It’s only words, but they are all we have: Simon Bevilacqua bids the Mercury farewell

What I want to achieve by writing is to touch people … I want to remind a reader they are alive and to be real, Simon Bevilacqua writes in his final column for the Mercury.

A NEWSPAPER columnist once warned me that the only subject a columnist should vigorously avoid writing about is the writing of a column.

Wise words.

Nonetheless, I think there is an exception when said column is the writer’s finale.

After 33 years writing for the Mercury in different roles, I’m calling last drinks, and this will be my last after five years writing the Saturday column for this newspaper.

When former Mercury Editor Matt Deighton came to me before Christmas 2016 to suggest I write a weekly Saturday column, I held my breath so as not to embarrass myself gushing with pride.

Matt Deighton.

I had secretly coveted the role as weekly columnist, while working as a reporter and subeditor, but for 27 years, one after another of my colleagues were granted the opportunity and I was overlooked.

I started on the paper writing news, sport and features on the North-West Coast under mentor Dick Crawford who had 25 years’ experience with the Advocate and the Mercury. Dick was a real-life Yoda. I still follow his tips and lessons. In my first few months, he forced me to read piles of clippings he had torn from the Everest-like volume of newspapers he and his wife, underappreciated Tasmanian novelist and historian Patsy Crawford, consumed daily.

Dick would make lunch while I read clippings from the Herald Sun, the Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age and the Financial Review. Each was an example of good writing, Dick told me. We’d eat his clumsily made sandwiches at the kitchen table in his humble Wivenhoe home, spilling sauce on the work of the likes of scribes like Martin Flanagan and Phillip Adams.

TAS_MER_TASWEEKEND_SOLDIER BOOK

Dick highlighted techniques writers employed and encouraged me to copy them, which I did. He showed me that nearly everything in a newspaper was written to the template of tried and tested formulas for news and feature writing. The moment I realised this I wanted to break the rules and so began my hunt for new ways, new intros and endings, new sensations. I tried to find different ways to write and to stretch the envelope of news writing. Mama, that’s where the fun is.

Newspapers at the time dealt in angst, fear and anger, but I realised curiosity, beauty, fulfilment, paradox, joy and bewilderment made for potent stories that were strong and perhaps even more honest in depicting the world.

I learnt that no story was as you imagined and nearly always more interesting than you could. Truth is stranger than fiction. Missing persons stories aren’t about people vanishing, they are about unrequited love, or wedding rings forever left in their boxes, or fate – you don’t know until you ask.

Dick encouraged me to take risks but warned that some editors would reject a story that did not instantly resemble an accepted template. He suggested I not bow to their will, however, and continue to strive for the new. He also told me there were a thousand introductions to any story.

I didn’t realise at the time but Dick was a heretic among more conventional peers.

I discovered this when I rushed after work to watch the TV news and to read competitor newspapers in the morning in hope that my story would be different, perhaps more insightful or interesting, than those by other journos, and then realised many other reporters were rushing to see whether they had the “right” story, that is, the same as everyone else.

My second 10 years as a reporter was focused on investigative journalism and news features, which required vastly more research, a total absence of the writer’s voice, and a focus on simplifying.

I became obsessed with short words and concise sentences with little or no punctuation.

I followed 20th century English novelist George Orwell’s rules for writing: (1) never use a metaphor, simile or figure of speech you are used to seeing in print, (2) never use a long word where a short one will do, (3) if possible always cut a word out, (4) never use the passive where you can use the active, (5) never use a foreign phrase or jargon if you can think of an English equivalent, and (6) break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

This undated image shows George Orwell, author of 1984. (AP Photo, File)

Orwell’s creed was eerily similar to that of Dick Crawford.

I remember reading Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish in 2001 and marvelling at the author’s rambling sentences that spanned line after line and used commas and semi-colons like baubles on a Christmas tree. Downing beers at a dockside bar, I recall trying to tell Flanagan what an outrageous and welcome shock his circus-ride sentences were to a hack who had spent years whittling away at the ultimate unadorned anonymous whispering simplicity.

Richard Flanagan. Picture: Zak Simmonds

I’m like Bruce Lee when it comes to writing styles, I steal moves from different schools and Flanagan’s flamboyant forays in Fish still make me laugh out loud.

Then I wrote the Editorial for the Mercury, which was an experiment in tone. Freed of personal responsibility for the words, as the Editorials are officially the voice of the Editor and the masthead not the mere scribe, I learnt how to manufacture authority and craft an argument, but also to find common ground amid trench warfare and encourage respect between combatants.

It was during this time as opinion editor I reimagined the letters and Talking Point pages much as they appear today as a community forum, a moderated social discourse with a broad range of competing opinions. It’s fair to say the four-page six-day section was my baby, and that of former opinion editor Michelle Paine, my long-suffering partner.

However, five years ago, with 24 hours to come up with my first Saturday column, I was Flanagan’s Fish out of water. I had written opinion pieces for years, but this was my first column and I didn’t have a voice. Was I the angry scribe? The funny one? The inspirational one? What’s my voice?

I walked for hours and came up with the solution that every week I would use a different voice. I wrote my first column and the only rule for the next was that it bore no resemblance to the last, and so I went, column after column. Brilliant, I thought.

However, what I learnt was that each week some readers would like what I’d written and others hated it and article by article I was aggravating everyone. Readers wanted a brand. Columnists wrote to a base and this made me feel claustrophobic.

It was a conundrum similar to when an artist has a sellout exhibition and feels pressure to keep painting a particular style or risk losing her audience, or a rock band following a hit record with something that will keep ringing the bell of their fans.

Thankfully, the riddle solved itself when, after a few dozen columns I ran out of styles, and the weekly demand for content wore me out to the extent I couldn’t give a stuff about style and just wrote. It was around then I found my voice.

What I want to achieve by writing is to touch people. I want to share empathy or awareness of our existence together. I want to remind a reader they are alive and to be real. This world is full of wonder and to recognise someone else shares the experience is heartwarming.

All Creatures Great and Small on TV reminded me of the wonder a few weeks back when young vet James Herriot saved the life of a cow, against the odds, conducting surgery to drain an abscess under the pale light of a car’s headlights in a rickety barn.

James reminded me of myself as a young reporter when boarding on a small farm with an elderly couple, Bert and Betty Cragg, at Upper Stowport behind Penguin on the North-West. One of the first things as a greenhorn journalist is learning to trust your own judgment and follow your nose.

James saved the cow’s life and went to the local pub to celebrate. He was glowing with pride and self-worth, when he was told that the love of his life, whom he had been too shy to express his true feelings for, was to marry someone else. He had to smile and show a stiff upper lip.

Tears washed down my face.

The episode reminded me how joy can be bittersweet, victories shrouded, and in these awkward collisions of pleasure and pain are moments of almost unbearable reality, the stuff that makes up who we are as people, and stocks the library shelves of our memories.

Somewhere in my tears for James was also a cry for the world.

There’s something awry about the mentality of the world, it feels so tenuous, so fragile, so ill-at-ease, so unfamiliar and inconsistent. Whether it’s a hangover from the pandemic or weariness from global trauma, I don’t know.

When James walks from the pub with Tristan, Siegfried and Mrs Hall at the end of the episode he saved the cow, there is a palpable sense of camaraderie, resolution and warmth, and an undeniable feeling that tomorrow brings a new day with new possibilities, but all set to the same reassuring rural idyll. The theme song starts and the credits roll.

That reassuring optimism and tender familiarity seems strangely missing in the world today.

I know it’s out there somewhere though and, when I find it, I’ll get back to you.

Thank you for your precious time, dear reader.