Versatile wordsmith Andrew Rule once tied his dog outside the local shops and, with mind still raking over a newspaper story he was writing at the time, absent-mindedly walked home alone. Man's best friend was not happy. 3AW's Neil Mitchell was laid low with a chronic back condition four years ago but was so keen to air his views on an upcoming election that he broadcast while dosed up on painkillers, lying prostrate on his lounge-room floor. An ambulance took him to hospital half an hour later.
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Is the media an obsessive business? Of course. It always has been. Few have been more obsessive than news photographer Bruce Postle whose famous shot of trainer Tommy Woodcock and horse Reckless in 1977 typifies the tenacity of the trade. Chasing a (false) rumour that, before big races, Woodcock slept in the stable with his horses, Postle pestered the little bloke relentlessly to pose for a photo in the weeks leading up to the Melbourne Cup. He eventually wore Woodcock down, the clincher being a blow-up mattress that Postle produced for Tommy's comfort (Postle had been carrying it around with him for that reason). The great beast nuzzled the little trainer's chest and "snap", a picture for the ages.
Rule, Mitchell and Postle are among 31 names added on Friday night to the Melbourne Press Club's Victorian Hall of Fame, an honour roll that now stretches across the years from Melbourne's first newspaper publisher, John Pascoe Fawkner, to the current-day leaders of the media pack.
They include Michelle Grattan, Les Carlyon, Alan Kohler, Laurie Oakes, Caroline Wilson, Ben Hills, Peter Blunden, Terry McCrann, Peter Isaacson -- a media dream team -- and now all 81 Hall of Famers are saluted in a new book, Media Legends – Journalists who helped shape Australia (Wilkinson Publishing). It is a delicious smorgasbord of achievement, history, characters and ripping yarns well-told by such fine word-sculptors as Garry Linnell, Martin Flanagan and Virginia Trioli. Some chapters about legends are written by fellow legends – Andrew Rule, for example, wrote the chapter on Les Carlyon while Neil Mitchell wrote the chapter on Andrew Rule. Political scribes Michelle Grattan and Laurie Oakes profiled each other.
Collectively, these mini-biographies clearly show what a huge impact the profession can have on the communities it serves. Harry Gordon, for example, can justly claim to have saved thousands of lives through the landmark "Declare War on 1034" campaign launched in response to a horror road toll during his editorship of the Sun News-Pictorial in the 1960s. More recently Neil Mitchell saved Melburnians around $20 million when he exposed faulty speed cameras, forcing the government to repay invalid fines.
For journalists down the ages the job has always been a thrilling ride. Caroline Wilson says she was first attracted to journalism by the sports journalists who knew her father – they seemed "romantic characters with very exciting lives". Of course, sometimes the excitement can go too far. Historian Geoffrey Blaimey points out in a foreword to the book, that the only rebel to be jailed after the uprising at the Eureka Stockade in 1854 was the editor of Ballarat Times, Henry Seekamp.
A century later the new medium of television began generating legends of its own – Jana Wendt, whose combination of charm and wiles earned her the soubriquet "the Perfumed Steamroller", and John Sorell, a star newspaper man who went on to transform TV news at Channel Nine. That was despite Sorell telling Kerry Packer, who first sought him out, that he had no idea how television worked. Good, said Packer - a news director who knew how cameras worked was in the wrong job.
Mike Sheahan was another to make the jump seamlessly from newspaper to TV and radio, to become one of the most influential media voices on Melbourne's sporting obsession, AFL football. Who would have predicted it when he started as a teenager on a two-week relief job at the Werribee Banner?
A permanent Hall of Fame exhibition is planned at the State Library and a possible national honour roll further down the track. Although the media landscape seems to change with ever-increasing speed, there will always be the personalities who have helped make it such a rich mix. Talents like the late Robert Haupt, another 2014 inductee, who took to his ground-breaking Age post in Moscow during the 1990s with such verve that he lived the part in a run-down pre-revolution apartment, learning Russian and growing such bushy hair he resembled (quipped former Age editor Michael Davie) "a missing Marx Brother".
Haupt was no less off-beat in the office. Eight years earlier, he had been the acting editor of the Age on the day Peter Cole-Adams filed a strongly critical column from Buenos Aires on the sinking of the General Belgrano by the British during the Falklands war. Haupt sent a note saying the sensible thing to do would be to spike this "emotional angry" piece. Instead, said Haupt, he was putting it on the front page. Funny business, the media.
The 2014 inductions into the Melbourne Press Club's Victorian Hall of Fame
James Harrison
Marcus Clarke
Bertie Cook
Les Tanner
Wilfred Burchett
Sir John Williams
Peter Isaacson
B.A. Santamaria
Terry Phelan
Creighton Burns
Ranald Macdonald
John Sorell
Bruce Postle
Phillip Adams
Ben Hills
Robert Gottliebsen
Laurie Oakes
Les Carlyon
Michelle Grattan
Ron Tandberg
Robert Haupt
Mike Sheahan
Terry McCrann
Neil Mitchell
Alan Kohler
Jana Wendt
Peter Blunden
Caroline Wilson
Robert Thomson
Gideon Haigh
Andrew Rule
Media Legends: Journalists Who Helped Shape Australia, Edited by Michael Smith and Mark Baker (Wilkinson Publishing).
RRP $49.95. Available from the Melbourne Press Club and book stores.
