DALIA SABLE INTERVIEWS JOURNALIST MICHAEL GAWENDA

Your last book was about US politics. Was writing this book, Rocky and Gawenda, a significant change of pace for you?

It was about US politics and a bit about other things as well included my time as editor of The Age. It was basically about my time in Washington and my view of the Bush administration. It was much more journalism than this book. This is a different sort of writing. The whole point of writing it was to write something other than journalism. It was much more personal which was where I wanted to go with my writing. I have been a journalist for a long time and I wanted to go somewhere different.

This is much more anecdotal, almost a memoir, done through my relationship with my dog. A lot of writers have written about their relationship with their dog. John Steinbeck did, Virginia Woolf did and many other have because dogs are very special in lots of ways. This dog thing gave me the chance to live in the moment. A lot came from that which was very paradoxical for me  because it also opened up a lot of memories.

What does this book represent?

The book sort of happened in a strange way. I never knew where it was going to go and I just let the writing take me wherever it would. At the end of that process, I had this book which is about growing up Jewish in Melbourne and how my Jewishness formed me as a person, as a writer and as a journalist even. It is about the different Jewish influences on my life, my mother was more religious than my father, so I had both influences secular Jewish influence and the more Orthodox influence on my life and it turned out I wanted to write about that.

I didn’t know that I wanted to, but I did. Of course it is more than that, there are reflections on how you go through changes in life; going from being a very high pressured job like editing a newspaper to a different sort of life. I think all the way through there is the sense of how my relationship with Rocky opened up doors. People who have read it have said they have found it delightful, which no-one ever said about my journalism which is a good experience! I enjoyed writing it in a way that I haven’t enjoyed writing in a long time. I have written millions of words as a journalist but I stopped enjoying that and this was very different. I looked forward to writing, it was just a pleasure and I hope that some of that comes through in the book.

I have really enjoyed doing it and people have really responded well to it and it has also told them something about life. This allowed me to write about things that I could never do in journalism. I guess as time went by I felt more and more comfortable about revealing myself.  My son and daughter also got involved and wrote a few pieces, one of my friends wrote a piece pretending to be Rocky. I have found this a very enjoyable experience and I hope I have said something important about being Jewish as well because it is something that is very important to me but something I couldn’t say a lot about as a journalist.

How do you describe your relationship with Rocky, your dog? What does he mean to you?

Virtually all of my life I have had a dog, from when I was a kid. As I got older, and some of that is in the book about different dogs I have had and what they mean to me, what I have thought for a long time is that you can actually mark stages your life by the dog you had. Your relationship with your dog when you’re a kid is very different from when you are older. It is very different when you are a young man. I had dogs when I was a single man living in Canberra during the Whitlam government when life was pretty crazy, but that was a different experience to later when I had children. You can actually reflect on your life through the dogs that you had. I always wanted to write something about that and this is a result of that wanting.

Rocky triggered this because we came back from Washington and my life had changed I was no longer a full-time journalist. I was thinking about my life and suddenly my son and daughter bought us this dog and I started walking with him. We walked further and further and earlier in the morning and it became this daily ritual where I would spend time with him. We spend other time together too he sits on my lap while I write. I think that’s got to do with the stage of my life that I’m in. He opened up the door for me to explore how life changes. In this stage of my life, there is every chance that we will grow old together and that is a new thing. I have never had a dog that was going to be old when I will be. I have never had, as an adult, the time to spend with a dog as I have now. He is the Bill Clinton of dogs, he is forever trying to seduce other people and he takes me for granted, I suppose that makes me the Hillary Clinton. But really, he has been very important to me.

There are two sides to a relationship with a dog, they are constant in their affection for you, they are not capricious like humans. They are unconditional in their love for you and they give humans the chance to love unreservedly. I think that’s really important and really beneficial. Not for all older people, but I think a dog makes a difference in your life. They fill some holes. The book is about the meaning of dogs, it’s about a lot of other things as well but Rocky is the key character in the book.

The suburb of St Kilda is an important part of the book. Having lived abroad, how important is home to you now?

Incredibly important. I feel this is my home. The more I travelled and the more we lived overseas, the more I felt I knew where my home was. St Kilda has so many memories for me even when we didn’t live here because it was where so many Jews lived when they first arrived. There are buildings near here where I know members of my family first lived. I have memories of that going back to my childhood I have memories of Acland Street going back when it was an Eastern European Street.

Then I have other memories when I was a journalist and it was full of illegal gambling places that we used to go to a lot. I love St Kilda and I have a relationship with it going back a long time but it wasn’t until Rocky came that I began exploring it for hours everyday. Now I know the houses, the streets, the gardens and every inch of the beach. I think home is important and I think writing about the physical place you call home is an interesting experience.

Can you tell us about your new role at Melbourne University?

I have set-up a centre for journalism at the university. When I came back from Washington, the vice chancellor Glyn Davis asked if I would be interested in giving the university a journalism profile. I thought then that I should give back to journalism considering it has given me so much. Journalism is in all sorts of difficulties at the moment and I thought maybe if I can help with that, maybe if I can come up with some ideas to help with that, I can give back to journalism.

The Centre is are doing some research projects looking at the future of journalism, others about the way that journalists cover certain issues and we have a number of other projects that we have in mind. We are now in the process of setting up a website where I will write a blog about media issues including the way the media covers certain issues, including the Middle East. We have a public program too with speakers, lectures and workshops. I believe it’s important that journalists talk to the community about their work so this is exciting.

What are the key lessons that you have learnt during your career that you are keen to impart to the students?

I have learnt lots of things, certainly during my time as editor of The Age. How to be a leader, how to have a vision, how to encourage people. I have learnt that people want to do good work and you have to find ways of encouraging them and opening doors to enable them to do good work. People want to have feedback about what their doing. They need to have the sense that other people appreciate what they are doing. I think it’s incredibly important to have balance in life.

People do need to have time for friends, family and themselves and it is a great pity if they let work overwhelm all aspects of their lives. I am not saying that I didn’t let that happen to me, but I hope also that at times I have given time to my friends,family and my self. Don’t ever let work define who you are. It means that as you get older, if you define yourself entirely by your work, there will come a time when you finish with your work and who are you then? I think in journalism there are certain things that we should all be aware of and teach young journalists.

It is a privilege to be a journalist, it is not a right. We enter into people’s lives and what we do deeply effects the,. If we get things wrong, if we distort things, we can cause an incredible amount of harm. We have a responsibility to be responsible. Journalists have to learn to be more thick skinned and take criticism. They have to learn to be accountable for what they do. I hope these are things that we will enable through the centre. Our goal is to improve the practice of journalism in any way we can.

You have gone from a newspaper editor to a blogger. What is your opinion on the future of newspapers?

I think the future is fraught. The economic model that has supported newspapers, that is advertising, that model has broken. The Age and the SMH, and overseas papers such as the New York Times and Washington Post relied for many years on classified advertising. These golden rivers have flown to the internet and dried up. I think there is a future for newspapers but not the way they are now. I think we will have smaller newspaper and a lot of the things that newspapers do now will go on to websites. Sadly, I think newspapers will have fewer journalists. Whether those journalists will migrate to the web, there is a possibility of that. I ask myself the question.

When I started off in newspapers at 21 or 22, I joined the age with great confidence about what I would be able to do. I never thought I would be the editor of that paper but I did think that if I had talent and I could work and  I was dedicated, I could have a really interesting time as a journalist. And I did have that. I traveled, I worked as a foreign correspondent, I was based at different times in Europe and the US. At one stage I was the person who the paper went to when there was a story overseas.

There was a time in my life when I spent a third of my life overseas and in fact I left papers at that time because there was too much travel involved. But nevertheless, what a great privilege, I witnessed great events, I traveled the world. What I ask myself is that people starting out now in newspaper, will they have those opportunities? Probably not and that is really sad if it’s true. If they won’t have them on newspapers, will they have them elsewhere on new platforms? Well I hope so. I can’t be certain but I certainly hope so. We live in interesting times.