About the author
Kevin Norbury was born in Maryborough, Victoria, in 1941.
He began his newspaper career in Ballarat at The Courier, a regional
daily, where he was denied the chance of becoming a reporter because of a
paralysed right arm from polio. It took him six years of persistence to get his
first break, not via a cadetship as most of his peers had done, but as the sole
reporter on a small bi-weekly in the state’s far west. From there he progressed
to a tri-weekly, then a large provincial daily in Geelong where he won a
prestigious Walkley Award for journalism. What followed were jobs at The Sun
News-Pictorial (now the Herald-Sun), and The Age, in
Melbourne, a political role as Press Secretary to the State’s Health Minister,
the ABC, and newspapers in London. He spent about 20 years at the Sunday Age
and The Age, his last eight years as a motoring writer. This is his third
book.
He lives with his wife, Helen, in Geelong. He has four
children and eight grandchildren.
Acknowledgements
There are a many people I would like to thank for their
support and encouragement during the writing of this book, which has been a long
time coming, mainly due to my own self-doubt.
Thanks must go to Marilyn Higgins, from Zeus Publications,
for offering me a publishing contract, recognising in my manuscript a story that
will appeal to readers of non-fiction.
Thanks also go to the publisher’s Editorial Evaluator,
Leanne Saunders, and to Julie Winzar who was set the task of editing my
manuscript.
My wife, Helen, and my family, rate highly on my list of
acknowledgements for their love and continued support and encouragement during
my deep, reflective moods about whether my life story was really worth putting
into print.
I must also thank the many journalists I have worked with
over the years, particularly my former colleague and more recently magazines
editor Eileen Berry, for her ready advice at crucial times and for her ongoing
support.
My former Age colleague and friend Rod Ashcroft
can’t be forgotten, above all for his expert help with my computer problems –
and I have always had plenty of those.
Finally, I would like to acknowledge
the enduring friendship of The Age’s columnist and writer Lawrence Money,
the paper’s former Education Editor Geoff Maslen, and my Irish mate and former
colleague Jim Glencross.
There are many others who have been supportive in one way
or another and to these people I say thanks.
Dedication
To Ron Roe,
my first editor.
Read a sample:
UNTIL I was ten years old, childhood was just one big
adventure for a kid growing up in the country. We roamed the sheep-studded
paddocks, climbed the cypress trees after birds’ nests, scaled pine trees to
swing on the branches and ate pine nuts underneath. We also caught yabbies in
our dam if we were quick enough to scoop them up in a colander the moment they
quizzically clawed the chunk of meat we tied to a piece of string. It was also
when I was ten that all of this abruptly ended. It’s not part of my life I think
much about now. Except when I am reminded of it, as I was at work one morning,
by a colleague I have long suspected held some sort of obscure degree in
smartarse remarks.
It was the early 1990s. By this time I was a reporter on
The Sunday Age, one of Melbourne’s vibrant new Sunday newspapers, the Sunday
edition of The Age, a prominent, influential Victorian daily. The new
paper had been cobbled together rather quickly and out of necessity, after media
baron Rupert Murdoch had pulled the pin on the Sunday Press, a
not-so-influential, but nonetheless popular little tabloid where I had been
working. That paper was jointly produced by Syme, owners of The Age, and
Murdoch’s Herald and Weekly Times group. It had succeeded despite reasons for
its existence, which were, by all accounts, to undermine the ambitions of the
devil-may-care editor and publisher Maxwell Newton and his Melbourne Observer,
the only other Sunday in town. But Murdoch had ideas of his own and took
everyone by surprise in August 1989 by launching not one, but two Sunday papers,
the Sunday Sun, a tabloid, and the Sunday Herald, an
upmarket broadsheet version of his afternoon daily. His aim was to corner the
growing Sunday advertising market, leaving The Age no alternative.
While plans for this were going on, I was still beavering
away at the Sunday Press, where I had been a sub-editor, then reporter,
and while I knew I had a job on The Age’s new Sunday and could have been
working on the dummies leading up to its launch, I could not abandon the poor
old Press in its dying days and saw it out to its sad and emotional end.
I’m really glad I did. I will never again experience a ‘galley rattle’, or a
paper’s ‘death rattle’, the printers’ traditional mark of respect to a
newspaper’s demise, and this was done as the last pages of the paper were put to
bed. Compositors and printers strutted around the production room of the Herald
and Weekly Times building in Flinders Street, holding metal galley trays
aloft – the long trays that once held the metal type before it was put into a
page – hitting them with bits of metal or simply just hitting them together,
although by that time we had already moved to pages that were paste-up or ‘cold
type’. The noise and emotion in the room on the night of August 12, 1989, was
electric, as printers and journalists, many from both sides of town working a
casual shift on Saturdays for extra cash, gathered to mourn the passing of this
under-rated little newspaper they all loved. Galley rattles are a thing of the
past now because newspapers – what’s left of them – are produced on desktop
computers. More’s the pity!
The new papers hit the streets of Melbourne on the morning
of August 19, 1989, with much fanfare. That al fresco coffee drinkers now had
three Sunday papers to choose from was a luxury they had never before
experienced. For the next weeks and months reporter battled reporter,
photographer battled photographer. For a while there, the new Sunday Age,
edited by staffer Steve Harris, with the urbane former Herald deputy
editor and foreign correspondent Bruce Guthrie as his deputy, was about as
popular as a barman’s strike among some senior journalists on the daily, clearly
not happy with having another broadsheet sharing their patch. Some patch. But I
couldn’t complain. For me, nothing could have been more exciting, a far cry from
the tedious, stuffy little proofreading room that had been my lot some thirty
years before on a regional daily in the old Victorian gold-mining city of
Ballarat, where a domineering managing director with very curious habits
practically destroyed what little ambition I had when he bluntly told me that I
was never likely to become a reporter, not then, or any time in the future. His
message was loud and clear: ‘Son, get back to the mind-numbing job you were
hired for and forget about those silly notions.’
Nonetheless, here I was, after many disappointments,
endless frustration and who knows how many soul-destroying nights and fruitless
job applications, living my dream in a grey pin-striped suit and purple tie, a
general reporter on not just any old rag, but a significant big-city newspaper
that would ultimately make its mark in Melbourne and beyond. My former bully-boy
boss and his very curious habits were by now pushing up the daisies so I didn’t
even get the pleasure.
So what if I were generally unknown in metropolitan
newspaper circles; sitting beside me during that first year, our desks jammed
together like conjoined twins, was The Spy columnist Lawrence Money, the
purveyor of gossip and a well-known scribe around town, having come from the
city’s afternoon daily, The Herald. Sitting behind me was my old mate
from Sunday Press days, the Beatle-cut American Steve O’Baugh, a chick
magnet in every sense of the word, with charm and olive-skin good looks from his
Apache Indian heritage. He had been chief-of-staff at the Press and had
picked up the same gig on The Age’s new Sunday. Apart from his escapades
with the opposite sex and his connection with Great Train Robber Ronald Biggs,
whom he visited on frequent trips to Rio, O’Baugh was known for his unorthodox
news contacts, his very, very long lunches, his impish laugh, and his long
association with the actress Lorraine Bayly.
While the area occupied by the new Sunday’s cluttered
editorial floor was generally limited, it wasn’t long before reporters were
shifted around like the deck chairs on the Titanic. By 1993 my desk was
halfway down the room, jammed up against the divider wall separating us from the
daily. Beside me now, over a low partition, was no longer the gossip columnist,
but the outspoken Dubliner and writer Muriel Reddy, always ready for what she
called ‘a bit of craic’, and behind me sat the bearded, feisty reporter Gary
Tippet, who at the time was fresh out of the Labor Party’s media unit after the
fall of the Kirner State Government. Which brings me to that unforgettable day
one morning after the daily news conference. Tippet was in deep discussion with
the dark-haired feature writer Liz Porter, who sat beside him. The topic was
work, no doubt driven by something the conference had drummed up to help fill
the pages of the next edition, and I decided to add my penny’s worth. I’m not
sure what lit Tippet’s fuse – often it didn’t take much – but no doubt I had
made some comment about work and he turned on me like a pitbull terrier,
teeth bared (I’m dramatising here). His words I have never forgotten.
‘Mate,’ he barked. ‘You couldn’t work in an
iron lung!’
I found an odd pleasure in what he had said, knowing that
his sarcastic off-the-cuff remark was just his caustic style of humour rather
than an intention to be offensive. In my case, anyway, it could not have been
more pertinent.
‘Listen, Gaz,’ I barked back. ‘If you must
know, I would be the only person in this room who knows he can
work in an iron lung because I have!’
I’m not sure what he knew about me, except I had my right
hand permanently stuck in my pocket and typed one-handed with my left. He
probably presumed that what I had just said was true. I might have explained
more later, but right then I just wanted to beat him at his own game. I first
met Tippet in the mid-1970s at The Sun News-Pictorial where I was a
struggling sub-editor fresh from country Geelong, and he was a cadet reporter
and ghost writer to Australian football’s Collingwood legend, captain and star
rover, Lou ‘the Lip’ Richards. Like Lou, Tippet shot from the hip and usually
fired off the first thought that came into his head. He’d grown up in
Melbourne’s western suburbs and could handle his tongue as well as his fists. I
was no match for him in a verbal or written context. This time, though, he had
fallen into his doggy bowl.
It was true. I had been in an iron lung as a boy after
being struck down by polio in the last epidemic in Australia in the early 1950s,
in my particular case after having injections at state school against whooping
cough and diphtheria. Both my arms were paralysed, my right arm completely and,
as it turned out, permanently. Some of my chest muscles were also badly affected
and I was struggling to breathe, the reason for the iron lung. Data on the
epidemic reveals that one in 200 cases of polio lead to irreversible paralysis,
and five to ten per cent died when their breathing muscles became immobilised. I
was one of the lucky ones. I could still breathe on my own, but with great
difficulty. Fortunately for me, though, when I was put in the iron lung, the
treating specialist decided not to turn it on. In that context I actually did
‘work’ in it as I told Tippet. Had it been turned on, I might well have stayed
there. Others had.
Some years later, the quietly spoken South African expat reporter Larry
Schwartz wrote a sensitive piece for The Age about a woman so confined
for a mind-boggling fifty-five years. She lay there, as he wrote, day after day,
‘her head protruding from the metal chamber in which alternate pulsations of
high and low pressure force normal lung movements’. I told Schwartz that his
story had literally sent shivers down my spine. I knew that, but for the grace
of God that could have been me. The strict instructions given to Ward 9 nursing
staff by the Melbourne polio specialist was that the machine should only be
turned on when and if I stopped breathing altogether. At that stage no one knew
if I would live or die. I didn’t die, obviously, and went on to live a
productive and relatively normal life. But no one could ever have imagined that
one day I would become a newspaper reporter, certainly not in the prying eyes of
that Ballarat managing director who had sentenced me to a night-shift job taking
late classified advertisements and holding copy in a proofreading room. At that
stage of my tenuous employment prospects, a reporter’s job might well have been
as improbable to me, too, coming from a small, working-class Victorian country
town as it was to the locals who knew me as this shy, curly-headed boy who had
spent years in metal splints and four years in Melbourne at Yooralla’s ‘School
for Crippled Children’. It wasn’t exactly a background conducive to the path I
had taken. |