My years of living pedantically

September 2003 at the Cobargo pub, the first AGM of The Triangle community newspaper. The committee was celebrating a year of publication and there was a general air of happy incredulity: that it was still a goer; that the community had welcomed the paper and were reading it and contributing stories in increasing numbers; that local businesses were lining up to advertise on its pages. After an initial injection of funds by an anonymous donor, the paper was already funding itself. Cheers all around.

Then I stood up.

I’d marked up a copy of the latest issue with red pen – spelling, grammar and formatting errors, a veritable display of print copy measles. Stammering and inarticulate, I held it up and turned page after page. The committee of the time looked at me blankly. Who was this woman, they must have thought. And what was the problem anyway? But, ‘Everyone,’ announced the President, Louise Brown, ‘please welcome our new proof-reader!’ And thus began my seventeen years with our local rag – committee members came and went but the one constant was me and my pedantry.

Proofing in those early days meant sitting with the layout person and watching for mistakes as the stories rolled out. The layout person at that time would have one hand moving between keyboard and mouse, and a ciggie or glass of beer in the other, so layout took a week. And we were using a very amateurish desktop publishing program, Microsoft Publisher. MS Publisher often went rogue and it was only after the cartons came back from the printers for distribution that we would discover, for instance, that photos had relocated themselves or disappeared completely, or that the last line of every story had gone missing.

One day in 2005 we had a call from Verona goat farmer Tom Rix. He’d been putting together a newsletter for the Australian Cashmere Growers Association for years and offered to have a go at The Triangle, if we didn’t mind his moving it into Adobe Pagemaker, a much more professional layout program. We accepted his offer with alacrity. Under Tom’s expert hand the quality took a quantum leap, and now layout was complete in two days.

I was doing the copyediting by then – before the stories ended up on the page, gratefully. I would deliver a flash-drive of clean text files and photos to Tom’s property on Gilbert’s Road, and soon enough I was sitting at his elbow as he worked, learning Pagemaker. I was Tom’s back-up for critical times, like when a Canberra Raiders home game coincided with a printer deadline.

One sad day in 2007 Tom revealed that he’d been encouraging me to learn his job for another reason entirely. He was dying of cancer and would have to pull out. For the next few years I was copyeditor and layout person – free to move commas around to my heart’s content. Soon we adopted the next-generation Adobe InDesign program, another leap in production quality. At some stage I also inserted myself back into the proofing team. My nitpickery knew no bounds.

There were some hairy times in the early days, when we were still learning about defamation and libel. We weren’t Bega Council’s promotional instrument of choice, but some friendly local lawyer or another always got us out of trouble on a pro bono basis. And I had a few sleepless nights when I decided to follow up a story involving an unpopular development proposal, poker machines and mysterious payments to Sydney management consultants, but this time there was no blowback—the editorial committee had crossed all their Ts, etc. (The development didn’t go ahead. I’d love to think it was down to my girl-detective exposé but I suspect the venture was simply found to be unviable).

My proudest moment? February 2020, the Bushfire Issue. Of the nine Triangle committee members, eight of us were evacuated on New Year’s Eve. We were allowed to return over the following days; thankfully we all had homes, but had to manage without water, power, internet or all three, for days or weeks.

After establishing that between us we had the technology, connectivity and emotional capacity to put an issue together, but still reeling from the events of that night, we invited the readership to send us their stories, photos and poems. We decided that we would publish everything we received; a paper that usually ran to 36 pages grew to 60.

It was those 60 pages of deeply personal experience – of a community holding together with heartbreaking courage and selflessness – that readers said was ‘a comfort’, ‘a precious reminder’, ‘the glue that binds us together’. And so it goes.

My years of living pedantically (on the paper, at least) ended in 2020 but I still receive my monthly issue with a twinge of pride. It’s a survivor. And as one disgruntled local told me years ago when his story, an event promotion, had been inadvertently omitted, ‘Everyone knows that if it’s not in The Triangle, it didn’t happen!’

Happy 20th Birthday, dear Triangle! It’s been a wild, pernickety ride.

 

A shorter version of this story first appeared in the September 2022 edition of The Triangle community newspaper.