Vera (21 page)

  
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THIS DAY TONIGHT

A
pplying make-up is not journalism, nor is giving advice to people who are determined to blow their lives to blazes. The years pass; I'm thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, and I begin to wonder if I will ever amount to more in this country than a cheerful woman with a good brain and a pretty face who can engage you in conversation while your wrinkles are smoothed out.

I can take some comfort in meeting interesting people, by no means all of them celebrities, just people who for one reason or another are invited to show their faces on television. I am happy to confess that meeting celebrities has never meant anything to me. You can't live each day with the SS hunting you for dinner and still feel that the fizzy magic we see in celebrities is what you want to encounter more than any other quality in your fellow human beings. The people you crave to meet are the brave and the generous, those who go from hideout to hideout, whispering, ‘Child, listen to me, hide yourself well today and tomorrow, I have been told that they will come for the children.' They are the ones who end up hanging from a lamppost because they didn't take enough care in hiding themselves. What I enjoy in a man or a woman is the desire to do some justice to being born with a heart and a brain. I saw that in people whose names you would not know, and in some you would know.

Of course, what you might – should! – admire in a celebrity is not their fame and fizz, but their talent, if they have talent. Dave Brubeck, a musician of rare gifts, tells me that his grandparents came from a Polish village – I had just mentioned that my background is Polish while applying some gentle sheen to his cheeks – and we chat about ancestry, politics, jazz. He says that it embarrassed him to find himself on the cover of
Time
magazine, when it should have been Duke Ellington. Best for those who admire you if you reveal a little humility. The man who whispers, ‘Hide yourself, they will come for the children', has found a way to honour his human head and heart, and so has the man who refuses to gorge on fame.

Over these years in make-up, I come to know quite a few of the people in ABC television, or at least their reflections, and it is generally conceded that I might find a happy home in research. I do not pester people for advancement, but my background has become well enough known for people to tell me that I should look at positions advertised internally. And so I do.

In 1967, at the age of thirty-three, I find a research position advertised on the staff of a new show with the proposed title of
This Day Tonight
. Current affairs, five nights a week.

Jan says, ‘It's for you, it's perfect, your English is okay.'

All those years of chatter in make-up have allowed me to develop a more fluent brand of English, also to master colloquialisms, and, after reference to grammatical texts, to know how to avoid split infinitives and employ the subjunctive in the right places.

I ask Sam Lipski – I've come to know him – if he thinks I might suit the research position. He says, ‘Sure.' He's to be the producer. And he's the man you'd choose out of a hundred to be the producer. Big brain, lots of drive, knows people, knows politics.

I go home and type up a résumé. I have my documents from Warsaw University. As I'm typing, I'm impressed. I'd hire me: hell, yes. Under ‘Personal Qualities' I write: ‘Can outdrink anyone. Gorgeous. Good in bed.' No, I don't. I keep it sober, restrained. I want to write, ‘For fuck's sake, I'm made for this.' I don't.

I go before a panel. Sam's in charge. The panel members mull over my credentials, rubbing their chins. They say, ‘Hmm, not bad.' I'm asked a couple of questions. Then one of the panellists – a woman, I don't know her – asks me, ‘What would you bring to the position that might be considered special?'

I say, ‘Plenty.'

Sam says, ‘You'll hear from us.'

And I do. A letter is delivered to me. At the Banff. It says – I'll summarise – ‘We like you, the job's yours, lots of love, The Panel.'

We meet in Gordon Street each morning. We have the whole of the third floor above the newsroom, with partitions and a big table. There are many meetings even before the first show is broadcast in 1967.

Sam Lipski says this to all of us – presenters, reporters, researchers, production people: ‘We've never done this before in Australia. This is current affairs made as important as it truly is. It's not a rerun of the news; it's good brains let loose on the news. This is analysis, interpretation. This is Australian television in the fast lane. Hold onto your hats.'

Was that Sam? I can't be sure. Somebody very like Sam, saying these words.

We were madly excited. Calm, but madly excited. We didn't really need anyone to tell us that the ABC had charged out to take the lead. We could feel it. It was as if we'd all been given a big whack of adrenaline that would be topped up every day for years to come. If you'd been born with a brain and lived through the tedium of the Menzies years, this was something you relished. To be original. To take the news and shake it until it howled for mercy.

I'd only been in Australia since 1958, but I knew that something had to happen. Do you remember the way it used to be? The news at seven o'clock, some big story in politics, some scandal, some attempt at a fat confidence trick, and that confidence trick might be an official government policy, a bill. Then the news was over and there was nothing more to be said. What the hell?

There were people in the ABC with the best brains in the country aching to take that big, fat confidence trick into the studio and turn a spotlight on it. Maybe the con man was a Menzies man; maybe it was some fat-arsed crook from the New South Wales Labor right. The people who'd signed up for
TDT
just wanted to get their hands on the guy, thrust him in front of a camera and ask him questions that would make him sick.

And now here it was:
This Day Tonight
. I'm not talking about missionary zeal; it was simply the excitement of making people you'd heard lies from for years tell the truth, or something close to the truth. It was proper, journalistic scrutiny. And while it was true that many of the journalists at the ABC embraced the politics of the left more than those of the right, the
TDT
crew ached to make the left and the right own up to rubbish policy, unexamined prejudices, slip-shod argument. Not only politics, of course. Stories that cried out for expansion.

And here I am, in the thick of it: Vera with her husky, Eastern European accent, her ironic emphasis, after ten years of sewing buttons on skirts, sweeping dusty floors in a way that subverts the image of Klotzman Industries, of using glue and paste and glass and wire to construct costume jewellery, of smoothing out wrinkles, hiding blemishes, accentuating the cheekbones of those who had cheekbones – after all this, I am a working journalist, and dear God, about time.

The
TDT
presenter is to be Bill Peach. I didn't know him before the gathering of the
TDT
staff before the first program, but he's worked for the ABC in the past, also for the BBC in London and New York, and for the Ten Network, in current affairs. I like him as soon as I see him. He's about thirty-three, easygoing and funny, with a winning smile. And when I see him on air, hosting, I fall in love with him. It's the poise he brings to his role – it hasn't been seen before in news commentary in this country. He is serious without making the big stories sound as if the Seventh Seal has been broken and the Four Horsemen released. Look at what he's achieved. He manages to appeal not only to the traditional ABC viewer in a frumpy cardigan, but also to younger adults who've been at university in this decade of dissent, seen through the bullshit of the war in Vietnam, and embraced casual sex, feminist politics, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Leonard Cohen. And as the first year of
TDT
unfolds, increasingly they watch: they're engaged; they recognise that they're the target audience, that we want to please them. From this point on, politics can be considered sexy.

It's not just Bill alone who creates this sense, of course – it's the production people – but it's Bill I enjoy watching. He has an unusual sort of sexiness, such as a libidinous aunt in her late forties might respond to in a blushful nephew.

Journalists don't always get the chance to take as much pride in what they do as people in other trades. Journalists in Warsaw, in Melbourne, in London – they get used to humiliation, their best work spiked. It's worst in Warsaw, where some party gorilla goes crazy over your copy with a fat red pencil, but it happens everywhere. It could be your boss. It could be the copyeditor who strikes out every three-syllable word and explains that you can't use ‘nonchalant' because only 1 per cent of readers speak French. Or it could be the political bias of the owner of the paper, the station. Journalists are always muttering over their beer, ‘Someday.'

The
TDT
people shine with the satisfaction of making something of quality. This is the ‘someday'. The day you'll make something fine; the day nobody will censor you. The day you'll employ the word ‘non-chalant' without having to answer to a semi-literate copyeditor. Creating the best work you can manage – that's all you need to worry about. The journalists don't make a big deal out of it, but they know that this is the ‘someday'.

It's the ‘someday' for me, too. I think,
Werunia, don't fuck up
.

It's thrilling. Sam says, ‘Vera, today, this and this, okay?' And I say, ‘Sure, this and this.' I get to work. I consult with the reporter. I line up a cameraman (they are always ‘cameramen'; women never get near such apparatus, for some reason). I have come to know all the cameramen, and I have favourites, and they have favourites, so we match the favourites: Vera and Ted, Vera and Mike. We take an ABC car to – well, to where? To Portsea, maybe. Some guy has a startling new theory about the disappearance of Harold Holt – Harold didn't drown; he has been seen in the Portsea pub drinking absinthe and playing darts – some such story. I've had two hours to complete the research, get the facts lined up; this eyewitness is obviously insane, but his looniness gives us a chance to run a story about all the loony Harold Holt theories.