Balancing death with love

Late on Thursday in the newsroom we had a dilemma: almost all our top stories were about death. We had the full population statistics the federal government had been drip-feeding out all week, and the clear headline was a COVID-induced spike in deaths in the past two years. We had that awful story about the four labourers who had come to our country from India to pick our fruit and vegetables, but were killed in a car accident near Shepparton. Then there was the spike in cases of group A streptococcal infections that had led to the deaths of two children.

All were worthy of a position on page one of our print edition and a run at the top of the homepage online, but considering the bleakness we were about to unleash, and realising the only other real candidate for the front page was the story about Mariam Raad, the former “ISIS” bride who had just been arrested, it all seemed just too dire.

So how did we solve what was looking like it was going to be the “death edition”? We changed our original plan to run a picture of a mangled car, and replaced it with Wayne Taylor’s joyful image of an actor dressed in a zebra costume to announce that Madagascar the Musical was coming to Melbourne.

Our front page picture of Joe Kalou as Marty the zebra in Madagascar the Musical.Credit:Wayne Taylor

Christmas and New Year are supposed to be a season of goodwill, of joy and celebration, renewal. And it is. We see it in the beautiful images of people kissing under the fireworks on New Year’s Eve, or celebrating moments like Dave Warner’s comeback double century in the Boxing Day Test, or flocking to the beach on Melbourne’s (occasional) warm days.

But summer in Australia is, unfortunately, often as much about tragedy: bushfires, drownings, the road toll, the spike in violent attacks against women. For many it’s a season of family conflict (though few families could do it with as much vigour as Britain’s royal family or the Republican Party in the United States). For others, it’s a lonely time as the social expectation that we’ll all be together and celebrating butts up against a quite different reality.

At The Age we talk a lot about getting the “balance” right – telling people about the tragedy and awfulness of the world while also looking for the humanity, the acts of kindness.

Our secret weapon in this quest is reporter Carolyn Webb (pictured below). Carolyn has been at The Age for 26 years. Her first story appeared in The Sunday Age in 1997 and she has written thousands of pieces since. When death day loomed and we needed a few hundred words on Madagascar the Musical, it was Carolyn we went to.

Reporter Carolyn Webb is our secret weapon for balancing the bad news with the good.Credit:Melissa Hine

Humanity is her specialty. Aided by our talented crew of photographers, she has written just in recent weeks about Welsh tourist Will Smith sweating over the steam furnace of Puffing Billy for his holiday; a hay bale sculpting exhibition near Hamilton; and the passion that Ivanhoe grandmother Eleni Zakkas developed for Christmas lights after she underwent 18 months of chemotherapy for lymphoma.

On Christmas Day, Carolyn told the extraordinary tale of Giuseppa and Giuseppi Callipari, who were visited via dinghy by son-in-law Frank Zappia and three of their grandchildren for Christmas breakfast after they were stranded by floods on their Mildura vineyard.

Some of their enormous brood of children and grandchildren had invited the elderly couple out of the flood for lunch but, as Carolyn wrote, “Giuseppe, 89, doesn’t like to leave home, Giuseppa said, and she would not leave her husband of 62 years”.

Carolyn’s prose is spare – she is never mawkish – but she has the extraordinary capacity, when the rest of the world seems bleak, to hunt down and write about these small moments of what can only be described as love.

Many of Carolyn’s stories feature in our Greater Good newsletter, which highlights the week’s most heartwarming and quirkiest stories. You can sign up here to get it every Wednesday evening.

Michael Bachelard sends a newsletter to subscribers each week. Sign up to receive his Note from the Editor.

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