Historic milestone for our columnist
Gazette columnist John Wells has reached a significant milestone.
It is 50 years today since his first Gippsland History column was published.
Growing up in Longwarry and attending secondary school in Drouin, Mr Wells has brought his passion for history to life in our columns that tell the stories of people and places across Gippsland.
In a two part series, he reflects on his stories and why our history is so important.
Happy Birthday, happy birthday, happy 50th birthday.
Yes, this column has its 50th birthday today, May 23. It is a very rare newspaper column that lasts that long and I want to immediately recognise the support it has been given by many people along the way. That support (and my brilliant writing, of course) is what has kept it alive.
It began when a young school teacher in Beaconsfield saw an advertisement for a parttime journalist to work on the newly launched West Gippslander. That young schoolteacher had a mortgage of $9700 dollars. In 1973 that was big money, and he was looking for a way to add to his meagre government salary.
The editor had no real idea what to do with me so he got me to do three stories on the Emerald Panther (there was more to that than you might think) and then said “Just write some local history stories. They’re easy and everyone likes them.”
The column was born. It started with a story on the St Germaine homestead out behind Clyde, because my mother knew all about that.
Now let’s look at the mathematic of the whole project. Averaging 49 issues a year, with an average column length of 1120 words, over 50 years, with six extra columns for the holidays I don’t get with the Gazette, we come up with this equation,
Forty nine times fifty equals 2450 columns, plus that extra six, so 2456 it is. Multiply that by 1120 words a column and you have 2,744,000 words. That is a lot! It would be enough, put end to end, to take you from Collingwood to somewhere better, which is almost anywhere, isn’t it?
The average word length in English is, I believe, 4.7 characters and if you want to know what that totals you’ll have to work it out yourself.
When it started back in 1973 the normal space used was 525 square centimetres. In the current layout and without a photo I’d put the average space at a conservative 350 square centimetres. Call the median size 337.5cm. Multiply by the 2450 columns and you have an area of 826,877 square centimetres, so had you been silly enough to collect every single story instead of just the good ones, you’d have 82.69 square metres, well on the way to papering a room.
My maths is not very good – I failed maths in form three at Drouin High in 1959 (I remember ‘Doc” Russell quite fondly) and I have never passed a maths exam since, so feel free to check those figures. I can’t imagine why you would.
Anyway, as I meant to be saying, the column was used by the West Gippslander and was run at the same time in the Berwick Banner and the Mountains Regional Times. It spent some time also appearing in the Sentinel-Times in Leongatha.
In the 1990s it had a five-year run in the Latrobe Valley Express. It had a stint where I read a column once a week on 3UL, as it was then, and a few were picked up by 3GI in Sale.
Indeed, a friend from Darwin rang to say she recognised my voice talking about rabbit plagues on the local ABC station, which was news to me.
There have been a few spun off it. Two were simple collections. “Colourful Tales of Old Gippsland” and “More Colourful Tales of Old Gippsland” were published by Rigby in 1977 and 1980. Russell Porch, of Landmark Press, bought the ‘plates’ and reprinted in 1984 and
1990. He also published my “Gippsland… people, a place and their past” in 1986.
There were other books along the way, some of which were ‘Gippsland topics’, including Berwick and later the Narracan Shire, then St Kieran’s Parish in Moe.
I started writing the column on a bright yellow Adler portable typewriter, which was my pride and joy. I did all the essays and the thesis for two bachelor degrees and one masters. In the end, it just plain wore out.
I bought a second hand electric IBM ‘golfball’ but I had loved that little yellow Adler.
The column was typed onto small ‘linotype’ sheets, a couple of sentences on each sheet. It was a slow process and I am still amazed at the progress during the life of this column of ours. For years I would run up against a deadline time and again, and drive to Warragul and Traralgon to stuff the copy-paper under the newspaper’s doors. I don’t think I ever completed that task before midnight, and I rarely got a week or two ahead so I could just mail them
That all changed when I got my Commodore 64 computer! Now it was easy to correct mistakes, though many typos still slipped through. The great thing was that I could now just press “send” and the story was delivered. The Commodore gave way to an Amstrad and the computers kept getting better and better. Now I luxuriate among three machines on which I can write and send them.
I am still trying to collect them all in the one place. Stories turn up on odd USB sticks and folders I had forgotten existed. Some still exist only as hard copy, and some I have not managed to save at all. Thank Heaven for simple programs like Microsoft Word.
There is one thing, though, that became a constant through all this change. There was one place that was the home of John Wells’ Gippsland History column.
The West Gippsland Trader, Warragul’s first free newspaper, appeared on the streets on Thursday 14 May 1981, and on page two was my column, this one on the Robin Hood Hotel out on the Princes Highway west of Drouin.
The Trader ran reliably and every single issue carried the history column, right up until April 2, 2020, when the COVID 19 pandemic forced its closure after 39 good years of service.
Fortunately for me, and for those of you who follow it, the column was immediately transferred to the Warragul Gazette where it continues with the ‘family’ it developed in the Trader.
Editors Carolyn Turner and now Yvette Brand have done a great job and been very supportive and very capable for all those long years. It has been fun working with them, and, no, I did not have to say that.
In next week’s column I will, if I may, be a little more serious about the Gippsland History column in the Gazette and about why it is so important.