Happy birthday, Good Weekend

I don’t remem­ber the first issue of the Good Week­end in the Sydney Morn­ing Herald in 1984. The earli­est edi­tion in my col­lec­tion is dated 1987. I have a cup­board full of Good Week­ends, not every issue, but every sig­ni­fic­ant one. Pride of place goes to the four mag­ni­fi­cent magazines pro­duced in the lead up to the mil­len­nium shift. I keep every one as flat as I can. They were part of why I pan­icked with the flood recently: stu­pidly, they are sit­ting on the floor, stacked high.

I didn’t really decide what I was going to do with my life until uni­ver­sity. At high school, I con­sidered acting and teach­ing maths. Then I saw All the Pres­id­ent’s Men and I wanted to be an invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ist and bring down gov­ern­ments. I became very polit­ical. I was obsessed with the late 60s, with Viet­nam, with My Lai. I had read Sartre and Marx and I was going to change the world.

My careers teacher, Rus­sell Cahill (who got back in touch with me a few years ago) sug­ges­ted the Uni­ver­sity of Tech­no­logy, an ungraded degree that was highly respec­ted if I wanted to work for Fair­fax (Mur­doch won’t hire out of there because it’s a left-wing fem­in­ist degree – graf­fiti on the loos used to read “hell hath no fury like a les­bian with a com­mu­nic­a­tions degree”).

I took the sug­ges­tion… but some­where along the way, invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ism faded as a goal. I’m not sure how: my teacher for Journ­al­ism 101 was Wendy Bacon, one of Aus­trali­a’s fore­most invest­ig­at­ive journ­al­ists and someone I admire to this day. I think it was partly the stand­ard of poetry teach­ing there (my lec­tur­ers included Dorothy Porter and Drusilla Modjeska), my dis­cov­ery of polit­ical theory and French post-struc­tur­al­ism and a very, very bad decision in terms of life part­ner – an emo­tion­ally abus­ive older man who drew my focus away from career.

At the same time, I became involved with pro­du­cing the UTS cre­at­ive writ­ing col­lec­tions and edit­ing the annual Women’s Magazine, Hon­ey­comb. Sud­denly, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to work on magazines. I could com­bine gor­geous prose with intense pho­to­graphs, images that would sear ima­gin­a­tions com­bined with words to haunt, seduce, amaze.

At some point, I applied to the SMH to do some sort of part-time work. I can’t remem­ber what it was; I remem­ber passing the spelling and typing tests with flying col­ours. I didn’t follow through with the job. I have no recol­lec­tion of why. It was a time in my life when I took many drugs and was less than focussed. Nor do I have any idea why I never applied to do a cadet­ship at the news­pa­per. Per­haps I thought that only led to news journ­al­ism. I know now it is one of the main ways into all parts of the paper, includ­ing editing.

Never mind: by 24 I had left the abus­ive man, was in a won­der­ful rela­tion­ship with pluces and hawk_eye and was the editor of my own ultra-cool magazine, a job I landed thanks to Next Medi­a’s tend­ency to hire enthu­si­astic people with little exper­i­ence for very low pay. 

At 28, the dream was on the way: I was head-hunted by Fair­fax to run its e)mag magazine out of Mel­bourne. Now I was in the right place, in Fair­fax’s magazine depart­ment. In the job inter­view, Age editor Michael Gawenda asked me, “So, do you want my job?”. “No, sir,” I con­fid­ently replied. “I want to be the editor of the Good Week­end.”

In 2002, they closed my magazine. Advert­ising down­turn, post-Septem­ber 11 crash, post-Sydney Olympics crash, post-tech stocks crash.

I men­tioned to my man­ager, pub­lisher and mentor Gaye Murray, that it was only two years until the Good Week­end’s 20th Anniversary. Per­haps I could start work on a book or a spe­cial com­mem­or­ative pro­ject? I wrote up a pro­posal but I don’t think it went anywhere.

I left Fair­fax. I went over­seas. I fin­ished my Mas­ters, I star­ted teach­ing. In the last year, GW editor Fenella Souter finally decided to leave after seven years in the role. My chance! I applied, but didn’t get an inter­view. Fair enough, I don’t really have the exper­i­ence yet.

Then in June, they advert­ised for a Deputy Editor. Surely, I thought, I can at least get an inter­view for this one. I pulled together my best ever applic­a­tion, citing annual sales fig­ures for the magazine and global trends in the newpa­per-inser­ted magazine (NIM) market. I men­tioned the upcom­ing anniversary. I argued that the magazine needed a web site after all these years and that I was the ideal person to help them develop it. I praised the spe­cial edi­tions for the Olympics and Mil­len­nium. No dice. The person who got it was SMH Travel Editor Kend­all Hill. If only I’d done that cadetship…

I figured I didn’t have exper­i­ence with a weekly and that’s what was needed. Well, now I have it… not really long enough, but some.

Anyway… today I bought the 20th anniversary edi­tion of the Good Week­end. I read it with a cer­tain amount of nos­tal­gia, a cer­tain pride in the industry and the pos­sib­il­it­ies of such a magazine and a cer­tain envy and regret.

I prob­ably have another seven years before those roles are up for grabs again. I have a chal­lenge ahead of me: to pro­duce a magazine so impress­ive, such a good com­pet­itor for the old GW that they hire me when it comes to that or that I don’t care because I’m already work­ing on the most amaz­ing cre­ation I can produce.

Thank you, Good Week­end people: for the inspir­a­tion over the years; for the stor­ies that made me cry; for the know­ledge you impar­ted; for the time out that I have given myself every week­end to read your magazine quietly at home on couches, over lattes and eggs pacific in intim­ate cafés, with part­ners and alone.