Life of Brine By PHIL JARRATT
LAST Saturday morning I found myself walking west on Sydney’s Broadway, heading for a breakfast meeting at the edge of the city.
As I passed the old Grace Bros building and then crossed over Glebe Point Road, its welcoming little cafes dotted in one direction, the beautiful spires of Sydney University in the other, I was suddenly overcome by an incredible sense of deja vu.
I realised that it was a quarter of a century, almost to the day, since I had left the offices of the old Bulletin magazine at 54 Park Street and marched westward bearing a backpack. I was tracing the footsteps of Blue Mountains explorers Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson, who of course did not have an air-conditioned city office from which to leave, nor a restaurant of any description (let alone the magnificent Cleopatra) in which to celebrate the conclusion of the journey.
I walked on into the night, crashed in a Parramatta Road motel and met my friend and editor David Dale on the lower slopes the following morning. Dale had an old-fashioned transistor radio and a single earphone, and he spent much of the day listening to exit polls and commentary on the Queensland elections. When we stopped for lunch we phoned Quentin Dempster, the magazine’s Brisbane correspondent, for the latest news.
I’m sure it was unusual for a couple of Sydney journos to take this much interest in another state’s election, but this was no ordinary poll. The popular young Labor leader Wayne Goss seemed likely to end more than 30 years of the iron grip of Johannes Bjelke-Petersen and his white-shoed acolytes, thereby dragging the Sunshine State out of the darkness and into the light. (At least this was the view from Sydney; it was considerably more complex, as I would discover.)
As promised, Goss delivered and we celebrated his triumph and ours on good old Kerry Packer’s tab at Cleopatra. The Sunday lunch was long and raucous and by the end of it Dale had confided in me that Quentin Dempster had accepted a new role at the ABC in Sydney and that the magazine was looking for a new Queensland political correspondent. Between the profiteroles and the cheese platter, the sticky and the port, I put my hand up for the job.
A couple of days later, in the less excitable environment of Dale’s office, I laid out my conditions. Spreading a crumpled map of southern Queensland and northern NSW across his desk, I drew an ellipse from Byron Bay in the south to Noosa in the north.
“This is where I live,” I said. “Between two hours south and two hours north of Parliament House. I’ll never miss a beat of the big game but I’ll also be part of the greatest migratory shift in our history. South to north. Or, as I call it, Sea-Change.”
OK, OK, I never said the last bit, but Dale seemed convinced, and by the end of the summer school holidays, we were Noosans. Thus began a fly-on-the-wall proximity to an extraordinary time in Queensland politics. Hanging out at the Strangers Bar in Parliament House, I became friendly with Labor Party secretary Wayne Swan, Goss’s press flack Dennis Atkins, his chief of staff Kevin Rudd (not so much) and eventually Goss himself. The good stories flowed my way.
I warmed to Goss immediately. A month older than me, he was sharp, funny, a tad cynical (I particularly liked that) and fit as a trout. He was also a great competitor. He liked to come to Noosa and run the National Park in the early morning. Although I had run full and half marathons until well into my thirties, I never once kept up his pace through the coast and Tanglewood circuit. Once, when I stopped by his office to invite him to come to Noosa to launch a photographic book our company had produced, he went straight to his diary, worked out he could fit in a beach run before and a park circuit the following morning, and accepted immediately.
In the wake of a devastating family tragedy in the early ’90s, I was crossing Sunshine Beach Road at the Junction one day when a window-tinted SUV pulled to an abrupt halt and I heard my name called from within. The premier of Queensland got out and hugged me, whispering, “I’m so sorry for your loss”.
Now Gossie has gone, and I’m so sorry at his loss. As so many others have noted, politics don’t come into it. He was a good man and he left this state a better place.
Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, oy, oy, oy
Surfing’s world tour is down to the pointy end, with the final event of the men’s race shaping for an exciting conclusion in a few days at Pipeline, and the final comp of the women’s tour already underway at beautiful Honolua Bay on Maui.
Our Mick Fanning has an outside chance of taking his fourth world title, but really, it would pretty much take the young Brazilian Medina breaking his leg for that to happen.
In the women’s, however, whatever happens we win!
The old warhorse Steph Gilmore (she must be 27 by now!) has so many world title trophies on her mantelpiece she probably wouldn’t notice another one, but she is in the box seat and the challenge is on for untitled young guns Sally Fitzgibbons and Tyler Wright, both of whom can theoretically take Steph down.
It’s tough to put your allegiance anywhere in this one. All three girls are more than worthy of the title, based on this year’s performances. I think I’m just going to get behind Layne’s pick, and follow the lead of the greatest female surfer of all time, seven-times world champion Layne Beachley, who is in town this week filming a documentary on the Noosa Festival of Surfing.
