By NARELLE COULTER
Tributes flow as Journal’s treasured journalist dies…
DANDENONG lost one of its living treasures and the Journal a precious link with its past when veteran reporter Marg Stork died last week.
Marg, as she was affectionately known, died on Tuesday 10 June after a short illness. She was 91.
Remarkably Marg never retired, contributing her popular Moment with Marg column right up until her recent illness.
“It’s the people who make it such an enjoyable job,” Marg is quoted as saying in a tribute to her career published on the Journal’s 140th birthday in 2005.
“(Former editor) Greg Dickson taught me to write and write – for this I am forever grateful”.
Her father Rowland Archer bought his 10-year-old daughter her first typewriter at Dandenong Market.
Marg started her career as an honorary correspondent with the Journal when she was just 15 and still a student at Dandenong High School.
Her round was social news from Hallam, Hampton Park, Cranbourne and Lyndhurst where she lived on her parents’ property ‘Ryecroft’.
She was put on the Journal payroll in 1940 at 10 shillings a week.
Marg’s recall of the past was legendary and she would often regale young reporters with stories of brownouts and the shortage of newsprint during the Great Depression and war years and of long lines of readers patiently waiting outside the old Scott Street office – each clutching a threepence in their hand – to purchase a copy of the Journal.
“In those days I was jack of all trades,” she recalled.
“I swept the office in the mornings and used to dive for cover when the district stock and station agents drove cows and calves along Scott Street on their way to the old stock market behind the council building in Clow Street.
“I did the banking, folded papers, proof read and worked until 2am at home doing Greg’s subscription and advertisement accounts – by hand!
“I rode my bike to get stories and did a regular news round walking the streets of Dandenong.
“I would call at WJ Garner funeral services, then in Walker Street, the Beau Mond factory near the station, to the schools, the churches and real estate offices.”
Marg worked in the halcyon days of newspapers and never forgot the click of the linotypes and going home with ink stains on her clothes.
Not even the birth of daughter Melvena could keep Marg from her news rounds. The baby went along in her pram as Marg visited contacts around the streets of Dandenong.
Marg married twice, and nursed Melvena until her daughter tragically lost her battle with cancer in 2010.
Marg struggled with the technological changes that swept through the industry in the 1980s and ’90s.
Management tried to make her use an early PC but Marg was having none of it. Repetitive strain injury meant she was able to revert to writing stories on her beloved manual typewriter.
Marg was delighted when the Journal was purchased by the family-owned Star News Group in 2013 and her beloved paper was returned to tabloid size and the focus was once again on community news.
In later years she hand wrote copy for her column, faithfully sending it by express post every Sunday so it would arrive on the editor’s desk in plenty of time for the Journal’s Friday deadline.
“I am proud to be part of the Journal team, and proud to think the newspaper, which means so much to me, is still going strong.
“I have watched the Journal grow from small beginnings… I hope it never loses its true role, that of a community newspaper.”
Marg will be farewelled at a small, private funeral this week.
She is survived by husband Don Davis.
Turn to pages 6 and 7 for more on Marg’s remarkable career as well as tributes from the community.
