My first cadetship in newspaper journalism ended as improbably as it had begun. I had just turned twenty-one and I was having a shouting match with the editor of a community newspaper on the Gold Coast when I told him to get out of his chair.
This wasn’t the first stage of an invitation for a physical fight, though I’m not sure he knew that. Shane was a lean bloke from the bush and he’d been in a few bar fights in his time. I was a rotund and shy cadet with arms like pool noodles. Shane stood, and I sat down in his chair. I began to type my resignation letter. It was short and crisp and, like the best poetry, it told a story about the macro in the micro. The words ‘effective immediately’ were included in there somewhere. The whir of the LaserJet printer punctuated our awkward silence before it spat out the page. I signed my name and dated the letter and walked out of the offices without saying goodbye to anyone.
Three years, three months and I was finished.
I have always found the yellow smiling-sun-face buses on the Gold Coast to be among the saddest in the world but the journey back to my apartment in Surfers Paradise took on a peculiar and vivid anxiety. Queens of the Stone Age’s ‘No One Knows’ crackled through my second-hand, second-generation metallic-pink iPod. I went home to an empty apartment I shared with my Greek shipping company heiress friend, took the rest of her cocaine and vacuumed the carpet.
Though I cut my own rope on the executioner’s platform, the conditions under which I was led there were expansive and thick, a kind of molasses for the soul. My friend and workmate Monica had known the end was near and wrote me a poem. I remember it all because I thought it so profound I almost had it tattooed on my shoulder.
I wish I was that cockroach, set free from the Sun, off to merry insect hell on a flea-ridden coach.
When I was growing up, the pointy-headed doom and gloom of current affairs was not for our family and I had almost zero exposure to it. Mum’s life was hard and we relaxed by watching soap operas, reality television and The Today Show. I can’t remember a time when we had ABC-anything on, let alone the radio. It sounded boring and stuffy and all the famous people were on the commercial TV stations. We loved famous people.
On a rare trip to Brisbane Airport to see off a friend, Mum stumbled across the Parramatta Eels NRL team. She couldn’t resist and heckled them.
‘The Broncos are gonna smash you tonight,’ she said in gentle tones.
The captain’s reply was excruciating. ‘The game was last night. And we flogged ’em!’
In my shame I managed to snap a picture on my cheap film camera. It was blurry and overexposed but I succeeded in selling it to a classmate in high school for ten bucks.
Mum was interested in politics in the way most people are: superficially. She saw the top stories on the commercial television news and lent her vote in elections according to the candidates who bothered turning up at her door. May the good Lord help anyone who left a leaflet in the mailbox without popping in to say hello. That was a sign of someone who thought they were too good for us. ‘Oh him, he thinks he’s God’s gift to man,’ Mum would often say.
There was no time for the complex analysis of deliberately opaque government policy because Deborah Morton was a single mum with three children and a job and several chickens, two dogs, two cats and a cockatiel called Cisco. If Bruce Paige on Channel Nine couldn’t get the point across, we just went on living.
I wanted to get into journalism for two reasons, neither of them fully informed. I could write because I could read and it seemed a fine job for writing. And it was a job that paid. We had no reference point for what a well-paying job was but something inside me said journalism was a profession for the rich and well-oiled because I saw a TV reporter get out of a helicopter once. On all counts, I was horribly misled.
The first time I was published was in Year 7 after our end-of-year inter-school camp in the mountain ranges around Boonah. I wanted to thank the teachers for organising the event—it had long seemed obvious to me that children were hell—and I wrote a letter to the Fassifern Guardian, the family-owned local newspaper. Seeing my name in print was electric. I don’t imagine I thought it at the time but it seemed to lend my very existence a credibility it had lacked. Newspapers, though I scarcely understood them, were the places where history met its first draft. To be a part of that, even in the service of thanking the local teachers, elevated my life above the grind. What does anybody look forward to when they are young? Some cranial niggle told me the usual aspirations would not be for me. No early marriage, no children to bear the best and worst parts of me out into the world and beyond my own existence, no grandchildren. I had no plan for my life beyond leaving some kind of mark, preferably one left in ink and checked by a subeditor.
The media isn’t filled by people from ‘state school, battler backgrounds’, as a friend of mine at the ABC told me once. Where diversity quotas exist, they tend to be by race and culture or even sexuality. This is a fine goal but even these diverse hires come from remarkably similar nooks by way of class. The ones who make it into the media typically come from comfortable families in comfortable suburbs. If they haven’t attended a nice independent or private school, they’ve attended a good state school. They have choice. If their spirited attempt at jagging a gig in an industry known for crushing the hopes of thousands fails, they have backup options. Crucially, they have a family with the resources to support dead-end careers.
By this reckoning, I ought to have done law like I’d intended. I had the marks, it would definitely pay and I could probably do it. If I failed at journalism there was nobody to catch me.
It never used to be that way, of course. Newspaper journalism was a respectable trade in the last century. Anybody who thought to enter it could be nurtured by those who went before them and guaranteed a proper wage or salary and the kind of career progression the legal fraternity enjoys. It was messy, dirty and required only vast reserves of pluck. Everything else just fell into place. Kids from working-class backgrounds became cadets and rose to become editors because Australia was small and inward-looking. These rough and ready types could talk to anyone, most often in a bar, and had the easy swagger of the man and woman with nothing to lose. You know that confidence when you see it; it is draped in the scars of a million tiny battles.
Everybody knows the story about how newspapers (and other media more generally) forgot to be worried about the internet and ended up haemorrhaging cash. It’s one of the greater miscalculations in history short of several wars and the entirety of my high school maths effort. The financial pain didn’t just hurt the work of the free press but also fundamentally changed the entry system.
In his 2009 report on universities in the United Kingdom, former cabinet minister Alan Milburn, together with twenty experts from across academia and industry, finally revealed the worst-kept secret in media. Journalism had become one of ‘the most exclusive middle-class professions of the 21st century’. The report is, bleakly, filled with headline news. Of those born between 1958 and 1970, it says, the biggest decline in social mobility has happened in the journalism and accounting professions: ‘Journalists and broadcasters born in 1958 typically grew up in families with an income of around 5.5% above that of the average family. But this rose to 42.4% for the generation of journalists and broadcasters born in 1970.’
In 2002, a report from the UK’s National Union of Journalists had produced data from the largest-ever survey of new entrants to journalism that showed that just 3 per cent of them grew up in homes headed by a semi-skilled or unskilled parent or parents.
This is a madness.
Early in my career I was trying to get my head around business journalism. Business seemed to me to be a sort of otherworld into which few were admitted. Like Heaven if you were a Catholic. I asked a colleague why she became a business writer and not, say, one who covered politics or social affairs. ‘Everything comes back to money. It took me a while to see it at first but you soon get a feeling for the way business makes politics turn and vice versa,’ she said. ‘Follow the money, there’s always a story.’
Following the money, like the arrow of time itself, is a one-way street. It means looking up, not down. Pick the thread and chase it to the top where the money accumulates. That’s journalism, or so it goes.
I remember thinking: What about the people with no money? Who follows them? The answer today is fewer and fewer people. An industry charged with the powers of observation and record keeping ought to understand the people about whom it is asked to account.
Folker Hanusch built on some early studies of journalist demographics in the 1990s to chart the decline of the working-class scribe in Australia. Take 1992, the first year of his comparisons, when almost half of all journalists working in the nation had no formal education beyond high school. That figure dropped to one-third at the turn of the millennium and plunged to 12 per cent in 2013. In the same period, those with university degrees jumped from one-third to three-quarters of journalists. Read into it what you will, but the proportion of journalists who described their personal politics as ‘left of centre’ rose over the two decades from 39 per cent to 51 per cent.
When I went to university in 2005 I was the first of twenty-one cousins on my father’s side to do so and the third of ten on my mother’s side. As the nation moved towards a knowledge class, the Mortons doubled down in their suspicion of it. Like Tasmanian families, my Queensland and South Australian relatives knew that higher education took people away from the land. What the land needed was not a degree but sons and, in certain cases, daughters who were willing to stay behind and work it and breed. It was, and to an extent remains, a feudal system in its simplistic expectations.
When I first moved out of home, just shy of my eighteenth birthday, I was flung into a city that I had visited only a few times—the Gold Coast—ninety minutes east of my home town, enrolled in a university degree and employed as a cadet journalist. The rare fights between my mother and me took on a new dimension entirely. ‘Ever since you moved out of home you think you’re better than us,’ she spat at me once when I was visiting. I can’t remember what precipitated this, though I imagine I said something short that wounded her pride.
The hurt was as big as class itself. This idea that your own child can move beyond the contours of your life, that they might be embarrassed by you, that you did all you could and it may not have been enough. These are the fears of any parent but they are particularly the fears of a parent who has been subjected to the full impact of the worst kind of social mobility: moving backward.
The discomfort was as small as steak, too. On one occasion I went out to lunch with my mum and Lauryn and we ordered steak. Influenced by our time on the cattle station, we had only ever eaten our steak one way: burned beyond even the identification powers of forensic science. When I ordered mine medium rare, then, it came as something of a shock to my sister. She responded in humour, but it said so much: ‘Oh, lah dee da rich boy.’
I turned eighteen having never tried any foreign food apart from the lemon chicken at my home-town Chinese restaurant. This isn’t necessarily unique. Being worldly is not a defining trait of any class. But almost every person who lacks the means and the resources starts off in a shell, insulated against other people and cultures and ways of being in the world.
The reverse is true, of course. The middle class and the properly rich tend to move in their own herds, pay for their own schools, socialise with their own kind. The effect is not as severe, however, because they will always have the means to go beyond. The extra cognitive capacity that comes with not having to worry about money or even work is freeing in a way the worry of the poor is shackling.
When the time comes, this knowledge becomes a reminder you are acting out of your station.
When I was seventeen, I made the short list for the vice-chancellor’s scholarship at Bond University. The package would pay entirely for any degree you chose to do, even two, and at Bond this could easily be worth more than $150 000. The stakes were high and the hoops many. In the final stage they brought thirty-three would-be students together on campus where we lived for a week during our high school holidays. We were put through challenges, interviews, cocktail receptions and dinners to assess not just our academic abilities but whether we could hold our own as full citizens of the professional class.
I was hopelessly out of my depth and I didn’t make the final eleven. Not because the selectors saw in me some classless bogan from the back blocks, but because that’s how I saw myself. There is discomfort in being immersed in your own shortcomings. The kids who had come from well-off families, and almost all of them did, were at ease. They seemed to glide through the world on a cushion of their own confidence. They were almost without exception lovely, kind, smart and worthy people. But this world belonged to them and they knew it.
When scientists at the Large Hadron Collider underneath Europe discovered the famed but heretofore hidden Higgs Boson in 2012, it proved the existence of the Higgs Field, the pan-universal net made up of these particles. This field, invisible to all of us, is what gives particles their mass. Think of it as like trying to get to a famous person at a party. Everyone else is in the way and they create a sense of drag when you make a beeline for the person; they hold you back. This is how I came to see the thousands of tiny, often individually low-impact markers of class in my own upbringing. Piled one on the other they created this net that had been thrown over me and people like me. We watched others with more ‘civilised’ families get around with smaller nets or no net at all, slipping through the ether with the aerodynamic ease of familiarity.
During the final dinner that week at the university, when we were still being watched and prodded like army recruits during a pre-deployment physical, all thirty-three of us went out to a teppanyaki restaurant. The chefs were throwing prawns and seafood at us and we had little bowls of rice, and for the first time in my life I encountered chopsticks. I watched as everyone wielded their little sticks with precision and I tried in vain to copy them. At the cocktail function later, I didn’t have a suit. Nor, even, a pair of smart chinos. It must have looked as if I’d wandered into the wrong room while searching for the student assistance office. Later, I cried.
With the early death of a defined nobility, the tale of Australia as a meritocracy prospered. For the longest time, it was largely true. At the height of manufacturing in the 1960s when the sector represented one-quarter of the nation’s GDP, blue-collar jobs in a growing nation grew faster than the suburbs. Professional jobs existed, of course, but in the same way that the town down the road existed. You could still get to it. The gap between the richest and the poorest was narrower and the economy rewarded those who did tangible things. And then this status quo flipped.
Though the build-up was long, the dramatic revision of work and effort was finally laid bare by recent crises. Australian National University historian Frank Bongiorno writes: ‘The global financial crisis inflicted serious wounds on the meritocratic myth by vividly demonstrating that financial rewards have become radically disconnected from merit or usefulness.’ According to Bongiorno, the GFC demolished the post-World War II ‘social compact’, and its re-establishment is not a given. ‘The myth of meritocracy survived partly because it was still possible to argue that those who were sufficiently talented and industrious could make their way up the social ladder, despite their class disadvantage,’ he writes.
Possible, of course, though harder than ever.
Then there are the culture warriors. They and I are interested in the constituency of journalists for different reasons. They assume more reporters are barking from the left because they are ‘elite’ and have never stepped outside their own bubble. This rankles because these same commentators have spent so long inside their own bubbles—many were even born in it—that they receive their mail there.
My colleague Peter van Onselen skewered this parasitism in deft fashion when writing in The Australian. ‘Making matters worse, an entire industry has developed that thrives on this dysfunction, as well as criticisms about the club-like nature of politics. It whips up anger among listeners and viewers doing it tough. We hear it on the radio waves and see it on populist television programs,’ he writes of the political class more broadly. ‘Ironically, most of those who spruik criticisms of the “insiders” are themselves the ultimate personification of what the system churns out. I can’t think of too many commentators who rail against “inner-city latte-sipping lefties” who get their coffee in the outer suburbs. Why would they, so far from their expensive homes in the inner suburbs? What these free speech warriors are really railing against is free expression they don’t agree with, and they falsely subsume themselves as part of the masses to give their criticisms more weight.’
One type of assassin bug from Africa springs to mind. It literally stacks the corpses of ants on its body as a protective shield against predators. I’m not saying this is precisely what some in the commentariat are doing, but they might be enthused by the innovative approach.
We don’t need more journalists from the right or from the left. It’s the wrong approach entirely. What the media needs—what it should desire, actually—is more reporters with the ability to understand their subjects. There is a small problem with the repetition of our egalitarian myth and that is this: repeating it doesn’t make it true. We never hear from the people for whom this myth failed and when we do, we feel instinctively that they are to blame.
I’ve heard friends in the industry say that higher power prices are the cost of fighting climate change, writing off the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Australians for whom the slightest bump in their electricity bill means a deeper slide into poverty. It seems silly to say it, but they’re right. Most of the world’s experts who have the benefit of having studied the matter agree. And yet, these offhand comments are callous because I am uncomfortably familiar with the pressure my own mother is under to pay her bills each month. That’s not a pretend concern. In the crossfire, my mum’s story is co-opted or dismissed by the ideologues and very often at the hands of people on either side who have never once lived a day the way she has lived her life.
Mum is open-minded towards climate change, without ever having the time to read extensively about it, but whatever concern she has about the future is mediated by her desire to survive the present. Neither extreme in the public debate understands her and, to be frank, it drives me wild. At a certain point, you need to be fed. Or your family needs to be fed. Is it any wonder, then, that so many people when presented with the opportunity of further study cannot afford to do it? This isn’t about whether education is free or whether the student loans scheme is up to the task. They work well enough but they are only half the solution. We all get to try the option, this much is true, but we do not pay the same price.
There are those who would tend to view this as a sweeping political statement but they, too, would miss the point. When you’re trying to survive you don’t give a fuck about the culture wars. Nor, even, about identity politics, or being ‘woke’, which is one of those terms fashioned to suit a fashion. To be awake to problematic behaviour as defined through the prism of identity politics is noble enough, I suppose, but only some people have the time. What has become problematic now? Who cares, we’re trying to put fuel in the car for night classes. Living, for so many people in Australia, is exhausting.
One of the major failings of progressive politics in Australia, indeed around the world, is a preoccupation with the grievances of the middle class. Put another way, this brand of politics prioritises the woe of people who can afford to worry about anything other than paying the bills and feeding themselves.
I was something of a dreamer as a child and, thankfully back then, these realities were yet to bite. Even so, particularly as a teenager, there were some things I knew. There was a sort of shadow in people wrought by poverty, a meridian running constant across the terrain of their own constitution. Some people made it out and up, but most did not. The income quintiles I read about in high school were like reserved seating at the cricket—the members’ stand was for members only, and so on and so forth. What it took to get ahead was, I reasoned as a young man, luck. And if luck was all I had, then maybe writing my affirmations about becoming a journalist twenty times a day, all in identical sentences, wasn’t such a dumb idea after all. Perhaps ambition, certainly the kind I had, is just a version of idiotic faith.
When I made my second application for a scholarship at Bond University, this one tied to a cadetship at the Gold Coast Bulletin, I assumed I would get the rest of the money I needed through government loans. At the time, in late 2004, the Higher Education Contribution Scheme didn’t actually extend to Bond, but I distinctly remember being told after I won one of the two places in the scholarship program that a new loan scheme for private institutions would come into effect in 2005. That seems like a fun fact but had I started a year earlier I might never have made it as a journalist at all. I might have done the degree at a regular university only to run up against a wall of unaffordability elsewhere. The problem? Internships.
They are the perpetual motion machine of modern media. The traditional entree in relation to jobs has all but become extinct and uni grads are now required to enter the colosseum of work experience as unpaid interns. Winner takes the job in an industry that is collapsing.
In a moment of pique I questioned an industry colleague’s promotion of seven-week unpaid internships at a large media company that rhymes with Schmairfax. The responses handily illustrated how feebly people from the middle classes, and beyond, understand the limitations of capital. ‘Some people who deserve those opportunities can’t afford to work for free,’ I wrote. The immediate response, and I must stress that this is the very first thing I received from the colleague in reply, was this: ‘For fuck’s sake, Rick. Get over it.’ Unfortunately, my class barrier doesn’t come with a stepladder, or scissor lift, or whatever it is people use to be socially mobile these days.
Another person chimed in with: ‘Getting into the industry I never got paid. I took it as an opportunity to learn and get a foot in the door.’ When pushed on how he might have afforded this, he said: ‘I worked weekends.’ If you live with your parents in the city where the internships are held, sure, you might get by. You might even get to go out drinking with mates and enjoy being twenty-something. This bloke, or any of the dozens of others who wondered what all of the fuss was about, didn’t come from a regional town with no public transport links to the cities. Maybe his parents could afford to support him around the edges.
The point isn’t disdain. We’d all be there if we could. The ignorance chafes, however. There are those who have had the good fortune to never have felt anything other than the silkiness of privilege, their bubbles so perfect they cannot feel the gravel underneath. And that’s what it is. Silkiness. When you’ve grown up in a vacuum, the very idea of friction seems alien. Yet that’s an internship, just more and more friction. These unpaid, time-consuming exercises grant what students need most—experience—but they come at a cost.
The journalists’ union in Australia helpfully explains that internships should not become a ‘source of free labour’ but in some companies this is precisely what has happened. Fairfax announced its round of weeks-long internships after a major tranche of redundancies. At News Corp, where I deputise as chief-of-staff, I’ve relied on a free body when resources get thin to handle a story from start to finish. I have always tried to sit with them at the end of the day and go through the copy, line by line, and answer any questions they have, but the reality is this is never as thorough as it might have been a decade ago. These interns, almost without exception, come from families whose resources have indirectly given them permission to fail.
Some media companies are selecting for urban and middle-class voices even when the gigs are paid. A friend of mine from a regional Queensland town made it to the final round of cadetship interviews at Fairfax Media in Sydney. He’s a talented young guy with oodles of newspaper experience in local communities. More, it turned out, than any of the others who had applied. In the end, however, he was told point blank by one of the interviewers: ‘You’re a bit too much of a country bumpkin for the audience.’
This is a particularly Sydney problem, which makes it a some-what national problem. The great media houses and networks are all headquartered in Australia’s largest city, where chatter about the kind of school a person went to is almost as common as the internecine debate about property prices.
When the Guardian Australia launched, my friend Bridie was one of the few reporters there who hadn’t gone to a Sydney private school. That changed as they expanded, but it took years. Bridie and I started our cadetships together at the Gold Coast Bulletin and, as we both migrated south to the global city, we noticed there were fewer and fewer people like us. We bonded because we came from similar backgrounds, and even on the transient tourist strip that counts as a city north of the Tweed, we were the odd ones out.
There is probably no better example of how media works to reinforce those on the inside than the case of a former cadet at The Australian who was given a years-long crack at success in journalism because he happened to be the bloke who brought the former editor-in-chief’s bins inside on rubbish day. His father, and by extension the would-be-journo, lived next door in an exclusive street, so the introductions were guaranteed. When his pestering finally paid off and the boss offered him a cadetship, his own father quietly asked the editor-in-chief: ‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ The cadet had a former life—in architecture—but his designs were on the masthead and his idea of the prestige it lent in the political circles within which he spent much of his time. The truth is, he wasn’t much suited to journalism and now runs a bar. He spent years in that newsroom taking the place of someone who would have burned more fiercely for journalism.
When I started my first job as a cadet in 2005, I didn’t have a car or a driver’s licence. I cannot count the number of jobs I turned up to late because I was waiting for a cab on the road outside the giant blue shed we called an office in Molendinar. Karl, my chief-of-staff, told me very early on: ‘Mate, if we have to keep sending you everywhere in cabs you’re not going to get very far.’ So I paid for myself to get driving lessons. About a year later my grandmother died and Mum received a small inheritance. She gave me $4000 to buy my first car, a little red 1990 Toyota Seca that came with a CD of African tribal music and a dodgy flange, which was a word that entered my life shortly after the vehicle did.
A cascading series of failures put me right back to square one when I ran up the arse end of another car while on my way to a story at work. I was young and naive and, thinking my insurance paid the towing fees, opted to have the car towed. I was illegally renting a friend’s on-campus accommodation at university and left the key in the wreckage. When I went to get the key and my other belongings back, I found out the towing fees were more than $300 and I couldn’t afford them. A day later, one of the university cleaners locked my room door while my friend was in Peru and I could no longer get inside. In the space of a few days I had lost my car—just six months after I’d bought it—and my home.
While I couldn’t pay the towing fees, I could just afford to rent a dodgy Toyota Starlet from a Surfers Paradise company on a discounted rate, and I slept in that until my friend returned from overseas. I kept the hire car for eight months because I was terrified of the consequences for my cadetship if I was again without a car. I earned very little and was living ninety minutes from my home town with no financial support, so the $160-a-week rental was solely on me. I paid this and about $170 a week in rent, which ate up almost two-thirds of my take-home pay.
A year or so later another cadet offered to give me his car as long as I made the repayments to him. It was worth about $3000 and was a manual, which I didn’t know how to drive, but I figured I would learn. An American university student borrowed the car just weeks after I took possession to take his girlfriend to the airport but it broke down on the side of the M1 near Beenleigh and he left it overnight. By the next day it had been torn to pieces for scrap by opportunists. The American never told me what happened and he only paid me $500 before he left the country. I paid the $3000 to my workmate as promised and spent the rest of my cadetship without a car. I never did get to drive this second car.
Constantly broke and worn down by the humiliations of my sexuality, I stopped going to university properly, began drinking heavily—over one two-week Christmas period I drank a bottle of rum a night while dancing alone in my sharehouse—and sabotaged my promising career in the most spectacular way. On some days I turned up to work still drunk, smelling of rum. More often I was hungover and scarcely capable of bashing out a few hundred words. I was told I would never work for that company again.
That I was trying to embark on a career as a reporter when I was least capable of doing it is not just my story. It belongs to a great many of us, some of whom you’ll have never heard of because they went into other things. It’s all very well and good. I’m not one of these types who thinks modern journalism is a heroic empire guarding society from the terror of the unexplained, though it can, at its best, be exactly that. Nor do I think journalists uniformly deserve to be exiled, by way of public ill favour, with the used-car salesmen and whoever it is that runs Danoz Direct. Granted, I have, on occasion, wished mild discomfort on different reporters at different times, but that just makes me normal, or an editor. The question I’m most interested in interrogating is this: Does anyone honestly believe the product would be better if we left its creation only to those well-oiled few who were able to have a crack?
You know where the class boundaries are kept when you find the people who aren’t truly, truly running on empty just to stay still. The inability to recognise what it takes simply to get by while poor goes both ways.
Around the time the Coalition was considering introducing a $7 co-payment for anyone going to the GP on Medicare, I pointed out that this could be the difference between eating or not for a person on the poverty line. I was thinking of my own mother when I said it. She had recently got to the stage in her life where, after the bills were paid and the shopping done, she could save enough to buy one takeaway hot chocolate at her local cafe once a week with her friends from work. A libertarian fired back on social media, arguing that it was just a return bus fare and why couldn’t people afford that. I politely explained my mum’s situation. Incredulous, he said surely there must be something she could cut out. Smokes, alcohol?
‘My mother doesn’t drink, smoke or gamble. There is no wriggle room here,’ I wrote back.
The man’s response shocked me, though it ought not to have. ‘I don’t believe you,’ he said.
Faced with the experience of people and a class he’d never belonged to, the man simply chose disbelief rather than admit that perhaps he was wrong about the ability of people to fish around in their wallet or purse for seven bucks.
When Tim Winton said there are those who see poverty and discern only a failure of character, he was talking about people like this. Libertarians, I have noticed, are the kind of people who deplore the government unless they’re begging it for tax breaks. Everything else is a handout.
Class is access. To resources, to culture, to the conversations people are having about you. For the longest time, as a child, I had no idea the conversation about us and people like us was even out there. My ignorance was built on generations of accumulated concerns: survival, rent, food, repeat. No time to make the world big. No-one to make it big for you. That it happened to me is still a matter of confusion.
The gig that finally brought me to Sydney, the cocaine-addled heart of media in Australia, was as a news editor for the women’s website Mamamia, which was founded and run by former magazine editor Mia Freedman. It was a blog written while I was bored and working for the Queensland Department of Education late in 2010 that snared their interest, but I, dear reader, was as surprised as you are that I ever ended up there. I went to Sydney to start in the Mamamia office in February 2011, not only moving cities and states but also going down an income tax bracket. The others who worked there, dear friends all, came from moderately wealthy and upper-class families. The bosses were staggeringly rich. It was impossible to find a reference point for that kind of wealth and equally my colleagues could not fathom the life I had led. There were frequent attempts at empathy but it sounded a lot like people who were reading pre-prepared lines. Imagine a fish turning up to discover her psychologist is a Very Concerned sea eagle.
The breaking point in a job that had otherwise devoured me came in April 2012 when two Indigenous teenagers were shot by police after they drove their stolen car onto the footpath in Kings Cross, mowing down pedestrians. They were fourteen and eighteen years old.
‘It is unforgivable. They put people’s lives in danger,’ my boss ranted.
‘You are discounting everything that has happened in their own lives to this point,’ I screamed back. ‘Do you honestly think they woke up this morning and thought it would be a good idea to run some people down on the footpath? Whatever happened today was put in play before they were even born.’
I was furious. Not because my boss had voiced concern about the (white) victims in the event, but because she had refused to consider any of the structural forces set in motion by their race and socioeconomic status. This was not because she was mean-spirited but because she had precisely no reference point in her own life.
I wanted out. Mia Freedman kind of wanted me out as well, though she was not about to fire me. Instead, I told her I wanted to leave. She asked me what I wanted to do. The answer: newspapers, again. I had had my time in the wilderness. Now I wanted back in.
Mia emailed the then editor-in-chief of The Australian, Chris Mitchell, whom she had never met, and told him about this young man in her employ: ‘He has newspapers in his blood and I think you should have coffee with him.’ It was the kind of bolshy move people with vast networks made; Mia wrote a Sunday column in the News Corp papers at the time. For reasons beyond my comprehension, Mitchell said yes.
Coffee turned into a three-panel interview with Mitchell, then-editor Clive Mathieson and Weekend Australian editor Michelle Gunn. I could see that the look on Clive’s face during the interview process very much said, What the fuck is going on here? Years later Clive would tell me at a pub: ‘You were the weirdest fucking hire we ever made.’
I began work in July in The Australian’s newsroom, the secret child of a Mitchell executive decision. Two months later more than twenty people were made redundant but I was given a full-time contract.
Four years after telling my then editor to get out of his chair and resigning, four years after abandoning my university degree and moving back home, destitute, I had made it back to my first true love.
Nobody knew who I was.