High Sobriety

by Jill Stark

  At work, the mood is bleak. Despite all of our strategising and negotiating, and a public campaign that garners the support of dozens of Australia’s most prominent leaders and thinkers — including former prime minister Malcolm Fraser, singer-songwriter Paul Kelly, writers Peter Carey and John Pilger, and an array of former state premiers and Australians of the year — there’s no sign that management will back down on the redundancies. No-one’s saying it, but there’s a palpable sense of inevitability to it all. The unspoken fear is that someday, and that day may be soon, newspapers will no longer be printed. We’re ready to embrace the digital revolution and to accept a degree of rationalisation if it will help us to survive, but what will survival cost? What will become of our craft when the last of these skilled practitioners, with newspaper ink pulsing through their veins, are put out to pasture? When they walk out the door for the last time, it won’t just be friends, colleagues, and decades of experience that we’ll lose. The door will close on tradition.

  As I brace for possible industrial action, and for the days of hard drinking in which I can’t participate, I start to think about the role that alcohol has in that tradition. Journalism is a recipe for heavy drinking: the long hours, the late deadlines, and the often extraordinary events we witness. The comradeship between subs and reporters, working together to get a late-breaking story into the paper, was traditionally cemented over beers when the presses started rolling. It was no surprise to me when I learned that it was journalists at the Bulletin magazine who led the push against Australia’s temperance movement, fighting any moves to restrict the sale of alcohol. Boozing is a journalistic institution.

  In my tabloid days in Scotland, retiring to the pub when your shift was over was an almost daily occurrence. Here, ten years later, it’s not so common — although there are some notable exceptions. In particular, there was the infamous 12-hour farewell lunch that a group of Sunday Age staff organised for our colleague Cam, who was off to spend a year in New York. What started out as a civilised pub lunch on a Tuesday afternoon ended up as a marathon drinking session. We sat down to eat at noon, and left when the pub shut its doors at midnight. And older journos talk fondly of The Age’s Bog Bar, which convened after the first edition, in a locker room off the men’s toilets. Both sexes were welcome, but membership was required.

  Bonding over beers in the pub with workmates is more than just a social gathering or a chance to get plastered. It can be a way to process the trauma on which we regularly report. It also offers schooling for younger journalists, providing a convivial environment in which to learn from veteran reporters who have covered wars, disasters, world cups, and Olympics. In years past, a reporter repeatedly turning in sloppy copy might get some quiet advice from a subeditor in the pub, but now we’re losing the chance for some of that interaction. Soon, the people editing our stories won’t even be in the same building.

  To better understand the historical role that drinking has played in journalism, I talk to some of The Age’s longest-serving reporters. I catch up with Steve Butcher — or Butch, as he’s known in the newsroom. He’s our award-winning chief court reporter. He’s also an old-school, pavement-pounding grafter, who started his career in 1972 at Melbourne’s notorious Truth newspaper, a Rupert Murdoch–owned publication, which he sums up as a renegade outfit offering ‘screaming headlines, breasts, sport, and brothel ads’. Heavy drinking was the predominant pastime at Truth. ‘You met contacts in the pub; you met police in the pub; lawyers, judges in the pub; crooks in the pub. If you didn’t drink, you weren’t trusted. So if you wanted a yarn, for people to absolutely open up, they’re a lot more comfortable when they’re off the bench, out of the police station, away from chambers, and they get a few beers in them. There’s a famous saying that a drunk man says what a sober man thinks. Loose lips provide stories.’

  Butch says that the art of ‘becoming a chameleon’ — blending into your contacts’ environment — is the key to establishing rapport and earning trust. If that means sitting in the park and eating a sandwich, he’ll do that. If the contact wants to grab a coffee or go for a walk, he’ll oblige them. But more secrets are spilled over a few beers.

  Oiling up sources over a liquid lunch used to be a management-sanctioned practice. Reporters were given free rein to rack up large expense bills in the pub, as long as the sessions spawned the occasional ripping yarn. ‘We’d have huge nights at the boozer, where you’d turn up to work the next day with a shocking hangover, and by about 11 o’clock someone would say, “Feel like a beer?” “Aw, yeah.” You were thinking, it’s going to kill me, but you got over there and before you knew it, you were pissed again. It was fantastic,’ he says, with a wide grin.

  These days, expenses are more tightly monitored. Set limits on ‘meal’ allowances have made boozy afternoons with sources an alien concept for many young reporters. Butch believes that the new generation of journalists are losing the ‘getting your boots dirty’ skill of building contacts; we’re all far more office-bound, and isolated behind our computer screens, than ever before. ‘More than half of this office I’d transplant back there if I could, for 18 months at Truth — the drinking and carrying on and working hard and being screamed at. They would be a lot more sharp-edged than they are. Everyone’s so fit and healthy these days. Nowadays you take people for a coffee, which is boring unless you’re going to put a whisky in it. There’s no doubt some of them [young journalists] are missing that opportunity to get out on the booze and have a drink with a couple of lawyers or coppers. At Christmas, every police station had a party, and the clerks of court would have Christmas parties and prosecutors would have barbecues, and the drunkenness and the outrageousness was just fantastic. You’d take booze and get blind, and fights would start, but it was all in.’ These days, he adds mournfully, media companies are more interested in ‘arse protection’.

  Butch’s good mate John ‘Sly’ Silvester, The Age’s veteran crime reporter and co-author of the Underbelly books, believes that newspaper journalism’s historical association with heavy drinking is less to do with alcohol being a lubricant and more to do with the long, unsociable hours that came from late deadlines. ‘All of these professions that were the last to break that strong alcohol dominance were almost all shift workers, all high-pressure jobs, many of them life-and-death jobs. So the coppers, barristers who worked long hours and worked in very strange environments together; the journos; the nurses, doctors in casualty — you shared your problems together. Today, we’ve got counsellors; we’ve got different ways of dealing with stuff. In the old days, the sort of rule was: go and get pissed, talk your problems out, front up tomorrow, have a shower and a shave, and off we go.’

  Drinking was common among reporters and subs working night shifts in the 1970s and 1980s, due to a combination of ‘comradeship, loneliness, and boredom’ as they waited for the big story to break. ‘You’d slip over to the pub because you’d done the crossword. There was no internet — this is 8.30 at night and you’re working to 11 — so you may as well go and have a few beers as just sit there. No subs went home before the first edition, so everyone was there at midnight. There was nothing for them to do except go home to an empty house. They’d spread the newspapers out, open the fridge, and get some beers out. When I started, the police club was one of the few places you could get packaged grog after ten o’clock at night, so on occasions we’d have the editor ring and say, “We’ve run out of booze. Can you get us some slabs?”’

  Drinking on the job was so accepted Sly remembers reporters turning up to work pissed, and management complaining about the number of empty beer cans in the police-rounds car. Drink-driving was a regular and unremarkable occurrence. The close social bond between journos and police officers meant that crime reporters were often green-lighted. Earlier deadlines, fewer editions, the demise of evening newspapers, and the introduction of drink-driving laws have helped change that drinking culture, which Sly says is not a bad
thing — for journos or police. ‘When you talk about the police culture, about working a million hours and then going down the police club and just sleeping on a desk, and then doing a raid, it sounds good. But look at the number of them who died when they hit poles, died in car accidents. Or there were police raids with cops who were over .05 — there were occasions when it was just a miracle people didn’t get shot.

  ‘There were night-shift barbecues, where the patrol cars would pull up, have a barbecue, and then drive up and down the freeway to get their clicks up so it looked like they’d been working. But then, one day, there was a fatal accident involving a divvy van going through a red light after they’d been to a barbecue. They weren’t drunk — they weren’t even .05 — but that was the end of that. While it was fun to be there, it mightn’t have been fun if I was at home and I’d just been burgled and the coppers weren’t turning up because they were having sausages on the Yarra.’

  But while heavy drinking was rife among law and justice reporters and their circles, both Butch and Sly tell me that it was nothing compared to the shenanigans that used to go on in the Canberra press gallery. Working in a rabbit warren of tiny offices, shrouded in a fug of cigarette smoke, political reporters lived a life of over-indulgence, hundreds of kilometres away from their newspaper’s headquarters and the scrutiny of their editors. One of the original party animals was Tony Wright, who has racked up nearly 25 years in the press gallery, starting at The Canberra Times in 1987. He now works for The Age as national editor, dividing his time between Melbourne and the nation’s capital. When we catch up, he looks back on his journalistic career, which began in 1970, and tells me that hard drinking was endemic throughout that decade, and remained so through the 1980s and well into the 1990s.

  He has a theory about the drinking and loutish behaviour. The hard-nosed journos, predominantly men, were overcompensating for the fact that they spent their days in offices typing, which was traditionally considered women’s work. They were the ‘Wild West of the clerical class’, he says. ‘The editor would say, “We’re off to the pub for a counter meal,” you’d knock back seven or eight schooners, and then you’d come back and fall asleep on your typewriter. That was just what you did. It was the social glue.’

  But the wild lifestyle took its toll on many mates. There were more than a few hard drinkers who ended up unable to function. Some went on to develop alcoholic dementia. ‘A lot of the so-called legendary journos made their names among their peers just as much for their behaviour at the bar, or for their ability to hold alcohol or still file with one hand over their eyes. But back then nobody thought of it as “problems with alcohol”. It just meant they could drink more than anybody else, or that they were wilder. But yeah, marriages fell apart, lives fell apart.’

  Sly had told me something similar. The war stories from the halcyon days don’t tell the whole tale. ‘More often than not, if you drill down to the end of the story, the person died prematurely or became very lonely. There was a series of working alcoholics. There were people who lost their way in that culture.’

  Sly believes that the hard-drinking reputation of crime reporters, and the police officers they befriended, was part of a myth constructed to help maintain the boys’-club mentality in a politically incorrect era. It was the kind of macho culture that, in the late 1970s, saw one female reporter sent home from work for wearing trousers. ‘It was that idea that girlies couldn’t possibly look at a dead body. You can’t have a girl go down the pub and drink ten pots. Of course, some of the best crime reporters in the world have been female.’

  When feminism took hold, many female reporters embraced the drinking culture as a way of being taken seriously in a man’s world. In Canberra, journalists and politicians would mingle at the non-members bar in Old Parliament House, or have long lunches together at the National Press Club or a handful of favoured restaurants. Boozy Friday sessions became so sacrosanct that a tacit agreement was reached between journalists and politicians: on Friday afternoons, no press conferences would be held, nor media releases issued. Things often got out of hand in these drinking sessions. In an incident still talked about today, two of Australia’s oldest and most venerated political reporters charged at each other ‘like a pair of old bulls’ during a heated argument in the Press Club bar, their bellies bouncing off each other upon impact. ‘This was accepted behaviour,’ Tony says.

  Graphix, an upstairs late-night bar in Kingston, was also a popular haunt with pollies and journos, particularly on budget night. It didn’t start jumping till after 2.00 a.m. ‘Blood was spilled, scores were settled, and marriages went upside down,’ said Tony. But he remembers it most for being the venue where, in the late 1980s, he and some colleagues invented the sport of ‘ottering’. ‘One night, a few of us worked out that if we put our hands behind our backs and stood at the top of the stairs and fell forward, you would slide on your bellies flat to the boards and get to the bottom. And if you had your head up, you wouldn’t get too much carpet rash. Politicians would actually come along to watch it because a lot of people in the press gallery got into it. It made planking look pretty bloody ordinary.’

  But it was a perilous pursuit. On the same night that an ABC television reporter fractured her wrist while attempting the advanced ‘double otter’ with a colleague, a Sydney Morning Herald photographer broke his leg in a solo feat. Their efforts made such an impact on the then federal treasurer, Peter Costello, that he shared them with the nation during a live National Press Club speech following the delivery of his 1998 budget.

  Hazardous drinking games aside, the relationships formed under the influence of alcohol had professional benefits for both politicians and reporters. Tony says that secrets were passed to inebriated journalists prior to Paul Keating’s leadership challenge on Bob Hawke. ‘Keating’s people made sure that journalists were extremely well briefed at Graphix, very late at night, about what Keating was up to and what a dreadful bastard Hawke was. That was all because of lubrication. Notes would be taken in the toilets and so forth. Somebody confided one night that Peter Walsh, who was the finance minister, had named Hawke “Old Jellyback”. Suddenly it started appearing in newspapers. A lot of unsourced stories from that period came out of those drinking holes very, very late at night, quite often with the sun glinting off Lake Burley Griffin when you were driving home.’

  I know, from speaking to friends and colleagues in the Canberra press gallery, that drinking has not gone out of fashion in the nation’s capital. Journalists still mix with politicians, and budget night remains one of the booziest events in the political calendar. But there’s no doubt that things have changed. Thirty years ago, newspapers provided their senior political reporters with large houses, where lavish parties would be thrown and journalists, diplomats, public servants, and politicians would get drunk together. The perks are gone these days, and there are few ‘lifers’ left. Reporters might spend a year or two as a Canberra correspondent, using it as a stepping stone before returning to a more senior role at head office. The chummy relationship between reporters and parliamentarians has changed, too — politicians are more closely media-managed than ever before.

  For Tony, it was Paul Keating’s decision to privatise the catering at Parliament House that sparked the beginning of the end of the entente cordiale. The new contractors deemed the non-members bar unprofitable, closing it down. It was later turned into an aerobics centre. ‘It changed a lot of things because suddenly there was no central social outlet where politicians and staffers and journos could gather in a totally informal way, pass secrets back and forth, and drink a lot and get a bit indiscreet. Things moved out of Parliament House, and a couple of other restaurants around the place became meeting places, but they were much more formal and much more open, and people could see who was talking to whom. The new Parliament House also allowed politicians to disappear into their big offices, protected by receptionists, so it really grew apart, the political
class from the journalist class.’

  The Prime Minister still holds annual Christmas drinks at the Lodge for the media, but Tony says they’re sedate, stage-managed affairs. Not like the parties thrown by Bob Hawke, who, although he didn’t drink for the 12 years he was in parliament, would invite his favourite journos upstairs to play pool and drink till dawn. John Howard’s shindigs were also a high point for Tony. ‘One year, I was stumbling around and I went over to get a drink, but the waiter said, “Sorry, the drinks are off now. It’s over. Mr Howard says the drinks go off at this time.” So I went back and said, “John, this is fucking outrageous — you’ve turned the taps off.” He said, “What are you talking about, Tony? I know nothing about that.” And I said, “Well, you better go and talk to your caterers, because we’ve just been told we can’t have any more drinks.” So off he went to talk to them, and next minute the grog’s back on, and everyone’s yahooing and carrying on. Then I said, “There’s a lot of young journos here who have never seen the Lodge” — because they have a big marquee out the back for the party — “I think you should do a guided tour.” He said, “Well, Tony, that’s a good idea.” So off we go, and we started this conga line weaving through the Lodge and carrying on, and we ended up at the grand piano playing Christmas tunes and singing off-key, and it went on quite late into the night.’