Talk of the Town: Scribing in the copy paper, party line era

That means I've been pounding the keyboard as a professional journalist for 40 years, some of the other 30 years on a small country newspaper but mostly as a freelancer, sending stories around Australia.

Now I know that means you're thinking I'm really old - well, let me confirm it by saying that when I began my career I typed my stories onto cheap A5 sheets known as copy paper, with a manual typewriter.

What that meant was that it was difficult to alter a story once you'd typed it, so you had to develop the skill of really getting to the heart of your story and knowing how it would flow, before you started typing.

Not only that, punctuation and spelling errors were a pain in the butt to correct and earned you black marks and red ink from sub-editors, so you tried extra hard to get it right first go.

It's still something I value, even though I can fix mistakes in the blink of an eye - far better not to have them than hope I or others find them before my work is published.

The other marked difference in my profession when I started was communications technology.

Watching young people these days grappling with the intricacies of a manual telephone - lifting the receiver, putting their finger in a hole corresponding with the number they want, circling it round until they get to a bar, letting the dial go back to the beginning, doing that again until they've entered the phone number, putting the receiver to their ear - is really amusing.

They can't get their heads around how clunky and slow it is and then, when they realise all they could do with it is talk to someone - mind blown.

I don't even want to go into trying to work as a journalist, which involves interviewing a number of people most days, on a remote property with a party line - the frustration I felt, and must have caused, still comes back to haunt me.

I hear people these days say "who even answers a call", only maybe deigning to respond to text messages, and grit my teeth at all I had to go through for their privilege.

After I'd developed my black and white film using the 'black bag' and printed photographs in my kitchen at night - dragging the enlarger out of the pantry, the chemicals from the fridge and changing to a red light over the sink - I had to get my article and prints to media outlets.

On a party line, I couldn't use a fax machine, when they were invented, so I had to wait for the mailman, twice a week. You could say I wasn't working on breaking news in those days.

The day we got automatic phones via a DRCS tower was a red letter day - faxes began to fly thick and fast - as was the day I put my manual typewriter to one side and powered up - wait for it - a computer!

Finally I had a satellite dish on my roof, and an email address.

It seems so rudimentary these days, but the internet was more of a game-changer for us in the bush than we realised.

I know I'm one of many who's embraced the advances - digital cameras, mobile phones, wifi, googling, social media, drones, voice recognition, making videos, putting it all together sitting in my car - and I don't take any of it for granted.

And despite all that, a notebook and pen is still an essential tool of my trade.

- Talk of the North is a weekly opinion piece written by ACM journalists. The thoughts expressed are their own.

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