Barrie Cassidy, the presenter of ABC’S Insiders, shares memories of growing up in Chiltern, Victoria.
POLITICAL JOURNALIST BARRIE CASSIDY SHARES MEMORIES OF HIS CHILDHOOD, SPENT IN THE VICTORIAN TOWN OF CHILTERN, WITH VIRGINIA IMHOFF.
WHEN REMINISCING ABOUT his childhood in Chiltern, one of Australia’s most experienced political journalists, Barrie Cassidy, smiles and says the north-east Victorian town has been described as a place “where shops shut for lunch and the dogs sleep in the street”. But for a country kid growing up there back in the 1950s and 60s, it was also a place where adventures could be as big as your imagination and where you could have plenty of good old-fashioned fun. For a young Barrie, Chiltern was his world. And he made the most of it. “I think all the kids in Chiltern had an adventurous streak because we lived in a small country town, surrounded by an ironbark forest, so adventure was part of our DNA,” he says. “We played a lot of sport and we all gathered at the pool when we had any spare time. I lived 50 metres from the main street and when you have a highway going through the town it’s a constant source of fascination. When I was eight years old I ran down the street to find this truck had gone through Brann’s drapery store and embedded itself in the building.” These days Barrie is the respected host of the ABC’S political discussion program, Insiders — a role he’s held since its inception in 2001. His varied journalism career spans 50 years, starting out as a cadet reporter with The Border Mail in Albury. He later worked with the Melbourne Herald, as a correspondent for The Australian in Washington, at Network Ten and as an ABC correspondent based in Brussels with his journalist wife Heather Ewart, the presenter of ABC’S Back Roads series. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, he was senior press secretary and a political adviser to the then Prime Minister Bob Hawke. Born in 1950, Barrie was the fourth child of six to his parents Bill and Myra. His older sister, Pam, was born in 1937 before Bill left to fight in World War II. Barrie and his older brothers, Ron and Bill, and younger brothers, Brian and Graham, were born after the war. Barrie — who wrote The Party Thieves about the demise of Kevin Rudd in 2010 and co-authored An Ocean of Cricket, with his son Adam from his first marriage, in 2013 — has written tenderly about his late father in Private Bill: In Love and War. Bill was wounded and captured in Crete in 1941 and spent four years as a prisoner of war. At home, Barrie’s mother Myra feared Bill was dead until finally news came of his capture. After the war, family life returned to its normal rhythm until decades later when, in 1991, Myra revealed she’d kept a painful secret: she had a child while Bill was missing — a boy whom she gave up for adoption. He wrote to Myra some 50 years after he was born, wanting to see her. Myra met him and stayed in touch until she died in 2006. Barrie recalls the night his mother broke the news to him. “I was in Washington and I just let Mum talk. She explained the whole thing. I remember motioning to Heather to pour me a gin and tonic; I remember saying to her, ‘You couldn’t script this…’ Dad had been missing, a year had gone by and she had no idea if he was dead or alive. We all understood how difficult it was for her. They were such a devoted couple and had this great life together, you couldn’t allow something like that, at that age, to disturb it. And in the end, it didn’t.” Bill and Myra stayed together until he died in 2001. Today Barrie and Heather, who have a daughter Caitlin, live in the inner Melbourne suburb of Richmond — close to the MCG for Barrie, a Collingwood fan. Private Bill: In Love and War (Melbourne University Press, $29.99). Insiders airs on ABC TV on Sundays at 9am.
“CHILTERN DIDN’T HAVE a hospital, so Dad had to crank up the Chevrolet and drive Mum to Wangaratta, and I was born in the Wangaratta hospital. My sister was born before the war and I was in the middle of the five boys — we all came after the war. Of the first four, there was barely 15 months between each of us and so we were all close and we all did things together. In my memory, the whole town was a playground. We ran free, there was never any anxiety from parents about where the kids were; they knew we would come home for meals. Nobody locked their doors, the dogs didn’t have leads, and I thought every place in Australia was like that. Dad gave us a lot of freedom. He was a labourer in the brickworks and he would be working eight hours a day and then come home and have all sorts of other things he needed to be doing including milking the house cow. I don’t know why >
he ever let us off the hook, milking the cow himself, with five sons. That’s the kind of guy he was. My mum was housebound and had her own phobias to deal with I suppose. Mum would never leave the house and she’d have a list of things for me to go and buy down the street that she could have gone and done any time of the day. I never appreciated there was any particular reason for that, and only later did we come to appreciate it was for fear of running into somebody and that she just didn’t want to confront that side of her life. Chiltern is in the middle of an ironbark forest, and we’d just get on bikes and ride into the forest and see these huge goannas, snakes and anthills; we grew up in that environment and had no fear of these things. We spent a lot of time playing tennis, going to cricket practice, going to football in the winter. Back then, football was central to country towns. In the summer months, the swimming pool was the centre of town for all of the kids. The pool was huge — they just dug a huge hole and bricked the sides, but the floor was dirt and they fed it from water pumped from the lake so it was full of leeches. If you were any more than half a metre under water you couldn’t be seen, not that anybody seemed to care at the time, and I can’t recall anybody drowning in the pool, but I do recall the leeches. I just laugh when I think about how popular that pool was and now nobody would jump in water like that. My father was instrumental in eventually agitating to get a proper pool built, which happened over time. We never really went on holidays, it was an affordability problem for a start and we didn’t really have a car reliable enough to take us far. I didn’t see the ocean until I was 13. Our holidays were spent in Chiltern and that seemed to satisfy us. It never occurred to me we were missing out on anything. Back then it was typical for most kids in town to have a job and we didn’t have a lot of money. If we wanted extras like a bike, we had to go out and earn the money. The first job I had was selling the afternoon newspaper. People liked the idea of having it sold to them in the street or if they were sitting in the bars. They would expect the Herald kid to turn up at 4pm and they were generous with their tips. I did that without any sense that one day I’d be working for that paper. It was a job at the local four-page newspaper, the Federal Standard, that got me a start in journalism. I was about 13. A guy called Ben Hicks, who was shire president and owned the picture theatre, also ran the newspaper. I went to him and said, ‘Would you give me a go at writing the football?’ I did that for five years. Ben Hicks’s best friend was the editor of The Border Mail in Albury. He told me that a cadetship was coming up and that I should apply for it. Ben Hicks put a word in for me about what I’d done for him for five years with no pay, and that unpaid job gave me a reward-for-life job. While I was at school, my third job was to run the telephone exchange. That involved going to the post office at 10pm and setting up a bed under the old exchange, where you’d ask the person the number they wanted to connect to and you’d put the cord in that number and pull down the switch. I would sleep there and then leave at 7am to catch the school bus. Farmers sometimes needed to make calls before 7am, but if there was an emergency; a car accident on the highway, you wouldn’t get any sleep because the phones would go all night. I did senior school in Rutherglen; I was educated by Presentation nuns at Mount Carmel College. It was a boarding school for girls but the nuns decided to take in boys as well. So, there would be 100 girls and 20 boys. My greatest complaint about the whole thing was that you could barely put a football team together. In Year 11 I did five subjects, all taught by the same nun, and I did really well. Then, as they weren’t set up to do Year 12, I went to Rutherglen High School. I had already been hired by The Border Mail as a cadet and just as well, because my Year 12 results were not very impressive at all. It didn’t matter — and I don’t know if they even asked in the end.
“Ben Hicks put a word in for me about what I’d done for him for five years with no pay, and that unpaid job gave me a reward-for-life job.”