The Year of the Dog promised opportunity for those born in the sign of Tiger and the noble hound has been good to Your Girl Reporter, still reeling from the enormous change in circumstances of the past 12 months.
It won’t surprise you, loyal reader, that the website has been left to fend pretty much for itself for most of the year, as I grappled with a move from Australia to Hong Kong, the city where I grew up.
As the end of 2018 approaches, Your Girl Reporter is getting her groove back and looking forward to a packed year ahead as I finally turn my attention back to those boxes of papers which are The Spackman Files.
In the meantime, there have been more pressing matters.
On the career front, I’ve fulfilled a lifelong ambition with a move to the South China Morning Post, where I’m now a copy editor on the China desk.
It’s been my practice to keep my personal website free of references to my current job, but this one is the exception.
That’s because I’m following in the footsteps of my parents, Jack and Margaret Spackman, who each in turn worked at the Post. My mother was the first to join the newspaper, the day after we arrived in Hong Kong in 1967.
Jack’s last position when he left here in 1987 was news editor for its Sunday edition.
Jack at the South China Morning Post in 1987 with then managing director Tom Lennon and the newspaper’s owner at the time Rupert Murdoch. On the back of the print, Dad wrote: When the boss makes a joke… laugh.
I’m not sure if they ever worked there at the same time, but as a team they made an enormous difference to journalism in Hong Kong.
It was my privilege soon after we arrived to attend the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Hong Kong Journalists Association, the organisation they founded in 1968.
And it was an honour to be squired to the event by My Extraordinary Uncle Bill Yim. A delight to introduce him in my new occasional series of his adventures. There’ll be more of his story in the year ahead, I promise.
There will also be more adventures of my extraordinary aunt, Joan Byrne. It shouldn’t really have surprised me that my inspirational honorary aunty had one of her own – her grandfather’s cousin Lucretia Byrne.
Louie, as she was known, was one of Ireland’s first women doctors. She went to China soon after she qualified. Her letters, read to Joan and my father on a dusty frontstep in rural New South Wales, introduced those two country kids to a world they wanted to see for themselves.
We also caught up with Joan in swinging London, where in best Aussie tradition she supported herself in a variety of odd jobs on the last stage of her journey which began with us in 1967. While we stayed in Hong Kong, Joan travelled through Asia to Cold War Moscow and beyond.
Looking forward to catching up with what Joan did next. I’m sure it will be extraordinary.
One of my favourites of the year was a story from Joan’s childhood – about a retired racehorse who provided anything but a sedate ride for Joan’s mum May and her sister Doris, my grandmother.
I grew up on tales of Papatata and the wild rides along the Temora Road, but had always assumed they were exaggerated. Not so, according to Joan and her sisters, who were there.
In September I made my only foray of the year into The Spackman Files, the collection of papers preserved by my stepmother Liu Ling.
They yielded some early examples of Jack’s stringing work – with two articles for Australia’s Catholic Weekly on the Church’s experience of the 1967 disturbances in Macau.
Remarkably, the hunt for photographs to illustrate the article turned into a story of its own, with the startling information that a tourist outing for my mother and grandmother had included a trip across the border into China.
The remainder of my contributions this year have been a mix of observations on my return to Hong Kong after an absence of 30 years, and an updating of some previously published material.
Typhoon Mangkhut in September was an opportunity to update my Typhoon Tally, which now stands at six. Only signal number 10 counts. After wreaking devastation on the northern Philippines, Mangkhut gave parts of Hong Kong a severe lashing.
Its diversion to the Philippines knocked Mangkhut off course to do much harm to our little village on Lamma Island, although there was one sad casualty – a much loved banyan tree which had provided shade for countless morning yum cha sessions in my youth.
Childhood memories have been at the fore for Your Girl Reporter this year, and the vagaries of a colonial education were highlighted with a walk past Kennedy Road Junior School, which prompted me to rework something I made earlier on the Battle of Hastings:
November brought an opportunity to highlight an important Men’s Health issue and republish my father’s last assignment, a half-finished article found among his papers on the ongoing problem of raising awareness about preventative cancer checks. It’s a year-round issue, so come on lads, get yourselves checked. That’s what he’d say.
And that sent me down another memory lane, to the story he told me of watching one of the iconic news photographs of the 20th century come down the wires. He was working on the Sydney Telegraph at the time, and his experience of how pictures travelled in those days is a huge contrast to today.
Another article which deserved an update and a re-run was a little lesson in Journalism 101, as taught to me over breakfast and the morning newspapers. For my father Jack Spackman, the day’s work began with a trawl through the news.
All this updating made me realise how much work stills need to be done on the website, and how much has been let slide in this busy year. Thank you for staying with me through this remarkable period of transition.
There’ll be one more offering from Your Girl Reporter this year – landing on 23 December, just in time for your Christmas reading pleasure. And then I’ll be taking a break, returning in the new year with my Chinese astrology predictions for the Year of the Pig.
One thing I can say with certainty about next year is that we will see the return of everyone’s favourite Girl Reporter, Sally Baxter.
She was a fictional character who appeared in a series of novels and formed the basis for my persona when I started a blog six years ago. It was a wrench letting go of her to start the new website under my own name, but it turns out you can’t keep a good girl reporter down. We left her, if you recall, mourning the loss of her traditional Aussie backyard.
I know there’ll be a cheer in some quarters at the news Sally Baxter, Girl Reporter has agreed to return as culture and gardening correspondent-at-large. And yes, she’s bringing the current Mr Baxter with her. Stay tuned, for her Adventures in Roof Gardening. Coming soon!
Wishing you all a safe and prosperous end to another tumultuous year. Looking forward to flying with you again in 2019.
Those Sally Baxter books have ‘long TV series’ oozing from them. When will someone wake up to the prospect?