* One Monday morning we discovered another new body in the reporters’ room, a scrawny man in his mid-twenties sitting silently at a desk and staring about with the mournful air of a disappointed cocker spaniel. Lank hair fell down his domed skull to his shoulders. Naturally, we ignored him until the chief of staff emerged from his office. ‘This is our new cadet,’ he said. ‘Bob Ellis. He used to edit Honi Soit . You’ve probably heard of him.’
No, we hadn’t. Honi Soit was the Sydney University student newspaper, we knew, but none of us moved in those circles, nor did we want to. Editor? Piss off. We were far too hard-bitten and street-smart to mingle with undergraduate dilettantes. The only climbers higher than us on journalism’s Kosciusko were the cadets at the Sydney Morning Herald, Granny herself, who made it plain that they viewed us electronic upstarts as circus jugglers, clowns and sword-swallowers.
* Someone remembered that the newcomer did have a claim to fame. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, and fearing annihilation, Ellis had fled with a girlfriend to the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, there to indulge in an end-of-days orgy of sexual abandon while awaiting the nuclear winter. This might not have mattered much in the scheme of things except that the girl was the daughter of David McNicoll, the grandee editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph and consigliere to its owner, Sir Frank Packer. Moreover, Ellis had borrowed McNicoll’s Jaguar for the journey. All hell had broken loose, with the cops called in and dire threats of criminal charges for car theft and kidnapping. The uproar died down eventually. We looked upon Ellis with new respect.
My favourite encounter happened when I was subbing. Ellis had been assigned to cover one of the early anti–Vietnam War demonstrations outside the US Consulate in Sydney. With the bulletin deadline closing in and no sign of his story, the chief sub sent me to find out what was happening. Ellis was still in the reporters’ room, sucking a pen and typing furiously. He had been so inspired by the fervour of the demonstrators and the rightness of their cause that his words had taken wing. Looking over his shoulder, I saw that he’d written a poem in rhyming couplets. ‘What do you think?’ he beamed.
The chief sub looked at me aghast when I handed him the blacks. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘You’ve got five minutes to put it into prose.’
Ellis was a puckish goblin in the newsroom. He leavened the solemnity no end, but he did not last long. He had greater things to do, as a writer, director, political speechwriter and polemicist, and he went off and did them. At times I thought he was plumb crazy, and at other times a genius. At his best he wrote like a corrupt, impious angel; at his worst it was ranting rubbish. We were not close but we stayed friendly thoughout.
In our last encounter not long before he died in 2016, he bombarded me with fiery emails and phone calls beseeching me to lead a quixotic campaign to proclaim the innocence of the corrupt former Labor MP and union official Craig Thomson.
Only much later did I learn that Ellis had bedded the two daughters of fellow-travelling Sydney bohemian, playwright Dorothy Hewett. Now in their fifties, both women wrote of living with their exotic, erotic mother in what one of them called ‘a brothel without payment’, where visitors, including Ellis, laid the girls – then aged around fourteen or fifteen – as part of the entertainment.
Dorothy Hewett is remembered as a leading poet, playwright and novelist. Admired for her passionate and politically charged writing, she was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for her services to literature in 1986.
But what will happen to her legacy in the light of revelations of the sexual abuse of her teenage daughters?
Sisters Kate and Rozanna Lilley say they were sexually assaulted by the men who visited the family home in the 1970s. The abuse, they say, was encouraged by their mother.
The women have named late Labor speechwriter Bob Ellis and pop artist Martin Sharp amongst those who assaulted them.
The sisters have written of their experiences in two separate books, and have received criticism from some artistic circles for coming forward with their stories.
“This has all been very well known for a very long time,” says Kate Lilley, who is a poet and academic.
“I think that a lot of the blowback saying that we’re harming Mum’s reputation is really just in disguise a critique of men from that generation, the kind of men who abused us and their supporters, who don’t want their behaviour to be examined.”
Lilley says that her mother’s work has always been polarising, with many finding her confronting descriptions of sex distasteful.
“Mum wrote plenty about competing sexually with us,” she says.
In one poem, Hewett wrote about young men partnering “her naked girls”.
* There is a pecking order at commercial radio stations. It’s determined by the time of your on-air shift, your ratings and the advertising bucks you pull in. Radio’s biggest audiences are at breakfast, when the nation is waking up to go about its business. Quite literally, millions of radios are switched on each day for the seven o’clock news, sport, weather and traffic. People time their early mornings to the rhythm and pace of breakfast shows: ‘The seven-fifteen sports report – time I was in the shower … Eight o’clock, out the front door.’ A top-rating breakfast program in any capital city is a goldmine, attracting millions of dollars in advertising revenue. Most of those breakfast listeners are creatures of habit and probably won’t touch the dial, staying tuned to the same station all day, or switching it on again when they drive home. This is especially true of talk listeners. Music listeners can be more fickle: if they don’t like a song they’ll often switch stations. So a successful breakfast presenter is paid truckloads and treated like a god, a rainmaker. Every whim and wish is indulged; mortal sins and star tantrums are forgiven. (Although not forgotten. If the star ever falls from radio heaven, those old crimes can be dragged out and used in evidence.)
* The voice has to come not from the back of your throat or somewhere up in the sinuses, but from deep in the pit of your stomach. You breathe it up, sort of. If you get it right, you can almost feel it happening down there. That gives you tone and timbre. Opera singers know the same sensation.
The next trick was to get light and shade, which is also difficult to describe. It can be a simple matter of raising or lowering your voice at the right moments. Or speaking more slowly and deliberately … or more quickly and urgently … or learning how and when to pause for a second or two. The well-timed pause can draw your listener towards you, and adds emphasis to what you say next.
