Press Escape by Shaun Carney

Author:Shaun Carney
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522870039
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

13

DISNEYLAND FOR JOURNALISTS

IT WAS ONLY a fifteen-minute tram ride west along Flinders Street and then north up Spencer Street to get from the Herald building to The Age’s awful late 1960s dark brown brick brutalist pile. But in terms of sensibility, confidence and power, it was the equivalent of travelling across the Pacific and arriving at Disneyland. The editorial floor was the biggest in Australia—the paper’s boast in the 1970s was that it was the largest in the Southern Hemisphere, that classically Australian distinction. Services and support were laid on for reporters. There was a team of assistants who answered your phone and took a message if you were out or didn’t feel like picking up, and who organised couriers to collect documents for you. Cab chits were cast around the office in the manner of a ticker-tape parade. Few questions were asked about expenses. And when you called anyone and said you were from The Age, in nearly every case they stopped what they were doing and responded to your questions. The tempo of the place was vastly different to The Herald, too. At The Herald, on most days you’d start writing your first story around 8 a.m. and when you’d filed, you’d move on to your next story and then the next one. Quite often, you might file five pieces, big and small, in a shift. At The Age, there would be multiple-story days but it was acceptable to just write the one 400-word piece a day. Some in the newsroom didn’t even do that.

On my first day there, the chief of staff Lindsay Murdoch, who I knew from my time at police rounds and who went on to be a brilliant long-serving correspondent in South-East Asia, came over to my desk and said: ‘Hey, mate, how’re you going? Do you feel like doing a story today or would you rather just settle in? Whatever you want to do, I’m fine’. I said I was happy to do something, and took the assignment, which involved some business aspect of the VFL. I made one call, to the then owner of the Sydney Swans Geoffrey Edelsten who, naturally, given that he was a publicity hound and I was from The Age, gave me what I was looking for. I took my time typing the story up and it ran on the back page the next morning—my one sports story in my career. I did think, as I reviewed my first day, ‘How easy is this?’

I joined The Age at twenty-eight, driven chiefly by the desire to stretch my abilities but also because eight years at one workplace seemed long enough. How then to explain my decision to spend the next twenty-six years in one place? I was even given an engraved gold watch after twenty-five years, for God’s sake. It wasn’t as though I didn’t have opportunities to leave. In the late 1980s, I was offered a job on a TV current affairs show. In the 1990s, the editor-in-chief

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