60 Minutes reporter reflects: 'sometimes you have to walk away from the story to tell it'

For the 40th anniversary of 60 Minutes I have been asked to write something about my long experience with the program;

‘Your favourite story Charlie or the most wonderful person you have ever met or the most fabulous place you’ve been or maybe the worst?’

After quarter of a century and a thousand people, places and stories, I must say that is indeed a very hard question.

I really don’t know where to begin.

I doubt in a few hundred words I can make much sense for you of the probably undeserved but fantastic blur that has been my 60 Minutes life.

If on this occasion I’m found short on answers, still I do know a good deal more about questions.

I’ve been asking them forever.

“Asks too many questions,” was on my Year 3 school report card. 

My Dad was quite pleased because he knew I wasn’t idly querulous. “You can’t ask too many questions Charlie,” he told me. “Questions lead to answers, or they should do.”

As a kid I genuinely wanted to know how I could be expected to believe everything I was told at school.

It was an attitude that got me into most strife in a bizarre subject with the contradictory title of ‘religious knowledge’.

It conflicted with everything I was learning in a much more compelling subject called science. 

For asking awkward questions about religion I was sent to the headmaster by a dark-suited, rotund, dog-collared and curmudgeonly old Tasmanian Methodist minister.

It was a formative memory still as vivid as if I had filmed it yesterday.

His name was the Reverent Lassom and he was my first encounter with religious intolerance but sadly, as a journalist, not my last.

The Reverend gentleman ordered me to the headmaster presumably for a caning because I questioned how the evolutionary science I was also being taught could be reconciled with the Rev’s assertion that the earth was created in six days and only a few thousand years ago.

I remember crossing the quadrangle with a mixture of fear and outrage.

Morbidly I fancied I was like Galileo in 1633, about to be tried by the Inquisition for saying the earth moved around the sun and not vice versa.

I wasn’t precocious, it was just that we didn’t have a television back then and so at my place we read a lot and talked a lot.

For a time I think I interrupted my education in order to go to school.

What’s this to do with a life in journalism?

Stick with me kiddies. Digression is the stuff of revelation.

I always tell young journalists that often you must walk away from the story in order to tell it.

Sometimes I might get lost in the meanderings but other times perspective only comes with distance.

The headmaster I was sent to see was a Mr Lowrie.

In those Dickensian days the head was as remote and omnipotent as God, with the state-sanctioned power apparently to thrash boys with impunity for offences sometimes as wicked as putting fire-crackers in letterboxes and sometimes as trivial as “talking in class”. 

It was despotic command capriciously exercised.

Education by the cane back in the Dark Age of my schooling might help explain why today the Australian Bureau of Statistics records that more than fifty percent of my fellow Tasmanian adults are “functionally illiterate”.

Happily Mr Lowrie was a cut above most headmasters of the day.

He heard my troubling story and with the wisdom of Solomon concluded that the Rev Lassom and I should part ways forever.

“I think it’s for the best Charlie,” he told me. “In future you should go to the library instead of to Religious Knowledge.”

And so that was, I am certain, the particular triumph of light over darkness and justice over tyranny, which set me on course for a life in journalism; a life of asking questions.

And in the fullness of time where better to end up than at 60 Minutes where no one in the long history of this institution has ever been sent to the headmaster for asking a question. 

To watch 60 Minutes’ 40^th anniversary in special, head to the official website: https://www.9now.com.au/60-minutes/2018/extras