Press Escape

Shaun Carney started his career in journalism as a 20-year-old cadet at Melbourne’s Herald and moved a few years later to the Age. After a 26-year career there, holding many influential positions, Shaun Carney couldn’t see what the future of journalism at the Age would be, and so he decided to take one the redundancy packages that were being offered. At the time, 2012, he didn’t know what to expect. Since then he’s been writing for the Herald Sun and, luckily for us, this memoir, Press Escape.

Carney grew up in working-class Frankston, an only child; the son of Eddie, a housewife, and Jim, a metal worker. Carney’s descriptions of suburban Australia in the ’60s are a wonderful evocation of a different Australia. They brought back many memories for me of a shared experience. By the end of form one he knew he wanted to be a journalist. After an Arts degree at Monash, he was taken as a trainee at the Herald, working the police rounds where everything he wrote was published because that was the stuff of the paper then. When his six-year-old daughter contracted cancer it turned his life upside down; for over two years his life and career were in limbo. He also had to navigate a difficult relationship with his beloved father and then the profound changes in his industry. Carney’s memoir is a moving, funny and engrossing account of the vicissitudes of life.

Mark Rubbo