The Saturday Review
THE ADVERTISER AUGUST 4 1984
After a lifetime in journalism MAX FATCHEN, the man of wit and warmth, has retired. Here he reflects on his career as a journalist and the places and people who shaped his life and work.
One night in the late ’30s on the beach near Henley a stable lantern flickered and, by its light, Max Harris read me Dostoyevsky to a background of murmuring waves while I tried earnestly to catch the import of the words.
We were both copy boys on the Adelaide News, Harris, brilliant and controversial was beginning his career as a leading critic, bookseller, writer and lively rebel of Australian letters and I was beginning mine as a mild journalist-to-be.
I enjoyed the reading for I’d come recently from the farm and needed a bit of culture. It was all a long time ago.
Yet that quiet night on the beach remains in my mind somehow for then the world was simpler, the pace was slower.
Nearly 50 years on with a major war intervening, I have seen men reach for the stars, the machines that carried them and the place from which they would depart at Cape Canaveral.
At Maralinga, I saw the hideous mushroom of an atomic explosion, its effects still reverberating
I have watched the wind touch the flowers on the Birdsville track after rain.
I have climbed wild islands of the SA coast and walked among fearless seals and rookeries of complaining sea birds.
I have written wry little verses for the unseen populace and received the readers’ acknowledgements and sometimes their scolding.
There has been much fun, a good deal of tension and great revelations along my journey through journalism.
I have found ordinary people have extraordinary qualities; that there is compassion as well as confrontation
I have seen the destroyers and the builders of our way of life at work.
And I’ve stayed in my own place, SA, which I love despite cajolings and offers from other countries.
I’ve learnt the privilege of writing for children as well as adults
I still live at Smithfield where I can see the farmland where I was born and bred. I still watch the showers of rain march across the paddocks that my father tilled so well and the homestead where my mother taught me about nature. It was where she would go at night and remove the paper with which bird dealers had marked the waxbills’ nests. She would then place the paper in the heart of the prickliest boxthorn.
I’ve watched Elizabeth grow into a fine city despite its difficulties, with its communities of people and its sea of trees.
Other people sometimes shrug their shoulders, lift their eye brows and say, “Elizabeth? You live there?”
It’s my town and there I intend to stay.
Perhaps most of all, I’ve been lucky enough to have a communion with the Australian countryside. I’ve dimly under- stood the wonderful poetic bridge that the Aboriginal people have built between the physical and the spiritual in the land in which we live.
I found that quality of landscape, at night, camping on the Birdsville track with Marree mailman Mel Noden under a canopy of stars with the sleepless land prowling beyond the firelight, old and ruthless yet a wonderful wooer of peoples hearts and senses.
I have wandered across the wide street of Normanton under the lip of the Gulf of Carpentaria on a sultry afternoon. A bullock, horns down chased me across, a dog appeared and chased the bullock and stockmen nodded their heads in the bar and told their stories, of being stranded on Outback islands in the Wet season and making boats out their tent canvas, saddles and saplings to paddle through the flood while crocodiles took the drowned cattle.
So much of Australia is unforgettable. I remember going with Army and Navy surveyors along the coast of Arnhem Land to map the islands and channels.
There was the time I climbed over the stern of a naval survey ship just as she lifted her tail and the sailors held me aloft with boathooks and poles until the ship lowered her rump and they were able to raise mine.
Journalism is an adventure. Sometimes it is boring, long conferences and verbose politics. Sometimes it is cat shows. Sometimes it is street quizzes of what the ordinary people think about such-and-such a law of which they usually don’t think much.
Sometimes it is frenzied excitement, floods and bushfires and people stripped of the normal peaceable guise of everyday and flung into situations that bring out undreamt-of courage.
The great Murray floods of 1956 remain in my memory. There were blokes using their bodies as sandbags; an echidna burrowing into a bank and nearly bringing the whole river down on Renmark.
There were convoys of helpers and food from all over the State: moments of sheer terror in a spinning Army DUKW which the old Murray flung around like a cork. But then again, the panorama of ordinary people doing those extraordinary, courageous things.
I always liked trains. I remember riding an RX engine hauling a small goods train on the Nuriootpa line. A hare came out and loped ahead of the engine.
“He often comes for a run with us,” said the driver.
Then he told of a strange thing that had happened to an RX engine pulling a circus train
Suddenly, in the middle of nowhere the engine unaccountably ran out of water. The train came to a halt. Then the puzzle was solved.
The elephants were riding next to the engine and had taken off the top of its water tank. Merrily they had squirted each other and the surrounding landscape with water until the tank was empty.
There was another elephant story told by an engineer on Adelaide Steam’s Minnipa, running between Port Adelaide and Port Lincoln.
A circus elephant had come aboard and been bedded down on deck.
The engineer came up for a breather and there, in the moonlight, beheld a strange sight.
The elephant’s great loose hide was rolling in grey ripples in unison with the roll of the ship. The engineer was hypnotised and disturbed by these pachydermal waves. He went to the side of the ship and was seasick for the first time in years.
I was a poor performer on ships’ rope ladders and clambering on to dangerous islands. Many bets were placed by sea- farers on my agility and much money changed hands.
But I found seamen, like railwaymen, congenial company. Once I spent three weeks in the Bight with a British distant water trawler, the Southern Endeavour, trawling along the lip of the continental shell.
There I had a chance to study seamen and to listen to their stories of trawlers turning over when they became top heavy with ice in the Arctic Sea
I have always found the sea, like the Inland, to have a spiritual quality about it…the way it can thrash the coastline or like a mirror reflect the sunset at Port Victoria in the great bay where squareriggers once rode and ketches lightered grain from the jetty to the ships which would sail home around the stormy Horn…
Cape Canaveral is a far cry from Yorke Peninsula. It, too, is fat with sandy beaches, with shrimp boats on the horizon and a lighthouse shaped like a rocket with which countless tourists have been teased by locals telling them the lighthouse would blast off for space within the hour.
I stood on a gantry with a giant Saturn rocket in its arms: and saw the big machines busy building the moon base.
The modest control room from which John Glenn’s orbits around the earth had been monitored, seemed insignificant, deserted and dusty on the day I saw it.
President Kennedy had been there a couple of days before and two days before that I’d seen him in what would be his last Press conference in Washington, a tall, golden-headed young man on whom so many people had built their hopes.
A few days later, on November 22, 1963, I stood at Dallas airport watching them bringing his body to the plane where a woman judge swore in President Johnson. Our plane waited at the end of the airstrip while Air Force One taxied past us with its sad cargo to take off for Washington.
Later I sat in the Western Union Office in Market Street, San Francisco, typing my story and finding it all incredible. Back at my hotel a kindly, elderly waitress sat down at my table and wept for what she called America’s shame.
Earlier, in 1963, I had visited Britain with other Australian journalists including that great writer, broadcaster, raconteur and former Test opener, Jack Fingleton. Jack Fingleton remains one of my memorable characters. He hadn’t forgotten Bodyline and believed in putting his views.
One night in a swank Scottish restaurant in Glasgow, Fingleton’s attention was attracted by three men in evening dress playing rather melancholy tunes on a violin, cello and piano on a little balcony above the unheeding diners
“Someone,” said Fingleton in a loud voice, “should give these poor b….s a bit of encouragement.”
He clapped loudly at the end of the item. The whole restaurant froze with shock. The trio paused in mid-note of the next number. Then played on. At the end of the next number our table applauded.
Finally the whole restaurant began exploding with roaring applause.
The men on the little balcony went mad. Their starched collars came undone. They played wild gypsy airs. When we finally left amid tremendous applause, the trio played Waltzing Matilda.
The manager said: “Mr Fingleton, I’ll have to give these men a rise.”
“And about bloody time,” said the cricketing democrat from Sydney.
There are many more stories of many more people. The fun of writing topical verse; the companionship of journalists; the remarkable women journalists whose numbers are increasing and a good thing, too.
People have often said to me, “We don’t know how your wife puts up with you the way you write about her.”
But of course she does because she has a wonderful sense of fun, because we care about each other and have been married 42 happy years.
My days at The Advertiser have seen hot metal change to cool computers, a succession of editors and journalists who have been my warm, professional friends.
But it’s the people out there I’ll remember, too, the farmers and the engine drivers; the lively, independent women, the dauntless grannies and the old- timers; the searching youth; all the pageant of a city and a State which has been my oyster.
Life is not always pretty and there are ugly stories as well as happy ones. This is the way of things.
One last memory. I once presented the cup at the Tarcoola races and, by request, wrote a poem at teatime to recite at the Tarcoola Cup ball.
The hall was jam-packed with station people, Aboriginal stockmen, railway fettlers and their families, children, teachers and everyone dressed to the nines.
I took the stage wearing a pair of baggy, travel-stained trousers and an old sports coat, my usual reporting gear for a dusty countryside. I cringed a little at this sartorial splendour. But the poem brought the most rewarding roar of applause I’ve ever had in a chequered poetical career.
The moon beamed down on the private planes outside, on the cars, and horses, the long straight track of the Trans Australia line while the wind murmured over the wide, timeless land.
After all, who wants the Albert Hall when you can perform at Tarcoola on Cup night under the Outback moon?