The First Front Page

THE FIRST FRONT PAGE

JOHN STAPLETON

Everything came in torrents from the past; always disturbed, always flung to the four winds, good times non-existent.

The world became a flat, monochromatic place, leaden grey, a terrifying place. There was no coherent, single personality. The grey was all that I knew, all it seemed I had known for years. Comfort came from the familiarity of despairing routines. If I sought wealth, it was purely to fritter it away. I had no belief in a brighter future.

On the outside I was a cheerful, entertaining, character. People would comment on how relaxed and easy going I was, how I knew everybody, could talk to anybody.

Inside a cringing, sad person had evolved over many years. I wore this depression, this melancholic view of the world, like a cloak; leaves blown on soggy ground, swirls of dark colors, orange sludge, despair etched into the ravishing landscapes I always sought.

I wandered into a job at The Sydney Morning Herald, then regarded as one of the world's top 20 newspapers, out of these doom laden winds with no ambition, no hope of a career, just a sad determination to see out promises made to myself a long time ago.

By the time I did actually arrive on the doorsteps, or loading docks, of The Sydney Morning Herald, through a ragged series of events in a post-relationship era, I didn't, in my heart of hearts, actually believe my determination to live by the typewriter would succeed.

But a friend who was working as a housing officer for people on welfare, Cara MacDougal, helped fuel me with enough social justice stories to attract attention. Her support made all the difference.

At the time I was taking my own photographs. One in particular that got a good run was of a single mother who had just been evicted from her home. In the chaos of eviction, her children’s possessions were strewn down the narrow concrete walks of their bleak apartment blocks. Even I could make a litter of toys evocative.

The homeless stories, which had been so influential in getting the job at The Sydney Morning Herald, weren't the beginning and the end, as I might have thought, they were just another string of stories around a central theme.

Most reporters or journalists came on to newspapers and magazines with heads full of ideas and subjects about which they were passionate. But newspapers burn stories like a bonfire; and soon enough you’ve written or turned into news stories all your private obsessions. And then you have to move on; and become instead the neutral observer of the mayhem and intrigue of the world around you.

Did those photographs of the homeless, their belongings scattered on the medium strip outside a grim block of apartments, really change anything? Encourage governments to take a more compassionate view?

The stories certainly didn’t help the actual people involved, although at the time, unused to the transient impact of sob stories, I thought that by bringing the multiple injustices of their plights to light I was doing them a great favor.

Somehow, out of sheer persistence and the kindness of strangers, I began to get stories published in the city’s finest newspaper.

Although I had spent several months perfecting the art of the swan dive as part of a downward spiral, in my first approaches to The Sydney Morning Herald I used an old and often successful line, “I’ve just got back from overseas and I’m looking for work”.

Just as in former years when an editor on the Review section of The Australian Financial Review had painstakingly taught me how to write for newspapers, so this time round one of the editor of the Saturday feature section of The Sydney Morning Herald also went out of his way to help.

Whatever the reason Thomas Liddle, after giving me a string of demanding feature assignments, took it on himself to recommend me to the editors.

And thus I began to do my first casual news reporting shifts.

Adjusting to the mainstream took some doing.

For a start, from a practical point of view, it was barely possible to decipher the hieroglyphics I left behind. The snail trails of discordant, disconnected images made sense to almost no one. I had been a long time out there. I had to take detailed notes on every situation just to make certain of getting it right. The door was blue. The ceiling grey. He had a moustache. She blonde hair. The children were three, five and 10. The car maroon. The sun was setting as the ambulance arrived. Burnt trees formed skeletons against the darkening sky. The wooden house was once painted white. A ramshackle fence enclosed daisies growing wild in a neglected garden.

Everything, I took it all down, filling out note pad after note pad.

Back in the office I would regurgitate too much data, struggling to confine the story to the standard 600 words.

Back then, when we were out on assignment in the news cars, the journalist was expected to be the boss and the driver and photographer to follow their lead.

In a later era there would no greater offence than to refer to “my photographer” or “my driver”.

The first time I had to radio into the news desk I didn’t know which button to press on the microphone; and my inexperience was painfully obvious.

My amateurishness didn’t last.

It was a preparedness to work Sundays that finally unlocked the door to the mainstream.

At that stage of life, disoriented and sad following a break-up, there weren’t any squabbling children or longing boyfriends at home, no picnics with friends. My arms were bruised and the flat mates barely tolerated my behavior. I had won and lost so many times, I already felt old.

I didn’t much care how I spent the days.

Sooner or later the paper’s hierarchy noticed that I kept getting a run on Mondays, the paper wasn't getting sued and the stories weren't too badly written. For months, poverty stricken and attempting to stabilise my life, I kept up the casual shifts.

My first front page would never normally have made it to Page Zed, much less the front. In those days, prior to so much advertising drifting to the internet, there were always a lot of news pages to fill and a scrabbling desperation by the editors to get enough stories for the next day.

In a medium sized city like Sydney, there wasn’t always that much newsworthy going on.

“There's a register for women in unorthodox jobs,” the Chief of Staff said. “Their funding has run out and they're whinging for more. These people always want more taxpayer’s money, they can't possibly stand on their own two feet.

“Anyway, we're desperate for picture stories tomorrow, see what you can get. Try and find some cute young woman carpenter, covered in saw dust, or a mechanic, grease streaking her face, dribbling down her breasts. Just make sure they're cute, we don't want some bull dyke.”

So I headed o to the meeting in inner-city Surry Hills with Stevti Christo, the most foul-mouthed of all the SMH photographers. Like an early Chef Ramsay, he found it impossible to utter a sentence without using the “f” word.

We were late, as the SMH of those days almost invariably was, a sense of the urgency of news yet to overtake the venerable institution,

The air was full of the self-righteous anger of 300 or more women crammed into a tiny space. Eventually the woman allocated to take care of the media – we were it – cleared a spot for us. We were, after all, The Sydney Morning Herald. We sat cross- legged on the floor; completely surrounded, the only men. The 1980s was the peak of male-bashing feminism, of women's collectives, power suits and committed separatists, of serious debate about whether all men were rapists and bashers, whether lipstick was self-repression or true liberation could be achieved without the elimination of all men from women’s lives.

I tried to feel comfortable, nothing to it, I'm a progressive kind of guy, go girls, all of that. I had done women's studies at university in the seventies. I thought of myself as a SNAG, a sensitive, new age guy, at the cutting edge of gender transformation.

Speaker after speaker portrayed the government's failure to continue to fund the directory of women in un- orthodox jobs as not just a slight against all working women, but yet another blow by a patriarchy determined to keep the sisters in the kitchen.

“There's no fucking picture here,” Steve whispered, loud enough for a dozen of the sisterhood to overhear. “Just look at them. None of them make a fucking picture mate. I'm out of here. I'm going to find something else.”

“I've got to stay and listen,” I whispered back.

“Well I don't, I'm fucking gone,” Steve said, standing up and elbowing his way through the crowd of hostile women.

I sat there, very uncomfortably, knowing full well the women around me had heard every last word Steve had said.

As representatives of The Sydney Morning Herald we were one of their few chances to put any pressure at all on the government and to thereby save their project. They had to bide their tongues.

On and on the speakers went. By the time I got back to the office that day I had interviewed a woman carpenter, plumber and electrician as well as the organisers. I wrote up the story on the antiquated computer system, made it as interesting as possible, assuming as my fingers rattled across the keyboard that it would never get a run.

The subject might have been important to the people involved, but a directory of women in unorthodox jobs wasn't earth shattering. Journalists were always being targeted by groups whose funding had run out; noble cause after noble cause.

Next day the story was on the front page, my very first front page story.

It was the picture that did it. I learnt forever the value of a good photograph in dragging a story onto the front; or higher in the “book” as the sections were called. In fact this was a principle that applied well to The Sydney Morning Herald; but not to The Australian, where the story was seen as all important and the photograph as secondary.

But that day a large photograph, run wide and deep, of a drop-dead gorgeous young woman adorned the front page of The Sydney Morning Herald.

She was carrying a ladder, with the Opera House in the background, her white overalls stained delicately with paint. The upper flaps of her overalls were just loose enough to provoke the imagination of males around the city. “Can I help you carry that?” a hundred thousand voices asked as their minds licked o the delicate traces of labor, the glorious smell of sweat.

I never got a thank you from the organizers of the Women in Unorthodox Jobs Directory. But later that same day the Chief of Staff leant across the desk and shook my hand.

“Congratulations,” he said. ”You've got the job.”

I was a full-time journalist on arguably the best paper in the country, not just a lowly hack doing casual shifts. It was the proudest day of my life.

And how celebrated The Sydney Morning Herald was.

In its power, status and hold on the city's imagination, the paper was a revered institution without peer. Just getting a letter onto the letters page of The Sydney Morning Heraldwas a major feat.

It’s hard to imagine now, when newspapers are no longer admired as bastions of truth representing the highest ideals of a community, just how admired the SMH was.

Sydney back then was in world terms a tiny city of little more than two million people in a far o country of barely 15 million people. At the top end of the market Sydney was basically a one newspaper town – and now I worked for them.

It had been a very long journey to get inside the celebrated editorial floor of TheSydney Morning Herald.

In the literally thousands of stories that would follow, an equally long journey lay ahead.