The newsroom occupied the entire third floor of the National Building. On the wall near the lift, and on the columns that brought anchor and pattern to the open-plan room, there hung framed copies of front pages, decades old: reports of disasters and notable deaths and victories in one kind of campaign or another. Half the past century’s great transformations. Outside the conference room, seven clocks showed the time in other parts of the world. All day the newsroom was lit like the inside of an open microwave. Television sets fell suspended from the ceiling. Across the desks lay piles of decaying newspapers: the smell of decomposing inks and solvents reminded the staff of their old lives, of crammed garages and school libraries and the kitchen tables of childhood homes.
The picture editor arrived first at the office – always in suit and tie, following the example of his former boss on the photo desk. There was no dress code, no editorial charter, no performance reviews. Apart from the political cartoonist, no one worked from home. Then the editor-in-chief appeared, and soon her assistant, next the reporters and photographers and editors of the daily sections and weekend supplements. When the last of the subeditors came to his desk in the late afternoon, the newsroom of The National was complete.
On Friday, hours before the pressure of deadline altered the atmosphere in the newsroom, they stopped work for the farewell speeches of two colleagues and stood huddled – most of the journalists – as the departing staff offered a few words and received applause and embraces and handshakes, and everyone returned to their desks in a ritual that resembled the send-offs at a thousand other offices in the city, except with regard to the increased frequency of these valedictions, and the candour of the speeches.
There was no dress code, no editorial charter, no performance reviews. Apart from the political cartoonist, no one worked from home.
A production journalist, Ivan Rakic, spoke first, having worked in the building for thirty-four years, originally as a junior compositor and then, after the hot metal era, as a subeditor on the news desk. Only the higher-ups could be sure whether management forced redundancy on Ivan or whether he’d responded to a recent email, sent to all editorial staff, offering what the human resources department termed ‘limited voluntary separations’. Ivan told everyone he was leaving on his own terms, which the rest of the newsroom agreed was an ambiguous claim; it might mean he approved of the redundancy package the company presented to him, or maybe, after four decades as a production journalist, he wanted to stop working at night.
In his farewell speech, Ivan said he did not regret a life in the newspaper business, even if the state of the industry was now worse than he could have ever imagined. He claimed that he’d grown to like the nickname Creature, bestowed on him in the 1990s by colleagues who decided his raspy voice – the result of a larynx injury sustained in a car crash – didn’t quite sound human. Without his being aware, the present-day newsroom also associated Creature’s voice with his habit of leaving the subediting desk every day at 3 pm to smoke a joint outside in the alley. At the end of his speech, he thanked the editors at The National for their compassion twelve years ago, when his youngest daughter died and he could not do his job properly, could not face coming to the newsroom some days. When it became clear he was barely functioning, the newspaper put him on leave with full pay for a few months – Ivan considered such kindness a relic of the past. Of all his workmates, he would miss George Desoulis the most.
The staff crowded into the aisle and moved to the arts desk for the next speech, where Helena Johnson, a reporter, told everyone that she’d decided to look for another job the day she stood up from her chair and could see, within her field of vision, her first husband at his desk, and her second husband waiting for the lift, and her second husband’s new partner, and Helena realised she could also observe, on the far side of the newsroom, her current boyfriend. She’d had enough: the presence of all these people in the same space, employed by the same paper, made her head spin. Then we could take into account, she said, all the secret affairs and one-night stands everyone pretended not to know about. Her advice to young reporters: don’t get involved with other journalists.
*
The National’s nearest pub, The Nobody, formerly known as The Imperial Hotel, curved around the street corner with brick of a reddish earth colour, circular windows, and thin neon signage. The block between the newspaper building and the pub was lined with shops: most of them restaurants and cafes. Scaffold covered the Juliet balconies of the apartments above these businesses; in daylight the scaffold looked like a marble run, and it resembled a jumble of girders in the semidarkness. Taxis came fast through this inner-city longitude and latitude, stopping outside the newspaper offices, where they picked up journalists. The National Building – this title engraved in black letters near the revolving doors – had once been three separate structures‚ all of them textile manufacturers: from a back alley, the joins were obvious, like the locution of an error. The proprietor, Bruce Lattimore, wasn’t interested in beauty, in the little details of design, in the views of architects or neighbours or councils. In 1963, he had set out to build a public institution, a news business, with family money and hell-bent ambition: now the National Building in Darlinghurst housed the newsroom of a broadsheet paper, a polling firm, gaming and gardening magazines, as well as the company’s departments of advertising, marketing, circulation, accounts, human resources, and a small gym with no cardio machines.
Taxis came fast through this inner-city longitude and latitude, stopping outside the newspaper offices, where they picked up journalists.
Inside The Nobody, in his usual spot, Ivan finished a story about his worst headline mistake (he misspelled the Pope) before a group of colleagues stood up to leave – returning to the newsroom for second edition – which set off a series of further exits, other people saying their goodbyes and going home, or moving on to restaurants or different bars. A handful of journalists stayed with Ivan. His forearms were wet with the smears of liquid left by condensating drinks on the table, while at his feet lay a farewell gift: a stand poster inside a frame. In those days – it was 2014 – stand posters comprised the paper’s masthead and a few words in 64-point type, and they were propped outside newsagents and convenience stores and kiosks at train stations. Ivan’s poster was a bad joke, a one-off artefact made just for him:
Ivan quits! Maria leaves
Maria being his wife of almost five decades, and the gift being somewhat appropriate because among Ivan’s duties each night was writing The National’s stand poster and sending the file to print. His colleagues justified the reference to Maria because, they claimed, Ivan’s wife held an enduring presence in the newsroom, despite the fact that she didn’t work there – ‘a symbolic figure’ according to the editor of the books pages – in part due to Ivan’s nightly phone calls home, easy to overhear in an open office, in which they shared the details of their day as if speaking to each other across a dinner table. As Helena Johnson described in her farewell speech, there was something unusually public about the love stories at this particular newspaper. But no marriage was quite as emblematic of all their flawed partnerships and marriages and affairs as the convoluted permanence of Ivan and Maria Rakic. They were the newsroom’s epitome of an imperfect yet happy marriage; they offered hope for those in the office who were struggling through turbulent periods in their own relationships. Maria and Ivan met in high school and separated and reconciled several times – no one in the office knew the real number – the most significant rupture being the two years they spent apart, from 2002 to 2004, while she pursued a relationship with a man in Melbourne. During that period, when necessary, Ivan’s colleagues had consoled him at The Nobody with their opinion that long-distance relationships between people who lived in those two cities tend not to last. In his case, they were correct.
The newsroom found the idea amusing that Maria might soon come home from work to find her retired husband, at the age of sixty-two, grumbling again about the day’s newspapers, about the state of subediting, the degraded nature of political discourse, and she’d finally reach her limit after forty-something years, three children and two grandchildren, and she would announce the end of their marriage. Only one person on the subediting desk believed the poster was stupid, but George Desoulis was not inclined to create conflict over small matters like farewell gifts, so he kept his opinion to himself.
This is an extract from The Transformations (Pan Macmillan), available now at your local independent bookseller.
