The late newspaperman Frank Devine, author of Older and Wiser, at The Australian in Sydney
The brains trust at Sydney production company Zapruder’s Other Films know when they’re on to a good thing which is why Andrew Denton and his right-hand-woman Anita Jacoby are in the middle of finishing another series of their top-rated Elders series for the ABC.
The first series of the show, itself a spin-off from Denton’s much missed Enough Rope, featured fascinating, in-depth interviews with members of our superannuated generation – all of whom still have much to offer and are offering it.
Denton and Jacoby, to their credit, realised that there were plenty more people to mine for knowledge and experience – some of it good, some of bad, but all of interesting.
Which brings me to my point: Frank Devine’s posthumously published prince of a book called Older and Wiser that will hit bookstores tomorrow.
The book is a collection of Devine’s essays from 2002 to 2009 originally published in Quadrant magazine after he retired “as a day labourer at the age of 70” from The Australian newspaper where he had previously been editor.
His intention was to examine getting old but after five years of writing his columns he realised he’d been “goofing off” and writing about everything but. Well almost. Devine’s facility with language ranks among the very best and his essays are sensible, endearing, charming, enlightening, clever, provocative and laugh-out-loud funny in equal measure.
Australia has a peculiar notion about age and retirement. Unlike many European and Asian nations, we don’t revere our elders or take from them the infinite wisdom they possess about life and living. They’ve been there, done that, which is why we should appreciate it. Yet, somehow, we don’t.
Remember the push to have former Prime Minister John Howard retire at 64 – as if 64 was the intellectual use-by date for employment? Whatever you think of his politics, there is no denying Howard was still as vigorous as a 44 or even 34-year-old. Not for nothing is he currently working on his memoir while travelling the world at the invitation of various heads of government and businesses that wisely seek his counsel on all manner of things.
So back to Devine and Older and Wiser. As an example of his acute insight and wit (and that of a grandson) take the following extract from an essay called Two Degrees of Separation about being a grandparent (he was that six times over – one granddaughter and five grandsons).
Frank Devine's new book, Older and Wiser
“It’s a mistake for grandparents to get ideas above our station. This was made clear to me when, in the temporary and unavoidable absence of his parents, I took a grandson from the rugby wing of our family (we also have a robust soccer wing) to his under-eights game one recent Saturday. We get on well and he was his usual ebullient self on the way to the ground. On the return journey, however, he was somewhat taciturn.
“You missed your dad?” I suggested.
Tactfully: “A bit.” His father is the team coach.
“What’s wrong with a grandfather?”
“Well…you’re old.”
“So?”
“Well, you can’t run around the field.”
“How do you know? You’ve never seen me try.”
Recourse to his gift for comic invention had become inevitable: “Sometimes at training we accidentally step on Dad’s foot with our sprigs. He just swears but, if we did it to you, I think you’d go down.”
Each of the essays in the hardback volume – the first title to be published by Quadrant Books – contains sentences, ideas, logic and laughs that sparkle like newly polished gems.
An early shot of newspaper man Frank Devine playing billiards
Devine writes about the “special choreography” of a marriage that survives and thrives after 50 years; about Margot Kingston’s “insistent drone of scold” in her book Not Happy, John!; about the delights of reading Wodehouse out loud to his wife – “once caught in the Wodehouse web there is no escape”; on Winston Churchill “pommy bastard”; about being home alone – “my household duties over the years have been light but I am by no means hapless. Not everybody accepts me as fully hap, however”; and extracts a revelatory and compelling conversation with historian Geoffrey Blainey who admits “to some extent I lead two lives”.
Devine’s brilliance can be found in the myriad of subjects he tackles and conquers, and the subtlety and finesse with which he executes the written word.
Older and Wiser is as beautiful to behold as the words contained therein. And as this collection of 34 essays from a total of 67 amply proves, Devine is among the finest wordsmiths Australia, sorry, New Zealand, has ever produced.
(Full disclosure: Frank Devine, who died in July from cancer, was a close personal friend.)
The book retails for $44.95
