CHARLES WOOLEY

W hy are we so nervous in Tasmania? There are many disadvantages of living on a small island at the end of the world, but one of them should never be a sense of physical insecurity.

Despite all the tourism hype, no one really knows where we are. I travel a lot and have always had to explain where I come from. Don’t worry, a few Chinese tourists do not turn Hobart into London or Paris. It just seems that way, especially if you don’t get out a lot. This really is the safest place in the world to live. So may I declare, as President Franklin D. Roosevelt did in 1932, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

I’ve been away for most of the past month, in dangerous places such as Darwin (crocs everywhere), Central Australia (flies will carry you away) and Canberra (you will die of boredom), but I keep up online. I know you are quaking in your Blundstone boots, but I can’t understand why.

The real reason the AFP was not rushing to put its troops back at Hobart airport is because it has more important things to do and real dangers to confront in our major cities. Our security forces have thwarted 13 terror plots in the past three years. None of them were in Hobart. The likelihood of terrorists schlepping down here just so they can get back on a return flight and do their evil (my spook sources tell me) is not a credible threat. The imagined fear that somehow the magnificent famous international transit hub of Hobart Airport is a soft target is just plain silly, naive parochialism.

Though so much fuss has been made, so many headlines written, so many local politicians grandstanding on a non-issue, the federal plods may well have to send in a token response. But will a few guns and uniforms make us feel better? I doubt it. We would just find something else to fret about because that’s how we are in the nervy city. If the sun shone more we’d be frightened of our own shadows. I trust you will miss Laurie Oakes half as much as I will. In the past 30 years, he has rescued many political stories of mine simply by deigning to be in them. The great man’s commentaries, like his news reports, were always incisive and revealing. A couple of Oakes grabs, spread like fertiliser where they would do most good, could always save a yarn.

Last week, though – I still can’t believe it – I interviewed him for the final time. I really needed that Oakes interview more than any other because the story for 60 Minutes was about him. Maybe the story has always been about him – though, modestly, he would never admit it.

Oakes commanded the Australian political landscape much as he filled the television screen, a journalistic colossus, a major player in our polity, prescient, authoritative, compelling and always revealing. Over almost half a century it feels like he must have written the Bible and encyclopedia many times over. Books, columns (published in this newspaper), television scripts and thousands of clip-boarded pages crammed with questions carefully honed to puncture overinflated and dissembling politicians during his masterful television interviews.

That Oakes has said he won’t do it anymore is, for me, unthinkable. I prefer to believe down at his beach house he will soon find the sea air and a diet of flathead much less invigorating and appetising than the politics he has eaten and breathed in Canberra. I cannot in all honesty wish him well. I miss him too much already. Rather than a happy retirement, I hope he is soon bored. I want to imagine him like Robinson Crusoe pacing the shore and anxiously scanning the horizon for any sail that will come to the rescue and carry him back to where he really belongs.

My 60 Minutes story last week was as it should have been, unstinting journalistic praise for a job superbly done and a nod to all of Oakes’ remarkable scoops and achievements. While I reported all that from the heart, this footnote is another matter. It darkly mutters about him having the audacity to leave us.

Who will now smite the unrighteous and the hypocrite? Who will unveil the craven cowardice of Canberra and yet bestow credible praise on the rare occasions it is deserved? Who will skewer them with the sharp rapiers of truth and accuracy? He was the prince of political reportage. Why wouldn’t he hang around another decade or so as did that other, equally grumpy old prince, Philip Mountbatten?

I know I am writing as if a treasured old colleague has died when I should be wishing him a happy salty seaside reclusion, snoozing by the shore and reading detective novels. Oakes has called time and we must respect his judgment. But these are dark days for journalism everywhere and the last thing we needed was for such a bright light to be extinguished.