by Shaun Carney
What troubled me most was what it said about my judgement. There was one colleague, someone I’d known for twenty years, who made a point of having nothing to do with me. On one occasion our paths crossed and there was no option but to speak. She said hello, said she’d get in touch soon, and headed off. I didn’t hear from her. But the other side of this was that just as many people I didn’t expect to hear from made it their business to check in and ask how things were going, not just once but many times. So while I discovered that some people weren’t my friends, I found just as many new friends. Their kindness meant so much more to me than the disappointments. The net effect of this was that I felt just as connected and supported as I’d ever been but with a rearranged line-up of friends. I found it difficult to comprehend. Was my judgement so bad? If you make a study of politics your life’s work, you end up telling yourself that you have some working understanding of people—the politicians and the public. You meet politicians, you look them in the eye to try to assess their truthfulness, analyse what motivates them—are they doing this for themselves or for others?—assess them for humour, ego, generosity, narcissism, their interest in other people, the things they want for voters, their engagement with the world outside politics. You have to get it at least passably right more often than not, otherwise you won’t last. How come I’d got some of my friends so wrong? For me, it was as much an intellectual inquiry as an emotional one. I sought out a professional counsellor, who listened to my query and then raised a hand to stop me. She’d seen it all before. ‘You’ve got a big black mark on you,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t see it but they could. You’re bad luck! Your child’s got cancer. If they have something to do with you, they’re scared you’ll pass it on to them.’ I got that. Kids suffering cancer or any potentially lethal illness is something that a lot of us find so hard to process that we’d prefer it just not be discussed at all. But didn’t this mean I should look at how I dealt with people?
‘Maybe you should, maybe not. This is about them, not you. This is survival for these people. They don’t want to overthink it. How much do you think we’ve developed, human beings? Not much! You’re better off without them,’ she said. That helped.
But I could see that I was a mug if I didn’t apply this experience to every part of my life. I’d had an assumption about the architecture of my personal and professional relationships that had proved in some parts to be incorrect. And for the next five years, I’d be sweating on every blood test Jane underwent, fearing a relapse. At the same time, my father was eighty-two and starting to fail. Here was a guy who’d worked around dangerous machinery since he was fifteen who almost cut his hand off because he wasn’t thinking. Then there was work. Obviously the people in charge of Fairfax had barely a clue about how to cope with the effects of technological change. That didn’t make them all that different to newspaper company executives and board members across the world; they were pretty much all blundering around in the semi-darkness. A lot of us in the newsroom still believed that the durability of our paper’s brand—its reach and standing as an editorial product along with its ability to deliver readers to advertisers—would be enough to give us fifteen more good years. At that time, in 2009, I held to that view.
I felt that we could leverage our strengths by adapting and embracing the digital delivery technologies, thus keeping us relevant and opening the company up to new revenue streams while maintaining readership/viewership numbers. That was why I made myself available to do scripted videos to be posted on our website, which at that time was the key form of digital delivery. I regularly did pieces to camera, punching out a script and using an autocue, trying to draw on the experience of decades of watching television news. It was fun, even if I came over like a character in an animatronic display at Disneyland. The videos were always of a high quality, with overlay material and grabs from televised interviews. The digital video team, a patient and professional group that was great to work with, was under-resourced. The guys never seemed to get a break in their day. A video shot in the second-floor studio at noon might not go live until 5 p.m. when the digital news cycle was starting to move on. And because the site had almost since its beginnings in the mid-1990s pursued a click-chasing all-you-can-eat policy in which the home page was stuffed with a jumble of high-brow and low-brow news, the videos were hard to find. This was what made it especially galling to hear every few months that senior executives in Sydney were critical of the company’s newspaper journalists for not getting on board with the digital transition. ‘Dinosaurs’ was often the epithet that filtered down. By saying this they were building a straw man. Most of us were keen to get involved in digital delivery. Why wouldn’t we be, given that it would give us extra skills and new readers, making us more employable? The enormous obstacle blocking full cooperation between the print journalists and their colleagues in the digital operation had been created and maintained by the board, not by the staff.
The newspaper and digital staff answered to different managers and operated out of separate parts of the company, with independent cost bases. They existed in silos. Although The Age website staff worked alongside the paper’s journalists and the site had access to all of the paper’s content, the Age editor had no direct control over the digital staff or what they did with the content. Unlike the websites of The Australian, The Guardian and The New York Times, which largely reflected the editorial choices and priorities of the print versions of those mastheads, the Age site rarely resembled the actual paper. Although the paper’s stories, columns and features made up the bulk of the site’s content, the lead stories through the day were breaking news that were often closer to the types of items that would lead an hourly radio news bulletin—house fires, freeway pileups, missing hikers and so on—buttressed by celebrity gossip, titillation headlines that screamed ‘Sister, 5, Stabs Brother’ but turned out to be not in Melbourne but Detroit, and freak-show pieces from all over the world involving babies or animals or fat people. That combination of broadsheet and tabloid content made the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald sites highly popular. They drew large volumes of traffic. But it could never be a long-term model because the digital offering was not the product of a considered and assured editorial hand. It was an inconsistent mash-up.
The word from on high in the company was that digital was continually showing up print because its revenue growth was massive while the papers’ revenue numbers were either static or rising slowly (and within a few years would be falling away). They wanted to know why we couldn’t be more like digital. After all, digital was cheap to run. The journalists weren’t highly paid and there weren’t many of them. On the print side, by contrast, the wages bill was enormous, with dozens of middle-aged journalists on hefty six-figure salaries. The fact that the papers paid for the journalism and the websites got it for free didn’t seem to be taken into account. Unfortunately, this magical equation served to encourage senior management to view the digital model of high output, low-cost production as the path to the future. In this framework, journalists with experience and a middle-class salary were no longer an investment, they were a cost. The misreading of what was going on in this phase of the digital revolution was not confined to the bosses. There was no question that The Age’s print journalists were uncomfortable about the website’s tone and preoccupations. We could fairly be accused of being a bit sniffy about it when we should have seen that taking a more popular approach was inevitable given the disruptive nature of digital technologies, which cut across distinctions between high and low brow, local and global, producer and consumer. All in all, Fairfax was losing some of the self-confidence and the certainty about its own identity that had made it such a happy place to work for so long, even in the 1990s when its ownership was being shifted between Conrad Black and a series of companies and managers, making it difficult even for us to keep track of. But continuation of the silo approach, in which digital and print came under separate editorial control, was deadly for the company and was the su
bject of constant complaint and discussion in our newsroom—all the way up to 2012 when a new position of news director, giving one person oversight of all editorial output, was created. By then, however, it was probably too late. It was definitely too late for me.
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But that was in the future. My preoccupation with Fairfax’s predicament had to share space with another concern: my father’s shaky health. At the end of 2008, after he had recovered the use of his right hand and the stitches had been removed, he was still active. We had moved to a new, larger home only a ten-minute walk from his childhood home and he stayed with us for Christmas. On a sunny Boxing Day morning, he announced that he would be heading back to his house. After gathering up his bag, he walked to his white Ford Falcon wagon parked in the street, looked back and offered his standard exit line: ‘Love your company, your hours are shocking. See you later, mates.’ I thanked him for coming and reminded him that this new home was on a one-way street. ‘Yep, yep, no worries, Bud,’ he said with a relaxed smile. He backed out his wagon from its angle park at a wide arc so that it was facing the wrong way, tooted the horn twice and headed off against the flow of traffic. This was not an old man brain fade, it was a young man declaration that the rules were for other folks—he would do it his way. But a few months into the new year, things started going wrong for him. He started having episodes in which he suffered diarrhoea and vomiting, and got colds that he couldn’t throw off. I put it down to unsanitary conditions in his house, given that he often just rinsed plates and glasses rather than cleaning them, and handwashing was for him an incidental activity that occurred during a shower or when watering the tomato plants. Sadly, that seems to be the lot of most of us if we make it to our eighties, especially if we wind up living on our own. Keeping clean must come to seem like too much effort. But it was more than the odd virus or overload of bacteria that was troubling him. His heart was starting to give out. Almost forty years of smoking thirty a day followed by another twenty years of addiction to sweets as a substitute for the smokes, a steady and gargantuan intake of beer, giving up on regular exercise after the age of thirty-five, and a meat-heavy diet (once when he saw me trimming a piece of rump steak before grilling it, he stiffened, jabbed a finger in the direction of my knife handiwork and said firmly: ‘Leave the fat on mine!’) were catching up with him. He called me one morning when I was on my way to work to tell me he’d had a terrible night, vomiting, unable to sleep, short of breath. It was a minor heart attack. Now I was shuttling back and forth between the city and Frankston several times a week. In a strange way, it was easier to deal with my father’s travails than to hook into the depressing reality of Fairfax and the antics of a wildly egotistical Kevin Rudd and an overreaching Malcolm Turnbull.
I admired my father’s defiance. He behaved as though each new problem was just a setback and after a bit of treatment he’d be fine. I accompanied him to several of his consultations with GPs at a bulk-billing clinic in Frankston, the waiting room at times resembling what might be a casting call for subjects in a modern-day drawing by Hogarth: overweight, scantily dressed, tattooed young women; skinny, toothless young men with rat’s tail hairstyles; stocky, elderly European migrants; people of varying ages in wheelchairs and motorised carts; men in their thirties with one limb heavily bandaged, presumably victims of a workplace accident; withered, grey-skinned Anglos in Kmart tracksuits who, like my parents, had come to Frankston in its first wave of suburban development fifty years earlier. All of the doctors that I observed were migrants. Several seemed to be from Russia and their English was not great. My father’s deafness was severe and he had bought the cheapest possible hearing aid under the Commonwealth Government’s subsidised assistance program; he might as well have used an old soup can pressed up to his ear. The doctors and my father rarely understood each other. I sometimes tried to translate but it was no good. During one consultation, my father, who would not desert his affection for slang for anyone, told the doctor that he’d been coming good but ‘then I got this lurgy, which I can’t throw off’. It was bad enough that rather than calling it a cold he was using a term created by the Goons in the 1950s, but he was also pronouncing it ler-jee, not ler-gee.
‘What did you say is wrong with you, James?’ the doctor asked in his heavy accent.
‘Ay?’ my father replied.
‘What is this ler-jee?’ the doctor said.
‘Yeah, well, I can’t get rid of this crap on my chest,’ was my father’s answer.
I confess that I just sat there enjoying it. As it was, the doctors had basically written him off anyway. As one said to him in a Russian accent after my father recounted his mounting series of health problems: ‘James, this is what happens when you smoke heavily for forty years—everything is damaged and cannot be fixed’.
But it was the tiniest of injuries that turned out to be the most dangerous. In the winter, during one of his breezy ‘Hey, buddy boy, how’s it been in the salt mines this week?’ phone calls he told me: ‘I’ve got a big toe that’s giving me curry. It must have rubbed on the end of a sock and a bit of the skin has come away. It’s just a little cut but, by golly, it stings. And the bastard won’t seem to heal. I’ve tried everything—bandaids, Savlon, even a bit of Rawleigh’s ointment I found in the cupboard—but it’s not scabbing up’.
I took notice of what he was saying but not what he was describing. The blood wasn’t circulating properly to his extremities. After a few weeks of putting up with the pain, he saw a GP and was referred to a specialist who booked him into a private hospital, where there would be an attempt to revitalise the blood flow in his lower leg through some minor invasive surgery. It had at best a fifty-fifty shot at success but it was worth a try. Once again, in the hospital he enjoyed the opportunity of being able to have cheery, superficial exchanges with the nursing staff and to deliver monologues—driven chiefly by his poor hearing, which meant he could talk but not really listen—to the incredibly pleasant man with whom he shared a room for most of his time there, who was also getting something done to the circulatory system in his legs. That man was eventually discharged and replaced by a shrivelled, jaundiced gentleman who looked to be in his seventies and was so weak that he did not speak and struggled to get himself in and out of his bed. As I was watching him have three, then four, then five goes before successfully swinging his legs out from under his bedcovers and then pause for breath after his exertions, my father nodded in his direction and said in a stage whisper: ‘He’s just taking up space, that poor fella’. It was said dispassionately. He did not regard himself as sharing the man’s downward health trajectory.
Progressively, he was, although it was clearly important to him to behave as if this were not so. The procedure did not work. Over a period of a couple of months, the cut on his toe became an open, suppurating wound. It was painful and disrupted his sleep. He started using a stick so that he could walk more lightly on the affected foot. I tried to visit him as often as I could, usually once a week, and every couple of Sundays he would drive up to see me. On one of these Sunday visits, I asked him to come with me while I bought a few things from my local Officeworks, stationery and computer supplies being the tax deduction of choice for journalists. The store is in a large former factory with a sawtooth roof at the north-eastern corner of Fitzroy, on the traffic-burdened corner of Smith Street and Alexandra Parade. It is only a few hundred metres from his childhood home. After we passed through the automatic sliding doors of the store, he stopped, tilted his head back slightly and took in the building.
‘I did my apprenticeship here,’ he said, with a sense of wonder.
The British United Shoe Machinery Company, whose four-storey heritage-listed factory was next door, had been engaged to make ammunition boxes soon after World War II began and built this factory to fulfil the contract. This was where he had ridden his bike from home as a fifteen-year-old to start his working life, where he had run errands, fetching hessian bags of bolts from another factory
in Richmond and balancing them on the bike’s handlebars on the return journey, learning the basics of welding. He pointed over to the printing area. That was where he had been stationed and was shown how to bend and shape metal sheets. Where the paper products were displayed was where the lunch room had been. The section housing office furniture was where a group of female employees wrapped up the ammunition boxes in waxed brown paper, ready for despatch. For fifteen minutes we stood there as he relived his time there. A couple of times, floor staff came over in their royal blue polo shirts and asked us if we needed help. He had not set foot in the building since he set off to join the army as a nineteen-year-old sixty-three years earlier but these memories were fully alive. He was a young man again, hobbled by an open wound that would never heal and reliant on a walking stick.
For the first time, on this day and in the following weeks whenever we got together, he abandoned the rose-tinted stories that he had always trotted out about his early life, which was that his parents must have really loved each other, given that they stayed together but never married, thus flouting social convention. And he added some darker colours to his previous portrayals of his father, whose death at fortynine had long haunted him. What I’d always heard about Jim Bren senior was that he was a cheerful father who took his son rabbiting in the paddocks in Preston and dispensed wisdom about the obligation to be entertaining in company and the need to be wary about human nature. As we drove back to my house from Officeworks, my father surprised me by saying: