Readers, whether or not you usually believe in miracles it may be that even as you read this modest column you are holding a kind of miracle, a printed daily newspaper, in your hands.
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And today's edition is even more supernatural than usual because after so many years of broadsheet Saturdays today's paper is, eerily, suddenly, exquisitely compact. Henceforth every edition of The Canberra Times will be this shapely.
I am not trying to be blasphemous (not today, although blasphemy will sometimes add sparkle to this column) in calling a daily newspaper a miracle. No, I am alluding to a famous and noble textbook The Daily Miracle - An Introduction to Journalism. By David Conley and Stephen Lamble and published by Oxford University Press, once upon a time it was the staple reading given to undergraduate students of journalism to introduce them to the magic of that calling.
The title is both a parody of an imagined newspaper's name and a reverent reference to what an extraordinary, semi-miraculous thing it is that a new and different daily newspaper is somehow against all the odds produced every day. In the New Testament, that anthology of pieces of fine journalism, Our Redeemer's miracles are performed only intermittently, often days apart from one another.
It is not that the daily appearance of a new newspaper is in quite the same class, as a miracle, as Our Redeemer's raising of an already decomposing Lazarus from the dead. But still, given the zillion feats of writing and editing and printing/publishing that all have to come together, every day, for a new newspaper to manifest itself the word "miracle" does seem to fit.
Forgive me a few reflections on this special day in Canberra newspaperdom, for I have been participating in these daily miracles for more than 40 years.
Surely few workplaces can have been so transformed, over 40 years, as a newspaper's newsroom. In 1975 and by a set of curious chances I was plucked from the leafy, poetic serenity of the ANU to the Mort Street premises (long since criminally demolished by a society with no sense of history) of The Canberra Times.
Old journalists love to exaggerate the squalor of their old newsrooms, and here I am shamelessly doing just that.
I am writing this memoir in a vast and spacious open plan newsroom blessed with oodles of natural light beaming in through a generous array of windows. Ludicrously healthy indoor plants give a green and pleasant sense of being in not so much a workplace as a jungle glade.
But the Mort Street newsroom was small, low-ceilinged and, with almost no windows, dungeon-dingy. In the gloom it was not possible to tell whether what looked like decades of accumulated beige-coloured grime was real or imagined.
Our tiny, high-partitioned work spaces, each desk almost entirely taken up with our giant, iron, Olivetti typewriters (today, 70 and and enfeebled by age, I doubt that I could lift a 1970s Olivetti) were branded by decades of coffee cups. There were scars to desks caused by neglected, burning cigarettes, set aside and forgotten during journalists' frenzies of creativity. One of my colleagues, a pungent legend in his lifetime, made a special contribution to the newsroom smog and haze with his powerful cigars.
I am making that newsroom sound like Hell but in truth it felt like Heaven. The gorgeous ANU, with so little to do and with my department's walls festooned with original works of art and my colleagues so underemployed and so fragrant, was rather wasted on me. I am from what was called in the England in which I grew up the lower working class. Sometimes I think that I am by temperament a bit of a pit pony with a mindless love of hard and dirty work. I was born to go down the pit, or into the newsroom.
In my romanticised recollection of it the Mort Street newsroom becomes a busy shipyard (sometimes seeming as noisy as a shipyard because our iron tools, our Olivettis, made a cacophony of clangings and clatterings), where, every day, we built, completely, one more mighty vessel, the S.S. Canberra Times.
How we used to bang our Olivettis' keys, the biffing intensifying when we felt strongly about what we were writing and/or when deadlines menaced! In Flann O'Brien's zany novel The Dalkley Archive the Irish locals spend many years riding their shuddering bicycles along rough country lanes. There is such an "interchanging of molecules" between rider and bicycle that this creates country people who are "half people and half bicycles". In the same way today some old journalists are half people, half old typewriters. In the Mort Street days my Olivetti, with so many of my molecules, seemed alive and semi-human, as in Jeremy Mayer's eerie typewriter portrait busts.
To this day the sepulchre-quiet of modern newsrooms (computer keyboards barely whisper as my gentle, non-smoking colleagues caress stories from their computers) unnerves me. It seems at odds with the fact that we are manufacturing something. Manufacturing miracles feels as if it should, like manufacturing big ships, make a noise.
