Reviving a Passion - The Went Report and its Beginnings

 

Reviving a Passion – The Went Report.

As a primary school student one of my obsessions was to be the first child to finish the work. I still recall the exasperated look on my teacher’s faces when they saw me coming out to show them my work, well before they were expecting someone to finish! Part of this was because I’d been told when I was younger that I was a slow worker and I was still burned about it. The other part of it, though, was that these were days when the concept of free time for children in school was not a laughable one. Being a reader, if my classroom had a decent class library, which some of them actually did – another rare event nowadays – I would read, but in Year 5 I cottoned onto a different activity.

I would ask the redoubtable Mr Wilson for a piece of art paper, skip back to my desk and create a mini newspaper sharing my thoughts about the most important thing in the world – rugby league! I was completely obsessed about the sport then, reading all the stories in the papers every day, harassing my brother David savagely if he failed to bring home Rugby league Week on a Thursday night, David got paid on Thursdays and being a young man who enjoyed a smoke and a drink he often had other plans but even drunk he learnt it just wasn’t worth not having it with him when he got in the door.

So, I would pour out my views about Rugby league and other assorted topics onto the page. But I needed a title for my work – even today, I feel the need to title things that I write. The editor of Rugby league Week was Geoff Prenter and he wrote a column every week called “The Prenter Report.” What better thing to imitate than the elite column in the most important magazine in the world? Voila, The Went Report was born!

So, I would fill the piece of art paper with my scribblings and when I was finished I would proudly take it back to Mr Wilson to show him. Being a league fan and a keen supporter of the Wests Magpies, he may well have enjoyed it but even if he didn’t, he was an experienced enough teacher to make it look like he did!

I assumed he showed it to the class on one occasion although it’s certainly not out of the question that, buoyed by the positive feedback he gave me and my seriously inflated sense of my own worth, that I took the opportunity to show it off to all of Year 5 boys. Sorry girls but at that stage of my life the opinions of the girls was absolutely inconsequential to me!

In response to my capture of writing glory, my future friend Andrew decided he needed to muscle in on the action and one day he created his own mini- newspaper! And the other boys flocked to read it! Scandalous behaviour. I was completely cut. Being an unrepentant know it all and completely unafraid to point out the lack of knowledge of other people about anything I happened to know and a few things that I didn’t, I wasn’t exactly the most popular boy in town.

However, after his successful raid, Andrew lost interest and I continued happily making my own Went Reports for the remainder of the year.

The Went Report went into hibernation until 1985, when my beloved St George Dragons embarked upon what would ultimately fall 2 points short of being the perfect season as they nearly triumphed in all 3 grades, a big deal to rugby league obsessives at the time. Unfortunately, those 2 points happened to be in the grand final against the evil enemy, the Canterbury Bankstown Bulldogs, the local team for Picnic Point High School and thus followed by a majority of the kids! The fact we hadn’t lost to them all year didn’t exactly soothe this mortal blow to my ego!

Nevertheless, the thrill of having a successful sporting team to follow fired up my creative urges. My brother David would take Geoffrey and I to most of the games that year, with my oldest brother Peter normally in attendance as well. Sometimes, my father would come but fortunately not too often. He and I weren’t close and his attendance increased the odds of the adults drinking, which added unnecessary stress to the whole event for this budding teetotaller.

Attending all 3 grades was par for the course for us so writing reports about all 3 grades was a logical next step. That became page 1 of the Dragon Weekly, a magazine I created about St George. Page 2 was the Went Report, containing all my views about the team and the game, followed by pictures cut out from the papers, Rugby League week and Big League, carefully captioned by yours truly. I was such an obsessive in 1985 that I would write the new competition table every Sunday night, including for and against and put the page in my wallet! I had been planning an epic edition had St George won the grand final, but the disappointment was such that all I could manage was a game report and a Went Report column.

Interestingly, it was rare for me to show The Dragon Weekly to anyone. My brothers saw the occasional edition, but more in passing rather than me showing it to them. This was to become a theme in my writing. I wrote other magazines about varying topics during high school, but I didn’t show them to people either. Consequently, it never occurred to me or anyone around me that I might have had some potential for journalism.

I get great pleasure out of creating something that did not exist before I made it. I can’t draw, I can’t sew, I can’t make things, I can’t fix things, I can’t sculpt or paint. But I can write. I do it often enough, I just haven’t had the courage to share or the determination to commit to writing regularly for an audience. Reflecting on this past history, I wonder too how much I’ve wanted to have an audience. Still, I always have an audience in mind when I write. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be so meticulous with my word choices and in drafting, re-drafting, then carefully re-reading and editing.

Do I want to make money from writing?

No, not especially. I have a job. I even like it.

How big an audience would I like for my writing?

I wouldn’t complain if something went viral but I won’t consider my writing to be a failure if nothing I wrote ever did. Some regular readers would be excellent.

What will I write about? The short answer: Whatever I fucking want to.

The long answer: Whatever interests me so my family, politics and current affairs, education, history, sport, books, movies and TV shows are all likely to appear should I hook into writing regular blog posts. There’s no shortage of topics.

I would love to write over 100 blog pieces in one year. That would show that I was taking it seriously. But if I managed something every week that would be a vast improvement upon previous efforts!

I tell Cassie that she needs to be creative in her life. The same is true for me and writing has always been how I express creativity.

I just want to write regularly, have a record of what I wrote and to know that some of what I write is reaching an audience.

I want to write with intensity and passion. I want my love for life and my enjoyment of my interests to come through in my writings. I want to be brave when I write. Writing for the public is not for cowards. Cowardly writing is weak, dull and boring. It’s easy enough to be boring without virtually guaranteeing it through a reluctance to be honest. Readers deserve better. As a writer, you’re asking people to devote their time, which they can literally give to thousands of other options at that moment, to you. The least you can do is come to the keyboard with intensity!