My first trip to Canberra was the result of an arithmetic error, of sorts.
It was in 1964 or 1965.
I recall the incident now after the blunder in last week’s column when I wrote that the naming of Canberra took place 82, rather than 92 years ago. Indeed, I sat bolt upright in the middle of the night – early Friday morning to be precise — realising the blunder. I dashed to the computer and penned an email to the editor of the Forum pages stating that arithmetic was not my strong suit and attached an amended version.
But silly me. I had corrected the Word file but failed to save the changes before attaching it to the email. The 82 years was duly published.
Normally, one would expect a cascade of nyahdy nyahdy nyahnadies. But the object or my tirade on this occasion was Bob McMullan, long-time Federal representative of the ACT in the Senate and the House – a man more keen on dealing with the merits of the argument than some trivial arithmetic error.
I would never have come to Canberra but for a similar error.
We were coming back after 13 days holiday in Sydney. It was always 13 days. We left immediately after by Anglican clergyman father held Mass in Beechworth. He had a locum for the following Sunday and had to be back the Sunday after that.
Somewhere the Sydney side of Goulburn my father said, what about Canberra? How far is that out of the way?
I looked at the map. Easy. Goulburn to Canberra was 23 miles. Canberra to Yass was 25 miles, making 48 miles. Whereas Goulburn to Yass was 31 miles. It was just 17 miles difference. It was not metric those days – so just 30kms difference in today’s laguage.
“Well, let’s look at the National Capital,” my father said, turning the FB Holden down the goat track that was then the Federal Highway.
About half an hour later it was obvious something was radically wrong. We were still a long way from Canberra.
Oh dear. I had in fact added the numbers of the highways rather than the mileage between the cities.
It took ages to get to Canberra. I have a dim recollection of a half-completed bridge in the middle of a paddock and a toasted sandwich in a café near some grey colonnades. We had to press on to get back to Beechworth in time for the next morning’s church services. That was Canberra. My father said we must go back when we have more time.
As it happened some years later a Saint Robert Menzies Commonwealth scholarship got me to ANU and a BA (barely passed). That led to a cadetship at The Canberra Times.
In my first summer, in an inspired piece of meteorological journalism, I wrote on December day that that day’s 32 degrees was “the hottest day this year”. At 9.01am the next day some perfidiously pedantic reader in some suburb yet to be printed in the UBD pointed out that in fact the previous January 14th at 34 degrees was the hottest day that year.
A correction with the dreaded words “this was the reporter’s error” was published the following day and I suffered the sniggers of the newsroom. A far-to-forgiving editor shuffled me to the race guide and show results for some months to learn the importance of figures.
Years later, I wrote a feature on the Very Slow Train to Sydney, describing how it had just three carriages. I also wrote that I had defied the silly NSW railways department’s ban on bringing alcohol on board – I was taking a special bottle to my daughter’s birthday party.
The Features Department thought, “We must have a picture.” The photographer went out the next day and took a splendid photo of the Very Slow Train going under a bridge near Bungendore. That day, however, an extra carriage had been put on.
The perfidiously pedantic reader from a suburb now printed in the UBD was there in force – revelling in it in a Letter to the Editor.
“I don’t know how much of his smuggled bottle Crispin Hull had drunk when he counted the carriages in the ‘Very Slow Train’, but in the picture I distinctly counted FOUR carriages — nyahdy nyahdy nyahnah.” – or words to that effect.
Then we had the Narooma tides. It was in the early 1990s.
I had been taken on a wonderful scuba dive inside the great rock wall that defines the Narooma bar. You go into the water near the bar about an hour before high tide and drift with the tide along the rock wall.
I attempted to repeat the dive with some friends and relatives. I looked at The Canberra Times tide advice on the weather page. I was editor at the time, so had complete confidence in everything published. High tide at Narooma, according to The Canberra Times, was going to be at noon that day so 11am was the perfect time.
With enormous confidence and bravado about local knowledge, I assured everyone of a magnificent drift dive. We struggled into our diving gear and entered the water.
It was utterly hopeless and humiliating. We were being sucked out to sea.
Later investigation revealed that for almost half a decade someone at The Canberra Times had been ADDING an hour instead of SUBTRACTING it from some base level tide in Sydney. I don’t think any newspaper in the English-speaking world has apologised for five year’s worth of error.
Another blunder was not arithmetical. It came from me using voice-recognition technology – you dictate and the computer prints the words. In an appallingly inappropriate context, John Howard’s praise for “ordinary Australians” in the face of the Hansonite horror came out as “ordinary astray aliens”.
But never has technology failed a journalist so grievously as when one of our obituary writers, who was notorious for typos, ripped his piece through an early version of Microsoft Word spell-checker accepting every suggested correction as it came up. Almost unbelievably, the daughters of the dearly departed – “Gisele, Kirsten and Ingrid” — appeared in print as “Gazelle, Keratin and Ingrate”.
I wince even now at the thought of it.