Outrider : William T. Vollmann, Tony Tanner, and the private extremes of an anti-journalism

One of Australia’s most august newspapers, the Sydney Morning Herald, hired me as a trainee after I earned my baccalaureate. Yet newspaper reporting had never been my calling and I was not even a journalism graduate; my bachelor degree studies had been in modern history, literature (Shakespeare, the Romantic era, Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence), and creative writing. It was a thirst for capturing situation and character that I sought to bring to journalism—not the slavish devotion to daily jolts of news nor a relish for the reporters’ culture that united many of my colleagues. I also had a hunger for adventure and risk, partly to find more realistic and exciting stories to tell and partly to meet my own psychological needs. I wanted to know the world, to know what history feels like, to know my limits and capabilities, and to write prose with longevity. The longer I endured the newspaper, battered by daily deadlines and chafing at the bit of the institutional culture of caution, seniority, and media groupthink, the more I found my mind returning to the long and anarchic, adventurous, anti-journalism of William T. Vollmann. Inspired by Vollmann, I started spending my annual vacations in the armed conflicts of the southern Philippines, writing long freelance magazine stories that were gratifying for me but that did not endear me to the Sydney Morning Herald. Eventually I resigned, went to Colombia to immerse myself in the country’s tensions and joys, wrote a book about it, and completed a doctorate in creative arts. Now I write reportage and work in academia. My attitude to Vollmann has matured and grown more complicated, but he will always be there at the start of my lunatic ambitions.