by Anne Summers
‘I can see the absolute terror in your eyes,’ a journalist from another newspaper told me one night over dinner.
He was trying to be sympathetic, and suggesting I bullshit my way through as everyone else did, but I wasn’t sure that I yet knew enough to be able to do that. Still, I was reassured to hear that others were faking it too.
Walsh and I had a number of fallings-out but, when it mattered he always backed me, and his advice on how to approach the ‘Canberra Observed’ column was astute: ‘Two points you should constantly remind yourself about in writing the column is that if there is a topic of popular conversation in Canberra,’ Walsh wrote, ‘it is usually worth writing about even if it is a little unconventional’. The second point has informed my writing ever since. ‘No matter what you are writing about you should always try to give the reader some[thing] new in the way of information. Your opinions are not going to be marketable for some time and even when they are you should sell them subliminally not shove them down people’s throats.’ I have now been writing opinion columns for close to four decades and still follow that advice: in each column I do my best to give my readers new facts or other material relevant to the topic I am writing about.
Despite my trepidation about the actual job, I loved going to work. I literally ran up the steps each morning into what is now old Parliament House. Some days I used the Senate entrance, which was the most direct route to our office, but once or twice a week I would go in the front doors and be sure first of all to pass over the spot where four years earlier the just-sacked Gough Whitlam had referred to Malcolm Fraser as ‘Kerr’s cur’. Now Fraser was still there, ensconced in the Prime Ministerial suite. I would walk up the short staircase just inside the Parliament House entrance into Kings Hall, the grand pillared space that was the epicentre of the building. Parliament House had opened in 1927 and was often referred to as ‘the wedding cake’ for its squat, tiered, blindingly-white structure. It is now the Museum of Australian Democracy—the new, much-larger, Parliament House, built on top of Capital Hill, opened in 1988—and the old interiors are perfectly preserved. When I visited in June 2016 to refresh my memory of the layout, I was surprised at how small the spaces were. Kings Hall had certainly shrunk.
The main entrances to both the Senate and the House of Representatives opened from Kings Hall so there were always politicians scurrying towards the chambers, especially if the bells were ringing, green for the Reps or red for the Senate, calling all members or senators to a vote. You would also see the mandarins—the senior public servants, all of them men, grey-suited and circumspect, briefcases held tightly—making their way across Kings Hall, towards the offices of their minister. Later in the day, Kings Hall was the ideal location for a loitering journalist as you could literally run into anyone there. Once I’d learned to recognise all the ministers, the MPs and the key public servants, I, too, would often hang around Kings Hall in the hope of being able to grab a few informative words with someone who knew what was going on.
The Press Gallery ran across the roof of the building. Literally. A wooden walkway joined the two ends. The Fin Review office was on the Senate side. We were part of the Fairfax corridor, with the Age, the SMH, the Sun-Herald and Channel 7 all having adjacent offices. The National Times was a bit further along, off an even-smaller corridor that housed what were known as ‘one-man bureaux’. The offices were all small and cramped. Ours had six metal desks jammed into a space that must have been no more than six by three metres. In Sydney, they were starting to get ‘the new technology’ that would supposedly make production of the paper more efficient but in Canberra we still bashed out our stories on typewriters then rushed the pages into the telex room across the corridor where two operators, Beryl and Yvonne, typed them out again for transmission. In Sydney, after the subeditors had read them, the stories were sent to the compositors who typed them a third time. There was massive scope for error in having copy retyped so many times, especially as there was little time for proofreading. Sometimes, mistakes were deliberately introduced. When Paddy McGuinness became editor-in-chief, in 1982, he was enraged when every single time he referred in an editorial to the Treasury Secretary Mr John Stone—and since Stone and Treasury were frequently mentioned in his editorials, it happened often—it always ended up in the paper as ‘Mr Johnstone’. The outspoken and image-conscious Stone refused to believe that this was not deliberate mischief by the editor, rather than subversion by the printers.
The ABC, AAP, News Limited and the Canberra Times were located at the other end, on the roof of the Reps. The Prime Minister’s Press Office was at that end, too, presided over by the gruff and domineering David Barnett. Barnett was a tall man who had the slightly stooped appearance of someone who is trying to appear shorter. Perhaps he did not want to compete with his boss who was a tall 195 centimetres and who, physically and psychologically, dominated every room he entered. Barnett always had a worried air about him and although he laughed a lot, it was a bitter sardonic sort of laugh that he seemed to use defensively against both criticism and attack. Malcolm Fraser always blamed him for any negative stories and I soon got the impression that Barnett had to scramble as hard as the rest of us to get information. The big difference was, of course, that Barnett’s source was the Prime Minister, whereas more often than not, ours was Barnett. Before he took the job, Barnett had been an AAP reporter and was renowned for his fast and impeccable shorthand. He had accompanied Gough Whitlam, then Leader of the Opposition, on his historic visit to China in 1971 and was present on 5 July when Premier Zhou Enlai finally sat down with Whitlam in the Great Hall of the People and conducted an intensive conversation lasting several hours. In a highly unusual move, the journalists were permitted to stay. Barnett’s transcript of the entire conversation, as translated, stands as the record of that extraordinary moment in Australian–Chinese diplomacy.2 Barnett also used his shorthand to take notes of what Fraser told him, which must have unnerved the man who could never bring himself to trust anyone, even—or perhaps especially—those on his personal staff. Malcolm Fraser was known as a tough bastard who showed no warmth or courtesy towards his staff. Someone I knew who worked for him for several years told me he never once said Good Morning or inquired about his family.
The Press Office was located strategically near the boxes, the hub from which all information and gossip radiated. The boxes were a wall of large wooden pigeonholes where news releases, government and parliamentary reports, answers to Questions on Notice and other material for the media were distributed. Each organisation was allocated a box, its name and number crudely created with a Dymo-label printer; ours was right in the middle, number 29, just under the Australian which was 28. If something was urgent, whoever was dropping it pressed a loud buzzer that could be heard throughout the Gallery and the most junior person in each office would be sent off to get it. Over the course of a day, dozens of documents and pieces of paper were dropped in these boxes; not only the politicians—government and opposition—distributed press releases but so did lobbyists, NGOs and any organisation that had a message to get out. There was no security at Parliament House and anyone could walk up to the Press Gallery and drop off a release. We cleared the boxes constantly and did a quick triage to see what would go to a journo or could be tossed straight into the bin. It was rare to find anything but public releases in the boxes, but I had the great fortune to have a series of extremely damaging internal Liberal Party memos dropped into our box over several Sundays, usually a quiet news day, so my stories got front-page treatment. I never found out who my benefactor was but there was no doubt they were genuine. The audible gulp at the other end of the phone when I rang the first time, seeking confirmation from the Liberal Party federal director, Tony Eggleton, was proof enough. By the third time it happened, he was becoming almost resigned to the treachery and had decided the best tactic was simply to ride it out. The Prime Minister, who was the subject of trenchant criticism in these documents, was less forgiving. I was droppe
d from his media Christmas party invitation list as part of my punishment.
There was tremendous camaraderie in the Gallery. We had no choice but to get along because we were all jam-packed in together. That did not mean there weren’t rivalries and jealousies and, of course, everyone wanted to be the one to break a big story. And if someone had a scoop, it was never a secret. The Gallery was village-like in the way gossip travelled. It was said that if someone started a rumour at one end of the Gallery it would take no more than eleven seconds for it to travel to the other end, often receiving some embellishment along the way. When word went around that someone had ‘the big one’ the rest of us would do whatever we could to try to find out what it was. ‘Take X from the [scoop-getter’s] bureau down to the non-members’ bar,’ I’d instruct one of my juniors, ‘see what he knows.’ But scoops were fiercely guarded, and even office colleagues often did not know what the story was. Like the rest of us, they would have to wait until the next morning when the papers arrived to find out that a minister was to be sacked or whatever the story was. Then our editors would be on the phone: Why didn’t you have that? How are you going to follow it up?
Like journalists everywhere, those in the Gallery were a cynical lot. I quickly learned that no person or policy was ever greeted positively, let alone with unadulterated enthusiasm. I had learned scepticism in the Sydney Push and could argue against any proposition that was put to me, but I had trouble with this constant negativity. I had to learn to tread the perilous path between political neutrality—we could not of course favour any political party in what we wrote, regardless of our personal views or how we voted—and my own principles. I did not always manage. Very early on, 10 April 1979, I walked out of a press conference where Bill Hayden, the Leader of the Opposition, was releasing the report of a Special Committee of Inquiry into the ALP because he opened proceedings with a joke about rape. Hayden said that one of his Queensland enemies was putting it around that when he, Hayden, had been a police sergeant he had raped a woman in the back of a police car. He wanted, he told us, to put the record straight: ‘I wasn’t a sergeant, I was a constable first class; secondly, it wasn’t a police car and, third, the woman had promised she wouldn’t squeal.’ I could not believe my ears. I felt I had two choices: to stand up and remonstrate with him, or to walk out. I thought that leaving was more professional than getting into a slanging match with the country’s alternative Prime Minister. Alan Ramsey, one of Hayden’s press secretaries, who had himself been a controversial Press Gallery figure in the past and later would be a notable reporter and columnist with the Sydney Morning Herald, followed me out and tried to hose me down. I’d been grateful to Hayden just four years earlier when, as Minister for Social Security in the Whitlam government, he had turned up unannounced at Elsie Women’s Refuge in Glebe, seen the appalling conditions in which we were operating, and arranged to get us federal funds.3 But in Canberra, I discovered, Hayden often strayed into embarrassing or even somewhat predatory behaviour when he had had a few drinks. That day after the press conference was not the only time during Hayden’s tenure that Ramsey would have to explain away, and apologise to me for, outrageous acts of sexism by his boss.
My reaction to Hayden’s joke was one indication that I was still very much an outsider. My colleagues did not seem bothered by such things. Either they had not been sensitised to understand how offensive to women these conversations were, or they were so totally accustomed to such talk and the assumptions that underscored them, that they did not even register. It was probably both. Either way, I was out of step. I intended to be utterly professional in how I approached my job, and I could swear with the best of them, so I wasn’t worried about that kind of language, but I did not think it was reasonable that I should have to listen to talk that was insulting or offensive to my very being as a woman. Maybe I would never fit in.
My first test in the new job came after just three weeks. What I could never have expected was that it would be my boss and mentor who precipitated it. Walsh had come from Sydney to visit the bureau, and startled and embarrassed me by sitting down at one of the typewriters to bash out a ‘rough draft’, as he put it, of my ‘Canberra Observed’ column. It was a big speculative piece about the possible future federal intentions of NSW Premier Neville Wran, the kind of article that only someone with the credibility resulting from years of political experience could write. I certainly could not, but Max argued that this column would ‘make me’, put me on the map, announce that I was going to be a significant player in the Gallery. He told me to rewrite the piece in my own language. He had already put my byline on it. The rest of the office watched to see what I would do. Then all of them—Judith Hoare, Greg Hywood, Paul Malone and Mungo MacCallum who had recently been hired to write a weekly sketch column—conspicuously got up and left. Obviously they were going to caucus in the non-members’ bar. I inserted a page into the typewriter, looked at Max’s draft and realised that all I could do would be to alter a word, here or there. It would still be his piece. His ideas. His characteristic bold style. I was still staring miserably at the page when Mungo returned:
‘It’s none of my business,’ he said, ‘but someone has to tell you. If you do this, you are finished in Canberra. You’ll be a laughing stock.’
It was what I needed. I flashed him a grateful smile and went to the teleprinter room to retrieve the two pages I had already placed in the basket for transmission. I replaced them with Max’s full article and changed my byline for his. I then rang Sydney and told them that this week’s column was being filed by Max Walsh and that if my byline appeared anywhere near it, I would resign. It all blew over as quickly as political winds change in Canberra. Strange as it was for my boss to have written my column, Max’s byline on the piece signalled to my new colleagues that I would not be a pushover. Max took it in good grace. I don’t think he was intentionally testing me, he just was frustrated that he no longer had a column as an outlet for his big ideas. My standing in the Gallery seemed to improve somewhat but I was still new, someone it was too soon to make judgements about.
Another sign that I had not yet been totally accepted by my colleagues was that, unlike almost everyone else in the Gallery, I did not have a nickname. The names were occasionally unkind, often amusing and usually so apt that, even 30 years on, it would not be wise to match some of them to their owners. One of the network cameramen was ‘tosser’ because, so it was said, he’d had the name ‘Throwing Stick’ as a boy scout. There was also ‘dogsy’, a guy who was always desperate for sex; and ‘dogsballs’ (let’s just say that when skinny-dipping at a Gallery barbecue people had glimpsed rather too much of him); and ‘dipstick’, a well-known womaniser; ‘the toad’, an especially unhandsome man; and a fellow who was known as ‘blacks’, because he was prone to rifling through colleagues’ carbons to check their stories (a practice akin to stealing, that was regarded with contempt). Mungo MacCallum, although about the same age as most of us, was already enough of a legend to be simply Mungo. Sometimes, the names were affectionate and there was no need to be discreet. Michelle Grattan was known as ‘Hondo’ after Hondo Grattan, the famous harness-racing horse that had won several championships in the early 1970s. Michelle was renowned for her indefatigable pursuit of stories and her doggedness when it came to details. She triple-checked everything and her stories were guaranteed to be accurate. She would ring ministers or bureaucrats or anyone she thought could help with her story at all hours; it became something of a badge of honour for a minister to boast he’d ‘got a call from bloody Michelle at 2 bloody am.’ Peter Harvey, the popular Channel 9 reporter, was ‘four balls’, because of his extremely deep voice. But no one had been able to come up with a name for me. They did not know me well enough to use some of the names given to me by close friends: ‘the moth’, in reference to my late-night sociability, or ‘HL’ (hollow legs), for my ability to put away large quantities of red wine. As it turned out, events would ensure that I would get my own nickname before t
he year was out.
We worked long hours, although by the standards of today our output was small. I rarely wrote more than one story a day. I would usually come in at around ten. I had already thoroughly digested at least the political stories in the five newspapers I had delivered at home, so the mornings were spent chatting with colleagues, picking up any gossip, and starting to figure out what the day’s stories might be. Sometimes there were press conferences or other scheduled events and, at 2 o’clock each sitting day, there was Question Time. We had our own two-tiered gallery, behind the Speaker’s Chair, from where we could look down on proceedings. (None of us would deign to attend Senate Question Time; we were interested only in the main game, the place where the government was formed.) The key media had seats in the lower gallery so we were close to the action on the floor below. We could sense the mood, pick up tensions, and get a sense of any drama that might be about to unfold. Politicians, especially ministers, would constantly and often anxiously glance up at us, as if to try to register how their performances were being judged. Today, the Press Gallery section of the chamber is high up, destroying that connection, and most journalists, if they watch it at all, follow Question Time on their television monitors. No political correspondent would have dreamed of not being there during the Fraser and Hawke governments. A lot more happened then. Questions were less scripted; even Dorothy Dixers had some content to them, and there was rarely anything predictable about how an issue was going to be dealt with. News stories often came out of Question Time. I usually finished filing my story by 9 p.m. but that was not the end of the working day. That time of night was ideal for prowling corridors, looking for MPs who might have had a few drinks and thus be a bit talkative, or for meeting ministers in their offices. Otherwise, I’d just head for the non-members bar, which was always full of lobbyists and politicians as well as journalistic colleagues. Like the ‘Sheltered Workshop’, as the parliamentary cafeteria was called, it was a place to catch up with colleagues, to be sure to know if there was a whiff of a story in the air, to just keep up with the events of the day. By the time everyone had already put in a twelve-hour day, the non-members was packed and it stayed that way until closing time which was, I think, midnight.