Sue Webster

During my tenure as associate editor of New Idea, an action-packed nine years of Di, Oprah, Nicole and lots of other wanabees, I never once perched on a barstool with a starlet.

In fact, I nearly overlooked one game show host I went to interview. I didn't know who he was because I'd never had a television. When I was headhunted from the old Melbourne Herald to join New Idea, it was a mutual leap of faith.

Here was a journalist who didn't watch TV, who was living in Melbourne's unfashionable western suburbs and if that wasn't bad enough a church-going Christian to boot! It's a wonder I got the gig at all. I was a parishioner at St Thomas' Werribee, a parish with a CCJ presence, and my church involvement led me to help with the Anglicare amalgamation committee. I remain on the board of the Children's Foundation and these days I am a parishoner at St James' Ivanhoe.

My main task at New Idea was to be the 'safety-net' to ensure that mistakes did not slip through – the small embarrassments that spawn large amounts of mail. This included the recipe that listed among its ingredients 500 peas instead of 500g. (And yes, some readers did count them out individually.)

I also negotiated international copyright, organised models, ran craft pages, fiction sections, lonely hearts columns, stoked egos and stroked egos and supervised a memorably messy photo-shoot involving three St Bernard puppies.

Part of my fiefdom included the horoscopes. There's nothing like handling months of forecasts to realise what a load of rubbish it all is. (Once, when I worked on The Herald, I actually lost the stars off the Cybergraphic computer system – so I just made them up for a while. No one noticed!)

At New Idea I found I also copped the really tough reader enquiries, such as '. . . I'm looking for a knitting pattern, it was for a baby layette in pink, I think . . . and possibly printed sometime before the war . . .'

That enquiry typically came from the sort of reader who referred to the magazine as 'the book'; I assume it was because they were the sole reading material in the house.

But while we might think the past was gentler, don't believe it. Scratching back through the archives I discovered the magazine used to respond to readers' letters in the 1920s – and the pen was laced with acid.

'Dear R.G. You say your friends tell you that you are not a true poet and that you await our decision with anxiety. Set your mind at rest; we are obliged to agree with your friends.'

New Idea gave me the honour of listening to a wide variety of Australian men and women of many ages, often in major life stresses. And despite the cavalier reputation built up by popular magazines, I found the magazine surprisingly open to their needs, both small and large.

It was a chance to show positive faith-based concern. Prayer helped in no small measure and on the top of my computer I stuck the words: 'Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.'

The years I spent at New Idea spanned the magazine's change from trusted weekly companion to something racier, pacier and more youth-oriented.

It was not always a comfortable place to be. And the most uncomfortable place of all was the weekly coverlines meeting. The most important page of any magazine is the front cover. It has to have that elusive quality that a former editor described as 'pick-me-up-and-take-me-home'.

Magazines have to put a lot of thought and gut feeling into their coverlines. A magazine of 1955 with the coverline 'Go Gay In Towelling' would be laughed off the supermarket checkout queue today.

It was the time of Di and Camilla, Kylie and Nicole, Blanche and Bob. But when things got too much, when my moral buttons got pushed, out came my phrase: 'What would a Queensland grandmother think of that?' Often I lost but sometimes I won. At the height of Camillagate when everything was getting very tacky, I successfully plumped for a cover that raised the prospect of a Queen Anne as the next monarch. It was the standout-selling edition for a long time.

But then I went off to have babies and the newsroom moved to Sydney so New Idea and I parted company amicably.

Sue's New Life: Cows, Jews and me. . .

I now write about cows for agricultural titles. As a wag commented: 'It's just shifting from one type of mammary gland to another.'

I am the third generation of my family involved in dairying . . . but the first not actually draining cows for a living.

The dairying lineage goes back through my uncle to my grandfather, one of Gippsland's few Jewish dairy farmers and possibly one of the region's most unsuccessful.

Bred of city-based merchant stock, he came from an eminent background of Melbourne Jewry – Benjamin, Marks, Cohen. MPs, Lord Mayors, judges and city tycoons littered the bloodlines.

But Cecil Solomon Marks wanted to be a farmer.The family sent him off for an agricultural education,starting with Scotch College, then Hamilton College, and then the agricultural tertiary institutions of Dookie and Longrenong.

Newly-graduate, he chose to farm a superb piece of land – on river flats outside Leongatha – which became so impossibly infested with St Johns Wort that he sold at a loss and bought 320 acres of virgin bush at Hallston in Gippsland's Strzelecki Ranges.

Gippsland and green start with 'g'. So do gradient,glutinous mud and grinding poverty. The scrub wa scleared over the years and the initial herd of 15 cows grew to 80. It was, however, a high-cost enterprise. At one time Cecil employed 13 hands – and fed them turkey. Rumour goes they spent their days playing cards and toasting their good fortune. He was the first in the region to have a car and – more impressively – a steam-powered milking machine.

One day, when he was on the tractor ploughing down on the flats, he was struck with a thought. Many young men had already enlisted for WWI. Cecil decided that he should go too. He was 46. He leased out the farm and the herd and spent a cruel number of years on the Western Front. When shell-shock rendered him incapable of combat, they put him to work in the kitchens. He returned to Hallston to find the herd and the equipment squandered. He started to rebuild the enterprise, but he was scarred.

He married the daughter of a Melbourne market gardener, a well-educated woman of Scottish descent who was a capable oil painter and highly-literate. Family legend was she had The Times of London sent out; she would often do the crossword at night resting her feet in the warm oven. Her daughter, my mother, sang Schubert lieder as childhood songs . . . not a common occurrence in the Gippsland backwoods.

The children went to Presbyterian church services held at the local hall. And every Anzac Day Grandfather Marks would make the annual address to the children in the one-room primary school because he was one of the few of the region who served. Many of the children wore no shoes. New Zealand relations, the Nathans, sent cast-off clothes. Fashionable silks, velvets and laces would tumble out of the parcels before the widening eyes of the delighted children – but Cecil ripped them up for udder cloths.

The farm was deteriorating. Lands Department students used to visit to see first-hand a textbook case of land erosion. The paddocks started reverting to scrub. His son planted willows along a bordering creek to stop the floods. The Melbourne relations sent money to keep the family going.

Cecil died and was buried in his prayer shawl at Melbourne General Cemetery. The bridge he built over the creek is all that remains of that ill-fated attempt of farming. The willows are an environmental pest and are due to be removed.

Susan Webster is an award-winning journalist and novelist and a parishioner at St James' Ivanhoe.