CHARLES WOOLEY
On the popularity of the NT News and his early journalism days
Back in another century, when I was a university student here in River City, I achieved the dubious honour of editing the student newspaper Togatus.
A Latin word of masculine gender, “togatus” simply meant “wearing a toga”. To me, the banner made no sense and in that new age of sexual equality I wanted to change it to the more gender-neutral title of Nickers (as in “anything you say will be taken down”), but they wouldn’t let me.
I got the job possibly because there wasn’t much competition. It came with onerous deadlines and paid only a pittance, but back in those wonderful days in the late ’60s you could buy a large bottle of Cascade Blue for 50c and there were lots of girls who wanted to be journalists.
We had editorial meetings along the waterfront bar of the now-defunct Traveller’s Rest Hotel. There was nothing bespectacled and geeky about the job. It seemed pretty cool back then, publishing a notorious and radical student newspaper in a conservative small town during the appalling misadventures of the Vietnam War. We ran excerpts from banned books such as the very funny Portnoy’s Complaint by the now-acclaimed author Philip Roth. We broke the Crimes Act with articles on how to avoid conscription. We famously outed the campus ASIO spy, not only publishing his identity (a serious crime, even today) but also rearranging the white stones of the “Keens Curry” sign in South Hobart to spell out his name. Apart from being briefly interviewed by a patient Commonwealth policeman and being called in for a cup of tea with a charmingly tolerant state attorney general there were no repercussions.
I went on to find employment with the ABC and later the Nine Network and never had trouble getting high-level security clearances. The truth was we were privileged middle-class kids, merely transitional radicals, inevitably bound for a life of boring bourgeois respectability. The government had nothing to fear from us and they knew it.
Those of us who came out of student newspapers into mainstream media in the ’70s had it easy. There was an abundance of jobs. Most capital cities had two or more newspapers, often with morning and afternoon editions. Even in Hobart, the
Mercury published an evening edition on Saturdays. The ABC ran the cheeky lefty
This Day Tonight in every state capital and almost everyone who worked on it was absurdly young and had come out of student newspapers. They paid us surprisingly well, but it was so much fun we would have done it for nothing.
Recently, I spent a week in a newsroom that reminded me of the outrageous fun of my journalistic youth. Darwin’s NT
News doesn’t just report the news but makes news around the world with such grabbing headlines as “Why I stuck a cracker up my clacker” and “Hit in head by flying dildo”. One was a drunken fireworks misadventure, the other a buck’s party gone wrong. Time and propriety don’t allow me to elaborate, but those frontpage stories are true.
The NT News doesn’t invent this stuff, although it does celebrate it. “Trouser snake on a plane” might be censored down south but in the “troppo” north it got the front-page treatment. Sparing your conservative deep southern sensibilities, it was about a man described as “a jack of all trades” who performed an obscene act on a Darwin-bound flight.
Then there was the unforgettable “Catnappers shaved my pussy”. No story could ever live up to that headline. A missing moggy returns home with no fur. “Furry mysterious,” read the subtitle, but the feline felony was never solved. No matter, the front page is a raging success and not just in the Territory. The age-old tabloid formula of a great picture and a cracker headline still works. The NT News online readership is twice the population of Darwin.
“UFO cut off my car” told of one driver’s lucky escape when aliens tried to run him off the road. In the vast and lonely reaches of the Territory, alien abduction and anal probing are apparently as common as a case of Darwin Stubbies and quite possibly related. This year, even a local Member of Parliament told the NT News about spotting a UFO. No wonder the paper has created a full-time position for a “Croc and UFO reporter”, generating an abundance of close encounters, leaping giant crocodiles and “What a croc” headlines. Inside the
NT News you will find the same national and international stories you might read anywhere but what sells the paper are without doubt those funny and bizarre front pages.
I spent an entertaining week with the crew of the NT News for an upcoming
60 Minutes story. The editor, Matt Williams, and his team up there in the land of mango madness are talented journalists who could undoubtedly make it in any newsroom anywhere – but I doubt they would have half as much fun.