MY MESSY CAREER
Writing was always my passion but when I realised it might also be my career it took some time to abandon pretentiousness and honour the voice in my head - the one running endless commentary on the ironies and oddities of everyday life.
My bent had always been satirical - beginning with a pre-emptive ‘me too’ type epic poem I wrote as an comic ode to a bunch of bikies I’d perversely fallen in with as a teenager, after deliberately losing my virginity to one of them. (It was blatant thrill-seeking behaviour, a ‘phase’ I reassured my dubious mother, driven solely by my suburban entrapment in seaside Beaumaris with five younger siblings.) The poem did not go down well and my life was briefly endangered - which added drama that helped the boredom - but more importantly, I’d made my point with words and they’d had a pretty impressive impact.
Still, I didn’t realise that the satisfaction of social engineering could fuel a whole career and so I went on to Melbourne University to study more serious literature. There, I mostly drifted around, disconnected from my fellow students - who seemed to be mostly the offspring of the academics and published poets who ruled the Arts Faculty - until I stumbled on the strange 1920’s works of Ivy Compton-Burnett, who wrote disturbing but wickedly funny portrayals of turn-of-the-century households ruled by murder, incest, adultery and fraud - with playful titles like, A House and Its Head, Pastors and Masters, The Mighty and their Fall. She was one of a kind and her dark parodies should have helped me appreciate the rich resource of ordinary domestic conflict and family psychoses that I was already sitting on.
The great levelling began when I started my first job as ‘Production Secretary’ in 1980 at Crawford Productions, where they churned out multiple shows about cops and doctors and airlines and families - and where I was mostly responsible for fixing spelling mistakes in bizarre storylines for five-day-a-week soaps. I hoped I would recover with my dreams in tact and still able to function as a serious writer. And I only remained sane because it was there I met Andrew Knight (who I later formed CoxKnight Productions with) who helped me appreciate the ridiculous aspects of the work and advocated for my rise up the ranks to the esteemed position of script editor - which in those days required little to no actual script-writing experience. If you could count pages, had a reliable stop-watch, and could neatly cut and paste a script together the job was practically yours. I failed on the ‘neat’ front - according to Mina Miller, the Grand Mistress of the typing pool, who accepted my deliveries with bitter disappointment - but I ticked the other boxes.
Meanwhile, I continued to set my sights on more grandiose horizons, clacking out a whopping period feature film script set against St Kilda’s Luna Park (in Melbourne) and the vast desertscapes of the First World War. It was a sprawling and unacheivable tale but it was elegantly written and had a title to fall in love with - and that’s the only possible explanation for the funding I kindly received from Film Victoria (now known as VicScreen) - ‘The Smiling Eyes of Mr Moon’.
And so, I eventually I chalked up enough writing credits to make my escape, snagging my first freelance job when my bank account was down to $200 and then spending the lot on an overseas trip. A few years after that, Andrew Knight threw me a lifeline - twice - working to help him develop drama projects in the various successful companies he’d become part of on the strength of his comedy writing. I’ve never known anyone funnier - including John Clark his revered mentor - but still he hankered after drama.
And so, as I wrote more and collaborated more, I realised the power of humour to temper the serious message and help deliver the emotional gut punch and I re-evaluated the power of writing to provoke that I’d wielded as a crude tool in my youth. I found my writer’s voice and it was lighter, more playful, more whimsical than I’d planned when I set out. But - whether the underlying preoccupation was finding a better work/life balance (as with SeaChange) or fighting mindless development (as with East of Everything), redressing the imbalances of the legal system (as with Newton’s Law) or celebrating female empowerment (as with all the Miss and Ms Fishers) - I embraced it as a voice also capable of telling stories with deep purpose.
I even came to appreciate the way in which the rigour of delivering high volume episodic soap at Crawford Productions had contributed to my craft and professionalism as a story teller. I never quite mastered ‘neat’ - but along came computers and that problem went away.
Sorry, dear Mina (RIP) - I still think of you whenever I unearth my defunct stop-watch.
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*Luckily, The Smiling Eyes of Mr Moon remains in a plastic storage bucket - and VicScreen wrote off their investment decades ago.