By John Stapleton
In an adroit move The Australian picked up the country’s best known cartoonist Bill Leak from The Sydney Morning Herald at more or less the same time I made the shift to the Evil Empire, as News Limited was commonly nicknamed.
Bill had won every major award an Australian cartoonist can win, often several times over. Not just a superb draughtsman, he possessed an unerring ability to prick the bubble of anybody’s pretensions. His caricatures of the country’s politicians were mercilessly funny.
Leak’s take on the pomposity of our former Editor In Chief at The Sydney Morning Herald, John Alexander, was hysterical. It seemed somehow to fit into Bill’s life story that he fell head first off the balcony of wealthy advertising guru John Singleton during a party, sustaining serious head injuries. He had been trying to feed some of the parrots that flocked around the millionaire’s luxury home. Bill was drinking again after a period of abstinence.
As he put it: “I was sober for seven years once, John. They were the worst seven years of my life.”
Having known the cartoonist for many years, I was the one assigned to cover Leak’s slow recovery from the accident. Bill was in a coma for several days during which he had to have his skull sawed open to relieve a buildup of fluid. At first no one knew whether Bill would survive, much less ever walk or talk again. When he did regain consciousness and began to recognize his sons I rang him in hospital to get a few quotes, as well as speaking to his doctor. The first faltering interview was a relief, just to know that Bill was still Bill.
Came the day when Leak was to draw his first cartoon again, for The Weekend Australian. As two of the paper’s old timers myself and veteran photographer Alan Pryke, or “Prykie” as he was nicknamed, were sent up to Bill’s home beside an idyllic north coast inlet.
Prykie and I were glad to be out of the office on an assignment which could almost be labeled “down time”.
As the job concerned a fellow newspaper man, we knew there would be no difficulties; and because the story was about one of the paper’s own we were guaranteed a run. At least we weren’t spending long boring hours outside some uncooperative suspect’s house or being called “vultures” and having doors slammed in our faces. Even the timing was easy, drive up, do the job, drive back, all contained within an eight hour shift.
Prykie was known for one thing, his ability to complain. It didn’t matter what the job, he would start whinging from the minute he was handed the assignment.
But on this day there were no complaints to be heard. As we pulled up in front of his house Bill Leak came out to greet us. He hadn’t been seeing as many of his old colleagues as he had once done, since retreating from city life. Technology allowed people to work from home and he was one who took advantage of it. Bill’s hair was only just starting to grow back on his shaved skull and the cut lines where the surgeons had lifted off the top of his skull were clearly visible. He wasn’t quite his old bonhomie self; but I expressed how nice it was to know that Bill Leak was still Bill Leak.
He agreed it was a relief to discover he was still himself; even with blinding headaches. Leak’s fame, if it could have gone any higher, had peaked in previous weeks with the airing of an ABC television series on his work.
I did the interview in the garden at the back of the house. Leak knew exactly what I needed and gave it. Then we retired to his work room, where Bill showed off some of the abilities of the new technology. Then I retreated to let Prykie go about his business.
The photographer’s unprepossessing manner and constant whinging could easily lead one to believe he was one of those burnt out old hacks who aimed, fired and filed with little care for the results. In fact Prykie almost invariably returned to the office with beautiful pictures; or the best that could be pulled out of any given situation. My fondest memory of him came when, after being stuck in the office for a long and tedious week, I drummed up a story about the last living specimen of a what was basically a willow-like version of the gum tree.
It had only grown in one part of the cold, low misty valleys of the Blue Mountains. All but one last remaining individual had been wiped out by housing development. Stories about the last of any species have a certain pathos about them. This very-last-of-its-kind, growing next to a railway siding, had been struck by lightning.
To the disappointment of National Parks officers, it was thought to have died before scientists had a chance to take samples and clone it. After months of being in an inert state, in an event spoken of by botanists as something akin to a life-enhancing miracle, it began to bud. Here was another Wollemi Pine in the making – a reference to the so-called dinosaur tree which became internationally famous after a single stand of the trees had been discovered in a steep, inaccessible gully west of the Blue Mountains. As fossil records demonstrated, the trees were unchanged after hundreds of millions of years.
The Wollemi Pine was cloned and sold around the world. A day out of the office and away from dreary stories about housing prices or demographic trends – on an easy undemanding job – was something I had been looking forward to. As time passed and journalism changed there were seemingly interminable stretches when we were stuck under the news room’s fluorescent lights interviewing so-called experts and doing crap stories dreamt up by the bosses; most of whom, as we were fond of saying, wouldn’t know a story if it sat on their face.
The long planned for day out of the office, a kind of picnic of the soul, did not begin well. For a start we hit the most useless driver in the News Limited fleet, a fat lazy bugger who had repeatedly sued the company for real or imagined injuries, never understood the urgency or complexity of even the most basic of jobs and was entirely unhelpful if a difficult situation arose. As was common as the millennium progressed, we were often sent to stake out the homes of suspected terrorists or to haunt the city’s more fundamentalist mosques. The media was never welcome in these situations.
This particular driver would complain he was not paid danger money, drop us off somewhere near the trouble spot and promptly disappear, instructing us to call him on his mobile when we needed him. We weren’t paid danger money either and by his actions he made a quick getaway in a hairy situation impossible.
Ofen enough, when the news desk pulled us off the stakeout, we would find the driver around the corner in a café stuffing his face with hamburgers and milkshakes. So the man behind the wheel wasn’t going to prove good company for the day, while Prykie had entered serious training for the Whinging Olympics. His first words as we pulled out from the front of News Limited’s headquarters, even before we hit the corner 50 meters up the hill, was: “This isn’t a story Stapo. Whose idea was this?”
“Shut up Prykie, it was my idea,” I responded. That stopped him for all of a minute or two, but by the time we had got past the second corner he started up the refrain again: “This isn’t a story Stapo. Who’s idea was this?” I tried to explain the romantic appeal of the last of a species but Prykie was having none of it.
He kept up the “this is not a story” refrain throughout the day. We got to the railway siding, met up with the local National Parks personnel, including one of their scientists, took the pictures, did the interviews and went to lunch. An easy job, a day out.
Except Prykie had kept up his refrain throughout the job; even on the site itself, in front of the National Parks officers and an excited botanist.
“There’s no picture here, Stapo,” wasn’t exactly encouraging for those who had gone to a fair amount of trouble to set the whole thing up. The scene looked romantic enough to me; the scientist posed with the ancient tree.
I assumed someone like Prykie could pull a decent shot out of it. But even before we went to lunch I could hear Prykie on the phone to the picture desk going on and on about how there just wasn’t a picture in it.
I dutifully but pessimistically wrote and filed the story. I saw the photographs later. Like so much of Prikey’s work, they were gorgeous. But they never got a run. So much for a pleasant day out.
The day at Bill Leak’s was much more successful. The job done we reminisced over cups of coffee, said our farewells, drove back to Sydney, filed and went home on time – for once.
And we got a run.
https://thejournalismofjohnstapleton.blogspot.com.au/2009/01/fear-ever-present-but-future-not-so.html