Vera (22 page)

The reporter could be Allan Hogan – best if it is. Allan, I adore, and he knows exactly what he's doing. Or it might be Peter Couchman, but probably not if this is a Harold Holt fruitcake piece – Peter is more attracted to stories with a sympathetic dimension.

At Portsea, Allan meets up with the crazy guy, interviews him, with a touch of irony, and films some footage on the beach maybe. Allan rehearses all the other disappearance yarns, then we head back to Gordon Street, I run upstairs, thrust the film into the hands of the editors, and the story is cobbled together by the 4 pm deadline.

Many stories that run on the show emerge from this sort of welter, this
meshugge
. Everything is done at speed, under pressure, glancing at your wristwatch every two minutes, three minutes, making quick calculations: we have time for this, we don't have time, make time. I think of what Anna Akhmatova said of making poems: that the readers of what the poet offers to the public would be appalled if they knew the mess from which these finely crafted lines emerge. She meant the squalid morass of experience that is the quarry of the creative mind, some grubby gem plucked from the muck, then cleaned up, made to shine. What if the
TDT
viewers could witness the mess from which our stories emanate? Because even to make a four-minute story about a lunatic's delusions requires creativity, craft, and for at least part of the time we are small-scale artists, plunging our hands into the mud to find a gem-phrase.

If Peter Luck or Paul Murphy or Tony Joyce (the first reporters on
TDT
) or Allan Hogan or Peter Couchman or any first-rate journalist is given time – as they are, now and again – they can fashion fabulous stuff with the quality of craft you expect of a poet. They work hard; they get themselves to the right place at the crucial moment. They're painstaking to the point of absurdity. And they require of me more than my pretty face. I have to keep up, be as exacting as they are, find the people they need, persuade them to talk. If I were to say, ‘Allan, no, the person you're after, he's dead,' that might only just – only just! – be an acceptable excuse. ‘Dead? Bullshit. Who says he's dead? Where's his grave? Have you seen it?'

The show's journalists bear the burden of the competent. You know how that works? Like this. The more able you show yourself to be, the more is expected of you. Bring the dead man back to life, for long enough to complete the interview. In Warsaw as a student, I enjoyed the expectation that I would know how to do anything necessary. As a student of journalism I was expected to intern at Warsaw Television, where we were taught to handle any situation that might occur during production of any show at all – news, drama, kids shows, comedies. A button falls off a costume for some Polish production of
Hamlet
– sew it back on. Hamlet himself is inebriated (boyfriend trouble with Laertes) – sober him up, you've got twenty minutes, the interval is yours. Also, write the cue cards again, twice as big, for some Gomułka stooge who is too vain to wear his spectacles on camera. For Gomułka himself, make sure the cameraman knows to avoid showing his fingers, because the nails will be dirty.

My job as a researcher is a hundred jobs, and if I am able to handle them competently it is because of Warsaw. It is because of Warsaw, and earlier. It is because of Lvov. There, in my hunger, I taught myself to think of anything that made the pain of fear fade. I taught myself to stay silent, even more silent than I needed to be. I taught myself to become a shadow among shadows, more like a shadow than was strictly necessary. This took skill. Another lesson concerned staring down at my feet, which were frozen, and making my feet believe they were warm. Each of the things I learnt, I learnt well. I told myself stories, and each story was carefully crafted. I said, ‘Werunia, more of the world awaits you than soldiers and their boots marching over the cobbles, more of the world awaits you than the cold in your bones. Two years have passed and with a hundred skills you have stayed alive. Your papa is dead and that is a bad, bad thing, but more of the world awaits you than sorrow.' And I said, ‘Werunia, your shoes are falling apart on your feet. Find some string, tie the soles to the uppers, use your skill to find the string, use your skill to tie the soles to the uppers. Werunia, use your wits.'

When I said, ‘More of the world awaits you …' I was speaking in hope, of course. The children beside me in the hiding place, sitting stone still, breathing in silence, wetting their pants in silence, their ears pricked for the sound of a footfall that comes too close; each of those children spoke to themselves in hope of more of the world awaiting them, and for most it was a hope that was never to be. In some hiding place I did not share on a particular day – where was I? concealed in yellow winter grass and packed snow up against a fence? – a footfall came too close, a man's voice shouted: ‘
Aussteigen!
' Another voice shouted: ‘
Sie fanden einige Jüden?
' The first voice: ‘
Kinder abschaum!
' And it was over for these small people. Why was I not in the hiding place with the other children that day? It was not the warning of the old man who said: ‘They will come for the children tomorrow.' I had noticed something that warned me, some skill among a hundred had alerted me. Maybe I had heard the distant roar of trucks arriving at the SS headquarters in the middle of the night. Lvov trained me to exploit every talent, every knack I possessed. The soldiers who came to Lvov from Germany to murder me and any Jew of any age they could find had educated me in the craft of being good at what I did.

It is at this time, the early seventies, that I meet John Hepworth, that wonderful, witty man, a journalist on
Nation Review
, a wonderful, witty paper, a weekly, very left-wing. It's maybe at a party that I meet John, or in the Canberra studio one time. Richard Walsh is the
Nation Review
publisher. I can't say ‘wonderful and witty' again, so let me say of Richard ‘clever'. Also a bit driven. I enjoy men who are driven, as long as they're not mad. I'm drinking when I first meet John, and John is drinking too, but what am I trying to convey by saying that? We're always drinking; it's more important to journalists than the red blood in their veins. More important to some than to others. Very important to John.

And to Mungo MacCallum, who's also working for
Nation Review
: their chief political writer. I've used up my ‘wonderful's and ‘witty's – too bad, because they're qualifiers that apply more to Mungo than to anyone else on earth. With some people, men and women, you listen to their marvellous conversation, you laugh at their jokes, you warm to them, but you somehow know that this is the absolute best of them: you've heard everything they have to offer and the next time you talk to them you'll get variations of what you heard today. Mungo is different. You listen for an hour and you feel that this is just a small part of what he can offer. Vera adores Mungo. Mungo loves Vera. Enough said.

And Michael Leunig, the cartoonist, he's also at
Nation Review
when I first meet him; that paper is a goldmine of talent. Michael is a gorgeous man, such warmth. Something I enjoyed about Michael was that he had more hair than almost anyone else, man or woman, but not me. I was on top in that way, thank God. My big messy head of hair, I love it.

I'm an immigrant. I can't experience the thrill and the pride Australians enjoy as this nation grows more sophisticated, and more complex. I only know little bits of what came before. But this I do know: you can't have a show like
TDT
unless something good is happening, not just in the ABC, but in a thousand places all over the country. And one aspect of this good thing is that Australians seem to be ready in a way I haven't noticed before to see themselves satirised. And satire is always just below the surface on
TDT
. We include a segment each week that gives a guy with a guitar sitting on a stool the chance to lampoon something topical in politics or in Australian culture, such as the ludicrous national cuisine. The song's chorus: ‘Hot pie and tomato sauce / Same again for the second course …' The message of these parodies is that it's okay to laugh yourself crazy over the serious business of politics, or to poke a stick up the behind of a sacred cow dawdling down the road.

The
TDT
producers and presenters would like more of this satirical complement, but you can only go so far before you end up with something that Max Gillies would appear in, rather than current affairs. Bill, with his laconic sense of humour, is aware each night that almost every political story on
TDT
could be introduced with a satirical smile and a raised eyebrow, and it's part of his mastery of the presenter's role that he's able to give the impression that he takes politics seriously. Which he does. And doesn't. It is the mischief in him that delights me most.

It is Bill who is largely responsible for the items on April 1st each year that try to pass off utter nonsense as serious news stories: the invention (for example) of a fishing rod equipped with a dial that allows you to select the type of fish you wish to catch. We're not talking about fabulous wit: something more like schoolboy japes. But welcome.

I meet them each day, politicians from both sides. I greet them when they arrive, flatter them, walk them to the studio. But it is not the politicians and not the political stories on
TDT
that mean the most to me. Gough, sure, who would not be impressed by an intellect like that? And let me say this: his intellect is bigger than his ego, and that man's ego is Everest. And it is not that I scorn politicians – just the opposite, I usually like them. Why not? Most are prepared to work hard at their job; most are honest enough. A house full of them is like a house full of people from any other profession: a few of extraordinary ability; a few schmucks,
shmegegges
; most in the middle. The men usually like to flirt – a good thing if they have some style, some wit, which they don't; the women – not so many women at this time – are mostly half-mad with the struggle to keep smiling when their colleagues throw off one sexist remark after another, hilarious I'm sure, and to mother their children over the landline from Canberra. The women are full of conviction – good convictions, bad convictions – and also resentment after seeing so many schmucks promoted ahead of them.

I am not a groupie. As a journalism student in the studios in Warsaw, I saw politicians all the time, party hacks, a couple more classy, and most had more power over the lives of their fellow countrymen than any politician in Australia will ever know. Some junior minister for pig production, if he doesn't like the look of you – maybe you've spoken up about the living conditions of abattoir workers – this junior minister can speak to somebody in state security, and in a week or so, you're off to the Polish gulag for twenty years. If you survive, good luck, but probably you won't. There's no mystique in politics when you've seen such things, no mystique in the exercise of power. The reporters, the presenters, the producers: they're connoisseurs of the power game, endlessly fascinated by its ebb and flow, even the very best of them – Bill Peach, Allan Hogan, Kerry, Gerald Stone, Sam Lipski too, and sure, the same goes for Mungo, who tries to keep a satirical distance – they'd go crazy if they couldn't throw themselves into the hurly-burly of big politics, federal politics. To them the theatre of Canberra is Greek; it's Sophocles, Euripides, but not as well written. They know it has its ridiculous aspects but they can't help it. And okay, it's important, the politics of this big, juicy social democracy, because a completely fair parliamentary system is what you want and that's what you get here. If you record 50 per cent of the national vote, you can be sure that you have the support of 50 per cent of the electorate, not 50 per cent reduced to 10 per cent by a gang of thugs. If you end up with a government full of schmucks, you can be fairly sure that it was voted in by schmucks. Here, you get the government you deserve. You're not going to get a government that's sweeter and purer or more villainous than the people who voted it in. In Warsaw it was different. The Poles were better than the people who governed them. Not a lot better, but a bit. So that's what I feel you can celebrate in the Australian democracy. If you're governed by galahs (that Australian term, ‘galah', I love it; a friend pointed to a flock of galahs once and explained it to me), galahs voted the government in. Simple.