In 1978, I walked into police rounds, and never really left

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This is an edited version of the forward for John Silvester’s new book, Naked City.

I was at the reception for my father’s wedding (his third) when a family friend asked, “What are you going to do with the rest of your life?”

It was a fair question as I was completing a university double degree in drinking beer and sleeping in.

45 years in the business: John Silvester’s press pass from his days at The Sun.

The questioner was Beverley Miller, wife of newly appointed chief commissioner Mick, who would become the best police leader Australia has seen.

I responded, “I have no idea.” She responded, “You should be a journalist as you have an opinion of everything.” (This was, I suspect, code for smart-arse.)

It was a light-bulb moment as I grasped this as the perfect solution. I would apply to be a reporter – get knocked back – and return to my chosen vocation of drinking beer and sleeping in.

I sent off a couple of letters to the big mastheads, offering them the opportunity to recruit someone of unlimited potential and immense talent. Modesty, you see, is vastly overrated.

The Age suggested I sit their exam. I suggested they stick it.

The Herald and Weekly Times offered me an interview. I met a slightly bored chap in an office who asked a few general questions. I managed to fake a few general answers.

To my surprise, I was offered a second interview. (I can only assume because I turned up sober and had my own teeth.)

This was an entirely different process as I met a panel of three stern newspaper executives.

They asked me questions about newspapers. I faked some answers because to be honest, I didn’t know anything about journalism.

The stern man in the middle, Bill Hoey, asked questions about a copper called Keith Plattfuss, saying, “He knows how to handle demonstrators doesn’t he?”

It was a trick question. “The Puss”, as he was known, had led a baton charge into a group of peaceful university students, later declaring, “They got some baton today, and they’ll get a lot more in the future.”

I had stumbled on the quote in a uni newspaper and suggested to the panel Plattfuss might have been more psychopath than strategist. Hoey looked down and read the direct quote from his blotter. He seemed pleased with himself. I wasn’t, believing I had been singled out because my father was a cop.

Hoey continued to chat. I continued to stew.

‘I didn’t think I would live to see the day when we had a Silvester on the payroll.’

He then opined that he wanted to move the journalism course from RMIT to Melbourne University. I told him it was a bad idea because journalism was a craft rather than a profession.

He gave me a patronising smile and said, “John, your attitude is pretty typical of someone who has never been in the workforce.” (This was entirely untrue as I had proved myself as mediocre at multiple casual jobs including retailing, pub work and fruit-picking.)

I responded, “Mr Hoey, your attitude is pretty typical of someone who has never been to university and I suspect never will.”

The exec next to him was caught mid-drag. His cigarette glowed red as he coughed, blowing ash over himself. I later realised he was pissing himself laughing.

I left the interview convinced a brilliant journalistic career had exploded on the launch pad.

Two weeks later, the phone rang. It was Hoey. “We are offering you a job. Where would you like to work, The Herald or The Sun?”

“The Herald, Mr Hoey.”

“You start at The Sun on Monday.”

He added, “I didn’t think I would live to see the day when we had a Silvester on the payroll.”

Police rounds Christmas party in the Russell Street pressroom, 1980. SIlvester, wearing an alarmingly wide tie, is in the middle.

Many years earlier, my father, then a gaming squad detective, wanted to prosecute The Herald, believing its promotion, Wealth Words, was an illegal lottery.

The opinion from a senior government solicitor was that it was legal, quoting a judge’s comments in an appeal case. It was a deliberate, selective and dishonest quote. Turns out it was from the dissenting opinion, meaning the promotion was illegal, but the fix was in, and the prosecution was not authorised.

The solicitor was eventually promoted to a high government office.

Truth is Hoey and the others must have seen something that I didn’t know existed, and I will always be in their debt.

On a Monday morning in January 1978, I walked into the HWT building in Flinders Street, Melbourne. Trucks with the Herald’s first edition raced onto the street, the place rumbled from the printing presses, and you could smell the ink and lead.

I went to the floor where the reporters worked to be introduced to my first editor, John Morgan. From the pocket of my skin-tight flared polyester trousers, the top of the gold pen presented to me for my 21st birthday was visible.

“Leave the pen at home, son,” Morgan said. “It will be stolen here.”

I thought these were the mutterings of a cynical, old man. Two days later, it was stolen.

I asked Morgan if he would be kind enough to direct me to my office. He laughed, sweeping an arm towards the newsroom where you grabbed a chair near a typewriter and hung on until someone important told you to move.

I tried to pretend I knew what I was doing, finding quickly I was mediocre at most tasks I was given. I was on a 12-month graduate cadetship and was coming to the conclusion that would be about it.

Then it became my turn to move to police rounds, the office at the Russell Street police headquarters, where reporters filed crime stories over the phone to typists. The “copy” was taken to subeditors to trim for the front page. (The stylebook showed it took 15 slips of copy paper each containing one paragraph, to fill a 38-centimetre news column.)

When I walked in, I saw a group of young guys (exclusively male despite the fact the best police reporter at the time was Edna Buchanan from the Miami Herald).

I thought they were a great group of blokes. They thought I was an arrogant prick. Turns out, we were all pretty good judges of character. There was the chief police reporter, the dapper Geoff Wilkinson, OAM, who drilled into us, “Be right and assume nothing”; night-shift genius Graeme “Bear” Walker, who consumed scoops and pizzas in equal measure; Peter William Robinson whose scowl concealed a wicked sense of humour (he would ring subeditors late at night threatening to murder them if his story was not on page one); and Big Jim Tennison, who avoided early-morning breathalysers by driving the office car along unused train tracks.

We once drove a detective home who insisted on firing shots out the rear passenger window. Luckily, it was open.

In The Age office was Lindsay Murdoch, OAM, as good a reporter as we have seen in 50 years; Andrew Rule, as good a writer as we have seen in 50 years; and the Hemingway-like figure, Steve Ballard, who drove a sports car and sometimes carried a gun.

There were page-one stories and late-night visits to the City Court Hotel, Police Club, Supper Inn and Galaxy Nightclub. The police rounds door would never close, with crooks and coppers wandering in on a whim.

There were no toilets (except inside the police station), which meant the night-shift ABC reporter insisted on relieving himself in the electric jug, creating the occasional OH&S issues.

Eventually, the police reporters (“Hounds from the Round”) overcame their initial views of me and very soon I knew I would never be going back to any other form of journalism.

A smiling John Silvester with the book, Naked City, containing his least -worst columns.

By the time this book is published, I have been doing it for 45 years. Not once, not ever, have I wanted to do anything else.

It is the type of journalism where you see the best and worst of humanity.

After 15 years, when I moved to The Sunday Age, I wasn’t a bad reporter but was still banging out stories the same old way. Editor Bruce Guthrie took one of my stories and rewrote just about every line. He taught me there was more to reporting than shovelling copy to subeditors.

Andrew Rule and John Silvester in 2011.Credit: Pat Scala

For years, I added jokes into stories, and for years, the subs took them out.

Then Saturday editor Steve Foley asked Andrew Rule and I to do a crime column called Naked City.

We had teamed together to write and publish the many books of Mark “Chopper” Read and the Underbelly crime series – seen by good judges as crimes against literature.

When Rule moved on, I kept going. The subs finally tired of removing the jokes and a succession of bosses allowed me to pick my own subject every week, the best of which are between these covers.

I once asked Alan Howe, the energetic and occasionally brilliant editor of the Sunday Herald Sun, “What is the best job in journalism?”

He gave a one-word answer.

“Yours.”

I think he’s right.

Naked City – Pan Macmillan – available online and at all good and bad bookshops. “John is the longest serving crime writer in Australia. He’s also the funniest person in the world. . . I like this man, and I like his book.” The impossibly talented Caroline Overington – The Australian.

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