Veteran newsman who won a Walkley from ‘God’s waiting room’

MICK BARNES: 1936 - 2023

I first laid eyes on Mick Barnes in the mid-70s, when everyone was hairy and nothing in the world was quite as scary. He was pounding away at a battered typewriter in the smoky depths of the Sunday Sun newsroom in Brisbane, where I’d just signed on as a young reporter.

Already a veteran newsman, Mick was a cool-looking dude with merry eyes, a devilish goatee and a reputation for not suffering fools lightly. I soon found he was equally hard on bigots, sexists, bullies and far-right dingbats. In Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland, these prejudices kept him pretty busy, both as a writer and – occasionally, as was the way back then – a bare knuckle fighter.

Mick Barnes with his daughter Jess after he won an award for best short feature, “Counting down the days in God’s waiting room”, which appeared in Good Weekend in 2018.Credit: Courtesy of Mick Barnes

“Barnsey”, as we all knew him, became my first real-life journalistic hero and a lifelong friend. He had a quality that made him seem lively even when he was calm, and calm when everyone else was losing it – a trait that seems to attach itself only to those who know their own true natures.

We had outrageous fun together bucking the system in Johburg, which led inevitably to us quitting Murdoch’s Sunday Sun (now long defunct) and forming our own news agency with another lefty mate, photographer David “Comrade” May.

There was no boss at News Unlimited, as we called ourselves. Our in-office authority figure was “F.J. Dunbar”, a one-armed shop mannequin we pinched from somewhere and appointed managing director. The pompous F.J. (aka Mick Barnes) handled all correspondence with the overseas publications we wrote for, specialising in promises of swift retribution against any of his godless hacks whose opinions had given offence, especially in the US. (When our agency disbanded, Mick informed our far-flung editors that F.J. had died.)

Barnes with childhood sweetheart Meg, 60 years on. Credit: Courtesy of Mick Barnes

Mick’s career had begun on a NSW bush newspaper in 1954, and by the time we met he’d already distinguished himself as an investigative reporter, theatre critic, sportswriter, columnist and subeditor in Australia and London. After the wild Brisbane days, he returned to his beloved Harbour City and tried something new, working as a high-speed script doctor for a busy TV newsroom, where his withering disdain for offences against grammar and context earned him the nickname “Crusty”.

Mick was a compulsive, prolific wordsmith for whom journalism stirred the blood and paid the bills, but his real passion was writing for the theatre. His wry, satirical plays (Eleven Eleven, The King and Di, Unit 46, The Runaway Man, and others) were performed around Australia and in Edinburgh.

In the latter part of his life Mick devoted himself to plays and short fiction. It was in this period, during rollicking family holidays at his home in Sydney, that my own two children, now middle-aged, also came to know and love him. Larrikin streak aside, Mick was a warm, grounded man who never spoke down to kids but celebrated their presence and ideas, even while – as my daughter recalls – “…people were shouting and the music was crashing and nobody else even saw us!”

Characteristic of the so-called stoic generation, Mick – in his seventies – accepted his Parkinson’s diagnosis with so little fuss many of us weren’t aware of it until much later. Not wanting to be a burden on his family, he began quietly putting his affairs in order before giving up his flat and moving into an aged care facility in Petersham.

But he kept on writing, churning out short stories as well as mini-plays for an in-house theatre troupe of aged residents and staff members, then directing rehearsals in a courtyard attached to the home. He’d never shown much interest in the rigours of long-form feature writing, preferring to work at breakneck speed with minimal rewriting. “It either works, or it doesn’t!” he grumped when I urged him to re-jig a short story he’d hurled down in less than a day.

But when I told Good Weekend editor Katrina Strickland of his daily phone insights about life at the home, and she commissioned him to write a piece about it, Mick rose to the challenge. The feature he produced, “Counting down the days in God’s waiting room”, originally published anonymously under the pseudonym of “Richard Roe”, was a small masterpiece of careful observation and unsentimental empathy, pinning himself and his fellow oldies in place as deftly as an entomologist mounting moths.

Not surprisingly, the piece won Mick his first Walkley Award for excellence in journalism in 2019 when he was 83, the oldest writer ever to take the gong. Barnsey was over the moon. He immediately began planning other Walkley triumphs, including seemingly endless rewrites of his memoir, With a Spring in my Limp, which he called “My last journey – to oblivion”.

Published online, with help from journo friends, it’s a funny, sad and deeply personal account of his own loves, joys, mistakes and darkest regrets, in particular the loss of his second-born son, Jason, who suffered from schizophrenia and died while Mick was overseas. Mick, twice married, fathered another son, Peter, a Brisbane-based photographer, and a daughter, Jessica, who was at his bedside when he died peacefully on June 19.

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