I'm in Chiltern, in the heart of gold rush era Victoria, Ned Kelly country,
to meet one of our finest and most respected journalists.
He has somehow made sense of the madness that is federal politics
for over 30 years.
His gruff yet strangely soothing voice
easing us into Sunday mornings on Insiders.
It's the indomitable Barrie Cassidy.
Well, this is a delight, for me mainly.
Hello, Barrie. Julia.
How are you? I'm really well.
Now, where have I just stepped into?
Chiltern is like this magic movie set.
You've just come to one of the best country towns in Australia.
I mean, this is sort of typical
of a lot of towns in the north-east of Victoria -
you know, Beechworth, Yackandandah, Rutherglen.
They just preserve the place,
so that it's like walking back into the 1860s.
It's an absolute treat. Now, this of course is the Old Hume Highway.
The most remarkable thing about this,
and I was 12 years old when they bypassed,
so I've got still a vivid memory of what it was like
when this town was the Hume Highway,
the link between Melbourne and Sydney.
And see how narrow it is now? Oh, my God.
Just imagine what it was like with cars parked on either side
and semitrailers passing one another.
What is amazing about this town of course
is that we can just walk to your house.
You can. We were 50 metres from the main street.
And look at this, there's even old cars.
It's like we've hired it in advance.
How incredible. Let's walk, shall we?
We should. We'll go this way. Great.
SONG: ♪ Jump in my car
♪ I wanna take you home
♪ Mm, jump in my car... ♪
There it is! There it is!
♪ It's too far to walk on your own. ♪
Mr Fraser is still trying to shake off a bout of the flu,
and as a result he's changed his itinerary.
Barrie Cassidy has reported on the machinations
of generations of Australian politicians.
Aside from slight detours as press secretary for Bob Hawke
and as the ABC's European correspondent,
Barrie has been our guide to the endless parade of prime ministers,
via the Last Shout, Meet the Press, The 7:30 Report
and for the past 17 years as host of the evergreen Insiders.
How did the Cassidys come to be based in Chiltern?
The family goes back to the very first year
that Chiltern became a town, in 1858,
on my mother's side.
And the guy's name was Matthew Magan.
He was a convict, and then after he served his sentence
he was in Albury when gold was discovered in this district.
And so Chiltern went from a pastoral community
to a thriving gold rush town.
And he was in Albury, therefore it was probably a day's walk away.
So he would have been one of the very first residents of Chiltern.
And the family's been here ever since. Still here.
Well, would you look at this. It's another Cassidy.
This is the number four son - Meggsy.
The number four son. Hello, Meggsy. Otherwise known as Brian, but...
Brian. Why Meggsy? Obviously because of Ginger Meggs?
Yeah, when I was young I had red hair -
when I had hair - and freckles.
How many Cassidys still live in Chiltern?
Two. Graham, my younger brother. The two youngest.
Now, of course Ned Kelly would have hung around here a little bit.
But how was he seen to you kids when you were young?
Was he a hero or not really?
To me personally, I don't know about a hero, but he was a good guy.
Fighting persecution. And do you still?
I still think so, yes. What about you, Barrie?
Well, yeah.
I mean, there weren't a lot of things
that we agree on in our family.
You could imagine if there were five boys sitting around the table,
we had five different opinions.
But I think we all agreed on Ned Kelly being a bit of a...
We liked his style. Right, yeah.
We liked that he stuck up for himself,
and we had this sense that his family was persecuted by the police.
I love it. Great to have a little Barrie-Brian meeting here.
I'm going to walk Barrie up to the house. Thank you, Meggsy.
Yeah, that's alright. A pleasure to meet you.
This is it. I have not been inside this house for 50 years.
So, I have no idea what to expect. Oh, wow.
And who lived here at the time?
There was your mum and dad, Myra and Bill.
The oldest in the family is my sister Pam,
who was born before the war, and then five boys.
Was she here too, as well? She was there at this time?
In the early part for me,
but she moved on when I was probably five or six.
Shall we go in? We should.
You lead the way, sir.
Oh, after you. It's your house. OK.
Oh, wow. Look at this.
That's my bedroom. Is it?
Yep.
This is the room that Meggsy and I shared.
Were you allowed to have stuff up on your walls?
Oh, yeah. Yeah. What did you have?
Well, mainly because it was around the time of the '56 Olympics
in Melbourne, the wall was just full of gold medallists
from the '56 Olympics.
Not so much a football thing.
We could never agree. Couldn't you?
Five boys and we supported five different teams.
Wasn't that a good idea?
Gee, that is a great way to keep a family apart, isn't it?
Great for family harmony.
Now, that was my parents' room. Parents' room.
Now, there were two rooms here
that we couldn't use because they were so damp.
So, just no-one would be in this room at all?
No, the door to this room was permanently shut
because the walls were damp.
And you were renting this place? We were renting it, yes.
And you couldn't get anything from a landlord in those days.
You certainly couldn't get these two rooms back.
Can you get it NOW my question would be.
We didn't have a tap in the kitchen.
My father connected it from the main system himself.
I mean, that's what it was like then.
That room was locked off, as well. Because it was damp, yep.
And this was the lounge room,
and this is so much smaller than I remember.
This was our only heating of course, was this open fire here.
And we would cook crumpets on the fire.
And we had the coin-in-the-slot television at this end of course.
Right here. Excellent.
Oh. (LAUGHS) This is not the house that I lived in.
(BOTH LAUGH)
This has been completely transformed.
My understanding is that in your day
these were actually separate buildings outside.
So, this would have been outside. They've covered it over.
Yeah, on a wet day you couldn't get from the lounge room to the kitchen
without getting wet.
The kitchen was a separate building altogether.
This was where we spent most of our time really, in the kitchen,
because we would come in at about six o'clock
and they'd put the radio serials on.
You know, Dad and Dave and Biggles,
and we'd listen to those until about 6:30
and then we'd all sit around and have dinner.
And that's when it got really noisy.
And so was it a political household? Did you argue about politics?
No. No we were not interested in politics.
My mum and dad were not interested in politics.
And my dad was involved in everything,
in all of the sporting clubs,
and so that would have been a topic of conversation every night.
What's going on in the swimming club and the tennis club
and the cricket club and football.
Shall we go and have a look at the backyard?
Yeah.
The great thing about being brought up in a country town is the space.
My father used to set up for the school sports.
He would bring all this sand along
and we'd practise the high jump and the long jump.
And half the town would turn up here after school every day
and they'd be in our backyard practising sports.
It's just the space.
The space was the key to it.
Your dad and your mum, Bill and Myra, how did they meet?
They're brothers and sisters had married one another
and so they met through that relationship,
and they met at a bush dance.
And they had Pam, your eldest sister, the first.
Pam was born before the war.
Yeah, and soon after that your father has to go to war.
He saw three days of conflict, three days,
and was then captured.
But in those three days he saw the most spectacular battle
that was probably fought in the Second World War.
It was the only parachute invasion in war, in the history of warfare,
when the Germans invaded Crete.
And he was standing under that invasion,
and they took over the island and by this time of course
Dad was a prisoner of war.
When your dad was away, how much did your mum know?
Did Myra know where he was?
No. Mum got a telegram that said "Missing in action."
Six months later she got another telegram saying
"Wounded and missing in action," and that's all she knew.
But the prospect of him being found alive was slim
because it was 12 months after the first telegram
that Mum got news that he had actually survived
and was in a prison camp.
So, for 12 months she had no idea whether he was alive or dead.
He was a prisoner of war for four years.
So, your dad's away all that time and he comes home.
They meet at Spencer Street Station, Bill and Myra.
Yeah. Talk me through that.
The weight of expectation of, "You're back and now what?"
Yeah, and it would have been very difficult
because they hadn't seen each other for four years.
They only knew each other for about three years before that.
So, they would have been very, very nervous.
And there's a little kid there.
Pam's there as well, and she's a little girl now.
Pam was 18 months old when Dad went away, so she's now six.
That would have been a really unsettling thing for my father.
To see a whole new person.
So, there was that plus not really knowing how times had changed
and whether it would change their relationship.
There would have been a lot of anxiety,
but he has said since that the moment that he saw Mum
he knew in his mind that it was going to be just as it was.
When Dad came back here
he got a job almost straightaway at the brick works
and he worked there for about 30 years.
Then it just eventually folded up and he ended up at the sawmill.
But they became... or he did, Dad did,
became very much a part of the community.
Mum was hard to get out of the house.
She had her own anxieties and problems,
and it's just something that we never really talked about.
We didn't examine it and we didn't ask ourselves,
"Why is it that Mum will never leave the house?"
There's a grocer shop right across the road
and she wouldn't go there.
She would wait until we got home from school
and we would go over and do the shopping.
And we found it annoying,
but not particularly peculiar.
So, your parents are here in Chiltern,
they have five more boys, six kids now,
a happy time really.
And then 50 years after your Dad comes back from the war
a letter arrives.
Yeah, 50 years after the war.
And they're out in the garden
and the postman turns up with a letter for Mum.
And that was unusual that a letter would be addressed to Mum.
And she went inside and she started reading it.
Dad went inside, put the kettle on and looked at Mum
and he could see that her hand was trembling
and he said, "Who's the letter from?"
And she didn't answer him at first, and he said, "What's in the letter?"
And she's just looked up at him and said, "Dad, I'm so sorry."
And then she went on to explain the letter was from a person
who suspected that she was his mother.
And she told him this and she said, "Dad, I know that I am."
She called him Dad, right? And she said, "Dad, I know that I am."
And that's how after 50 years she broke the news
that she'd had another child.
Mm. And could you imagine that?
Dad is 83, Mum's 79
and they've got to deal with that issue so late in life.
It was extraordinary.
Is that what you're referring to when your Mum never went out that much?
Was she genuinely worried that if she went outside she might see...
Maybe she would bump into somebody who might have known something.
She kept the story only to her brother and sister-in-law,
and when they died she thought the story went with them
and that nobody else knew.
Until this letter arrived, and they had to deal with it.
Now, Dad's first reaction was, you know, not unreasonably,
he was very, very upset and he started thinking about
what he was doing at that time
and the suffering that he was going through.
And so his initial reaction was to... to be very angry.
Mm.
Over time he thought it through.
Mum phoned every one of the kids one after another,
and the message that came through from all of us was really the same.
That you couldn't script this.
You couldn't come up with a set of circumstances that better explained
something like this happening.
Dad came around to that point of view
and then he eventually said to Mum, "Your son wants to see you.
"I think we'd better deal with this.
"And if you want me to come with you I will."
And he did. And they dealt with it together.
Have you met your half-brother? Yeah, I have.
I've seen a lot of him.
And he said to me that he wasn't looking for a new family,
he just wanted to find out the history and the background.
They found their way back though, didn't they, Bill and Myra?
In the later years,
Dad was more affectionate towards Mum than I'd ever seen.
I just think being tested in that way,
not that Dad hadn't been tested, you know, through the war,
like so many, and survived that test,
but then he gets this late-in-life test,
and seriously the relationship between the two in their last years
was never stronger.
Well, let's go to Rutherglen, to your secondary school.
We had to travel from Chiltern to Rutherglen
because Chiltern didn't have a high school.
So, we made this trip every day.
It was a really slow bus ride,
because it's a ride that should take 15 minutes
and it took us just about an hour.
Because it used to divert for various farms
and it would just pick up farm kids all the way along.
Historic Rutherglen. We've just driven into historic Rutherglen.
I just hope they still have the sign up.
Because it's great wine country
and they've had a sign here now for decades
that said, "Sydney has a great harbour,
"but Rutherglen has a great port," and it does.
Oh, please let that sign still be here.
There it is! There it is!
"Sydney may have a nice harbour..." There it is.
Oh, my God, that's hilarious. Well, I can vouch for that.
It's been there for at least 50 years.
Oh, my God. That is so great.
You can see the convent. Look at the size of it.
You can imagine just how imposing and intimidating that building was
to a 14-year-old, especially when it was just loaded up with girls.
(LAUGHS)
It was a girls' boarding school. A girls' boarding school.
Now, what are you doing going to a girls' boarding school?
Well, you see, the nuns who ran it, the Presbyterian nuns,
couldn't allow a situation
where Catholic boys in Chiltern and Rutherglen
would not go to a Catholic school,
so they allowed the boys to come to the girls' boarding school.
As a result, you ended up with about 80 girls and 20 boys.
So, it was a very different education for me,
I've got to tell you.
Wow. I mean, some people would say "hurrah"
and some people would say "overwhelming".
But given the way I was as a teenager,
no, it didn't really work for me, it intimidated me.
The entrance here is the entrance to the convent itself.
But it very quickly merges into the school.
The school was on the left and the convent on the right,
and then the boarders were upstairs.
Let's go to the left. Let's go left.
I mean, let's keep it balanced. It's the ABC, but let's go to the left.
Well, this is going to be really weird, going in here, I tell you.
I have not been here for 50 years of course.
Yeah, as I said, the convent on the right and then school.
The classrooms start here.
That's my Year 11 room right here on the right.
Show me Year 11?
And I presume now it's, yep, it's a bit of a mess.
There's even a cot here now. I don't know why that's there, but...
And would they have taken up the whole room?
No, no, it was just there. That divider is new.
So, it was just this tiny room here,
and there were 12 of us in this room and I was the only boy.
And was that strange, being the only boy in the class?
It made it a bit difficult
because you know how you need to swap information with people,
share information and help each other out?
I felt that I was a bit isolated. Right.
So, it wasn't that easy. They didn't make you feel included?
No, not really. Wow.
I didn't sense I was getting a whole lot of help from them.
(BOTH LAUGH)
They were very competitive. Were they?
But you know what's just outside this door?
No. Show me. Is the most...
This right here is the punishment area for the whole school.
It's like for me, coming here, is like coming back into a dungeon
because whenever you got the strap, either the strap or the cane,
the nuns who, some of them were quite short,
and they would get up here onto the second step
and the student would be down there.
Where's the student? Here?
The student would be at the bottom
and they would just hit you with the cane.
So they could get a bit of force behind it,
they would get on the second step and belt you from there.
This is the spot.
Let's keep going through this dungeon.
This is where we used to have our retreats.
A retreat is when...
It's a kind of a Catholic thing where for two or three days
you don't speak, you don't say anything, you just contemplate.
Yes. You read books. Holy books.
Well, at least you get a book. But just a holy book. No novels?
Yes, holy books. Bibles and things.
And so you contemplate on your life for two or three days.
And imagine that, you know, this idea of not talking for that period.
Were you a good student?
I was a really good student at this school.
I crashed in Year 12.
Not that that mattered because I managed to secure a job
just before my Year 12 results came out.
Shall we meet an old friend
who might be able to tell us a bit more about this side?
Yep. That'll be a lot of fun. Alright, let's meet Judy.
Judy Corton. Barrie Cassidy.
One of the famous Corton sisters.
(BOTH LAUGH)
How are you? This is totally weird.
So, you were both here at the same time.
Yeah, for two years. For two years.
How long were you here for, Judy?
I was here for two years. I was a boarder.
Lead the way, Judy. OK.
These were the stairs that the boarders would use,
and our chores were to clean these stairs
and we had to polish them, as well.
So, you're studying here and working. Basically maintaining the building.
(ALL LAUGH)
Had our sink and we had a locker there.
And we had two bathrooms,
but we'd have to wash our hair and everything in these sinks.
Now, look what the lovely Judy has brought in.
Barrie. Oh, no way!
I wonder if we can find Barrie here.
Oh, let me have a look. Let me have a look.
Just look for the shortest one. Easily the smallest.
What do you recall of Barrie as a young man?
Was he quiet? Was he outgoing? Very shy.
Shy? Shy, quiet.
A few people have said now that you were shy when you were young, Barrie.
Apparently, yeah. How did you deal with that shyness?
No, look, I'm aware of it.
And, you know, there was segregation at this school.
The boys were encouraged to, at playtimes and lunchtimes,
to go to their own areas and the girls in other areas,
and that kind of suited me.
But what was, do you think, the essential message of the school?
What was the thing they were trying to drive home?
I don't know what the aim was other than to educate us, I suppose.
But looking back, I will concede that,
as weird as it might have been to be at a school
where I was out numbered four to one by girls,
it was a great education.
They were good teachers.
And the fact that one nun
could teach me five subjects at Year 11 level,
and I passed them all, I think that says it all.
Judy?
Well, there must have been something in that
because I won a scholarship at the end of Form 2.
Mm. I was pretty much "a good girl".
Were you nun material? Do you think they might have...
Oh, absolutely. They said to me, "You have a vocation."
Well, they said the same to me about the priesthood, I can tell you.
There was this subtle recruiting process going on the whole time.
What a disappointment we are, Barrie.
It must have been 40 years that we didn't see each other at all
and then Judy came across my radar
because of the work that you do as an advocate for child abuse victims.
And, so, that's what you do now,
you are an advocate for child abuse victims from the clergy,
sexual abuse by the clergy.
Was there any sexual abuse happening at this school?
Not that I'm aware of, no. I don't know of any sexual abuse here.
No, I had never had any sense of it either with the priests,
and we came in contact with a lot of priests while we were here.
Were you an altar boy? Yeah, of course.
Oh, OK. Yeah.
Well, I know that coming back to an old school
sometimes can be delightful or it can be quite hideous,
but I feel like it's been OK today.
Thank you for coming.
It's been an absolute hoot and an honour.
Great to see you again. An honour, Barrie.
I'm taking him back to Chiltern, to his first place of work.
It's the start of journalism.
Oh, this building is magnificent -
The Federal Standard Printing Works.
From the 1850s.
That's a newspaper - The Federal Standard.
Hey, look at this! (GASPS)
Isn't it amazing? Oh!
And it still works. Oh, my gosh.
This gear is over 100 years old.
The Federal Standard is a newspaper that was printed in Chiltern.
Once a week. Once a week.
Four pages.
At 13 years of age, you somehow get a little look into this newspaper.
How's that?
I would read the football in the four-page thing,
and I thought this guy, called Ben Hicks,
who ran the movie theatre, he was shire president
and he ran this newspaper,
and I figured he really didn't know much about football.
I just detected that from what I was reading.
Did you? So confident.
So I plucked up the courage and I went to him
and I said, "Would you mind if I had a go at the football writing?"
And he thought, "Well, I'll give you a week or two
"and see how it works out."
And I wrote football for this paper for five years.
Well, I'm delighted,
because there's some of your work here, isn't there?
Yep. Let's take a... Where is it here?
There's one here that says Chiltern will host a grand final
"for the first time in years and years".
I wrote that when I was 13. That is appalling journalism.
And it's appalling because "years and years", no.
When did they last host a premiership?
You do your research, and you find was it 20 years ago?
Was it 30 years ago? Not just years and years.
Gee, you're tough on yourself.
After doing something like this,
did you ever think, "Oh, well, journalism,
"OK, that's something I'm going to work towards,"
or you're just writing something for you?
No, look, I never thought that doing something like this
would lead to a real career in journalism.
But what happened is that when I got to Year 12,
Ben Hicks, who ran this...
Now, what I didn't appreciate is that Ben Hicks's best friend
was the editor of The Border Mail in Albury,
which is only half an hour away,
and he suggested that I should apply for their cadetship.
And I thought I'd have no chance, but I applied.
You know, from a country town of 800 people at the time
with no real background except for this, and so I...
Years and years of it.
Yeah, and I applied, and clearly it was that connection
that got me the job and that got me...
So, this building really got me my start in journalism.
How did you get to be in the press gallery at the Victorian Parliament?
I had no real interest in politics and no real knowledge of politics,
and I was about 28 at this point,
and the editor said to me, because I was a court reporter,
he said, "Look, you're into accuracy,
"you get the basic details down,
"so we want you to go and be a gallery reporter."
I was there 10 minutes and I was hooked. I just loved it.
The next gig you get is with Bob Hawke?
Yeah, I was political correspondent for the ABC in Canberra for a while.
And I was there about five or six years, I guess,
and Bob Hawke personally approached me.
And at that stage I decided, look,
if I'm ever gong to know how it works from the inside,
this would be the guy to do it with because he was from Melbourne,
I knew the guy from the ACTU days in Melbourne.
We had a lot in common, I liked his style
and I liked what he was doing at the time,
and so I thought, "Right, I'll do it,
"because I'll never get this opportunity again."
What was your first day like?
My first day was hilarious.
It was November 11, 1986,
and we went to the War Memorial in Canberra for an event
and then we had to fly to Perth.
And I thought a long flight is precisely what I need on day one
because then I can talk to the Prime Minister,
get to know him a little better, see what he really wants from me.
He spent the whole flight, the four hours,
with his head in papers, buried in papers.
And I didn't get to speak with him at all.
We got off at the other end and he handed me these crumpled newspapers,
and he didn't say anything.
And I looked at these papers and so I threw them in the bin.
It was only afterwards when we got back to the hotel
and he started shouting, "Where's my form guide?"
And I realised what he'd been doing.
He spent four hours marking every horse in every race
in Sydney and Melbourne according to the weather,
the jockeys, the trainers, the times.
He was that meticulous.
He'd done four hours of work and I had thrown the whole lot in the bin.
Not a great start.
How many years were you with him? I was with him for four years.
You know, he had a basic approach
and he said this a lot about politics
and being prime minister at the time,
and he said, "If you get the policy right,
"then the politics with follow."
And genuinely he did, and Paul Keating, John Howard,
the guys who were there for a long time, that's the way they operated.
They operated on policy first and then the rest followed.
And I thought, "Well, if he is going to be true to that,
"my job as a press secretary will be a whole lot easier."
I still get criticised
because I worked at one stage for a Labor government.
I put up with that because I know what I got out of it.
And as a result of it, I always had a sense
during the crises that followed,
I had a sense of what was going on
and how people would be behaving and dealing with these sorts of issues
and events at the time.
Should voters be a bit disappointed
in the quality of leadership that's going on?
Of course. I mean, we're constantly...
And not just the quality of leadership,
but the way the politics is practised these days.
It's outrageous. It is.
It's dreadful and it has been for so long.
But sometimes even in the people reporting it,
there is such an excitement and a kind of a delight
and almost a fetishism in all the detail.
And chaos. Like they're enjoying the chaos.
Yeah. Nothing is still getting done.
No. It's more tribal than it's ever been now.
Did you ever want to be a politician, Barrie?
No. I was offered the opportunity at one point,
and my response was that being a politician
is a multi-faceted thing,
but one of the things it involved is looking after your electorate,
and to do that and the sort of work they do -
like, it's never-ending,
and you have to go to some very, very boring events.
I could only do that in an electorate that I really care about,
and quite frankly the only one I care about is right here.
Where I grew up,
in Chiltern, the district and electorate of Indi.
And that was a conservative electorate
and they had a hold on the thing the whole time,
but it's now held by an independent.
Mm. I should have thought of that.
(BOTH LAUGH)
(GASPS)
It's amazing, isn't it? Such an old piece of machinery.
And that was your first paper. That's how it came out.
Oh. Exactly like that.
Oh, it's magic.
So in working order.
Imagine how time-consuming that would have been.
Even the sound is beautiful. I love the sound.
Chiltern Grandstand. This grandstand is amazing.
It's almost 140 years old.
And this amazing field,
now, did your brothers play here, did your dad work here?
Yeah, my dad looked after this football ground
for 30 years before he died,
and then the 20 years since he died my two youngest brothers,
who still live here in Chiltern, took over it.
So, for 50 consecutive years,
the Cassidys have been the curator of this football ground.
And that's no mean feat, because this is probably the largest
Aussie Rules football ground in the country.
It's 20 metres longer than the MCG.
They called it the airport when I was here.
It's a massive oval. It takes a lot of looking after.
Sport is obviously in the Cassidy blood.
Yeah, it is. Particularly football.
I mean, that was the one thing that we all fought about, loved it.
It was the glue for our family, but also the glue for the country town.
In a way, both your parents were prisoners -
your father as a POW and your mum in her own town
and certainly even her own home.
Yeah. How did that play out later in life?
Yeah, because my mother was a prisoner to her past,
in that sense that, yeah.
To her past, yeah.
And Dad never really escaped that
because he got post-traumatic stress disorder.
And it came on after Mum had...
..the story about Mum and the child that she had during the war.
You really think that's the trigger?
Yeah, when that came out I think he went downhill.
It's stressful, yeah.
At one point, and he was diagnosed with that very late in life.
He ended up in a hospice towards the end and he had a roommate.
Yeah, this guy, I went back to see him after Dad had died
to tell him what had happened.
And they'd been roommates for a while, hadn't they?
Yeah, and he said...
When I was there previously,
Dad had got upset about a brown cardigan of his
that he couldn't find, he got really agitated about it.
And I think it was the whole stress thing starting to kick in.
I went back and told this guy that Dad had died,
and I was walking towards the door and he said,
"By the way, your father told me everything."
And I said, "What do you mean?"
And he said, "He told me everything that had gone on
"with your mother and what had happened during the war,
"and he really did love her, you know."
And that was lovely to hear.
And then he said, "And by the way, I found that brown cardigan,"
and he gave me the cardigan.
It was a very emotional time.
Oh, very emotional time.
And so nice that you did that service
for that man, as well, to go back and tell him what happened.
They were very close - you know, they shared a room,
and he opened up to him in a way
that he didn't open up to anybody else really.
How has today been? The whole day?
Look, I've come back to Chiltern hundreds of times
and for all sorts of events.
But never like this.
I've never come back and just reflected so much on Chiltern,
and it's, yeah, it's quite emotional.
Any regrets?
How could I have any regrets?
I started out in Chiltern, I got a job in journalism,
which would have been hard for anybody from a small country town.
I've travelled the world.
I've hosted a television program for 16 years.
Regrets?! Hardly. Hardly.
Well, Barrie, I am such a big fan of your work.
I am so delighted that you said yes to come today,
and I have had a lot of women quite jealous
that I was spending the day with you, Barrie Cassidy.
Just let that be known.
I just knew if I stood in the street of Chiltern long enough,
you would eventually... Julia Zemiro would come along.
And say would you like to be home delivered?
But thank you for being so generous with your stories
and what you felt today.
It's really great. Thank you. Really enjoyed it.
Now, why don't we pop back out to the Hume Highway
and see if we can find a truck that we can chase?
We'll chase a truck to the nearest wine bar I think.
(LAUGHS) Yes, he's ready for a wine.
Thank you, Barrie. Thank you.
Captions by Red Bee Media
Copyright Australian Broadcasting Corporation