Press Escape

By Shaun Carney

Getting away was always a driving ambition for Shaun Carney—from an outer-suburban house in the 60s and 70s, from a family with a secret: a father with a double life and a borrowed name.

Journalism gave Shaun that escape, to another life, to becoming a different person. For 34 years he took every opportunity it offered, flourished and knew success even while dealing with the personal struggle of his own child battling cancer. But a greater sense of freedom came when he forgave the people he’d wanted to flee and, unexpectedly, let go of the life that he’d worked so hard to create. In this beautifully crafted memoir one of Australia’s leading political journalists writes movingly about discovering the one story that really matters.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Oct 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9780522870039

Book preview

Acknowledgements

1

THREE CALLS

MY CAREER IN journalism can be distilled down to three phone calls, none of which I made. When the first came, I was twenty, with twenty-seven dollars in an ANZ savings account, a maroon 1973 Valiant station wagon, an arts degree from Monash University achieved with nothing but passes save for a single credit in one first-year history unit, and no other prospects. The call was from the editorial manager of the Herald & Weekly Times, Bill Hoey, offering me a one-year graduate cadetship at Melbourne’s afternoon broadsheet The Herald. In the second, I was asked to cross over from The Herald to The Age by Age news editor Steve Harris. The third came on Tuesday, 28 August 2012. It was the one that officially ended the career that the previous two calls had established and sustained. If the first call represented my receipt of a golden ticket, entry into the only professional field I had ever wanted to be part of, that third call can be seen as my employer and me jointly casting that golden ticket on the ground and taking turns to stomp on it with glee. The executive editor of The Age, Rod Wiedermann, made that third call, contacting me on my mobile as I walked through a fine mist of mid-afternoon rain not far from my home. In what had become a habit in recent years, I had been in the office for only a few hours that day. I was a twice-weekly columnist and associate editor—a courtesy title, really—and attendance at my desk was rarely required. I was especially anxious that day and that’s why I was out walking—to try to get some respite from the anxiety. The date for the latest wave of voluntary redundancies set by Fairfax Media, owner of The Age, was only three days away.

I was not really in much doubt about getting a positive response to my request for a redundancy. I had recently turned fifty-five, which in many modern Australian workplaces—especially those that see digital technology as the giver of light—is the professional equivalent of being in palliative care. I’d been what passed for a ‘name’—I simply have to use quotation marks, lest I give the impression that I accord some sort of real value to the notion—on the paper for probably more than twenty years and I was well-remunerated compared with most of my colleagues (naturally, like every other member of the Australian workforce, though, I was sure that I was not and never had been paid enough). But I had for some time felt that I could not figure in The Age’s future—I barely related to its present—and I’d been subjected to enough casual indifference at work in recent years to conclude that my bosses had come to the same view. If I had not got out a red Sharpie and painted a big red circle on my forehead by applying for redundancy, the bean counters and swagger merchants at head office in Sydney would have eventually done it and shot me anyway. All the same, until you get the okay, you can’t be certain. Rod’s call was designed to put my mind at ease. His reason for calling was personal, not professional. ‘This isn’t an official call, Shaun, but I just wanted to let you know that your redundancy is going through. You’re going to be told officially tomorrow and that’s when you’ll get the paperwork. Probably best to keep this to yourself until then.’ Rod is a decent guy. Weeks earlier, I’d visited his office just to talk about the redundancy process and when I told him I had twenty-six years’ service and we both did the rough calculation of my likely payout, he gasped, smiled and exclaimed: ‘Fuck!’ The task of trying to make the numbers work at The Age while also watching a succession of managers and editors passing through, all with their ideas about how to turn things around or make a difference, had given him the sort of wry humility that’s not always available in the jazzed-up, ego-fuelled environs of an editorial floor. On the phone I thanked him for letting me know and for helping to steer my redundancy through. I knew that I had to escape that place, that life. I felt calm. I also sensed a weight pushing down, right through my body. This was my life’s work that I was abandoning. The dream had been realised, the hoped-for life had been lived—to an extent, anyway—and I had elected not to experience another moment of it. Rod had one more thing to tell me and his tone was mildly apologetic. ‘They want you out at the close of business on Friday. You’ll have three days to tidy up. Can you manage that?’

Yes, I can fit in with that, Rod, I replied. So there would be no prolonged farewell tour among my colleagues (awkward handshakes and go-nowhere small talk amid the ‘Do you have a job lined up?’ queries), no properly organised lunch (large tables where colleagues order from a prix fixe menu, take pot luck with who they get seated next to and often come up short on both counts), no late-afternoon presentation just near the news desk (empty speech from the editor who’s just decided he’s happier if I’m no longer there, me saying how things are still going strong and I’m sorry to be going, desultory applause, people wandering back to their desks, someone I’ve barely ever talked to now deciding they want to bail me up for a conversation). I could handle that. Better to get out quickly and do the thinking later.

My last three days went like this. On the Wednesday, I was ushered into an office being occupied by the acting editor Steve Foley, the recently installed editor-in-chief Andrew Holden in New Zealand that week as he transitioned from being editor of the Christchurch Press. Steve had been appointed news director. That position was itself new, created to—at long last—reflect in The Age’s editorial structure the truth that had been steamrolling newspapers across the world for the previous fifteen years: the supplanting of print by digital delivery. Steve was the first news executive to have direct control over both the paper and The Age’s digital products. We had first met in 1978 when I was in my cadet year and he had just returned to The Sun News-Pictorial’s Melbourne newsroom after a couple of years in the Herald & Weekly Times’ London bureau. After I reminded him of our initial encounter at the shared Herald and Sun press room at the Russell Street police headquarters all those years earlier and got a slight grin and a ‘That’s right’ in reply, Steve gave me a manilla envelope containing my ‘packet’—the exact figure of my redundancy payout, some legal bumpf and details of a free outplacement service offered by the company. ‘You’re leaving with your reputation intact, Shaun,’ he said, while shaking my hand. I thought Steve’s brief encomium was an apt encapsulation of my career: no great highs but at least I hadn’t fucked up spectacularly—not to a degree that had drawn too much attention, anyway.

The Thursday involved stuffing what remained in my desk drawers—I have always been a hoarder—into boxes and green shopping bags, then systematically depositing it all in my car parked near The Age’s Spencer Street offices. While this was going on, my personal files and digital copies of twenty years’ worth of what I’d written for The Age—all 1 243 703 words of it—were slowly filling a portable hard drive I’d plugged into my work PC. (Cuttings from the pre-digital days, once held in the paper’s now-vanished physical library, were … where? In a warehouse somewhere? Rotting as landfill in an outer suburban tip?) Friday was taken up with one final column on national politics for the Saturday paper, an interview with ex-colleague Jonathan Green for his Sunday Extra program on ABC Radio National about what it was like to be one of the sixty journalists exiting The Age, a hastily arranged lunch with a dozen colleagues, and more packing. Then drinks at a nearby pub after nightfall, where many in the throng, which skewed young, seemed either fatigued or bemused at having to say goodbye yet again to even more fellow workers, and then home.

There was a parallel process at The Sydney Morning Herald, where eighty journalists took up voluntary redundancy. Later, reports emerged of high emotion among some of the veteran reporters—of hardened, middle-aged men, some of whom I knew well, weeping together in the lifts as their roles in this great institution came to an end. There was none of that in Melbourne, or at least not that I saw or ever heard about. I certainly couldn’t get choked up. My unsentimental reaction wasn’t driven overwhelmingly by the money or the way the job and the company had changed in the face of evolving digital technologies, although they did have something to do with it. I just needed to get away and this was my best and least painful chance to do it. This was not so that I could relocate to a golf course or a caravan or a corporate job. I really didn’t know what I’d be doing, although I’d been thinking about it a lot. While I cared about that—naturally, I cared because I had family responsibilities and I would have to find a way to keep making a living—I couldn’t see how I could go on with my working life as it was currently arranged, not with what I’d seen and experienced in recent years. Fear and lies shape so much of human behaviour. They definitely played a big role in my life. They got me into journalism. But I’d been scared of stepping out of line, of standing alone and relying on myself, for as long as I could remember. Now I would find out if I could do it.

It wasn’t meant to end this way. That is to say, it was a long way from what I had planned. Even as late as 2010, just two years before I put my hand up to leave, I expected to be able to see out my working life as a full-time journalist, writing for The Age. I would be a venerable sage. I would continue to pick up the phone to find out something and influential people would take my call because they knew of my work and because I carried the imprimatur of an important newspaper, as I had been able to do since my twenties. But it became clear as the century’s second decade got into its stride that this was unrealistic. In fact it was going to be impossible. That my working life didn’t play out the way I expected didn’t make me a special case. Every year, tens of thousands of Australians find their lives disrupted and diverted—and, in many cases, irreparably damaged or diminished—by redundancy. Australia Post shrinks, a hardware chain collapses, an electronics retailer falls over, call-centre work is shifted from a regional centre to India or the Philippines, a smelter shuts down, a nickel refinery closes, and the media refers to the workers who are being turfed out as numbers: 190 at one place; 230 at another; 3000 over there. Generally, these decisions to divest employees are reported once and the news cycle moves on.

In 2006, I attended a talk by Bill Clinton at a function room in the football stadium in Melbourne’s Docklands. At one point in his free-ranging discussion of the state of the world, he chided the businesspeople who’d paid up to $2500 to attend, questioning their ability to understand what went on around them. The audience was seated at round tables. You’re all sitting at those tables, Clinton said. How do you think those tables got there? Who laid out the tablecloths? Who put the chairs around the tables for you to sit on? Someone did all those things so you could be here. After you leave, they’ll come back and take away those tablecloths and pack up the chairs and tables. And every one of those people who did that for you has a life, a home, people they love, hopes and aspirations. They’ve all got a story. Do you ever stop to think about those people when you come to a place like this? You should, he said.

This is one story.

2

SPARKALARKALARKALING

THE FIRST TUESDAY in February 1962. It was hot, the sky was clear, and at 8.45 in the morning, I was guided into a line of children outside the breezeway of the primary school opposite my home. I could feel my mother’s hand on my back, the sharp ends of the grey nylon stitching on my shirt collar and the heat of the sun on my right ear. I was four and I had been dreading this day for at least a year, convincing myself that it would never come.

Our house featured large windows on its front wall, which faced the street and the expansive schoolyard opposite. That grassed space, big enough to contain a small football oval, was always called ‘the schoolground’ by everyone who used it.

Hanging around my mother throughout 1961 as she swept and washed clothes and cut up onions and carrots for soup, the radio playing 3DB all morning, I would hear the bell pinging on the school’s PA from across the street to announce morning and afternoon playtimes and the lunchbreak each day. Another clamorous sound would follow within a minute or so: the chirping, swaying noise of children playing.

Most days I would perch myself on my knees on our lounge room couch, leaning my chest forward against the couch’s back, so that I could watch through the windows the various swirls of activity on the schoolground, rituals and conversations that mystified me. What were they talking about? What was there to talk about? Were they told what to do or did they organise things for themselves during that lunchtime hour on the suburban veldt?

Why were some of them running, some not? Why were they making noise? And what about the big kids, from Grade Two or above, who terrified me? You couldn’t go near them, could you? The sound that wafted across the recently laid tarmac of Boonong Avenue conveyed happiness but I could not see any of the children laughing. So where was the joy emanating from? I could not see it. I could not imagine it.

Amid these questions, I knew one thing for certain: I never wanted to go there. I never wanted to contribute to that noise, take part in that running or whatever it was that they were doing. My mother knew this. I don’t believe I ever told her I didn’t want to cross the street and try to belong. But she knew. We were together so much, how could she not?

I had no siblings. My father was still a part of the household but, endlessly inventive, was always coming up with reasons not to be around. My mother’s life had already started to reshape itself into a narrowing tunnel of disappointment and isolation. She had me, though, born relatively late in her life, just a few weeks after her thirty-eighth birthday, and she directed her emotional attentions to me above all else.

So whatever was going on in my head, she understood. This didn’t mean that she was interested in placating me. Whenever I placed myself in my viewing position on the couch during a school day, she would say to me: ‘You’ll be going there next year, playing with some of those children.’ It was said in a reassuring tone, suggesting that she was keeping me up to speed with my next step in life and that she knew what was best for me. She was also keen to get me out from under her skirt. You see, she was a loner too.

I was born just before the end of June in 1957. The state had decreed that all children who turned five before July 1 in their first year of school were eligible for enrolment, but parents could wait another year before sending their child if they wanted to.

She was having none of that. I was angry with her over this. I liked my life. Midmorning, the serial Portia Faces Life (‘A story taken from the heart of every woman who has ever dared to love’) would play on the brown bakelite radio in the kitchen, with its big circular dial on the front. Midafternoon, Tommy Hanlon Jr’s It Could Be You was on the television. I had no idea what either of those shows was about, except that heightened emotions were their currency. Judging by my mother’s reaction to them, they were interesting. Washing on Monday morning. Chops on Thursday night. Every day, I would get into some sort of disagreement with her that would culminate in me talking back to her, a social and familial sin in the early 1960s when children had not yet been granted status as autonomous individuals. She would tell me not to talk back to her. I would say, ‘Why can’t I talk back to you? I’m a person.’ Stressed and despairing because of her eroding happiness, she would lose her temper and smack me on the bottom or the back of my legs, almost always with a wet hand because her hands were often wet from her housework. I would then run to my room, throw myself face down on the bed and cry. After a period that seemed like several hours but was probably closer to ten minutes, I would return to the kitchen, wrap my arms around her legs, push my face into her skirt and tell her I was sorry. She would pat the top of my head. Drama, resolution, a small, closed cast of characters. There was a cosy predictability to that life.

And I needed predictability and familiarity. They were as vital to me as oxygen. I was shy, pathologically so. My shyness was like a big, bright red wound—a slash mark running right through my personality, my sense of self. I couldn’t face up to meeting anyone, be they an adult or a child. I could not form words when people spoke to me. I had only one thought: how could I get away? Most people will tell you they are shy. That is how they like to look at themselves. It is a way of explaining any residual social insecurities, a good check on the ego. I operated—and to a great, and often debilitating, extent still operate—with the knowledge that every social contact, even with people I knew well and regarded fondly, would be exhausting, frightening and potentially disastrous.

I resented my mother’s firmness during our exchanges about the inevitability of school attendance and I felt that she wasn’t telling me the truth. Who was she to cast me out into this world? I didn’t understand school but I knew enough to know that I would not, as she was suggesting, be playing with the children already at school. You played exclusively with kids in your grade. Everyone knew that. I would be with a bunch of strangers who, like me, had not set foot on the schoolground before. Who were these unseen kids anyway?

I did not want to join the world. It looked frightening and confusing. I enjoyed watching it very much but being part of it didn’t appeal at all. Anyway, I already could read. I can’t remember a time when I couldn’t read. From the moment I could talk, I would ask my parents about words. What’s that word? How do you say it? What does it mean? This was my chatter when we would drive around Melbourne’s half-built outer southern suburbs in our 1948 Chevrolet ute. My father was a welder, he needed a ute, he liked Chevrolets and he definitely wasn’t going to have any more kids, so that’s why we had a Chev. ute and not a family sedan. A ute had room for three on a bench seat and that would always be enough.

There were no other children in my life to distract me or my mother. There was a family with children living next door but my mother didn’t like me playing with them because they were ‘rough’ and ‘older’, so I kept to myself. Before I turned four I would thumb through The Sun News-Pictorial in the morning and The Herald in the evening, and try to match up the words with either the pictures accompanying the stories or the items I’d hear on the radio news bulletins during the day.

But on that blazing hot February morning in 1962, my high level of literacy, which, in a just world obviated any need to engage in any formal education as far as I was concerned, counted for nothing. I was starting at school and my mother was putting me in the line. My institutionalisation was beginning. I did not fight or complain but I also did not make any effort to hide my discomfort. Clearly I bore a look of distress crossed with bewilderment. Perhaps she could see that I felt betrayed. My mother pointed over at another boy who I did not know but recognised because he lived at the other end of our street, and I had seen him through the front window walking past our house with his older sister and their border collie on the way to and from the milk bar—also known as The Shop—that was just a block away from my house. ‘Look, there’s John Middleton. You know him. He’s starting today, too,’ she said in a