Bruce Jones was an exemplary journalist and gentleman in a myriad of ways, but perhaps one of the most unusual for a journalist was a capacity for unobtrusive witness which told the story without making himself a fundamental part of the action. He could ask just the right questions. He had the background and the long experience to know which answers mattered. He was an excellent wordsmith. The reader was his first concern. But he was first a reporter, not a character, or a player in the report he was writing.
There were times when there had to be exceptions. He once, like many other Canberra scribes, had the benefit of a free and frank character reading from the then treasurer, Paul Keating. Bruce Jones had impeccable Grieg shorthand, learnt when he was a cadet journalist, 20 years before, at the Sydney Daily Telegraph. Very much to Keating's embarrassment, the conversation was printed.
On Wednesday Bruce was described in news reports of his death the day before as a gentleman and true professional. Both are entirely true, but almost understate both the courtesy and kindness that he extended to colleagues and the public, his role as a mentor to many, his enormous and thoughtful contribution to the news-gathering process, and his loyalty to standards and his concerns with fairness and rights to privacy as much as accuracy, to the record as much as to gossip. He also had a great fund of compassion and understanding, as well as modesty, dignity and a certain nattiness. No one could remember him ever saying a nasty word about anyone. There was nothing he hated more than a fuss being made of him. He was laconic and droll.
His death caused genuine grief, and not only in the newsrooms of The Canberra Times, where he had served 15 years, but in other former workplaces, including Parliament House, and among the scores of journalists, old and young, whom he had shepherded and mentored over the years. His mentoring was no braggadocio about what he himself had said or done, but was very much focused not only on eliciting the best from the person involved, but on their next stories and assignments on ''moving forward''. These were habits long ingrained.
At only 64, he was at the older end of a new generation of journalists born after World War II, and, certainly in the Packer empire, where he started, first, in 1964, as a copyboy and proofreader, later as a cadet journalist, reporters were regarded as tradesmen and not encouraged to get above themselves, certainly not with betters such as Liberal Party ministers.
After a few years, Bruce came to Canberra to work as a bar manager in a family business at Canberra Airport, but he was back in the game from 1969 when he began at Australian Associated Press. AAP was an independent creature of almost all the newspapers, then particularly important for maintaining a steady coverage of Parliament (this at a time when debates were much more reported), and in covering the bases the steady diet of reports, press statements, and announcements issuing from politicians, government and the senior lobbies. It also covered the news generally with a good deal of that cover incorporated (unacknowledged) by newspaper journalists into their news reports, but was only then developing its own independent commentary and news-breaking style. That ''everyone'' made free use of AAP gave its reporters an especial duty of fairness, neutrality and a certain detached style: individual flourishes were not welcomed, and, as often as not, while many journalists were fronting the bar, AAP journalists were still taking notes of dreary Senate debates.
Bruce reported from the parliamentary press gallery through the Gorton, McMahon, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating years there, if unobtrusively, for nearly all of the big stories and very well regarded and respected by his colleagues. He had a spell as a foreign correspondent, based in London, between 1980 and 1982. In due course he became head of the AAP Canberra bureau. As such he frequently travelled about the nation, and sometimes internationally, with senior politicians. He particularly had the wary respect of Malcolm Fraser, whom he several times embarrassed with news reports, particularly from a Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Jamaica. Later, in the Hawke years, he became political correspondent for the Sydney Sun-Herald, before joining the Times in early 1996. Here he was first a senior sub-editor, working particularly over local and national political news stories, and involved in the making of judgments about importance, space, placement and headlines. Later he became news editor, responsible generally for the news judgments of the paper, as well as for providing the ''demand'' for supplementary material, analysis and follow-up.
Later still, he was involved at the top of the ''supply'' side, as chief of the reporting staff, coordinating the resources of the paper into gathering and writing the news of the day, often involving making snap judgments about competing priorities, as often as not having to put aside projects well in hand to cope with sudden news breaking from other directions. One of the features which distinguished Bruce was calm, and a refusal to panic. His calm and his steady judgment were inspiring.
Bruce Jones died of a heart attack in his sleep on an aircraft returning from a brief holiday with his wife, Uli Wilfert, in Mauritius. On the day before his death, he began preparing an article for the travel pages which began, typically: ''Imagine waking up in the morning, looking out a full-length picture window and seeing the Indian Ocean, lit by the rising sun, lapping at the edge of a white sandy beach only 20m or so from the foot of your bed. The bright green leaves and gnarled trunks of native fig trees frame a yellow sky and, further out to sea, a brisk offshore breeze is blowing cockscombs of spray from the breaking waves ... It will be a good day for sailing, for snorkelling, or just relaxing, doing not very much at all except lying by the pool and wondering what to have for lunch.''
Not a few journalists would like to go like that.
He is survived by his wife, Uli, whom he met when he was seeking to learn German (he has not yet paid for the lessons) to prepare for a trip to meet the German president, and, from an earlier marriage to Helen, by a son, Robert.
The funeral for Bruce Jones will be held at Norwood Park Crematorium, Sandford St, Mitchell, at 1.30pm on Thursday, August 5. No flowers by request.
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