Visitors to the Museum of Australian Democracy’s (Old Parliament House) very informative exhibition on the press gallery are treated to an array of painstakingly-collated pieces of memorabilia showing the work of reporters, camera operators, editors and news support staff and their cramped work conditions, from earlier times. Some of their tools-of-trade shown include large manual typewriters, teleprinters, microphones and interactive recording machines. Working in the building’s small spaces meant that journalists and politicians regularly brushed shoulders with each other, which, as Elizabeth Reid, the women’s adviser to prime minister, Gough Whitlam, has said, can make “good governance more likely”. Reflecting on her time in OPH in “Respecting and Embracing Difference: Reflections on the Whitlam Government” (in Whitlam and Modern Labor: It’s Time Again – eds Jenny Hocking & Colleen Lewis), Ms Reid notes that the building’s design, spaces for interaction and intimacy “facilitated friendships across party lines…[and] formal interactions between politicians and those gatekeepers of transparency and accountability, the press”. The exhibition is a reminder of how political reporting was done long before smart phones and state-of-the-art technology came on the scene. It’s a reminder too of more casual times when smoking was permitted in the building, no security passes or processes were required and even visitors might run into old-time journalists who could recall political events dating back many years.
