by Alex Nicol
Andree Withey came back with a story from a local inventor. It will surprise you to know that all these years you’ve been using the ‘throne’ in the smallest room in the house incorrectly. That’s what’s been causing everything from arthritis to earache, but it’s not your fault. The ‘throne’ is wrongly designed, and Andree’s inventor had the answer.
You can’t draw a set of plans in an interview, but his description of how the job should be done left little doubt that his services would have been keenly sought by the interrogators of the Spanish Inquisition.
Andree was on a roll. Her next mission? ‘I’m going on a parachute jump and I’ll describe what it’s like from the time I leave the aircraft to the time I hit the ground.’
Robert Peach, who then controlled all the ABC regional stations, remarked that he’d ‘spent the war trying very hard not to have to do what the young lady is planning’. He strongly advised against it.
Andree’s description of the descent was riveting. She clearly loved the sensation and enjoyed describing it. Unfortunately, she was so engrossed in telling us about it that she’d forgotten that at the end of every jump is the ground, and she was unprepared for its arrival.
As they loaded her into the ambulance with a fractured pelvis, she started to describe the trip to the hospital. What a trooper!
At this time, Radio National had a program called Practicalities. In essence, it was about inventions and how to use them. Hospital proved a fertile ground for Andree, and the producers were offered stories on everything from how to use a commode to why shy young men chose a private ward—clearly the sound of urine hitting the end of the ‘bottle’ was too embarrassing.
She was incorrigible.
THE RIGHT THING
I always thought of 2CR as family. I know all the staff did, and I’m sure many, many listeners felt the same way about the old girl. Why? Principally, I suppose, because we knew that we could depend on each other—presenters, journalists and listeners—and together we’d ‘do the right thing’.
Doing the right thing sounds terribly dull these days when ‘fake news’ is so fashionable, but doing the right thing could have very practical consequences.
We had a wanted man on the loose in our country. He was one of those clever bushmen, and he’d led the police a merry dance for months. Of course he’d become a media celebrity—the city newspapers and television stations couldn’t get enough of him.
At this stage I was managing the station, and Amos Bennett, our senior journalist, gave me the news that one of our listeners had just rung to tell us the wanted man was in her chook house. She told us first.
Of course, he’d told her to ring the police, and they were on the way. But it was ten minutes to news time and Amos had a scoop. ‘Nic, we know he has a radio. If I run the news, chances are he’ll make a break.’
‘What do you want to do?’ I asked.
‘We’ll hold off till they’ve got him.’
Amos lost his scoop, but I reckoned he’d done the right thing—and that that philosophy would eventually land us a bigger scoop.
BEST ON SHOW
The president of the Walgett Jockey Club was a bit embarrassed when he rang. They were another of the country tracks anxious to tap into the tourist market, and the big event this year was the Black & White Cup, sponsored by the distributors of Black & White Whisky. There’d be a ‘Fashions on the Field’ contest, and the sponsor had been invited to be the judge.
But there was a problem. Saturday was the big day; it was now Wednesday, and there’d been no reply to the invitation.
‘I know it’s very late, but would there be any chance … ?’
Nothing like knowing you’re the second choice.
My wife, Diana, had her eye on a very stylish Spanish white hat that would go a treat with her navy outfit and was very keen. A day at the races. A night away from the kids!
In Walgett, Fashions on the Field was a discreet affair. None of this calling out the contestants to parade in front of the mob. Diana and I would wander through the crowd during the day and quietly select the best-dressed lady and gentleman. Very proper.
We’d made our decision just before the feature race, and were in the committee rooms giving the good news to the president, when a beefy bloke clad in stubbies, thongs and T-shirt introduced himself as the Black & White rep. He’d been looking the fillies over, he said. Then, tapping Diana on the shoulder, he announced ‘this little lady’ as the winner.
I’m not sure how we got out of that one.
THE DOC
‘I really want to be a sports journalist.’
‘Of course you do—you and 40,000 others,’ was my first thought. Half the kids who’ve played school rep football or cricket and can name the last five grand final winners imagine themselves as a gift to sports broadcasting. If only they knew.
The young bloke in front of me certainly wasn’t straight out of school. I put him in his late 20s, early 30s. He looked like a real-estate salesman but he wanted to be a sports reporter.
2CR always welcomed triers, but I told him that I had no budget for a freelance and could not offer him a job.
No matter—he wanted to learn.
If he could find a story, I offered, I’d teach him how to write a script and how to conduct an interview. Who knows? We might even get to tape editing. But understand: no job. Deal done.
I’ll say this: he was a quick learner, and the station’s sports coverage blossomed as a result. Within a couple of weeks he was working on his own and starting to pile up neatly packaged sports stories, ready for broadcast.
There was only one problem: he never seemed to leave the place. Look around and there he’d be: sportscoat draped over the back of a chair, tie neatly knotted, spinning the reels of a tape editing recorder like a professional. He was a natural. He had a good eye for a story and knew instinctively how to pick an interesting angle, and people obviously liked him.
Enough is enough. ‘This is becoming offensive,’ I told him.
‘What?’ Naturally, he was upset and I had to explain.
‘I told you I had no money to pay you and couldn’t offer you a job. You’re turning out good, valuable material, and I can’t keep taking your work without paying you. It’s not right. It’s offensive.’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘I do. Look, you’re always here. Your own job must be suffering, and your boss, whoever that is, can’t be too happy.’
He grinned and said, ‘Don’t worry about it. I’m on a house call.’
‘House call?’
‘I’m a doctor.’
Doc was in fact a young local GP, and he cordially hated his job. People, he told me, came into his rooms with the flu, the mumps, depression or whatever. They sat on one side of a desk; he sat on the other side. Before they left, they had passed across that desk to him whatever infection they’d brought in. He couldn’t stand it anymore. He wanted to be a sports reporter.
‘But all that training,’ I argued. ‘Those years of training. Perhaps sports medicine?’
‘No. Sports reporting. This is fun.’
He left Orange after a couple of months, and took with him a ‘show reel’ of stories to impress any editor. His name popped up years later as a by-line on the back page of The Sun, Sydney’s afternoon paper. Doc had become a sports reporter.
Seeing his by-line prompted the memory of a story he’d once told me of a time when sport and medicine had collided fortuitously for one of his patients. The man was in the midst of a massive heart attack, and Doc needed to know, and quickly, how long he’d been in pain.
‘Can you tell me when the pain started?’ Doc demanded.
‘When Border got out,’ came the gasping reply.
‘I knew to the second,’ Doc said.
THE DOGGER
The dogger remains a mystery. For a start, his craft was part black magic, or at least a hangover from a time past. His business was killing dogs, and it made him quiet and rese
rved to the point of self-effacement. Everything about him—his clothes and his manner—was designed to make you forget him. The success of his business—and he was very successful—depended on his being next-to-invisible. He didn’t smoke (unusual for a bushman) because ‘the smell hangs around’.
To emphasise something when he spoke, he’d point with his chin. His hands were still.
He spent hours, days and sometimes weeks alone. He was content with his own company and not easy to interview. A testament to the success of his strategy is the fact that I honestly can’t remember where I met him.
I think I won him over because of my love of dogs. I always had a good dog when I was working stock, and as a townie I’ve always had a pet to spoil. We had some common ground.
He squatted as he told me some of the tricks of his trade. It was the typical bushman’s sit-on-a-heel squat. He liked to be close to the ground, and he was comfortable. I wasn’t. I was cramped, but once he started talking I didn’t dare move for fear of interrupting him.
He had been paid to kill dogs all over Australia, and yet he told me how much he admired dogs. ‘Better than humans’ was his summation. He told me that once, when he was hunting dogs in the desert country, he’d come across dozens of tracks circling an old disused mine shaft. That puzzled him. A closer look revealed a half-grown pup caught on a ledge about six feet down. As far as he could make out, his mob had been feeding him. You have to admire that.
The dogger had worked at a time when the old serrated-jaw gin-traps were still legal; to him, setting one was a work of art. It was vital that there should be no trace of him, no sign or smell that a human had had anything to do with the trap, because that would give the game away. As bait, he used a trick. He took a small bottle out of his pocket and held it out for me to smell—and you didn’t have to get very close to get the pungent whiff. It was urine taken from a bitch in season. He carried that bottle with him everywhere, and just a couple of drops in the right place all but guaranteed he’d have a dog in his trap.
And dogs are clever. ‘You get one chance at a dog,’ he said. ‘If you miss that chance, he won’t forget you and you’ll never get an easy shot at him again.’
He told me the story of his hunt for a particularly clever bitch. That story left me wondering how he felt about his kill.
He’d been hired to clean out the dogs on, I think, a place in Queensland, and he’d been successful. But one old dog—he was pretty sure it was a bitch—had beaten him. ‘Oh, she’d come across men before,’ he reckoned, ‘she knew their tricks and she wasn’t having anything to do with them.’
He debated leaving her, but he had a reputation to maintain, so he pulled a trick out of the bag. ‘I decided I’d paper her in. You know, catch her with the Sydney Morning Herald.’ He chuckled.
No, I didn’t know how you could ‘paper a dog in’ with a newspaper.
‘Well, she’s afraid of humans,’ he started. ‘She’ll run a mile to get away from anything she thinks humans have had anything to do with. So you use that against her.’ And he spun me this story of incredible patience and cunning.
The idea was to take a newspaper and to tear it into strips. The place was big, but he reckoned he knew which paddock she was in. So he walked that paddock, twisting a strip of paper into every panel of fence. He left a couple, which were screened by some trees, free. Then he got a jackeroo from the place to drive to the back of the paddock and ‘beat’ towards those panels he’d left free, while he settled down to wait.
He’d been chasing this bitch over the past couple of weeks, so he’d got to know her. He respected her. She was a cunning old girl.
He picked up his first sight of her as she made a bolt for the fence. She spotted the paper flapping there and, just as he predicted, she backed away.
He spotted her again as she tried in a different spot, with the same result. Of course she found the panels he’d left free, and he let her come to him and then shot her cleanly.
‘Oh, she was a clever old girl, that one,’ was all he said.
A RUSH OF BLOOD
What were they thinking? It was lunacy. In an age when the business world is all about corporate image, and when logos and corporate colours are zealously guarded, the ‘powers that be’ at the ABC’s head office decided to allocate a small amount of money to each regional station to be spent on ‘promotion’.
They decided to allow—to encourage—individual regions to express their own personalities. What madness was this?
At a meeting of minds, we at 2CR reckoned that ‘I’m Proud to Own 2CR’ sounded just right. We’d encourage every one of our listeners to take ownership of the place. But what would be our logo? Aunty’s ‘pregnant worm’ was nowhere near sexy enough.
My elder son, who had a talent for drawing comics when he should have been doing homework, overheard our discussions and came up with an image of an old man emu at full stretch carrying a tape recorder, and with a microphone attached to his neck and swinging in the breeze. He captioned it ‘We cover the country’. Genius. That was us.
Now, how could we get the message out there? Memory tells me that our advertising—sorry, promotions—budget was absurdly small, about $200. Another meeting of minds thought that the best thing was for us to do a ‘loaves and fishes’ and multiply it. We would have the logo and catchphrase screen-printed on T-shirts. We’d sell them, and as the money came in, we’d print more T-shirts, and so on, ad infinitum. What could possibly go wrong?
The great T-shirt sale: rank commercialism at the ABC.
The T-shirts were a phenomenal success and the money flowed in. Naturally, we had to open a bank account to handle this business we’d established. And, just as naturally, the auditor was not impressed when he came across an ABC bank account controlled by a couple of enthusiasts from the bush.
Involuntary liquidation swiftly followed. But I still have my T-shirt.
THE DEMO SATELLITE DISH
It was 1985 and satellites were flying around up there, and we were at the cutting edge of using them to transmit radio and television. The federal government had introduced the Homestead and Community Broadcast Satellite Service. Each homestead or isolated community could buy one of these systems, and it would bring first-class radio reception—and, more importantly, television reception—to outback Australia.
The demonstration model was set up at 2CR. At the heart of the system was a receiving dish. It was very much like the dishes you now see set up to receive cable television, except that it was about 6 feet (2 metres) in diameter.
You carefully pointed this dish in the right direction, and it collected the satellite signal and concentrated it into a tube positioned over the centre of the disc. There the technical bits took over and converted the concentrated signal into TV or radio. That was the theory—except it wasn’t working.
A bevy of heavies from Sydney was standing around the wretched thing and checking again and again this or that connection with complicated-looking instruments. No signal was getting through, and no one could put a finger on the cause.
Of course our PMG techs had been interested onlookers. They were working with similar equipment up on Mount Canobolas, where the satellite was going to do magical things for telephone connections.
One of our old techs had been watching the proceedings carefully. Finally, he pulled a biro from his top pocket, leaned in and pushed it up the tube where the signal would be concentrated. When he pulled it out, the remains of a spider and its web coated his pen. And we had a signal.
Later on, winter and the snow on top of Canobolas proved a problem. Snow in the satellite dishes there distorted the signal. Heads were scratched, and measurements taken for specially constructed fibreglass domes to be fitted to the dishes.
The old techs went into town and bought one of those covers you place over a kid’s round swimming pool. That did the trick.
THE RIDGE
‘Please don’t broadcast the rainfall figures.’
The
request came from Lightning Ridge, the opal-mining town out in the north-west of New South Wales. Don’t broadcast the rainfall figures? Things were changing out there.
I first got to see Lightning Ridge in the 1960s. It was still an opal-mining town. People were living in caravans and lean-tos, and the famous bottle house wasn’t quite finished. If you’ve never seen it, I can tell you it’s an example of someone’s quiet genius. They built a house entirely out of mud, with bottles—all sorts of bottles—embedded in the mud. That’s bush insulation at its best.
People were still drifting in to mine opals, and it wasn’t polite to ask where they’d been before they turned up at ‘the Ridge’. There wasn’t much in the way of storefronts, and Harold Hodge had just bought the trams that he was going to turn into motel units. Harold had introduced his now-famous opal false teeth and loved to tell the story of how he wore them when he met the Queen. What she thought when she saw that smile we can only guess at.
You could, and people did, ‘noodle’ (put your head down and scramble through the mullock heap that someone had left at the head of a mine shaft, looking for a bit of colour), but it was politic to ask for permission before you ventured onto someone’s claim. There were mine shafts everywhere and it was dangerous to wander about after dark. Disputes weren’t settled by dropping someone down a shaft, but people did fall into them. And opals were bought by a handful of people working in the Ridge.
And the rainfall? It was very important. Water was always short in the Ridge.
Please don’t broadcast the rainfall figures. What was going on?
While I never saw the Ridge before it was a raw mining camp, I did get a glimpse into what that country must have been like back then. I had an invitation from the owner of the homestead block of one of the original runs. He wanted me to see how they’d once lived. I wasn’t ready for what he showed me. I should have been, but I’d never thought of Australia the way he showed it to me.