From Canberra to Katanning (and beyond) – returning to roots after decades away

Chris Johnson returns to where his journalism career began.

Katanning, in the Great Southern region of the West Australian wheatbelt, is a long way from Canberra.

But it’s not too far at all from some of Australia’s most beautiful beaches and more than a few mountains that seem to always be mysteriously beckoning to adventurous bushwalkers.

If it wasn’t for Katanning, I would never have come to Canberra to work and to live and raise kids.

Located 277 kilometres south-east of Perth, but just 171 kilometres north of picturesque Albany on the state’s southern tip, Katanning has a population of about 4000.

In the mid 1990s, it was about half the size.

For almost two years, I was one of those people – having moved there from Perth with a young family to take up a role as the town’s ‘senior reporter’ for what would be my first real newspaper gig.

I had worked writing for magazines and even held down short contracts freelancing for some bigger newspapers in the lead-up to that appointment, but the tiny, weekly published Great Southern Herald gave me my first full-time, permanent job in newspaper journalism.

The fact I had already written for some newspapers, and had a degree, catapulted me straight into the ‘senior’ role overseeing a small team of one full-time junior reporter, another part-time journalist and a bevy of stringers filing despatches from further afield in the Great Southern. I was thrown in at the deep end.

Opting for a genuinely rural experience, a rented prefab farm cottage 10 kilometres out of town (the last 2 km along dirt road) and in the middle of a 4000-acre wheat and sheep farming enterprise, was the home we rented.

We were city slickers, but I loved the isolation. My wife couldn’t bear it.

But we understood that if approached with enthusiasm and professionalism, this little newspaper job could be the kickstart my career needed.

And for a tiny town, it offered plenty of news.

The police round was always eventful and the local courthouse provided a fascinating grounding for the much higher level of court reporting to come (including in the High Court of Australia many years later).

The sheep saleyards brought the town to life once a week.

It was there I discovered a passion for environmental reporting that would become embedded in my whole career.

I learned a great deal about the landcare efforts of the farming community; and of the state’s wildlife rehabilitation programs.

I could disappear for days at a time to accompany rangers into the remotest corners of the Great Southern to report on the tracking of numbats, bandicoots, malleefowl, eagles and chuditch (western quoll).

It was in Katanning too where I discovered that environmental reporting, by its very nature, was also political reporting.

Clearfelling of old growth forests in Tasmania, whaling in the Southern Ocean, carbon pricing, and international climate change conferences would all form part of the environmental issues I would be covering as a Canberra Press Gallery political journalist as my career progressed.

But it all started in Katanning.

About an hour-and-a-half’s drive from Katanning is the magnificent Stirling Range National Park and the imposing Bluff Knoll, which the local Noongar people call Bular Mial – the place of many faces.

I had climbed Bluff Knoll a number of times before ever knowing I would be relocating to Katanning one day. Once I moved so close, the mountain became a friend.

Rising 1099 metres above sea level, with a 650-metre prominence, Bluff Knoll boasts a challenging three kilometre steep trail that rewards with 360-degree views at the summit.

My son excitedly and stubbornly scaled the summit without assistance before he was even two years old (needed piggybacking a little on the way down though).

We climbed other peaks in the range too, as well as in the nearby but smaller Porongurup National Park.

There is a mystery to the mountains in WA’s Great Southern that I couldn’t resist.

Just recently, almost three decades later, I returned to Katanning and to the spectacular mountains of that south-west part of the country.

I had visited once or twice in the years immediately after leaving the employ of the Great Southern Herald, but I hadn’t stepped foot in that part of the world for more than 20 years.

I wanted to introduce my partner to Bluff Knoll, my ‘spiritual home’, and I also had a longing to rediscover my journalism roots in Katanning.

The reporters I worked with there were of course long gone (most journos don’t tend to stay long at country newspapers) but the Herald’s manager from my time and the entire front office team – who were all locals – still lived in Katanning and were keen to catch up.

They were all retired and hadn’t worked at the paper for a good many years – but they were the same great bunch of people I enjoyed working and socialising with so much back in the day.

I was happy to see the newspaper hadn’t closed down and that its offices were in the same spot in the main street where I had worked.

The town itself has undergone a massive transformation, with trendy cafes and classy hotels lining the main drag – and new saleyards built to become the largest undercover sheep saleyards in the southern hemisphere.

On the drive out of town we detoured past the old prefab cottage. I didn’t expect it to still be there, but it was – and the road was now bitumen all the way to the gate.

After Katanning, which itself is all quite flat terrain, we ventured further down the highway and climbed three peaks in two days.

A quiet night in a B&B at Porongurup gave us the rest and the energy to climb Castle Rock Peak the next morning and scramble out onto a skywalk that’s not for the fainthearted.

Then it was a drive to Stirling Range and a two-hour climb up Mt Trio, one of its many prominent peaks.

We stayed in a rammed earth cottage at the foot of Bluff Knoll and started for the summit of Bular Mial before daybreak the next morning.

It was a gruelling three kilometre steep ascent with many more knee-breaking steps built into the trail than were there the last time I had walked it.

The mountain was surrounded by fog and covered with clouds across its bluff. Rain came and went.

It was a tough but enjoyable hike, past a small waterfall and the most unique native flora. We had a sense of accomplishment when we finally reached the summit, but we couldn’t see a thing due to the low cloud cover.

Then, as if to reward us for all our effort, the cloud dispersed for a few minutes, opening the skies to offer spectacular views far into the distance.

Welcome back, I heard the mountain say.