THE PLACES FLED: BOXES

Clunes, NSW, Australia

The Places Fled included, perhaps most specifically, boxes full of the past.

Each was a crystalline shard cloaked in emotional baggage.

He needed to work through them, even just to store them away before hitting the road again, and yet he keep veering off at angles, any angle.

The last thing he had ever wanted was to feel anything. 

The detritus was the result of a perfect storm in his own life; years of physical pain, routine psychic storms, hundreds of kilometres walked through sleepless nights, a job disintegrated, kids grown and flown, a medication that had kept him stable for years withdrawn, or withdrawn from, an identity that had served him in a shrugging sense for decades lost with the job, a little farm, unimposing, but a retreat, a cellar, vanished in the wind, all washed up against thieving Thai sex workers, sick vicious Thai and Russian bar owners, or mafia as they liked to think of themselves, the indemically corrupt police of Thailand and their cohorts in the Thai Tourist Police, mounting pursuit after pursuit against someone who had already felt depressed, lost, disorientated. But the thugs and thieves, running their pedophile gangs and tourist scams built on an exploitative, feudalistic system, did not like anyone or anything that could expose their game. And so they mounted their own vicious propaganda campaign, dancing in the street jeering his name, dancing, if they could have done, on his grave.

Who they were, why fate had chosen him, that was for the authorities to know and you to guess.

First went the old reporter's pads, stray lines from hundreds upon hundreds of stories. Under the house, perhaps not to emerge in his lifetime.

Then went the old Family Court papers. Even now they sent a sick thud through him, staring at the pointless legalistic garbage the country's most dysfunctional and dishonest court put so many separated parents through.

Another saga, another morally, and yes legally, corrupt jurisdiction he would have known nothing about, and have never believed, if he hadn't experienced it himself. If they hadn't decided to do him over, as they did over everyone who came within their orbit.

Then he opened a file, labelled it State Library. 

He had sold material to them before. Maybe they would bite again.

The first was a letter from the deceased Sydney poet and writer Vicki Viidikas dated 27 March 1990 and written in her own hand writing.

He had known Vicki seemingly forever, an impossible junky, a difficult person  who had always been pressing her books of poetry on him, autographing them as if it was an event. Reading lyrical sreams to him in the midle of the night, because one thing about Vicki, she never stopped talking. Not even with a fit in her arm.

Her work had recently been the subject of re-evaluation with the publication of a selection of her work. She had died 14 years before, in 1998, a few years after he had joined The Australian newspaper. She had followed her own true love into bank robbing and serial scams, and her death followed months of chaos and the death of a number of her friends in the chaotic milieu of Kings Cross, one of the only urban hearts in anotherwise suburban land. One of the last times he had seen her, they walked through the streets of the Cross together, and they had stopped every few metres to talk to knotted little groups of dishevelled "patrons", the recent death of one of their own the subject of every conversation. 

The death of her addiction buddy had impacted badly on Vicki.

And then came her own; surprising nobody.

The 1990 letter had come from a property near Alstonville, a hamlet on the north coast of NSW. 

She hoped that her luggage, which she had left at my place, was safe and had not been robbed or lost. As the stable one, I was often enough the subject of such convenience by various of those plunging past into the depths. 

Although she had been strung out to the max and needed a bit of rest and respite, Vicki complained of how boring her "holiday" was, of getting to sleep at midnight. "This is my penance for dangerous indulgence."

And in an unstated D.H. Lawrence reference she talked of a snake, for we had all, our generation, in those school houses of the 1950s, grown up with the words of Lawrence's The Snake:

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat, 
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough beforeme.. 


Vicki, too, wrote:  "and found a snake in the carport, staring back with green eyes, it went off after I left to catch a bush rat (whole) I heard it shrieking down by the laundry, before the snake disappeared with its fat stomach. These are rural matters!"

The next was a diatribe from a a Sydney eccentric Sandor Berger, protesting over an article I wrote about him in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1989. 

Sandor photocopied the article into a corner of an A3 page and then filled the rest of it, in his own handwriting, with his response, beginning: "I have read the article you sneaked in on me urgently,without my consent. Yu (sic) must have been really desperate for a story if you couldn't find anybody or anything else to write about in the way you did and with such urgency that you couldn't wait for my own Press Release.

Here are the first three paragraphs of the SMH article, dated 14 November 1989. 

"For many years the notices have appeared on telegraph poles around Sydney: "Pschiatry is Evil, It Must Be Banned!!" But now the author, Sandor Berger, is getting older, and the notices appear only within a few hundred metres of the dilapidated boarding house in Darlinghurst where he lives.

"Sydney is full of eccentrics. What makes Sandor Berger, 64, extraordinary is the series of manuscripts he had published himself and lodged with the Mitchell Library over the past 35 years.

"These include an erotic musical called Springtime in May, several works of poetry and two angry volumes written when he was in Long Bay Jail during the Sixties."

I was known for a time as the paper's inner-city expert and had come across the story because I knew Jeffrey Wegener, who lived in the same rundown Darlinghurst boarding house as Sandor.

But Jeffrey's shambolic flat on the second floor was positively sumptuous in contrast to Sandor's digs at the rear of the first floor.

We tried hard to get a photograph of him, but with newspaper deadlines being what they were, never succeeded. My primary communication with Sandor was shouting at him through his closed door.

As the article recorded: "Mr Berger refused to be interviewed by the Herald yesterday. He would not come out of his room, saying that he would communicate by letter early next year.

"I am not suitable for a hard interview," he said. "I could not cover a fraction of it. It will take preparation. I am an entirely preoccupied person."

http://mumbrella.com.au/online-news-market-sees-new-challenger-new-daily-189284

Australia’s online media landscape today sees the launch of The New Daily, a general news website funded by Australia’s major superannuation funds.

The New Daily will be run by former Herald Sun editor Bruce Guthrie, who is the website’s editorial director and former online editor of The Age Daniel Sankay, who had been rumoured to joining an Australian version of The Huffington Post.

“The important thing about The New Daily is that this is a digital only product,” said Guthrie, “most other sites out there have been something else before they were digital.” 

“When we started we sat down and thought what do you need on an online news website, we felt video was important and that the site should be able to move and speak.”

The New Daily will have an editorial staff of 15 full time staff and is owned equally by super funds AustralianSuper, Cbus and Industry SuperHoldings who have invested in The New Daily’s parent company Motion Publishing.

“What we are is a digital first news publication that it is based on a model which was launched in Adelaide for inDaily and it is backed by the industry superannuation funds,” said Paul Hamra, publisher of The New Daily.

“It is a general news website and given the super funds have 5.5m members and represent all Australians and so our site is very much a mass site.”

In addition to the editorial content provided by the editorial staff and contributors The New Daily will have access to ABC videos and copy which it will use on the website.

“We have reached an agreement with the ABC that they will provide video for us,” said Guthrie, “These are predominately 90 second videos across news, business, sport and weather.”

“We have bought those from the ABC because we think if users are time poor, particularly in the morning they might just go straight to those videos,” he said, while declining to comment on the fee paid for licencing ABC content.

Guthrie said the wake of Fairfax and News Corp Australia implementing paywalls there were opportunities for new entrants who came to the market with digital mindsets.

“I set up The Age’s website in 1996 and I relaunched the Herald Sun’s website in 2007 and I can tell you those websites were created with a print mindset,” said Guthrie.

“That still exists within News and Fairfax that they approach digital with a print mindset but what we have done is say we don’t have to worry about that what is a digital news site and what should it look like.”

He argues metered paywalls, introduced by both publishers earlier this year, were frustrating readers.

“What we have seen in our research that there is an increasing frustration with these porous paywalls which lock you out after 15 or 30 articles,” said Guthrie. “Providing good quality journalism for free, and the super funds have made it clear they will never charge for journalism is a significant selling point for the website.”

Among the launch contributors to The New Daily are former editor of Vogue Kristy Clements, former cricketer Rodney Hogg and TV identity Steve Vizard reviewing television.

The New Daily will launch with a marketing push to  members of the super funds who own the site.

“The good thing we have is that we are able to market to members of super funds, we are in the middle of an email campaign introducing them to the site,  that began on Monday night and will go for the next week,” said Hamra.

“We have the power to market to a really big section of the community.”

Hamra and Guthrie are also joined on the board of Motion Publishing by Private Media’s Eric Beecher.

Nic Christensen 

November 13th, 2013 at 12:12 pm