By LACHLAN MOORHEAD
HUGH Buggy was known as the ‘oracle’.
So detailed were the crime reporter’s records of murder investigations that, after his death, police wanted his clipping books for their own library.
Hugh served on the editorial staff of the Dandenong Journal later in his career, which had previously included stints at the Truth, the Argus, and the Melbourne Herald and Sun.
He was fascinated by crime.
Hugh witnessed three hangings and, according to the late Journal scribe Marg Stork, who used to sit opposite him, Hugh spoke with “personal authority on anything from Squizzy Taylor to the Albury Pyjama Girl Mystery and the Inverloch Murder”.
“Criminals respected Hugh like they respect Father Brosnan,” Marg wrote in 1995.
“And he could talk to them with the same characteristic frankness as the top brass in the police force.”
Hugh began his career in journalism as a junior reporter on a South Melbourne paper after studying arts part-time at Melbourne University.
He knew meticulous shorthand and possessed a “picturesque turn of phrase”.
“He was an inspiration to countless dozens of young journalists,” Marg wrote.
“He had a fund of stories which never failed to draw an appreciative and impressionable audience.
“If you didn’t know anything, you asked Hugh.
“He was the oracle.”
Avid Journal reader and Narre Warren resident Alan Croy remembers meeting Hugh Buggy at the newspaper’s Scott Street offices many years ago.
“My memories of him, such as they are, are of an older, kindly, avuncular, well-spoken gentleman, perhaps with a touch of whimsy,” Mr Croy said.
“And I felt there was a sense of a touch of history with him, a connection with the past, contributing to a well-groundedness that I believe he had.
“Hugh added life and energy to Dandenong. He wasn’t a carbon-copy, paper cut-out, made-to-regulation, colourless, one size fits all non-entity.
“He had an identity and, more importantly, his writing and what he wrote about had an identity.”
Hugh died in the mid-1970s and his picture hangs proudly in the Melbourne Cricket Club’s Hall of Fame.
His articles will always remain.
“Hugh was part of this world order, both part of it, and definitely part-creator of it, and this holds true regardless of whatever Hugh’s own opinion of his place in it may have been,” Alan said.
“Dandenong, and The Dandenong Journal, are immeasurably the richer for him having been there.”
