Emma Macdonald was quite cross last week.
She had written a column for the Summer Page. The Summer Page runs in January to add bulk to the paper and fill the space between the saying advertisements. It is also there to occupy people who take January off down the coast. There is some light entertainment and the soft read.
Macdonald’s column was a beautifully written tale about a possum that lived in her fire box. She got e-mails and letters saying what a wonderful piece and litanies from people telling her how possums should be removed, fed, cared for or exterminated.
So a fuming Emma came into the office, “” I write all this important stuff about the education of people’s kids, for Christ’ sake, and no-one says a word. I write a shitty little piece about a bloody possum and all these people write in saying . . . .””
(Sorry, journalists tend to speak with the expletives undeleted and undiluted.)
She was too cross to finish the sentence.
I tried to console her by relating a story about Bruce Juddery. One day Juddery wrote an hilarious column about driving back from the South Coast in a very unreliable Volkswagen.
The column was exquisite. There were no clauses, sub-clauses, attention-shattering extraneous asides between dashes or parenthetical diversions that would make an ACTION bus route look direct.
Next day, a fuming Juddery, expletives undeleted came into the newsroom.
“”You bastards. I write, important pertinent columns about public administration in this town and none of you say a word. I write some crap about my Volkswagen and you are all over me.”
Mutter, murmur, fume, spit, spew.
I share their anguish. It happened to me last week.
I write long and learned articles about constitutional law, health insurance and federal-state financial arrangements to a dead audience.
Last week I wrote a snippet in the desperation of a policy-free January about bicycle paths.
Gosh. A letter writer urged that Saint Crispin be invited to take over Urban Services. Incisive. Brilliant. Hammer on the nail. Best thing you have ever written. Etc Etc.
Sob. What about the expose on media policy? What about slaving over health-insurance mumbo jumbo and translating it into English? What about diligently searching through three years of judicial records to expose the mania of the ACT judiciary? All nought.
Tis the fate of columnists.
The essential point, though, is Macdonald could not possibly have got such a response from the possum column without the training gained from the harsh discipline of writing education. Education is tough. Every pedantic teacher and parent is at you. Similarly Judders could not do a coastal car trip so well without the discipline of a decade of public service writing.
So, too, with Bill Mandle. Mandle is well versed in the discipline of history. Furious socialists love to hate him. Mandle has had a bit of flogging in the Letters column in the past week or so. (His reply is in the Forum pages this week.)
Mandle has been branded a right-wing columnist. The lefties demand some balance. They want an equivalent left-wing columnist.
This argument misses the point. It should not be a left-right argument but a demand for diversity of opinion.
To the extent that Mandle and Steven Kates are right-wing, Tom Connors and Marie Coleman are left-wing. All four would rightly fume at those labels. They are not political apparaticks. They are all people of the world. More importantly, they all write well about a diverse range of topics. Sure, Kates sticks to economics, but the joy of Mandle is that you don’t know whether he will pop up with a column of cricket, or depression, or marriage, or welfare. With Coleman you don’t know whether it will be NRMA road service or the Child Support Agency. With Connors, it is most often agriculture, but he grazes over the gamut of the human condition.
The staff columnists are harder to pin labels on. Sometimes you’d swear Robert Macklin was a tory. Next week he is wringing wet. He hates Howard then gets stuck into Beazley. Penelope Layland hops from soft life issues to solid hard-head stuff. But, my heaven, it is always beautifully written.
As for my stuff, I hope to translate huge amounts of government and opposition policy into understandable English, particularly media, health policy and constitutional law. I’m just a translator. And when I see foolish governments mess up cycling rules — small beer stuff, sure — I write about it. (God, it’s good to be paid for your hobby.)
I think all of us — lefties, righties and eclectic centrists — try to make it readable. If not we’re gone.
And we are all Clint Eastwoods at heart. Give us a Letter to the Editor writer with a loaded gun of vitriol and we will say, “”Make my day.”