In Depth Working Lives – Jana Wendt

Jana Wendt is one of Australia’s best known journalists, having presented segments of Network 9’s 60 Minutes, A Current Affair, Dateline and Sunday. Since leaving television, Jana Wendt has written two books – A Matter of Principle and, in 2010, Nice Work which fleshes out the unusual working lives of an assortment of Australians, from a boxer working for a comeback to a CEO dealing with a company scandal. To discuss her new book, Jana Wendt addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 28 April 2010.

IN DEPTH WORKING LIVES

JANA WENDT

To explain the genesis of Nice Work,I need to reach back briefly into my past work in television. Doing that job, I was at various times struck by just how strange an occupation it was. For instance, I recall travelling from Moscow to St Petersburg in the depths of a white winter on an overnight train in the company of Russian nationalists who were running amok through the carriages emptying bottle after bottle of vodka down their throats. They were accompanying their eccentric leader Boris Zhirinovsky and I was with Zhirinovsky for the purposes of delivering a story on him. It was a long night.

A couple of days later for the same report, I remember standing knee-deep in snow delivering a piece to camera about the fall of communism for so long that my jaw seized up – all this, to produce 15 seconds of television. Similarly, as I trudged through the snow across a remote Canadian mountainside I wondered whether the ends would justify the means. Somehow I doubted that we would ever discover the landing site of a UFO piloted by extra-terrestrials.  Surely, this was not normal work, I thought. There had to be jobs in the world that were more “regular” than this. What did other people do for a living?

Ignorance is a terrible thing to admit to, especially for someone who has made a living as a journalist. But it is in part a desire to fill in the gaps in my knowledge and experience that nudged me towards the subject of other people’s working lives. The fact is that the amount of material that passes before and through the average generalist journalist is immense. It may be that on Monday you are asked to investigate a dodgy pink batt installer. So you accumulate some information, and then a bit more information, until you can present a more or less coherent story about that particular batt-man. When it’s all over and the report has been published or broadcast, then a generalist reporter moves on. The next day you could be required to produce a story on conflict in the Middle East or a survey of Australian schools or maybe an inside look at brothels. In fact, the brothel is a convenient place to stop to consider the journalist’s work because as a journalist, you are open to all comers, so to speak, and required to “love” the one you’re with, until you’re paid to move on to someone else.

So with three decades of whoring behind me and with time to consider my sordid past, I thought of all the things I didn’t know about the people I had interviewed. In the past, I would interview a “CEO” for instance, and would question him or her about a particular issue that was making waves at the time, and then I would go home. But what was often missing was a context for what that person actually did day to day – aside from giving interviews, of course. The kind of work that I did on television often dictated that I drop into the professional (sometimes even personal) life of an individual, cherry pick a newsworthy morsel from it and retreat. But later I found myself asking: what did these people do when I wasn’t around? When the excitement, or trauma, of media exposure died down – what was the actual job they did? What were the fundamental requirements for it? How did their days start and finish? To pursue the CEO example a little longer – what made a person a good or an incompetent CEO? What did so-called “dedication” to the job mean? And how much of the flesh and blood person had to be given over to CEO-ing? How much if anything could be withheld? How much did it mean to a given CEO to be one? Was it just a way to make a buck? Was it a contest in which you tried to trump or even bump off other actual or potential CEOs? Was it a calling?

For Nice Work I wanted to hang around – as unobtrusively as possible – to watch what went on in people’s working days. I wanted to look at the particular – the nuts and bolts of jobs. As it turned out, the project was more complicated than that as it became obvious that jobs didn’t do themselves – people did them, and they brought with them their life history, their experience and their attitudes. So each job template was filled in with individual colours by each worker. I did not go in search of famous people – that wasn’t my interest – but as it turned out a few of my workers were publicly known.

Sometimes my task involved situations that did not exactly come naturally to me. For instance, as I stood in a life class observing the work of a sculptor, I found myself staring at the plump bare bottom of a naked young woman and, as I did that, I felt strange. I was there to see how a master sculptor instructed his students, so of course I had no other job but to watch. So there I was in the dust and the dead silence – watching students moulding tiny bits of clay into bottoms. Frankly, I felt like a Mormon in a bar.

Even more intimidating, I found, was being seated at the end of a boardroom table as the CEO of a large company – a cruise ship company – conducted a meeting of her senior executives. You can probably imagine the scene: on the wall, clocks representing the cities which formed part of this big international business: Los Angeles, Miami, etc, etc. As the executives were put through their paces, I found myself suddenly longing to be smaller – preferably tick-sized so that I could avoid attracting attention to myself and run the risk of exposing my utter ignorance of business and commerce. I was desperately afraid of being asked about “Key Performance Indicators” or “revenue streams” or God forbid, “allocational rigidities”, all of which sound like medical conditions to me. The tortured language of business irritated me and since I can barely count, the figures eluded me. I struggled on and the struggle turned out to be worth it.

During the time that I spent with this particular CEO, who, you might have guessed, was Ann Sherry of Carnival Australia, she was taken up with a very broad range of activities. She was engaged in a battle of wills, a kind of war with the state government over port facilities, and she was personally waging a carefully calibrated public relations campaign on the issue. At the same time, the CEO was travelling overseas for board meetings of the global parent company where she had to compete for attention for her Australian division; she was also coordinating and presiding over extraordinarily elaborate publicity events on Carnival’s cruise ships here in Australia; she was attending meetings of an unrelated board on which she sat; as well as mentoring an ambitious young woman who was having a hard time with another employer. Oh and the CEO was also overseeing who would or would not get a pay rise.

You will recall no doubt that it was on one of the company’s ships that a woman had died in 2002 in awful circumstances. Dianne Brimble had been found dead in a cabin on the Pacific Sky. Brimble died five years before Sherry was recruited for the CEO’s job. But during my time at Carnival not only was the company dealing with the trial of one of the men accused of involvement in Brimble’s death but also with the arrival of a fully fledged health crisis on board the ships – swine flu. All of these issues and more, were being juggled by the CEO. Sherry’s trademark is candour and it was her openness that made the time spent with her so valuable.

In order to write Nice Work then, I did not just venture into working worlds where I felt comfortable. My experience with a boxer in training for a comeback was another case in point. I had never much understood boxing – neither the reason for its existence nor the enthusiasm of its fans. But I admit I was curious about it and soon got into the swing of spending time at an inner city boxing training gym.  When I mentioned to women in particular that I was shadowing a boxer, and consorting with the “colourful characters” at his gym I would get in response a facial expression that combined distaste with pity. I felt dirty – briefly.

When I first met Brett the boxer, he was attempting to reduce a somewhat flabby 100k body, to the weight his trainer insisted was necessary for a decent showing in the ring. He needed to drop 20 kilos. That sounded like a lot to me. Practically, for Brett this meant leaping out of bed in the wee small hours to pedal on an exercise bike before driving to a ditch in a suburban street to do his day job of repairing water pipes; it meant confining his diet to sad drips of fruit juice, tiny morsels of fruit and pale thin bits of chicken when his favourite foods were really pizza and ice cream (of which he normally consumed large buckets all on his own).

After a day of ripping monstrously heavy pipes out of the ground while standing in the mud and muck he would go sparring in the gym. He would follow that with a session of running, weightlifting and muscle crunching. The next day he would get up and do it all again. On the first day that I watched Brett sparring in the gym, he tore a ligament in his left hand. This was not a good start to our relationship as Brett is a southpaw – a left-hander – and the injury set him back for months. He thought I’d jinxed him.

While Brett’s hand was out of action though, he and a few friends took me along to see a fight. And it turned out to be quite a night. At one point I found myself standing in an open men’s toilet cubicle at the back of Blacktown RSL in Sydney just so that I could fit into a room where a number of boxers were limbering up for the night’s events. They were throwing punches into the practice mitts their trainers were holding up or shadow boxing. As I propped in the toilet cubicle, I particularly noticed a huge man whose dark skin was brilliantly greased and who for reasons known only to him, was delivering blow after blow to one of those electric hand dryers you see on walls in public toilets. At the same time, the wizened old guy who was his trainer seemed to be passing on pretty basic instructions on how to duck and weave.

I later learned that with just one professional fight to his name, Royce Sio was about to enter the ring with Solomon Haumono, a boxer whom the ring announcer called the “Excitement Machine” of boxing. A former rugby league forward Haumono had 16 professional fights to his name – 15 victories, 14 by knockout. The bell rang and these two huge men – mountains, really – faced each other in the ring. I looked down to make a note in my notebook. When I looked up again, the Excitement Machine – 16 fights, 15 victories, 14 by KO – was flat on his back. His eyes were fogged while the hand dryer man was leaping excitedly around the ring. So this was boxing, I thought. Nice Work.

But just as I was launching into a meditation on the cruel twists of the game, I discovered that success had gone to Sio’s head. He had decided that while the Excitement Machine was down, he would shoot another couple of big ones to his jaw. Since this was an outrageous breach of the “never hit a man when he’s down” commandment of boxing and of life in general, the entire room stood up as one and roared with rage. Hand dryer man made a quick exit from the ring and a posse of police followed him just in case the Excitement Machine’s fans decided to take matters into their own hands. So here was I, a boxing novice, in the middle of absolute mayhem. In the end, though, I thought I’d been lucky to be there, lucky to have a ringside seat and as the promoter pointed out to me when a shower of blood sprayed from the ring during another fight, lucky I wore black.

The elephant in the ring is of course, death, or at least the possibility of it. Brett the boxer deals with it by saying that he prefers to do his business as quickly as possible – to get in, knock out his opponent, and go home.

One of my other workers though, had to look death in the face every day as part of her job. That’s what forensic anthropologists do. Their speciality is osteology –  skeletal anatomy and biology. In practice, it means examining the remains of human beings in a legal context, providing information to police and the courts about the cause of a person’s death. The working days of a forensic anthropologist can vary greatly. One day I watched Soren Blau, who is based in Melbourne at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine, the mother of two small children, giving evidence in the Supreme Court about a particularly grisly murder. The remains of a young man had been found in a drain wrapped in a sleeping bag. Animals had begun to scavenge the body. Blau had been present during the opening of the sleeping bag and she had examined the remains. In the courtroom a portly grey-haired man sat in the dock. The charge was that he had been involved in torturing the victim before killing him. The forensic anthropologist was required to tell the court and the jury what she had seen – what the particular defects in the dead man’s bones told her about the way he had died.

That was one kind of working day for the forensic anthropologist. I saw quite another kind when I accompanied Blau to East Timor on her mission to solve an 18 year-old mystery.S he had assembled an international team of forensic anthropologists to excavate a site that many suspected could be a possible secret burial place of people who had disappeared after a protest march in the East Timorese capital of Dili on 12 November 1991. Many of the young people who had marched against Indonesian rule on the day had been shot in the grounds of a cemetery, known as the Santa Cruz. An unknown number of the protesters disappeared. Despite subsequent inquiries and commissions there were no bodies and no graves. The forensic scientists had made several earlier attempts to find answers, without success. This time, on the strength of persistent rumours, they were going to dig in another graveyard, in a seaside town west of Dili called Hera.

The work quickly paid off. On the second day of the excavation, I watched as a honey-coloured skull appeared from beneath a mound of earth. It was an electric moment. In the days that followed I found myself staring into other graves containing human remains. Sometimes, buried with them were belongings and clothing that were, ironically, perfectly preserved. The bold striped shorts of one skeleton are fixed in my memory, as are the high top sneakers that the young man in the grave had put on the day he died. Now they were attached to the end of smooth fleshless leg bones.

On some days the forensic anthropologists would be lying stretched out in the graves next to the skeletons. They worked with fine brushes to clear away soil from the bones to make sure that the graves’ contents were preserved in good condition for the next stage of their investigations. At the end of the day, they would leave the cemetery with large brown paper bags, containing the bones they had exhumed. Sometimes the contents were too large for the bags and the biggest bones, the femurs, would poke out from the top. It was strange to think that the scientists were carrying in their arms all that was left of a human being. The exhumations were only the first stage of their work, there would be many more working days involving the reconstruction of body parts from the bones, interviewing relatives of the missing, and taking blood samples in the hope of an eventual DNA match.

Several months later, three of the first five DNA tests revealed that the remains were indeed of three young people, two 18 year-olds and one 22 year-old who had marched to the Santa Cruz cemetery eighteen years ago. This was a world first. The first time that any of the bodies missing after the notorious Santa Cruz massacre had been found and identified. This forensic breakthrough was by the standards of this particular job a significant success – a job well done. I wondered though, how anyone doing this work could assimilate it with a normal home life. How does it feel to go home at night with the day’s work still on your mind? In this case, the forensic anthropologist is a young mother of two small children. She explains as best she can how she manages what in some ways, amounts to a double life. She admits that after a few weeks away working in dusty graves, she finds it hard to adjust to conversations about tuck shop duty back home.

I want you to know that not all of my working days were grim, one in fact, was, quite unexpectedly, full of torrid sex. I enjoyed this courtesy of a person known as a Foley artist. A Foley artist goes to work every day to make the sound effects of humans and animals for feature films and television programs. To do this the Foley artist uses a vast array of everyday objects.

The Foley studio is a cross between a warehouse and a junkyard. In one I saw, amongst many, many other things: some unhinged doors; a bike helmet; a sink top; a tree branch; a collection of suitcases; a teapot; a baby stroller; a sheet of corrugated iron; a birdcage; a roll of carpet, some wicker baskets; a bucket and a cocktail shaker. The job is in fact named after Jack Foley who helped Universal Studios make the transition from silent films to talkies. He famously jangled keys on a key ring to provide the sounds of slaves’ chains rattling in the legendary movie Spartacus. The Foley artist’s work requires the banging, rubbing together, scraping and stroking of objects and various substances to make authentic-sounding sounds.

For instance, if you need to make the sound of a human spine snapping – this is what Foley artist Helen Brown, with whom I spent time, had to provide for a science fiction film – a cabbage is a winner; just one twist and you’re there. The sounds you take for granted when you watch a character in, say, a period film, wearing a long gown and moving across a dance floor – they’re provided by a Foley artist. Helen is one of only ten or so Foley artists in the whole country.

And now, the sex.

On one of my days with Helen, she was working on an episode of the Underbelly series. And a particularly racy one at that. One of her tasks was to recreate the sounds of a drug baron – a nasty piece of work – having raunchy sex with his blonde floozy. The solution to this challenge was – Sorbolene cream. Helen had used it many times before in all sorts of sticky situations and she knew it was a lifesaver. As the drug baron mounted his blonde, the Foley artist sat on a stool in front of a microphone with her trouser legs rolled up, rubbing Sorbolene up and down her legs and arms. Yes, it sounded just like the real thing. Needless to say, I now look at Sorbolene cream with new eyes.

In summary, there was one factor common to all of the workers with whom I spent time. None of them could imagine a life doing anything else. This phenomenon of work as defining or taking over the individual was probably best articulated by CEO Ann Sherry. I asked her how much of her life was taken up with her job as CEO. Her instinctive answer began with: 100 per cent, because my brain is going all the time. She later modified that to between 70 and 80 per cent. But by her own reckoning, she was largely CEO with an option for totally CEO.

It’s true also to say that not one of the workers I met was anything other than deeply invested in his or her work, although two of them were profoundly disappointed at the end of their careers.  Both felt unappreciated, undervalued. This was true in the case of a Catholic priest in his mid 50s whose working life I entered just as he was being transferred after 12 years as parish priest of one of the largest parishes in Sydney to one of the smallest. He saw this as a demotion.

The other deeply disappointed worker was an elderly sculptor who felt that the value of his life’s work had never been recognised by the art establishment. The sense of disappointment was compounded by the fact that he was very aware that time was running out for him. He was 92 and frail although still keeping to a working schedule at his sculpture school; he would still inspect students’ work and offer advice as well as doing what sculpting he was still able to manage.

In his earlier years Tom Bass, whose public sculptures are dotted around the country, had been a firebrand whose fierce faith in his particular artistic ideal had a deep impact on many of his students. Our conversations were interesting for a number of reasons – firstly, because he had stuck so doggedly to his beliefs; secondly, because he was still exceptionally articulate and lastly, because of his willingness to talk about the biggest subject of them all – death. He did feel that his own was close; he thought about it every day and was preparing for it. I found myself not nearly as comfortable with the subject as he was. As a consequence of his strong religious faith, the sculptor believed he would be entering another, better life when his frail body finally gave way. He said: “I feel in a way sort of irrelevant to this age because I live somewhere else.” Tom Bass, as you might be aware, died in February this year – about a year after that conversation.

I suppose it’s pretty obvious from what I’ve just said that people’s working lives have a habit of interweaving with their private ones. There were two marriage break ups among my workers in the time that I was putting together this book – both, it appeared, in some way connected with the nature of the work itself. Writing the book, I was again struck by the willingness of the workers to honestly open up their lives to my prying eyes.

If we who do this kind of thing – observing and writing – for a living were to be honest, we’d have to say that it’s a strange hunger we satisfy by doing it. We are drawn to the lure of learning a secret or, if not quite a secret, then having privileged entrée to the way others live, of being able to see life in a light that few others can, and interpreting what we’ve seen for anyone who may open a book like Nice Work. That’s my work – and just like the people I wrote about, I can’t imagine doing anything else.