From the Rolling Stones to a nosey parker, I eventually found my perfect job

It was obvious I was never going to cut it as a police reporter. In 1969 I was still in my teens and employed as a cadet journalist on the local paper, The Dandenong Journal, when the Southern Aurora passenger train crashed into a goods train at Violet Town in Victoria.

Journalist Niki Savva in 1974.Credit:

Among those killed on that terrible day were Nora Newell and her daughter Lorna, who lived in Doveton, where I grew up. I had been at Doveton High not so long before the crash with Nora’s son John.

After news broke of the disaster I went to their house and knocked on the door, which was opened by a family member in tears. I burst into tears, too.

It was my one and only “death knock” – journo-speak for arriving at the home of someone who has just experienced the most devastating tragedy in the hope they will be prepared to speak about it.

I was never going to be a health reporter, either. Until Alan Kohler arrived as the first finance cadet (along with predictions from the journos there that we would all one day be working for him), I was the most junior reporter in The Australian’s Melbourne bureau.

Pat McDonald and Graham Kennedy, Logie winners in 1974. Savva had to forgo an interview with the Rolling Stones for a chat with McDonald, then a star of TV show Number 96.Credit: TV Week

One day I was assigned to cover a press conference at St Vincent’s Hospital, where they had made magnificent advances in microsurgery. Standing in a large room was the surgeon Dr Joseph Santamaria, brother of journalist B. A. (Bob) Santamaria, with the chief matron and a group of men.

The men stood in a line in front of me, holding up their hands to show how well Dr Santamaria and his team had reattached their severed fingers. Some of them were not fully healed. Suddenly, overcome by the heat, I fled the room. The matron chased me out, worried I was going to faint, and gave me a glass of water to help cool me down.

Because of the illness of my sister Christina I was no stranger to hospitals, either accompanying her for appointments or visiting her, ever since I was in kindergarten in Carlton. My mother Elpiniki would push Christina in a pram, through the Melbourne cemetery to the Royal Children’s Hospital (the one before the one that now exists), while my brother Steve and I walked alongside. But I was nowhere near as stoic as Christina when it came to wounds and so many other things.

The governor-general's secretary David Smith announces the dismissal of Gough Whitlam as prime minister in 1975.

Life as an entertainment reporter was also not on the cards. I was assigned to cover the one and only press conference with the Rolling Stones at the artists’ retreat Montsalvat during their tour in 1973, but at the last minute was told I had to interview actress Pat McDonald, who played the nosey parker Dorrie Evans in Number 96. She had won a Logie, and TV Week was part of the News Ltd stable.

I was also sent to interview Hawaii Five-O mega-star Jack Lord. The bio said he was a keen gardener. I went to the hotel florist where he was staying and bought a banksia for him, to smooth him into the interview. He cringed when I tried to give it to him, saying it was “too phallic”. He refused to be photographed with it. It was downhill all the way from there.

Soon after, I was asked if I wanted to go and work in the Canberra bureau, to write about “show business for ugly people”. Initially it would be for four weeks, then four months. Then I was asked to stay on permanently. Sure. Give me an upgrade and pay all my rent – there was a housing crisis back then, too – and they did.

For me, February 25, 1974 – that summer’s day I flew to Canberra as the young, single daughter of very strict migrant parents – was liberation day.

The work was exhilarating. Intoxicating. As was the socialising. Those first two years – the final two years of the Whitlam government – remain the most exciting, the most dramatic, news-sodden days in my 50 years (50!) of reporting on national politics.

Niki Savva is a regular columnist and author of The Road to Ruin, Plots and Prayers and Bulldozed, the trilogy chronicling nine years of Coalition rule.

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