Strange business of a regular columnist has come to an end

The day is fast approaching when this page will be permanently scribeless.

It’s difficult to face or write this, but the day is fast approaching when this page will be permanently scribeless. So far as columns are concerned, your ancient correspondent is uncomfortably close to meeting his maker. He’s pretty well ceased to be. His metabolic processes are close to history. He’s not far from joining the choir invisible. He’s rather adjacent to becoming a dead parrot, a Norwegian Blue pining for the fjords.

A regular column is a tyrannical thing that consumes many more of your waking hours than it takes to write. It can become an all-consuming cannibal of a thing that all but forbids you to “waste” time thinking about anything else.

What should that bloody column be about? Will it be out of date by Monday? Will someone else have written something similar (and better) in the meantime? Do you know enough about whatever it is to dare to pontificate? Do you feel strongly enough about it to sustain an argument for close to 1000 words? The one thing that simply never occurs to a regular columnist is not to do a column.

The scribe has written this column down the years through all manner of ailments, not because he’s brave or noble or ultra-conscientious but because that’s what you do. Mark Day is much the same. There’s a space to be filled and despite broken bones, surgery, toothaches, fevers, myriad infections and all the rest, the space is still there and so long as you’re conscious it remains a challenge. It’s a challenge you condition yourself to win.

Besides, having combed your tiny brain for at least a week to select a topic you can be childishly loath to abandon your “good” idea. A regular column can be a brutal taskmaster. It becomes an urgent, self-imposed obligation. It’s something that must be done. It is, as we said, tyrannical.

Yet, it’s a tyrant whose absence can leave an awful, empty void in your life. But we shouldn’t give way to melancholia. And we should stress that none of the above is by way of complaint. A column is also a privilege. It affords you a vehicle through which to say what you believe needs to be said. Such as, for example, that public broadcasting is (at its best) a virtuous thing, an aid to media ­diversity, a reinforcement of democratic values and, overall, a public good that needs constant and vigilant protection against ­ignorant politicians and the predatory corporate dollar.

A regular column allows you to build a relationship with regular readers, relationships that can be immensely rewarding. They can also be instructive. You discover, over the years, that many readers are so much more knowledgeable than you are about so many, many things. They are frequently generous with that knowledge and mercifully gentle with their corrections. Readers, in the main, are wonderful, good-natured people. The scribe has much readers’ correspondence he’ll endeavour to keep by him until he goes to that great newsroom in the sky.

It’s a strange thing to finally retire from journalism. It’s a strange feeling to thumb through mountains of decaying, yellowing newspaper clippings of stories you did way, way back. You wonder at the energy you must have had, back then. Where has it all gone? Strange, too, to think back to how a handful of seemingly casual, innocuous remarks can totally reshape your career.

The scribe was coming to the end of a longish stint as national chief-of-staff sometime back in the late 1980s and was much looking forward to getting back on the road. He had no thoughts of becoming a columnist. It had never crossed his mind.

One day the then editor, the well-respected Frank Devine, told your correspondent he’d be well suited to write about the television ­industry. Frank told the faintly dubious scribe: “Television writing has become a seriously good beat in the US.” A while later an incoming editor-in-chief, Paul Kelly, muttered to someone that the scribe’s television meanderings should be broadened to include print media and radio. A few months later, and with Kelly away, former editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell was editing The Weekend Australian.

He sent a late Friday afternoon message, via Graham Erbacher (then night news editor), to the effect that he (Mitchell) could do with a media-oriented feature that would blend with the tone of the then “Broadcasting” page of the old Focus (now Inquirer) section, which traditionally carried the weekend television schedules.

Your correspondent gave him an interview with the then manager of the ABC’s Radio National, the late Roger Grant. Roger later told the scribe the then managing-director of the ABC, David Hill, had told Roger off in no uncertain terms for speaking to the scribe without his (Hill’s) permission. Well, David ticked lots of people off back in those days, including the scribe.

Sometimes he was justified, sometimes not. But we digress.

The thing is that a week on and Erbacher returned with a similarly late and inconvenient Mitchell request: a media story for the Broadcasting page.

The scribe said he didn’t have another Grant-like story in his drawer so it’d have to be a quick opinion piece and would that do? Erbacher said don’t talk about it, just do it, Chris needs to get the page away. Thus did a weekly habit take root. Kelly allowed the scribe’s nonsense to continue. Subsequent editors and editors-in-chief must simply have turned a benevolent blind eye to his arcane, digressive ramblings. A strange business, is journalism.

Chris Mitchell’s column will appear next week.