The journalist who helped Melbourne get the joke

With the Chinese People’s Liberation Army at the gates, the family fled Shanghai for Melbourne and settled in St Kilda.

It was an immense cultural shock. His father would take public transport from St Kilda to Broadmeadows every Saturday morning where a friend from his youth had managed to procure a coffee percolator, one of few in early 1950s Melbourne. Weiniger too, held the old ways to his breast: in a city ruled by Australian Rules, he stayed loyal to still uncool soccer, and was renowned as a goalie. But years later he enjoyed a last laugh against his primary school bullies when his 1982 children’s book How to Play Soccer was still selling internationally 20 years after its release. Yet, he also remained a lifelong follower of the St Kilda Football Club.

Weiniger went to North Caulfield Primary before gaining entry to the selective Melbourne High School. On matriculation, he joined the first student intake at Monash University’s original Clayton campus, but bombed out after just a year of not studying economics.

Still, aiming to fulfil his father’s wishes to have an accountant for a son, he spent another abortive year at the Australian National University in Canberra, where he finally had a taste of his future, working as a casual for Rupert Murdoch’s new national daily, The Australian, in 1964. The camaraderie of such a fraught endeavour briefly tore down Australia’s class divisions: Weiniger liked to recall Murdoch spotting him late at night in a bus shelter and driving him home.

Weiniger returned to Melbourne and briefly started the first of many stints on The Australian Jewish News, then travelled to South-East Asia as the Vietnam War unfolded and ended up a freelancer in Cambodia. He also worked a part-time news agency stringer in Vientiane when the regular correspondent left Laos on assignment.

Weiniger spent time in Israel before returning to Melbourne for a job with the AAP news agency in 1976 before rejoining the Jewish News. He also married. It did not last, but produced a son. Three years later he was offered work as a researcher/reporter on The Age when the new editor, Michael Davie, decided to reinvigorate the page two daily column.

Weiniger added a touch of diversity and humour to the newsroom, and soon shared writing News Diary with Jan McGuinness and Kevin Childs. His own diary appeared for about a year until a long journalists’ strike in May 1980 caused a rethink and Davie returned to England. He then worked for a while as a general news reporter before finding his niche as an arts reporter where he did his ground-breaking work on Melbourne comedy.

To Jon Hawkes, a founding member of Circus Oz this work was invaluable. “He understood and sympathised with this mob’s intent, he enjoyed their aesthetic, and he validated their efforts. He became a friend of those he wrote about, he engaged with their issues, and he wrote well. He moved on to more diverse themes in later decades, but I will always remember, and treasure, the contribution he made to the strange, the confronting and the amateur.”

Ralph Kerle, of the Flying Trapeze, wrote on Facebook that Weiniger was instrumental in bringing to public notice many of the successful shows there in the ’70s and ’80s. “Importantly, he fought for space for his reviews … legitimising the Fitzroy cabaret scene as part of the greater Melbourne theatre scene.” He saw the first late night Los Trios Ringbarkus shows and convinced Ralph to offer two performers a full season that broke attendance records. “… this moment with Los Trios Ringbarkus was a breakthrough for me and for future programming,” Ralph remembered. “Peter was a very humble, caring person in my experience and yet vital to the public success of the early Fitzroy scene.”

Not that it was all sunshine. A critical review of a Last Laugh show so incensed its owner, John Pinder, that he promptly sent a bucket of slime to await Weiniger’s arrival at his newsroom desk.

Yet, such was his warmth that his friendships included some with whom he had been at kindergarten and primary school. They were at his funeral with black-and-white classroom photos in plastic folders.

With other friends, he travelled to places like Vietnam, the Pacific and Turkey. There, Weiniger was rock-hard in his determination to have a massage, despite a friend’s efforts to dissuade him. The average masseur was probably three times Weiniger’s size, at least four times his weight and with strangler’s wrists. But he insisted, returning two hours later wracked with pain and walking robotically. He took days to recover.

Back home, change was afoot and so Weiniger left comedy and arts reporting as a new generation of comedians moved into television and the theatre restaurant scene died. He went on to write and edit various Age sections, including Epicure, the Green Guide and EG. His final job on The Age was writing editorials where his international experience and interest came to the fore. In 1998 he was among a swathe of journalists offered redundancy. He taught journalism at RMIT University for a decade before falling ill in 2011.

His sister Nelly predeceased him.

Weiniger was interred in the Springvale Botanical Cemetery. Before the traditional shovelling of earth, his son, Patrick, dropped in a St Kilda scarf.

He is also survived by his grandchildren, Camilo and Arlen.

Kevin Childs and Damien Murphy were colleagues and friends of Peter Weiniger.