Matthew Abraham: How an angel rescued 10 weeks of my life from the scrap heap

Matthew Abraham has been sticking copies of his work into a scrapbook since the 1970s ... then he discovered two and a half months of his life were missing.

It’s careless losing a whole week of your life but reckless losing 11. So, this is the story of how my lost weeks were found and safely returned by an angel.

In my first days as a cadet journalist at The Advertiser in 1972, I began the habit of keeping clippings of my articles, glued with Clag paste in scrapbooks. Clag was in plentiful supply in the Tiser newsroom then, gallons of the stuff.

We once had a contest chucking bottles of Clag out the old third-floor editorial window, across Waymouth St and on to the roof of the real estate firm opposite.

In a world before computers, Clag was the glue that held newspapers together.

After we banged out a par on the newsroom’s manual typewriters, the subs would Clag our copy and any changes on to another sheet of paper and it’d head off to the linotype operators, who’d punch the words into hot lead, ready for the printing presses. All very Harry Potter.

One day our chief of staff, John Satterley, walked up to me with the word “abattoir” written on a slip of copy paper. He carefully glued it to my desk and said “If you ever spell that wrong again, you’re sacked”. Point taken.

So that’s how the habit of sticking my stories in a scrapbook stuck. My first scrapbook was a bright orange Coles number and my first story, published on Wednesday, February 16, 1972, was about two Canadian tourists injured when their small sedan and a freight train collided at a level crossing near Ceduna.

Let’s hope the young couple, Stuart and Irene Pitt, got their lives back on track.

From that, I graduated to the Tiser-supplied, archive-grade, hardcover clipping books – blue covers at first, then red until 1984 and black with a brown spine until 1999.

Another chief of staff, Alec Mathieson, after he retired, sat down by a campfire with his clipping books and a bottle of scotch. He tore a page out, read its yarns, then tossed each into the flames, doing this until they were all gone, nothing but smoke and ashes. I admired the finality of this bonfire but for me it’d be like cremating my soul.

It’s my black and tan books, six of them, from July 1984 to May 1999, where life gets increasingly complex.

They hold hundreds of articles from covering state and federal politics for The Advertiser and The Australian, ranging from big social and economic reforms, sackings, political assassinations, scandals and assorted bastardry.

In a digital world, many of these stories no longer exist outside of print archives.

A Google search often brings up a big fat blank. This is the enduring beauty of the printed word.

One Adelaide journalist contacted me a few months back trying to find copies of any articles on the so-called “Liar, Liar” affair – the bitter, settled defamation stoush between Labor’s Mike Rann and Premier John Olsen.

It remains an important case in defining the use of parliamentary privilege in legal action. It’s safely in the 1997 black and tan book.

But somewhere around the year 2000, things began to get a little ragged in the Abraham scrapbook department.

With my career heading into radio, and without a ready supply of free Tiser scrapbooks, my printed words became homeless, uncatalogued and unglued.

So, when I started writing for these pages in the Sunday Mail on September 24, 2017, I vowed to get my Clag mojo back, optimistically purchasing black, hardcovered, A3 art books from Officeworks for the job.

It’s a Bluestick world now and I’ve gone through tubes of the stuff sticking down each week’s column. But, for reasons too complex to explain here, I found myself with 11 missing weeks – one in 2017, nine in 2018 and one in 2019.

And they would have stayed missing, black holes in my black books, if it weren’t for a heavenly intervention.

A few months back I was at the home of a good friend, Viano Jaksa, when he said he wanted me to have something from his mum, Maria, who died in 2019.

It was a black plastic folder. Inside were dozens of my articles, all neatly clipped and slipped into individual plastic sleeves.

Weeks later, I started going through them and, lo and behold, realised her collection included 10 of the 11 missing columns. Only January 7, 2018, is still missing.

Bless you, Maria Jaksa, for being a reader and a collector. And for giving back 10 missing weeks of my life.