Vale Ella Ebery, rural journalism doyenne at St Arnaud newspaper

Feisty, passionate and a fighter for her community, one of Victoria’s longest serving and most outstanding country newspaper editors has passed away.

Farewelled: Ella Ebery passed away this month, aged 103.

FEISTY, passionate, a fighter for her community, a woman who wasn’t afraid to stand her ground.

This is how colleagues and townspeople describe one of Victoria’s longest serving and most outstanding country newspaper editors, Ella Ebery, who died this month. She was 103.

Known widely among journalists and politicians, Ella carved her reputation as a fierce advocate for her community. She joined St Arnaud’s North Central News at the age of 58, becoming its editor at the age of 65, the year her husband, Jack, died.

A mother of three, she described herself as “a trapped housewife searching for identity”. She married shearer Jack Ebery when she was 22, had three children, lost one in infancy and raised her other two in a house with linoleum floors, hessian curtains and wood-fired hot water.

“You couldn’t get out because you spent all week doing the housework, it was so labour intensive,” she told writer and photographer Ian Kenins who profiled her for The Monthly magazine in 2013.

Profiles like this weren’t unusual. Jane Cadzow, whose family came from St Arnaud, wrote her up for Fairfax’s Weekend magazine, lauding her as professionally inspiring.

It was a reputation well earned. Described by some as gruff and serious about her responsibilities as an editor, she took on power at state and local level and unusually for a country newspaper didn’t give football its traditional saturation coverage.

“People in town who weren’t fans of Ella’s would ask, ‘What’s wrong with her?’. To her credit she thought there were more important things in life to give space to,” Ian Kenins says.

Her advocacy helped save some of St Arnaud’s heritage verandas, the courthouse, an Edna Walling-designed garden that was mooted as a site for a swimming pool and she was a key figure in the battle to save the hospital at nearby Dunolly.

“If she believed in something, even if some of the town would go against her, she held her ground,” former owner of the North Central News Brian Garrett said.

Brian remembers the newspaper and Ella winning awards “left, right and centre” for journalism, including the Shakespeare Award for Editorials.

“She was a real pedant, she loved writing and she wasn’t afraid to upset people. People couldn’t con her into writing stories. She’d only write them if there was a real story there,” he said.

Jeff Zeuschner, an editor of a North East Victoria newspaper group who completed a four-year cadetship at the North Central News under Ella, remembers being sent out to cover a shooting of a local policeman a month into his cadetship.

“I snapped what I thought were all these fantastic photos that were fairly gruesome. When I got back to the office Ella said there was no way we could use them. She went back out and took more measured photos and the next week we got an exclusive story from the policeman who survived the shooting. I didn’t make that mistake again. I learnt a lot from Ella.”

Colleague Dorothy Patton, whom Ella hired to work with her at the newspaper, says not everybody got on with Ella.

“When I applied for the job, she rang me and said, ‘I know you can write, but I’m not sure that you can follow instructions. I’ll ring you back’. When she rang back she said, ‘I haven’t got anybody any better so you’d better come in and give it a go. Can you come in tomorrow’. I said ‘yes’ and that was it, she hung up.”

Dorothy, who was then in her 50s, began timidly. “I would hand her my printed work on paper like a school kid and she’d go through it and put a big circle in red pen around a bit of it and say that’s the crux of the story, leave out the rest,” she says. Over time, the two got to work well together.

In 1968 Ella became the first woman elected to the St Arnaud Town Council, which she served for 24 years, including three years as mayor in the late 1980s, finally succumbing in 1995 when the-then Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett sacked and moved to amalgamate councils, which Ella fiercely opposed. She told him so personally when he visited St Arnaud.

Brain Garrett recalls her saying to Kennett, “now listen young man, if you don’t look after the rural areas, you’ll lose the next election” which he did. Another story quotes her as saying if Jeff Kennett had been her grandson she would have given him “a good clip over the ear”.

“She stood up to Jeff Kennett at a time when others wouldn’t,” Ian recalls. “She didn’t like the cuts to services in rural areas, the trainline and school closures and council amalgamations. She was a truly amazing woman.

“Her perseverance was phenomenal for someone who grew up when women weren’t expected to work, particularly in a professional field,” he says.

Ella juggled civic and editorial roles, writing and publishing letters to the editor under fictitious names.

She left the North Central News, slighted, just shy of four decades, in 2013 at the age of 97, when its new owners offered her a column and her own office as enticement to step down after errors began to appear.

Ella died on May 16 at a hostel in St Arnaud where she’d lived the last 12 months of her life.

Says Dorothy: “She died the same day as Bob Hawke, which was funny because she loved important people and I thought then her spirit was winging its way to wherever it was going beside Bob.”

Ella was privately cremated in Ballarat. Her memorial service will be at 2pm on June 20 in St Arnaud’s town hall (McDonald Hall).

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