Press Escape

by Shaun Carney

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  My visits to Carrum Downs had got me thinking about Australia’s addiction to cars and the creation of suburbs. It was one thing in the 1950s and 1960s to suburbanise the bits of Seaford and Frankston near the beach and the train line, which was where I’d grown up. But it was another to create great tracts of housing with little public transport. If governments were going to give the okay to establishing these new suburbs, they had to provide quality infrastructure—either road or rail. Carrum Downs was 36 kilometres from the Melbourne CBD and 10 kilometres from Frankston. The nearest railway station was at Seaford, 6 kilometres away. Road transport was the only option if you lived in Carrum Downs and if you were on an average wage or a bit above it, a place like Carrum Downs was likely to be the type of suburb you could afford if you wanted to buy a home. I knew what it was like to live in such a place and I knew how important it was to have a car if you lived there. Shortly before my father cut his hand, a new, tolled freeway called EastLink had opened, connecting Melbourne’s outer eastern suburbs to Seaford and the Mornington Peninsula. It made my life much easier; I could get from Clifton Hill to Boonong Avenue—a 60-kilometre trip—in forty-two minutes. It cut about twenty-five minutes off the travelling time each way. For anyone who’s ever wondered how newspaper columnists come up with their columns, the above provides a clue. All of this coalesced in a piece headed ‘Be Realistic! It’s Too Late to Put the Car Genie Back in the Bottle’, which ran in August 2008. The crosshead read: ‘Australians Are in Love with Cars and the Freedom They Bring’. It then went on to outline my outer suburban history and the fact that when I moved to an inner suburb I gave up on the tram service because it was so slow and drove to work instead, saving many hours a week. I argued that it was too late to be anti-car because Australian suburbia had for so long been developed on the assumption that car travel was the chief means of transport, that public transport would never be viable for many, many suburbanites. I cited Carrum Downs as an example.

  I knew that I might be poking a finger in the eye of quite a lot of Age readers—or at least the readers who send letters to the editor, which should not be taken as the same thing—but that was part of the job: to prompt them to think about things differently, not to reflect their prejudices and preoccupations back to them. The lives lived by most Australians were not the same as those lived in the inner and middle suburbs that formed the core of the paper’s readership. My efforts in trying to illustrate the point were not appreciated. The paper’s letters page ran four letters under the heading Car Culture.

  All the correspondents thought I was a tosser. There was a letter from Greg Barber, a Greens MP in the Victorian upper house, in which he likened cars to toilets and asserted that the best thing people would say about their cars was that they were a necessary evil. Someone from the Australian Conservation Foundation, headquartered in inner Melbourne, said it was too simplistic to suggest that just because Australians loved their cars they always would. A reader who gave his address as ‘Melbourne’ foreshadowed a new world in which transport could include personalised rocket packs. Another reader, from Collingwood, predicted a dystopia in which inner suburbs such as the one in which he resided were flattened in order to give motorists faster car access from one far-flung suburb to another. From what I could see, no-one who lived in an outer suburb had contributed a response.

  And not just Age letter-writers were exercised by the piece. On the same day, The Australian ran a 245-word extract in the Cut & Paste section of its opinion page with the lead-in ‘Shaun Carney, in The Age, dares to write what surely must be one of the few pro-car articles in Pravda on the Yarra’. I wasn’t surprised by the snark in that reference; I realised when I read it that in a way I had actually dared to write it, given the face The Age was now presenting to the community. If you relied on the letters page, the general line was public transport good, roads and freeways bad. This reflected a development that had certainly affected The Age and, it appeared to me, other papers: the rise of the Internet and the attachment of reader comments to Web versions of opinion pieces had led to a dramatic fall in the number of contributions to letters pages. Indeed, even at that stage—about ten years into the life of the Internet in Australia—the letters page of The Age had become almost uniformly Green, hand-wringing, hateful towards the Liberal Party and dismissive of the ALP. The same readers kept appearing on the page. Sometimes it was like there were about a couple of dozen readers who took it in turns to contribute. In fact, I knew one of them, though he was admittedly a slight exception to the majority because he hewed to a traditional Labor Party view. ‘Alan Inchley, Frankston’ had been my maths teacher in Form Five. This reorientation was not the fault of the people editing the letters page. They could only publish a representative sample of the correspondence they received—I knew that they aimed to do this—and progressively their choices were becoming limited. But this episode permanently shifted my assessment of The Age and its role in the community. Based on what we published, not one reader of the paper saw anything positive in the development of the motor car. Could that really be right? My piece stimulated no debate, it merely invited a reactionary, purist, inner-city response to an unwelcome point of view, complete with a fatuous contribution from a Greens politician whose letter I fail to fully understand to this day. I could feel The Age and its reach and impact on the broader community narrowing. Looking back, I can see that I was getting sick of my own paper. I decided that I’d have another crack the following week. After all, it had long been a truism that the journalist always had the last word.

  This is what I wrote:

  Leftists Who Sneer at the Outer Suburbs Are Betraying Labor

  Radical action on climate change could offend a key group of voters.

  FIRST, a clarification. Last week in this space I argued that cleaner, greener cars should be a more important part of Australia’s effort to reduce carbon emissions than an increase in public transport. In making the point, I suggested that people in the inner suburbs who found this shocking could benefit by taking the nearest train to the end of the line to see how hard it is for people in the outer suburbs to do without their cars.

  This was a mistake because it implied that Melbourne’s outer suburban belt was accessible by rail. In fact, it extends way beyond the metropolitan train system.

  Recently, for family reasons, I’ve been spending time in Carrum Downs. For those who don’t know, Carrum Downs is a suburb of about 18,000 people south-east of Frankston. When I knew it back in the 1970s, it was made up of paddocks and a mushroom farm. Now it’s so substantial that it has its own secondary school and its retail hub calls itself the Carrum Downs Regional Shopping Centre.

  You cannot get to the suburb by train. There are connecting buses from Frankston that snake their way through the suburbs in between, making it a very long journey. It would be very difficult to get around if you lived in Carrum Downs and did not have a car.

  There are those who will say that places such as Carrum Downs should never have been developed, that urban sprawl is overloading our resources and making not just Melbourne but Sydney, and probably several other capitals, unworkable. There might be something to that argument but the question is: what happens to the hundreds of thousands of people who already live in Carrum Downs and Caroline Springs and Berwick and Roxburgh Park?

  If you live within 15 kilometres of the city and have a tramline running right past your door, or a station nearby, as did many of those readers who were offended by last week’s column, you could say it’s not your problem. To be a car user is, one letter-writer observed, a planet-destroying ‘lifestyle choice’.

  Indeed, you could adopt a position that finds its way into letters to the editor and even the occasional opinion piece: the sneer. This assumes that outer suburbanites are less intelligent, less engaged and generally less enlightened than those of us who are closer to, you know, where it’s all happening. From what I can see, it comes more often from the broade
r leftist end of the political spectrum than from the right.

  Aside from being a betrayal of a genuine progressive perspective and just plain wrong, it represents a misreading of where electoral power lies in our society. Governments are made and broken in the outer suburbs. For decades now, the major political parties have relied on their traditional bases of support in the inner and middle suburbs—the older residential belts established up to the Second World War—to act as their electoral bedrock.

  They then must woo voters in the outer suburbs who have more flexible voting patterns. If you look at each new federal government over the past 40 years—Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Howard and Rudd—their initial victories were largely due to the establishment of beachheads of support in developing suburbs. Having won these voters over, each government has faced the task of trying to hold onto them.

  In John Howard’s case, he established a series of positions on social values that had some success in outer suburban Melbourne and much greater success in the outer reaches of Sydney and Brisbane. Eventually the appeal of this wore thin and was overtaken by Kevin Rudd’s self-portrayal as someone who fully empathised with ‘working families’ in the outer suburbs. Rudd’s spiel is unlikely to have the same shelf life as Howard’s because as economic circumstances change, so does the power of the message.

  But there’s a bigger problem for Rudd and the Labor Party, whose core political challenge is to hold together the ALP’s disparate inner and outer suburban constituencies. Although the Liberals appear to be on their uppers, they can take comfort in the knowledge that even after the collapse of the Howard Government, their conservative and moderate tendencies have remained inside the same tent. In fact, under Howard, the Democrats, who attracted moderate Liberals and channelled some of their preferences to Labor, shrivelled and died. And Howard saw off Pauline Hanson too.

  That’s not happening on the left. In Melbourne particularly, some parts of the inner suburbs are becoming very slippery territory for the ALP as the Greens become ever more popular. How does Rudd satisfy inner urban Labor sympathisers who want radical action on climate change while also holding on to shaky Labor voters in the outer suburbs who want something done but aren’t so keen on the radical option and don’t enjoy being lectured by people who have many more facilities than they have? Increasingly, Rudd presides over two tribes. Come the next election, they might just go to war.

  The day after that, The Oz reproduced a slab of that column, announcing it thus: ‘Shaun Carney, in The Age, who outed himself as pro-car, confronts the sneering Left’. Of course, The Australian could not resist its own sneer, declaring that I’d ‘outed’ myself, as if I’d been somehow hiding my views until now. An amused Mark Dreyfus, the federal Labor member for Isaacs, which includes Carrum Downs, phoned me to acknowledge my attempt to highlight the challenges faced by his constituents and to register his bewilderment at the counterarguments. Meanwhile, a couple of bloggers joined in on the attack because I’d decided to add to my calumny of backing road transport by also giving the inner-city Left a light smack for its lack of empathy with outer suburbanites. There wasn’t a lot that was surprising in the discussion threads—I was a fool, what would anyone expect et cetera—although the attempts by a few idiots to prove that Carrum Downs was in fact well served by speedy public transport were pretty funny, including the contribution from one dope, obviously ignorant of Melbourne’s geography but determined to prove me wrong anyway, who got Carrum Downs mixed up with Carrum, which does have a railway station but is 10 kilometres away. Just to add to the Bizarro World flavour of this experience, Frank Devine, former editor-in-chief of The Australian and a popular long-time columnist with that paper, contacted me. After beginning his call with a query—‘You’re an ex-Herald man like me, aren’t you, Shaun?’—he asked if I had been subject to direct personal abuse because of these columns. He intended to write about the joy of road trips in his column in Quadrant and wanted to ask me about the strident nature of the readership’s reaction to my two pieces. Frank told me he’d once received a death threat because of something he’d written about a McDonald’s. I had to say that nothing like that had happened to me.

  This was all happening as Andrew Jaspan was punted by the Fairfax board as editor after a little less than four years in the job. A few of my Age colleagues, some I regarded very highly, disliked working with him, having found him personally difficult and his decision-making built too much on caprice. Many others had been determined not to like him before he arrived because he’d been appointed after a worldwide search by editorial chief Mark Scott in 2004. He was an outsider. Andrew had never worked in Australia before. He arrived from Glasgow, where he’d started the Sunday Herald, and he had been editor of The Observer in London, a truly venerable newspaper title, in the 1990s. We got on well. I liked him and found him a good editor. He talked to me every week about what I was writing, regularly asked me about Jane’s wellbeing and never gave me any grief about my absences when she was getting treated. I was sorry to see him go but I had no problem with his successor, Paul Ramadge, who’d been a faithful soldier at The Age since arriving from the Newcastle Herald in 1996, having occupied the deputy editor’s role several times in that period. Paul was less politically engaged than Andrew, so we rarely talked about my columns. I liked Paul. He could be an attentive boss too. Unlike his two predecessors, Paul gave me annual merit-based pay rises.

  But as August passed into September in 2008, my preoccupation was the home front. Jane had come home from hospital but was still weak. After a week of spending half-days at school, she collapsed on a Saturday. She struggled to breathe. Her temperature hit forty-one. During the two years of the treatment, she’d never been this ill. When Caroline took her yet again to the emergency department at The Royal Children’s, having phoned ahead to describe Jane’s condition, the staff eventually switched on more than usual, although there were the predictable delays in getting a doctor to see her. Why emergency departments force parents to stand in queues for up to twenty minutes regardless of the severity of their child’s illness or condition is beyond me—especially if the child is a long-term patient. After that obligatory, and harrowing, interregnum, Jane was taken into an isolation unit in the ED, designed for patients with compromised immunity, where she was left without a doctor coming to assess her for another fifteen minutes. She was struggling to breathe and distressed. She looked to her mother and asked matter-of-factly between gasps for air: ‘Mummy, am I going to die?’ Caroline assured her she wouldn’t but wasn’t sure. She walked out to the central medical station in the ED and told a nurse: ‘My daughter is in a very bad way. She’s really sick’. The nurse snapped back in a dismissive tone: ‘We’ve got lots of sick children here. You’ll just have to wait’. About five minutes after that, a medical team measured Jane’s fever and gave her oxygen. She was readmitted and put on antibiotics for ten days. Tests of her mucous showed that she had pneumonia. Blood tests taken after she concluded her chemo revealed not just vestiges of pneumonia but glandular fever, which was not diagnosed at the time. When Jane spent her seventh birthday in hospital, we brought in a cake but weren’t able to use candles because it would trigger the hospital’s sprinkler system. As a substitute, a couple of nurses took seven syringes out of a supplies cabinet, tore off their plastic wrapping and plunged them into the icing—a thoughtful but slightly macabre gesture. Now she was spending another birthday in a hospital bed, hooked up to a machine. We brought in an ice-cream cake at her request and this time didn’t bother with the syringe candles. We had a little celebration at lunchtime, each of us had a piece, and there was still half of the cake left. I placed it back in its box, found a felt pen in the children’s playroom, and wrote ‘Jane’s eight birthday cake’ on the top and sides before putting it in the fridge in the parents’ utility room. At dinnertime, Jane asked if she could have a piece of the cake instead of the block of jelly offered for dessert by the hospital. But when I opened the fridge, the cake was gone.


  17

  NO WORRIES, BUD

  AFTER JANE’S CHEMOTHERAPY came to an end, one set of anxieties was replaced with another. She was to be tested for leukaemia at decreasing intervals throughout the next five years—quarterly for the first couple of years and then every six months after that. We would have to learn to live with the fear of relapse and try to make the most of our lives now that weekly hospital visits would be no more. But life could not fully return to normal because I’d realised there was so such thing as ‘normal’. I’d never written any stories about people who endured a troubled time that included the stock-standard quote ‘I really learned who my true friends were’, but I’d certainly read plenty of them. Now I’d lived through some serious difficulties, I understood why so many people said it.

  Early on, in the months after Jane’s diagnosis, I’d been at first hurt and then flabbergasted at how people I’d regarded as friends or close professional acquaintances—women and men I’d had in my home or with whom I’d had lunches or helped out in some way—cut me dead. They not only failed to seek me out, they would actively avoid me in the office. It wasn’t only people in the journalistic world who did this. Friends from long ago, who I knew had heard about my troubles, didn’t bother to make contact either. There were days when I felt incredibly alone and unworthy, a failure. I couldn’t get angry about it. That looked like wasted energy. And really they were telling me in a profound and meaningful way how they regarded me and our relationship. You can’t get angry at someone if they don’t feel about you the way you feel about them. For all of my loner instincts, I do try to reach out to people if I hear they’re in a bad way. Or I think I do. All through this period, I kept asking myself: Am I a bad friend? Quite possibly. We all think we’re good citizens, good drivers, good friends, good spouses, don’t we? Obviously, quite a few of us are deluded. For all I knew, I was one of them.