via Dr DAVID OBENDORF
PATSY ADAM-SMITH
It seemed to me when I came to Tasmania still in my teens that my lack of sophistication must be blinding me to the corruption and depravity that was regularly reported of the island State in Australian and overseas newspapers and journals.
While other writers were paid to cover the villainous goings-on that I seem to miss, I was labouring up hills with names like Bust Me Gall, Break Me Neck, and Black Charlie’s Opening.
It was not so much that I chose to write about the Tasmanian hinterland but rather that this was all that was left to me: established staff members of mainland Australian papers were covering all the salacious bites… the bush was all I could get.
In 1956 when every major news agency in the country was sending a representative over to cover the [Sidney Sparkes] Orr case I was up a creek with six of the best bushmen in the State; when Hobart was host to the Australian journalists covering the Hursey case [1957] I was in cage five foot square with three Tasmanian Devils and an elderly man and the following year when Dr ‘Spot’ Turnbull’s [Labour Minister for Health] trial made it the HOT State (Hursey, Orr and Turnbull) I was being dropped by helicopter into the uninhabited south-west corner while other writers and photographers were housed at Wrest Point, the Chevron Hilton of Hobart.
No-one asked me to cover the things Tasmania is famous for – convicts, Port Arthur, and apples have always, as most Australians know, come a poor second to scandal in the ‘”Heart Shaped Island of Content” as John Betjeman assures us it was described in the tourist brochures of his youth.
The early Hobart paper, The Colonial Times said on 6 February 1838, “There is probably no portion of earth wherein scandal is so prevalent as in our little Tasmanian Metropolis.”
While other writers kept Tasmania on the hot-news map I learnt to use a water-proof sleeping bag and to wear woollen vests…
The sophistries of handling hard-news continued to elude me but now, with 20 years maturity and residence in Tasmania to lend me confidence in assessment I believe I pursued the better of the two fields of writing.
[Dr R.J.D. Turnbull case involved allegations that a Cabinet Minister, who had notoriously been in conflict with some of his colleagues during the last three years, had offered or been a offered a bribe during transactions for the transfer of a lottery licence.]
