Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Shaun Carney, Melbourne University Publishing, $29.99.
Part-memoir, Press Escape is also partially a statement on social history. Journalist, editor and columnist, this is Carney’s deeply personal record that ‘will resonate with those who grew up in the 1960s’.
Getting away was always a driving ambition for Shaun Carney — from an outer-suburban house in the 60s and 70s, from a family with a secret: a father with a double life and a borrowed name.
Journalism gave Shaun that escape, to another life, to becoming a different person. For 34 years he took every opportunity it offered, flourished and knew success even while dealing with the personal struggle of his own child battling cancer. It’s an account of life that’s told with beautiful dexterity.
An only child, Carney grew up in working-class Frankston, the son of Jim and Eddie. Carney’s descriptions of suburban Australia in the ’60s are nostalgic, and a lovely indication of a different country.
Reflections of the famous people he’s met, the many places he’s visited and the impact of IT advances make for crucial reading. Carney does not mince words.
The fact is the “entire newspaper industry has been mugged repeatedly by the internet although some companies have suffered worse muggings than others”.
Carney admits that “although my chief professional preoccupation was politics, the biggest thrill I’ve ever had in my work was meeting and interviewing Ray Davies, the lead singer of The Kinks and the man who wrote one of the great postwar pop songs Waterloo Sunset, a piece of art that will live on well beyond any policy created by any of the politicians I’ve met.”
It chronicles a stirring, humorous and absorbing account of a change in circumstances or fortune, one that’s unwanted or unlikable.
