Chapter 7: Quambatook - My time as editor and just about everything.

In a moment of utter madness, my widowed mother, Rena M Richardson, bought two weekly newspapers based in Quambatook, Victoria, the Quambatook Times and the Manangatang Courier, in September 1957 from brothers John and Albert Page. She paid them £2,500.

It was utter madness because the brothers were leaving Quambatook to run a newspaper at Alexandra and mum had given no serious thought to how her new purchases would be staffed. The first one or two issues were produced with great difficulty by compositor Norman Abbott and my younger apprentice brother, Jeffrey, who were already busy staff members producing the Charlton Tribune and Wycheproof News in Charlton. It was an impossible task and they told my mother so. Hence her call to the McPherson family, owners of the Shepparton News, that I could no longer work for them and would have to return to Charlton immediately.

Having returned home over the weekend as instructed, I found myself and Jeffrey being driven by Norman to Quambatook at 6am. Although Quambatook was just 60kms from Charlton, I’d never been there. It was off the beaten track and I could see why. As we entered the town I witnessed tumbleweed in the main drag, Guthrie Street. Previously, the only tumbleweed I’d seen was in Hollywood-produced cowboy films. There was something about the Wild West about the town with one of the two pubs, Beamish’s, bearing the bold slogan “Leave Your Thirst Here”. I was told that Guthrie Street had been sealed with bitumen just a year or two before.

The building where both the Quambatook Times and Manangatang Courier were produced was at the end of Guthrie Street and in a bad state, both inside and out. It had a front office, and there was a Linotype in very bad need of maintenance and an ancient flatbed machine where the 400 copies of the Times and 200 copies of the Courier were printed. There was also a photographic darkroom that hadn’t been used for decades. It had an enlarger and a flash tray. A flash tray was on a stick. Flash powder was poured into the tray and fired by a flint or match to light up a scene in the very early days of photography. It was a dangerous bit of equipment replaced by flash bulbs within a decade or two.

It was here that I first met Nancy Bibby (later McNaughton) who had been employed by the Page brothers to run the front office for £7/9/6 a week in old money. We liked her and kept her on. She remains a friend to this day. When Nancy visited my wife, Rosemary, and I in London in July 2014 we did a video recording of our memories of the Quambatook Times. You can see it HERE.

Here’s the final issue of the Quambatook Times published by the Page brothers:

My time working on Linotypes at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (Chapter 5) proved to be essential in Quambatook. My first task was to get the Quambatook Times one working properly by giving it a good clean. I won’t bore you with the details but a Linotype used matrixes to form hot metal type with the matrixes being rotated through the machine. If the sorting bar wasn’t kept very clean, the matrixes failed to drop into their allotted slot.

The flatbed machine also needed a lot of work and had a habit of sliding off its wooden foundations. We would then have to use a crowbar to return it to the foundations.

Most of the reporting for the Quambatook Times was done by Tom Hogan, a nice man who ran Hogan’s Store and whose brother was a journalist working for the ABC station 3WV in Horsham. The Manangatang news — such as there was — came from people like the local post mistress. I doubt that I visited Manangatang more than once and after a short time I shut the Courier down without consulting my mother. She wasn’t pleased but the paper was a financial and practical no-no.

This is the first issue of the Quambatook Times under my editorship. I had turned 20 a couple of weeks beforehand:

Once I got the equipment working reasonably well, there was no need for Jeffrey or Norman Abbott to help me in Quambatook. I soon got into a routine where I would arrive on Monday morning, stay at the Quambatook Hotel for two nights and travel back to Charlton on Wednesday evening after printing the latest edition which was delivered around the town by a local lad, John Beard. Nancy Bibby would be alone in the office on Thursdays and Fridays.

Amazingly, my mother never once had a discussion with me about what would appear in the paper. All she wanted was that it be published every week in reasonably readable and profitable form.

Although I was in Quambatook just three days a week, I made many friends there, not least Alan Bett who worked at the Post Office and married a local girl Christine Parker, and Angus Grieve who was a teller at the National Bank and was the groomsman at my wedding. It was in the days of telegrams and Alan was a skilled morse code operator. He would also top up his salary by doing some of the night shifts on the local telephone exchange. He would drag up a stretcher beside the switchboard and sleep between the few calls which he would listen to, then pull the plug when the call was finished. There was no such thing as privacy.

Also among my friends was Pixie Ryan, a local teacher, who I escorted to the nearby town of Kerang for its annual Movie Ball which also had a prominent Aussie actor as guest. Chips Rafferty was the star turn on this occasion. The highlight was the Progressive Barn Dance which meant all the females would get a chance to do a few twirls with Chips. When it came Pixie’s turn, he whispered into her ear: “I’m having a poetry reading in my room later. Would you like to join me.” Pixie declined his interesting invitation.

When I was turning 21 a few of my Quambatook friends invited me to a party in an abandoned farm house. There was no alcohol, but someone had cooked me a beautiful cream sponge cake. It turned out that the cake wasn’t for eating, but for slamming in my face. We have all grown up since then.

I had a radio with me to listen to the news and pop music, but I was also a regular listener to the BBC’s Radio Newsreel, relayed from London by the ABC. If I had then said that one day I would be editing that program in London, I would have been told that I should be dragged away by men in white coats, but that’s what happened in the 1970s when I worked for the BBC World Service at Bush House. More on this in later chapters.

There was just one policeman in Quambatook at that time. I won’t name him in case he is still alive and inclined to sue for libel. I first encountered him when he came into the Times office to acquire some stationery. It appeared that he had become accustomed to not paying for anything in the local shops and was rather miffed when I suggested he should.

Six o’clock closing for pub bars was still the law in Victoria. Not that the Quambatook Hotel felt the law applied to it. Come six o’clock, the front door was closed and the back door was opened. I asked the publican if he wasn’t concerned that the local policeman would take action and was told “I don’t think so. That’s him over there”, pointing to the copper in civilian clothes among the drinkers.

I can’t guarantee the accuracy of this story. There were times when tensions got out of hand at the two pubs in the town and on one occasion, a drinker got his shotgun and fired a shot as he chased another drinker down Guthrie Street. The shot missed. You and I might think this was a case of attempted murder, but my unnamed local policeman wasn’t overly agitated and felt that the best way to deal with this matter was to call on the offender the next morning and warn him that he would be “in real trouble” if there was a repeat.

Next chapter: more of my adventures in Charlton, Victoria