By Alan Attwood
MEMOIR
Press Escape
SHAUN CARNEY
MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS, $29.99
Disclosure: I used to work with Shaun Carney. We once shared a cupboard-sized space on the third floor of The Age's Lonsdale Street office. He was always immaculately dressed and had an impressive ability to conduct phone conversations that were unintelligible from just a few feet away.
Shaun CarneyCredit: Simon Schluter
I knew him as a colleague, an astute political journalist with a sideline in music-writing: a close encounter with a rude Elvis Costello once left him shaken. But it seems I barely knew him at all. This becomes clear from his engaging memoir of family life and journalism. We all have secrets, or at least things we choose not to talk about; the Carneys had more than most.
There are two main strands to this book – his working life and his parents. He summarises the first succinctly: "Sixteen years full-time study. Straight into full-time work as a journalist at The Herald (Melbourne), where I lasted for eight years and one day. A single week off during which I was officially not employed but had lined up my next job. Then 26 years, six months and 28 days at The Age."
Press Escape by Shaun Carney.
The truth about his family – his father, in particular – takes longer to discover, but enables him to understand "why my first 15 years had felt like they'd been built on sand."
Carney, a big-city journalist with admirable contacts (those sotto-voce phone-calls could have been with treasurers or opposition leaders), was a shy boy from the suburbs. He grew up in Frankston, long before a freeway made it less remote. "I had no siblings. My father was still a part of the household but, endlessly inventive, was always coming up with reasons not to be around. My mother's life had already started to reshape itself into a narrowing tunnel of disappointment and isolation."
He begins in 2012 with the ostensible end of his career: Carney is one of the legion of journalists whose careers began in the 1970s and ended in redundancy. His reflections on what has happened to newspapers over five decades (the book's clunky title refers to the "Esc" tab on a computer keyboard) will interest former readers and colleagues. But this is even more valuable as social history. He has an acute memory and eye for detail: the roll-call of brand-names and flim-flam from the 1960s and '70s is like an old red-rattler ride to the end of the Frankston line: Marchants lemonade ("Sparkalarkalarkaling"); Guests biscuits; Colvan chips, Maxwell House coffee...
Television was his companion: shows such as Sea Hunt, Casey Jones and (a big treat) Disneyland on Sunday evenings. Crucial to his development was the Adventures of Superman, starring the ill-fated George Reeves. Many other contemporaries were fans. But young Carney wanted to be mild-mannered Clark Kent and work at The Daily Planet more than he aspired to superpowers.
"I saw what happened in a newspaper office and it looked irresistible... Reporters dressed neatly and got to go places. They snooped around and asked what was going on... What a great place to work."
Journalism also represented an escape from Frankston and parents who shared a house rather than a close partnership. It would give too much away to disclose what Carney learns, over time, about his father. He imposes a similar reticence on himself, revealing little about his own personal life – except in the case of a daughter, whom he shields with a false name, who has a long and traumatic battle with childhood leukaemia. His account of this illness, and its impact on her parents, then the inexorable decline of his father, are beautifully handled.
These sections also explain his move away from writing about music – everything starts to sound grey – and increasing misgivings about political journalism, its impact on all participants, and the murky world of on- and off-the-record conversations. News about his father's final illness reaches him as "I was finishing off a column about the psychological warfare between Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott...I couldn't get to the hospital until the following morning".
Unlike many of his contemporaries, Carney is not a big-noter. He assesses his own career as "passable, not great". He is too hard on himself there, and his book merits a much higher mark.
Alan Attwood is a former editor of The Big Issue.