Mike Carlton - On Air

Mike Carlton was born to controversy. His father, Jimmy, a renowned Olympic athlete and later a Catholic priest, married his mother after a whirlwind wartime courtship. This scandal was hushed up at first, but eventually it made headlines. Six years later, Jimmy Carlton died in his wifes arms, felled by asthma.

It was a tough beginning. Mike would have a Sydney suburban childhood where every penny counted. Unable to afford a university education, he left school at sixteen to begin a life in journalism that would propel him to the top, as one of Australias best-known media figures. In an often turbulent career of more than fifty years he has been a war correspondent, political reporter, a TV news and current affairs reporter, an award-winning radio presenter in both Sydney and London, an outspoken newspaper columnist and a biting satirist. In later life, he has realised a long-held ambition to write a series of bestselling books of Australian naval history.

On Air is his story, no holds barred. With characteristic humour and flair, Mike tells of the feuds and the friendships, the fun and the follies, writing candidly of the extraordinary parade of characters and events he has encountered in the unique life he has led.

We know the truth not only by reason, but also by the heart.

Blaise Pascal

In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand.

Stephen King

P RODDY DOG, SHITTING ON a log, eating maggots from a frog The taunt echoes down the decades in the reaches of my mind. I heard it first when I was perhaps nine years old and waiting for a train on Sydneys lower North Shore, conspicuously alone in the blue cap, grey woollen shorts and red-and-blue tie of Barker College, an Anglican private school. A scrum of older kids in the uniform of a nearby Catholic school surrounded me, jeering and spitting, their faces twisted in mockery and loathing.

I stood there quaking in fear, unaware that the crushing weight of the English Reformation was being loaded upon my schoolboy shoulders: Henry VIII and Clement VII, the sacking of the monasteries, wretched Anne Boleyn and saintly Thomas More on the scaffold, the Statute of Praemunire, Cromwells rape of Ireland, King Billy at the Boyne. All my fault. One of the kids snatched my cap and hurled it onto the tracks.

I could have told them I had been christened Michaelus Iacobus Michael James in the Latin rite, blessed with holy water by a Roman Catholic priest at the font of no less than St Patricks Cathedral in Melbourne. In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti But I didnt know that then. So I burst into tears. Exultant, the Spanish Inquisition melted away and caught the train in the opposite direction.

Sometimes the knife cut the other way. Fast-forward ten years. Youre a fucking mick, said an ABC executive, one of my bosses, as the two of us stood at a pub urinal, swaying unsteadily after a long afternoon at the bar. Youre a left-footer. We had been arguing about something. You talk the sort of shit Id expect to hear from the son of a Catholic priest, he sneered.

No tears this time: I was strong and up for it. The Irish rose within me and I shoved him headlong into the trough, where he lay struggling on his back, his suit drenched in the foaming urine. Outside if you want to finish it, I said.

He declined the offer. It was not my smartest career move, but he avoided my eyes the next day and never spoke of it again.

The sectarian insult is rare now, although it occasionally flickers back to life. The cut no longer draws blood. Sometimes its even amusing. I long ago learned to live with it.

A few years before senile dementia tormented my mother to a miserable death, she wrote an account of her love affair with the Roman Catholic priest she married and who fathered her two sons. I had never quite believed she would do it, for she was an intensely private woman who held her secrets close. But she had promised it to us and she kept her word page after page, neatly typed and carefully corrected.

She left the document with my younger brother, Peter, to be opened only after her death. You must not show it to Michael, she told him.

She was proud that I was a journalist but she didnt trust the species including me and I think she feared that if I got my hands on it she would read it the next day, luridly embellished and splashed across page one of the Sydney Morning Herald . She and my father had been headlines before, when news of their marriage leaked to the newspapers in the late 1940s, adding fuel to the fires of religious hatred that still fiercely burned in Anglo-Irish Australia. The bigots capering around the flames had painted her as the Protestant whore who lured my father from his priestly vocation, or him as the papist rapist who seduced the young virgin in the evil surrounds of the monastery. There was not a sliver of truth to such caricatures, but they had hurt nonetheless. The slur would occasionally intrude into my life, too, over the years.

My mother was born in 1922, christened Enid Alison, the younger daughter of Robert and Winifred Symington, who scratched away at an existence of middle-class respectability in a cramped Federation cottage at Chatswood, on Sydneys North Shore. Bob, my maternal grandfather, had a family tree rooted in the Ulster Protestant ascendancy. Win, an energetic snob, liked to bask in the glow of a distant blood connection to the Scottish Clan Arbuthnott, also Protestant, a minor noble house which had produced a long and stolidly undistinguished line of viscounts and baronets, and scattered their offspring around the colonies.

So far as I can gather, the Arbuthnotts have done little of interest since 1420, when one Hugh Arbuthnott joined a posse of fellow lairds in Kincardineshire to do away with a turbulent local notable, Sir John Melville of Glenbervie, Sheriff of the Mearns. The wretched Melville, an officious bully, had aroused the ire of King James I of Scotland, who, in a fit of royal temper, snapped to his gathered courtiers: Sorrow gin that sheriff were soddin and supped in broo. Taking the king at his word not always a wise move Arbuthnott and his co-conspirators loyally hacked the man to pieces in a hunting forest, stuffed him into a cauldron and boiled him, whereupon they indeed supped of ye broo before reporting the good news back to the throne. James, who had not expected things to go quite that far, cast around for a punishment for the killers but was snookered when Hugh sent in the lawyers:

The Laird of Arbuthnott claimed and obtained the benefit of the Law of Clan MacDuff which, in case of homicide, allowed a pardon to anyone within the ninth degree of kindred to MacDuff, Thane of Fife, who should flee to his cross, which then stood between Lindores, on the march between Fife and Strathearn, and pay a fine. The pardon is still extant at Arbuthnott House.