As one newsroom legend passes, there are new ones in the making

Hello there. It’s Liam Phelan here, filling in for Bevan while he is on leave in France.

This week I’d like to delve a little into Herald history to let you know about the passing of one of our great columnists and writers. But I’d also like to highlight the work of the new wave of talent that we have, making sure we remain a crucial part of this city’s political and cultural life, both today and into the future.

I arrived in Australia in the late 1980s as a teenager to visit my father Seumas, who had been hired from The Irish Times to come and work at the Herald as a newspaper subeditor. In those days, when the Herald was owned by the Fairfax family, the company went on a global hiring spree, luring production staff from around the English-speaking world.

The paper then had a mix of politics, state and federal, world news, business news etc, with some heavyweight political commentators who made sense of the big events of the day. But easily my favourite bit of the paper was the irreverent and laugh-out-loud Stay in Touch column, written by David Dale.

Dale was a man ahead of his time. He wrote about food, culture and daily life in a cheeky, chatty way that cut through the stuffiness and pompousness of the time. While most of the paper was serious and earnest, Stay in Touch was a fun daily column that told you who was eating where, who was playing up, what new trends were emerging and where you should be heading in Emerald City. The column gave you a sense of the city that was not available in any other publication.

These days the Herald has an entire culture team, keeping us up to date with what’s happening across music, theatre and the arts, both in Sydney and around the world. But back then Dale, who died last week aged 77, was a sort of one-man culture progenitor, writing in a style no one else could imitate.

Damien Murphy, himself another giant of the Sydney newsroom, wrote a wonderful tribute this week, pointing out how the column was a springboard that took Dale to New York as the Herald’s correspondent and then the editorship of Kerry Packer’s Bulletin magazine.

Even in the weeks before he died, Dale was contacting us to alert us to the passing of a pioneering Sydney restaurateur, Doreen Orsatti.

So, vale David Dale. I hope you are having a great long lunch somewhere, looking back with a quiet chuckle over your great career and your pioneering role in changing the way journalism operates in our city.

While I am personally sad about David’s death, I take great comfort in coming to work every day and seeing the waves of new talent that continue to come through the somewhat corporate revolving doors of the Herald’s North Sydney office.

Our latest troupe of trainees have recently been absorbed into the newsroom, landing in rounds including state, Canberra and breaking news and sport. They are getting exclusives, writing analyses and generally adding to our understanding of Sydney as a 21st-century international city.

I have no doubt that in a few decades time we will be looking back on their work and complimenting them for the part they played in keeping our journalism crisp, cutting-edge and relevant.

So, this weekend I will charge my glass to the memory of our paper’s pioneering history – and have a cheeky little second toast to our new wave of stars who will keep flying the flag into tomorrow and beyond.

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