THE LAST OF HIS TRIBE
He crouches, and buries his face on his knees,
And hides in the dark of his hair;
For he cannot look up to the storm-smitten trees,
Or think of the loneliness there --
Of the loss and the loneliness there.
The wallaroos grope through the tufts of the grass,
And turn to their coverts for fear;
But he sits in the ashes and lets them pass
Where the boomerangs sleep with the spear --
With the nullah, the sling and the spear.
Uloola, behold him! The thunder that breaks
On the tops of the rocks with the rain,
And the wind which drives up with the salt of the lakes,
Have made him a hunter again --
A hunter and fisher again.
For his eyes have been full with a smouldering thought;
But he dreams of the hunts of yore,
And of foes that he sought, and of fights that he fought
With those who will battle no more --
Who will go to the battle no more.
It is well that the water which tumbles and fills,
Goes moaning and moaning along;
For an echo rolls out from the sides of the hills,
And he starts at a wonderful song --
At the sound of a wonderful song.
And he sees, through the rents of the scattering fogs,
The corroboree warlike and grim,
And the lubra who sat by the fire on the logs,
To watch, like a mourner, for him --
Like a mother and mourner for him.
Will he go in his sleep from these desolate lands,
Like a chief, to the rest of his race,
With the honey-voiced woman who beckons and stands,
And gleams like a dream in his face --
Like a marvellous dream in his face.
Henry Kendall.
If in memory, in those dark streets. It was his time in jail, he often thought that, as he crossed the six lanes of ceaseless traffic that was Broadway in Sydney. This Broadway had none of the glamour of its American counterpart; and all was lost, lost, as he gazed up at that misshapen concrete building and knew he was an insect in a strange land, that he would be lucky to make it through the day. When he first started work there the printers were still downstairs, and the whole building shuddered as they started up in the late afternoons. The place smelled of ink and when he arrived for work on a Sunday morning the docks were full of drifting paper and the chaos left over from loading hundreds of thousands of papers.
It all changed. Technology changed not just the nature of journalism and the nature of newspapers, but the nature of the buildings themselves. Once they were self contained factories, with management on top, editorial in the middle, and production downstairs. There was a sense of creating something, or making something, which is lost now when fingers fly across the keyboards and send buttons transmit whole newspapers down the line to printing facilities suburbs away; sometimes even half a continent away. The smell of ink no longer permeates newspapers.
And with instant communication via computers, the offices are no longer creative firments full of people shouting and smoking at their desks. Oh how celebrated we were. In a tiny town in a tiny place, in a city of barely four million people, in what was virtually a one newspaper town; if you were looking at the quality end of the market. There was The Sydney Morning Herald and then there were the tabloids. He had come with a sniffy upper air, thinking the tabloids were for peasants and real art, real intellectual endeavour, only took place on the broadsheets.
But over time he learnt to differ. When he first went on staff at Fairfax in the mid 1980s perhaps Sydney's most famous tabloid of all, The Sun, was in its final throws, eventually closing in 1987. The Sun was an evening newspaper, a tradition now lost, and when he arrived to begin work at the SMH the old soldiers from The Sun were just winding up their shift, and soon would be decorating the surrounding pubs, where journalistic legends finished their days in what was everyone else's morning with that great tradition of the era, getting plastered.
He watched in awe as the ancient subs finished off the edition, working and joking, excited, at last, to be inside the citadel. And citadel it truly had been. He had knocked so often, had tried so hard. And then one day, the old trick worked. I've just got back from overseas and I'm looking for work. It was true, he had just got back from overseas and he was looking for work, but that was hardly unusual. But this time, with a great deal of assistance, it worked. Thomas Little, the editor of the weekend features edition, started to give him assignments. And recommended him to the hierarchy.
And finally, after months of casual shifts, they reached across the news desk and said: congratulations, you've got the job. It was the same day he got his first front page, thanks to a picture of a cute young woman in overalls and a story on women in unusual jobs, and, that terrible old cliché, he thought his heart would burst, he was so dammed proud. In those days, sadly no longer, The Sydney Morning Herald was regularly listed as one of the Top 20 newspapers in the world, and to have arrived there after so many attempts, after so many years of eking out a living as a freelancer, was indeed an achievement.
Now the Sydney Morning Herald is on strike, and yet another purge, perhaps the purge of purges that Stalin was preparing before his curious death, is being enacted. It has been a sick, dysfunctional and unhappy institution for years now, and its many failures are clear for anyone to read. It's eternally soft left non-questioning and unauthoritative coverage has betrayed its readers, its focus on wealth and lifestyle at odds with its eternally platitudinous greener than green ideology, and it tells people now exactly what they want to hear; and pitches its coverage at the Turramurra doctors wives. It's a sad relic of its former self, when layers of old men, legendary journalists, legendary drunks, made the paper great.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/08/29/2350333.htm
It was an angry scene outside the Sydney Morning Herald's headquarters this morning.
Fairfax journalists across Australia are on strike until Monday in protest at the company's plans to cut 550 jobs from its operations in Australia and New Zealand.
The Sydney journalists were told of another big-name casualty in their fight against the latest round of job cuts announced by the company this week - prominent broadcaster and Sydney Morning Herald columnist Mike Carlton.
The crowd was told that Carlton had announced on air this morning that he was not filing his column for the Herald tomorrow because the journalists were on strike.
But cheers from the crowd turned to boos when they were told that the minute Carlton got off air, he took a call from Phil McLean, one of the senior executives of Fairfax, who sacked him.
The crowd was told Mr McLean asked Carlton where his column was and when Carlton replied that the journalists were on strike and that he was not filing it, he was told the paper didn't want one of his columns ever again.
Sydney Morning Herald journalist Ruth Pollard says the job losses will erode journalistic quality.
"The Sydney Morning Herald and the other newspapers that Fairfax covers are part of people's everyday life," she said.
"People rely on us to tell them what is happening in their community, to tell them what is happening in business and government.
"We are not going to have the opportunity to do that if they cut a third of the staff."
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24258094-30541,00.html
UNTIL today, the most significant aspect of the job cuts at Fairfax Media have been overlooked.
The destruction of that company's in-house legal unit in Sydney -- and the departure of top media lawyer Mark Polden -- speaks volumes about the new Fairfax.
Unless the legal unit is replaced, Fairfax must be planning to outsource its legal advice on defamation, contempt and other aspects of media law.
There are two possible reasons for doing this: Fairfax might want to dramatically increase its legal bill, or it might believe it won't need as much legal advice.
It seems safe to assume that Fairfax is not attracted to the idea of spending more money. So that suggests the group believes its demand for legal advice is about to fall.
There are another two possible reasons for that: it might be planning to rely on the legal knowledge of its senior staff, or it might be planning to reduce the number of contentious stories in the group's Sydney papers. There might also be a combination of the two.
Such a system provides a strong incentive for the type of journalism that is unlikely to trouble anyone.
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24264739-2702,00.html
JOHN B. Fairfax paid more than $4 a share earlier this year to take control of his family's birthright.
When he bought 212 million shares in the company that bears his name, Fairfax Media, it was a bullish vote of confidence in the future of Australia's oldest newspaper company.
But within months, that optimistic picture for the owner of The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian Financial Review had turned sour. Fairfax took a paper loss of $300 million on his family's stake after the company's share price fell, at one point, to an 11-year low of $2.64.
Something had to give. Yesterday, Fairfax Media journalists were on strike and old friends were engaged in hostile exchanges at picket lines outside the company's Sydney and Melbourne headquarters.
On Tuesday, using the Orwellian title "Business Improvement Program," Fairfax chief executive David Kirk and deputy Brian McCarthy said they would cut 550 jobs to save $50 million a year.
Almost a third of these staff losses, or 165 jobs, were to come from the ranks of journalists.
Fairfax journalists refuse to accept the company's edict, declaring that standards will be badly compromised if management's plans proceed, and are on strike until Monday. They are talking about a war of attrition, if necessary, to uphold a culture of journalism they value dearly.
It was the dominant shareholder, John B. Fairfax, and his right-hand man, McCarthy, who drove the cuts. McCarthy has an enduring relationship with Mr Fairfax, having been his main manager at regional newspaper group Rural Press, the company he had controlled. It was famed for its cost-cutting, and ability to run local newspapers with tiny journalistic teams.
Over the past year, McCarthy had been asking increasingly difficult questions about why things could not be done more cheaply at Fairfax as well. When the company's Australian metropolitan newspapers last week revealed a 9 per cent fall in profit, McCarthy's moment had arrived.
It was time to roll out a program of significant job shedding dubbed by the staff as "the new McCarthyism".
For Fairfax, the crisis escalated yesterday with the sacking of Mike Carlton, one of the SMH's most high-profile columnists, after he refused to send his regular article for Saturday's strike edition.
Two days earlier, The Age's editor-in-chief, Andrew Jaspan, was sacked without warning.
Tambar Springs, NSW, Australia.
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