Adrian Tame - The Awful Truth: My adventures with Australias most notorious tabloid

THE AWFUL TRUTH

First published in Australia in 2020 by

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Adrian Tame 2020

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PHOTO SECTION CREDITS

: Truth front pages courtesy Mark Day.

: Chris Segar.

Cover design: Luke Causby/Blue Cork

Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

For my beloved wife, Ann, who enriched my life beyond measure for 44 years. My sweetheart and my best friend. Her eternal search for beauty ended much too soon.

Reporters are a mixed bunch. Most, having survived their apprenticeship, are adequate providers of copy the words needed to fill the paper or broadcast. Some are dolts, useful only to send to cover the dull areas that still need to be noted. A select few are brilliant.

Adrian Tame was one held in such high regard. I knew him first in the early 70s, when we both worked on the Nottingham Evening Post, a vibrant paper in the principal city of the East Midlands of England. He had worked in Fleet Street, and North America, and he was fearless. He was a soldier to lead the charge, and that he did, winning plaudits for his investigative reporting that went beyond the norm. He lived in The Park, a posh part of central Nottingham, and was a bit of a dandy, wearing fashionably loud clothes, and sporting a mass of wiry red hair and a beard. He was married to a lovely woman, Ann, who was blonde, beautiful, elfin and sharp. This modish couple took no prisoners. They were part of that new generation, the children of the 60s about to take over the 70s.

I dont know why he took to me. I was a sub-editor on the Post, not a reporter. But I had long ginger hair, a beard, and wore natty shirts when most wore theirs with loose ties and rolled-up sleeves. I was also a would-be hippy and smoked dope. And I had a car. Adrian did not drive. We thought he never would, never could.

He made it his mission to introduce me to decent music. Like Loves Forever Changes, Country Joe and the Fishs Electric Music for the Mind and Body, Van Morrisons Astral Weeks and the MC5s Kick out the Jams, Motherfucker. Not a bad education. He introduced me to good food he had always rejected the dismal offerings that so characterised English dining, and the usual reticence of Brits to make a fuss. We discovered a shared passion for the natural world so wed take off on forays into the wild or what passed for the wild in Central England to smoke Moroccan black, to drink Moroccan red and eat pork pies.

We went our separate ways in 1973 he exploring Australia, me to Wales then France. When he visited in 1978 he ate three nights running in Cardiffs best Indian restaurant. Melbourne at that time did not have a lot of spicy wog tucker, as such delights were once described by a prominent parliamentarian, opposing the abolition of tariffs on imported food.

I am not a witness to the Truth years; he can tell that story. I didnt see him again until 2007, after my son moved to Sydney to work, and I looked him up. Adrian rang me out of the blue and said: I hear youre coming to Oz. So I arranged to see him at Tullamarine Airport.

Shall I wear a red rose or something? he asked.

I told him to fuck off. It will take me one nanosecond to recognise you, I said. And it did, except for two notable changes. His shock of red hair and his beard were now white, and he was driving me back to the Goldfields. Tame, at the wheel of a car, was a scary thought.

I found a man whose temperament had not changed. He was still irascible, waspish, even intolerant, but generous and thoughtful too. He and Ann were always bickering, then loving. I joked to him at the time: You know why your marriage works? Its still under negotiation. In fact its re-negotiated daily.

I have returned Down Under every year since then, and Adrian has introduced me to the wilds of Australia. He still retains that edge that pushy factor that sets him apart from most of us, meekly ready to accept second best without a murmur. He was then, and is now, his own man. A great reporter who, faced with the challenge of the next page, is ready to step up, get on with it and tell us the truth.

Chris Segar

Goulven, France

November 2018

So this is the Truth?

Im standing on the pavement outside a squat, grey, three-storey building in the centre of Melbourne, three days after my arrival in Australia from the UK. Its late December 1973, and I have a job interview with the editor of Australias most scurrilous metropolitan newspaper of note the Truth, or the Old Whore of La Trobe Street, as shes widely known.

Out front of the Salvation Army hostel next door a number of homeless men are enjoying the mid-morning sunshine, reclining on benches, or sitting in a row on the pavement, backs against the wall, as they sip from bottles encased in crumpled brown paper bags. I climb the stone steps into the newspaper building and take a wheezy old elevator to the third floor. Here in the shabby foyer a receptionist directs me into the bustle and clutter of the Truth newsroom.

I am approached by the editorial secretary, Pearl the Girl, who is dressed in a faux leopard-skin trouser suit. I learn later her most important role is doling out Murdochs Magic Carpets the taxi dockets that send reporters speeding to jobs or, more frequently, pubs across the city, courtesy of the papers owner, Rupert Murdoch.

Go right in, says Pearl, gesturing at a closed door next to her desk. Mr Edwards has someone with him, but he said to send you in.

Paul Edwards is the editor Ive arranged to see, but as I open the door and enter his office, Im unsure which one of the four men gathered around a desk is him. Two of them are naked to the waist, wearing pig masks, and are arm wrestling across the desk. The other two muscle in as close to the action as their bulky cameras will allow.

I should point out at this stage that my experience of newspapers and editors had so far been exclusively mainstream and conservative. Id worked in the provinces in the UK, where the editor was a bland, faceless individual given to cardigans and shuffling acquiescence; a sports agency in Fleet Street, where they all aspired to become the jocks they wrote about; and the Vancouver Sun, a Canadian daily where the German editors most outrageous lifestyle choice was to wear red braces at weekends. Coming across any of them stripped to the waist would have been unsettling. Pig masks even more so.

The smaller of the two wrestlers tips his mask back from his face and glances across at me.

Adrian Tame? Have a seat, this wont take long, and Ill be right with you.

I find a chair and try to appear unconcerned by the grunting and cursing of the arm wrestlers and, more alarmingly, the manic cavorting of the two photographers as they jostle and elbow one another for the best vantage point, while simultaneously bellowing their support for the boss.