There is something perfectly fitting about Laurie Oakes and Michelle Grattan receiving, on the eve of a federal budget, inaugural awards for their immense contributions to political journalism.
Oakes, the greatest story-breaker in Australian politics, won lasting fame by reporting the entire federal budget of 1980 a day before it was brought down – the only time such a thing has happened.
An informant – still anonymous – leaked the top-secret budget draft to him in a Canberra hotel carpark, allowing him 15 minutes to read it into a tape machine.
Oakes reported the whole thing on air, blowing to smithereens Treasurer John Howard’s careful plans for the big day.
Grattan, who has been reporting budgets and the doings of every prime minister since Billy McMahon in incomparable detail since she arrived in the federal press gallery in 1971, will cover the latest budget from her office on Tuesday.
On Monday night, Grattan and Oakes received the first two lifetime achievement awards granted by the federal press gallery in its 125-year history.
The presentations reflect the fact that in the turbulent years since Oakes arrived in Canberra in 1969 and Grattan two years later, generations of Australian news audiences learned to rely on any report by either of them as reliably accurate.
The awards add to a string of honours both have received for their journalism over the years, including Walkleys for Journalistic Leadership and the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year (1988 for Grattan, 2014 for Oakes, who also won the Gold Walkley that year). In 2004, Grattan was made an officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for her distinguished service to Australian journalism.
The new press gallery lifetime achievement awards were presented at a function at Canberra’s Old Parliament House to celebrate the gallery’s long history, which began when a small group of journalists covered the opening of Australia’s first parliament on May 9, 1901, at the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne.
Monday’s award-giving doubled as the launch by the Museum of Australian Democracy of an exhibition based around some of the preserved offices and spectacular work of the press gallery that operated at the old parliament from 1927 to 1988.
Oakes, who retired in 2017, regularly shook the national political landscape on all sides with his numerous and astonishingly well-sourced reports.
The existence of the Hawke-Keating Kirribilli agreement and its bitter fallout, the rorting by Howard government ministers that lost them their jobs, the undermining of Julia Gillard by Kevin Rudd, Liberal president Shane Stone’s letter describing the Howard government as “mean and tricky”… the scoops never seemed to stop.
He started as political correspondent with the Sun News Pictorial, moved on to the 7 and 10 TV channels and consolidated his ability to shake governments over many years on the Nine network, becoming political editor there in December 1984. He also wrote influential columns with The Bulletin magazine. In later years he wrote for News online.
Cabinet ministers and prime ministers were known to turn white with anxiety when Oakes chose to attend a press conference, because they knew he would be in possession of information that could – and often enough, did – bring them undone.
Grattan, who was the first woman to become chief political correspondent of The Age in 1976, gained – and still holds – a reputation for checking and re-checking every detail of her stories so thoroughly that Cabinet ministers, MPs, public servants and many others became accustomed to answering her phone calls well after midnight.
They answered because they knew a Grattan story was gospel, and there was no way to avoid it.
On overseas trips with prime ministers, Grattan carried heavy stacks of printed files with her, and required that each story she filed to The Age was faxed back to her so she could check and correct every detail before publication.
She became the first woman to edit an Australian daily metropolitan newspaper when she was appointed editor of The Canberra Times in 1993.
She returned to The Age as political editor in 1995 and subsequently held senior positions in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review before once again returning to The Age, where she was political editor and bureau chief from 2004 to 2013.
Since 2013, she has been chief political correspondent and associate editor (politics) of The Conversation, and is a professorial fellow at the University of Canberra.
Beyond the work that consumed much of their lives, Grattan and Oakes built loyal circles of close, lifelong friends in what is often an unforgiving environment.
Grattan is known to those closest to her as extraordinarily generous to anyone in need, particularly younger colleagues. She is a modest, private woman who makes sure her generosity is unsung and mostly unknown. Her dinner parties are discreet affairs attended by both the powerful and the anonymous.
Her devotion to her horses is the stuff of legend and though Grattan does not drive, Canberra’s taxi drivers grew familiar with requests that they carry hay to her animals. She also brought back part of her family’s old property near Jerilderie, and often took a night bus to visit the place on weekends.
Oakes, whose quiet pleasure is his endless collection of crime novels, for many years was known as one of Canberra’s great and most engaging luncheon companions.
Niki Savva, long-time press gallery journalist, colleague and friend of Oakes, recalls that one record lunch with Oakes went for 17½ hours, starting at Canberra’s Bacchus and finishing at Charlies (restaurants that were haunts of press gallery journalists, now both defunct).
“Laurie and I still lunch regularly, as recently as a couple of weeks ago,” Savva related. “He had a diet Coke and a cappuccino; I had water and a peppermint tea.”
You could guarantee the inside stories were still first class.
Tony Wright is an associate editor and special writer for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.