Press Escape

by Shaun Carney

  _______________

  Not a lot happened in the next few months to rekindle the flame. The year 2010 wasn’t great for Kevin Rudd and it wasn’t so good for me, either. On the night of my fifty-third birthday, around 7.30, I was looking at a chocolate cake with a candle on it when the news editor of The Age, Patrick Smithers, called me. ‘Mate, have you heard what’s coming out of Canberra? Gillard’s moving on Rudd. They’re in a meeting right now. The bureau’s having trouble finding out why it’s happening. Are you able to help us out, see what you can find?’ I thought about who might know and concluded that no-one would answer my calls. But I got lucky. My first call got through and the person who answered it knew everything, which he shared with me. Now I knew the story the anti-Rudd people were using to unseat him, which was that Rudd had sent an adviser to check with caucus members that Julia Gillard was staying loyal, he was unimaginative, treated his colleagues like garbage, and didn’t know how to properly use the authority he had as prime minister; and all of this had tipped Gillard over the edge. As it turned out, that was less than the whole truth but it was the best I could get that febrile night. After making another couple of calls and gathering up complaints about Rudd from some MPs, I wrote it up, turned it around in thirty minutes and sent it in. Then I had a piece of cake.

  The story appeared above the fold on the front page the next morning. It was not a great piece of journalism. It was not worth an A. I didn’t generate it myself and the office had to ask me for it (although in my defence it was my birthday). Other staff on the paper apparently couldn’t get it in that limited time frame but I could. Perhaps it was worth a B. In the morning when I went in to the office, there was no thank you, not even an acknowledgement, although Patrick called to thank me later. The morning conference staff wanted to know what else I had. Why don’t I keep drilling into what caused it, I said. No, that’s last night’s story, was the response: what will Gillard be like as PM—that’s the story for today. How the heck would I know? I said I really thought we owed it to our readers to tell them more about why the PM they elected in 2007 got shafted overnight. No, I was told quite firmly. I thought to myself: I found out stuff other people were having trouble finding out last night, but rather than let me follow my own leads, you now want to tell me what to do. This sort of thing is far from uncommon in newsrooms and of course I do not regard it as an atrocity, far from it. But it didn’t sit right. I’d played my part in making the paper look a bit better. I was the one with the contact who spilled his guts. Once, I wouldn’t have cared. Now I did.

  The subsequent federal election called soon after by Gillard to establish a personal mandate didn’t improve my state of mind. It was, by widespread acclamation, the worst election in modern Australian history, full of vapid marketing lines, and with the genuine humanity sucked out of nearly every moment. As a sign of The Age’s multi-platform approach, it was arranged for Gillard and her Liberal opponent Tony Abbott to be interviewed by the paper’s political heavy-hitters: the editor Paul Ramadge plus Michelle Grattan, Michael Gordon and me. Gillard was first and she visited our editorial floor late one afternoon to record her interview in our state-of-the-art video studio. I hated the entire experience. I was then an admirer of Gillard’s and was, later, disappointed that she did not make a good fist of being prime minister. The interview was just awful. Gillard, sticking to her risk-averse approach to the campaign, went out of her way to run down the clock and say nothing of any perceptible news value. Nevertheless, we led the paper with some reheated version of a set of sentences she uttered that gave the appearance of being substantial, and made a song and dance about the video package on our website. When it came time to do the Abbott interview, his schedule was tight so we were going to have to do it on his plane on the way from Melbourne to Newcastle. Paul consulted me, concerned that there wouldn’t be enough seats on the plane for all of us. It was clear to me that he really wanted to participate again. I definitely did not. I just thought life was too short. I volunteered not to go, an easy decision. He seemed happy with that. The whole thing highlighted to me how much more journalism and politics were coming to value marketing and presentation. What I thought then—and nothing has changed my assessment—was that the Fairfax organisation was flailing about as it attempted to rescue itself and this had encouraged more and more overcooking of our product. No one individual was responsible for this; it was across the company. Month after month of bad numbers and continual ‘sell’ recommendations by market analysts will do that.

  My period of The Great Letting Go had begun. I had inherited the house in Boonong Avenue, which I kept vacant with my father’s furniture and clothes all in place. For months I could not bring myself to sell it. In fact, it was not until the end of the year that I summoned up the wherewithal to engage an estate agent to get the sale started. I took a while to clean up the house and it went on the market in February 2011. It sold pretty quickly—it was, after all, within walking distance of a beach and a railway station, and opposite a school—with a sixty-day settlement period. I organised a holiday in America for April so that I would be out of the country when settlement took place. I cleaned out everything, filling two industrial skips, and gave the furniture to charity. I put a bunch of my father’s Reader’s Digest compendiums in my boot, so that I could keep them on the bookshelves in my backyard studio. I found a copy of The Adult Only Joke Book III on his bedside table. He must have read that before he went to bed in order to memorise the jokes. He always had a new one whenever he visited me and could be counted on to laugh louder than me at the punchline. I brought that home with me too.

  On the day before I took off for New York, I visited the house one last time, this oversize weatherboard shoebox that was the scene of fights and freeze-outs and bad guitar playing and my father’s singing and my mother’s gentle listening and her crying and letter-writing and my studying and his smoking and television watching and lessons, lots of lessons, good and bad. This place of dreams being broken and taking shape. This place to which he had once escaped and where I organised my escape. And now I was letting it go. I had to. I photographed everything: the door handles, the box containing the electricity meter, the knothole in the side doorstep, the Britex sticker still attached to the kitchen sink fifty-two years after it was installed. I took pictures of the deck my father and I built during the summer of 1972–73, when he let me bring a speaker from the stereo out so that I could listen to the album A Product of a Broken Reality by Company Caine during the work, where he nodded and smiled when I returned from seeing The Rolling Stones at Kooyong and I told him that Mick Jagger had pointed to me in the audience and urged me to clap along. I carried a video camera and provided a commentary. I have never looked at the video. I do not want to. But I will never get rid of it. I walked to the centre of the house where three doors meet. To my left was the bathroom door, to my right, my parents’ bedroom. In front of me was the doorway to my room. I felt a force pulling me to the floor. I dropped to my knees, looking into my room. It was the vantage point I had when I was—what? Six? Seven? Eight? I recognised it. It was familiar, just as the breeze coming in from the bay had been when I’d walked into the backyard only half an hour earlier. On my knees, I wept because this time I was going away for good. Of course, there was no force pushing me down. I was doing this myself. It was my last chance of inhabiting that scared little boy’s place in the world. I rose, got into my car, packed my bag, slept well and got out of the country.

  After two weeks in New York, I visited Los Angeles. I was in Disneyland, on a hot Monday afternoon, standing underneath the Silly Symphony Swings, when The Age’s switchboard number appeared on my phone. It was Anna Marulli, now working as Paul Ramadge’s executive assistant, ringing to tell me that Paul wanted the senior staff to know that there was to be an announcement later that day: The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald were getting rid of most of their sub-editors and contracting out most of the production. I thanked her, put the phone back in my po
cket and said that’s it, the reporters will be next. I’m going.

  20

  YOU CAN’T PUT BRAINS IN A STATUE

  ON THE LAST day of winter in 2012, a little more than a year after my Californian epiphany, I walked out along with scores of colleagues, including my partner Caroline. Between the two of us, we had fifty years’ service with The Age. I was not sad. I was not frightened. I was excited. I had no guarantees of a job. I had not looked for an actual full-time job, even though I had been planning my departure for a year. I did not want one. In many respects, this insouciant mindset was a repeat of my approach in the months leading up to my entry into journalism: I just assumed something would turn up and it would all work out. I have spent most of my waking days anxious and mildly worried about the smallest, most pathetic domestic things but in these really big, life-determining moments I’ve been bizarrely calm. I know I am part of one of the luckiest generations in human history. Perhaps I took a lesson from my time in journalism, which was that worrying about a deadline or whether someone will call you back won’t help you write a story. I left my full-time career with nothing but good feelings towards The Age and my colleagues there, many of whom I call friends. I wanted it to succeed in its transformation to a tabloid, slated for early 2013. And in its transition to a fully digital masthead, I wish it well. I worry about what the abandonment of print will mean for a masthead as storied as The Age and all of the well-established Australian papers, for that matter. Chief executives and ambitious editors and news directors can talk the transition up as much as they like but when what we know as newspapers become an exclusively digital presence, what will define them? The website, already regarded by digital natives as old hat? The tablet version, going the same way? The phone app, which is a very handy but by definition diminutive representation of the masthead’s content? Maybe it won’t matter. Or maybe it will matter a lot.

  It is a hard thing to accept that you are redundant. My redundancy due to technological change was obviously easier for me than for many people pushed out of their jobs. I have always been overly mindful of the passage of time, perhaps because my mind captures dates and hangs on to them along with all sorts of other not-very-useful information, and somehow that cushioned the blow. I can recall being shocked at the age of twenty-eight when, travelling in to work on an old W-class tram, I saw a face through the pane of glass that protected the end of the bench seat from the open door on the side of the vehicle. There was a guy with crow’s feet next to me. No, that’s my reflection. It’s me! When I wrote up the Saulwick Poll results each month for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald in the 1980s, I would look at the demographic breakdown: eighteen to twenty-four; twenty-five to thirty-nine; forty to fifty-four; fifty-five and over. After fifty-five, there was nothing. What would that be like to be in an age cohort beyond which there was nothing? It was serendipitous that the offer of redundancy came just as I turned fifty-five. Rather than enfeebling me, it made me feel stronger. Now I would see if I could stand on my own two feet after thirty-four years of being on a salary. I’d come to feel that I had no value after being in one place for twenty-six years. I was like a piece of furniture and I had allowed that to happen. That was on me. Naturally, taking this leap was a lot smoother with four weeks’ pay for every year of service. You can do the arithmetic on that. But that money doesn’t last and you have to do something with yourself, anyway.

  All I can recall is that I was happy, free, on the weekend after I left. I don’t know what I did. What I do know is that on the Tuesday morning, my mobile phone rang as I was shaving and the man on the other end announced himself as James Campbell, the opinion editor of the Herald Sun, and would I like to have lunch on Thursday? At the lunch he offered me a column. I said I wanted to think about it overnight. He said, a little incredulously: ‘Mate, it’s just one column—800 words—a week!’ He was right, of course. The next day I called him and said yes.

  I began this story saying that three phone calls summed up my career, but it’s really four calls. Campbell’s call was the one that vindicated my decision to hit the Escape button. I had felt worthless and unnoticed and now at least someone had noticed me: the other paper in town. It was not a job—I would be a contributor—but I could still ply my trade each week. I was not completely redundant. I cast my net for other things to do. I contacted Paul Strangio, a gifted political scientist and historian at Monash, and that resulted in an honorary appointment in the politics school: adjunct associate professor. In light of my desultory performance as an undergraduate, this can be placed in one of two categories: Academic Standards Are On An Inexorable Decline; or Is This A Great Country Or What? I was also put in touch with a woman who ran a speakers’ bureau, which did not go so well. We had a meeting in a café, I rabbited on about myself for too long and when our conversation came to an end and I offered to pick up the tab, I swear she leapt over tables to get out of there. I discovered that I had left my wallet at home and had to scrounge around in my satchel and on the floor of my car to find enough coins to pay for our coffees. A friend, Bill Shannon, gave me work writing narratives for his Melbourne advertising company, the building blocks for his behaviour change programs and social marketing campaigns. Bit by bit, I put together a quilt of things to do and got the chance to see the world from a different vantage point. And the thing is, I did not miss my full-time job. There was never a moment when I thought, ‘I wish I was in the newsroom’. Clearly, that life I had sought with such passion and commitment, that I loved—there was never a day in my thirty-four years with The Herald and The Age when I didn’t feel like going in—well, I was over it. But you know what? I don’t have to wonder. I haven’t had to wonder ever since I got that first phone call from Bill Hoey when I was twenty.

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  As for the rest of my life, Jane was declared cured in 2014, more than seven years after she first fell ill. And my parents are still around. I think about my mother’s steady reassurance and her belief in me every day. She trained me in how to listen and maintain a confidence. My father? His language stays with me. When he felt something was unreasonable he would say, ‘Aise it up!’ If something went wrong for him: ‘I’m a good bloke having a stiff trot’. When he was enjoying himself, often with a seven-ounce glass of beer in his hand: ‘I wonder what the poor people are doing’. After we had a joke-telling contest, he would declare himself the winner with the declaration that there were ‘no second prizes, only bottles of tomato sauce’. As we worked on an always imperfect project at home, such as putting fake wood panelling in the lounge room, and I wondered what to do after he had given me inadequate directions: ‘Don’t stand around like a stale bottle of milk’. A philosophical approach to humanity he had been handed by his father: ‘The only problems you’ll have in life will be on two legs’. On marriage: ‘If you’re going well, it’s only a temporary situation’. On parenting: ‘You only have your kids on loan’. When confronted by a pretentious individual, in a lisping, affected voice: ‘Ooohh, I say “poo”’. At the end of a meal: ‘I’ve had an elegant sufficiency’. When seated in his favourite chair, upon hearing a knock on the door, a shout: ‘Nobody’s home!’ (This always caused my mother to say in an exasperated stage whisper: ‘Oh, God! You don’t even know who it is! It could be anyone!’) Upon finding a missing item: ‘Luck’s a fortune’. When flabbergasted by someone’s stupidity, said with gusto: ‘What a dickhead!’ And my favourite, his reflection on the haplessness of many of his fellow humans: ‘You can’t put brains in a statue’. He also had an oft-expressed assessment of his own legacy: ‘When I die, half the people who knew me will say, “Oh, that’s sad. There goes Jim Carney, he was a terrific fella”, and the other half will say, “There goes Jim Carney. He was a rotten bastard and I’m glad he’s gone”’. It summed up the duality of his domestic life, I always thought.

  Was it just coincidence that I started to lose my intense attachment to my job at The Age only a day after he died? He was the reader in my mind�
��s eye every time I wrote anything. That might be a little too neat; the Internet had a lot to do with it. All the same, I had idealised him as my target audience for thirty-two years and I started to find writing just a little bit more difficult after his death.

  We are all just the next chapter in a larger story. Without my parents’ unresolved dramas and their love and their willingness to let me go my own way, I would never have had what I regard as an interesting life. My career was passable, not great. There were disappointments. But it did me. Why did my father live his life the way he did? He told me that when he lost his business, he would look at me running around as a four-year-old and wonder ‘What have I done to you, bringing you into this world?’ The bankruptcy took something from him. Rather than taking a risk in his work, he took risks and sought thrills in his personal life. And he had a secret about his beginnings that plagued him all the way to his death. I have no doubt that the secrets that sat near the heart of my childhood home caused me to pursue a professional life that allowed me to dig around in people’s minds and lives and activities and aspirations and to then share them with other people.

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  In December 2015, a forty-five-year-old man was chased along Boonong Avenue and stabbed in the buttocks and neck. He died. A fourteen-hour siege in a house just near my childhood home followed. It ended when police stormed the house and shot a man who, according to the Herald Sun report of the incident, was affected by the drug ice. The report was accompanied by a picture of a man and woman, both distraught. Each held a hand to their heads. The woman had her back to the camera. She was wearing a black-and-white striped tank top and shorts and had tattoos on her arms and on one leg. The man, large and bearded, was in a t-shirt bearing a motorcycle print and shorts. He had tattoos on both legs, an arm and his considerable stomach, which protruded out from under his shirt. As I read the report and studied the picture, I wondered what my little Boonong Avenue family would have made of this event. My mother would have tut-tutted and, concerned for our safety, locked the doors. My father, upon spying the neighbour in the t-shirt, would have said: ‘He’s trim, taut and terrific, isn’t he?’ Me? I would have memorised everything and used it as an excuse to write a book.