News reader and sex symbol Mike Higgins became a household name in the heady days of the 1970s
One of the legends of Brisbane TV news has released a hard-hitting memoir that lifts the lid on not only his life in front of the cameras but his brush with society’s seedy underbelly.
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THE news boss wants to see you,” said Ian Evans, one of Channel Seven’s journos, poking his bearded, crew-cut head through the door as I sat in reverie in my booth.
There were no live commercials coming up, so I ambled round the corridors to Mr Ell’s domain.
“John Bailey can’t come in this afternoon,” said Mr Ell, referring to the network’s suave news anchor who was a huge star. “How do you think you’d go on a couple of on-camera updates?”
Holy Mackerel! Updates on camera I thought, almost jumping out of my skin.
Mr Ell smiled. “Just pop up to makeup,” he said. “I’ll have a script ready, take you round the studio, show you how it works.” … Within minutes, I was on the news set, surrounded by a small, intense crowd: two cameramen, a floor manager, a lighting technician, Mr Ell and Dita, all saying indecipherable things, evidently to me.
Then, with a frightening bang, all the lights came on. “Five minutes,” boomed the intercom, and everyone began to speak at once.
“Your scripts,” said Mr Ell, handing me a sheaf of papers.
“Straight into the camera. Peter will cue you. The camera’s on when that little red light’s on.”
“Ten fingers held up means 10 seconds to go,” said the floor manager. “This is a stretch,” he added, waving his arms about to demonstrate, “and this is a wind-up” he added, making another series of gestures, which seemed indistinguishable from the first lot.
“Three minutes,” blared the voice from the intercom. “He’s got a shadow on the left side of his face.”
Somebody clanked up a ladder and, as I looked up, shone an arc-light with the strength of a billion suns into my eyes. A huge black circle immediately established itself at the centre of my vision, blocking out the scene around me.
Here is the news on former Channel 7 anchorman Mike Higgins
As I sat there blinking and forgetting all my instructions, I felt a whispered voice close to my ear. “Just pretend someone who likes you a lot is watching you at home.” It was Dita, and her last-minute advice saved the day.
Trying not to hyperventilate, I pictured Mum, Jack Perkins, Paul, Cansdell and the Woman from Inverell gathered affectionately around the tube and pulled off a passable, if somewhat nervous, debut.
Within days I’d been offered a one-year contract to be a part-time afternoon news reader.
Compared to my humble wages at 2NZ, my new salary seemed astronomical. Eighty pounds a week! I’d been earning 15 quid at 2NZ and now I felt like a billionaire. I went shopping and bought a whole new outfit.
At last, I was also able to afford a mattress.
In my new flat, I set to work with some lengths of timber I’d found in the garden and some old velvet drapes to make myself a rickety four-poster bed in which I hoped to leave behind, forever, Bey’s “No Undue Mixing of Sexes”. If my dreams came true, this edifice would become a bedstead of bonking, a divan of delight.
Instead, all that happened was that a family of unusually large brown moths took up residence there and soon, among the dark folds of the velvet, increased to plague proportions.
The year was 1966 and things were looking up.
My first year at Channel Seven flew by. The Vietnam War dominated the news, particularly when Australian forces suffered heavy casualties during a terrible battle with the Vietcong at Long Tan. LBJ – aka US President Lyndon Baines Johnson – came to Australia and there were anti-war protests and arrests in the streets.
****
On my first day at Channel Seven in Brisbane I sat in the program department in a large office filled with framed pictures of the station’s stars, one of whom had several meerschaum pipes in his mouth and one protruding from each ear.
“We want to turn you into a household name,” the program manager said. “I’ve got the whole campaign planned. We’ve chosen your personal anthem. The theme from Midnight Cowboy.” I must admit I was stunned.
“You’re young and this song captures it all,” he continued. “You’ve ridden in, maybe on horseback from somewhere, maybe on a Greyhound bus. We’ll send you out with a film crew, capture you doing a whole range of Midnight Cowboy things – climbing rock faces, sailing boats, skiing on water. We’re going to see the real you.”
“But I don’t do any of those things.”
“Who’s to know?” he chimed. “We’ll fake them!”
Eventually, I came to see fakery was pretty standard fare for television. Even in Sydney, crackling sound effects, off disc, had been added by the audio operators to news footage of house fires to heighten their dramatic quality.
That year we covered all the big stories: the terrible bushfires in Victoria that claimed 23 lives, the collision between a goods train and the Southern Aurora, and the second horrific HMAS Melbourne disaster. That was also the year of the musical, Hair….
After working at Channel Seven for a while, I decided to move into a large old Queenslander at Kelvin Grove, which I shared with several female art college and uni students in their early 20s. Work at the studio and the newsroom took up most of my time, and I’d reconnected with the anti-Vietnam War movement. That year, 1970, federal MP Jim Cairns led a huge protest march through the streets of Melbourne. Nearly a hundred thousand people turned up. The groundswell against the war was growing as the death toll escalated.
I was so engrossed with these activities I hardly paid any attention to developments at home. I was aware the girls sometimes sold a little grass on the side to help pay their college fees, but that didn’t worry me. Compared to all the lushes I’d met in the TV industry, including a fellow newsreader who hid his bottles inside the grand piano and became quite hostile on the drink, my pot-smoking housemates were innocuous and gentle creatures.
But things started to get serious when a skinny little bloke called Milligan, who supplied the girls with most of their grass, began to drop in sometimes. He was a bit unhinged, and occasionally wore a priest’s outfit as a disguise, with a gun hidden in its folds.
As more suspicious-looking characters started passing through the front door, I began to wonder whether Milligan was dealing other, harder drugs. That possibility really freaked me out. I’d never injected drugs and never would. Just the thought of hard drugs appalled me. And Milligan’s mates were a dangerous-looking lot. Besides my work at Channel Seven, I often recorded voice-overs at a radio station on a freelance basis. It was extra income, relatively easy work.
Galloping up the stairs to the station’s studios one day behind the shapely girl ahead of me, I realised she was going to beat me to the top. She’d appeared suddenly out of a doorway into the stairwell which also served as a staff entrance. On the spur of the moment, I challenged her to a race to the top floor where the studios were situated.
Upon reaching the finish line ahead of me, the girl turned and gave me a saucy grin. Her name, I soon discovered, was Susan, and she was the station’s receptionist.
It wasn’t long before I’d phoned Susan and invited her out for dinner. Barbara and I had agreed long ago our marriage was over: all that remained was to file for divorce …
The Kelvin Grove house, meanwhile, had become busier and busier, with people coming and going buying what I hoped was their little bags of greenery. But the last straw came when I arrived home one day to find a bloke sitting on my bed with an open suitcase filled with little bags of white powder, and cleaning the dismantled components of a lethal-looking firearm.
That night I phoned Susan at her flat and told her I planned to get away. I’d been very depressed because I’d been badly missing my sons. And now the Kelvin Grove house was not the safest place to be. To leave Brisbane would be the wisest thing. Hopefully, I could track my two sons down and fill the void I’d felt.
Things got even more worrying when Milligan asked me to fly to Sydney once a month to do the old bring-back-the-suitcase trick. I wouldn’t have to know the contents, he said. But I was certain it wouldn’t be just grass. In return, I’d get a unit on the Gold Coast. And a Ferrari.
According to Milligan, a well-known TV personality transporting drugs for him would be above suspicion. I’d already found out he claimed to be using a female presenter from another network as an interstate drug mule. Now he was trying to suck me into his nefarious f--king schemes.
Later that week, at Milligan’s insistent invitation, and to some degree to placate him, I foolishly agreed to meet some friends of his for dinner. It turned out to be more of a business meeting than a social dinner. And a major mistake. I spent the evening in an Asian restaurant with a mixed bag of shady diners nervously trying to appear nonchalant.
At our table was the bloke who’d been sitting on my bed cleaning his gun whose name was John Regan. Also present was a well-known Brisbane businessman and two menacing-looking characters from Sydney. One of them was connected to the notorious Toecutters Gang, a group of callous crims who tracked down bank robbers and, in order to make them confess where the loot was, cut off their toes one by one with long-handled bolt cutters before killing them.
For the entire meal, I couldn’t keep my eyes off my fellow diner’s cutlery. And when, two nights later, I refused to go along with his plan for me to smuggle drugs for him, Milligan threatened to shoot me.
There was another factor in my decision to take off: Milligan had found out where Susan lived.
Pondering this latest exhilarating development, I looked out through the bay windows of Susan’s flat, facing on to Petrie Terrace. Beyond lay the Roma Street goods yards, and beyond them, the city skyline. In here, it felt safe.
“Shoot you?” Susan’s face wore a look of disbelief.
“Only in the kneecaps.” I could imagine myself squeaking around on plastic patellas.
“Why did he threaten to shoot you?”
“Probably because I refused to be his drug courier,” I said, gazing across the Petrie Terrace traffic to the far horizon of trees and city buildings. I wanted to be very far away from all this. Beamed up by Scotty, perhaps. And I was too freaked out to go to the police. Life was beginning to feel like a bizarre B-grade movie.
Eventually, I dropped Susan at the radio station and headed for Channel Seven, gunning the car up the winding Mount Coot-tha drive to the studio. Upon arrival, I was immediately swept up in the business of the coming evening bulletin.
So much had happened in the past year. Soviet tanks in Prague. Bobby Kennedy shot. And now, the Westgate Bridge had collapsed into the Yarra River, taking 35 workers down to their deaths amid 2000 tonnes of steel and concrete. The world could be an awful mess sometimes.
After I’d finished the news bulletin that night, determined to cheer myself up, I rang Serge, a bloke my own age I’d met in Surfers.
“Come out to Queensland Uni,” he said. “There’s a party on.”
The gathering, when I got there, was a welcome relief from the concerns of the previous few days. Afterwards, as we sat outside in the nippy winter night, I spilled the beans.
“My own life’s not so hot either,” Serge confessed, “drilling bum-holes for tails in wooden rocking horses.” He was exaggerating, of course, but he was fed up with the monotony of holding a stopwatch over a staff of disgruntled workers in a factory.
“I wish I could just run away,” I said.
“We could.” Serge’s face had taken on his beaming-Russian peasant look.
Suddenly it dawned on me. He was right. Why stay? Kids in their 20s weren’t supposed to have all this stress. We could just go. Get away from Milligan and Regan and their murderous cronies.
Maybe I could even locate Barbara and the children. I’d recently been told she’d headed north again.
Within minutes, Serge and I had come up with a plan.
Kangarooing wildly in Serge’s old car, we went to his house and picked up his haversack, then to Susan’s where I got a few things of my own.
“What about me?” she said.
“We’ll wait for you. Up the coast somewhere. I’ll phone.”
And it was done. We sped away into the night, in the direction of Cape York.
Three mornings later, waking rather more soberly at Nambour, I realised the seriousness of our decision. In the haste of departure, I’d omitted to let the TV studio bosses know I was doing a midnight flit.
Stepping out into the main street, I saw my face and name plastered all over the newsstands. The Sunday Truth had decided to run with the story in a big way:
“Mike Higgins Mystery,” the article began. “Baffling TV drama. Brisbane’s glamour television world was seething yesterday with rumour and counter-rumour about the sudden disappearance of Channel Seven’s highly paid news frontman, Mike Higgins. Rumours had Higgins dead, kidnapped and heading for a life of sunshine in the tropical north.
“Channel Seven executives first became concerned when Higgins failed to report for duty on Thursday night to read the 6 o’clock news. He also failed to keep a scheduled appointment to compere the RSL ‘Girl in a Million’ function at a leading city hotel.
“Higgins was last seen near Nambour driving a blue 1959 VW Sedan with a red flash along the sides and heading north. Police were called into the search for Higgins after he was reported as a missing person on Friday.”
I looked up and down the street. It was probably the same all over Queensland. There was only one thing to do. Grow a beard and keep going.
This is an edited extract from Trouserless Under the News Desk by Mike Higgins. Boolarong Press RRP $29.99
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