by Mark Colvin
We learned to use tape recorders, microphone technique, how to cut tape by ‘dubbing’ (transferring from one machine to another) or cutting with a razor and sticky tape. We went up to the ABC Training Centre in Darlinghurst Road to learn the rudiments of how to direct a television news story on the road and how to work in a TV studio. Back in William Street, there were exercises in how to turn a press release and a sheaf of cuttings into a story at speed, and how to build up a contact book. But we were told above all to be curious: not to rely on handouts but to see the stories in the events we experienced.
On the other hand, it was obvious that some of the things we saw, or were ‘common knowledge’, were not reportable. The newsroom was three blocks from King’s Cross: just up the road, you could sometimes see a prostitute or a pimp step out of a shop doorway to hand a brown envelope through the window of a police car.
Across the road from the newsroom, in Forbes Street, was the Forbes Club, a notorious illegal gambling joint. ABC TV Current Affairs’ This Day Tonight once set up its camera on the roof of the building next door and told viewers, in innocent tones, that the program had phoned the police hours earlier to alert them that the place was hosting gambling without a licence, but that no-one, so far, had turned up to raid the place. The program kept crossing back to the camera for the next half-hour, but no police ever came. This provocation so enraged the NSW premier, Sir Robert Askin, that the next day he went into parliament to announce that there would be police raids on all of Sydney’s illegal gambling dens at six o’clock that evening. Given that kind of notice, it was hardly surprising that when the cops arrived, TV cameras in tow, nothing untoward was happening at any of these fine establishments.
Privately, most people in journalism believed that NSW was corrupt from top to bottom, and the corruption began around the corner from our office, with two people only ever referred to as ‘Mr Big’ and ‘Mr Sin’. Mr Big was a thug and organised crime figure called Lenny McPherson. Mr Sin was Abe Saffron, a former sly-grog seller who’d accumulated a gambling and prostitution empire. Years later, in a book called Gentle Satan, Abe Saffron’s son Alan said his father paid Premier Sir Robert Askin, as well as two successive NSW police commissioners, Norm Allan and Fred Hanson, huge sums in bribes over the years.
Everyone in Sydney journalism ‘knew’ most of this, but the barriers to publication were huge. Juanita Nielsen, who ran a little crusading newspaper in King’s Cross, crossed someone powerful and disappeared—kidnapped and murdered, presumably, though nobody knew that for certain at the time. And where intimidation didn’t work, there were the defamation laws. At ABC News, it was unthinkable that these kinds of stories would get into our bulletins, not least because the ABC’s legal department at the time was thought by most journalists to be cravenly cautious. Its teetering, almost-ceiling-high piles of dusty old files and briefs tied with pink tape gave a Dickensian impression, and its default setting seemed to be ‘If in doubt, don’t publish.’ Our job, it was clear, was bread-and-butter news. Campaigns, crusades and investigation were largely off-limits.
In any case, I was completely wet behind the ears. I knew we cadets had to start small, and that meant doing routine minor assignments handed out by the chief of staff, shadowing ‘rounds’ correspondents, going to Miss Hale’s Secretarial College in the CBD twice a week for shorthand lessons, and keeping your eyes peeled for stories.
I had found a shared house in Coogee through friends of my Canberra mate John Langtry, and one steamy night almost a month after I joined up, John got us tickets to see the great blues guitarist BB King in concert at the Hordern Pavilion. All went well until, an hour or so in, King collapsed on stage while playing ‘Sweet Sixteen’ and had to be carried off. I left the Hordern in search of a phone box. The first one was broken. Finding one that worked, I stuffed some money in, rang one of the copy-takers at ABC News and dictated five lines of copy. I got on a bus and got home in time to hear those lines being delivered on the hourly ABC Radio News: ‘The blues guitarist BB King collapsed on stage tonight …’
It was the first time anything I’d written ever got to air. It was a thrill at least equal to seeing my first photo in print in the Falmouth Packet in 1971.
* * *
The key to getting sent out into the wider world as a cadet was to get through the shorthand course. Tape recorders weren’t enough for a radio reporter back then. You needed to be able to take notes at talking speed: at least 100–110 words per minute. Until then, you were stuck in the Sydney newsroom. For some reason, I found Pitman’s easy, getting to the requisite number of words in what I was told was a record twelve lessons in six weeks. There was no great secret to it, other than doing a couple of hours’ practice every night, and rote-learning—boarding school had given me plenty of experience of that.
Once I’d passed, I was eligible to be sent out to regional offices to fill in for more-senior journalists on leave. I was sent first to the ABC’s Canberra newsroom in Northbourne Avenue. There I learned the daily routine of helping fill the local radio bulletins, which involved ringing around a regular circuit of police stations, farm agents, firemen, hospitals, local identities and stringers. Canberra was much smaller then, and in any case its transmitters served places as far afield as Cooma and Cootamundra. I got into the swing of it, and was obviously competent enough: after about three weeks they told me that the chief of staff in the ABC’s press gallery bureau, Owen Lloyd, had asked for me to go over there to replace (temporarily) one of the long-time reporters, who was going on leave.
Parliament was broadcast live, but the law then said it was not to be recorded, certainly not for edited rebroadcast. So doing accurate shorthand ‘takes’ of ten minutes at a time, in relays, was an essential part of the job. It just happened that I was the one doing the ‘take’ at 8.30 p.m. on 10 April 1974, when Prime Minister Gough Whitlam rose to his feet and said, ‘Mr Speaker, I inform the House that I have this evening advised His Excellency the Governor-General that a situation has arisen under section 57 of the Constitution which would entitle him to dissolve both Houses. His Excellency accepted my advice and granted an immediate simultaneous dissolution …’ It was just on two months since I had started as a cadet, and there I was, sitting at a typewriter in the press gallery, with Owen Lloyd standing over my shoulder, bashing out the lead for the nine o’clock news: ‘It’s official: there’s to be a double-dissolution election.’
My little piece was hardly a major achievement in itself: the people telling the story on TV that night—Ken Begg for ABC News and Richard Carleton for This Day Tonight—had far bigger parts to play. But it was my own first small introduction to the adrenaline rush of covering a really big national story.
I liked Old Parliament House, despite its cramped and crowded conditions. Or perhaps because of them: there was an intimacy about it, which meant that politicians—especially ministers—couldn’t quarantine themselves from journalists, as many do now. Some MPs would just drop into the ABC office for a beer, but even for the others there were few ways to keep away from the media. It was difficult to get quickly around the building without going through King’s Hall, at the front, and old hands like the ‘Silver Fox’, Alan Reid, were famous for lurking behind its pillars to buttonhole their political targets. That said, it was an atmosphere hugely dominated by men and booze. A large portion of some journalists’ days was spent in the non-members’ bar, which many MPs also frequented, giving the journos the excuse that they were ‘cultivating sources’.
The ABC’s chief Senate correspondent, Les Love, a tiny, genuinely charming man in his sixties, was very seldom even remotely sober. But somehow he managed to do the job despite his steady intake. Les had been there so long he was generally known as ‘Senator Love’. On one famous occasion, he was muttering from the press gallery during a speech by Senator Margaret Guilfoyle about Aboriginal ‘trachoma’. ‘It’s glaucoma, you stupid woman,’ Les said, rightly or wrongly, but definitely audibly. ‘I thank the honourable s
enator for his correction,’ said Senator Guilfoyle, glancing up.
One story about him from before my time concerned the then uncovered walkway that joined the rear of the Senate to the House of Representatives. It was the shortest way back to the ABC office, and late one night, during a snowstorm, Les slipped over and fell unconscious. Parliamentary attendants found him an hour later and an ambulance took him to hospital. The doctor who saw him when he woke the next morning is alleged to have said, ‘Mr Love, you are a very lucky man. If not for the quantity of alcohol in your blood, you would probably have died of hypothermia. On the other hand, if not for the extreme cold, which slowed down your metabolism, you would almost certainly have died of alcohol poisoning.’
With parliament dissolved, there was less to do after Whitlam’s election announcement, and I spent a few weeks largely following up press releases by far-flung MPs and candidates, for stories which were mainly used on ABC Rural and regional stations. I had returned to Sydney by the time Whitlam beat Billy Snedden in the May 1974 election, but I came back to Canberra for a year in 1978, by which time Malcolm Fraser was prime minister. By then things were slowly—very slowly—starting to change. Women like Niki Savva, Michelle Grattan and Gay Davidson were starting to make much more of a mark in the press, but it would take decades for the male dominance of the gallery to change radically.
* * *
In Sydney in mid-1974, for some absurd reason, my English accent gave someone the mistaken idea that I was the right person to compile and read the finance report on the ABC’s breakfast show. This was way outside my area of expertise. A more senior reporter kindly told me the story of how a previous incumbent had made a mistake on air with the price of gold which led to an investor ringing in to say that he had just lost $20 000 on the strength of it. No pressure there, then. To make things worse, the breakfast presenter, Clive Robertson, who could be very funny, had no respect at all for the ‘just-the-facts-no-personalities’ rules of ABC News, and would keep interrupting, playing sound effects, or asking me questions.
I survived, somehow, for a while, and soon I was down at the NSW Parliament shadowing the state political correspondent, Paul Mullins. ‘Mullo’ was an ex-boxer whose broad shoulders and slightly crouched posture always reminded you of his ring days: he went on to a long career asking politicians the tough questions on Channel Ten. But in 1974, at the end of every week, he wrote and presented a fifteen-minute radio program, The Week in State Parliament, known in the newsroom as ‘Twisp’. There I learned the rudiments of radio producing, timing scripts, cutting tapes as needed, and sitting in the control room with a stopwatch making sure it all fitted.
The NSW Parliament press gallery then was a complete anachronism, really not much changed from the kind of press room depicted in Ben Hecht’s 1928 Broadway play The Front Page. Uniformed parliamentary attendants served ice-cold beer, and meals on crested parliamentary crockery, while the reporters sat around telling all the salacious stories they could never print or broadcast, and playing the card game 500. Meanwhile, the government of Sir Robert Askin was not only corrupt but old and tired. A sharp new ALP leader, Neville Wran, made question time more interesting in the Legislative Assembly usually nicknamed the ‘Bear Pit’, and Liberal ‘law-and-order’ (or Laura Norder) slogans seemed to be losing their punch in the face of growing discontent over the state’s crumbling transport system.
Towards the end of the year I got another regional posting, this time to Orange. I packed my gear onto my Yamaha 250 motorbike and headed west through the Blue Mountains. The Orange area was a far more traditionally agricultural region then: now known as a food and wine destination, in those days it was known for fruit, cattle, sheep and grain crops. But its ABC radio station covered a huge area of western NSW: Bathurst, Dubbo, Cowra, Forbes, Parkes, Canowindra, and all the way out to Cobar. With local bulletins at breakfast, lunch and dinner, it was far too big to do much coverage on the ground: it was all about the daily round of phone calls to friendly contacts, farmers, the occasional stringer on a retainer, police and so on. Fortunately, the senior reporter, the kindly Amos Bennett, had been there a long time, and the contact book was huge.
I settled into a routine, usually producing enough ‘lines’ to fill the bulletin with local news, though there was occasional recycling from, say, lunchtime to evening bulletins. Country towns tend to be places where everyone knows each other, and my colleague Chris Masters remembers working at the ABC office in Albury at around this time, when the local news journalist and newsreader was a man called Cleaver Bunton, who also happened to be the town’s mayor. Chris swears that one night the bulletin began: ‘This is the ABC News, written by Cleaver Bunton and read by Cleaver Bunton. The mayor of Albury, Cleaver Bunton, said today …’
I seem to recall that the most exciting thing to happen in the Orange region one week was an exploding outside dunny in Canowindra, but I have long forgotten the details. I had a room in the Hotel Canobolas, ate a steak or a casserole in the pub most nights, and, knowing no-one of my own age in town, had very little social life other than conversations at the bar. At weekends I buzzed around the district on my bike.
ABC News at this time featured very few reporters’ voices. Most stories were read in actorly, English-accented tones by veteran newsreaders like Bruce Menzies (pronounced ‘Ming-ies’), Martin Royle and Peter Dawes-Smith. The only other voices that audiences heard in bulletins (as opposed to current affairs programs like AM and PM) were those of people like federal ministers and their opposition counterparts, the ABC’s foreign correspondents, and its federal and state political reporters. But that began to change in 1974, as general and rounds reporters started to be encouraged to file ‘voice pieces’ and ‘actuality’ into bulletins.
It was about time. It created a greater incentive for reporters like me to get out into the field with a tape recorder and see and hear for themselves. In Orange, with its thrice-daily round of bulletins, I hadn’t yet been able to do that.
In December, a huge bushfire broke out around Cobar, way over to the west of our territory. For about a day I covered it by phone, ringing the fire service in Cobar and anyone else I could find—Cobar is about 450 kilometres from Orange by road, so I thought, being stuck with the bulletins, I didn’t have a choice. Then an announcer called Terry Berkrey suggested that we both hire a plane and fly there. He would cover the crisis for the station, and since this was now much more than a local story, I could file for ABC state and national news. This was an astonishing notion to me, but I rang Sydney and they said yes. While ABC local management in Orange organised someone to do the local bulletins, we drove out to the local airfield, got in a single-engine Cessna, and headed out.
It was a hell of a flight (though still small beer compared to the one I’d taken through a Mongolian mountain pass two years earlier), because as the plane got closer to the fire, the thermal currents became more and more turbulent. It felt as though we were being tossed around like a leaf in the wind as we approached the bushfire, the first I’d ever seen. It was a wall of smoke and flame stretching for many kilometres along the ground and hundreds of metres into the air. A fire as big as that sucks in powerful winds at its base and creates a whole microclimate of aerial chaos. It was hard to keep from throwing up as the pilot wrestled to keep us on course and on the level through a series of unpredictable thermals.
I scribbled a description of what we’d seen from the air and filed by phone from the airfield. When I arrived at the emergency centre, people were listening to the ABC bulletin, and my voice piece was there as the national lead. But to send better-quality audio, I needed a line, not a phone. The answer was at the PMG—the Postmaster-General’s Department—which was what we had before Telstra or even Telecom. A friendly tech ushered me behind the scenes into a world of switching boxes, cords and plugholes, and I was able to hook up at will for the next few days to send high-quality material to Sydney.
That fire around Cobar burnt out one and a half million
hectares. I remember interviewing people who’d seen rabbits and kangaroos with their fur burning running, panicked, across firebreaks and spreading the blaze to new areas. I remember seeing the air over and around a stand of trees—not the trees themselves—explode into flame as a spark hit the halo of evaporated eucalyptus oil they were giving off in the heat.
One evening I filed for the ten o’clock news, and the intake sub Mike Rue told me that I had just become the first ABC reporter ever to have a voice piece in both the national and state bulletins. An incredibly minor achievement in retrospect, but for a cadet approaching the end of his first year, it seemed like something.
I think I was in Cobar for a few days, sleeping on floors and filing around the clock, before the fire was sufficiently under control for Sydney to pull me out. I hitched a ride on an RAAF Hercules back to Sydney. When I got there, I was surprised to see a bunch of other ABC reporters on the tarmac. During the previous few hours, news of Cyclone Tracy flattening Darwin, including all of its communications links, had finally got out to the rest of Australia. When I realised what was going on, I volunteered to go straight there—to switch from one RAAF plane to another and head north.
That was a bridge too far for a cadet, as far as the bosses were concerned. They sent me back to my mum’s in Canberra for Christmas. But I was on my way, and I already had hopes of moving out of the ABC newsroom and across the road into the planned new youth station, 2JJ—Double J.
