Jana Wendt: ‘Politics these days, boy, is it controlled. I actually remember having fun interviewing politicians'

The Guardian

15 hours ago

Step through the Henry Lawson Gate at Sydney's Botanic Gardens on a blue winter's afternoon and prepare for the glory of it – long shadows from magnificent trees on a perfect lawn that sweeps down to a sparkling harbour. The Bridge, the House. Bring out every picture postcard cliche, here they are.
'I think I know every centimetre of this place,' says Jana Wendt, the former 60 Minutes reporter and A Current Affair host of the 80s and 90s. 'It was my place to come during Covid and it never failed as a sort of a tonic during that horrible time.'
The 'extravagant beauty' of this city still dazzles the Melbourne-born child of Czech refugees who was famously and controversially brought to Sydney to join 60 Minutes in 1982. At that time, it was a male-dominated arena – the late George Negus, Ray Martin, Ian Leslie, titans of Australian journalism – and she an inexperienced 24-year-old newsreader.
But Wendt proved herself quickly, as television history attests. By the time she left Channel Nine in 2006, she was arguably the biggest name in television, admired and emulated. She was nicknamed 'the perfumed steamroller' – it seems diminishing now to even type those words – and racked up an extraordinary roll call of interviewees, from Yasser Arafat (who walked out on their interview) to Kermit the Frog (who told her she was very attractive for a human being), and many in between. Netanyahu, Gorbachev, Kissinger, Murdoch, Bhutto. David Malouf and Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman. Bob Hawke. Paul Keating. John Howard. Countless others.
Her velvet voice spawned many imitators and it was satirised perfectly by Marg Downey in Fast Forward. Decades on, by a pond in the gardens, the parody gets the slow tilted nod of approval from Wendt.
'She was great,' Wendt says. 'She got the head turn, which I am possibly doing even now, and she did an achingly slow, deep delivery and I think that at times I might have been achingly slow.'
Now at 69, Wendt is seemingly slighter than the 1980-90s version thanks to much smaller hair and much smaller shoulder pads (if indeed any). We laugh remembering the size of those things, quite something to behold at the studio desk of A Current Affair. There, her sangfroid when faced with irate politicians and public figures was legend. She would often just stay still. Maybe a tilt of the head, a slightly raised eyebrow, but her forward-leaning, shoulder-pad-bolstered unwavering gaze wouldn't let them off the hook. Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen became even more unintelligible in response to her repeated questions about bribery and corruption; broadcaster Ron Casey smashed a glass at her feet and tried to storm off set; Bob Hawke called her suggestion that his famed parliamentary tears for Tiananmen were merely a display 'despicable, contemptible and repugnant'.
'Obviously I liked to ask questions that challenged people and sometimes people resist and resist and resist and you need to break through that wall of resistance,' she says. 'Sometimes it is through a pointed or a sharp word, and then you get a flow of … something.
'When I look around these days in politics, I think boy, is it controlled. I mean, I actually remember having fun interviewing politicians.
'The language has changed,' she says, not just that used by politicians but what she calls 'professionalised classes'.
'Really the language has been destroyed as a medium for actually saying things that are meaningful. In fact, what a lot of this language does is try to bypass true meaning, because true meaning could get you into a lot of trouble.'
As we meander the network of the botanical pathways – left? right? straight ahead? why not – Wendt fills in the years since leaving broadcasting. Two works of nonfiction, written journalism, and now the terrifying life development of becoming a fiction writer – 'terrifying' surely being a relative term for someone who in their 20s forayed into war zones and once asked the despot Colonel Muammar Gaddafi why he was described as a terrorist, a butcher, a gangster and a madman.
'There are certain rules that apply to the job of journalism and all those more or less go out the window [with fiction]. And the thing that I guess scared me most about it is how personal it actually is – how personal every single word that appears on the page is.
'It's about what's in the writer's mind, what's in your mind, but it seems much more exposing of you as a person than anything you may do in journalism. You can never really let yourself go in journalism.'
The Far Side of the Moon is a collection of 12 short stories, unconnected except for the final two about a relationship between two male co-workers and the markedly different view each man has of the other and the world around them. It's an elegant collection, sometimes delightful, funny, and always observant of the human condition via the smallness of everyday lives. Themes emerge. You can see what's in the writer's mind – mortality, ageing, loneliness, connection. The immigrant experience.
'These things come with the time of life that I'm in. And not to be too morose about it all, clearly the older you are, the more you contemplate mortality and the nearness of death,' she says. 'I'm sounding like a 120-year-old, but you know what I mean.'
As another pathway takes us head-on into another Sydney vista, we talk about how the two connected stories in her book show how two people having the same experience can have such radically different perceptions of everything around them.
'One thing that strikes me is the difference between people who have dark hearts and people who are open-hearted, and how differently they lead their lives and how much sadness the former category somehow has to put up with because their eyes are open to the same world as the open-hearted person, but they see it completely differently.
'And it makes a world of difference to how life plays out and how much pleasure and joy can be had in a life if your heart is actually open to that pleasure and joy.
'The truth is that I've got a bit of both those elements in me and I would much rather have the struggle to become the open-hearted person than to be working the other way.
'It's a shame to waste your time on Earth. And so whatever you can do to open yourself up to a new experience, I think is worth the effort.' Through observing people, Wendt has come across a lot of dark hearts and open hearts. 'I've seen many examples of those two types. And I know which one I'd like to be.'
Wendt's fiction is not all heft and seriousness. There's a lot of humour, and one wry story is drawn from her experience. In Fame and Nothingness, a former famous television journalist, Lena Gombas, contemplates a bifurcated life, gardening at home in obscurity while listening to a commercial radio program duo discuss a 'whatever happened to Lena Gombas' segment.
In the story Lena looks back at the other Lena almost as a separate entity. Does that mean Jana Wendt looks back on 'Jana Wendt' the icon as a completely different person?
'Fame often doesn't intersect with who you actually are. I mean, it doesn't intersect at all with who you actually are, which, when you think about it, it's quite a phenomenon. So I guess that part of it is an element that I used to write Lena's story.
'I guess there are two things in public life – there is a job you do. And you know, that was my job and it was substantial. And I appreciated that. It's the other side of it that, the kind of the celebrity status that seems somewhat alien.'
With time, Wendt says has come to realise 'you know, just how private I actually am'.
From the glare of her fame and panoramic view of big issues to the very private and terrifying world of writing fiction, Wendt is keeping her focus tight, looking for meaning in the small and the mundane, or, as one of her characters observes, 'seeing big things in the small things'.
'I think there's a point in everyday life that somehow stumbles into lyricism and poetry, when mundanity transforms itself into something else and it's that 'something else' that I think you need or is worth expressing. And finding.
'I mean it can be the slightest thing in a beautiful place like this, like a turn of a bird's head or something, or an unexpected moment of serene quiet that strikes you as very special, you know, and there's no easy way to communicate it but I think a writer can try.'
The Far Side of the Moon by Jana Wendt is out now (A$34.99, Text Publishing)