My Big Brother Jack
And his mate the Prime Minister
Most people, quite wrongly, assume that siblings are the same.
And this is amplified when two brothers are both journalists in the same small town. Even if they work for different newspapers.
Inevitably, my big brother Jack and I ended up covering the same stories.
One day, we were the only reporters who turned up at the Commonwealth Bank opposite Brisbane City Hall to interview the bank’s national boss about the new phenomenon where you would get cash out after-hours from a hole in the wall (legally).
After a while, the banker joked that he was being questioned “in stereo” because both reporters had the same distinctive husky voice.
We explained we’d inherited our father’s voice.
At Christmas 1971 I flew north to cover Cyclone Althea which had hit Townsville hard. There I heard that a man had been cut up by a flying pane of glass on Magnetic Island: only for his life to be saved by a nursing sister and her daughter who ran into the violent storm and dragged him into a Besser-brick toilet block and stitched up his wounds on the lavatory floor.
This was a big one!
As I didn’t own a boat, I hitched a ride on an Army helicopter.
As they dropped me off on that lonely blown beach 800 miles from Brisbane, someone clutching a notebook ran out from under the shade of a row of palm trees towards the helicopter.
It was Jack!
He was running ahead of me, as usual.
Sometimes, Brisbane people complained to Jack about a feature story I had written in The Australian; while some journalists took it out on me because Jack had risen to the top of the ranks to be their Editor-in-Chief of The Courier-Mail and Sunday Mail.
They even sent plenty of poison pen letters to us both.
Colleagues, in fact, tended to treat us as if we were the same person.
But then I suppose even the family occasionally mixed us up.
After midnight one night I was at a journalists’ post-work party and an argument broke out over who wrote Fire on the Snow — the famous Australian radio play on Scott’s failed Antarctic Expedition.
Eventually I said, “My big brother Jack will know the answer” and everyone drunkenly agreed he could be the official arbiter.
I dialled his home at The Gap and — after at least a dozen rings — his wife Lyn answered.
“Hey Lyn!” I shouted over the noise of alcohol, ego, and arrogance.
“And where are you?” she demanded.
“I’m at Peter Thompson’s!” I yelled. “… the party’s getting rough! I wanna …”
“You were supposed to be home two hours ago!”
Only then did I realise that even Jack’s wife had mistaken me for my brother.
People would say: “You ignored me at the airport on Monday!” or “You were having lunch with another woman at the Golf Club! You looked very pleased with yourself.”
Strangely, it often proved difficult to convince them that it must have been my brother.
And how could they mix us up when Jack was taller and always dressed better?
Though Jack and I were regularly mistaken for each other, the one time I hoped, and needed, for that to happen — it didn’t.
To read about how Jack and I each developed a very different relationship with Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, click on An Unusual Friendship.
Love the way you write Hugh. I always succumb to subtle chuckles..