Midget Is A Giant Still
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday February 6, 1999
SITTING down to resume this column has that back-to-school air about it. I should have a shiny new pencil case, a wooden ruler saying "Souvenir of Katoomba", with plastic set-squares and a pile of virgin exercise books soon to be defaced by cartoons of Spitfires and Heinkels. "What I Did In My Holidays," by Michael Carlton, Aged 53.
It has been one of those glorious, endless summers I remember from my teenage years, and the news from the beach is that Midget Farrelly has at last earned his Bronze Medal for Lifesaving.
The Great Midget Farrelly, that is. He was God to most of us when he became Australia's first world surfing champion at the age of 18 in 1963, beating the best that Hawaii could throw at him. But that was also the time of bloody warfare on the beaches, surfies versus clubbies, when boards were smashed, cars were torched, heads and limbs were broken. On some beaches there were guns and knives. Crazy, but boardriders were alienated from the surf lifesaving movement for a quarter of a century.
Midget himself is the most modest ex-champ you would ever meet. Even now, to watch him on a wave is to see poetry in motion, but he thinks differently. Over the years, he has tried everything from hang-gliding to skiing to sail-boarding, but there was always the lure of maybe, one day, taking an oar with a boat crew. If they'd have him. He decided to go for his bronze at the age of 54 because "I realised how little I know", he told me. "These people had skills I didn't have."
Fanciful, perhaps, but I like to think it brings the boardies and the clubbies full circle, the final burying of the hatchet. Midget did his first patrol at Palm Beach a couple of weekends ago, wearing the red and yellow cap with a bunch of guys less than half his age.
"I felt quietly proud," he said. "It meant more to me than most of the trophies over the years."
On a far lower note, your columnist boasts that he came a convincing 52nd from a field of 77 in the annual local surf ski marathon, a gruelling paddle out around Barrenjoey and back. Teenage Tarzans knock it off in about 45 minutes. For us gentlefolk, it's an hour or more.
I almost came 51st, but Hugo Eisdell, the well-respected Sydney auctioneer, inexplicably caught a lucky wave and shot past to make one of his famous sideways arrivals on the sand, mowing down a line of terrified spectators who will no doubt bear the physical and emotional scars for life. Heaps of fun, though. THE great campaign now being mounted to save the ABC's television headquarters at Gore Hill is a puzzle, to say the least.
The place is a slum, a dark, satanic mill if ever there was. The last time I worked there, about 18 months ago, there was a pervasive stench of urine not at all concealed by the fog of industrial-strength disinfectant and sour linoleum polish. With its threadbare carpet and cracked vinyl chairs, the foyer suggested a flea-pit hotel in some faded tourist resort. Waiting there to be escorted into the bowels, I could think only of Dante's Inferno : All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
Deeper into the works, stalactites of nondescript gunk had congealed on the ceilings of dank corridors which could not have seen a lick of paint since we cheeky 20-somethings were whooping it up on Bill Peach's This Day Tonight in the '70s. The various program production units were jammed, cheek by jowl, into temporary outbuildings made permanent by time and apathy. People sat hunched in converted broom cupboards, staring glumly at little heaps of stale biscuits and stained tea urns steaming like witches' cauldrons. Obsolete memos curled from chipped noticeboards. It was infinitely depressing.
How odd that Messrs David Salter and Quentin Dempster, et al, wish to preserve these horrors. Perhaps they know no better. They urge their ragged battalions to the barricades, to fling revolutionary defiance in the face of the ABC board, which quite sensibly decided this week to abandon the hideous old pile and move television over to the radio headquarters at Ultimo.
"Collocation" is the clumsy word bandied about to describe this. The bomb-throwers believe it is a wicked conspiracy to slash jobs and "outsource" programs to private production houses. We are in for a public brawl of soaring hyperbole.
"They've dingoed on us," said Salter, the colourful former boss of Media Watch. "The ABC's word is clearly no longer its bond." A Mr Chas Savage, described as a spokesman for The Friends of the ABC, announced on Thursday that the decision to leave Gore Hill was "tantamount to the ABC eating its young".
Experience suggests we should treat the extravagance of both sides with reserve. It is a myth that the ABC is a cornucopia of talent not seen since Renaissance Florence, whose creative genius is kept from a thirsty Australian public only by management incompetence and the Canberra chainsaw. There are some very bright people there, it is true, but, as in any large public organisation, there are many more drones clogging the machinery and clinging to sinecures. There is nothing wrong with outsourcing as long as news and current affairs remain in-house, which they will. What is The Bill, after all, but an outsourced program ?
On the other hand, I can make no sense of the ABC board's financial estimates for the upheaval. It says it will get $25 million for flogging Gore Hill, and it wants to borrow another $90 million to, er, collocate at Ultimo. $115 million all up, if I am not wrong. Even if it got I. M. Pei to build it Xanadu, I cannot see how it could cost that much.
© 1999 Sydney Morning Herald