Home » Mind & Soul » Depression » To Madness and Back - Page 2

To Madness and Back - Page 2

© John McManamy

Oh, the motor had been running hard back in New Zealand. The new Labor Government there had surprised everyone by becoming more right-wing than the right-wingers had ever been, and a whole new wildwest economy had been born, dominated by capitalist cowboys with paper fortunes who had Parliament at their beck and call. Suddenly, instead of operating on the fringes of journalism, we business/finance journalists were front stage center, smugly looking down our noses at our less-knowing brethren in the Parliamentary gallery.

Fifteen-hour days were par for the course, and twenty-hour days were not uncommon. In the meantime my dress had become slightly eccentric, featuring brightly colored socks and ties and a collection of broad-brimmed Humphrey Bogart fedoras. The thing I am most proud of during all that time was that, unlike many of my colleagues, I never glorified any of these capitalist cowboys. It would have been easy to fill up space with material put out by their PR flaks, but I resisted pressure from a lot of quarters and put my readers first.

It took me a little while to find my rhythm in Australia, but by September my old habits were returning. Then came the stockmarket crash of October 1987, and - thanks to all those paper fortunes going up in smoke - nowhere in the world did it hit harder than in Australia and New Zealand. By then, I had found my niche as the paper's cowboy capitalist reporter, and I covered the spectacle of their downfall across the entire continent, plus New Zealand. I treated the airline as my bus service, up to Sydney and back again the same day, perhaps Brisbane, over to Perth for a longer stay, not to mention New Zealand, always on short notice, usually not knowing for sure when I would return.

Often I literally composed the stories in my head, dictating them over the phone to someone at the other end in hopes of making it into the next edition. On one occasion, I actually found myself reviewing a Frank Sinatra concert, which got major play on the paper's entertainment pages, together with about three or four pieces of mine that appeared on the business pages that same day.

An acquaintance from New Zealand then living in Melbourne called me up and commented on my output, for which I had a ready answer: "Yeh, well it was my turn to write the paper that day."

The copyright of the article To Madness and Back - Page 2 in Depression is owned by John McManamy. Permission to republish To Madness and Back - Page 2 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.