A good book by Greg Sheridan
It was, Greg Sheridan told the assembled crowd of politicians, media luminaries, and religious figures, a damn good thing for him that Bob Carr, Tony Abbott, and Malcolm Turnbull left journalism for politics.
“They were all great journalists,” Sheridan said at the launch of his book When We Were Young & Foolish.
“It was very good that they cleared off,” he said, saying it left him more space and less competition to proceed with his own career, which has led him to his current long-serving role as TheAustralian’s foreign editor.
There was a certain feel of a class reunion at the launch at the NSW Parliament in Sydney of Sheridan’s book, a memoir in large part about some of the future top politicians he got to know knocking about as a young university student, journalist and, at one brief stage, seminarian in the 1970s and 80s.
Sheridan said one motivation for writing When We Were Young & Foolish was to “try to fix a time and place in print’’.
Sheridan and Mr Abbott, who was the official launcher of the work, shared tales of the uncanny similarities of their early careers.
While Mr Abbott had an abortive stint aspiring to become a diocesan priest after a Jesuit education, Sheridan had his flirtation “with the commandos of the church”, the Redemptorist order.
“We moved from the seminary to journalism,” Sheridan said.
The pair curiously found themselves pitted against each other in student politics at Sydney University in the mid-70s. The contest, the Prime Minister told the audience, was for the prized position of Economics 1 (A) class representative, with Sheridan having the gravitas of a “bearded intellectual” against Mr Abbott as a sportsman.
“It was another election that I lost,” Mr Abbott said.
The Prime Minister reprised his line that he had moved from being a journalist and frustrated politician to becoming a politician and frustrated journalist, and said it was not impossible he might one day have to complete the circle.
Julian Clarke, the chief executive of News Corp Australia, publisher of The Australian, told the audience that “few can make the intergalactic journey” between what he described as the “parallel universes” of journalism and politics, which operated on “completely different laws of physics’’.
There were plenty of friendly jousts, including by Sheridan at some unnamed hardline leftists of his youth who “supported revolutionary violence”, some of whom mellowed and went on to careers in mainstream politics.
“They would be portrayed by the ABC in a very sympathetic light,” Sheridan said, suggesting they would be prime candidates as subjects for Australian Story.
An extraordinary look at the formative years of some of our most prominent and influential politicians.
By chance, Greg Sheridan's early life saw him become intimate friends and colleagues with a fascinating list of people who now make up Australia's political leadership. At university Tony Abbott was his best friend; he became close to Peter Costello as well as Labor figures Michael Danby and Michael Easson. As a young journalist on The Bulletin he became friends and colleagues with Bob Carr and Malcolm Turnbull. When he first joined The Australian he was posted to China, there to befriend another future leader, Kevin Rudd.When We Were Young and Foolish traces Greg's determined and passionate journey from an underprivileged but emotionally rich childhood in Sydney's inner west, to a world of clashing political fronts. From Greg's early years at a seminary, through political stoushes at university, the surprising period as a union organiser and heady intellectual times at The Bulletin,
he also illuminates the formative years and experiences of his friends who would who go on to be prime ministers, premiers and senior cabinet ministers. It offers new and personal insights into the people they were as students and twenty-somethings, and the events, philosophies, demons and relationships that helped make them the people they are. More books by this author