No Tern Unstoned: Musings at Breakfast

Introduction

As a journalist, I am irresistibly attracted to a good line — even when it is someone else’s. In fact it has been said that the art of journalism consists of stealing other people’s words and phrases — and their stories. But good stories (hopefully correctly sourced) are what journalists and journalism are all about. And this is especially true of radio where the time-honoured art of storytelling continues to flourish and delight the listener.

That is the unique enchantment of radio, it is a one-to-one connection between the broadcaster and ‘the listener’ — whom Phillip Adams has dubbed ‘Gladys’. This linkage is remarkably personal, and depends a lot on the character of the broadcaster, or the interviewee. We draw all kinds of conclusions from the sound of a human voice. It is immediately evident whether that person is male or female, young, middle-aged or exceedingly old. We make instant assumptions, not always complimentary, based on that voice. Personality seems to be woven into voice. Straightaway we judge whether the speaker is sincere, or whether the sentiments expressed should be treated with scepticism. We can be moved to tears by a harrowing, self-revealing interview, or laugh uproariously at an outrageous, wickedly funny Monty Pythonesque sketch. Insincerity or blatantly self-serving cant can make us angry. And unlike television, we can listen to the radio while we are doing something else — gardening, knitting, cooking the dinner or even walking and jogging.

I worked in radio before television came to my home state of Tasmania in the early 1960s. There, as elsewhere, it was feared that radio would be overtaken by this dramatic, visual medium, so that it might even become irrelevant. Radio adapted very quickly. It lost its evening prime time to the glittering screen, of course, but quickly capitalised on morning and daytime listening as well as the small hours, sustaining shift workers as well as restless insomniacs.

Supposedly threatened radio species, like the documentary, flourished. While a good television documentary captures your entire attention, the images on the screen are all consuming and leave no room for the individual imagination. With radio, however, the only limit to mental imagery is the effectiveness of your own imagination — and you can drive your car at the same time. So people quickly stopped talking about the demise of radio.

As a journalist I have been lucky enough to travel extensively and interview a wide variety of people. I am sometimes asked, ‘Who was the most interesting/memorable/famous/unforgettable person you ever interviewed?’ Apart from being a clichéd question, it is one I find impossible to answer. If I were to name someone, it would not be anyone that either my questioner, or indeed ‘Gladys’, would know — because that someone would have no celebrity status. As an oral historian I have never ceased to be amazed by the intriguing stories told by so-called ‘ordinary’ people, who are genuinely surprised to be asked about their lives yet are so often able to express their feelings, experiences and philosophies in the most powerful and poetic ways. Writers of fiction would be accused of going ‘over the top’ if they wrote novels based on some of the excoriatingly moving and shattering events these people had participated in or endured.

In my journalistic life as a current affairs reporter, foreign correspondent and producer in radio and television, I have been lucky enough to record interviews with people in locations as diverse as Europe, North America, Asia, Antarctica and, of course mostly, my beloved Australia. These travels and one-to-one meetings with memorable, mostly not-so-famous individuals, have spawned the anecdotes featured on Peter Thompson’s Radio National Breakfast program.

So, you might wonder, whom do I have in mind as ‘the listener’, my ‘Gladys’? I’m not able to be as definitive as my friend Phillip Adams, of the mellifluous voice and marvellously eclectic mind, but perhaps I have been broadcasting subconsciously to my father, John Bowden, all these years. He died late last century at the age of ninety-one, so I’m not sure if he’s still hearing me on air. He was an immensely wise, humourous man who loved life, good conversation and ideas, a glass or three of wine and who maintained an open mind on political and social issues right up until he eyeballed his Maker — an unlikely occurrence, now I come to think of it, as he was an avowed agnostic. He features in several of my talks, particularly in ‘Beach Fishing’.

I am also grateful to ‘Aunty’ ABC for employing me for twenty-nine years and eleven months, and still according me the odd gig on her airwaves. And who is Aunty? It is time to revert to type and steal the words and phrases of G James of North Carlton, Victoria, who once defined the old dear when I presented the ABC’s viewer reaction program Backchat.

Aunty is an independent-minded woman in her sixties who lives in the Dandenongs, wears a parka and inclines towards eating what we weren’t meant to eat and believing what we weren’t meant to believe.

And may dear Aunty never change.

Tim Bowden.

Going Coasty

It is no surprise to hear that more and more Australians are heading for the coast, not only for pleasure on weekends and holidays, but to live. I have to confess to doing it myself. In 2000 the Bowdens sold their Sydney home to move to the New South Wales coast. Another reason for selling our house was to encourage our two adult sons to leave home. It concentrated their minds wonderfully, as it happened.

Ros and I did our first east-coastal exploration in 1974 with our then eighteen-month-old first son, Barnaby. We stayed on the road for seven months, driving up the east coast from Sydney to Cairns and eventually heading inland across to Tennant Creek, north to Darwin and then south (a few weeks before Cyclone Tracey all but blew Darwin away in December 1974). We headed back towards the Southern Ocean down a then unsealed and red, rutted, bulldust-strewn Stuart Highway via Adelaide, Melbourne and Hobart, and accompanied our veteran van back to Sydney on board the Empress of Australia — a Tasmania to Sydney shipping service now re-established after more than thirty years. On our way up the east coast we did some of the tourist trips of the day, including a daytrip to Green Island from Cairns.

Those were the days when tourism wasn’t a mainstream activity in Australia — indeed tourists were faintly resented by the locals, treated with scant courtesy and not expected back. I recall it was a choppy trip out to the island, and the ferry was crowded and totally enclosed. As people became queasy it was apparent there were no seasickness bags available. Nothing spreads as quickly as nausea when a few people begin to throw up. But what were they to do? Tissues, handkerchiefs and even hats were pressed into service. Believe me, I saw one desperate woman yodel as discretely as she could in the circumstances into her handbag. The hour-long voyage seemed an eternity. We were, after all, supposed to be enjoying ourselves and paying good money to do so. As we filed groggily off the by now malodorous hell ship, I saw the skipper standing nonchalantly on his bridge, and shouted to him that even though tourists were treated like cattle on his ship, basic human dignity demanded at least providing seasickness bags.

‘I can’t do anything,’ he said. ‘The company won’t supply them.’ I suggested to him fairly forcefully that a captain was, supposedly, master of his own ship. In later weeks I bombarded the company with complaining letters, copied the correspondence to state and federal tourist ministers, and got absolutely zilch response from anyone.

I mention this to illustrate how things have changed for the better for tourists these days. Ros and I recently travelled to the outer Great Barrier Reef from Airlie Beach in a high-speed catamaran in great comfort. Although the motion was quite gentle, seasickness pills were made available by the tour organisers in case anyone needed them. Professional marine biologists gave us illustrated lectures on what we would see when we snorkelled along the reef, and how we should behave to have minimum impact on the site. While this was happening, a talented staffer was creating origami fish out of palm fronds for enchanted children on board.

Our snorkelling was done from a moored platform, permanently stationed at the reef. Those who did not want to go into the water could take a tour in a glass-bottomed boat, or sit in an underwater observatory and take photographs of a giant wrasse, nicknamed Henry, who obligingly cruised backwards and forwards in front of the viewing window. Henry is so tame he likes being stroked by snorkellers. But even Henry (at around 10 kilos) was dwarfed by George, the 2-metre, 200-kilogram groper, also in attendance. George used to be handfed by diving staff but political correctness stopped that several years ago. George lives in hope, though, and as a reminder sometimes gently sucks the mask off the face of Sue, the diving biologist, who used to feed him. She claimed not to be alarmed by this.

Ros and I decided that Australian tourism had come a long way since the 1970s. On our way back to Sydney we called in at Byron Bay, and during an early morning walk around the headland track at the Cape Byron lighthouse (Australia’s most easterly point) we saw pods of humpback whales making their way slowly back to Antarctica. The track was dotted with whale-smacked early morning walkers, gazing with wonder and disbelief out into the Pacific as the great grey glistening bodies of the humpbacks curved gracefully through the turquoise water only 300 metres offshore. No wonder Australians are obsessed by their coastline. We are very lucky.

But there are problems looming. Privately owned caravan parks on prime waterfront sites, once the battler’s holiday playground, are now being developed into luxury cluster-housing apartments. High-rise, Gold Coast-style development is threatening to engulf sleepy coastal regions up and down the whole east coast and councils and communities are in turmoil over how to regulate and shape that precious fringe of sun and surf that so many of us want to make our very own into the twenty-first century.

Loud Music

In our insatiable search for new hedonistic experiences, a new dining craze is said to be breaking out in Europe and the United States where people dine in total darkness, eating unseen food with their fingers, feeling for glasses containing unknown beverages, attended by waiters wearing night vision goggles. It is undeniably messy, but also extremely sensual according to its practitioners. (I know this is a breakfast program, but just bear with me for a moment.) A young couple filmed — by infra-red cameras of course — were so carried away by gastronomic pleasure that the cameraman said afterwards it was like filming what might have gone on in the back seat of a car on a Saturday night.

(I didn’t think young people bothered with the back seats of cars any more. But I digress …)

The article didn’t say whether the fumbling diners were also bombarded with loud music, but they probably were. I say this because it is impossible to go anywhere these days without being subjected to blaring music — in shops, lifts, pubs, bars, restaurants and in aircraft waiting to take off. I’d happily give blind eating a go if it meant that I could actually go to a restaurant where I could talk to the person next to me without shouting over force-fed techno-rock or the musical masturbation of muzak.

I wistfully recall the days when you could go into a pub and actually have a conversation. Perhaps it is the generation gap, but to go into any pub, club or place of entertainment is to be clubbed with a wall of loud music, often augmented with the hideous electronic cacophony of poker machines. Finding myself in Melbourne not long ago with an hour to spare before a function, I bumped into an old Antarctic hand I hadn’t seen for many moons, and suggested we go to a pub for a beer and a chat. Silly me. As we