Carney has achieved eminence as a journalist. But this book is gnawed by grief. Carney mourns the passing of a robust journalistic culture that has been replaced by a far less substantial sense of news. He was made redundant, a sad word with a bitter aftertaste. Deeper than that, Carney mourns his parents. Look at the cover: the father and son find it hard to be close.

There are lighter moments in Carney’s childhood, many of them revolving around popular culture. He writes that his leaning towards journalism was the result of watching Clark Kent at work at the Daily Planet. You can’t blame Carney for resorting to television. He was an only child, born ten years into a difficult marriage. His father had been deeply wounded by his own childhood. Even Jimmy’s true name was a mystery. His mother experienced ‘disappointment and isolation’. For all that, Carney emphasises all the reasons he has to be grateful.

This is an exquisite book with a string of tender moments, unlike the political gristle Carney has dealt with over the years. His personal and journalistic lives occasionally overlap. Carney wrote a biography of Peter Costello. At one stage in the book, Costello calls Carney to take him to task for some opinion or other. At the time, Carney’s six-year-old daughter, whom he calls ‘Jane’, is suffering from cancer and ‘had been reduced to skin and bone by her treatment’. Naturally, Carney didn’t think Costello’s concerns were as important as the latter thought. At first, Costello insists that he doesn’t have to hold back ‘because you’ve got a sick daughter’. But the tone of the conversation becomes more human, and Carney notes that the following budget made provision for a kind of medical test that Carney had drawn to Costello’s attention and that would help patients in Jane’s situation.

This book is not without its frustrations. It has areas of unexpected privacy. We never discover how many children Carney has. In his twenties, Carney married ‘and started a family’. He describes the subsequent divorce as ‘a wound that will never fully heal’. He has another family with Caroline Milburn, a colleague, but only speaks of one child, ‘Jane’. Carney’s account of her heroic journey with leukaemia is superb: sensitive, open to others, never mawkish. Carney says blandly that ‘my children might one day want to tell their own stories in their own way and in their own names’. The reader must respect this decision. Yet when he is dying, Jimmy regrets that ‘he should have done more for and with his granddaughters’. Jane, it appears, has at least one sister, maybe more, who are completely absent from the story. Surely the impact of Jane’s illness on the whole family was significant. There are pieces missing here. This is all the more perplexing given that Carney spent his childhood in a context of half-told stories. This is not to imply that stories have been withheld from any person who actually has a right to them. A memoir such as this is a gift to the reader. But there are people the reader is sorry not to meet.

Shaun Carney

The heart of this book is Carney’s humility. He admits that he lacks imagination, that he is a ‘fifty-fifty split between wanting to hang back and a compulsion to be noticed’, that often as a journalist he was a ‘fashion slave’ who went ‘with the dominant thinking’. There is a self-effacing quality here that allows him, finally, to embrace his father. Carney’s account of his father’s sickness and death is profoundly moving. He tells a story of going with his father to Officeworks in Collingwood. It turns out that the building was the very place where Jimmy started his apprenticeship as a fifteen year old soon after World War II. There are three generations of vulnerable children in this searching book, all inhabiting a fragile culture. Carney’s achievement is to hold them together.