My life has always been one of walking that delicate line between responsibility and rebellion. At school I was more often than not the model student. A prefect. The editor of the school magazine. A member of the debating team and the person chosen to speak on behalf of the student body on Anzac Day. But I also smoked in the toilets, occasionally nicked over the road to the wine bar for a Cinzano and lemonade at lunchtime, and wagged school in the afternoon to meet up with my long-haired dropout boyfriend. In my final year my prefect badge was stripped from my lapel because I announced an anti-Vietnam protest at the school assembly.
As a parent I joined the P&C Association, served in the school canteen, worked hard as a school fundraiser, and enrolled my children in a multitude of extracurricular activities including sport, music, languages and art. But I roared with laughter when they swore and behaved outrageously, and in their teens I tolerated them smoking dope and having their girlfriends and boyfriends to stay the night. I let them turn one of the bedrooms into a disco where they graffitied the walls and had all-night music sessions.
In my career I have also swerved between the respectable and the outrageous. I have worked as a social reporter covering weddings and picnic race meetings for an upmarket women’s magazine, and I have written dozens of articles about the joys of pruning roses. But I have also edited a local newspaper that was so scandalous that at times our lawyer used to tear his hair out in disbelief at some of the articles we attempted to publish.
So there probably have always been two versions of me. The ‘good’ me who conformed to expectations and managed with good humour huge amounts of responsibility. And the ‘wicked’ me who has always been lurking just slightly under the surface, wanting to rock the boat and ruffle the feathers.
Like most journalists I have always aspired to the fantasy of one day becoming a publisher, knowing full well that the reality of achieving the lofty heights of a Rupert Murdoch or Kerry Packer is highly unlikely. Despite the ethical notion that publishers have absolutely no say in editorial content, any journalist who has worked for a large newspaper or magazine publisher knows that there is an ‘editorial policy’ that comes from the top. The ultimate power.
Although my bread-and-butter income during the twenty-five years we lived in the Blue Mountains was as a gardening writer and editor, I always retained a fascination with mainstream journalism, devouring all the newspapers, from the national dailies to the weekly local rag.
One icy Katoomba evening in the late 1980s I was invited out to a trendy cafe for dinner by an old friend who had published a weekly newspaper in the upper Mountains for several years. This had, to his financial and personal disappointment, been sold out from under him by his business partner. In his frustration he’d come up with the idea of starting his own local monthly newspaper as an independent publisher, and was curious to see if I was interested in being involved – not just as the editor but as co-publisher. On every level it was a crazy idea. Financially potentially disastrous in an environment where there were already two well-established local newspapers. There simply wouldn’t be enough advertising dollars to go around. Who would work on the paper and how would we pay them? We would need writers and photographers and advertising sales people, not to mention computers and production staff to do the design and layout. It was sheer madness but I leapt at the idea, convincing David that it was financially feasible if we recruited supporters who were prepared to give their time without pay. I must have caught him at a weak moment because he agreed. The Blue Mountains Whisper was born.
My publishing partner in this hare-brained scheme was Geoff Fanning, a London printer who had migrated from the UK in the early 1980s with his glamorous blonde wife Anna and their son Jan, who had a peaches-and-cream English schoolboy complexion and a charming accent compared to my rough-and-tumble youngsters. Geoff had the wackiest sense of humour I’ve ever encountered. Because his trade as a scanner operator bored him rigid, he balanced his life by writing comedic essays and sketches, which he later performed as stand-up comedy routines on the live comedy circuit. In essence, Geoff was a frustrated writer and photographer, and therefore part of his motivation in wanting to own his own newspaper was as a forum for his creative energies. One of his first forays into getting his humour in print was by writing regular letters to the editor of the entrenched and highly conservative weekly Blue Mountains Gazette, which he did under a pseudonym. It took the naïve editor quite a while to realise that letters from J. D. Castleberg were a hoax, but in the meantime they created a stir in the local community. His tongue-in-cheek humour was over the head of some people and so the letters were always being discussed in coffee shops and offices around the Mountains.
The only way to make the Blue Mountains Whisper work was for it to be different in style and content from the two mainstream newspapers and to rally as much unpaid assistance as possible. The Mountains have always been a haven for creative people – writers and artists and musicians – and it was up to us to enthuse them with the concept and to get them involved.
The biggest political issue in the area at the time – both on the state and local government level – was the destruction of the environment by thoughtless and greedy overdevelopment. So we decided our paper should be a pro-environment/anti-development newspaper with a strongly satirical bent (this was Geoff’s forte). Our first target for help was Greg Gaul, a local artist/cartoonist, who we hoped would design a masthead and set the style for the paper. He immediately agreed, lured by the challenge but also by a promise of regular meals around the kitchen table and a good supply of my homemade beer. He was fantastic and his wife Carol, a teacher, was also enthused by the concept.
Quickly others came on board. I talked to Richard Neville, who shared our outrage at the environmental destruction happening on a daily basis right across the Mountains. He and his journalist wife Julie Clarke both offered to contribute articles. Noni Hazelhurst, before her days on ‘Better Homes and Gardens’, was also keen to write a column. Designer Jenny Kee, always at the forefront of environmental battles, contributed and local writer Ken Quinnell volunteered, along with two computer whizzes who could do the layout using desktop publishing. Essentially this technological breakthrough was what made self-publishing feasible for people like us. Until computers could be used to design and lay-out pages, the cost of production was prohibitive. Now it was possible to put together a sixteen-page newspaper in less than a week using the new design programs, and we could also design and lay-out advertisements. All we needed were people who would buy space, and this task fell to a local woman, Susanna Miller, who agreed to chat up local businesses and take only a commission. My brother Dan, also a journalist, offered to help with the first few issues. It was all hands to the pump.
The other Mountains papers were give-aways and we would have to charge at least $1 a copy just to cover printing costs. We didn’t worry about not earning an income from the paper, but we certainly didn’t want it to cost us money. At the time I was editing a series of bi-monthly gardening magazines, so we organised our Whisper deadline to fit in between my ‘paying’ obligations. Geoff had a city job with a printer, so we had enough income to survive if our crazy scheme didn’t take off immediately.
What followed the launch of the Whisper were the most outrageous and funniest three years of my life. The kitchen table became the editor’s desk, and regular meetings of contributors were held in and among family dinner times. My mother, also an old journalist, loved the buzz of these editorial think-tanks, but erred on the side of caution, always fearful that we would be sued. Glass of Scotch in hand, she would wave her arms in dismay at many of our story ideas – especially ones that involved holding local politicians and public figures up to public ridicule. We ignored her advice, taking the ‘publish or perish’ point of view.
We attacked the local aldermen on council, the state government ministers and the opposition as well. We quickly managed to offend just about everyone – left-wing, right-wing, religious, conservative, feminist, arty, greenie – no group or individual was spared our scrutiny and undergraduate humour. Our local Liberal state member, Barry Morris, was a rotund man in his fifties who, several years after the Whisper days, was sent to Berrima jail for making threatening phone calls to a local alderman. Barry had a reputation as a bit of a bully boy, but we found him utterly benign. He was fond of his food, our Barry, and we frequently bumped into him at public events or functions that involved eating. Barry was always the first in line at any community sausage sizzle, so we established an editorial policy of only publishing photographs of him eating. It wasn’t difficult to achieve – Geoff and I carried our cameras with us everywhere and Barry even played up to the joke, posing with a slice of cake or a handful of hot chips every time he saw us approaching. He didn’t seem to feel at all threatened by us, unlike most of the other local politicians, who took our lampooning far too seriously.
Getting the paper out every month was very much a family affair. My mum proofread and subedited the pages and reiterated her dismay at some of our more outrageous articles. David wrote a film column, Miriam posed for photographs for advertising and Aaron, wearing a baseball cap with the word ‘Shithead’ on the crown and a plastic dog turd on the brim, stood beside the then Liberal premier Nick Greiner while he was opening the annual Leura Fair. It made for an hilarious photograph. Mum (once more against her better instincts) even agreed to be photographed for our bumper Christmas edition in bed, clutching a flagon of sweet sherry, with Geoff dressed in a Santa Claus suit, with the headline ‘Santa Strikes Again’.
Geoff took photographs and wrote various columns, including a restaurant review and his regular ‘Wasted Days’ monologue, which developed a bit of a cult following. Sydney broadcasters such as Margaret Throsby and David Spicer would regularly quote from our pages on morning radio.
Amazingly, we did get good advertising support from local business, including one of the most prominent real estate agencies in Katoomba, and we managed to cover our costs with enough left over for the odd bottle of wine or two.
Sad to say, eventually our high jinks got us into trouble – serious trouble in the Supreme Court, with a defamation suit slapped on us by three local politicians who failed to appreciate the humour of our scribblings. It didn’t stop us – in fact it made us even more outrageous, but eventually we ran out of puff because of time commitments. All of us needed to have ‘proper jobs’ to keep the wolf from the door, allowing less and less time for our Whisper antics. The defamation suit was settled out of court (thank heavens we had good insurance) and the Whisper faded away, we like to think with dignity.
It certainly was one of the most creatively charged and high-spirited times of my life, and thinking back to it reminds me of the naughty streak that I have never really managed to suppress. And that, eventually, being naughty will get you into trouble!