By LACHLAN MOORHEAD
MOTHER and daughter pair Barbara Haw and Julie Timms share more than just a family bond.
Barbara and Julie have both worked in newspapers for most of their lives and spent several years together as part of the classified advertising team at the Dandenong Journal.
These were years, during the golden age of the ’70s, that both women are quick to say were some of the best of their lives.
“We only had television and radio to compete with so papers were huge and the advertising was huge and it was just really exciting,” Julie said.
“I mean, it still is, it’s just different now, back then walking through classifieds you wouldn’t be able to stop and talk to anybody, the phones were just bang, bang, bang, whereas now we’re more having to chase business, rather than being an inbound.
“It was a great time.”
Barbara’s memories of the Journal are similarly of a place that was always buzzing with activity, where cigarettes smoked in ashtrays at each person’s desk, and where a tea break was often spent discussing that day’s drama at the pub around the corner from the newspaper’s Scott Street offices.
“When I first started the advertising, manager Des Gillick, his phone would ring and I’d answer it, and I’d say ‘Des Gillick’s phone and they’d say ‘oh, it’s Mr Walders here from so and so, is Des there please?’” Barbara said.
“I’d say ‘just a moment’. I’d put the phone down, run down the passage, out into the bar and tell him he’s wanted on the phone. And Des would say ‘here, hang onto me beer.’
“People probably wouldn’t believe it, but it’s true!”
That wasn’t the only time Barbara wandered down to the bar.
Julie remembers her mother sharing a drink with an Australian singing icon and Dandenong native.
“I remember you going out drinking with bloody Johnny Farnham,” Julie said to her mum.
“You were dancing on the bar at the pub in Dandenong!”
Barbara and her late husband Geoff grew up in Dandenong before moving to the country where Geoff, Julie’s dad, worked as a farm labourer.
But the family moved back to Dandenong when Julie was about 12.
“The one reason we shifted back into Dandenong was because we couldn’t see a future for our children in what we were doing,” Barbara said.
“My husband’s mother needed a bit of help and we bought a house, it was like two units, so we could help take care of her and then the kids were able to get on with their lives.”
Julie also met her husband, Daryl, at the Journal, a veteran journalist who himself worked at the paper before moving to the Herald Sun, where he has been for the past 27 years.
“I ’spose it’s in our blood. I love the deadlines, I love… just the atmosphere, it’s just different to another job,” Julie said.
“Once you work somewhere where you’ve got deadlines, I don’t think… it’s just you’re always pushing, so the next deadline, once one deadline’s gone that’s not it, you’ve got another deadline coming up so you’re always looking for things.”
And while Barbara has now settled into retirement – with far less dancing on bar tops – things have come full circle for Julie.
She was working for Star News Group in Pakenham when the company bought the Journal 2013 and is back on her old patch.
“It was like coming home,” Julie said.
