It’s disconcerting, but not really surprising, that very often as I sit down to write about some aspect of Hunter Valley history, I discover that Mike Scanlon has already been there and done that. Not surprising, because Mike has been working on Newcastle newspapers for more than 60 years with barely a break. Despite officially retiring 20 years ago, Mike keeps producing a weekly history column of remarkable verve and interest. By his own count he’s produced about 1200 columns in his post-retirement career and he shows no sign of wanting to slow down.
In conversation Mike sparkles with infectious enthusiasm, racing from one tantalising anecdote to the next with barely time to draw breath. “I love what I do,” he says, with emphatic sincerity. “That’s the reason I keep going.” Journalism, he says, has been a privilege. “I’m grateful for the chance to record all these stories. Some people see history as covered in cobwebs. I don’t. I want to breathe new life into interesting old stories and save them from disappearing, because they can and do disappear.” The stories Mike thrives on are often the oddest and most obscure. He follows up strange rumours from the past with amazing tenacity, often proving the most unlikely yarns to have a foundation in fact.
Journalism wasn’t something Mike set out to do. In fact, he applied for a cadetship at The Newcastle Sun back in the 1960s more or less as a holiday job while he figured out what he really wanted. Turns out what he really wanted was to be a journalist so he stayed, and stayed, and stayed.
Mike Scanlon as a young reporter for The Newcastle Sun, seen here interviewing an American sailor who doesn’t seem amused. In those days, cigarette smoking was considered almost obligatory among journalists. Mike didn’t persist with the habit.
Mike was born at Newcastle’s Mater Hospital in the mid-1940s and spent his early years at Weston, on the Hunter Coalfields. His forebears had come out from Cork, in Ireland, as railroad navvies and while working on the railway somewhere near Fassifern, decided to stop and put down roots. The jobs then were in the mines, and his grandfather worked as a fitter and turner in the pits. About his grandpa, the story goes that one day, at Sydney’s Central Station, he bought coffee and a snack but found he couldn’t pay. He told the waitress he’d come back with the money when he had some. She shook her head and let him go. It was a common story in those days. But this one really did come back – the only one ever, apparently – and wedding bells followed.
Mike’s dad also worked in the mines and he too married a Sydney girl. It turned out she didn’t like living at Weston, and the family moved to Newcastle when Mike was four, buying the lovely old four-storey Lance Villa on the corner of Church and Perkins Streets – one of the nicest designs of renowned architect Frederick Menkens. He went to school at the old Star of the Sea, then Marist Brothers, then St Pius X, followed in the 1960s by three years in Sydney at St Josephs.
After high school he more or less had a job lined up as a trainee manager at Johns Silk Store in Newcastle, but when he was offered a cadetship on The Sun he thought he’d give it a try. The Sun was Newcastle’s afternoon paper, operated under the same ownership as The Newcastle Morning Herald. The two papers operated from the same building but competed fiercely for stories.
“They didn’t really have any training for cadets at that time,” Mike recollected. “I’d only been there for three weeks and they sent me up to cover courts. It was a real eye-opener. The divorce cases were amazing. You sat through them but all you could report at the end was that the decree had been granted. But the facts were sometimes incredible, like the bloke who complained about his dinner being cold and threw a knife at his wife. She went to hospital with a knife sticking out of her head. Divorce was granted”.
At one point the paper’s only cadet – the others left for one reason or another, mostly the bad pay – Mike grew accustomed to dealing with unreasonable workloads. Which was lucky for him, since unreasonable workloads seemed to follow him wherever he went.
As shipping reporter Mike was expected to go aboard ships and find stories among the officers and crew. He hovered around the Water Police headquarters and picked up titbits of yarns like cattle falling into the harbour and being “rustled”, a ship’s captain belting golf balls into the harbour from the upper deck of his vessel and the strange character who reckoned he was going to row to New Zealand. “I was really very shy, and also felt like a bit of an outsider in Newcastle after my time away in Sydney, so I had to push myself to approach strangers for stories.” But no doubt about it, Mike has a very engaging manner that coaxes yarns from even the most unlikely people. This was perfect for The Sun, which prided itself on being chatty, accessible, good-humoured but hard-hitting when occasion demanded. “Actually it was fairly seat-of-your-pants a lot of the time,” he acknowledged.
With maybe three editions a day to write for, the pressure was always on. The first deadline was about 11am, he recalled, but later in the day when the paper was ready for the press many of the staff would head to the Grand Hotel for a drink and a debrief. “I think they were the happiest days of my newspaper career,” Mike said.
One of Mike’s favourite assignments for The Sun. Journalist Perc Haslam had been writing in The Lake Herald (a replate in The Newcastle Herald) about alleged sightings of a gigantic goanna in the Watagan mountains. Mike went to the local army disposals store for a gun and pith helmet, putting the story to rest in a humorous way.
“We considered The Herald a bit moribund really,” Mike said. “It saw itself as the serious broadsheet; the newspaper of record. We were the flash ones.” Mike was on the Sun staff for 16 years until the paper folded in 1980. He, and about 15 other Sun people transferred to The Herald – much, allegedly, to the disgust of then editor John Allan who didn’t appreciate the influx. There was, admittedly, a significant difference in the culture of the two papers, and some of the Sun people felt more than a little unwelcome in their new surroundings. Not so much Mike, who said he simply realised he had to adjust to the changed circumstance. “It was a very much slower pace at The Herald,” Mike said.
At one point, when The Herald was feeling the heat after the establishment of The Newcastle Star – partly staffed by some former Sun people with a point to prove – Mike was made editor of the newly created Newcastle Post – a tabloid production owned by The Herald and designed to run interference against the unwelcome newcomer. “I was told I wasn’t supposed to take any really good stories. I had to leave them for The Herald,” he said.
Mike did a bewildering number of jobs at The Herald over the years. Sub-editor, Civic reporter, Lake Macquarie reporter, Port Stephens reporter, night chief-of-staff, features editor . . . One of his favourite jobs was writing the Topics column, a daily smorgasbord of short, pithy paragraphs that married gossip and humour with a bit of reader advocacy. He wrote Topics for about five years and loved it. But naturally he couldn’t just do that one job: he also did history pieces, like Hidden Hunter, Then and Now and Signposts, that really fanned the flames of his already strong interest in local history.
When he retired in 2004, Mike was immediately asked to keep writing his weekly history column as a weekly freelance contribution. No wonder. His personal following was and is enormous, and Newcastle people have a remarkably strong appetite for history. In 2006 his fellow journalists voted to award him a lifetime achievement award in recognition of his stupendous energy and output over the course of four decades in the profession. Two decades later it seems a new award is required to recognise his achievement in cramming two lifetimes worth of quality output into one.
Since his “retirement”, Mike has also self-published two books of history anecdotes winnowed from his extensive back-catalogue of stories. Past Port – a collection of yarns centred on Port Stephens – appeared in 2020 and The Hidden Hunter – featuring some of his favourite column subjects from over the years – in 2021.
You can buy Mike’s Hidden Hunter book from his website here, from MacLean’s Bookshop at Hamilton or from our website (see below).
The Hidden Hunter, amazing yarns from the region’s rich history. By Mike Scanlon.
The Hidden Hunter, by Mike Scanlon. Amazing yarns from the region’s rich history 158 pages, A4 size, softcover. Self published, 2021 Marvellous collection of yarns, many repurposed from Mike’s popular weekly history column in The Newcastle Herald. Share on FacebookTweet
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Thank you Mike Scanlon for all your interesting Newcastle and Hunter Valley news over the years. Robin Hyland nee Bowker. Great granddaughter of Dr. Richard Ryther Steer Bowker. (The slave Trader.)