leaden bureaucracy, kindness, callousness, egotism, selflessness, harsh c
hemical smells, underwhelming food, vomit, blood, stupidity, mind-bending technical knowledge, jaw-dropping skills, confidence, unyielding optimism and relentless fear. We had been to The Royal Children’s before. When Jane was only a few months old, a nurse at the local maternal welfare clinic, while making a routine heart check, picked up a whistling sound. Jane had been born with a hole in her heart the size of a pinprick. A kindly old surgeon at the hospital assured us that this would not require surgery and the hole could be expected to disappear as Jane grew. As we made our way to ground level after that consultation, we shared the lift with a mother and a little boy in a stroller. The boy looked to be around three. His head was shaved. It bore a large right-angled scar across the top. He seemed very quiet. As we walked out of the building into the afternoon light towards our car, I said to Caroline, ‘Let’s make sure we never come here again.’ Such a ridiculous thought.

  The emergency department experience and the hours that followed our induction were the stuff of so many calls to talk-back radio, letters to the editor and opinion articles. We waited in a long line for about half an hour before Jane was taken into a cubicle. No-one explained what was happening. There were more hours of waiting while they tested her blood yet again. She was given a transfusion of platelets. The test confirmed ALL and she was given the first of hundreds of doses of chemotherapy through a drip, that night via a needle inserted in the back of a hand, later in her long course of treatment through a port placed under the skin of her chest and also into her spinal column at regular intervals. When the emergency department was through with her, she was placed in a room upstairs. The cancer ward that night was full, so she shared a room in another part of the hospital with a baby who had been recently blinded by a series of inexplicable fits. His father, no older than twentyfive, a working-class guy from a regional city, was well short of getting over the shock. The little boy slept fitfully and when he awoke, terrified by his blindness, he would break into long screams. Jane began vomiting. The hospital allows only one parent to remain with a child overnight. Caroline stayed and I went home. At one point in the early hours, the duty doctor from the cancer ward, a young fellow with a robotic mien, arrived to tell Caroline how serious this was and how extensive the treatment would be. He spoke at the volume a teacher would use when addressing a rowdy class, which woke up the baby and Jane. The nurse who visited through the night spoke at the same volume, to similar effect. The doctor used every medical and technical term available to him, almost as if to parade his knowledge. He gave Caroline the blood counts, a list of figures with no meaning to the uninitiated, and named the drugs that she’d be given. Again, this information was worthless. Then he took off. By that point, Jane was dry-retching, crying. We learned later on that effective anti-nausea tablets were available but neither the emergency department staff nor Dr Numbers had thought of giving one to our daughter.