Open Writing

I came back from Canberra to Sydney one weekend and found Alex had been sick with glandular fever. She looked worn, pale with a low life force.

Her life was all work and not much fun. She wrote a lot of medical/science stories, material which had to be checked back with sources, and this added to the tension of her work. She had also been appearing on Channel 9’s Meet the Press with the editor, King Watson, and the editor in chief, David MacNicholl. She didn’t need this pressure.

We were married in a civil ceremony at Kings Cross on the last Saturday in June. I was 26 at the time. We spent our honeymoon driving up to Mackay in Queensland, where we visited my mother in law, stayed a few days and returned to work.

We decided that to give our life together a sporting chance, we needed to get out of the Sydney-Canberra maelstrom, so we each applied for jobs in Perth. Alex was accepted by the West Australian and I went to the Daily News. We drove over to the west in a small car, a Morris minor. The bitumen road ran out at Ceduna and the sign on the unsealed, potholed Eyre Highway reminded us this was the last water for 770 miles. We had no problems, arriving in the Perth metropolitan area on a rainy day in August 1962, and booked in at the Raffles motel. What a difference in pace – unbelievable. We went from being assigned about 10 to 15 stories per day to one or two. Sometimes nothing. We had a lot of trouble coping with the pace change.

We bought a half acre block at Kelmscott and built a three bedroom house on it, and developed an interesting garden full of fruit and flowers. We’d go to Bedfordale and talk to the Plymouth Brethren there – in particular Oliver Dowell – asking for advice on growing fruit. We’d ask the owner of Azalea Gardens in Kelmscott about the requirements of camelias and azaleas. We spent many an hour discussing plants with Mrs Kiuper, a Dutch woman, who ran a small garden nursery in Kelmscott. We loved our garden. People driving past on Sundays used to stop and ask if they could come in and have a look around.

The Daily News gave me a good run with my copy but after about 18 months there, I started to doubt the whole basis of my style of writing. I had been putting everything into style, perhaps to the detriment of content.

At the time I didn’t realise it but what I was suffering from was the wound of the Fisher King, which could be treated only by the search for grace. My copy looked very clever – too clever for my personal taste. I’d wince when I read it back to myself a day or two later. How could I have been so callow as to write that?

Alex and I used to discuss this a lot, the question of style versus content. The problem was that in getting the content right, you might miss the impact you needed to have on the copy taster to get published.

I decided that the answer was to improve the depth of my mind and this could be done by reading but a more reliable way was through study. I enrolled for a mature age matriculation course in Australian history and current affairs, studied at night and passed, gaining acceptance at the University of WA.

My son Leon was born in the Women’s Hospital at Subiaco, the year I turned 30. Alex had handled her pregnancy very well and was devoted to the task of motherhood, with a copy of Dr Spock’s advice for parents by her bedside lamp.

I left the Daily News to take up a job as Public Relations Officer with the Main Roads Department, which was quartered behind the Barracks Arch in those days. My friends all thought this was a backward step but I felt I’d had enough of daily journalism and ambulance chasing. I wanted to do something a little more positive in my work.