JOHN MARTIN'S TALES

It’s very early on Christmas Day 1983 and two of us are following a weak torch beam along a dark, rugged beach.

When I say beach, don’t picture golden sand and gently lapping waves. This one comes complete with towering dunes, dense scrub, razor-sharp rocks and, because it’s Tasmania, freezing rain.

We set off from Bridport at 3.30am. It takes us two and a quarter hours to trudge 10 kilometres.

For comparison, the world’s best distance runners were covering 10 kilometres in about 27 minutes that year.

We were almost five times slower.

In our defence, they weren’t stumbling through the dark looking for stranded whales.

Santa Claus wouldn’t have had this problem.

He has a sleigh and eight reindeer who know exactly where they are going.

We have only the sound of the surf warning us not to wander too close to the water. We have no idea whether the tide was creeping in, no idea whether we’d make it in time and, for all we know, no idea whether somebody would eventually have to send a search party to find us.

My companion’s legs are much longer and stronger than mine.

His name is Mark Ray and he opens the batting for Tasmania in the Sheffield Shield. Left-handed batsman. Left-arm orthodox spinner. A genuine athlete.

So it’s reasonable if you assume we are actually heading off for a spot of beach cricket.

Perish the thought.

Instead of a bat and ball, Mark is carrying a camera bag bulging with lenses and rolls of film.

I carry a mighty burden too.

A reporter’s notebook and a pen.

Pocket notebooks are much heavier than they look.

I also carry the torch.

I guess.

Come to think of it, perhaps we didn’t have one after all and my memory has faded faster than the batteries. I had to locate an old scrapbook to refresh my mind’s eye — and none of the clippings said anything about flashlights.

What we definitely do not have is a sleigh.

Nor a four-wheel drive.

Nor a beach buggy.

What we do have is a newspaper deadline.

And the clock is ticking.

Mark is my photographer.

I am his reporter.

And the story we are chasing was never supposed to happen.

Let me explain.

I’d just finished two years as a sub-editor at The Examiner. It was a comfortable existence. Warm office. Dry chair. Regular hours. I edited other reporters’ stories while they got wet.

Now I’d switched back to sports reporting.

Sport is the toy department of journalism. We played happily in the back pages while the serious reporters covered politics, courts and disasters. And some of them would resent it whenever sport encroached into their pages.

Christmas was supposed to ease me gently into the job.

I was rostered to cover the North-West cycling and running carnivals. A few previews on Christmas Eve. It would take me half a dozen phone calls and a few hours’ work. Easy. Take Christmas Day off. Cover Latrobe carnival on Boxing Day.

I was asked, too, to ring around the police, fire brigade and ambulance on Christmas Eve. Just check nothing’s happened.

No worries.

Christmas was supposed to be the quietest time of the year. Politics shut down, business shut down, and senior reporters, who might have otherwise done the police rounds, preferred to spend Christmas with their families.

Nothing ever happened at Christmas, anyway.

Apart from the Queen’s Christmas message.

(Admittedly, Cyclone Tracy had flattened Darwin on Christmas Day only nine years earlier, but let’s not spoil a perfectly good newsroom myth.)

I can’t remember which phone call overturned my Christmas plans. One police station or another.

Nearly one hundred pilot whales had stranded themselves at remote St Albans Bay.

Wildlife officers, police and volunteers planned to spend Christmas morning trying to push them back into deep water.

Even an out-of-practice sports reporter could recognise an emotional front-page story when he heard one.

We had to be there.

My rostered Christmas Day off disappeared.

Instead, Mark and I leave Launceston at 2am on Christmas Day for the drive to Bridport.

From there, we grit our teeth and hit the beach, heading west into the darkness.

I’d traded one quiet sports shift for one of the biggest stories of my young career.

My byline ends up on Pages 1, 2 and 3.

I didn’t start writing my scheduled back-page sports lead until 11 o’clock that night.

Sports reporter 4.

News reporters 0.

The whales, sadly, do not fare nearly as well.

Despite the heartstring-tugging efforts to shepherd them back out to sea, most simply turn around and beach themselves again