David Banks | July 11, 2009
IT is tea on the first day of the first Test in Wales; England is three wickets down and struggling and I, against my upbringing and instincts, am barracking for the Aussies on behalf of a friend who cannot be with us.
Half a day earlier, on the other side of the planet in St Leonard's Catholic Church, Naremburn, in northern Sydney, family and friends who loved him as I did bade farewell to my former boss, friend and mentor.
Frank Devine, "the laughing cavalier of Australian journalism", died last week the way he edited great newspapers: with courage, with dignity and humour and with a stubborn disregard for the deadline his maker had set.
Only his timing, usually so immaculate, could be faulted on this occasion. "I think I have one more Ashes series in me," he had predicted cheerfully but mistakenly from his hospital bed three weeks earlier.
The great man had known for a long time that the game was up, accepting his fate with a graceful nonchalance for which a lifetime of devotion to Catholicism had prepared the world's unlikeliest altar boy.
"I have unstoppable cancer," he growled at me down the phone from his home in Cammeray. "I suppose you've heard?"
Indeed, I had. An email from Chris Mitchell, editor-in-chief of The Australian and an old colleague from my years in Australia, alerted me to the state of Frank's worsening health just a day after the two had lunched together. "I'll find a flight," I promised Frank. By the time I arrived at his bedside in the Royal North Shore Hospital, he was battling double pneumonia. Not that the irascible old legend was letting that hold him back.
Long-suffering Jacqueline, the love of his life and his wife of 50 years, arrived moments before me bearing a dozen Sydney rock oysters which he slurped with selfish satisfaction while dictating a text message to his eldest daughter, Miranda, requesting pate and baguette for his evening meal.
"Best columnist in Australia," said Devine, throwing me Miranda's offering in that morning's The Sydney Morning Herald. That was a big rap, even from a proud parent, coming from the editor who retired to become what many contemporaries reckoned to be the nation's premier commentator.
Throughout his laughter-filled life, Frank loved language, literature and lunch, and I was lucky enough to share his meal table on many occasions during 12 months as his deputy while he skilfully internationalised The Australian in 1988-89. Our noisy arguments on a troika of taboo subjects - sport, religion and politics - sustained a friendship of opposites. Devine cared deeply for his many friends, lavishing praise and bolstering their spirits when they were down.
An avowed conservative - after sport, politics was our favourite area for combat - Devine the columnist became the bete noire of the Australian Left: he took pride in prime minister Paul Keating's sneering description of him as "that old fart".
Journalism was more than a career for 77-year-old Devine: along with love of family and cricket, journalism was his passion. Aussie journalists regard him as "the first editor-in-chief of The Australian to bring an international outlook to Murdoch's brainchild and introduce it to big ideas" - not my words, but those of Mitchell, the incumbent.
I met Devine in Chicago in 1985 when I went to the US from London as the Wapping point man, directed by Rupert Murdoch to "spend as long as it takes to find out everything there is to know about journalists producing newspapers using computers". Devine, then editing the Chicago Sun-Times, appointed a mentor for me, provided staff, resources and frequent dinners and drinks opportunities, including a newsroom trip to Hannibal, Missouri, to commemorate the centenary of Mark Twain's death. (For me the highlight was a Wild Turkey-drinking contest in which I finished a "wasted" second.)
After the Wapping "revolution", when I left London and The Sun to join the rival to Murdoch's The New York Post, the Daily News, Devine's relentlessly combative editorship of the Post ensured my life on 42nd Street was never easy. Devine was an unashamed Murdoch loyalist but he retained a healthy taste for rebellion: "I hated it when Rupert sold the Sun-Times," he said. "In fact, I think at that moment I hated Rupert."
But Murdoch obviously knew what he was doing: releasing Devine from Chicago made him available - via his consolidating period in New York - to take The Australian into a new era of success.
My last visit to the great man saw me pushing through the crowd at his bedside. "I brought a copy of the Oz," I said.
"Got it," growled a greatly weakened Frank, spreading his arm across the pile of newsprint littering his counterpane. "And all the rivals, too." Under his despotic direction, Jacqueline, her brother-in-law and their nephew were carrying out a critical inquest of the dailies' offerings. Just like the old days, I joined Devine's morning news conference.
Three hours later I flew home determined to make my next column in the British media monthly Press Gazette a tribute to a living legend in the present tense, not the past. "After all," a fellow Frank protege said as we toasted the great man, "the old bastard's buggered but he ain't dead yet!"
Sadly, that column appeared two days before he slipped away, his bed appropriately cluttered with that day's newspapers. But not before he had the opportunity to email a critique, having read a proof of my piece - a "present-tense obituary", as he described it.
"Banksy," he wrote, "I knew I would have to do something extreme to get a good word out of you but I didn't expect so many and such good ones." Typically wry, generous as always and embarrassingly flattering.
But back to the cricket ... somewhere in the background, play has resumed in what for me has become the Frank Devine Memorial Test Match; an excitable Australian commentator is recording the fall of a fourth English wicket.
Rest easy, old pal.
David Banks, a columnist with Britain's Press Gazette, is a former deputy editor of The Australian and a former editor of TheDaily Telegraph (Sydney) and Daily Mirror (London).
