Keysar Trad's Forays of the Heart, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 October, 2013.

POETS AND POLLIES

Undercover Susan Wyndham

Here are five words you would not expect to see in one cosy sentence: Keysar Trad, Philip Ruddock and poetry. But last Sunday at Gleebooks in Glebe, Ruddock – who was Immigration Minister and Attorney-General in the Howard Government – launched Forays of the Heart, a book of poems by Trad (pictured), the well-known spokesman for Islam in Australia. Both men have been controversial and at times fought over refugees. They were brought together by John Stapleton, who has published Trad’s collection through his small press, A Sense of Place Publishing. Stapleton met Trad and worked with his daughter Sanna when he was a reporter at The Australian. When he asked Sanna if she had a book to publish she said ‘‘No, but my father writes poetry’’. Stapleton says the poems about unrequited love are intense, passionate, well written – and embarrassing to Trad’s nine children and perhaps his wife. The man who has argued for polygamy and described scantily clad women as ‘‘uncovered meat’’ writes about the ‘‘messiness of his own earthly longings’’, as ethicist Simon Longstaff puts it. Seeasenseofplacepublishing.com.

Keysar Trad tries hand at love poetry, AAP, Seven News, 6 October, 2013.

With kids at Gleebook launch of Keysar Trad's Forays of the Heart

VALE ELISABETH WYNHAUSEN 1946 - 2013

Elisabeth Wynhausen -- a battling, campaigning social justice journalist of the old school of whom in the end, despite their occasional disagreements, he had been enormously fond -- was dismissed without ceremony from The Australian. Owned by Rupert Murdoch, the paper's management style and contempt for the working journalists who filled its pages had long been a source of angst.

Like himself, Wynhausen had been fascinated by the underclass, by those to whom life had not always been so kind, and as a pioneering journalist from the days when there were few women on the city’s news floor she was tough as old boots. Her interests put her at odds with the prevailing culture of The Australian which was obsessed with catering to their AAA demographic. It was all about success, business, the triumph of the few.

Wynhausen was the author of Dirt Cheap: Life at the Wrong End of the Job Market which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Prize.

When she was fired, Editor-in-Chief Chris Mitchell, who had never written a book or been shortlisted for any literary prize, couldn’t be bothered to emerge from his office to shake her hand, bid her farewell or wish her the best for the future.

Mitchell was notorious for not deigning to speak to his journalists. It was called "managing upwards". He managed Rupert Murdoch very well. Most of his reporters hated him.

Wynhausen’s first book was Manly Girls, published by Penguin, a memoir of her arrival as a Jewish immigrant from Holland at the age of four and her engagement with Australia. With her typical style of disparaging humour she declared: “I'd confess to anything. It's not in my nature to wait to be found out.”

Described as an “exuberant and engaging memoir”, as she propelled herself through one comic debacle after the other, she mused at the pedestrian eating habits of Australians: “The same scoop of mashed potato. The same subservient beans. The same lamb chop, as dried out as the Nullarbor Plains.”

Another of her books, The Short Goodbye: A Skewed History of the Last Boom and the Next Bust, published by Melbourne University Press, told the story of how ordinary Australians were affected by the global financial crisis. The work dissected the myth that Australia dodged a financial bullet by documenting the lives of those discarded on an economic minefield—from bankers to factory workers—and warned that without reform Australia could suffer a more terrible social and economic calamity from the next global rout.

A shorter work, also published by Melbourne University Press, On Resilience, was described as “an inspirational memoir that delves into family life and the immigrant experience”. 

Prior to arriving at News Limited Elisabeth had a distinguished career working at many of the country’s leading outlets, including The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and The Women’s Weekly both in Sydney and in New York. She had also worked on the now defunct -- but in the history of Australian journalism, significant -- ground-breaking publications The Bulletin and The National Times.

This was the person the Editor-in-Chief Chris Mitchell, and thereby the newspaper itself, was treating with complete contempt.

She had been at the newspaper for the same period of time that he had, 15 years or so since the 1990s, and was one of those characters necessary for any vibrant newsroom. And while a slow writer by contemporary standards where reporters were expected to shove out three stories a day -- usually stories of little consequence or regurgitated press releases -- Wynhausen’s copy was deeply felt and deeply worked. It read well, broke ground.

Journalism had been in her blood and in her psyche.

As The Sydney Morning Herald described her: “Elisabeth Wynhausen could be a pain in the neck. She was raucous. She wouldn't let up. Her default setting was full throttle. And she had an unwavering confidence that she and she alone knew how the world worked.

“But her loud mouth and sharp eyes were attached to a great heart. She had insight and was endlessly funny. Her friendships were deep. Her sympathies sound. All the restraint she lacked in life, she brought to bear on prose that was sparse and true. Her taste was impeccable.

“She was forgiven everything by her friends and a lot by her editors. Getting a story out of Wynhausen was an all-of-paper operation: endless talk and cigarettes and missed deadlines as she taste-tested each paragraph rolling slowly out of her typewriter. She ignored advice and took applause in her stride.”

Ultimately, getting her stories out was not something Mitchell was prepared to indulge.

After her peremptory, just plain rude dismissal, News Limited protocol was that she should have emptied her desk, been escorted out of the building and not allowed back in.

Wynhausen ignored them. No one had the heart or the gumption to sick the security guards onto her.

Throughout that final day a gutless Mitchell stayed cowering in his office; not emerging to say goodbye, to apologise or express regret at the circumstances which had led to her departure, to thank someone for her years of service.

Mitchell knew the news floor hated him. He didn’t care. He still got paid his sterling salary for doing bugger all no matter how much he decimated the paper’s personnel, or what fake economic or managerial justification there was for the latest round of sackings. He is also a coward and a bully.

The old man had seen it all before -- time after time after time -- on Sydney’s news floors.

Sooner or later, he knew perfectly well, he too would become the victim of the same pogroms that had destroyed so many other talents and careers.

It didn’t matter how many years you had served The Great Rupert or his henchman Mitchell. You were instantly dispensable.

The newspapers paid in their discernible lack of character or depth. And the nation as a whole paid because its major newspaper became so callow, so shallow.

After they had both left the paper, although rarely in Australia at that point, he would serendipitously run into her in odd places: walking along Bondi Beach, in the Blue Mountains. She seemed lonely, lively, still full of ideas, curious takes and opinions on just about everything, but lost.

Wynhausen could not live, could barely breathe, outside newspapers. It wasn’t long before she curled up and died, keeping, until the final days, news of her illness secret from even her closest friends.

Back in Australia in 2013, he had been saddened by news of her death and went to her funeral which was attended by many of the city’s best known journalists.

Mitchell did not even bother to accord her the basic courtesy of attending. Or perhaps he knew he would not be welcomed.

Only days after her death, conservative alter boy Tony Abbott became Prime Minister.

The standard joke, even at the funeral, was that she simply couldn't stand the thought of living in a country run by Tony Abbott.

She would have been in a fury, if not of litigation, of a determination to make his Prime Ministership as miserable as possible.

As it turned out, in the years that followed Australia lurched ever further to the right, into a totalitarian mindset which would have appalled her; as the people of Australia were utterly betrayed by their political class, both left and right.

Not just a pioneer in her day, Elisabeth was one of the last crusaders of a style of journalism which she believed could effect societal change, and make the world a better place.

Journalism became entertainment, social change became a rigor mortis grin of diversity apparatchiks, and Australia, and Australian journalism, was a sadder place without her.

http://elisabethwynhausen.com/

Old Hacks Write On, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 July, 2013

OLD HACKS WRITE ON

The redundancies of recent years have given former newspaper journalists time to work on the books they had daydreamt about at their desks. Undercover knows of many books in progress and is already seeing the fruits of their leisure, some with a nostalgic tone. Jenny Tabakoff, a long-time Sydney Morning Herald journo, and Eleanor Learmonth have co-authored No Mercy: True Stories of Disaster, Survival and Brutality, out this week from Text Publishing. No, it is not another media book (Killing Fairfax by Pamela Williams and Fairfax: The Rise and Fall by Colleen Ryan are the latest), but a study of how survivors behave in extremity. OK, so it could be about newspapers. Tabakoff has also collaborated with former Herald colleague Greg Lenthen, under the pen name Jen Gregory, to write Late Final Extra, a digital crime novel (published by Smashwords) about murder, corruption and life in an old-fashioned newspaper office.

William John Stapleton, who worked for the Herald and The Australian, has started A Sense of Place Publishing and one of his first titles is Hunting the Famous, his own wistful memoir of life as a reporter from the 1960s to 2009. He has also published Attack at the Dolphin by one-time journalist Bridget Wilson, a novel about a married woman’s affair with a cadet reporter. Already doing well is Keith Austin, a former Herald feature writer and chief subeditor, whose children’s novel, Grymm, has been lauded in his native Britain by a Guardian reviewer who wrote that Austin ‘‘deserves to take his place up there with Stephen King and Neil Gaiman’’.

RICHARD TREVASKIS MEETS MALCOLM MCLAREN

By John Stapleton

For me London of the 1980s was always bound up with a band of Australians I had known for years.

Richard Trevaskis, who had starred in a play I wrote back in the 1970s called The Police Commissioner’s Grandmother, was one of the leading lights.

The play had garnered good reviews and I experienced for the first and last time the pleasure of sitting in a theatre listening to an audience laugh at my sense of humour.

A subsequent play The Oblivion Seekers, a multi-layered science fiction epic big on collapsing reality systems, was never performed. It found its’ first and only outing at a playwright’s forum in Canberra and was hated by the judges; ending that particular avenue of creativity.

We were all a little in love with Richard. He kept insisting on going out with girls while kissing us affectionately each time we saw him.

London, although we hadn’t realized it at the time, turned out to be Richard’s high water mark.

He was the barman par excellent; looked smashing in black and white. Trevaskis had a knack of getting gigs in some of London’s trendiest nightclubs, including that massive cathedral of hedonism known as Heaven. Richard was always a loyal friend. He showed particular skill at spotting our little gang and swishing us drinks from behind the bar across the six deep queues of customers clamoring for his attention. All with the greatest of panache. There were always privileges to knowing him. Until there weren’t.

Richard died of a drug overdose, retreating from London to Sydney and finally to Adelaide, along the way helping to organize some of Sydney and Adelaide’s wildest mega-parties before becoming an incoherent shell in his mother’s giant house. It was the most pointless of deaths.

Even in his final days Richard would have been interested in the news that Malcolm McLaren was dead.

The mother of my children relayed the news in the muggy heat of a Phnom Penh backyard in 2010, but it immediately took me back some 30 years to that day when, as per arrangement, Richard and I went to

interview Malcolm McLaren, often enough described as a Svengali like figure.

Richard Trevaskis acted as the photographer. He hoped it would be the beginning of a great career.

We were the boys from Australia, bumfuck nowhere as far as most Londoners were concerned.

Having more or less invented punk rock and the Sex Pistols, Malcolm had recently discovered opera.

His record, which I later played till no one could bear to hear it anymore, combining rock with Madam Butterfly, was just about to come out.

Everything seemed to be soaring then; the music, our lives, our loves; the endless adventures of London nights.

I would come home to my partner of the time sooner or later; but nothing much stopped some of us going out all night most every night.

Who was to know that this would be our last hurrah?

That Richard’s dreams of being a photographer or even a film maker would never amount to a pile of dust.

That these days, this interview, wasn't a precursor to an ever more fabulous life and successful career, but that this was it. There would be no rehearsal. We were already on the stage.

Richard didn’t finish work until late; and often drank heavily through until dawn. For a long time he got away with it. Women adored him. Men swooned. The lethal speed he kept scoring up Chelsea Road kept us running at a million miles an hour. Late at night the holy rituals led us to states of euphoria no human should endure.

Richard was always up at three or four in the morning, perfectly happy see a visitor. That was the sort of friend I liked.

For years aeer he died I kept expecKng Richard to show up in the early hours of the morning with a bojle under his arm; a sunny smile plastered across his ever appealing face, giving me a big hug and talking about everything and everybody just for the fun of it.

When, a few years later the whole of Sydney turned clean and sober overnight as self-help programs and personal recovery became the trendiest thing on God’s planet, I took Richard to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the hope he might join the throng of the recovered.

Instead of spending his nights in that Elizabeth Bay apartment with the harbor lapping on the sandstone walls outside; working his way through bottle after bottle of vodka and wondering why nobody visited him much anymore.

Richard, a walking encyclopedia on cocktails and every form of fancy alcohol known to man, couldn't think of anything worse than a sober life.

So I took him to a meeting when the slide had already begun, when the good times were in the past and the mega-parties of the era, which took months of planning and were remembered and discussed for months afterwards, were just objects in the litter of the city’s social history.

When the crates of fine beer and the bottles of high class booze began to clutter Richard’s apartment in an embarrassing way and he became pathetically glad to see any of the old gang.

Some of Sydney’s meetings were just ridiculous, full of people who didn’t have a problem except that they could never fit in anywhere and lacked ambition, motivation or talent. Instead they made up stories of their own dereliction and despair as incest survivors, describing their own supposedly terrible rock bottoms by piecing together bits and pieces of other people’s narratives.

At least they now felt they belonged somewhere, with a crew as equally dysfunctional and unaccomplished as themselves.

It was a terrible meeting. Even I, filled at the time with the fervour of recovery and the substantiality of a mainstream job, had to admit that.

It was an inner-city meeting I thought Richard might relate to; but far from being inspirational it was just chaotic. An old junky, obviously stoned, droned on for 30, 40, 50 minutes, and nothing Richard heard gave even so much as a glimmer of alternate fate lines.

After the meeting Richard couldn't wait to get down to the nearby pub the Lord Roberts, just couldn't wait. As I watched, he drank furiously, anything to wipe that dreadful meeting out of his mind.

Richard drank that night and every other night; and was determined not to stop; and that dismal meeting, that one attempt at rehabilitation in the soggy streets of Darlinghurst, became just one little point on the highway to no return.

Grow old? Forget it.

Richard retreated to his old bedroom in his mother's giant house in North Adelaide 1400 kilometers away. For the last year of his life I heard stories; and wanted to go and visit. We occasionally spoke on the phone. And then Richard was dead at barely 30 and there wouldn't be any visit south anyway.

But way back then, in London, Richard had been an aspiring young photographer and the idea of photographing Malcolm McLaren had excited him greatly.

We had shown up at McLaren's offices in Soho and while I did the interview Richard fussed around with all his gear, trying to pretend this was just another routine assignment. In fact it was the first time he had ever photographed a celebrity.

McLaren was an interview I had already sold to a magazine called Stiletto back in Australia.

After keeping us waiting for almost an hour McLaren couldn't have been more charming. It was that rarest of interviews. While not normally a fan of the interview format, I typed up the transcript, changed the order of the first and last sentences and sent the piece off. It read perfectly.

During the interview Malcolm disappeared several times into his offices and then re-emerged sniffing slightly, even more articulate than he had been minutes before, expansive on the future of fashion, music, cultural. Perhaps the high quality of the cocaine available in London at the time had as much to do with the quality of the interview as the subject’s natural gifts.

Richard fussed as McLaren expanded on his many themes. I was glad to see his earnest face there because I hated doing these jobs on my own.

What was the point of meeting famous people if you couldn't share the experience with someone afterwards?

Richard took photograph after photograph. And in later years would talk about the day he met Malcolm McLaren. And now McLaren is dead and Richard is dead; and everyone in those little rooms and past adventures has passed away; that precocious smile and fine body nothing but a skeleton in a remote grave yard.

“Malcolm McLaren is dead,” the mother of my children said as we lounged by a Phnom Penh pool behind 20 foot walls; the chaos of potholes and beggars that characterized the nearby streets lost on her. “Can you believe that? I loved Buffalo Gals. I loved the Sex Pistols.”

I just nodded. With her, saying nothing, silence, was the safest place to be.

SALMAN RUSHDIE

SALMAN RUSHDIE

John Stapleton.

The interview with Salman Rushdie took place in the same room where he had written Midnight’s Children. Despite having won the Booker Prize, these were the days before Satanic Verses scandalized the Islamic world and a fatwah was issued against him – a time when Rushdie’s fame was more or less contained within literary circles.

Serious breaches were breaking through the fabric of things.

I was using my newfound status as a freelance journalist to pursue literary idols.

Any Australian literary or features editor would practically slather down the phone If I asked them if they would like an interview with Joseph Heller, Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Anthony Burgess, Dirk Bogarde or Salman Rushdie. And London was the place to do it all, to meet the gods.

I had walked on Hampstead Heath with Al Alvarez, who I had gone out of my way to befriend after interviewing him. He was the author of one of the bibles of my youth, a meditation on suicide and Sylvia Plath called The Savage God.

The story about his then just published book on Las Vegas and the lure of gambling, The Biggest Game In Town, got a good run in The Australian Financial Review. And I was off and running, the world full of hope, opportunity, fond affections.

Of course parts of Hampstead Heath were notorious as a gay beat, with God knows how many hundreds of men lurking in its bushes and hideaways. These weren’t the parts of the Heath on which we walked.

Back in the 1970s in the crowd with which I used to run, Sylvia Plath was one of our demi-gods, the author of The Savage God a legend.

To us, Plath’s early death at the hands of an oven in W.B. Yeats former London apartment simply made her all-the-more appealing.

We could quote lines from Plath's Daddy by rote; and we weren't even at school:

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time--

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one gray toe…”

“You do not do, you do not do, black shoe...you bastard I'm through” was one of our favorite lines.

“Sylvia Platitude” was scrawled across the lounge room wall of John Bygate’s terrace in Sydney's inner-city suburb of Paddington, the man who I wrote a short story about, and co-won a competition back in 1972. The then princely sum of $75. The discovery that you could make money out of something I liked doing, writing, was a revelation.

The British treated Australians, colonials as we were, with something between amusement and contempt.

But with the boldness of youth, it was still relatively easy to inveigle my way into all sorts of situations.

Salman was a special case.

In those days, before time and age and numerous life pressures crowded out the days and I would, like so many working journalists, be forced to interview people without having read a word of their work, heard their music or seen their paintings, back before the Executive Summary was all one would have time to read of some major report or other, back then, I always read as many of their books as possible before interviewing an author.

I particularly loved Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, as had millions of other readers. I read it in Bombay, or Mumbai as it became known, where the book was set. I even visited some of the locations in the book, including the site of the Jaan temple, in that sprawling, jumbled area of Mumbai with its feel of fading wealth which he describes so beautifully.

Midnight’s Children resonated with the chaos and multiple story lines of India. The London house where Rushdie lived at the time was a large hushed home which even then would have cost a substantial amount of money. Rushdie came from a wealthy family. Struggling to survive was not part of his experience, but was certainly part of mine.

I was living in squats at the time, and the casualness of the money struck me. My own life had been riddled with bohemian friends, and I was impressed by the substantiality of this world of casual influence and success.

A maid had opened the door. It soon became apparent that all four floors of the house were occupied by the Rushdie family; an astonishing thing in the London I mostly knew. His wife appeared briefly before disappearing into the bowels of the house. I was taken up to Rushdie's study.

In those days, before my short hand and personal hieroglyphics became good enough to keep up with most conversations, I used a tape recorder, which I duly set up.

Rushdie told me about his first published book, a science fiction novel called Grimus. And then the author pointed out a framed black and white photograph of a house featured in Midnight’s Children, the rambling Indian house where he had grown up.

Outside, before I knocked on the door, I had been frantically reading the last pages of Shame, the book I was ostensibly interviewing him about, a sprawling, black work set in Pakistan. Few of the characters were admirable, the plot confusing and the politics dark. Rushdie seemed impressed that I had actually read it.

The interview went well. He spoke disarmingly of the fame that had been thrust upon him with the phenomenal success of Midnight’s Children. He showed me the desk where he had written it; and asked: “If you had written a book like that, just sitting here, not really talking to anybody, without any orthodox plot, with multiple voices inside it, the voices of India, could you have possible imagined it would be a success?”

“No,” I replied.

And, of course, nor could he.

Afterwards, Rushdie saw me graciously to the door.

I walked back down the road into my own contrasting life in that overwhelming city.

After that intimate hour with one of the world's greatest writers, I always followed Rushdie’s career with interest, the wall of secrecy and security that surrounded him after the death threats stemming from Satanic Verses, the changed wives, his progress into the literary stratosphere.

The public relations person from Jonathan Cape said Rushdie had rang after our encounter and told her it was the best interview he had ever done. I couldn’t have been more chuffed.