Having spent more than two decades as a member of the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery, Katharine has earned a reputation as one of the nation’s sharpest political analysts. While based in Canberra, she has worked as a reporter for The Australian Financial Review, The Australian and The Age, and more recently, she has been a part of Guardian Australia‘s team since the website launched in 2013. In addition to her daily reporting and editorial duties, Katharine also writes occasional longform essays for the Melbourne-based literary journal Meanjin.

In late August, I spoke with Katharine before a live audience at the Canberra Writers Festival, whose theme in 2017 was “power, politics and passion”. Our conversation at the festival touches on Katharine’s approach to political reporting, which requires constant scepticism while avoiding cynicism as much as possible; how her mother’s fiery passion for a Sydney Morning Herald columnist rubbed off on her at a young age; what she has observed about the cultural differences of working for three different media organisations in Fairfax, News Corp and The Guardian; what she has learned about the mechanics and logistics of live blogging political news with little time for coffee or bathroom breaks, and how she came to write an intimate and moving essay about the joys and sorrows of raising her daughter.

Katharine Murphy has worked in Canberra’s parliamentary gallery for more than 20 years, starting at The Australian Financial Review, where she was Canberra chief of staff from 2001 to 2004. In 2004, Katharine moved to The Australian as a specialist writer until 2006, when she became national affairs correspondent at The Age. In 2008, she won the Paul Lyneham award for excellence in press gallery journalism, and has been a Walkley Award finalist twice: for digital journalism for her pioneering live politics blog, and for political commentary. She is a regular panelist on the ABC’s Insiders program, on ABC24’s The Drum, and Sky News Agenda. Katharine is Guardian Australia‘s political editor, and has worked there since the site’s inception in 2013. She is also a regular essayist for the quaterly literary journal Meanjin.

Katharine Murphy on Twitter: @Murpharoo

Special thanks to the team behind the 2017 Canberra Writers Festival for hosting this conversation, and thanks to Bevan Noble at B Natural Productions for recording the audio.

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Timeline: 

2.30 Katharine has an essay in the winter 2017 issue of Meanjin named ‘The Political Life is No Life At All‘, in which she wrote that a toxic work environment threatens the health of Australian democracy

3.30 “As a long-term political journalist and practitioner, I honestly do not believe at any time that the political class in Australia went to bed one night, woke up the next morning with a burning aspiration to screw things up. I really don’t think that happened”

5.00 Katharine found it hard to get politicians to talk on the record for this story, as they “fear being spurned by their peers; they fear being judged by the media and the public if they present their own human face to the community. They’re quite scared about doing that, and the consequences of doing that”

6.00 “The objective of this piece was to get them to narrate their own story; rather than me interposing myself significantly in the essay, I wanted them to tell their own story, and it’s conducted in the sort of style of ‘exit interviews'”

7.00 Katharine already knew her interviewees for the essay well, so “I suppose they had a basic level of trust; they knew I wasn’t a cowboy. But none of them were very happy about doing it”

8.00 While interviewing former politicians and staffers for her essay, Katharine was conscious of the need to project that it was a safe space to have a difficult conversation, where she told them: “‘I get where you’re coming from, and I want to tell this story in a way where the Australian public can understand it. This will be okay.’ I’m not generally reassuring in interviews with politicians; it’s not generally my style”

11.00 “It’s a really tough business. Again, I didn’t write the piece as some sort of great, big public apologia for politics; I didn’t write the piece to try and get everybody having mass waves of sympathy for parliamentarians”

14.00 “The purpose of the piece wasn’t for the pity party of ‘woe is politics’; this has a practical implication for all of us. If democracy gets to a point where the lifestyle is so punishing – the terrain is so punishing – that it’s no longer a safe space for a human being to occupy, then that has implications for the quality of representation: we will only get a particular type of personality who wants to get into politics”

15.30 Since its publication in mid 2017, Katharine saw a “massive” response to the article, particularly from politicians and political staffers; it was so popular that it broke the Meanjin web server, and they had to buy additional bandwidth to cope with the traffic it was bringing to the site

16.30 “I’ve had the most amazing conversations with people since that essay was published […] I’ve heard the most amazing stories from people about what their perception is about the culture inside their party rooms, and what political staff are doing to sustain themselves in these jobs”

18.30 Katharine finds that if she’s not writing quickly, there’s a problem, generally with the structure or the thesis of a particular piece. With her Meanjin essay, “as I spoke to the three protagonists, I saw this tragedy in three acts in my head. That’s how the piece spoke to me, as a conceptual frame”

19.30 “In these longform things, I tend to get down a draft fairly quickly, but the process of refinement takes the time, where you’re just literally twiddling buttons; you’re turning volume down, turning a little bit of volume down, and I have trusted people who I often seek guidance from”

20.30 When writing long articles, Katharine shares early drafts with a small group of people whose opinions she trusts and values, including her husband, Mark Davis, who is “a marvellous in-house support for my work, and he is very tough on my work. He doesn’t spare me, which I don’t always appreciate, but I always benefit from”

22.30 Her editor at Meanjin, Jonathan Green, is “a great friend and a great support”; Michael Gordon “has been quite influential in my work and style”, and Gabrielle Chan “is a wonderful, wonderful writer, and is always helpful if I really need her to read something, or give me feedback”

23.00 Fellow political commentator Michelle Grattan is a member of Katharine’s “psychic gallery brains trust”; the two of them recently found that they wrote similar columns at the same time, which was “a weird crossover moment”

25.00 Katharine says that she is the least cynical person she knows, and it’s an active choice she makes: “You can sink into that sinkhole. The most essential quality about political reporting is that one must be sceptical all the time […] But if you’re cynical, you’ve kind of lost it […] and the audience doesn’t benefit from your cynicism”

26.00 “I find when I’m hitting particularly nihilistic territory, which I have been lately […] I step back and change my point of view, and look for something inside the process that is working, still. Or find a group of people who are in politics for the right reason, and try and tell their story, which is not really being told in the great big narration of dysfunction”

27.30 In her childhood during the 1980s, Katharine’s mother had a “fiery passion” for The Sydney Morning Herald columnist Alan Ramsey: “From a very early age, my mum would put me on the back porch in front of Alan Ramsey’s column and insist that I read it, top to toe”

29.00 “I was one of those dreadful kids who always kept a diary; who had the most florid, horrendous stories in the diary; who was always writing; who was always looking for means of creative expression”

29.30 “I always thought in the back of my mind, ”It’d be great if you could somehow be a political journalist in Canberra’, but I didn’t know really how one did that, so I went to university and did an arts degree “, then came to Canberra in 1991 and joined the public service, before befriending some press gallery journalists

30.30 An early career influence was the journalist and editor Tom Burton, who hired Katharine on The Australian Financial Review, where she started on the industrial relations round in 1996

32.30 “I was a completely hopeless journalist in terms of tradecraft; but I knew the area, I knew people I could go to for background information, and that was enormously helpful to me in that reporting period”

33.30 From there, Katharine moved to The Australian for a change, then Michelle Grattan brought her back to report on politics for The Age, before later joining Guardian Australia when it launched in 2013

34.00 Katharine says that Fairfax, News Corp and The Guardian have “all got different cultures, and different obsessions, preoccupations, things that are important to them […] there’s a certain similarity between the Fairfax culture and The Guardian culture, but it’s a bit different. And News is its very own thing”

34.30 Katharine says that her employer hasn’t affected how she has reported on politics throughout her career, as “I’m kind of tough to budge; I’m not very malleable”

36.00 “At The Guardian, we are very, very interested in the environment; we are very, very interested in the fate of people less well off than ourselves; we are very, very interested in whether the people we are currently detaining indefinitely in offshore detention are living or dying under our care”

37.00 What makes a good editor? “Editors that are reassuring to journalists are editors who stand in the trench with the troops, and are completely part of the journalistic mission”

38.00 Katharine also lauds the efforts of “backbenchers”, or copy editors who help with tweaks before publication: “People like Patrick Smithers, a long-time night editor for The Age in Melbourne, is one of the most brilliant backbench operators I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. That guy was unflappable under pressure”

41.00 Katharine tries to bring that idea of being in the trenches with the troops to her role as political editor at Guardian Australia: “I’ve worked for a lot of political editors in my time […] I’ve always benefited from people who are hands-on, and who have worked with my intensively at times, when I’ve needed it”

42.30 On making mistakes in journalism: “You need to correct those mistakes quickly and honestly and transparently, and move on”. Katharine recalls making a mistake about waterline data while reporting on industrial relations for The Australian Financial Review

44.30 When it comes to cultivating sources as a political reporter, Katharine says it’s important to be honest and transparent: “The best thing you can do is be trusted, so that people know that they can tell you something approximating the truth, and that you’ll report it fairly, or on some occasions, that you won’t report it, because you’ve undertaken not to”

45.30 Katharine thinks young reporters can sometimes over-complicate these relationships by wanting people to like them: “It’s just not important. People have to get to know one another on their own terms, and reach a basic operating point of trust”

46.00 “The best thing about being a long-term political reporter is that, if you stick at this for 21 years, you learn not to be afraid. You’re dealing with very powerful people; with the most powerful people in the country. That can be, when you first enter the field, quite intimidating. But the longer you do this, you learn that you will probably outlast everyone who is sitting before you in the parliament, and all of their staff, and all of their underlings”

47.00 “I think the longer you do it, the less afraid you get. And the less afraid you are, the more honest you will be as a reporter. That’s the benefit of longevity in Canberra”

48.0 Katharine first began live blogging at The Age, then brought the concept across to Guardian Australia when she started there, having been an avid reader of Andrew Sparrow’s live blog on UK politics for The Guardian

50.30 “It’s quite a thing, live blogging: it retools you as a journalist, in all kinds of ways, and you come out the other side like you’ve had the most massive grease and oil change you’ve ever had in your life”

51.00 Katharine wrote about live blogging for a 2013 Meanjin essay, ‘This Connected Life‘, where she wrote that “bathroom and coffee logistics became a significant preoccupation on a live blogging day”, which demands updates every 10 minutes

52.30 In that 2013 essay, Katharine reflected on the 24/7 media cycle, which has only become more intense in the four years since: “Journalism’s gone through this major technological disruption in my reporting lifetime. The first ten years, I was a newspaper person; the next ten years I was a digital person, and that’s just because of the intrusion of the internet”

54.00 When she wrote that essay in 2013, Katharine was more optimistic about the transformative effects of technology on journalism than she is now: “We’ve had no privacy to make this transition. We’ve had to do it in full public view, basically”

58.00 “The art of ‘live’, for those of us who practice it – and who care deeply about our profession, and who don’t want to fail our audiences – what we’re trying to do in this mode is give you new, important, quality. That’s a very, very, very tough benchmark to set yourself”

59.00 How Katharine manages to switch off from her role in journalism: “In my life, I am totally ‘on’, and I am totally ‘off’. It’s the only way to survive”

60.30 In 2016, Katharine wrote a Meanjin essay called ‘The Hair Apparent‘, which was about her 17 year-old daughter leaving home and going off to live an independent life as a student in Sydney

61.30 “It hit me hard. It hit me like a ton of bricks. I felt as though I needed to put some structure around it, in a writerly sense, because that’s how I cope with pretty much everything: writing about it, writing about chaos of any type”

62.30 “It celebrates her independence, and my very curmudgeonly attitude to it. It was good for both of us; my daughter and I both felt good about that piece, and it was a nice farewell”

64.00 Before she wrote it, Katharine asked her daughter’s permission. “She looked a bit trepidatious, and said, ‘Let’s see how we go with that’. I wrote it and gave it to her, full of anxiety […] I took it rather nervously into the bedroom, and handed it to her. She shut the door […] and then she came out and said, ‘Mum, this is amazing. You’ve gotta do it'”

66.30 Katharine’s daughter later had the strange experience of attending a social gathering in Canberra, and overhearing two adults talking about the piece: “She came home quite delighted, and retold this story to me, that she was the silent figure in the middle of this party, where nobody knew”

Photographs

The below three photographs from this interview were taken by Stuart McMillen.

The post Episode 42: Katharine Murphy (live) appeared first on Penmanship.

Since its inception in 2005, The Monthly has been one of the few Australian publications to strongly invest in longform journalism. Each month, the magazine publishes a handful of essays from some of Australia’s best writers and critics, which regularly run in excess of 5,000 words apiece. Because of this dedication to funding and promoting serious journalism that concerns the nation’s culture and politics, The Monthly has built a large and devoted base of subscribers and readers. Nick Feik has been in the editor’s chair since April 2014, after joining the magazine’s publisher, Schwartz Media, several years earlier to establish online projects which included daily email newsletters and building a home for longform video.

I met with Nick at the Schwartz Media office in Melbourne in late July, shortly after he and his team had sent the August issue off to be printed. Our conversation touches on the origins of a cover story that Nick wrote about the effects that tech giants Facebook and Google are having on the media landscape; how the choice of cover photograph or illustration can affect The Monthly‘s newsstand sales; his routine for getting away from screens in order to read first drafts without distractions; what he’s looking for when commissioning work from first-time contributors to the magazine, and how he feels about being the first person to cast his eyes across essays by great writers such as Helen Garner.

Nick Feik is the editor of The Monthly magazine. Under the auspices of The Monthly, Nick created email newsletters the Shortlist Daily and Politicoz (later Today), and was The Monthly’s first online editor. As a writer, Nick has contributed political and current affairs-related pieces to Fairfax, ABC’s The Drum, The Saturday Paper and The Monthly. Previously he worked at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) as programmer, short film coordinator and travelling film festival coordinator.

Nick Feik on Twitter: @NickFeik

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Timeline: 

2.30 Nick’s cover story for the July 2017 issue, ‘Killing Our Media‘, came about after a Senate inquiry into the effects that Facebook and Google are having on the rest of the media: “I thought it was important that we, at length, consider these kinds of issues and put a lot of the pieces together for readers”

4.00 “In terms of me writing it, I’ve been following these kinds of issues for a long time – Facebook especially. I kind of knew what I wanted us to say, so it seemed easier for me to do it myself”

5.00 This is the longest piece Nick has written for the magazine, which he says he does on an “as needs” basis: “Occasionally things drop out at the last minute, and it takes a little bit of pressure off my shoulders as an editor to know that, if push comes to shove, I’m there at the last minute if necessary”

5.30 “I’m kind of allergic to just writing for writing’s sake. I could never be a weekly columnist, or something like that”

6.00 By the time the piece went to press, it had been read over by at least five professional editors, including Chris Feik, Nick’s brother, who is editor of Quarterly Essay

6.30 Nick has “a lot of faith” in Chris as an editor, so “I think I probably let him get away with some things that maybe I wouldn’t let others [get away with]”

7.30 “It would be pretty weird for me, as an editor, to not respect the art of editing”

9.00 Nick says that the cover of The Monthly is arguably less important when compared to other magazines, because “something like three-quarters of our readers are subscribers, but it can make a difference of a couple of thousand copies, if you get the cover right versus wrong”

10.00 “Our readers are more interested in politics; they are more likely to pick up a magazine if they feel strongly about the person on the cover – but that can be a ‘hate’ as much as a ‘like'”

10.30 During his three-plus years as editor, Nick gives a couple of examples of getting the cover right, including David Marr’s 2014 essay on Tony Abbott (‘Freedom Abbott’) and Richard Cooke’s 2017 essay on alt-right politics (‘Alt-Wrong‘), both done by illustrator Neil Moore

12.30 For an issue of the magazine published in July 2016 – featuring Galarrwuy Yunupingu on the cover – 75% of the contributors were indigenous writers. “It didn’t sell that well on the [news]stands. It had a picture of Galarrwuy on the front, and he’s not greatly recognised. Even though that issue and that essay in particular are among my proudest publishing achievements in terms of magazine articles, and whole magazines, that particular issue didn’t sell particularly well, even though I thought it was so important”

14.30 For the March 2017 issue, The Monthly published a cover photograph of Donald Trump shot from the behind, with his arms aloft, to accompany a Don Watson Nation Reviewed piece  (‘American Berserk‘). “Either Morry [Schwartz, publisher] or our designer, Peter Long, had a theory that you could tell Donald Trump from any angle, because he has such a distinctive head, and hair shape, and neck. We were looking around for ways of doing a Donald Trump cover that was different from the others”

16.00 At the time of this conversation was recorded ,in late July, Nick has just finished work on the August issue a week ahead of it being on newsstands, then he’ll be straight into the next one

16.30 “I always like to have essays commissioned definitely for the next month, but for the next couple of months. Because if it’s a piece that’s 7,000 words, you really want someone to have been working on it for a couple of months, and a lot of really good freelancers are busy. You can’t just expect people to drop things and work on something for a month, when you want them to work on it”

18.30 By publishing eleven magazines per year, and three essays per issue, Nick says that gives The Monthly the space to write 33 essays about “everything that we think is important in Australia, and it has to be topical”

18.30 Nick says that The Monthly is “really the only Australian magazine that’s able to pay journalists by the word to do longform journalism… I mean, we almost are that, the only one, in terms of political and social affairs”

19.30 “An essay on the NBN, where you’re tracing it back to those moments where Kevin Rudd was reputed to have drawn the idea on a cocktail napkin and handed it to his advisers – which wasn’t the case, anyway – but for an essay that starts with a rumour like that, then traces it all the way through to the biggest infrastructure in Australia’s history […] You kind of need that length” (‘Network Error‘ by Paddy Manning, April 2017)

20.30 Nick cites Richard Denniss’s essay on the gas industry (‘Feeding The Beast‘, November 2016) and Jess Hill’s piece on power prices (‘Power Corrupts‘, July 2014) as examples of essays that couldn’t have been said in less than 5,000 words, and “had a big impact on the debate generally”

22.30 “There’s a lot of things that can’t be really be said properly in 800 to 1,000 words. By the same token, there probably aren’t as many new ideas in the media as we like to think, but when they do come around, it’s worth prioritising”

23.30 How Nick decides how long the essays in The Monthly should be: “It’s a kind of intuitive thing, really. You have to wonder about whether something’s going to be topical when the piece comes out; whether you’re adding anything new. How much value is there for us publishing this?”

25.30 When a writer’s first draft hits his inbox, Nick prints out a copy and moves to a different chair, where he sits and reads it with a pen in hand. “I try to do it when I’m not too tired […] It’s an important first read, and I find it much easier to  read it on paper”

26.30 Nick has followed this idea of going ‘offline’ for his first read since he began editing: “Like most people, I’m still struggling to get away from screens. These things really affect your attention span, even if it’s near you. For me, the act of getting up and sitting somewhere different is like sending a sign to your brain that ‘This is where you’re not distracted'”

28.00 Nick also puts noise-cancelling headphones on while sitting for that first read, and sometimes turns music on, “But only particular sorts of music actually help”, including classical music like Bach, Arvo Pärt and Erik Satie

29.30 What Nick is looking for when he sits for his first read of an essay: “I try to read it with a view to how a reader’s going to take it. I’ve trained myself to catch myself being bored. Points of confusion or boredom are the stop sign, basically”

31.00 “The first draft is very much about: how does it open? Does it have momentum? Does it kind of tick over? And is there anything here that people simply won’t understand? […] I sometimes think, ‘I wonder if my Mum would understand this?’ As an educated, intelligent general reader ”

32.30 How Nick frames his feedback to writers after reading their first draft: “I got a really good piece of advice very early on from Robert Manne […] who said, ‘Get back to writers quickly, and let them know what you think – especially if you like it, as much as if you don’t like it'”

34.00 “Almost every writer gets nervous. I’m still surprised by the kind of people who still go, ‘Oh, phew, I’m glad you like it!’ And you think, ‘God, of course I’m going to like it! How could you not think this is brilliant?’ But I know that people don’t really know, and it’s a really crucial part of the job for me”

35.00 In his feedback to writers, Nick always aims to explain his feedback with specificity. “I generally try not to get back to people with just a general sense of, ‘This part’s boring!'”

37.00 “Some writers are more fragile than others; some I wish they were more fragile. Sometimes you have to get a sense of where they think the essay’s at”

38.00 For Helen Garner’s June 2017 cover story ‘Why She Broke‘, Nick had been talking with Helen for six to nine months. “It was one I always wanted her to write, but there were complications in the sense that, I know that when she wrote [2014 book] This House Of Grief, it took her a long time to psychologically recover from [writing] that”

39.30 “The saving grace was that this was a way of writing about similar issues [to what she wrote about in This House Of Grief], but really in a completely different way. The fact that it was a mother, rather than a father, and that it wasn’t driven by hate made it easier to write about”

40.30 “Helen’s such a great writer. She writes almost perfect prose. It comes in extremely clean. It’s often just a case of looking at a few words here and there”

42.00 Nick feels privileged to be the first one to read an essay by great writers like Helen Garner: “It’s a gift”

43.00 “Any good writers knows, deep down, that if you have reasonable criticisms and objections […] then it should be fine, and it should be a mutually beneficial process”

43.30 “There’s a very, very small number of writers who think that their words are utterly perfect […] and I’m not enamoured of working in that situation where you get something and it’s like, ‘It’s take it or leave it; this is how it is'”

44.30 “The idea that you’re the perfect reader of your own work is completely absurd to me. How do you know what your biases are? That’s what an editor is for: an editor is fundamentally just a good reader”

46.00 In the front of the magazine are shorter stories for a section called The Nation Reviewed, which are “generally observational, and observing things from a perspective that others haven’t recorded”; Nick likes it to be “about something that we may not have thought about, or there’s a detail in there we hadn’t considered before, or something strange”

47.00 Penmanship host Andrew McMillen’s last contribution to The Monthly was a Nation Reviewed piece called ‘Dogs On The Inside‘ (March 2015), about programs inside Queensland prisons where inmates care for dogs and cats: “That’s a great example of an unusual perspective on something that we know happens in society all the time, but we don’t know about”

48.00 “Basically, if I feel like I’ve read it before, I won’t commission it […] After doing it [being editor] for three and a bit years, you have a strong sense of what the form is of that section. It doesn’t mean that they all read the same, but you become very quick at figuring out what’s just not right for that bit”

49.00 Nick says the idea for The Nation Reviewed was based on the Talk Of The Town section at the front of The New Yorker magazine: “Writers tell me that they really like writing those pieces, because they give you a chance to stretch out, and work every muscle”

50.30 On commissioning a pitch from a writer, Nick says he needs to “have a good sense of what it’s going to be like when it comes back. I have to really know about the writer, their style, whether it matches the thing they’re pitching,” which can make it harder for first-time contributors

51.00 Nick believes the magazine publishes one new piece from a new writer almost every issue, “which is really gratifying, and it’s nice to keep turning over new writers – but it is harder, because on the one hand, they’re writing into a new form for the first time, and we haven’t figured out what our working relationship is like”

52.00 In terms pitching, Nick says “it’s a combination of the idea; they have to demonstrate that they understand which part of the magazine it’s to be published in – so, at the appropriate length. It has to be a good idea, and they have to be able to show that they could pull it off”

52.30 Nick’s reading diet includes magazines such as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books, as well as a lot of newspapers

54.00 Nick says he probably rejects more pitches than he approves, “but we receive a lot of unsolicited pitches that we say ‘no’ to, and it’s simply because most of them just aren’t appropriate […] It doesn’t take you long to figure out that they don’t know who they’re pitching to, or that it’s just not right for us”

55.30 “We still have to produce 30,000 words a month, so there’s a lot of saying ‘yes’, as well as saying ‘no'”; the summer issue is about 40,000 to 45,000 words

56.30 Whenever he can, Nick still reads books: “It’s difficult, but I make a priority of reading novels when I get a spare few days”

57.00 Nick came to work at The Monthly via “an unusual trajectory”: he studied politics and literature at university, then got a job at the Melbourne Film Festival before starting at Schwartz Media “about eight or nine years ago” by setting up a video arm called SlowTV, which involved filming and streaming longform interviews and writers’ festival panels

58.30 When former Monthly editor John van Tiggelen left the magazine in 2014, Nick put his hat in the ring and was hired as editor. “I didn’t ever feel like it needed a huge deal of surgery. It was a very strong product, brand, magazine: it had a personality already, which was working well”

60.00 “I was cognizant of the importance of strengthening it; bolstering it, basically. Not making radical change, but incremental improvements […] I think I’ve tried to make it a diverse publication in terms of subject matter and writers”

62.00 Nick says he’s never had a five-year goal for himself; he takes the job month-by-month. “One of my tests for myself, and for the magazine, has always been: can we hold onto the best writers, the ones that we most want to work with in Australia? That to me is one of the key indicators of success for me”

63.30 The Monthly has no staff writer, so relies entirely on freelance writers, who have been paid at $1.00 per word since the magazine’s inception in 2015 T: “It’s a respectable rate, and it’s important to us that we pay properly”

64.30 In June 2017, The Monthly announced a commitment to boost its online arts and culture coverage: “It was a deliberate decision, and this is a drop in the bucket in terms of what is required for a strong culture of writing about culture in Australia. But there are fewer reviewers, there’s less space, less time devoted to writing about culture in Australian than there ever was. The newspapers are struggling to deliver anything like what they used to”

The post Episode 41: Nick Feik appeared first on Penmanship.

Since he began as a cadet journalist at The Age in 1984, fresh out of high school, Gideon’s main subject areas in journalism have been in sport and business. For most of his career, Gideon has worked as a freelancer, and his writing has been published in more than one hundred newspapers and magazines around the world. As an author, he has written 32 books to date, with at least two more underway. The breadth and depth of his body of work is simply astounding, and I’ve been an admirer of his for some time. During the last few years, my main understanding and appreciation of Gideon’s writing is through his role as senior cricket writer at The Australian, where he has become one of the most read and trusted voices in sports journalism.

In late July, I met with Gideon at his home in Melbourne’s inner-city, and was led into his writing room, which is also home to his extraordinary collection of thousands of books. Our conversation touches on why he prefers not to think too much about the structure of his books before he starts writing them; how he goes about writing daily cricket match reports for The Australian each summer; how he has managed to avoid becoming cynical about cricket, despite writing about it for decades; how he decides which writing projects to pursue as a freelancer with several sources of income; and how he found himself occupying a sort of public service role in late 2014 as the nation came to terms with the shock death of a young Australian cricketer. The conversation begins, however, with a small discussion about the purpose of this podcast.

Gideon Haigh has been a journalist for more than three decades. He has contributed to more than a hundred newspapers and magazines, published thirty-two books, and edited seven others. He has been writing about sport and business for more than 22 years. His best-known books are Mystery Spinner, The Big Ship, The Summer Game, Game for Anything: Writings On Cricket and A Fair Field and No Favour: The Ashes 2005. His 2012 book The Office: A Hardworking History won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction; On Warne was shortlisted for the Melbourne Prize for Literature; and Certain Admissions won the 2016 Ned Kelly Award for True Crime. His latest book is Stroke of Genius: Victor Trumper and the Shot that Changed Cricket. Gideon lives in Melbourne with his wife and daughter. Nobody has played more games for his cricket club – nor, perhaps, wanted to.

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Timeline: 

3.30 Gideon has been a journalist since 4 February 1984, when he joined The Age after finishing high school; he has never held any other occupation, and has been freelance since 1995 – or as he puts it, “a member of the self-unemployed”

4.30 Gideon’s writing room contains “four walls, mainly consisting of books; two windows, a door, an overburdened desk, a [Mac] Powerbook on the desktop…”

5.30 The wall behind Gideon’s chair consists entirely of cricket books; hundreds of titles on cricket alone, organised in categories devoted to humour, history, different countries, instructional books, annuals, anthologies, biographies and autobiographies in alphabetical order

8.30 “It’s a user’s library; they’re all there because I want to be able to reach for them”

10.30 Gideon’s reading diet tends to get geared toward the projects he’s involved with, but he reads “no contemporary fiction at all. It’s a terrible oversight and admission on my part, but it’s just not where my head’s at”

11.30 Gideon’s reading “is all for pleasure; it’s all completely self-indulgent, but I need to feel that when I’ve finished a book, I will be improved. Better informed. A better reader and writer, as a result”

12.30 Gideon renovated his house in Carlton in 2011, and when he put the books into storage, the removalists told him that his collection of books weighed five tons

13.30 On a Friday in late July, Gideon is writing chapter eight of a true crime book. The crime occurred in the 1920s in Melbourne; he declines to reveal further details due to superstition about the research and writing purpose

15.00 “I do like areas where I don’t know very much; where it’s new and interesting, and challenging”

15.30 After writing 32 books, Gideon says he’s become quite good at selling book proposals, and his body of work also indicates to publishers that he’s going to deliver on what he proposes

16.00 Gideon kept a journal during his late teens and early 20s, but became bored of writing about himself and has never returned to the subject

16.30 Gideon doesn’t outline the structure of his books before he starts writing them; this true crime book is based on a single-page outline, which he hasn’t looked at since his publisher approved it

18.00 Gideon says he doesn’t do much other than write books; he plays cricket, he’s a father of one and has a wife, “but there’s not a lot of time left over at the end of that”

18.30 Gideon is currently out of contract as The Australian‘s senior cricket writer, but his contract will begin in the start of October until the end of March, where he’s contracted to deliver a certain number of articles per week

19.30 Gideon wrote a feature for The Weekend Australian Inquirer in July 2017 about the long-running dispute surrounding Cricket Australia and the Australian Cricketers Association [‘A Painfully Tense Pause In The Game‘, July 2017]

21.00 “I think every story that you write has a history. Sometimes we’re impervious to that as journalists; we’re such creatures of the present, that we spend very little time trying to educate ourselves in the context of a story, or the system of relations that exist between the dramatis personae”

24.00 Gideon on the mechanics of watching and reporting on cricket Test matches in his role as senior cricket writer at The Australian

24.30 “I just sit there and watch the cricket, and move paragraphs around the screen, and around about tea time I panic and think, ‘What am I going to say about this?'”

25.30 In 2015, Gideon wrote a column for UK longform cricket publication The Nightwatchman about writing cricket columns – while staying with Mike Atherton and sitting at the same table, as Atherton wrote and filed a cricket column for The Times

27.30 “You don’t go naked and innocent into reporting a day’s cricket anymore; a lot of your judgments are influenced by other factors, and other media phenomena around you”

28.30 Why Gideon thinks the way in which cricket is presented on television is like “writing history with a one-ton pencil”

30.00 Gideon hopes that the experience of reading his daily Test match reports is “like sitting next to an interesting companion, with some kind of understanding of the before and after of cricket”

32.00 “I’ve never had any difficulty filing; I’ve always filed on time, I’ve always filed to length”

33.00 Gideon says he has no idea how he’d write a T20 match report, and he hopes he never has to find out

34.00 While reporting on the sport, Gideon is forever “looking for good cricket. I’m looking for an even contest between bat and ball. I’m looking for characters to reveal themselves”

35.00 “In the end, we are all enthusiasts for the game. We’re there, really, because we want to be”

35.30 How Gideon has managed to avoid becoming cynical about cricket, despite writing about it for decades

36.30 When Gideon left working in a newsroom in 1995, he sensed that he’d probably go back at some stage, but in the ensuing years, “my interests and the interests of large media companies have diverged to the extent that I suspect that ne’er the twain shall meet”

37.30 Gideon says it’s hard to see what else would have done with his life, other than being a journalist, because he suspects he wasn’t capable of much else

38.00 After high school, Gideon did not attend university; he preferred to move out of home and start earning a living

40.00 At his interview with the editor of The Age, Gideon was asked how he’d improve the newspaper; he said he’d get rid of the lifestyle section, “because I think that lifestyle stuff is just tedious, and meretricious”

41.30 As a cadet, Gideon did six months in the newsroom during “chores”, and “cheesy little pic stories, occasionally”

42.30 After six months, Gideon was sent to the business section, which he’d never read before; in 1986, age 20, Gideon had the opportunity to cover several important stories that he found exciting and stimulating

44.00 “Journalism is very much a young person’s game; if you had youth, vitality and naivety, and a bit of energy, you could go places quite quickly”

44.30 Stephen Bartholomeusz was the senior investment writer in the business section, and he became an early mentor of Gideon’s: “He was very generous with his technical advice; didn’t make me feel shamefully ignorant”

47.00 “Even though initially the business section looked like a hardship posting for the mathematically innumerate, it soon became an exciting, steep and stimulating learning curve”

47.30 As a cadet, Gideon was earning around $18,000 while writing about wealthy people, but never aspired to be part of the business systems he was writing about

59.30 Gideon says he’s quite a shy person, but “journalism is a tremendous license for your curiosity; you can ask questions in journalism that you can’t under any other circumstances”

50.30 Why Gideon thinks many people talk to journalists when asked: “People are attracted by the idea of a solicitous listener, because a lot of people talk in this life, and not a lot of people listen”

52.00 “Journalism is abysmally managed most of the time, because people don’t go into it to manage – they go in it to write, they go in it to tell stories”

52.30 “I haven’t encountered many great editors, I’d have to say. Perhaps fortunately, most editors have just tended to leave me alone, and let me do what I want to do”

53.30 “If an editor comes to me with an idea for a story, they’re usually pretty bad ideas, but there’s usually some sort of potential in them”

54.30 Gideon thinks readers are pretty shrewd about when a writer is phoning it in, or faking it; Gideon doesn’t like faking

55.00 Gideon’s first book, The Battle For BHP, came about after a feature he wrote for The Age about a week in the BHP takeover battle; “I really didn’t know what I was doing”

56.00 Gideon wrote at The Age office on Saturday nights, after playing cricket; he’d take in an electric skillet and a Maggi reheatable meal; he wrote 70,000 words in a few months of this routine

57.30 Gideon wasn’t really happy with the book; he remembers opening the first page, finding a typographical error in the first paragraph, and never looking at it again

58.00 Gideon wrote The Battle For BHP while simultaneously reporting the story for The Age

59.30 “There wasn’t a lot of fanfare, and it had seemed pretty straightforward, frankly. I didn’t seem like I’d scaled a mountain. It’s not like I immediately wanted to do another book, either; I just wanted to carry on being a daily journalist”

60.30 In 1989, Gideon decided he was getting “a bit stale”, and so he worked in London as a stringer for a business sections of The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald; this was where he started writing about cricket for a fanzine called Johnny Miller 96 Not Out

63.00 “I think I wrote about cricket because I was probably a bit frustrated with what I was reading about cricket. There were a few writers I liked, but a lot of stuff I didn’t really. I thought, ‘I could probably do better than that myself; I might as well have a crack'”

63.30 On returning to Australia, Gideon went back to The Age and worked as a feature writer from late 1990 through to late 1991, before being approached by Max Suitch, editor of the Independently Monthly, who asked if Gideon would be his Melbourne-based staff writer

65.30 “The irony is that the piece that stimulated [his second book] The Cricket War was for a magazine called FYI, which was a lifestyle adjunct to BRW”

67.00 “I had no reputation as a cricket writer at all. It wasn’t an insurmountable handicap”

68.00 Gideon got a book contract for The Cricket War from Text Publishing, after being rejected by 11 other publishers who showed no interest in the idea

70.00 “A lot of these players had left cricket without very much more than their memories, and hadn’t been asked about them in any great detail subsequently. But they were very generous with their time, and I think probably part of it appreciated the interest being taken in them”

71.30 “It was a good introduction to longform interviewing, management of information, and adducing a sympathetic or interested in response in your interlocutor”

72.00 The book was published when Gideon was 27; when we meet, he is working on a reprint of The Cricket War later in 2017 to be published by Bloomsbury

73.00 “Journalism’s pretty simple, frankly. A half-intelligent person can learn the principles of it in about six weeks. After that, it’s all a matter of degree and detail”

74.00 The first manuscript of The Cricket War was about 250,000 words, which he then had to cut back to 110,000 words: “I put in everything, because I was kind of fascinated by it, and it was all new to me”

75.00 “I get very excited when I do a book. I do think it’s the most interesting subject that’s ever been explored. That is a recurrent experience for me: I fall completely in love with what I’m doing, and totally lose perspective on its significance”

78.00 Gideon wrote an essay for Kill Your Darlings in 2012 about the process of writing his book The Office across three years [‘‘You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on’ Falling In and Out of Love with The Office‘]

79.30 The Office came about because Gideon had always liked novels, films and television series set in workplaces, “Yet we try to avoid the idea that [work] is who we are”

83.00 “In the end, the effort almost killed me, because you just completely lose touch with the outside world”

85.00 How Gideon judges which projects to take on, in terms of income and time required to complete a piece of writing

85.30 “I’m lucky that I have the daily journalism to subsidise the book writing […] I live pretty frugally. Books are really my only extravagance. I don’t drink, don’t drive a car, don’t smoke”

87.30 As a freelance journalist, Gideon and his family don’t tend to take holidays, because there are some luxuries they can’t afford

88.00 In 2014-2015, Gideon did his tax return, having spent 80% of his time that year writing books, and earned $14,000

88.30 “For quite a few years, The Monthly was my biggest source of income. And of course I had to kiss that goodbye in 2009. That was interesting, to kiss goodbye to your biggest source of freelance income because you weren’t comfortable with who you were working with”

89.00 In 2009, Gideon wrote for The Age about quitting The Monthly, where he detailed why he stopped freelancing for the magazine after its editor, Sally Warhaft, resigned in contentious circumstances [‘When The Media Is The Story‘, May 2009]

90.00 “I don’t regret leaving. I did what I felt I had to do. I didn’t have to do it, but I felt comfortable with it”

91.00 When Phillip Hughes was struck on the head by a cricket ball in November 2014, Gideon was sitting in his writing room in Carlton, where this interview is being conducted

93.30 “I find it unsettling even thinking about it now. I remember going into Lateline to talk to Tony Jones […] I remember sitting there, on my own, in studio, looking down the barrel of the camera, listening to the show on the earpiece, and I thought, shit, maybe I can’t do this”

95.30 Gideon’s interview with Tony Jones on 27 November 2014 ran for 12 minutes, and he fulfilled a public service-type role of helping cricket fans to try to make sense of an incomprehensible accident

97.00 “The thing that really intrigued or stimulated me in that environment was how naturally people responded to it. They didn’t need cues from the media; they didn’t need help from the administration. Things happened spontaneously, and people responded decently”

100.00 “My biggest experience of sport isn’t the watching of it or the writing about it; it’s the playing”

103.00 Gideon enjoys sport in part because so much of his work involves being sedentary, sitting at a desk

103.30 “That’s an important part of sport: self-forgetting. You can’t concentrate on anything else when you’re playing sport. I can go to training feeling burdened by the weight of the world, but by the end of training, I’ve almost forgotten what I was worrying about”

105.00 Gideon tends to see big stories in little things, “But I think there are big stories in every damn thing. There are no uninteresting stories, only uninteresting journalists”

Photographs

The below two photographs of Gideon’s library – with the wall behind his desk composed entirely of books related to cricket – were taken by Andrew McMillen following the podcast interview in July 2017. Click each photo to see a bigger version.

The post Episode 40: Gideon Haigh appeared first on Penmanship.

During her decade of writing for the national newspaper, Sarah has reported on many of the biggest news stories that have taken place in Queensland. It takes tenacity and passion to be a daily news reporter, and Sarah clearly has an abundance of both of these qualities. After extensively covering the fall-out from the closure of the Queensland Nickel refinery in late 2015, Sarah was named Journalist of the Year at the Queensland Clarion Awards for her stories that uncovered Clive Palmer’s use of the alias ‘Terry Smith’ to manage his business while also holding office as a Member of Parliament. The judges for that award in 2016 noted that Sarah’s work is “a tremendous how-to for journalists young and old, and deserves recognition”.

I met with Sarah at her home in Brisbane’s inner-north in early July to record a conversation which touches on how she manages an unpredictable workload that can vary drastically from week to week; how she handled the paranoia of ‘correspondent syndrome’ while working as The Australian‘s sole reporter based in Far North Queensland; how her two years in that role took her to a remote island in the Torres Strait, where few people will ever have the privilege of setting foot; why she has a deep and abiding passion for court reporting, which is not shared by many other journalists, and how she increases her likelihood of getting Clive Palmer to respond to her text messages during the course of reporting on the man himself.

Sarah Elks is the Queensland political reporter for The Australian. She began her career working for the newspaper at its Sydney headquarters in 2007, before moving back to her home state of Queensland. After a two-year stint in Cairns as the paper’s north Queensland correspondent, Sarah returned to Brisbane to cover general news and legal affairs, including some of the state’s highest profile criminal trials. Now, as well as state politics, Sarah reports on the continuing fallout from the $300m corporate collapse of Clive Palmer’s Queensland Nickel. In what is surely a sign of love and respect for her ongoing work, Mr Palmer recently tweeted: “Is it true or did you read it in the Australian“. Sarah’s only useful skills are catching beach worms with her bare hands and arranging cheese platters.

Sarah Elks on Twitter: @SarahElks

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Timeline: 

3.00 Sarah tends to start each workday with a clean slate: “Every day is a new day to fuck up, as one of my colleagues says”

5.30 Sarah might have to file two or three stories per day, so it’s a matter of juggling the reporting and writing them up

6.00 Sarah reported on the tragedy at Dreamworld in late 2016, where four people died, and she had been keeping an eye on the timeline of the investigation as to whether it was keeping to the intended timeline; this led to a follow-up story that was published in July 2017

7.30 The Weekend Australian has the biggest readership of the daily editions, so sometimes Sarah will aim to get a longer piece in the weekend paper, but it’s tricky because the edition is largely planned almost a week before the newspaper is printed

9.00 As Queensland political reporter, Sarah’s direct editor is is Michael McKenna, who overseas the Brisbane bureau; he’s the person that Sarah pitches ideas to each morning

10.30 When Sarah comes back from holidays, she finds that it takes her several days to remember how to be a journalist, but within a couple of weeks she is back to feeling as though there’s more stories than she can possibly cover

11.30 “It’s probably self-imposed, but I feel too guilty to just have a day where I’m not doing very much”

14.00 Sarah says the job of a daily news reporter is sometimes stressful: “Adrenaline keeps you going, and it’s sometimes difficult to switch off when you get home”

15.00 Sarah’s husband will text message her at a certain time in the evening to ask, “Do you think maybe you should leave work? Time to eat dinner!”

16.00 Sarah estimates that the job is approximately 60% reacting to news events, and 40% pursuing her own interests as a reporter

18.00 A recent story of Sarah’s, about the Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s new chief of staff, David Barbagallo, came out of a phone tip from a reader, and required some patience on the source’s part as Sarah took a few weeks to pursue the tip

20.30 Sarah lists her email address in her Twitter bio, requesting reader tips, which sometimes yields good results. However, Sarah admits: “I’m very bad at email”, as she gets more than 100 per day and most of them are “complete rubbish”

22.30 “It’s the ‘real people’ that I feel the responsibility of having to respond to […] I make that distinction as opposed to say, politicians or political staffers, or people in the media – it’s sort of okay if you sit on an email from a media advisor trying to pitch you some silly thing”

24.00 Email wasn’t such a source of stress when Sarah started at The Australian in 2007, as smartphones weren’t in wide use at that point

24.30 When Sarah was an intern at The Australian in Sydney, she was assigned a doorstop with Sophia Loren in the western suburbs of Sydney, and called her mother in the taxi on the way there to ask her to Google the Italian actress and dictate some of her biographical details, so that she wasn’t completely clueless on arrival

27.30 Sarah decided that she wanted to be a journalist at the age of 15, and she had her eye on the editor’s job at Rolling Stone magazine

28.30 Sarah had her first taste of being in a newsroom as part of her journalism studies, when she interned at the Queensland Times

29.30 Sarah remembers being excited by the vibe of that newsroom, and loving the commute from Brisbane to Ipswich, listening to the news on the radio on her way to work. “From that moment – just the news, thanks! I just want to write in newspapers!”

30.30 Sarah still finds that it’s scary and unnerving to approach people out of the blue, in person or on the phone, even though she might do it 20 times per day

33.00 “I just assume that nobody wants to talk to the media – and in a lot of cases, why would you?”

34.30 Each year, around Federal Budget time, The Australian‘s reporters are tasked with finding a series of intimate case studies to fit a particular budget story, to be published alongside a photograph

36.30 One year, Sarah was tasked with finding a middle income family with a child in child-care, and potentially a baby on the way – while living in a marginal electorate. She ended up finding a woman who worked in the AgForce office, who she interviewed and was photographed on a Sunday. “I took up three hours of their Sunday morning […] and [the story] never ran”

39.30 Sarah sent them flowers to say thank you, and sorry that the story didn’t run in the newspaper, because the editorial decision was not hers to make

41.30 Sarah studied journalism and arts at the University of Queensland, majoring in political science and Spanish; as well as the Queensland Times internship, she also interned for a week at The Courier-Mail‘s sports section

43.00 Sarah was told at university it was really hard to get a job as a journalist; you’ve got to really want it, and you’ve got to put yourself out there by working for free and getting stories published wherever possible

43.30 Sarah doesn’t think that her journalism studies equipped her for the job, but she’s not sure that any degree could prepare you for what it’s like to work in a newsroom

46.00 Sarah moved to Sydney because her then boyfriend (now husband) was working there, and thought that there would be more journalism opportunities in Sydney

47.00 Sarah got an interview for a six-week unpaid internship at The Australian, and then “basically begged for a cadetship, and thankfully, begging worked; it was right before the GFC, and after they put me and a few other people on, there was a hiring freeze”

47.30 Growing up, Sarah’s parents had three newspapers delivered every day, and she had always viewed The Australian as a “really good paper, particularly around its indigenous affairs reporting; I was prepared to go anywhere, and work in any newspaper, so to get my first job at The Australian… I was thrilled and terrified”

50.30 After a few months as a general reporter, working a lot of night shifts, The Australian‘s then editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell offered her a spot at the paper’s Queensland bureau, based in Brisbane

53.00 Sarah worked as North Queensland correspondent at The Australian from 2010 to 2012, while based in Cairns; she was the newspaper’s sole writer in that area, and her “patch” was considered to be from Gladstone in the south, out to the Northern Territory border in the west, and up to Papua New Guinea

54.00 News Corp hired office space for Sarah above a Nandos store in the main street of Cairns: “I used to smell chips all day, every day; chips are a real problem for me”

55.00 “It’s incredibly lonely and paranoia-inducing to be a correspondent; the distance was so great, and because you only talk to your bureau chief on the phone, it can be really lonely.” Before she left for Cairns, Sarah was warned about ‘correspondent syndrome’, which is when you might go several days or a week without getting a story in the paper, and being filled with self-doubt about your abilities as a reporter

56.00 “The start of that really shook my confidence a lot. I went from feeling like I knew what I was doing in Brisbane, to thinking that I had no idea what I was doing in Cairns. It took me a little while to find my feet”

57.00 Sarah found that strong picture stories had a good chance of making it into the paper, as tropical scenes played particularly well among the cold southern winter months in Sydney and Melbourne

58.30 For picture stories, Sarah would sometimes use a photographer from the Cairns Post, but also relied heavily on a freelance photographer named Brian Cassey

59.30 Sarah recalls working on a story about the wettest place in Australia, and the person who reads the rain gauge at that location; she travelled to the top of the second highest mountain in Queensland, Mount Bellenden Ker, which is only accessible via cable car

61.30 During her time as North Queensland correspondent, Sarah particularly enjoyed reporting a series of stories about the Torres Strait secession campaign, which involved travelling to Erub Island and meeting local elder George Mye

64.00 “It was a spectacular privilege to go to a place that most people will never go to, and I got to go. Obviously it was work, because I had to write a story, but I got to talk to this incredibly interesting man and his wife, and wander around this absolute paradise of an island, and I got paid to do it”

65.00 Sarah left that role in June 2012: “I loved it; I’d probably still be in Cairns if it would work in my personal life, because I made some of the best friends of my life up there, and the stories were so great. But it worked professionally and personally to come back to Brisbane”

66.30 Sarah has a deep and abiding passion for court reporting, which is not shared by many journalists, as during 2014 she was in court almost every day that year while following the Daniel Morcombe and Allison Baden-Clay murder trials

67.00 “It’s almost like theatre, because you sit in the public gallery of a courtroom, and you watch the theater of the legal system unfold in front of your eyes. Sometimes you can be sitting there for a whole day of evidence, and potentially, only five minutes in the heart of it sums up the whole day, or is the crucial part”

68.00 Sarah says there is great camaraderie among court reporters, and there’s also the challenge of sitting beside your competitors and challenging yourself to write the most beautifully written, perfectly accurate account of what happened in court the day before

69.00 The other challenge of court reporting is being able to dig through information that other people may not know about, and find exclusive stories that other reporters haven’t gotten to yet

69.30 Sarah says that some of her court reporting colleagues will do crosswords while waiting, or look at social media, but the job is “often an endurance test of your attention span, because if you miss the key moment, there’s no getting it back. You can’t go, ‘Sorry, Your Honour, what just happened there?'”

72.00 “There’s few things more terrifying than having your story discussed in court in a not-very-favourable way”

72.30 Since being appointed Queensland political reporter in September 2015, Sarah has written extensively about businessman and former politician Clive Palmer, whose company Queensland Nickel started to run into financial troubles toward the end of 2015

74.00 “He loves being in the media, and for a long time, journalists loved reporting on his antics. But things took a more serious turn when, in January 2016, the refinery company was put into voluntary administration, and a whole heap of employees were made redundant”

74.30 Sarah says that one good thing about working over the Christmas period is that there are few other reporters in the office, so she had more time to investigate what was going on with Queensland Nickel

76.00 With a colleague named Jessica Grewal, Sarah was interviewing some of the company’s ex-workers, and one of them “I bet Terry Smith signed off on that” in an offhand manner. Sarah then started to ask everyone she knew at Queensland Nickel about Terry Smith, and it emerged that this name was Clive Palmer’s alias

77.30 Clive Palmer initially denied that he used an alias, then later admitted on the record that he is Terry Smith. “Clive is a very genial character; he doesn’t answer my phone calls anymore. I mostly text him. A fellow journalist said that the key to get him to answer your texts is to put emojis in them”

79.00 “I don’t think he likes what’s being reported about him because he likes to be loved, but it’s an important story to do. His overriding feeling is that he likes being in the news; you’ve seen what he puts on Twitter, and he loves being the centre of attention”

79.30 Sarah thinks that the strange turn Clive Palmer’s social media presence has taken – “the weird poetry and the memes” – is to rehabilitate his image to be a figure of fun again. “It’s sort of a distraction to make people stop thinking about the fact that Queensland Nickel owing $300 million in debts; 800 people lost their jobs; you and I, as federal taxpayers, spent $70 million covering the redunancy entitlements of his workers […] that his company didn’t pay”

80.30 In 2016, Sarah was awarded Queensland Journalist of the Year at the Queensland Clarion Awards for excellence in the media; she did not receive a message of congratulations from Clive Palmer

82.30 In late 2016, Sarah conducted an investigation into the Queensland agriculture minister, Leanne Donaldson, with a colleague named Sarah Vogler. They received a tip that the minister wasn’t good with her finances, and might have some unpaid council rates and an undeclared mortgage; this turned out to be true, and resulted in Leanne Donaldson tendering her resignation shortly after the story was reported in The Australian

87.30 Sarah enjoys that search-and-discovery process of careful investigation. “It can be fruitless sometimes; most of the time, it’s fruitless, but when you do find something it is quite satisfying, because often it’s something that a person in a position of power or in the public eye doesn’t want you to know about”

88.30 “I think governments try to get you to do as much reactive reporting as possible; they try to do as many shiny announcements […] But often the more important story is what people don’t want you to know. The challenge for me, and other journalists in this day and age, is to try and carve out a little bit of time in our busy schedules to see if you can dig around and find out things that people don’t want you to know”

The post Episode 39: Sarah Elks appeared first on Penmanship.

His contribution to Australian music journalism during the last decade has been significant. After co-founding a magazine and website devoted to independent music named Mess+Noise, Marcus went on to work as music editor at The Vine for six years from 2008. Under his editorial guidance, this pop culture-centric website became one of the most popular and respected outlets for music writing in the country. It also provided a regular home for thoughtful, longform journalism and criticism for many freelance writers, myself included. Writing for Marcus at The Vine was an incredibly important aspect of my development as a journalist and music critic, and I have many fond memories of my time writing for the site for four years from 2010.

Since he left The Vine in 2014, Marcus has freelanced for the likes of Rolling Stone and Guardian Australia, while copywriting and working on artist bios on the side, in addition to his day job as commercial editor at Broadsheet. One evening in April, I met Marcus at a studio in Fitzroy, and our conversation touches on why he thinks suspicion is an essential character trait for music journalists; how he developed resilience as a fledgling musician who dreamed of making it in Melbourne; how he started writing songs in tandem with publishing a magazine that was a precursor to Mess+Noise; why he now finds it harder to write songs as he becomes more invested in journalism, and what happened when the drummer of Metallica read a concert review on The Vine and decided to give Marcus a call.

Marcus Teague is an editor, freelance writer, songwriter and musician based in Melbourne. He formed the band Deloris in the late 1990s, and wrote and recorded four albums until the band split in 2008. While in Deloris, he began writing about Australian music, first in the self-made, small-run zine Poolside with friend and bandmate Leigh Lambert, then as co-founder of magazine and website Mess+Noise. In 2008, Marcus was hired as full-time Music Editor for new website The Vine, a pop-culture offshoot of Fairfax Digital. Writing daily about music, it was there many of his formative experiences as a music journalist occurred: covering CMJ in New York, becoming a panelist and guest on the likes of Bigsound, triple j, and Face the Music, filing reviews for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, and being asked to tour with Metallica after the band read Marcus’s review of their live show. After leaving The Vine in 2014 Marcus freelanced, becoming a regular contributor to Rolling Stone and Guardian Australia, among others. He also began a sideline in writing copy for music industry clients and artist bios. Marcus is currently the Commercial Editor for Broadsheet, and continues to freelance as a music writer. He also writes and releases music under the solo moniker of Single Twin, as well as in the band Near Myth, whose debut album, Idiot Mystic, was released in late 2016.

Marcus Teague on Twitter: @MarcusTeague

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Timeline: 

2.30 Currently, Marcus is writing freelance music journalism, writing bios, and working at Broadsheet as their commercial editor, while “trying to still play some music”

3.30 Being commercial editor means “editing native comment for a publication; commissioning, editing, and working with a publication to make sure that everybody’s story is being told”

6.00 Marcus says that for music journalists, “it’s partly their role to elicit the kinds of things and find the stories that are outside of what the label or the publicist or the band wants you to tell – but nonetheless, it’s still a transaction that is hopefully ending in someone selling some more records”

7.30 Marcus has found that the commercial editor role still has “all the same interesting rules and challenges, and things to try and figure out that you innately have as a writer or editor”

8.30 Marcus grew up in Frankston, which is 41 kilometres minutes south-east of Melbourne’s city centre: “The kind of town that’s close enough to the city that you feel the attraction to what’s happening in ‘the big smoke’ […] but far enough away that you’re never truly part in it, so you’re always wanting for something”

10.00 As a fledgling musician, Marcus found that you have to develop resilience in order “to buy into trusting what you’re doing enough to continue doing it, even though people don’t show up to the show, or someone says you’re shit, or you get a bad review”

13.00 Marcus started writing songs with his brother about his parents, as a child; one song was titled ‘The Battle of the Parents’, featuring the lyric “Mum and Dad coming down the hall / To see who’s the best of all”

16.30 After learning drums, Marcus moved onto guitar and started writing his own lyrics, which led to “writing bad teenage poetry, essentially”

17.30 “Writing stuff, and writing songs, is a lot about making your own bubble of that experience. You get to create this little thing that you have ownership over; you get to fill out, arrange and decorate that bubble”

18.30 Marcus stayed in Frankston until the age of about 21, when he moved up to Melbourne. “By then, the band that I had, Deloris, were playing pretty regularly up here, and we had a couple of records out, so it felt like a natural inclination to get up here”

20.00 Marcus studied Fine Art at university in Melbourne for three years before he moved here, which required a daily train ride; then studied design in Frankston before doing a professional writing and editing course

20.30 Around this time, Marcus and a friend started a zine called Poolside, which was “a collection of dumb ideas, thoughts and emotional stories that we’d written, or asking some friends in bands to contribute some lyrics”; it lasted three issues

23.00 Marcus also worked part-time at a Liquorland bottle shop in Frankston, then later got offered a design job in Melbourne for a marketing services company named Sensis

29.00 Later, Marcus was interviewed by Danny Bos, who ran an Australian music website called Mono; the pair became good friends

30.30 “Growing up in Frankston, it took me a while to realise that the band on the cover [of street press] wasn’t there because they’re good. They’re there because someone is paying for it”

33.30 In 2005, Marcus and Danny Bos decided to start a bimonthly print publication called Mess+Noise, where they could put whichever bands they liked on the cover

37.30 Marcus described the monthly magazine as being “about interesting, local, independent music – and it’s free, so just take it”

39.00 Pre-Facebook, the Mess+Noise discussion forum became “a community unto itself, of lovers and haters, and people interested in the Australian music scene and beyond”

40.30 After leaving Sensis, Marcus found a job working at a call centre as a mystery shopper; “an interesting experience, and pretty soul-destroying”

42.30 One day, Marcus got a phone call saying “Hey, do you want to talk to us about being our music editor at The Vine?”, before the website had been launched in 2008

44.00 Marcus was the first person hired after editor-in-chief Annie Fox, and “kind of fell into it; I never considered that being a music editor was a job that you could do”

46.30 Marcus was given free reign to pay freelance music writers for The Vine based on his past experiences with Mess+Noise and while touring with Deloris around Australia

48.00 The Vine was partly funded by Fairfax Media and Lifelounge, and it was designed as a place to discuss and analyse youth and pop culture for people who didn’t buy newspapers, but were interested in fashion, music and entertainment

50.00 Marcus’s job was to publish four music stories per day, about anything he wanted, while trying to meet traffic targets across the whole website

51.30 “We were in that great window where we still got to be an authority on stuff, and trying to convince people, without them coming back and saying, ‘I’ve already heard that on YouTube and it sucks, and you don’t know what you’re talking about'”

52.00 With live reviews on The Vine, Marcus was motivated to try to capture a moment in time, and to document history: “To try and put a stake in time, that this little blip happened”

52.30 One memorable live review on The Vine was Marcus’s review of the final song performed at The Tote in Melbourne in 2010 (The Drones covering ‘My Pal’ by GOD), which shows Marcus taking that role as a documentarian seriously

53.30 “One thing being a music editor affords you is that you read a lot of music writing, so you get past all the stuff that reviews usually talk about pretty quickly. You’re so flooded with reviews or writing that you realise the only way to survive is to do it differently”

54.00 With his review of the final song performed at The Tote, Marcus wanted to talk about the moment and its significance, and to use his words “to put someone in that spot, because that’s going to be far more powerful than just listing a bunch of stuff that happened, or explaining the circumstances around it”

55.30 Another example of capturing a moment was Marcus’s review of a Bluesfest sideshow by Modest Mouse in 2016, where he noticed a spider descending from a very high ceiling

56.30 In 2010, Marcus wrote a review for The Vine of the first show of Metallica’s Australian tour. He wasn’t a big fan of the band, but was taken in by the spectacle of the event when he sat down to document it afterwards

60.00 A couple of days after the review was published, Marcus got a call from Lars Ulrich, Metallica’s drummer, who said he’d read Marcus’s review and found it interesting. Lars asked if Marcus wanted to come on tour with Metallica for the last week of its Australian tour for the band’s fan club magazine; Marcus said yes

62.30 On this assignment, Marcus decided not to ask about Metallica; “Just be a dude that is backstage, like anyone else. Don’t fan out. I wasn’t a fan, so that helped”

63.30 One night at rehearsal, singer/guitarist James Hetfield was late, so Lars asked if Marcus knew how to play ‘The Outlaw Torn’ on guitar; to his crushing dismay, he did not

64.30 Marcus’s article was published in So What, the Metallica fan club magazine, and ran to about 5,500 words. [He later published it on The Vine in two parts under the title ‘My Week With Metallica’; you can read the whole story as a PDF download here]

66.30 What Marcus thinks about web publishing, and how the value of web content is valued largely through the number of clicks each article receives

69.00 Marcus brought an open-minded ethos to The Vine‘s music journalism, where he and his writers could “try to make everything interesting”

70.00 In 2014, Marcus’s whole identity was wrapped up in The Vine, and when the site was being sold, he was offered the chance to stay within Fairfax Media or take a redundancy payout; he chose the latter

70.30 Around the same time, Marcus was asked to write for Rolling Stone, which is part of the reason why he left the full-time role and chose to become a freelance journalist

72.00 At The Vine, “we were lucky that we didn’t dictate what people could cover. If you wanted to email [pitch] and write about something, and we figured out that you could write about it, you could generally write about it”

72.30 “It’s fun to take that stuff seriously, as well. It’s fun to have a really long email argument about what you’re actually saying at the end of this Tool review. That is a fun way to spend your day”

73.30 At The Vine, Marcus started publishing a music writer named Tim Byron, who pitched a column called ‘Number Ones’, where he used music theory and history to analyse each #1 song on the ARIA single charts (link to ‘Number Ones’ archive on Junkee, where it was published after The Vine closed)

74.30 “That was one of the funnest things to work at. [Tim and I] had a lot of arguments behind the scenes, and that’s a fun thing as well; spending a large part of your day tussling over the second verse in Christina Aguilera’s new, shit pop song”

75.30 One example of Marcus taking an email conversation to publication was his review of the cancelled Harvest Festival in Melbourne

77.00 “That became the fun of a lot of that stuff; you could start to do surreal galleries of stuff, poking fun at online culture before Clickhole took off”

78.30 It took Marcus a while to adapt to becoming freelance, and “not having free reign over stupid ideas”

79.30 “I’ve been lucky that I’ve never really pitched anything; people just ask me to do stuff”

80.00 Marcus has also taken some “weird copywriting jobs” like writing surreal reviews of customers for hotels, called ‘Reverse Reviews‘

81.00 In his work, Marcus gets the biggest kick out of writing about the surreal, and “trying to make the surreal real”

82.00 Marcus has enjoyed writing longform artists profiles for Rolling Stone, including A.B. Original and Violent Soho, and he tends not to outline the articles before he starts writing them, preferring instead to start writing and trust his instincts

84.00 One skill that Marcus learned from The Vine was that, as music editor, he was the backup interviewer. On a few occasions, he was called out of the blue to interview people he had no idea about, such as George Pettit from Alexisonfire, a band which Marcus knew nothing about

86.30 “I had this whole interesting conversation because he didn’t get asked any of the usual questions – because I didn’t actually know any of the usual questions! So to him it was fascinating, I think, because I got to talk to him like a regular dude”

88.30 Marcus has found that, the more he’s gotten into journalism, the harder it is to write songs, because it seems a lot of his brain space is taken up by working on non-fiction writing or editing

90.30 “I find when I’m trying really hard to keep my eyes open before falling asleep, that’s usually the best time to write some stuff for songs. That bit where you can’t really think all that rationally anymore, and there’s almost a weird, subconscious poetry to your messy brain, or something, and your filters are down a bit”

92.00 Marcus recently found a fan-made music video for a Single Twin song that he wrote, ‘Came Home Dead’, where the fan literally acts out many of the lyrics; Marcus has considered writing about the strangeness of this entire situation

96.30 “Music journalism [today] certainly doesn’t affect peoples’ lives in the way that it traditionally has, for a long period of time”

97.00 Marcus finds that, as a former music editor, it’s hard to take edits from his own editors

99.30 “Music journalism has almost become the hobby that’s attached to you trying to write and edit, and exist in other parts of the industry that actually pay you – which is maybe not a bad thing”

101.30 “Maybe the up-cycle will be that people do start getting interested in it [again]. People will come out of Dune Rats show after being a fan for ten years and think, ‘What did it all mean?'”

102.00 Marcus believes that bio writing is a “privileged position, because the artist doesn’t yet know how to talk about their music, or their album that they’re about to talk about”; he compares his role to that of a therapist

103.00 “Bios are interesting in that you’re setting the template for what they then have to talk about for the next few years”

103.30 In that moment, artists can be fragile and unsure about the work, and Marcus enjoys sometimes helping them to discover what their art is actually about

104.30 Bios are often ghostwritten, meaning that the writer’s name is not attributed as a byline on the final work

106.00 “You’re at the service of what they’re trying to do. And maybe it’s a challenge as well: ‘Here’s all this interesting stuff; take out the interesting stuff, and make it interesting!'”

107.00 Marcus transcribes most of his own interviews, having found that paying someone else to transcribe them loses some of the meaning and nuance of the conversation

108.00 “Who am I to be able to take this person’s album, or years that they’ve put into this thing, give my version of it and give it back, and they go, ‘Yep, that’s what it’s about! That’s what I want to say!'”

The post Episode 38: Marcus Teague appeared first on Penmanship.

When it comes to the art of writing magazine feature stories, Richard is among Australia’s masters of the form. He has been writing magazine-length articles for more than two decades, and has won a couple of Walkley Awards along the way. His subject matter and profiles are diverse, which he admits is part of the job description when writing for a general interest publication like The Weekend Australian Magazine, where he has been a staff writer since 2006. He has also written two books about vastly different topics, which we explore in some detail in this episode.

I have a close relationship with Richard. Soon after we met for the first time at an investigative journalism conference in 2011, I asked if he would be my mentor. During those six years, his advice has been enormously helpful as I learned how to pitch, structure and write magazine features under his guidance. For the first few years, I would send him drafts of my work before filing to my editors, and his feedback always improved my writing. Richard has been one of the most significant influences in my career as a freelance journalist, and I feel incredibly lucky to have had such a generous and wise ally in my corner. We don’t discuss his mentorship during this episode, but I think it’s important to note here at the beginning.

In March, I visited Richard at his home in Sydney, and our conversation touches on how he comes up with ideas for magazine stories while juggling his own interests and his editor’s suggestions; how an editor at The Age pushed Richard out of his comfort zone as a young journalist, in order to improve his reporting and writing; how he worked as a freelance writer based in New York City for seven years; how he co-wrote a book about a German warship whose mission was to create panic among the Australian public during World War I; and how he became interested in writing about controversial subjects such as repressed memory, and more recently, the deception of public figures such as cancer hoaxer Belle Gibson.

Richard Guilliatt started his journalistic career in 1978 as a cadet reporter on The Truth newspaper, where he excelled at stories about disgraced pop stars and misbehaving headmasters. From 1980-86 he worked at The Australian and The Age newspapers, initially as a news reporter and then as a feature writer and section-editor. In 1986, he moved to New York and freelanced for seven years, writing features for newspapers and magazines including The Sunday Times Magazine, The Independent, New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. In 1993, he returned to Australia and joined The Sydney Morning Herald as a feature writer, primarily at Good Weekend magazine. Since 2006, he has been a staff writer at The Weekend Australian Magazine. In 2000, he won the Walkley Award for Best Magazine Feature, for a story in Good Weekend about the Stolen Generations debate. In 2004, his profile of David Gulpilil was included in The Best Australian Profiles (Black Inc). In 2012, his feature on concussion in sports won the Walkley Award for Sports Journalism, and he was shortlisted for Scoop Of The Year in the 2015 Walkley Awards for a series of stories in The Australian which exposed the cancer hoaxer Belle Gibson. Richard is the author of Talk Of The Devil (Text, 1996), a book about the ‘repressed memory’ phenomenon. He is co-author (with Peter Hohnen) of The Wolf (Heinemann, 2009), a work of historical non-fiction which won the Mountbatten Maritime Award in Britain and was shortlisted in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards.

Richard Guilliatt on Twitter: @RMGuilliatt

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Timeline: 

3.30 When we meet in March, Richard is working on “quite a complicated investigative piece about a criminal case”, which he is hoping to finish with a couple of weeks [NOTE: this story, titled ‘The Unbelievers‘, was published in July 2017]

4.30 Richard first read about this case in September 2016, then discussed it with his editor Christine Middap, and has been working on it on-and-off since then; about six months in total

5.30 “It’s the sort of thing that’s difficult to do unless you’re on you’re actually on staff somewhere, at a place like The Australian”

6.00 Richard wrote a feature in 2016 about a mining company in Queensland who used a technology where the underground coal seams are ignited, and the gas is tapped (‘Burning Questions‘, June 2016)

7.00 In that story, Richard wrote about Linc Energy’s process called underground coal gasification (UCG), which had previously only been used in the Soviet Union; “It’s now been described by the Queensland Government as one of the worst environment disasters in the state’s history”

8.30 How Richard comes across ideas for magazine stories, while writing across a wide breadth of subject matters: “I’m pretty open, and I think if you work for a general interest magazine […] It’s part of the job description, that you must be prepared to do a pretty wide variety of stories”

9.30 Richard particularly dislikes interviewing actors, or as he describes it, “people who pretend to be someone interesting”

10.30 Richard loved reading old-school New York journalists like Jimmy Breslin, who wrote columns where they interviewed “some ordinary schmo on the street, and capture their story”

12.00 Richard’s wife would say that he doesn’t have any coping strategies for fallow periods, where he struggles to find ideas for stories

13.00 One of Richard’s colleagues reckons that working for a magazine is “like an inverse version of having your period; there’s three or four pleasant days, and the rest are just hell”

14.00 About half of Richard’s work is based on stories he has pitched, while the other half are suggested by his editor

14.30 Richard was born in England but his family moved to Melbourne when he was eight years old; English was his best subject at school, and he was a voracious reader of novels, though not newspapers

16.00 Richard was a student of the British music magazines such as NME during the 1970s, a period he regards as the golden age of music journalism

17.00 Richard began writing for Rock Australia Magazine (RAM) as a teenager, under editor Anthony O’Grady, reviewing albums and interviewing bands

18.00 Richard then got a job on tabloid newspaper The Truth as an ‘office boy’ in 1979; he then became a cadet reporter on The Australian‘s Melbourne bureau, and later, a “D-grade reporter” before talking his way into a job at The Age

20.30 Richard went straight from high school to news reporting, and during his cadetship, Richard was trained in the likes of the shorthand writing method

22.00 He continued freelance music writing during this time, including features, but he remembers feeling “completely at sea” when he first tried to write a non-music feature for The Age

23.00 One of the most influential editors in Richard’s career was Russell Skelton, then features editor at The Age, who pushed Richard out his comfort zone and “assigned me to do stuff that I really felt I was incapable of doing; it scared the shit out of me”

24.00 “He was really encouraging. He said to me, ‘Listen, you can do this. You can pull this off.’ He gave me good, constructive feedback on writing, and he seemed to know how to push me outside of my comfort zone, just far enough that I would come out of it feeling like I’d really pulled something off”

25.30 Richard had ambitions, because after a few years as a feature writer on The Age, he and his partner decided to go overseas in 1986 to see how he could handle working in a bigger market

27.00 Richard’s partner Susan was a chef, so she had a stable income while he worked as a freelance writer

28.00 Richard was a student of the ‘New Journalism’ movement in American journalism in the 1970s, which blew apart the rigid, conventional structure of a story; “They used novelistic techniques and narratives that you just had to go with [as a reader], to find out what was going on”

30.30 On arriving in New York, Richard had a retainer to write about Wall Street for The Times On Sunday – “A subject I knew nothing about” – for $100 per week, as well some freelance work for Australian newspapers

31.30 Richard got a break with the Australian owner of Time Out London, who offered him the chance to be a regular correspondent for that publication from New York City, writing about music, film and popular authors

34.00 “There’s endless stories in America; it’s an embarrassment of riches, really […] But to get into magazines in America, that was a real hustle. There were great journalists everywhere”

35.00 Richard did some work for American magazines and papers, like The Washington Post, The New York Times and The L.A. Times, “but I never really cracked that New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic – that lofty, upper sphere of the whole thing”

36.30 Richard’s partner got a job working in a popular bistro; “We had a great time in New York, and we had a comfortable life there, which was surprising – until the end, when the recession hit, and a lot of mags closed”

38.00 “I remember that period as being exciting, although the celebrity stuff did start to become a grind. You’d go to these junkets in Hollywood where you’re one of ten journalists sitting around a table, listening to Winona Ryder crap on about her latest psychodrama”

39.00 Richard has a tragic story about a book idea that never came to fruition, after he and his partner returned to Australia in 1993, which came out of the last story he did for The Sunday Times Magazine before leaving New York

40.30 Richard’s profile of Leonard Cohen ran in the magazine after they returned to Sydney. “I’d been home about a week, and Bloomsbury called from London, wanting me to commission me to do a book about Leonard Cohen – which is something I would have killed to have done, quite frankly!”

41.30 Richard had taken a job working for The Age again, and in the end had to say he couldn’t do it – “which just killed me, actually. I hadn’t written a book, and I knew that a biography of Leonard Cohen would be a great first book, published around the world”

43.00 Richard then moved to The Sydney Morning Herald, where he became a news reporter and then a feature writer, which is how he started reporting about repressed memory and became the subject matter of his first book, Talk Of The Devil, published by Text in 1996

45.00 “I poured all of that into Talk Of The Devil, which sold by the dozens […] The subject matter is very dark, and nearly every woman I’ve known who’s tried to read that book has found it really difficult to get through”

46.00 “I’m pretty proud of it. It was also an investigative work, because I was looking at how these ideas spread. It was really about a kind of contagious hysteria, really […] Because all these people who work in sexual assault counselling really believed that there were these satanic cults everywhere”

48.30 For Richard, this was one of those topics where objectivity became difficult, “because I became convinced that it was a really big problem – you just couldn’t have people being prosecuted in court, and potentially sentenced to years in prison, on the basis of a psychiatric memory recovery technique that was really dubious”

49.00 After writing on this subject, Richard became a “widely disliked figure” in the field of sexual assault counselling; “I was seen as a guy who was sympathising with pedophiles, and I was in fact accused of being a pedophile myself”

50.00 While working at The Sydney Morning Herald, Richard wanted to pursue that story to the exclusion of everything else, because he was fascinated by how objective medical and legal professionals had gotten caught up in what he considered to be hysteria

51.00 In about 1998, Richard then got a job writing for Good Weekend, under editor Fenella Souter, which had him doing longer magazine stories about a wide range of subjects

52.00 One of the things that Richard finds most difficult about his current job at The Weekend Australian Magazine is trying to fit a complex story into a maximum of 4,000 words

53.00 “There’s this necessity with what I do: you’ve got to somehow hit the reader at the beginning with ‘This is what the story’s about’, so you do get into a bit of a formula, which I’m very aware of”

54.00 Fenella Souter was “really someone who knew writing”, and would go through her writer’s pieces line-by-line, which is rare in newspaper publishing

54.30 Richard believes that a good magazine story editor needs to be able to recognise and suggest good ideas; they also need patience, because some of these stories can take a long time

57.30 “Most [news reporters] would love some extra time; they’re just churning stuff out every day. I sit next to a guy, Will Glasgow, who writes a business gossip column every day. I’d be dead by the end of the week!”

59.00 Richard was at Good Weekend for about seven years, and his most memorable story was profiling indigenous Australian actor David Gulpilil in 2002. The actor lived on a remote community in Arnhem Land, northern Australia, and took Richard on a night-time crocodile hunting trip

65.00 “It was the most incredible assignment I’ve ever been on, quite frankly […] I came back from that job and wrote that story in about two days flat. I sat down and it just poured out of me” (‘The Double Life of David Gulpilil‘, December 2002; also republished in the 2004 Black Inc collection The Best Australian Profiles, edited by Matthew Ricketson)

65.30 Richard doesn’t have a digital copy of this story. He recently contacted Fairfax Media, who told him that they got rid of all the electronic copies of old issues of Good Weekend

67.00 Richard’s agent put him onto the story of The Wolf, which was a German warship in World War I whose mission was to come to Australia and create havoc and panic among the citizenry

68.00 “[The Wolf] was at sea for sixteen months, and it never pulled into a port to refuel. It was a coal-fired ship; it simply attacked other ships and stole their coal”

69.30 Much of the research for the book The Wolf was done by a lawyer named Peter Hohnen, Richard’s co-author, whose great-uncle was a prisoner on the warship

71.00 The book was published in 2009, and it sold about 26,000 copies in Australia, which Richard says surprised the publisher; the book has yet to be published in Germany

72.00 “I’ve been scratching around for another historical topic ever since then, but I haven’t been able to find one. The problem with non-fiction writing in Australia is that the advances are very low, and if your subject matter isn’t sellable overseas, then […] spending three years on a book is not possible unless you’ve got some other source of income”

73.00 The Wolf took Richard three years to write; the proposal was 95 pages long, and consisted of a condensed version of the book which took Richard about a year to put together, off and on

75.00 Richard discovered Trove, the National Library’s digitised newspaper archive, while researching The Wolf, which was enormously helpful

76.00 Richard was part-time at The Weekend Australian Magazine for the first four or five years as a staff writer, which was helpful when he was working on the book

77.00 In 2009, Richard profiled Wikileaks founder Julian Assange for The Weekend Australian Magazine, which was the first significant profile of the man (‘Searching For Assange‘, May 2009)

81.30 “I wrote this profile, and I was really pleased with myself. It had been quite difficult to penetrate this veil that he put around himself. I handed the story in, and my editor [at the time] said, ‘No-one’s ever heard of this guy – I don’t think we’ll put him on the cover'”

84.00 In 2015, Richard became interested in writing about a young woman named Belle Gibson, after previously writing about people with cancer who are drawn to dubious alternative treatments (‘Holding Out For A Miracle‘, September 2012)

86.30 “I went in to my editor and said, ‘There’s something way wrong about this story.’ […] If it’s not true, how is that she’s managed to con all these people in the media? It was one of those weird stories”

88.00 Like many journalists, Richard has learned to love the Wayback Machine on archive.org, which was invaluable while researching the Belle Gibson story (‘A Healthy Dose of Scepticism About Belle Gibson‘, March 2015)

89.00 Meeting Belle Gibson in Melbourne was one of the strangest interviews Richard has ever done: “She was telling me all these things about these various cancers […] And she started to become querulous and teary, and halting said to me that she might not have these other cancers after all, and that she’d been misdiagnosed by a doctor”

92.00 The Weekend Australian Magazine published Richard’s story in April 2015, where he wrote that Belle Gibson admitted that her claims were dubious, and that she had a history of “making apparently improbable medical claims”, as well as lying about her age

92.30 “We broke the story that she was a fake, and she completely went to ground. It was one of those stories where I wasn’t one hundred per cent certain that she wasn’t ill in some way, so there was a certain amount of nervousness about the story”

93.30 “I did certainly the see the link with the repressed stuff I’d done 20 years earlier, and I realised over time that the whole thing of people’s self-deception is a topic that I find really fascinating”

94.30 Richard is fascinated by writing about the idea of memory: how people create stories about themselves while fooling others, and perhaps fooling themselves

The post Episode 37: Richard Guilliatt appeared first on Penmanship.

John died suddenly on Sunday, 9 April 2017, aged 68. I had spoken to him a few days beforehand, and we had made plans to record a conversation for this podcast while I was visiting Melbourne that weekend. Since that cannot happen, I am bringing you a special episode based on a day that I spent with John in November 2014, when I was reporting a story for The Weekend Australian Review about the creative process behind Clarke & Dawe, the weekly political satire program that John wrote and performed alongside longtime collaborator Bryan Dawe. As I wrote in my article, Clarke & Dawe was more often than not among the week’s sharpest commentary on up-to-the-minute matters relating to Australian politics and public life. Together, the two performers sought to make us laugh while also making us think.

This was a dream assignment for me, as it involved spending a day in John’s company as he wrote a couple of scripts, met with Bryan to film the program at an ABC television studio, and supervised the final edits of a two-and-a-half minute program that would be broadcast around Australia the following evening. In between these tasks, there was plenty of time for conversation; at no point did John seem rushed, and he had a kind word and a wry joke for everyone he crossed paths with. This episode consists of excerpts from some of the writing-related discussions he and I had that day, as well as a few amusing asides. I’d also encourage you to read my article for The Weekend Australian Review, which is called ‘In The Line of Political Satire’. I put a lot of effort into the writing and rhythm of this piece because I knew John would read it, and that man rarely wasted a word.

Our first conversation that day took place in a Fitzroy cafe on Wednesday, 12 November 2014. My recording device was a small digital recorder placed on the table between us, or held in my hand as I wrote in my notebook while on the move. The audio wasn’t captured with this podcast in mind, as Penmanship did not exist at the time. The recording at this first location has the most ambient noise, so you’ll hear a bit of the coffee machine in action, as well as some other voices in the background. Please bear with me, as the audio quality does improve throughout this episode, as we move to quieter locations. There is about 20 minutes of audio in this cafe section, cut into four segments. Some of the cuts are quite abrupt, but I’ll briefly introduce each section to give some context throughout the episode.

CLARKE, John, Dip Lid, PhD in Cattle (Oxen). Advisor and comforter to various governments. Born 1948. Educ. subsequently. Travelled extensively throughout Holy Lands, then left New Zealand for Europe. Stationed in London 1971-73. Escaped (decorated). Rejoined unit. Arrived Australia 1977. Held positions with ABC radio (Sckd), ABC Television (Dfnct), Various newspapers (Dcd), and Aust Film Industry (Fkd). Currently a freelance expert specialising in matters of a general character. Recreations: Whistling. Address: C/– the people next door. Or just pop it inside the door of the fusebox. Should be back Friday. Died 2017.

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Timeline: 

3.30 This first excerpt sees John discussing the weekly format of Clarke & Dawe, and how he liked to sometimes break it up by latching onto current events.

3.30 “One of things about doing that once a week is that, if you’re given the opportunity to shift the form slightly, you do, because the opportunities aren’t always there to do that. So if we can get a different metaphor, or another way of dealing with it, which happens whenever there’s a big other event, like the Olympics, then you can infuse it with the same concerns that the audience and us are looking at. Then you’re not condemned to exactly the same model each week. Now and again, you jump out of that model.”

5.00 The next excerpt discusses John’s views on the audience for Clarke & Dawe, as well as how he has developed his instincts as a writer by attempting to amuse himself first.

5.30 “I’m in the audience for our stuff. I mean, if I’m thinking about what might work, I’m not thinking about what might amuse you. I’m thinking about what might amuse me. I’m thinking about pitching it so that I would get it, because a lot of this is instinctive. You need to understand the instinct, and keep in touch with it. If you start trying to please someone who isn’t you, and you do something that doesn’t work, you can go, ‘That’s just what I do for a living’.”

7.30 John says his thinking on this matter has been the same since he was a child

9.30 “The audience part of me is a key instinct. How else are you going to assess what you’re doing?”

10.00 This excerpt discusses the rhythm of the dialogue that powered Clarke & Dawe, as well how John attempted to draw viewers in by writing marginal iterations on a familiar format.

10.00 “I would think that the same things apply in normal conversations as apply in what we do. There’s very similar mechanisms. We pick a form that’s designed to contain all of that. There are lots of times in your life where you’re engaged in dialogue.”

13.00 “Quite a lot of it is to just with the fact that, in our talk […] there are things that make it enjoyable. One of them is rhythm, for example. Sometimes we’ll shoot the same interview twice, and that one’s much funnier than that one. The words are the same, but it’s the rhythm.”

14.00 “It’s not exactly ‘jokes’. There are jokes. We’ll put a joke in there if we know one – old army gags, and anything that amuses us.”

15.00 John says that the speaking style on Clarke & Dawe is kind of like the verbal equivalent of handwriting, or something. If you don’t do that, then I think people don’t need to listen to you quite so carefully. We’re trying to draw people in a bit.”

15.30 This next excerpt is the last one in the cafe, and the longest recording from that location. Here, John discusses the origins of the Q+A format of Clarke & Dawe, which started as a newspaper column and then became a radio segment, before it became a television program. Through it all, John made no attempt to impersonate the appearance or voice of politicians and public figures, and here we discuss why he chose that approach.

16.00 “I like our audience. Our audience is a very good audience […] because you can do stuff that’s so small, and a lot of it is to do with reading the way we behave.”

16.30 “The business of pretending to be someone else is an interesting one, because I’m pretending to be someone else, but I’m not pretending to be them. That’s an interesting idea.”

17.00 “The democratic ideal is that each of us has the capability to do that thing. Part of the idea of a democracy is that those people [public figures] are us. It’s not absolute nonsense. It’s a bit surreal, but at a deep level, it ain’t too far from at least the comforting notion that that is the case.”

18.00 John says the idea of not dressing up or changing his voice “started from the fact that, when I first started the idea, I wrote it as a newspaper column. What I was trying to do was adopt the form. The first one that was published in the newspaper was an interview with Joh Bjelke-Petersen, the lapsed New Zealander who was running the state you come from [Queensland], with a huge gerrymander and a few designs which emerged later.”

19.00 “He was being completely silly. He said he was going to have a run at Canberra, and he wasn’t even in the country. He said things that were manifestly ridiculous all the time. I thought, the problem with this is that when you see an interview with him, he’s treated seriously. What would it be like if we treated him in a different way? So I did the standard interview that people do with a comic. The first question was: ‘Joh Bjelke-Petersen, when did you first discover you could make people laugh? Was it a schoolyard thing? Was it sort of defensive, basically?’”

21.00 John later shifted the newspaper Q+A column idea to ABC Radio, which is how he met Bryan Dawe

21.30 “We did a few on radio to tease out the idea, and to work out how the fun could be in the writing and the performance. So it’s not just either of those, it’s both.”

22.00 The idea then moved to television when John was approached by Channel 9, where the dialogue format first aired on A Current Affair, which coincided with Australian politicians starting to realise that they couldn’t afford to not talk to the public through the television, to seed their messages into the electorate

23.30 “There was beginning to be a quite performative element about what they [politicians] were doing in their public manifestation. Therefore, it’s nice counterbalance if we remove anything performative, including even the appearance and sound of the person. We not only don’t do impressions; we’re almost monotonous, so it’s up to you.”

24.00 The next few excerpts were recorded in John’s office in Fitzroy, which was a short walk from the cafe. This office consisted of two rooms: a large one surrounded by floor-to-ceiling shelves that included personal archives and storage, as well as DVDs, CDs and books that were sold through his website, mrjohnclarke.com. The second, smaller room featured a desk, a chair, a laptop computer and a phone. This second room is where John wrote two Clarke & Dawe scripts from scratch, in a couple of hours, occasionally interrupted by phone calls that he placed to reporter friends so that he might better understand something that was in the news at the time. (See the bottom of this page for a photo of John working at his desk.)

25.00 “When the European economics collapsed, we did a thing that got very popular about that. I was sitting here thinking, an amusing aspect of this terrible shambles in the European economies what they each owned billions, but they owed them to each other. And that sooner or later, there was going to have to be someone who had some money. It was a carousel of mutual indebtedness. I thought, that’s a funny idea if I can get it right. I looked on the internet […] and then I found in The New York Times a graph which perfectly represented with arrows even I could understand what each country owed to the other country!”

26.00 After that episode (‘European Debt Crisis‘, 20 May 2010) appeared on Australian TV and published online, it was mentioned by an editor at The New York Times as a perfect representation of the problem

27.00 “People were looking around at the time, and I thought what they’d done was a perfect at-a-glance exposition. But then he’d forgotten he was the chicken, we were the egg!”

27.30 This next section is a short snippet recorded just before we walked across the road for lunch – toasted sandwiches and coffee.

27.30 John says he is not fussy about which writing software he uses. “I think that computer uses mainly Word. I think in this computer I use something that’s in the Mac system. I just open it up and type. It’s a typewriter. It has no other influence. I don’t have other devices that plug into it, and I don’t have any great desire.”

28.00 This next excerpt was recorded after John had finished writing the two scripts, and before we headed to the ABC studio at Southbank to film. Here, John reflects on narratives and storytelling, as well an unrelated snippet about the glasses he was wearing while writing that day.

28.30 John mentions a school friend who has become a ‘narrative therapist’: “I said, ‘what’s that?’ Well, it’s something to do with some strand of psychology. He said, ‘in a nutshell, what I do is, people come to me with some sort of psychological problem which is affecting their life sufficient for them to get pissed off and worried, or forced with a cattle prod by people they know to come and do something about it. They come and see me, and I get them to tell me the story of their life, and I help them edit it’.”

33.00 “You get to an age where you need reading glasses. This happens to everybody. So you go along to a person who looks at your eyes and says, ‘Yes, yes, yes, very interesting. Here’s a prescription for these glasses.’ Basically what he’s saying to you is, ‘You’re in your 50s, aren’t you?'”

34.00 This next bit is the final section recorded in John’s office, and it’s about how much he enjoyed the simple act of writing in order to better understand the world around him.

34.00 John has all of his scripts on file, either on paper or on a computer.

34.30 “I think one of the reasons I like writing is that I like handwriting. It’s like walking. It feels good. […] My handwriting used to be halfway decent. Even if my handwriting’s no good, I physically liked the fact that you could set down an idea. I still like this about writing in a different form. I physically like writing an idea I’ve had, and writing an idea I haven’t had, which emerges because you’re writing. They’re both good. Don’t you think?”

36.00 This next excerpt was recorded in a dressing room at ABC’s Southbank studio, after John and Bryan Dawe had finished filming several takes of both scripts. This was the same room where I had the privilege of watching the pair of them rehearse their lines. Both of their eyes were on the pages as they got their minds and their mouths around the words for the first time. They didn’t laugh, but you couldn’t have beaten the grin from my face. After watching these two men performing in character on television throughout my whole life, it was an incredible thrill to see it taking place right in front of me. Two masters at work.

36.30 This excerpt begins with an anecdote that John asked me to leave out of my article, which I did, but I’m sharing it with you as I think the lesson – about how writers can go about developing their capacity to perform at a high level – is too good to be left unheard.

36.30 “I remember years ago, in 1972, when I was living in England […] I was in the first Barry McKenzie picture as an extra. They were very nice to me. I’ll never forget it, because it’s pretty important really […] I remember one time we were at a piss-up, basically, after we’d finished shooting. There was a guy there. I said ‘what do you do?’ He said, ‘I’m a writer.’

38.30 “It was Clive James. He did have this capacity, but he couldn’t break through. So what he was trying to was to demonstrate the capacity regardless, because the capacity was going to be of use to the system that he wanted to break into. He was right about that. It was extremely well-deserved. He later denied that he’d done that, but even if he wasn’t doing it, I was impressed with it as an idea.”

40.00 “You can be shit-scared of an aspect of it [the work], but you must believe that somehow you can do it. You must also believe that not everything you do is going to be brilliant. You’re going to fuck it up, and you’re going to need a bit of help, and you’re going to grateful for the wisdom of that person, or the eye of that person, and that way, you’re going to learn. If you don’t keep learning, you’re not going to be very engaged in it, and you’ll want to give it away.”

41.30 John references a quote from Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, who said there was a point in his life where he was trying to be a writer. There was a moment where he had a realisation about exactly what his style was, and what he wanted to do.

43.00 “He described what the realisation was, and it was a definitely recognisable idea that he had. I think you need to go through […] they sound mutually exclusive, because you need to be confident, but you don’t want to be arrogant. You need to be sensitive to what wise people – not fools, but smarties – are saying to you.”

47.00 “We have different responses to things. One of the things that’s never said about the arts is that, if you and I look at a painting […] We might both say, ‘I like that’. But we won’t be having the same experience, because the painting will be resonating against our [separate] memories. You are unique in that case.”

49.30 “When you go to an art exhibition or a film and it bores you shitless, it’s because […] you’re being deprived of a creative experience that you might have otherwise had.”

50.00 After the dressing room, we visited an editing suite, where John viewed rough cuts with his producers before sticking around to advise on final cuts before the program was ready for broadcast. The other voice you will hear belongs to editor Kala Lampbard, and this short anecdote came out of the pair of them reflecting on the development of her daughter and John’s granddaughter, who are the same age.

50.00 “My mother said that the first day I went to school, she saw me on the lawn after I came home from school. I’d brought some other kids home with me. I was five. I’d gone to school as this lovely little soft boy that my mother adored, and she said to me, ‘Hello John, what are you doing?’ And I said, ‘I’m riding my bike! Can’t you see, you dumb cluck!’ And she said, ‘My heart disappeared into the ground. You’d become this monster!’ […] One of the things she needed to understand was that, yeah, I’d gone into a different group, and it was kind of inevitable. And horrible for her.”

52.00 The final scene in this episode is the longest, and it was recorded in John’s car, as he drove me from the ABC’s studio in Southbank to where I was staying in Brunswick. We talk about the structure of his workweeks, the Clarke & Dawe DVD that was soon to be released at the time (Operational Matters), as well as how he managed his career as a freelance writer and performer to ensure that he had several streams of income at any one time. The conversation continued for quite a while after pulled over near the house where I was staying. More than anything else you’ve heard up until this point, I think this particular conversation is a perfect example of how deeply John thought and cared about writing, as well as how much he remained curious about everything and everyone around him.

52.30 The Wednesday we spent together was the rare example of a “routine day” in John’s life at that time, in November 2014. Sometimes he’s involved in other projects as a writer, a producer, an actor, or a script editor.

54.00 Outside of this interview for my article in The Weekend Australian Review, John was unsure whether he’d be doing much more promotion for the Operational Matters DVD, as the ABC has a “strangely ambivalent attitude toward promotion”.

55.30 “My instinct is that a DVD of ours would be a gift product around Christmastime, and in the retail outlets, it vaguely ought to sell itself to a degree. If it’s got a picture of us on the front, people know what they’re getting.”

56.00 “Retail is interesting to me, because I’ve always had to make a part of my income out of retail. When I was first doing television, I think I got paid $30 an appearance on New Zealand television.”

57.00 “I realised pretty early on that there’s a large dislocation between impact and income. So I’ve always been aware of the usefulness of having some product in the market, because otherwise I don’t think I could always make a living. And there’s certainly no income between late November and February, unless you’re a shop Santa, in this business.”

58.30 “I’ve always tried to put into any contract my capacity to buy at the wholesale rate the product, so I can sell it – which also puts us into direct contact with our audience. Then if you’ve got a new product, you can just ping out a message, and that first rush of sales will often underwrite the production of the thing.”

59.00 The retail aspect of the online store mrjohnclarke.com was managed by an assistant of John’s, named Stu

59.30 “The first record I released in New Zealand was a Fred Dagg LP, released in November 1975. […] They said, ‘righto, here’s a contract’. The cost of a record at that time was NZD$9.99. I said, ‘I’d like it to sell for $4.99’.”

61.30 I said, ‘how many records are you expecting to sell?’ […] They said, ‘Well, John, if you sell 3,000 copies in New Zealand, you’re going pretty well, and if you sell 5,000 it’ll be the biggest selling record released in New Zealand in five years’. My agent said, ‘Well, in that case, you won’t mind putting the royalty up after 20,000 copies? […] And again after 30,000 copies, and 40,000, and after 50,000 copies?'”

64.00 “The record was released for $4.99 on 17 November in 1975, and by Christmas Eve, it had sold 87,000 copies. It was the biggest selling New Zealand record in New Zealand history. And I thought, ‘ooh, that’s comforting, because what we said was true. Our instinct was right. They said, ‘you don’t know anything about the record market’, and we said, ‘you don’t know anything about the Fred Dagg market’.”

64.30 “In fact, a lot of the time in my subsequent years, my market has been about my age. When I was doing Fred Dagg on New Zealand television, I wasn’t a lot older than these kids. But now, if we walk down this street, there’ll be a whole lot of young people who won’t recognise me because they don’t look at the ABC very much. But very few people of my age will not have seen my somewhere, because I’ve been around for a long time, and so have they.”

66.00 “I’ve only a few times done a product that didn’t have any relationship with a primary use [such as an existing TV show like Clarke & Dawe]. It wasn’t the secondary use of a primary thing. And they were projects that I just fiddled with.”

66.30 John wrote a book of verse, The Even More Complete Book Of Australian Verse (Text Publishing, 2012), whose “paper-thin claim is that all of the great poets of the world actually came from here, and I’ve discovered works by all of them.”

67.30 I ask John how many revenue streams he has right now, in November 2014.

69.00 “On [1998 mockumentary TV series] The Games, I got a fee as a producer, a performer, and a writer […] But I did quite well out of that, because I’m in three parts of the equation.”

69.30 “[John’s wife] Helen and I are reasonably cheap to run. We’re also typical of our generation in that there’s not a lot of superannuation in my line of work. Job security, sick pay, all of that – they don’t exist. We don’t have entitlements. Our advantage is that we have a house.”

70.30 “We get by. And also, a day when we don’t have any income, but we have a good idea, that’s a good day because that might be some income another day. But it’s terribly swings-and-roundabouts. If you wanted to do any financial planning, you wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing.”

71.00 I ask what the Clarke & Dawe contract is worth to John.

72.00 “I’ve worked for pretty well everybody over the years.”

74.00 John on the difference between commercial television and the ABC, which has a remit to be a national network, hence why it’s so valuable, especially to people living outside of cities.

76.00 “When we were doing The Games, we never missed a week [doing Clarke & Dawe], because that contact we have with an audience every week is pretty delicious to us. It’s nice. It would be much less enjoyable all round if it wasn’t there every week.”

76.30 “We’ve always wanted to do it, and we’ve always wanted to stay there. We liked doing it, but we haven’t always had time to… we didn’t always have a whole day to prepare it, for example. Cobbling it together, there was a fair bit of ad libbing.”

78.00 John and Bryan have been doing about 46 episodes of Clarke & Dawe per year for more than 20 years, as well as the extra script that’s filmed but not broadcast.

78.30 “There are these customers called completists, so these days, the advice is it’s much better to do them complete, because otherwise people will go, ‘Where’s that thing?!’

79.00 “The weekly show would be the main thing [source of income]. This year I haven’t done a film, so my main income is from [Clarke & Dawe]. […] As long as I’ve got some money coming in, from some reasonably regular source […] then you can do things you’re not getting paid for, too. Things like, young people write a script, they send it to you, and you can read it, then you go and have a chat and help them.”

82.00 “One of the reasons why being a writer, or engaged in writing in some way, I reckon is an interesting thing to do, is because if somebody’s not paying you to do it, you can still do it.”

83.30 “I’ve just written a family history. Nobody paid me to do that, but something in me wanted to do it, and I’ve always wanted to do it […] I’m glad I did it. I feel I understand things a bit better about where everybody came from, and what the hell’s going on.”

85.30 “If writing genuinely engages you […] I’ve started writing about a few people I met in my life who were very interesting people. […] I should be able to synthesise that, and write it. Why is that person so interesting, or so impressive? Why is that life, and why has nobody written about that life? So I’ve tried to open up the computer and have a bit of a crack at writing some of these things about people that I’ve run across, not even to do with my work, but to do with them, really. One of these days that’ll become something. I don’t know what it is. Who the hell knows?”

86.30 “I think one of the uses of talk and writing is that you don’t always write something because you know what you want to say. You sometimes know what you want to say because you start writing.”

87.30 “Sometimes, when I’m not being employed to do anything, I’ll sit there and go, ‘I might write something about so-and-so.’”

88.00 “There are a few books that I keep going back to. There’s a very good book, a favourite of mine, by an American sportswriter called Red Smith, who was writing in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s or something. Long dead now. But he wrote very beautifully. I don’t know much about him. I only read collections of his writing after he died. He wrote one book called To Absent Friends […] It’s a collection of pieces he wrote after some people died, including some horses. So not the obituary piece […] He’s not trying to get onto the coattails of what actually happened, it’s much more to do with his own ruminative process.”

90.00 John gives a couple of examples of memorable chapters from Red Smith’s To Absent Friends.

94.00 “So I read this book, and I was reading about all these people. I knew none of them, and I’d never heard of him [Red Smith], but I felt good after reading each piece. I thought, ‘What a fantastic idea for a book’.”

94.30 John went on to read more about Red Smith, and he found an interview where Red mentioned a memorable lesson about writing and editing that he learned in 1910, on the first day of New York University’s very first writing course.

96.00 “The teacher said, 50 minutes is up. I’ll have to ask you stop writing in 10 minutes. I would remind you that while you can’t write a lot in 10 minutes, if you’re intelligent, you can cut a fair bit out. [Red] said, ‘I never forgot that. That’s a great thing to learn’. […] ‘I should be editing my stuff, not someone else. I should be making those decisions. I’m not auditioning this shit for someone else – this is what I fucking mean!'”

97.30 “I’ve written shitloads of stuff that no-one else will ever see, but it’s an early draft of something that you then get better and better at doing Writing is possibly changing. Maybe your generation’s learning to write in 42 character lengths, or something. I don’t know. But mine didn’t. I think sometimes when I’m writing [something], I don’t worry about the length, because I don’t have a length in mind. I have a story, and the impression I want to give you about that person. The effect I want to have on you is my head, not the length of it, or even how I’m going to do it, or even the structure, or even where I’m going to start.”

98.30 John says that Helen and my kids are normally the first people to see anything that he’s written, and they’ll sometimes tell him to start somewhere else, after he has cleared his throat.

99.30 “If you’re a bit lucky with the people you know, and they’re going to offer you criticism which is not designed to hurt you, and is honest and intelligent, and doesn’t come from doing the same thing you do. They’re not trying to do the thing the way you do it. But if you can’t have the effect you want to have on the people who you have that sort of regard for… ‘Do it again, John, go and have another crack at it. There’s a good boy!'”

100.00 “I’ve always been a fiddler like that. I’m so stupid; my education wasn’t entirely successful. I don’t know that I respond terribly well to structured learning, so I’m afraid I’ve always been at the mercy of the haphazardry of learning things myself by coming off my bike rather a lot.”

102.00 “A lot of the pleasure you get is not in the professional part of it at all, in a sense. But how you make a living, that is an interesting question. And it’s always been my main question. How do I make a living? Because if you wanted to make a living as an entertainer, the money’s in live performances and advertising. Money’s not over here, where I’m farting around in the sandpit with my friends. Playing pretend!”

103.30 “I have done almost everything. I’ve given everything a look, but I didn’t enjoy every aspect of it. The things I’ve ended up doing, I really do rather like. I’m lucky. But you do have to buy the right to do that. Otherwise, you’ll end up writing something that you don’t have any regard for, for somebody you don’t much care for. I’ve done that, and I’m not very nice under those circumstances. I’m not very happy. I’d rather do my thing badly, than someone else’s thing well, because I’m going to learn here.”

105.00 “Getting old is an interesting process, because you don’t want to do what you used to do. I don’t want to do what I used to do when I was doing stuff on the telly when I was in my 20s. I couldn’t do what I do now without having done that, but I don’t want to keep doing it. You need to develop; you change your mind. As [Irish poet] Seamus Heaney says, the nucleus stays the same, but with any luck, the circumference moves out.”

Pictured below is a photograph of John Clarke at work in his Fitzroy office on 12 November, 2014, taken by Andrew McMillen.

The post Episode 36: John Clarke appeared first on Penmanship.

For the first episode of 2017, I could think of few more qualified guests than Amelia Lester. Penmanship is all about exploring the gritty details of how to build a life around working with words, and Amelia has done just that at the very highest level of magazine publishing. After graduating from Harvard University, she worked at a literary agency for a year and then achieved her dream of working at The New Yorker, which has long been regarded as one of the leading homes for longform journalism in the English-speaking world. Amelia stayed there for ten years in various editorial roles before returning to her home country to take the reins at Good Weekend, a magazine she loved to read while growing up in Australia.

In early March, I met with Amelia at the Fairfax Media building in Sydney. I have written for Good Weekend since 2014, and for Amelia since October, so this episode marks the second time I’ve interviewed a current editor of mine on Penmanship, following last year’s chat with Erik Jensen of The Saturday Paper. My conversation with Amelia touches on what makes a great magazine feature story; her philosophy about how editors should manage their schedules to spend less time at the desk, and more time out in the world; how she began working at The New Yorker as a fact-checker and then became Managing Editor by the time she was 26; why manners are important in journalism; how she learnt to manage her email inbox, and why she is leaving Good Weekend in April after a little over a year in the role.

Amelia Lester is the editor of Good Weekend, the Saturday magazine of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age newspapers. Amelia grew up in Sydney and graduated from Harvard with a BA in English and American Literature and Language. She spent ten years at The New Yorker, where she was first a fact-checker and was appointed managing editor at the age of 26. Later on she relaunched the Goings On About Town section of the magazine, served as executive editor of newyorker.com, and wrote the “Tables for Two” restaurants column. In between she was also a features editor at The Paris Review, a New York literary quarterly. Amelia has worked at Good Weekend, Australia’s premier home of long form journalism, since February 2016, and relaunched the magazine in June of that year. She appears regularly on television and radio as a political commentator and is a board member of the Sydney Writers Festival.

Amelia Lester on Twitter: @ThatAmelia

Direct download | iTunes | Stitcher | Libsyn | YouTube

Timeline: 

3.30 Good Weekend is produced on a ten-day lead time, and Wednesday is the final day of its production cycle. On a typical Tuesday, Amelia is usually reading pieces that have already been laid out in the magazine

5.30 Amelia says that her particular skillset is in figuring out the mix of stories each week, and in working on a story from the original idea conception through to its execution: how it’s presented in the magazine, and how the story is sold

6.00 Amelia says that Good Weekend‘s art director, Tim Beor, is “the finest art director I’ve ever worked with; he’s an astonishingly talented individual”

7.30 In Amelia’s opinion, a great magazine story requires figuring out how to keep someone reading. “I notice increasingly that people talk about longform [journalism] as if it’s like eating your vegetables […] Like it’s the broccoli that keeps you feeling like you’re reading a quality product”

9.00 “I’m constantly having to remind people that longform is just really fascinating stories. They need to be told at length, because that’s how much space they need”

9.30 “Part of what is important to make a story sing at length is that you need details, and you need characters […] If you’ve got the details and the characters, then you’ve got the makings of a story that sings”

11.00 Amelia thinks that it’s a useful discipline for writers starting out to avoid using the personal pronoun, ‘I’

11.30 “It’s important to learn how to tell the story without yourself, and then once you can do that, maybe inject a little of yourself into it”

12.00 As an example of using the personal pronoun at length, Amelia thinks that Konrad Marshall’s cover story from September 2016, ‘Me, Inc.‘, would have been “a disaster” in the hands of a lesser writer; she also mentions his October cover story ‘Mud, Sweat and Gears‘, where Konrad went to a Ute Muster and had a “muddy, unpleasant time”, in this context

13.00 Amelia receives a lot of pitches from people who want to tell their own story. “That’s fine, but the problem is, at three or four thousand words, if you’re not used to writing at length, you’re likely not going to be able to tell your story in a way that gets someone through to the end”

14.00 The longest story that Amelia has run at Good Weekend is about 5,000 words, though she has been interested more generally in running “fewer, longer” stories

15.00 Amelia says that length has nothing to do with the quality of the writer, the quality of the assignment, or the subject. For instance, one of her favourite profiles in the last year was by Melissa Fyfe, ‘The Bill Henson Bubble‘, where she wrote about the controversial photographer Bill Henson

16.30 “That was about 3,200 words, I think. The reason it was 3,200 words is because it was partially dependent on access […] but partially dependent on the way she told the story. It was an encounter with a very interesting and high profile artist, with some thoughtful context around that encounter. That’s 3,200 words”

17.30 To contrast that example, Amelia mentions a recent cover story by Jane Cadzow, ‘Ingrid Bishop’s campaign to release the man convicted of killing her son‘. “That was a pretty extraordinary story when I first heard about it, but I like to keep an open mind about length […] It turned into a profile of this mother. On the surface, this man’s mother is not as ‘famous’ as Bill Henson […] But it turned out to be a 5,000 word piece”

20.00 Each week, Amelia has sought to give Good Weekend‘s readers “unexpected perspectives on Australia, and Australians”; she cites Danielle Moylan’s profile of Eddie Ayres (‘Why Emma Ayres became Eddie Ayres‘) and Matthew Knott’s profile of George Christensen (‘Why it’s time to take George Christensen seriously‘) as examples

21.00 “In both those cases, the writer had never written a longform piece before. Both of them were very experienced news reporters; both of them approached me with the story idea, and to be honest, I was skeptical, because it’s really hard to tell a story at length”

23.00 At Good Weekend, Amelia has access to “some of the most extraordinary photographers”, including Andrew Meares, Andrew Quilty, Nic Walker and Tim Bauer

24.00 Amelia cites Tim Elliott’s recent story, ‘The Audacity Of Hope‘, as an example of a great cover story. “Anything Tim Elliott writes is going to be beautiful, lyrical, astute and funny – which is a pretty rare combination […] He has this ability to never lose his light touch, which is really important when you’re writing about some pretty upsetting things”

26.30 “That’s the beauty of working with such talented art directors and photographers: my decision about what to put on the cover is pretty much purely editorial. It’s not generally visual, in the sense that I don’t have to think, ‘Well, I can’t put that on the cover because it’s not visual enough'”

27.00 Tim Beor won Designer of the Year at the Australian Magazine Award’s for his work on Good Weekend in 2016, and Amelia cites his cover for a story by Stephanie Wood – “Who is also an extraordinary writer because she is an incredibly sensitive observer; she sees everything about people” – about how she is “childless by chance” (‘Missing Children‘) as one of Tim Beor’s finest works

29.00 Amelia knows that writing is a “really difficult thing, and when someone has written a piece, it can feel incredibly vulnerable and scary to send it off to the editor”

29.30 Amelia says she’s not a workaholic, and she doesn’t want to work “all the hours in the week. I actually don’t think that serves me as an editor, anyway. I think it’s really important that editors live lives, and consume lots of content and culture, and talk to lots of people. I wouldn’t want to be just hunched over a desk ’til all hours”

30.30 Amelia’s philosophy is that, for editors, “it’s better to be interested, than interesting”

31.00 On reading a draft for the first time, Amelia tries to read it all the way through, but she tries to observe how she’s feeling all the way through; if she’s distracted by a text message, “that’s a sign that a piece needs work”

32.30 Amelia thinks that a good magazine has to be “reflective of the vision of its editor, and if my bosses don’t like the vision, they can get rid of me. But all I can do is put out what I think is interesting, and that to me creates a coherent, exciting product”

33.30 “We’re not a charity. We’re meant to be putting out a magazine that people want to read. So I’m a big fan of mixing high and low [culture]”; for instance, Amelia has on her desk right now a copy of Gwyneth Paltrow’s new “holistic health handbook”, as well as a book looking at Helen Garner’s writing career

35.00 Amelia says that every editor has “blind spots”, and that all she can do is put out a magazine that she finds interesting – which she learned from David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker

37.00 Amelia was born in Paris, and her parents are economists. She was raised in Sydney, went to North Sydney Girls’ High School, and applied to study at Harvard University on a whim: “I’m very whim-driven”

37.30 In 2005, Amelia had a fellowship for Harvard Magazine to write from the perspective of an undergraduate; this was Amelia’s first paid journalism, for a column called ‘The Undergraduate‘

38.30 One of Amelia’s columns for Harvard Magazine, about her difficulty in finding employment (‘Working Out‘), led to her getting a job at literary firm The Wylie Agency in 2005

40.00 Amelia worked as Andrew Wylie’s assistant, writing emails to publishers and editors, chasing up deals, and working out how to get the best deals for Wylie’s writers; Salman Rushdie and Philip Roth were regular callers

42.00 All of the reading that Amelia did at The Wylie Agency was related to her work in publishing, because she didn’t get time to read manuscripts during office hours

43.30 Amelia loved The New Yorker since reading an article by David Grann in 2005, ‘The Lost City Of Z‘, which would later become the basis for his book of the same name. “I couldn’t believe that there was a magazine that had sent a writer off for months to track a lost civilisation in South America, in the jungle. It just blew my mind. I desperately wanted to work there”

44.30 It was a race against the clock to get a job there, because Amelia’s visa was running out, and typically The New Yorker‘s fact-checkers are more advanced in their careers and know at least one other language

46.30 The first piece that Amelia checked for The New Yorker was a comment piece; she recalls the page proof coming to her desk, and “I couldn’t believe […] I was putting marks on a page that would end up in the magazine”

47.30 Every word in the magazine is agonised over by five or six people; there’s a whole system whereby a single piece of paper is routed through these people for changes, until it gets to a ‘closing meeting’, where each ‘stakeholder’ in the piece sit around a table and say their piece on each page before it goes to the printer

48.00 There were 15 fact-checkers employed at The New Yorker when Amelia started there, which later expanded to 17 when the website was relaunched

50.30 In the job, Amelia had to get over her fear of calling people on the phone: she found it “really scary” to call someone up and ask them a question while checking a piece

51.00 “Manners are very important in journalism. I think it’s very important to show respect to everyone with whom you come into contact, because we as practitioners of the craft do not understand how terrifying it is to see your name in print, or in a story”

52.30 “Being a fact-checker is the most self-righteous, sanctimonious position to be in, because you say, ‘I’m on the side of truth on this […] I just want to figure out what the actual truth of this situation is'”

53.30 Amelia describes The New Yorker‘s editor since 1999, David Remnick, as “the most magnificent writer, editor and boss […] He’s just a brilliant reporter because he gets you to open up, and to share your enthusiasms and your interests”

55.30 In 2009, The New Yorker was advertising for a Managing Editor job, and Amelia’s family encouraged her to go for it. She was 26 at the time, so Amelia sent David Remnick a polite email to ask if he’d consider her

57.00 “David likes ‘hungry people’, as he would put it; he likes people who are really going to throw themselves into it”

59.00 Amelia worked as Managing Editor for four years, and she struggles to recall an average week in the job, because the weekly publication was very responsive to the news, and even broke news, under David Remnick’s editorship

60.00 “If you did have a big news story break, then your whole week would become about that news story”, such as Osama Bin Laden’s assassination, or the Japanese earthquake and tsunami

61.00 As Managing Editor, Amelia was responsible for thinking about the next six months’ worth of magazine issues, in addition to overseeing the weekly production cycle

62.30 The magazine does occasionally take story pitches from freelancers, but newyorker.com is now typically the gateway into the magazine, because editors will want to see evidence of the reporter’s work, “and that’s always better if it comes from newyorker.com”

63.00 While working as Managing Editor, Amelia also began writing ‘Tables For Two‘ columns in the magazine, which is “not telling you where to eat or what to order; it’s creating a sense of being there, in New York, having a meal. Restaurants in New York are where life happens; it’s impossible to overstate their importance to people’s lives”

65.00 Amelia wrote these 450 word columns for three or four years, which she enjoyed very much: “I ate out every night; it was probably terrible for my cholesterol, but I was doing it anyway”

68.00 After Managing Editor, Amelia became Executive Online Editor of newyorker.com and oversaw the magazine’s relaunch of its website

70.30 Amelia says that Elements, the science and technology blog edited by Anthony Lydgate, is “a perfect example of what newyorker.com should be”

72.00 Amelia introduced the ‘Minutes With’ weekly column to Good Weekend, which is about watching someone really carefully and writing about what you see: “Amanda Hooton is just the master of [writing the ‘Minutes With’ columns]”

72.30 During her time at The New Yorker, there were three occasions where she wrote about Australia: about Julia Gillard’s misogyny speech in 2012, Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize win in 2014, and Tony Abbott being removed as Prime Minister in 2015

74.30 While in New York, Amelia read smh.com.au every day; she knew she wanted to come back to Australia at some point, so “it was important to me to keep that connection”

75.00 Amelia’s transition from The New Yorker to Good Weekend allowed her to put out a magazine that was “exactly reflective of my own interests; so what’s not to like?”

75.30 Under her editorship, Good Weekend re-hired several staff writers; previously, the magazine had relied on a pool of contributors

77.00 Amelia says she “wasn’t that interested in scoping out the competition”, because she had a good idea of what she wanted Good Weekend to be, having read it while growing up in Sydney

78.00 “Rather than reading the competition, I think it is very important for a magazine editor to immerse his or herself in the news”

79.30 Amelia learned how to manage her email inbox and correspondence while working at The Wylie Agency, which has flowed through to her job as editor of Good Weekend

82.30 “Writing is hard, and I really try and show respect to writers in the work that they’re doing; I like to take the time to write back to them politely”

83.30 Amelia is leaving Good Weekend in April 2017 and moving to Japan, because her husband-to-be is a doctor in the US Navy and will be stationed there. “I’ve always wanted to have adventures, and to live a big, interesting life – just like magazines should be big and interesting […] So I am seizing this opportunity for adventure, and I’ve got a few projects already lined up”

The post Episode 35: Amelia Lester appeared first on Penmanship.

In 2004, UQP published his landmark book, Pig City: From The Saints To Savage Garden, which covered three decades of Queensland’s musical and political history. Three years later, the book was followed by an event of the same name, staged by Queensland Music Festival and featuring a headline performance by the original line-up of Brisbane punk rock band The Saints, who had not played together in almost 30 years. Sometimes authors live to see their book made into a film; it is much rarer that a book is made into a music festival with their heroes headlining, and Andrew Stafford can count himself among the lucky few in the latter category.

Reviewing the Pig City festival in 2007 was one of my first assignments as a fledgling music journalist for the website FasterLouder, and in the years since, Andrew and I have become colleagues and friends. Having spent 14 years driving a cab while writing about music, sport and the environment, Andrew is a full-time freelance journalist who now writes about these matters for a range of outlets including The Guardian, The Saturday Paper and The Sydney Morning Herald.

In late September, I visited his home in the Brisbane suburb of St Lucia to record a conversation which touches on the skillset required for his long-standing role as Queensland AFL correspondent for The Age newspaper; how an early interest in birdwatching introduced him to an enduring passion for punk rock; how he got started writing about music for Brisbane street press and Rolling Stone magazine; how his depression has affected his productivity throughout his career; how he first hatched the idea for Pig City and spent three years writing it while driving taxis, and how he looks back on a mental health crisis in early 2016 that led to national media coverage in the wake of his sudden disappearance.

Andrew Stafford is a freelance journalist and the author of Pig City, a musical, political and social history of Brisbane, now in its third edition. In July 2007 the book was transformed into a key event as part of the Queensland Music Festival, headlined by the first performance by the original line-up of The Saints in nearly 30 years. He has been the Queensland AFL correspondent for The Age for 11 years. His journalism also appears in The Sydney Morning Herald, The Guardian, The Saturday Paper, The Monthly and many more. He maintains a blog, ‘Notes From Pig City’, and watches birds for fun.

Andrew Stafford on Twitter: @staffo_sez

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Timeline: 

3.30 Between 2000 and 2014, Andrew worked as a part-time taxi driver, then gave it up in order to fully commit himself to freelance writing since 2015; during the winter months, he is Fairfax Media’s Queensland AFL correspondent, following the Brisbane Lions and Gold Coast Suns

4.30 “I’m now in the position of pretty much living off my wits, with nothing coming in next week, as far as I’m aware at this point – which is a scary position to be in”

5.30 Throughout 2016, Andrew says that the Brisbane Lions story has been beneficial for him as a freelancer, as it has been “a poorly administered and poorly run club for over a decade”, culminating in them sacking their coach Justin Leppitsch after a poor season

8.00 How Andrew differentiates between feature writing and news reporting, especially when reporting on AFL-related matters in terms of breaking news, such as Justin Leppitsch’s sacking in late August

9.00 Andrew tends not to share most of his AFL-related writing on social media, in part because he knows that most of his musical fan friends aren’t interested

10.00 “It’s an older reflection of a fact that Melbourne and Brisbane are very different cultures […] In Melbourne, it is perfectly acceptable to be passionate about the arts and sport at the same time”

12.30 At present, Andrew is finding that “a surprising amount” of his freelance writing income is coming from musical journalism, largely for the likes of The Guardian and Fairfax Media

14.00 “There are not many music writers that have been around as long as I have, that have stuck at it. It’s something that I’ve returned to, and found that there are actually opportunities there, and I’m getting quite a bit of work”

15.00 What led Andrew to pursuing a career in writing, including his perceived status as an “outsider” through his interests such as birding, or birdwatching

16.00 “When I was growing up, all I really wanted to do was go to university and study zoology, so I could spend my life in the field”; he later studied arts/law at the University of Queensland, and dropped the law component after six months

17.00 During his early teens, Andrew was introduced by other birdwatchers to punk; he recalls a trip to “somewhere in the wilds of The Mallee in Victoria, and being introduced to the Dead Kennedys, The Sex Pistols and Midnight Oil”

18.00 For Andrew, hearing Sydney rock band Midnight Oil for the first time was a political awakening as well as a musical one, and started to give him “a sense of self, and helped confirm that slight outsider status that I’d developed”

19.00 After quitting the law degree, Andrew was quite active on the Brisbane music scene in the early 1990s, and starting to consume the Australian rock press such as Rolling Stone: “It occurred to me that that was something I could do; it allowed me to fuse my interests in words with music”

20.30 A friend of Andrew’s was working for Brisbane street press Time Off at the time, and offered Andrew his first assignment for the paper: a live review of You Am I, supporting Beasts of Bourbon

23.00 How Andrew went about recording interviews in the 1990s, when he started in music journalism, such as using a Sony Walkman or whichever technology could hold a cassette

24.30 Andrew started at the bottom of the pile as a junior writer at Time Off, but soon started getting regular work with Rolling Stone for a national audience, under editor Kathy Bail

26.30 “I was pretty serious; I was as interested in my politics as I was interested in music, as I still maintained an interest in wildlife”

28.00 After a few years of street press and freelancing for Rolling Stone, Andrew moved to Sydney to work as a copy editor and, later, features editor for Studio Magazines, which published “high-brow nudey titles” such as Black&White, Blue and Studio For Men

29.00 “These were the jobs that appeared in the paper, and I didn’t know that the journalism jobs advertised in the paper were the jobs that no other journalist really wanted”

30.30 While working for Studio Magazines, earning a salary of about $27,000 as a copy editor, Andrew continued freelancing under a pseudonym, “Andrew David”; David is Andrew’s middle name, and looks back on this pseudonym “an appalling lapse of creativity on my part”

33.30 Andrew later fled to Australian Geographic, which he thought might be a more natural marriage of his personal interests, but it was his first experience with a publication that had an “extremely rigid” house style with multiple layers of editorial oversight spread across several months

35.30 “That was awful. I lasted about six months, and thought I was a failure. It had a terrible effect on my confidence”; for about a year, he couldn’t write a sentence “without striking a line through it”

36.30 This episode triggered Andrew’s depression, which he has found is cyclical: “That’s a battle, and my productivity tends to go up and down with it”

37.30 The turning point in his productivity came “quite suddenly”; Andrew bumped into an old friend in Brisbane’s CBD who happened to be lecturing in music at QUT, and invited Andrew to the university for a chat

38.30 QUT’s creative writing head tapped Andrew to give a guest lecture on music writing. He agreed, despite going through “a terribly difficult time” with his depression at that point, having just spent a couple of weeks in hospital for the first time

39.30 He was able to crank out about 8,000 words for a two-hour lecture on music writing, to about 120 students, who he was surprised to find were paying close attention to what he was saying, including an unsolicited round of applause at the end

40.30 After that, he started to do some tutoring, and a few months later, Andrew was watching Savage Garden perform at the Closing Ceremony at the Sydney Olympics Games in 2000, which gave him the spur to formulate and pitch an idea “about Brisbane’s musical history, and how it fused with the politics of the place under Bjelke-Petersen”

41.30 At that point, Andrew was reading a book by Clinton Heylin, From The Velvets to the Voidoids, about New York punk, and thought of applying a similar idea: “From The Saints to Savage Garden”

42.00 The night after the Closing Ceremony, Andrew sat down and sketched out a chapter outline for the book, “which was almost mathematical, right from the start”, including six chapters each dedicated to the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s

44.00 “Brisbane undeniably transformed in that decade [the 1990s], in my view. There’s a reason why people like Robert Forster and [previous Penmanship guest] Ed Kuepper came back to Brisbane, and they both said the same thing: it had a really good energy about it”

45.00 Andrew took it back to QUT to see if they would consider it as a post-graduate project; the book proposal was accepted as a Master of Arts at QUT, and he spent the next three years working on it

46.00 “There was a point at which I stalled after the first two or three chapters; there were some times of self-doubt where I wondered if I would get the thing done, but I pushed through it”

47.00 Andrew thinks his outsider sensibility, having been born in Melbourne, served him “rather well”, as it allowed him a slightly distanced take on Brisbane during that era

48.00 After “breaking the back” of the book while finishing the final chapter of part two (‘Cyclone Hits Expo’), Andrew celebrated by going out and buying himself a Victorinox watch, which he is wearing during this interview

49.00 Andrew had no funding to complete the book; it was written entirely under his own steam, which is why he drove a cab two nights a week, on Fridays and Saturdays, while renting a room in Red Hill for $70 per week

50.30 While writing the book, Andrew was quite isolated, which he thinks was important to the project; his peak writing time was generally between 10pm and 4am, probably because of working night shifts in the car

51.30 Andrew got into cab driving after returning to Brisbane and living with his mother; he saw an ad in the paper and applied for a job

52.30 When Andrew first hatched the idea of the book, it was called Security City, a name borrowed from a song on The Saints’ third album, Prehistoric Sounds; it later hit him that Pig City, named for an all-but-unknown song by The Parameters, was a”much punchier title”

56.30 Andrew thinks there’s a “huge, ongoing irony” that the best reception the book got critically was in Melbourne, where it was also shortlisted by The Age for their Book Of The Year awards

57.30 That irony “continues to resonate”, as today almost all of Andrew’s freelance journalism is published by newspapers, magazines and websites based outside of Queensland

59.00 In 2005, while on a seabird research trip to Antarctica, Andrew received a short email from John Harms, a sports writer based in Melbourne at The Age, asking if he was interested in being considered to cover the Brisbane Lions

60.00 This job meant writing match reports and filing “five minutes after the siren”, which included writing ‘go last’ copy as the game unfolded, then topping and tailing it at the end of the match

62.00 Writing match reports was a powerful experience for Andrew, after years of being a slow writer – a “stone cutter”, as he puts it– and being unsure of himself, he realised that he could do this work, and had achieved a dream of writing for a national broadsheet alongside writers he admires

63.00 Andrew had a book deal in hand for Pig City “surprisingly early”; he originally pitched a couple of chapters to Text Publishing in Melbourne, only to receive a rejection notice which said it was “fanzine journalism”

64.00 “That made me very determined to prove her wrong. I then pitched it to UQP, which was obviously a more natural home for a book set in Brisbane […] [New UQP publisher] Madonna Duffy had a brief to find new talent, and she signed me up on the strength of those chapters and the outline”

66.00 Andrew sent over each chapter to UQP as they were completed; the editorial process was “pretty simple”, and his original chapter outline didn’t change too much between watching Savage Garden at the Olympics, and what he submitted

67.00 “It took a while to get enough distance from the book to have any sense of objectivity about it, but I was tremendously proud of it”

68.30 Pig City had a tenth anniversary edition published in 2014, for which Andrew wrote a new introduction, “which became redundant far sooner than we might have thought, because at that stage Campbell Newman was Premier, and he had been elected with such a whopping majority that most people assumed he was going to be in power for at least another ten years”

69.30 Andrew has twice visited Antarctica to count seabirds on the Aurora Australis icebreaker, for eight to ten weeks at a time, but has never written about it: “I wanted to be able to enjoy an experience like that without having to document it”

73.00 Hanging on a wall in Andrew’s home is a framed poster from the Pig City music festival, held at the University of Queensland in 2007, which saw the original line-up of The Saints reform for their first performance in 28 years

79.00 The Saints’ Pig City festival show was released on Shock Records, and Andrew wrote the liner notes for it

80.00 “I was determined to enjoy the day purely as a punter. I didn’t go backstage until the end of proceedings, I think, and so I spent the day enjoying it as I would any other show – basically, down the front!”

81.30 Reviewing that festival for FasterLouder was one of Andrew McMillen’s first assignments as a newbie music writer

83.00 “Not too many people get their book turned into a rock festival, with their heroes headlining; that’s something I’ll be able to go to the grave very happy about”

84.00 In 2016, Andrew has decided to hatch the idea of a purely Brisbane-based, vinyl-only record label, “and it just made sense to call it Pig City Records, of course”; its first release is by a band called Some Jerks, which will be launched on October 28 at Black Bear Lodge

85.30 “It’s a risky endeavour, particularly when I’m not quite sure how my rent’s getting paid in the next few weeks”

87.30 “I’d be very surprised if I got anything out of this financially; it’s a risk more than anything, but it’s a way of keeping the name alive, and also giving something back to that community”

89.00 A few years ago Andrew toured Europe with the Brisbane rock band HITS, and had designs on writing a book about that experience of being their road manager in foreign countries

92.00 While the book didn’t happen, there was a feature article about the tour named Tour De Farce, which was published as a cover story in Qweekend in 2012

93.00 In February 2016, Andrew experienced a mental health crisis and went missing, after posting a troubling series of messages on Twitter, then deactivated his social media accounts

94.00 “In the aftermath, it got me thinking deeply about how we talk about mental health in the media. I presented a difficult case in terms of reporting: I am a relatively public figure […] and I’d set the hares running with a couple of tweets that I would not have made if I was not in a state of acute mental crisis”

95.30 Andrew was aware that there was “an enormous shitstorm” developing around his disappearance, but it wasn’t until some time later that he learned there was media camped outside his house, and journalists were calling Andrew’s partner, harassing her for photographs

96.30 “I became aware after the fact that, at that point, I’d actually effectively ceased to be a human being in the eyes of some; I’d become a story to be got, even among people who I might consider colleagues”

98.00 Later in the year, Andrew was “quite disturbed” by the story of Duncan Storrar, who asked a question on the television program Q&A, and later had his life upended by Australia’s mainstream media

99.00 “I don’t want to claim to be more than I’m not […] But I thought Duncan did what good journalists actually should do. For speaking truth to power, he got sat upon by power”

100.00 Andrew says his case was “mostly treated far more sympathetically” than Duncan’s, but “that does not make what happened right, either”

100.30 When searching his own name since that episode, Andrew came across a Daily Mail article which had included screenshots of the tweets Andrew had sent, then deleted; he ended up emailing the editor and journalist asking them to delete the images, because “that was simply not good practice”

102.00 Andrew is interested in writing about his own experience, but only if it’s combined with speaking to community leaders in mental health about how this sort of issue could be better reported by the Australian media

104.30 Andrew is a strong advocate for freelance journalists to be paid what they deserve, which is an issue that he got involved with in 2013 when Private Media website Daily Review asked him to write “for exposure”

106.00 One of Andrew’s key journalistic interests in 2016 has been the reporting in Queensland around a significant coral bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef, about which he has written articles for The Saturday Paper and The Monthly

107.00 “The one place you wouldn’t read about this happening was in the state newspaper, The Courier-Mail; eventually, I took them to task in a piece for The Saturday Paper, which in turn was picked up by Media Watch”

108.30 “That, to me, was a monstrous failure of journalism in this state, and it needed to be called out. I knew that by doing that, it was going to limit my prospects at that newspaper from that point”

109.30 “I was prepared to die in a ditch for that issue. It was that important to me, and I think it was important that that conversation had to be had in media circles”

110.30 Andrew had previously pitched an idea on what was happening on the Barrier Reef to Qweekend, The Courier-Mail‘s Saturday magazine, while being aware that it was likely to be rejected or not even responded because of the paper’s recent editorial bent on that issue

112.00 “I write about music, sport, and a little bit of environmental journalism; it’s not what you’d call ‘hard journalism’, but I still believe very strongly that the job of a good newspaper is to speak truth to power, and what I saw was a newspaper that instead was kowtowing to it”

113.30 After Pig City was published in 2004, it became apparent to Andrew that his mother was “behaving quite oddly”, and it took a few years for his family and himself to realise that she was showing signs of early onset dementia

114.30 Andrew had been contracted by UQP to write another book about Australian music, and got “some way into” before the project was derailed by his mum’s illness, which wasn’t diagnosed until late 2011

115.00 “If I had had greater intestinal fortitude at the time, maybe that would not have derailed me, but it was obviously a very significant thing to happen; I was very close to my mum”

117.00 “One of the things about freelancing is trying to find a routine in your day, and trying to discipline yourself – you need a lot of self-motivation, and it became very difficult because the nature of mum’s illness was very disruptive”

118.00 For Andrew during this period, driving the cab was a steadier form of income than freelancing, and he began embracing that as part of his identity: “the rock and roll cabbie”

119.00 Andrew stopped driving a taxi in June 2015: “Cab driving was finished at that point, too. I was lucky to take home $100 from a 12-hour shift”. Andrew wrote about the taxi vs Uber situation for Qweekend in December 2014, Fare Game

120.00 “No shortage of stories [from taxi driving], not all of them bad, by any means; there were some good times there, as well, but I’m done with it, and glad to shut that door. But certainly there’s room for a good story after it”

The post Episode 34: Andrew Stafford appeared first on Penmanship.

As an accomplished singer and songwriter, Holly has been performing since 2004, and has released five albums. In 2010, she joined forces with her friends Sarah Blasko and Sally Seltmann to form the indie pop group Seeker Lover Keeper, which released one album the following year. In 2016, she became an author: her first novel was published in September by Allen & Unwin. It’s named Goodwood, and it’s about what happens to a small town in New South Wales when two prominent members of the community go missing within a week of each other.

The story is narrated by a 17 year-old named Jean Brown, and everything we see is filtered through the young narrator as she grapples with the dramatic turn of events. It’s a combination of a mystery narrative and a portrait of a town experiencing a collective trauma. Goodwood offers a wonderfully lush and well-realised depiction of several aspects of contemporary Australian life, and it announces Holly as a major talent in fiction writing.

I first met Holly in April 2013, when she invited me into her home in Sydney to talk about drug use for my book Talking Smack. In late September 2016, Holly’s book was launched in Brisbane by previous Penmanship guest Kathleen Noonan at Avid Reader bookstore. The morning after, we met at an inner-city hotel room for a conversation which touches on her extensive research into the creative process as she began the book’s first draft while pregnant with her daughter; why she likes the distance and anonymity that comes with writing fiction; how elements of the story and its characters draw on her upbringing in Sydney’s inner west; how she snuck some of her favourite Australian expressions into the book’s dialogue; what inspired her to record an album for children, and what led her to write an op-ed for The Sydney Morning Herald about same-sex marriage.

Holly Throsby is a Sydney-based songwriter and musician. She has released four solo albums and a children’s album called See! She is known for summoning melodies that sound beautifully crumpled, worn and decades-old, and matching them with hushed, cutting lyrics that read like a Carver short story. Holly has been nominated for four ARIA Awards: two for Best Female Artist, one for Best Children’s Album, and one as part of Seeker Lover Keeper, her band with Sally Seltmann and Sarah Blasko. Goodwood is Holly’s debut novel.

Holly Throsby on Twitter: @HollyThrosby

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Timeline: 

3.00 Holly compares the feeling of publishing Goodwood to the release of her first album: “[I feel] kind of terrified, but very excited, because completing a big project always gives a nice sense of achievement”

4.00 Before she set off to write the book, Holly decided to read a lot about how other authors write: she particularly enjoyed Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey, and On Writing by Stephen King

6.30 “Stephen King says to write every day, to put stuff in a drawer and leave it for a while, and decide whether to chuck it out or keep going”

8.00 Holly also liked Elmore Leonard’s ‘10 Rules of Writing‘, and John Steinbeck’s work on character description

8.30 “I like to give an indication, but also leave a lot of space for readers to fill in faces, or places, in their own mind. When I was writing Goodwood, I wanted it to be a bit of an ‘every town'”

9.30 Holly has always been inspired by Annie Proulx, largely because she was such a late publisher; Proux’s first novel Postcards was published when she was in her 50s

10.30 “I didn’t feel this huge rush to do it all through my 20s. I felt it was something that was slowly, slowly building in me, and I think that must be how a lot of authors feel, because they publish late in life and go on to have these careers into their 60s and 70s”

12.00 Holly likes the distance and anonymity that comes with writing fiction, as it frees people to be able to express themselves in a purer way: “I really understand people who write under pseudonyms; it makes perfect sense to me”

12.30 Holly did not consider writing Goodwood under a pseudonym: “The distance that I was able to achieve was in writing in fiction, as opposed to performing a song under my own name, which people often assume is autobiographical”

13.30 There are elements of Holly’s personality in the characters in the book, but she says she’s not concerned as the audience can make up their own minds about which elements reflect her

15.00 The mystery in Goodwood is laid out in the first few pages, as Holly was interested in “putting it out there and working backwards from there, in terms of the tension it creates”

16.00 “The book is really interested in relationships, and connections between people, place and family; a lot of them are unexpected or unlikely connections”

16.30 Holly set the book in 1992, partly because she wanted to avoid the way in which information spreads in the modern day, with the internet and mobile phones

17.00 In 1992, Holly was aged 13, but she was looking up to her elder sister, who is five years older; it was also a formative year in terms of popular music, some of which creeps into the book’s setting

18.30 Writing a cast of characters wasn’t as much of a challenge as Holly expected: “As they arrived to me, they were strangely formed, and I wonder if a lot of authors feel the same way”

20.30 The aspect of smalltown gossip reflects Holly’s upbringing in Balmain, a peninsula suburb in Sydney’s inner west: “If you walked up and down Darling Street, the main street, you really knew everybody”

22.30 Holly has read a handful of true crime books, and often finds them “a bit scary”, but she’s a big fan of crime mystery as a genre; her first love in this field was James Ellroy’s L.A. Confidential, which she studied at university

23.30 “I found [Elroy’s ‘L.A. Quartet‘] just fascinating in terms of the pace, and the way that the revelations would just smash you in the face; they were so fantastic”

25.00 Holly wrote the first draft of Goodwood in about eight months, while she was pregnant, which she liked as it gave her a hard deadline to meet

26.00 The book’s narrator, Jean Brown, was always conceived as a single-parent child, because Holly wanted to explore and celebrate non-traditional family structures

27.00 The first chapter Holly wrote in the first draft is quite similar to what appears in the finished book

29.00 With the first draft, Holly tried to write every day, between the hours of roughly 10am and 3pm

30.00 “When I do feel like I’ve written a good song, I like to play and sing it ten times in a row, and feel really excited by that. But the thing I really liked about [writing Goodwood] is how that long that lasted, and how many ups and downs you can feel within one project that’s extremely long”

31.00 Holly finished the first draft, gave birth to her daughter, and planned to pick it up again three months later; ultimately, she printed and read it aloud ten months later, on the advice of her publisher at Allen & Unwin, Richard Walsh

32.00 Songwriter and author Peggy Frew also advised Holly to print out, read it aloud, and change the text to a different font than the one she’d written it in, in order to spot errors

33.30 Richard Walsh advises Holly to “lock all the doors, turn the phone off, and keep writing, and I think that’s the best advice anyone can give a writer”

34.00 Holly’s mother, Margaret Throsby, read the third draft of the book, followed by the uncorrected proof which Holly showed to her partner and close friends

35.00 Speaking of copy editing, Holly says it was “a treat to have someone who’s so professional read your book in such a focussed way; that’s very flattering, like when someone mixes your record”

36.00 Holly’s book deal only came after the third draft; Richard Walsh is an old friend of her mother’s, and he encouraged her to write Goodwood, saying that he thinks it’ll be good book

37.00 Holly wrote the book without a publishing contract, which is the same approach that she took with her first album On Night (2004) and her 2010 children’s album, See!

38.30 “This is all new to me, the book world, but that didn’t seem strange to me. What if they said, ‘Yeah, write us a book!’ and it was crap, and they hated it!”

39.00 Her children’s album, See!, came about because Holly wanted to try something different, and wanted to make children’s music for her god-daughter

40.00 “There’s something really freeing about writing kids’ songs, because they’re not for grown-ups, so I felt like there would be this suspension of judgment. If kids like it, does it really matter if it’s good or bad?”

41.30 Holly would take a recorder to kids’ birthday parties and primary schools to get their voices on tape, to weave them into the songs

42.30 Whenever the kids’ show Small Potatoes is on ABC KIDS, Holly is glued to the TV, because she loves the innocence of what the children are expressing through the potato characters

43.00 Holly isn’t comfortable playing her own music in her house, but her partner sometimes plays See! to their daughter, Alvy, who is also a big fan of the new Warpaint single, ‘New Song’

44.00 Holly’s next album for adults is currently being mixed, and is due for release in February 2017, while the first single will be out in November 2016

45.00 On the new album, Holly played a lot of electric guitar, and Mick Turner from instrumental rock band Dirty Three – her favourite guitarist in the world – plays on the album, too

46.30 “Mick is an instinctive performer; he has this characteristic sound that’s really impressionistic. It’s really about his guitar, his amp and his sound, and somehow melding himself with a song. It’s very textural, and to me, as soon as I start hearing that swell up, I find it extremely emotional”

47.30 Mick Turner is partnered and has three children with Peggy Frew, and has also performed with Dirty Three drummer Jim White, who played with Seeker Lover Keeper alongside Holly, Sarah Blasko and Sally Seltmann

48.00 Holly worked at a Balmain video store named The Video Shift for eight years, between the ages of 18 and 26

49.30 Holly also worked at a Balmain bookshop at the age of 17: “A very classy bookshop, similar to an Avid Reader or a Riverbend [Books]; I felt very out of my depth. I wanted to be good at it, but I hadn’t read enough”

51.00 While saving up to make her first album, Holly worked six days a week programming music channels for airlines, including Qantas

52.30 Holly loved to use the phrase “of an evening” or “of a Saturday” because she loves Australian expressions such as “deadset keen”

54.00 Jean Brown’s best friend in Goodwood, Georgina, has photic sneeze reflex – a sensitivity to bright light – which is weird because Holly’s daughter now has it, as does the donor that Holly and her partner used to conceive Alvy

55.00 “Speaking of Australian expressions, in Goodwood, George says one of my favourites when she says she’s ‘fizzing at the bunghole’, which is an expression I learned in Hay, New South Wales, meaning to be very excited”

56.00 Holly has started writing her second novel, which is currently set in Cedar Valley, a town situated south of Goodwood, a year after the events of Goodwood

57.00 Holly wrote an op-ed piece for The Sydney Morning Herald about same-sex marriage in 2013, titled Sing out loud: marriage equality is in tune with the times

58.30 “I felt like I was really ready to speak out on that issue. I think it’s a very basic equal rights issue, and it saddens me that we haven’t caught up with a lot of other countries in the world”

59.00 “The thing that strikes me about the whole debate is that I can’t find convincing arguments against it […] I’m not so sure why people would be so nervous about it”

61.00 When writing Goodwood, Holly wanted to write about things that aren’t spoken about much, but which are prevalent in Australian society, such as domestic violence, undiagnosed mental illness and alcoholism

63.00 Holly’s reading diet mainly consists of fiction, political books and pop psychology, as well as reading a hard copy of The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper every day

65.00 “I still really like to read a printed newspaper, and I like to do the crosswords with a pen”; previous Penmanship guest David Astle does Friday’s SMH crosswords, and Holly says they are “impossible” to solve

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