Philobiblon

My first memory of Barry Clarke is one that will be shared by many. I was sitting in his poky little office in the Cootaumndra Herald, high on the thought that I might just about, nearly have, secured my first proper job, when he pulled out a yellowed front page of the Harden Express. He explained it contained the story of his brother, who ran a baker’s shop, being hauled into court for having dirty premises. “Without fear or favour, you just have to tell the truth,” he told me.

And the same story he told to many others – it was the core of his philosophy, his being. When many others were content to turn out rags containing little more than press releases and puffs, the Herald was a proper, tri-weekly NEWSpaper. It covered every court hearing, every council meeting, every sporting occasion – even if Barry, as he often did, had to do it himself.

That was how, for decades, he edited the Cootamundra Herald and its stable of newspapers (seven produced in five days, all rolling off the press out the back of the Cootamundra office). He was an employee of the paper for 59 years (starting as a small paperboy), and if anyone could have been said to have ink in their veins it was Barry. Literally. Another key element of his philosophy was “all hands on deck”. The press had only very limited capacity and for bigger papers, and advertising inserts, there were no machines. Pressmen, comps, journalists, and the editor, all mucked in to get the job done.

Leading the way was Barry. “Never ask anyone to do what you won’t do yourself,” he said – and it’s a philosophy that I’ve always tried to stick to. (It also taught me the invaluable lesson that white clothing and printrooms don’t mix.) He stuck to it even when the comps were trying to chase him away to work on the next paper of the inexorable cycle – he was determined to do his share.

And he needed to start on the next paper, for he was the sun around which all at the Herald revolved. When the paper was, sadly, taken over by Rural Press, after decades in which Barry had enjoyed laissez faire owners who allowed him to do pretty much what he liked — which was turn out excellent newspapers — he was forced to take some of the 52 weeks of untaken leave he had accrued over the years. (The accountants had a fit about what it was doing to their balance sheet.)

I had the impossible task of filling in for Barry during some of that time – and only then realised just how much he took on. It wasn’t just the editing, and the management of a young and sometimes difficult staff (like the staff member who shall remain nameless who allowed herself to be got drunk at the rugby dinner before she had taken the photos). There was the whole operation. Plonked down in a chair in front of me was the print manager, to dicuss paper purchases, then there was a real estate manager wanting to discuss, for a precious half-hour or more, when there were a thousand other things to do, the precise wording of their advert: “calm”, or “tranquil”.

This was what Barry handled for year after year, decade after decade. He defended the town, the region – master of the “don’t take away our rural services” editorial, he could thunder with the best of them, but he was always the best of employers. He took me on, like others before and after, to write the Eastern Riverina Observer in Henty, two hours’ drive away from Cootamundra. I was straight from university, with no more than a couple of short work experience stints under my belt, yet he gave me the paper, to do with virtually as I would. It would be some years before I would understand just what an unbelievable luxury it was to be allowed to say “there’s a lot of news this week; let’s have four more pages”, and to get them. The 32-page paper he allowed me to produce for the 1988 Easter weekend, with bicentennial celebrations in full swing in every town and hamlet, might have set a record for low advertising percentage, but Barry didn’t care: the news was there.

Money was never a high prioirity – quality was what mattered. “Management” was what he did after Friday’s Herald had been pushed out the door about 4.30pm – and he was under strict instructions to be home by 6. That meant basically signing the cheques for whatever was needed. He could have paid me, and my predecessors and successors in Henty, peanuts, but he insisted that since we were doing a graded journalist’s job we should be paid as such.

He knew we’d only stay two years — the third year of the Henty field days would have been more than our young flesh and blood could take — and he told us so: he was training generations of young journalists, and was proud of that. His graduates are, like me, now scattered around the media, in Australia, and the world. And when tragedy struck very close to home for me he was the most understanding of employers, understanding even sometimes that sympathy in the wrong time and place could be debilitating.

Barry was also a fierce defender of the print staff – when the Herald computerised he insisted on maintaining the place of the compositors, producing a wonderfully eccentric hybrid of a system that linked Wordperfect with a printing programme: that it was never thereafter possible to hyphenate mother-in-law and similar words was one of its more curious eccentricities, but it ensure that skilled, dedicated staff maintained their jobs for many years more than they would have at any other newspaper group.

They were the newspaper, for Barry, but he was the newspaperman par excellence.

Barry died last Friday in Canberra, I’ve just learnt.

Update: Pat Caskie, the second foundation of the Herald, has written a great obituary