By Tony Wright - December 1, 2004
I had not known him as long or as well as a lot of people. He was in Sydney and I was in Canberra, but for four years he was part of my weekly existence, gentling stories into life, offering wise suggestions and never once complaining that we were hurtling towards a deadline with large amounts of white space threatening.
He is, indeed, responsible for my chronic last-minute filing. A few weeks after arriving at The Bulletin, I was commissioned to write a 3,000-word feature. It would, surely, have to be filed at least a week early to allow the subs a decent run at it, I figured. Naturally, I found myself pressed hard against this self-imposed deadline and on a Sunday, I finally squirted the yarn down the line and in a state of mild hysteria, phoned The Bulletin newsroom to see if the thing had arrived. Col – who seems to have worked every Sunday of his life – answered the phone. As I began stammering apologies for filing so late, he interrupted. "Mate," he said calmly. "What are you talking about? No one files this early. We’ll have a look at it during the week and I’ll give you a call. Now relax and enjoy the rest of the weekend." I was astonished that such generosity existed on any news desk, and, sad to admit, never filed so early again. If this caused him dyspepsia, he never said.
On subsequent visits to Sydney, I had a few beers with Col at the occasional Sydney pub and always looked forward to his conversation. One mild night in Glebe we pulled up chairs to a table of pasta beneath the moon and Col ordered wine. My daughter aged 21 was with us and Col treated her as an equal. He drew her into our discussion and talked wine with her and books and journalism and life in Sydney and places distant and made her feel a part of something special. We were, of course, in the presence of a man of rare intelligence and breadth of experience, yet he was so humble he did not know any way of doing things other than with an easy, inclusive grace.
That’s where I want to leave Col in my memory, sipping a glass of good wine beneath a big moon on a Sydney night, chuckling away at some small absurdity of life and sharing his self-deprecating warmth. That, and an email he sent in response to a story I had written about visiting a house of Champagne in France. A particular vintage of Veuve Clicquot, I had written "makes a fellow feel like dancing." "Yes," Col wrote back. "It does make a fellow feel like dancing." None of us feel much like dancing right now, but Colin Climo will waltz through our thoughts for a very long time.
