By Tony Wright
WHEN a young fellow named Rob Chalmers turned up to report the doings of the Federal Parliament in Canberra, a Mr Menzies sat in the prime minister's chair and a Mr Chifley sat in the opposition leader's spot across the table.
It was 1951.
Rob Chalmers.
Rob Chalmers' retirement from the Canberra press gallery was announced on Monday this week.
On Wednesday, he died.
Thus ended the longest single innings for a journalist in Australia's press gallery. It surely will never be repeated. Sixty years. Rob Chalmers, when he went away this week, was 82.
He had seen off Menzies, Holt, McEwen, Gorton, McMahon, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Keating, Howard and Rudd and witnessed the arrival of Gillard. And they were merely the prime ministers of his time.
He never stopped, in the pages of the Inside Canberra newsletter with which he had been associated since 1957, railing about the mendacity of the modern political period, and he never walked away from what he considered was his job of passing on to younger journalists what the years had taught him.
Indeed, every working day for the past year until the cancer that was eating him kept him home, he wandered down the press gallery corridor and took a seat in the office of my own daughter, also a journalist, and talked of things that had happened long before she was born, but which to him were hardly more than yesterday.
History was an important ingredient of any story, he contended. You needed to know the background, and he took pleasure in handing it on. He never forgot that he had once been a young journalist, thirsty for knowledge.
He was only 22 when he arrived in the gallery as the junior in the three-man bureau of the now defunct Sydney Daily Mirror, peering down from the gallery at Mr Menzies and Mr Chifley.
Ben Chifley, he was fond of telling anyone who would listen, wasn't remotely like a pampered politician of today. No big white taxpayer-funded Commonwealth car for him. Chifley's pride and joy, Chalmers related, was a Buick he'd bought with his own money. Chif would drive it along country roads - no chauffeur, no bodyguard - between Canberra, where he lived in a single room at the Kurrajong Hotel, and Bathurst, his home town.
Yes, and Bob Menzies when he was leader of the opposition before defeating Chifley had so few resources at his disposal that he was considering raising the money for a trip overseas by writing newspaper articles before a wealthy friend, Arthur Sims, offered to bankroll the trip.
Chalmers, no fan of celebrity politicians on fat superannuation payouts, amazed young journalists of recent times when he told them that Menzies, despite being Australia's longest-serving prime minister, couldn't afford to buy a home. The Melbourne business community financed a house for the old prime minister's retirement instead.
Rob Chalmers spent the bulk of his working life in the cramped old Parliament House where legends were made in a fug of cigarette smoke in the sticky-carpet non-members' bar.
The Parliament moved up the hill to its grand new $1.1 billion home in 1988, but long-termers like Chalmers never lost their nostalgia for the old place, low-slung, painted white and known around Canberra as the Wedding Cake.
Back there, today's uncivilised 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week news cycle did not apply. To his last working days, Rob Chalmers honoured the tradition, all but lost now, of packing up his desk each Friday morning and setting off for a long lunch with old mates and a few bottles of red, the idea of returning to work in the afternoon a notion so absurd it bore no consideration.
In those hours when he wasn't working or lunching or playing golf, he spent his last few years writing a book about his years in journalism, and he called it Life in the Wedding Cake: Inside the Canberra Press Gallery. A modest man, he confided often that he had no idea whether anyone would want to publish such a thing.
Alan Ramsey, one of the great press gallery columnists and an uncompromising judge of politics and the media (many of his Sydney Morning Herald columns are collected in his 2009 book, A Matter of Opinion), related in a moving tribute to Chalmers on the Inside Story website this week that Life in the Wedding Cake was completed a few weeks ago and the Australian National University plans to publish it.
A friend had rushed together an ''author's print'' so Chalmers could see his finished work, but the author was spent, already unconscious by the time it was complete.
And so, even after six decades as a working journalist, even after the grave, there is still more of Chalmers' wisdom and anecdotal telling of history to come.