Story Club: Annabel Crabb On Desecrating Stonehenge, Chasing Shane Warne, And Her Worst Moments As A Foreign Correspondent

Story Club is a monthly live event held at Giant Dwarf Theatre, where Australia’s finest raconteurs — politicians, comics, writers, commentators and musicians — tell the audience a story based on that month’s theme.

To spread the word about their brand new podcast, they’ve shared with us the transcript of a tale told by award-winning journalist, commentator, TV host and author Annabel Crabb at the March event, themed ‘The One That Got Away’. You can listen to the podcast here; an audio version of Crabb’s story is embedded below.

–

We live in a marvellous country. Of course we do, and I could not possibly love it more. We have prodigious national figures to guide and inspire us – obviously I’m mainly talking about Prince Philip here, but there are others – and when we have national feuds, we tend to have them more about sensibly puerile things, like whether Taylor Swift is an appropriate emblem for fourteen pissed blokes on a raft with a bong listening to the Hottest 100, and less about fighting each other in futuristic hellscapes armed with burning rags on sticks based on tiny interpretive variations on an ancient religious book. I love that about us.

And even our attempts at world-standard patriotism – the giant inflatable thumbs at the cricket, the plaintive squawks of “Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!” – tend to be packed away peaceably with the empty tinnies at the end of the day.

(One of the best ever responses to that particular chant, by the way, came during the 2000 Olympics, where I believe it was fiendishly invented. It came from Bob Carr, who way back then was NSW Premier and merely thought of as a book-reading oddball. He was at that stage yet to metastasise into the steel-cut-oats chomping, Henry Kissinger-smooching, one-legged Romanian deadlifter we know and love today. “Aussie Aussie Aussie! Oi Oi Oi!” chanted the Olympic-fevered TV audience at the NSW Premier during a media interview. “Errr… Ahem. Indeed,” was his response. May he never retire.)

Like I said, we’ve all had our experiences with national self-love. And it’s perfectly fine, healthy, normal, and up to a certain point it will not make you go blind.

But there is one way to experience a concentrated, sustained blast of these national leanings, and thus to live in a constant, sweaty state of meat-beating patriotic onanism.

And that, my friends, is to become the correspondent abroad for an Australian news outlet.

When you serve as the point person in a foreign location for an Australian media organ, everything you casually understand about the national interest — which is to say in general that we are interested, as a nation, in any particular international story to the exact extent that it involves anyone with a +61 dial code — is distilled and personalised to a throbbing, terrifying point.

And this is it: The agony and the ecstasy of foreign correspondentism.

No story is so tiny, no London mugging or Bangkok shakedown or Delhi car accident or camel-related misadventure in Cairo is so minor, that it cannot be transformed into a front-page news story in Australia by virtue of a Dapto newsagent being nebulously involved.

Foreign correspondents themselves, being pitiful paranoiacs who tend to work vampiric hours and spend much of that time fretting that they’re not making enough of an impact, are both cursed and blessed. On one hand, they can find themselves all over page one for days and days, owing to some blockhead’s decision to fly to Singapore with fifteen tranquillised Gang Gang cockatoos stuffed down his trousers.

On the other – and this really sucks – every tourist ballooning disaster, every light plane crash, every abduction or gas leak or food poisoning outbreak at Claridge’s carries within it, for the Australian correspondent, the potential for days and days of fruitless searching for Any Australians Involved.

During my four years in London working as a correspondent for Fairfax’s Sunday titles, without a doubt the most horrible period was the one after the London Underground bombings, which I spent loitering around outside hospitals listening out for the distinctive twang of traumatised Australians. That was an awful assignment, and of course I was completely useless at it.

Other requests ranged from the hilarious (“We need a picture of Rolf Harris and the Queen! By tomorrow!”), to the extravagantly impossible (“We need you to find Gordon Wood. Apparently he’s in Europe somewhere”).

I had many humiliating moments. Like trailing along to Wimbledon in order to stalk Delta Goodrem and her then-boyfriend, Mark Philippoussis, the latter of whom I was instructed to ask, in a crowded press conference, whether too much nooky with Delta was the reason he kept losing matches. The famously even-tempered Philippoussis took it awfully well, as you can imagine.

“Our Home Grown Nutter Meets Famous People” is a popular theme in foreign correspondent-land. I once spent about two hours trying to wangle Sheik Taj-El-Din Hilaly, nutbag Sydney imam, into a picture with Cat Stevens at a London Islamic conference. In the end, I actually just introduced them.

Another common one: “Famous Person Is Rude About Australia”. Or “Australian Person Is Honoured By Famous Institution”. I must have interviewed hundreds of Australians who have been hung in the Tate Gallery, or been given membership of the Royal Society, or worked at Number Ten Downing Street, or won a restaurant award in London, or to whom Princess Diana was once really, really nice.

I once accompanied a fabulous group of young Aboriginal dancers from Broome who had been invited to go and dance at Stonehenge. We arranged to photograph them one morning at daybreak. It was stunning. These beautiful young men, painted and beaming, dancing against the backdrop of England’s most famous and baffling sacred site. Getting into the swing of it, one of the boys leapt up on top of one of the smaller stones and struck a pose, thus creating a dilemma for me and the photographer. On one hand – International Incident As Visiting Aussie Crawls All Over National Treasure. On the other – Bloody Awesome Photo.

Vermin that we are, we kept shooting, only to notice after a minute or two a faint roaring sound. The portly lady from the Stonehenge Trust, who had retired to the overseer’s cottage for a cup of tea, was steaming back towards us, shrieking at the top of her lungs. The boys watched her approach, fascinated. By the time she reached us, she was distinctly out of breath , capable only of flapping her arms desperately and emitting bare fragments of what would no doubt have otherwise been a blistering tirade. The boys stared at her, giggling openly as she flapped. “How dare … outrageous… You can’t… you can’t … you can’t,” she spluttered. One of the boys, rather unfortunately, leaned over to his mate and said, slightly too audibly, “It’s a fucking rock, lady. Calm down.” Which she heard. And uttered a full-throated gasp, as if she’d been socked in the solar plexus. “Get out!” she screamed. “I’ve never heard such filthy language!” Whereupon her young tormentor observed – not unreasonably, from his perspective, though it did serve to terminate entirely our permission to be on the property – “Come on, lady. You’re the one calling me a cunt.”

Ah, happy days.

But by a country mile, the worst gig on the London correspondent roster – the most thankless, time consuming, repetitive and most personally shameful – was Warnie Watch.

Shane Warne, in 2006, was captaining Southampton and splitting up with his wife. Which meant that he spent his days playing amazing cricket, and his nights shagging any cocktail waitress that moved. Warnie’s judgment on the field was superb, but off it, he needed work, and there was a time when it seemed every week or two I’d be obliged to catch a train to Southampton and set up shop outside Warnie’s house with a photographer, looking for a picture and a quick word about his latest indiscretion.

The photographers from the local agency could pretty much drive to Warnie’s place with their eyes shut. My most regular companion on Warnie-watch was an affable chap called Dave, who had a travel set of Connect Four in his glovebox, and a boot full of fake emergency services vests (for getting around police roadblocks).

Our longest stint was in May 2006, when Warnie – halfway through a match in which he was captaining his side against Middlesex – drove to West London after a full day’s play and stayed up all night getting his rocket polished by a busty pair of ladies called Emma and Coralie. Even the appearance of an inflatable sex doll (ding-a-ling!) and a VIDEO CAMERA (Ding-a-ling-a-ling!!) did not, it seems, alert our man to the possibility that the pair might be News Of The World plants, which of course they were. Rather fabulously, as dawn broke, Warnie hopped back in his car, drove back to the game and took seven for 99, which just goes to show that he is a bloody legend.

But on behalf of Australia, we took a censorious approach, and when the story broke, Dave and I pretty much moved into Warnie’s street.

Encouraged by the presence of an empty chocolate milk carton on the front step (we fancied that this might be a reliable sign of the great man’s presence, like how the Union Jack flying over Buckingham Palace always means that the Queen is home), we played an endless world series of Connect Four, and every hour or two I’d hop out and ring the doorbell, just in case Warnie had arrived via the rooftop on a giant sex-toy Zeppelin or something.

And here’s where it becomes clear that in the now-defunct Warne marriage, it was the female party who really possessed the off-field smarts. Because every time I rang the bell, Simone – who was inside the house – would send the kids to answer it. And as those three little blonde kids stood there, looking at me with their big innocent eyes, and I stared back at them, transfixedly unable to ask any of the horrible questions I had come, on behalf of Australia, to ask, I knew, with a chilling certainty I shall never forget: I come from a land down under. And I am a total dirtbag.

–

Subscribe to Story Club’s podcast here, or listen below:

–

Tonight — Monday July 20 — Story Club gives the chair over to their audience for one night only, as punters spin their favourite yarns. The event begins at 8pm at Sydney’s Giant Dwarf Theatre; more info here.