Plotting a paper with Col Allan

Broad pages with few advertisements faced Col Allan and I as we put together the first edition of The Australian for 1986.

Alan Howe recalls working with former editor-in-chief of The New York Post Col Allan, who retired at the end of last month.

It was a quiet Tuesday and also New Year’s Eve. Broad pages with few advertisements faced Col Allan and I as we began to put together what would be the first edition of The Australian for 1986.

With the editor and editor-in-chief away, it fell to us to edit the night’s newspaper.

The steady grasp of editor-in-chief Les Hollings had steered The Australian away from near extinction just three years before. His newspaper was conservative and averse to risks, but he apparently lost no sleep knowing his beloved masthead was, briefly, in our hands.

Col Allan.

At morning conference Col and I plotted the content of the news pages. The page one picture would be the newspaper’s Australian of the Year. That year it was Jay Pendarivis, the courageous owner of the Mudginberri abattoir in the Northern Territory who had bravely taken on a rigid union system and its restrictive practices to cut a generous, flexible deal for his staff.

Pendarvis had received the second highest number of nominations; Queensland Premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen had been the most popular choice among readers, but he had previously been the newspaper’s Australian of the Year.

The splash, we agreed, should be the Western Australian Premier Brian Burke’s proposal to scrap payroll tax, which was quickly supported by other Labor states, but not the old contrarian Bjelke-Petersen.

Elsewhere, an Australian couple who had been kidnapped months earlier by Pakistani tribesmen, were released to fly home, and a shipment of arms discovered in New Zealand and believed destined for a then restive New Caledonia was reported to have come from Australia.

Early in the afternoon news came through that would-be assassins had ambushed the motorcade of Lebanon’s president Amin Gemayal.

Lebanon, paralysed by feuding warlords, had been news — mostly bad news — for years, but this was a big story. Three years earlier Gemayal became president following the assassination of his brother who had been elected leader weeks before.

Col and I were cruising. But we lacked a “keeper”, a solid, perhaps unexpected story to anchor the lower half of page one.

Back then the world was about to welcome the return of Halley’s Comet, making its once-every-76-year journey past earth.

We spotted a story about how the ageing Pioneer space probe — at that stage nearing Venus — had been reorientated so that it could observe the comet, giving scientists their first close-up images of it.

Embellished with a byline stating “from a correspondent in Mountain View, California”, the comet piece — a wire story — was placed and the page complete. For Col and me it mission accomplished.

An hour after we had despatched the first edition, news came through of the death in a plane crash of singer Ricky Nelson.

In the late 1950s, Nelson, aided by his role in the long-running television series The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, had become a huge pop star with songs such as Poor Little Fool, Travelin’ Man and Hello Mary Lou. Only Elvis Presley was bigger. I was quite a fan.

Weeks earlier Nelson — pretty much a spent force, and now playing the oldies’ circuit — had been in Sydney and The Australian had photographed him down at Bondi as a jogger recognised the star and stopped to shake his hand.

Nelson and his band had been touring the southern states and were on a flight from Alabama to Dallas, Texas, for a New Year’s Eve performance when their 41-year-old Douglas DC-3 caught fire and crashed. Seven of the nine occupants were killed.

“This is better than Halley’s Comet,” I assured Col and hurriedly reworked the front page.

Pleased with ourselves, we headed off to the Journo’s Club near Sydney’s Central Station to belatedly welcome in the New Year.

The following Monday morning, Hollings asked Col and me to stay on after morning news conference. He thanked us for looking after the newspaper.

“You did an excellent job. Good choice of stories, well presented. Off on time,” he said with the nasally remnants of his English accent.

“But, deary me, who’s Ricky Nelson?”

Alan Howe is a Herald Sun columnist