Press Escape
Shaun Carney
Press Escape
Shaun Carney
Getting away was always a driving ambition for Shaun Carney-from an outer-suburban house in the 60s and 70s, from a family with a secret: a father with a double life and a borrowed name.
Journalism gave Shaun that escape, to another life, to becoming a different person. For 34 years he took every opportunity it offered, flourished and knew success even while dealing with the personal struggle of his own child battling cancer. But a greater sense of freedom came when he forgave the people he’d wanted to flee and, unexpectedly, let go of the life that he’d worked so hard to create. In this beautifully crafted memoir one of Australia’s leading political journalists writes movingly about discovering the one story that really matters.
Review
Mark Rubbo
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.
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