A Journo Remembers

The Seven Ages
…of a news addict
IF news were a substance, I’d be an abuser with a lifetime habit. When I started as a cadet journalist, World War Two was still raging. Twelve days later, it was not. Hiroshima taught me there is no such thing as the unthinkable, but it’s hard to believe that after more than 60years, the newsroom is still part of my life, even if only for half a day a week.
Now, with a lifetime of deadlines behind me, and the ultimate one just over the hill, why do I risk freak status? It’s not so much the contact with fresher minds, as the contrast between pressure and peace. The former intensifies the latter, reminding me that for the rest of the week, time is not of the essence. My morning walk not only helps ward off the sixth of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man (although the shrunk shanks are already well in evidence) but gives me time for the free-wheeling of memory that has given birth to this book. Not for me the anxious pacing of the fitness fanatic, with frequent checks on time and heart rate, earphones injecting the cacophony of the outside world into a brain already overloaded with the static of the day. No, just a loosenng of the limbs and a reminder to the heart that it has work to do, but all in good time.
I have been a regional print journalist since I started at the Toowoomba Chronicle in 1945 and my column And Another Thing appears in the Saturday edition of the Sunshine Coast Daily.
Far be it for me to claim status as an emerging writer, … there’s not much time left in which to emerge … but having just successfully published Chapter & Verse, my first book of short fiction and fragments of poetry, I am encouraged by the comments of that great Australian writer David Malouf about one of the stories in the collection of short fiction and poetry:
“I’d have no criticism to make, only a slight complaint: that I wanted more.… I distinctly felt that you had more in your memory and in your experience than a short story like this brings out. …. I wonder what you would find yourself saying – where memory would lead you, where the writing would go – if you gave yourself space and abandoned the shapeliness of ‘story’ for first person memoir… So I consider you might be tempted to go on from the stories to naked reminiscence. My feeling is that you’d discover, in the writing, as you open up and let the “I” loose, that you have a whole lot more to recall and quite different things to say.”
(Chapter & Verse has been favourably reviewed in print and on radio and has been produced by Queensland Narrative Services as a double CD for the vision-affected. It is on sale at good bookshops on the Sunshine Coast and also at Riverbend Books in Brisbane, or from the author at rich.29.net.au)
Acting on David Malouf’s suggestion, I am now well into writing my recollections of journalism, and of life, in a period when the industry has changed its spots more times than I’ve had a free feed … and journos being journos, that’s plenty.
What follows is the first chapter of my work in progress, which has the working title The Seven Ages … of a news addict .Whether you are a reader or a publisher, may it whet your appetite (not “wet” as many so-called professionals would now write).
Chapter 1
AT first I hated the tin voice. Expressionless, toneless, relentless. Force feeding me with news from all over the world. In through my 16-year-old
ears, out through my fingers. Typing like hell, but unable to keep up. Dictaphone duty. Christ, this wasn’t journalism, surely?
I’d already served several long months in the reading room, where I’d endured the droning recital of everything in the paper, ads and all. My job was to stop the reader if there was any variation between proof and copy, but my concentration often wandered, sometimes to the illustrations in the lingerie ads; sometimes to fantasies about my first scoop and a swashbuckling career ahead, Press pass in hat-band and relishing the authority of bad news; but most often to thoughts of the dark-haired girl at the motorcycle shop where I could be found most lunchtimes, along with other young hopefuls pretending an interest in the ex-army BSAs.
Awake to my musings, the proof reader would deliberately misread a line from a beauty parlour ad: “Ladies, come in to Suzie’s and get your beard trimmed.” If I did not pull him up, he would slam his heavy brass gauge down on the table, roaring “Watch the bloody copy!” His rage was understandable.There was no more abusive tradesman than a lino operator whose darg, or production quota, was cut back because of faulty proof-reading. One could hardly blame Gerry for being a bit short on the fuse … he’d lost a leg in the war, but with the impudence of youth, I just wished he wasn’t so grumpy.
My servitude in the reading room was not wasted, though. I learned to spell, to double check names and to assume nothing. The journalism graduates who now staff the newsrooms could well do with a stint under the watchful eye of that almost extinct species, the proof reader. Newspaper copy is now deemed to be error-free when it leaves the sub-editor’s terminal, but dreamed might be a better word. The error rate, from the “class” papers down to the yellowest of the tabloids, is a disgrace to an industry that is supposed to be about communication. To what extent this is due to shortcomings in education can be argued, but the once widely held, albeit erroneous view that if it was “in the paper” it must be right has long gone by the board, and rightly so. Surely, though, wordsmiths have a need and an obligation to at least use the language clearly and effectively.
Over-reliance on that useful but far from infallible tool the spellcheck contributes to this dumbing-down of the printed word, and many are the resulting idiocies. As for correct syntax, I was once lecturing young graduate journalists when, moved by the puzzled expression on some of their faces, I felt it necessary to explain that this is not a tax on prostitution. Sloppy syntax can and too often does change the meaning of sentence, as in “Police said a man questioned in relation to Daniel Morcombe’s abduction yesterday in Mackay was one of hundreds of persons of interest…..” It was the questioning, not the abduction, that occurred in Mackay, (Daniel was abducted at Woombye on the Sunshine Coast) but that’s not what this badly constructed sentence tells us.
But who cares? Does it matter? Many educationists now hold that correct spelling, grammar and sentence construction are unimportant so long as the meaning is clear; but surely the whole purpose of the rules we learned, or used to learn, is exactly that.
The basic rules of grammar and syntax are the linguistic rules of the road. Their only purpose is to make the meaning clear, and if we don’t abide by them, we risk being misunderstood. And that can be dangerous.
But back to the reading room. In the breaks while waiting for more proofs, I would surreptitiously dip into a grubbily thumbed copy of Love Me Sailor, a novel about misogynist but sex-mad seamen. It had just been banned and was therefore a prized possession going the rounds of the apprentices.
Sometimes I would wander out into the composing room, marvelling at the apprentices’ ability to read and correct the lines of metal type in the long narrow trays called galleys and place it in the formes, the steel frames in which the pages were assembled on the steel-topped bench known as the stone.
Just for fun, I taught myself to read the type in reverse and from the wrong side of the stone. This proved useful much later when as stone sub-editor I oversaw page make-up, cutting stories, selecting filler articles and getting rid of the odd “widow” (just one word sitting awkwardly by itself at the top of a column). I learned very quickly, though, never to touch the type. The printers, jealous of their skills and strongly unionised. were quite prepared to walk off the job if a non union member crossed the line.
It’s more than 60 years now since the half-sweet, half-acrid smell of molten lead, antimony and tin, mixed with that of gas and printer’s ink, first offended yet excited my nose, but no-one who has walked even once into a hot-metal composing room will ever forget it.
The typesetting machines, ridiculously intricate though they were, seemed to me the last word in technology, even though Ottmar Mergenthaler’s invention had been around since 1884. So complex were they, and so many were the skills required in the trade, that the apprenticeship called Hand and Machine Composing took six years to complete, compared with only four for my cadedtship.
Proud though I was to be a journalist — it gave me good bragging material at teenage parties — it was made clear to me that journalism was not a profession. Just why was never stated, but it could have had something to do with the fact that most provincial (now read regional) journalists were then recruited as cadets, rather than as university graduates, and could thus be paid considerably less. The bottom line was just as sacred then as now.
So just what is journalism? Macquarie calls it an occupation, Oxford an occupation or a profession and old Noah Webster, interestingly, a businesss, but some of its older practitioners, myself included, still think of it quaintly, and with just a touch of wistfulness, as a calling.
And then there’s the fusty old tag The Fourth Estate. I first heard this as a young reporter when, at a lunch for some visiting dignitary, a pro forma toast was proposed, not to the Press, as was usual, but to “the fourth estate”. Mystified, I sat waiting for someone to respond, until my neighbour dug me testily in the ribs. “That’s you” he growled. It was only much later that I found the term was coined by Edmund Burke as an add-on to the “three estates” represented in parliament — King, Lords and Commons, with the Press, Burke thought, the most powerful of all.
Journalism has had many names gratuitously bestowed on it, usually by people angered by what it has said of them, or by what it has not. Henry II’s frustrated plea “Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?”could, for many public figures caught in the spotlight of investigative journalism, well be amended by changing “priest” to “press”.
Journalism has been called the world’s second oldest profession and sadly some of its exponents, particularly in the tabloid sector, could well be said to belong to the oldest, at least metaphorically. They may not be selling their bodies, but they surely sell something of their calling. (I refer here not to the page size of tabloids, but to the generic term for shallow, sensationalist and intrusive reporting, typified by the 10-year feeding frenzy over the death of a beautiful but not very bright young woman in a Paris tunnel.)
At the other end of the scale, from the first pamphleteers to today’s investigative reporters, there are and always have been journalists who have fearlessly dragged the truth out from behind closed doors in the public interest. May this breed never become extinct.
And then there are the workhorses, the hacks, if you like, who day after day, week after week simply report, present and when required to do so, comment on the news. Overwhelmingly, they are true to their code of ethics, and I’m proud to have been one of them.
The monotony of the reading room ended with a bang …. VJ day and the end of the war. The Chronicle put out a special mid-morning Peace edition, and the entire staff, from the editor down, went out on the streets to sell it. The staid old Queen City of the Downs let her prissy hair down for once and the singing, dancing, swaying revellers clamoured for copies.
“Over here, Mate! Here’s a quid. No, bugger the change. This’ll be a great souvenir.” A pound for a twopenny paper .Two-thirds of my weekly wage, and no one was counting, but the euphoria helped me resist temptation and I gave away the rest of my bundle.
©Peter Richardson 5/12 Gloucester Road, Buderim, Qld May 2008

The Seven Ages...of a news Abuser