UA31316 Lumen Spring 2024 Final Digital - Flipbook - Page 15
My years at Adelaide Uni were
rich with lively political clubs, debates,
Footlights' satirical revues, student
unionism, protest marches, and Prosh rags.
These were happy days, stimulating busy
days, amid fabulous fellow students:
academics, activists, artists, satirists,
composers, and burgeoning politicians.
The “we can change the world” broad
educational life that universities used to
be all about.
I was never struck in the brain by that
poetic impulse I had witnessed in action
on my father. However, I was, am and
ever will be a writer.
In 1964 I entered the University of
Adelaide as a law student. It was an
interesting time. This was the tail end of
the Menzies era in Australia and the end
of the epic rule of Sir Tom Playford as
Premier. The 1965 election of Frank Walsh
was to produce the first State Labor
government in 32 years.
The lawyers I had known were poets
and artists and, while I blithely envisaged
a career path in an Adelaide law firm,
I had not anticipated the rigours of rote
learning and the inflexibility of the
subjects ahead of me. I soon became a
rebel student, arguing points of law which,
of course, I could not change.
Then, John Bannon (LLB 1967, BA
1968, Doctor of the University honoris
causa 2014), an older law student active
in the Student Representative Council
(SRC), suggested I edit On Dit. He
nominated me and I was duly elected
alongside Piers Plumridge (LLB 1969)
and John Waters (LLB 1967).
We were a diverse and colourful trio.
There were lots of editorial disputes
between the politically feisty Waters and
the arty-farty me. Gentle Piers disapproved
of our raucous debates and resigned
spectacularly very early on – throwing his vintage typewriter down
the hall outside the On Dit office.
This was a lively period at the University. The SRC was a
powerful, well respected, and supportive backbone for the student
body. Some of its leading lights went on to become leading
political figures, notably John Bannon, who became Premier, and
Chris Sumner (LLB 1966, BA 1968), who became Attorney General.
Student activism was taken for granted and various causes
brought students out en masse into the streets. Most memorable was
the protest against the death sentence and what was to be the last
hanging in South Australia, the case of Glen Valance.
Of my own special assignments, Bob Dylan’s first visit was the most
exciting. It was my first superstar press conference. Editing On Dit led
to a career in journalism and I abandoned law as a lost cause.
I was lured from Law School to The News on the Murdoch
Scholarship of the day, and went on to work for The Australian; AAP/
Reuters in Fleet Street, London; The Evening News in Edinburgh; and
then The Advertiser back in Adelaide. I was the first woman on two
LUMEN
general news floors, the country’s first female Australian Rules
Football writer in the 1960s, and in the early naughties I was
The Advertiser’s inaugural online editor and founding chair of the
Adelaide Critics Circle.
All thanks to my father, the University, On Dit, and the poet who
never was, but who lives on in me still, Ern Malley.
Samela Harris is an Australian journalist, critic, columnist, author, and
blogger. Her career as an arts journalist and cultural commentator spans
a variety of print media. In 2017, for these and other contributions to
South Australian cultural and public life, she was awarded the SA
Media Lifetime Achievement Award and inducted into the SA
Journalists’ Hall of Fame.
The main photo, by Isaac Freeman, taken at the Ern Malley Bar,
Magill Road, Stepney, features Samela Harris holding a copy of the
original Angry Penguins magazine, a reproduction of a Sidney
Nolan painting of Ern Malley, and a photograph of Max Harris
resting his chin on one of his signature canes and looking over his
daughter’s shoulder.
