Vera

by Wasowski, Vera; Hillman, Robert;

  I can take some comfort in meeting interesting people, by no means all of them celebrities, just people who for one reason or another are invited to show their faces on television. I am happy to confess that meeting celebrities has never meant anything to me. You can’t live each day with the SS hunting you for dinner and still feel that the fizzy magic we see in celebrities is what you want to encounter more than any other quality in your fellow human beings. The people you crave to meet are the brave and the generous, those who go from hideout to hideout, whispering, ‘Child, listen to me, hide yourself well today and tomorrow, I have been told that they will come for the children.’ They are the ones who end up hanging from a lamppost because they didn’t take enough care in hiding themselves. What I enjoy in a man or a woman is the desire to do some justice to being born with a heart and a brain. I saw that in people whose names you would not know, and in some you would know.

  Of course, what you might – should! – admire in a celebrity is not their fame and fizz, but their talent, if they have talent. Dave Brubeck, a musician of rare gifts, tells me that his grandparents came from a Polish village – I had just mentioned that my background is Polish while applying some gentle sheen to his cheeks – and we chat about ancestry, politics, jazz. He says that it embarrassed him to find himself on the cover of Time magazine, when it should have been Duke Ellington. Best for those who admire you if you reveal a little humility. The man who whispers, ‘Hide yourself, they will come for the children’, has found a way to honour his human head and heart, and so has the man who refuses to gorge on fame.

  Over these years in make-up, I come to know quite a few of the people in ABC television, or at least their reflections, and it is generally conceded that I might find a happy home in research. I do not pester people for advancement, but my background has become well enough known for people to tell me that I should look at positions advertised internally. And so I do.

  In 1967, at the age of thirty-three, I find a research position advertised on the staff of a new show with the proposed title of This Day Tonight. Current affairs, five nights a week.

  Jan says, ‘It’s for you, it’s perfect, your English is okay.’

  All those years of chatter in make-up have allowed me to develop a more fluent brand of English, also to master colloquialisms, and, after reference to grammatical texts, to know how to avoid split infinitives and employ the subjunctive in the right places.

  I ask Sam Lipski – I’ve come to know him – if he thinks I might suit the research position. He says, ‘Sure.’ He’s to be the producer. And he’s the man you’d choose out of a hundred to be the producer. Big brain, lots of drive, knows people, knows politics.

  I go home and type up a résumé. I have my documents from Warsaw University. As I’m typing, I’m impressed. I’d hire me: hell, yes. Under ‘Personal Qualities’ I write: ‘Can outdrink anyone. Gorgeous. Good in bed.’ No, I don’t. I keep it sober, restrained. I want to write, ‘For fuck’s sake, I’m made for this.’ I don’t.

  I go before a panel. Sam’s in charge. The panel members mull over my credentials, rubbing their chins. They say, ‘Hmm, not bad.’ I’m asked a couple of questions. Then one of the panellists – a woman, I don’t know her – asks me, ‘What would you bring to the position that might be considered special?’

  I say, ‘Plenty.’

  Sam says, ‘You’ll hear from us.’

  And I do. A letter is delivered to me. At the Banff. It says – I’ll summarise – ‘We like you, the job’s yours, lots of love, The Panel.’

  We meet in Gordon Street each morning. We have the whole of the third floor above the newsroom, with partitions and a big table. There are many meetings even before the first show is broadcast in 1967.

  Sam Lipski says this to all of us – presenters, reporters, researchers, production people: ‘We’ve never done this before in Australia. This is current affairs made as important as it truly is. It’s not a rerun of the news; it’s good brains let loose on the news. This is analysis, interpretation. This is Australian television in the fast lane. Hold onto your hats.’

  Was that Sam? I can’t be sure. Somebody very like Sam, saying these words.

  We were madly excited. Calm, but madly excited. We didn’t really need anyone to tell us that the ABC had charged out to take the lead. We could feel it. It was as if we’d all been given a big whack of adrenaline that would be topped up every day for years to come. If you’d been born with a brain and lived through the tedium of the Menzies years, this was something you relished. To be original. To take the news and shake it until it howled for mercy.

  I’d only been in Australia since 1958, but I knew that something had to happen. Do you remember the way it used to be? The news at seven o’clock, some big story in politics, some scandal, some attempt at a fat confidence trick, and that confidence trick might be an official government policy, a bill. Then the news was over and there was nothing more to be said. What the hell?

  There were people in the ABC with the best brains in the country aching to take that big, fat confidence trick into the studio and turn a spotlight on it. Maybe the con man was a Menzies man; maybe it was some fat-arsed crook from the New South Wales Labor right. The people who’d signed up for TDT just wanted to get their hands on the guy, thrust him in front of a camera and ask him questions that would make him sick.

  And now here it was: This Day Tonight. I’m not talking about missionary zeal; it was simply the excitement of making people you’d heard lies from for years tell the truth, or something close to the truth. It was proper, journalistic scrutiny. And while it was true that many of the journalists at the ABC embraced the politics of the left more than those of the right, the TDT crew ached to make the left and the right own up to rubbish policy, unexamined prejudices, slip-shod argument. Not only politics, of course. Stories that cried out for expansion.

  And here I am, in the thick of it: Vera with her husky, Eastern European accent, her ironic emphasis, after ten years of sewing buttons on skirts, sweeping dusty floors in a way that subverts the image of Klotzman Industries, of using glue and paste and glass and wire to construct costume jewellery, of smoothing out wrinkles, hiding blemishes, accentuating the cheekbones of those who had cheekbones – after all this, I am a working journalist, and dear God, about time.

  The TDT presenter is to be Bill Peach. I didn’t know him before the gathering of the TDT staff before the first program, but he’s worked for the ABC in the past, also for the BBC in London and New York, and for the Ten Network, in current affairs. I like him as soon as I see him. He’s about thirty-three, easygoing and funny, with a winning smile. And when I see him on air, hosting, I fall in love with him. It’s the poise he brings to his role – it hasn’t been seen before in news commentary in this country. He is serious without making the big stories sound as if the Seventh Seal has been broken and the Four Horsemen released. Look at what he’s achieved. He manages to appeal not only to the traditional ABC viewer in a frumpy cardigan, but also to younger adults who’ve been at university in this decade of dissent, seen through the bullshit of the war in Vietnam, and embraced casual sex, feminist politics, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Leonard Cohen. And as the first year of TDT unfolds, increasingly they watch: they’re engaged; they recognise that they’re the target audience, that we want to please them. From this point on, politics can be considered sexy.

  It’s not just Bill alone who creates this sense, of course – it’s the production people – but it’s Bill I enjoy watching. He has an unusual sort of sexiness, such as a libidinous aunt in her late forties might respond to in a blushful nephew.

  Journalists don’t always get the chance to take as much pride in what they do as people in other trades. Journalists in Warsaw, in Melbourne, in London – they get used to humiliation, their best work spiked. It’s worst in Warsaw, where some party gorilla goes crazy over your copy with a fat red pencil, but it happens everywhere. It could be your boss. It could be the
copyeditor who strikes out every three-syllable word and explains that you can’t use ‘nonchalant’ because only 1 per cent of readers speak French. Or it could be the political bias of the owner of the paper, the station. Journalists are always muttering over their beer, ‘Someday.’

  The TDT people shine with the satisfaction of making something of quality. This is the ‘someday’. The day you’ll make something fine; the day nobody will censor you. The day you’ll employ the word ‘non-chalant’ without having to answer to a semi-literate copyeditor. Creating the best work you can manage – that’s all you need to worry about. The journalists don’t make a big deal out of it, but they know that this is the ‘someday’.

  It’s the ‘someday’ for me, too. I think, Werunia, don’t fuck up.

  It’s thrilling. Sam says, ‘Vera, today, this and this, okay?’ And I say, ‘Sure, this and this.’ I get to work. I consult with the reporter. I line up a cameraman (they are always ‘cameramen’; women never get near such apparatus, for some reason). I have come to know all the cameramen, and I have favourites, and they have favourites, so we match the favourites: Vera and Ted, Vera and Mike. We take an ABC car to – well, to where? To Portsea, maybe. Some guy has a startling new theory about the disappearance of Harold Holt – Harold didn’t drown; he has been seen in the Portsea pub drinking absinthe and playing darts – some such story. I’ve had two hours to complete the research, get the facts lined up; this eyewitness is obviously insane, but his looniness gives us a chance to run a story about all the loony Harold Holt theories.

  The reporter could be Allan Hogan – best if it is. Allan, I adore, and he knows exactly what he’s doing. Or it might be Peter Couchman, but probably not if this is a Harold Holt fruitcake piece – Peter is more attracted to stories with a sympathetic dimension.

  At Portsea, Allan meets up with the crazy guy, interviews him, with a touch of irony, and films some footage on the beach maybe. Allan rehearses all the other disappearance yarns, then we head back to Gordon Street, I run upstairs, thrust the film into the hands of the editors, and the story is cobbled together by the 4 pm deadline.

  Many stories that run on the show emerge from this sort of welter, this meshugge. Everything is done at speed, under pressure, glancing at your wristwatch every two minutes, three minutes, making quick calculations: we have time for this, we don’t have time, make time. I think of what Anna Akhmatova said of making poems: that the readers of what the poet offers to the public would be appalled if they knew the mess from which these finely crafted lines emerge. She meant the squalid morass of experience that is the quarry of the creative mind, some grubby gem plucked from the muck, then cleaned up, made to shine. What if the TDT viewers could witness the mess from which our stories emanate? Because even to make a four-minute story about a lunatic’s delusions requires creativity, craft, and for at least part of the time we are small-scale artists, plunging our hands into the mud to find a gem-phrase.

  If Peter Luck or Paul Murphy or Tony Joyce (the first reporters on TDT) or Allan Hogan or Peter Couchman or any first-rate journalist is given time – as they are, now and again – they can fashion fabulous stuff with the quality of craft you expect of a poet. They work hard; they get themselves to the right place at the crucial moment. They’re painstaking to the point of absurdity. And they require of me more than my pretty face. I have to keep up, be as exacting as they are, find the people they need, persuade them to talk. If I were to say, ‘Allan, no, the person you’re after, he’s dead,’ that might only just – only just! – be an acceptable excuse. ‘Dead? Bullshit. Who says he’s dead? Where’s his grave? Have you seen it?’

  The show’s journalists bear the burden of the competent. You know how that works? Like this. The more able you show yourself to be, the more is expected of you. Bring the dead man back to life, for long enough to complete the interview. In Warsaw as a student, I enjoyed the expectation that I would know how to do anything necessary. As a student of journalism I was expected to intern at Warsaw Television, where we were taught to handle any situation that might occur during production of any show at all – news, drama, kids shows, comedies. A button falls off a costume for some Polish production of Hamlet – sew it back on. Hamlet himself is inebriated (boyfriend trouble with Laertes) – sober him up, you’ve got twenty minutes, the interval is yours. Also, write the cue cards again, twice as big, for some Gomułka stooge who is too vain to wear his spectacles on camera. For Gomułka himself, make sure the cameraman knows to avoid showing his fingers, because the nails will be dirty.

  My job as a researcher is a hundred jobs, and if I am able to handle them competently it is because of Warsaw. It is because of Warsaw, and earlier. It is because of Lvov. There, in my hunger, I taught myself to think of anything that made the pain of fear fade. I taught myself to stay silent, even more silent than I needed to be. I taught myself to become a shadow among shadows, more like a shadow than was strictly necessary. This took skill. Another lesson concerned staring down at my feet, which were frozen, and making my feet believe they were warm. Each of the things I learnt, I learnt well. I told myself stories, and each story was carefully crafted. I said, ‘Werunia, more of the world awaits you than soldiers and their boots marching over the cobbles, more of the world awaits you than the cold in your bones. Two years have passed and with a hundred skills you have stayed alive. Your papa is dead and that is a bad, bad thing, but more of the world awaits you than sorrow.’ And I said, ‘Werunia, your shoes are falling apart on your feet. Find some string, tie the soles to the uppers, use your skill to find the string, use your skill to tie the soles to the uppers. Werunia, use your wits.’

  When I said, ‘More of the world awaits you …’ I was speaking in hope, of course. The children beside me in the hiding place, sitting stone still, breathing in silence, wetting their pants in silence, their ears pricked for the sound of a footfall that comes too close; each of those children spoke to themselves in hope of more of the world awaiting them, and for most it was a hope that was never to be. In some hiding place I did not share on a particular day – where was I? concealed in yellow winter grass and packed snow up against a fence? – a footfall came too close, a man’s voice shouted: ‘Aussteigen!’ Another voice shouted: ‘Sie fanden einige Jüden?’ The first voice: ‘Kinder abschaum!’ And it was over for these small people. Why was I not in the hiding place with the other children that day? It was not the warning of the old man who said: ‘They will come for the children tomorrow.’ I had noticed something that warned me, some skill among a hundred had alerted me. Maybe I had heard the distant roar of trucks arriving at the SS headquarters in the middle of the night. Lvov trained me to exploit every talent, every knack I possessed. The soldiers who came to Lvov from Germany to murder me and any Jew of any age they could find had educated me in the craft of being good at what I did.

  It is at this time, the early seventies, that I meet John Hepworth, that wonderful, witty man, a journalist on Nation Review, a wonderful, witty paper, a weekly, very left-wing. It’s maybe at a party that I meet John, or in the Canberra studio one time. Richard Walsh is the Nation Review publisher. I can’t say ‘wonderful and witty’ again, so let me say of Richard ‘clever’. Also a bit driven. I enjoy men who are driven, as long as they’re not mad. I’m drinking when I first meet John, and John is drinking too, but what am I trying to convey by saying that? We’re always drinking; it’s more important to journalists than the red blood in their veins. More important to some than to others. Very important to John.

  And to Mungo MacCallum, who’s also working for Nation Review: their chief political writer. I’ve used up my ‘wonderful’s and ‘witty’s – too bad, because they’re qualifiers that apply more to Mungo than to anyone else on earth. With some people, men and women, you listen to their marvellous conversation, you laugh at their jokes, you warm to them, but you somehow know that this is the absolute best of them: you’ve heard everything they have to offer and the next time you talk to them you’ll ge
t variations of what you heard today. Mungo is different. You listen for an hour and you feel that this is just a small part of what he can offer. Vera adores Mungo. Mungo loves Vera. Enough said.

  And Michael Leunig, the cartoonist, he’s also at Nation Review when I first meet him; that paper is a goldmine of talent. Michael is a gorgeous man, such warmth. Something I enjoyed about Michael was that he had more hair than almost anyone else, man or woman, but not me. I was on top in that way, thank God. My big messy head of hair, I love it.

  I’m an immigrant. I can’t experience the thrill and the pride Australians enjoy as this nation grows more sophisticated, and more complex. I only know little bits of what came before. But this I do know: you can’t have a show like TDT unless something good is happening, not just in the ABC, but in a thousand places all over the country. And one aspect of this good thing is that Australians seem to be ready in a way I haven’t noticed before to see themselves satirised. And satire is always just below the surface on TDT. We include a segment each week that gives a guy with a guitar sitting on a stool the chance to lampoon something topical in politics or in Australian culture, such as the ludicrous national cuisine. The song’s chorus: ‘Hot pie and tomato sauce / Same again for the second course …’ The message of these parodies is that it’s okay to laugh yourself crazy over the serious business of politics, or to poke a stick up the behind of a sacred cow dawdling down the road.

  The TDT producers and presenters would like more of this satirical complement, but you can only go so far before you end up with something that Max Gillies would appear in, rather than current affairs. Bill, with his laconic sense of humour, is aware each night that almost every political story on TDT could be introduced with a satirical smile and a raised eyebrow, and it’s part of his mastery of the presenter’s role that he’s able to give the impression that he takes politics seriously. Which he does. And doesn’t. It is the mischief in him that delights me most.