The Journalist and the Teenager

I can’t remember what reason my mother gave in the note to excuse me early from school on that day in March 1975. It would have been one of her ‘white lies’ about me having an appointment. Perhaps she said it was a ‘specialist’s appointment’, which, in a sense, was true.

The appointment I had was with Age journalist Jennifer Byrne. I walked home from school that day along the pathway next to the railway line that led to Camberwell Station in Melbourne thinking—in a punching-the-air kind of way—I’m going to be interviewed by a journalist.

Jenny, as she was known then, had been commissioned to do a feature story on what it was like for four women of different generations to be thirteen years old. It was the idea of Graham Perkin, the now-celebrated, great editor of the Age at that time. The story was what some journalists in those days called ‘a matcher’, a concept copied from one of the overseas papers and applied in Australia.

Being thirteen, I qualified as a subject. Family friends who knew Jenny recommended me as a kid with strong opinions and plenty to say. I didn’t hesitate when asked. My parents agreed on the condition that my father could ‘vet’ the article before publication.

At home I changed out of my school uniform and into a mid-length, pale blue scrub denim skirt, a shirt my sister had bought from the shop Merivale and Mr John, pale-blue stockings and cork platform shoes. I then applied eye shadow, mascara and some rouge to my face. Looking back, the outfit strikes me as strange because I was always more comfortable in Levis, runners and no make-up. These interview clothes were my teenage ‘going out’ clothes and, as I was to be photographed, I dressed up.

At the appointed time, Jenny picked me up from my house in a taxi. Seeing the suburb I lived in enabled her later to describe my socio-economic position, and she wrote of Camberwell as a ‘middle brow suburb’. My interview quotes would later contrast well with the conservatism of bourgeois, pub-less Camberwell, filled with parks and large, double-brick Victorian and Edwardian homes inhabited alternately by ageing widows and young, mostly Liberal-voting, families.

Jenny and I drove across Melbourne’s eastern suburbs past working-class Richmond to her apartment on a tree-lined street, which was close to Toorak Road — a favourite, move-out-of-home location for ex–private school kids in the wealthy Melbourne suburb of South Yarra.

Jenny was dressed fashionably in jeans and boots. She was leaning forward in the taxi and smiling at me in much the same way as I watch her do with her subjects now. It was as if I was the most important person in the world. This is not a criticism. It’s what journalists do. I’ve done it myself—smiled for longer than was comfortable, nodded with more vigour than was necessary, and leaned forward further than was natural, to beckon desired material from the mouths of interview subjects. Jenny, with her larger-than-life smile, was good at it. She still is.

Her apartment, as I remember, was modern for its day—a brownish brick building with pale carpets and big windows. Jenny and I sat at her dining table opposite each other and she offered me a glass of white wine and a cigarette. I accepted more than one of each. Back then my parents knew that I smoked a bit and I was allowed the occasional glass of wine with a meal. (It would be another year before I tried pot.) My parents might have thought I’d have a cigarette during the interview, although news of the alcohol came as a surprise.

Conversation flowed. Jenny asked questions in her intelligent, fun-filled way and my swear-word–studded answers fell freely from my mouth. The more Jenny nod-smiled, the bigger I talked. By the time the photographer turned up, her notebook contained my quotes on boys, smoking, drinking, homosexuality, marriage, children, hobbies, watching Number 96 and being patronised by adults (‘It shits me up the wall,’ I said of the last.) The photograph to go with the story was a full-length shot of me, directed by the photographer, standing in Jenny’s lounge room with my hands in my skirt pockets, leaning to one side—a slight swagger to a stance I’d not struck before and haven’t since.

A few weeks after the interview, my father went out to lunch with Graham Perkin, who took him back to the Age office in Spencer Street to read and vet the article ahead of publication. ‘It’s provocative,’ he told my mother when he came home that night. Lunches in media circles were long, boozy affairs in the 1970s and I doubt my father’s that day with Perkin was an exception. Both died of massive heart attacks later that year. Not only did Dad agree to the article in full, he authorised the inclusion of a statement that was not mine. To my subsequent and expressed horror, he allowed me to be misquoted as having name-dropped my late grandfather, Louis Voumard QC, in the context of comments about maybe wanting to become a lawyer when I grew up. ‘I didn’t say that,’ I said, on reading it later. ‘I let them put it in,’ said my father. I felt embarrassed because it made me sound boastful. Of course I forgave Dad his own rebellious flourish, a calculated and rarely expressed ‘up you’ to conservative Melbourne. I wondered what Jenny thought of this tinkering with the truth, although I never got to ask her. And what of Perkin, the great newspaper editor?

There’s no doubt the detail was true and gave the story added spice—the swearing, smoking granddaughter of the late and strongly Anglican Melbourne legal figure. By today’s journalistic standards, to manufacture a quote, even with a father’s blessing, is unethical. The reason I find this interesting is that journalism back then was on the cusp of becoming a profession, and I suspect ethics in the broadsheet press were a little more elastic and subject to less scrutiny then than they are now. This bears thinking about given the reverence in which the Perkin era at the Age is held.

The Age published the story in its Saturday edition on 5 April 1975. Of the four subjects interviewed, I was the headline act. ‘And she’s only 13 …’ it began. It summed me up as a ‘mix of considered depth, throwaway opinion and adolescent enchantments’, adding ‘[she] feels a cigarette or two calms her down for the discussion’. No mention of the wine.

I was quoted as saying: I was allowed to do whatever I wanted; that there were no restrictions on me going out with boys; that my mother didn’t mind me smoking but my father did; that I planned to get married at twenty-five or maybe older, and that I wanted to feel free in life and not tied down. I cared about population control. I had it all worked out. Or so it seemed in the article. Perkin told my father he thought it was the best story Jennifer Byrne had ever written.

Thirty-five years after the publication of ‘What it means to be 13’, I track it down on microfiche in the State Library of New South Wales. The first thing that strikes me, and that I must have forgotten, is that Jenny misspelt my given name. When I read the piece now, I am struck by how little actual writing there is in it. It’s almost pure quotes stacked one on top of the other. There are six paragraphs of introduction and twenty-three paragraphs of direct quotes. Without context and linkages some of the statements seem like non sequiturs, even though there is a freshness to the style that jumps out of the page and is what made it a compelling read for its day. It feels rushed though, a reflection I suppose of the breathlessness of journalism in such changing times.

I remember waking up and going into my parents’ bedroom on the Saturday of its publication where the paper was laid out on the bed. My mother and father were having a laugh about it together, aware that it would, as people said in the seventies, create a stir. It did. The phone started ringing late that morning and didn’t stop all day. Many of the calls were from friends and relatives—some shocked but most supportive. Several, from strangers, were abusive. The one I remember most is the woman who asked my mother if she was speaking to Sonya’s mother. ‘I hope you’re proud of your daughter talking about things like homosexuality in the paper,’ she said. We took the phone off the hook after that.

For the next couple of months, ‘What it means to be 13’ was the subject of much controversy in Melbourne, where schools held class discussions and the rights and wrongs of my opinions and lifestyle were hotly debated. Oddly, few if any criticisms were about me smoking.

For a long time stories found their way back to my family about someone having been either offended or impressed with my comments in the newspaper. One remote acquaintance described me as ‘a little tart’ to some family friends. Their daughter, who was also thirteen, cheerily repeated the insult to me. Our immediate neighbour said people were fascinated to know what I was really like when they learned I lived next door to her. A close friend of my father’s who was also a senior journalist said the story would have ‘ruined a lesser child’. A relative said I’d ‘rubbed the family name in the dirt’. The cousin of a school friend made fun of what Jenny had described as my ‘jacked up clogs’. My shoes, said this girl, were ‘not real platties, more like T-Bar sandals’. In the seventies, the power of the media was just beginning to be realised, including by me. Strangely, I seemed to sail through it pretty much unscathed although the T-Bar sandal jibe stung.

So many big things happened that year. Our family moved to London for a while, my father died, the Australian newsmen, three of whom had been sent to East Timor by a close family friend, were killed and Whitlam was sacked. What it meant for me to be thirteen in April 1975 was very different to what it meant in December of that same year. Those bigger events overshadowed my cameo role in shocking Melbourne readers of the Age.

Over the next few years, back in Australia, Jennifer Byrne and I were sometimes at the same social gatherings. But the rapport she’d worked so hard and quickly to establish on the day of our interview had vanished. I certainly didn’t expect us to become best buddies but the odd thing is that despite being (very loosely) socially and professionally connected I don’t think, apart from across-the-room hellos, we ever spoke again.

In 1980 I became a journalist myself, first on the Melbourne Herald, then as a political journalist for the Age, where I worked in the 1980s and 1990s, and later freelanced for magazines. I learned early that as a journalist there is often little time or sympathy for concerns about the impact stories have on the people at the centre of them. Relationships between journalists and subjects are quickly consummated and just as quickly consumed. Those trading their information, whatever their motive, can never be sure how it will be used. Stories that displease or hurt subjects are often not wrong in the technical sense.

In her book The Journalist and the Murderer, American writer Janet Malcolm wrote that: ‘Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible … He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse.’ Two things strike me about this: journalism is transactional; and you can never see yourself exactly as someone else sees you.

One of my first news jobs involved a picture story about a tiger snake that got caught and died in the hub cap of a Mercedes. I don’t think I’m imagining that the caption to the story, written by one of the subs, was something like, ‘You’ve heard of a tiger in your tank but …’ On the way back from that job we came across a car accident. The photographer screeched our car to a halt and jaywalked us across several terrifying lanes of traffic to ‘cover’ the accident, after which a woman, injured, though not seriously, was being lifted into an ambulance. As the photographer clicked away, I stood back. Back at the office as the car crash photo was rushed into print, I was reprimanded for not gathering details of the accident. ‘You’ve got to toughen up,’ the chief of staff said.

A year or so later, I was assigned to do a story on Prue Acton and the Australian fashion industry. Over a Japanese lunch in her Little Bourke Street studio we spent a couple of hours discussing the difficulties facing the fashion world. The gist, if not the exact words, of my published story intro was as follows: ‘Prue Acton and pessimism aren’t compatible, which is why it takes the Australian fashion designer almost two hours to admit things in her industry have never been worse …’ Acton was furious and rang the then fashion editor of the Herald to complain that I had misrepresented her as someone who was talking down the industry. Had I misquoted her? the editor asked her. I hadn’t and, to her credit, Acton didn’t say I had. I expect she thought I betrayed her without remorse, although I didn’t mean to. I thought I was telling her story.

Throughout my years in journalism, I hope I haven’t betrayed too many people without remorse, although doubtless some have been unhappy with how they came out in print. One of them was the late Aboriginal singer Ruby Hunter, whom I interviewed for a story about the Stolen Generations for Marie Claire magazine in the mid 1990s. When I spoke to her later, Ruby told me of her disappointment. ‘It didn’t tell everything that happened. It just seemed so small,’ she said.