RIGHT, let’s get this straight from the outset. Paul Bevan is not my brother. He’s not my father. And I’m not his. We’re not related.
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Paul can confirm that. His father had traced the family tree.
“We haven’t found you,” he shrugs. “But it’s got to be there somewhere!”
By the way, while we’re clearing things up, Paul and I are not the same person. So to all those people who have told me they love my radio program on ABC Newcastle, and to those who have asked Paul to sign copies of The Hunter and The Harbour, thank you, but wrong Bevan.
However, the confusion is not just endearing (Paul and I call each other “brother”), it’s understandable. After all, more than share a surname, we both work in the media. But that’s changing.
After 32 years with the ABC, and being a voice on our radio for more than two decades, Paul Bevan has retired from his weekday presenting role.
When we meet for lunch at Umami Bar in Newcastle West, Bevan still has a handful of Drive shifts to complete, but he looks as though he is already dressed for retirement. He is wearing a pair of shorts and a bold-patterned shirt.
Yet don’t let the attire fool you. Paul Bevan doesn’t think the word “retirement” really applies to where he is at in life; rather, he is taking a “leap”.
“It is more of a change,” he replies. “I am only 60, and 60 is not very old.
“It’s just, ‘Let’s see what happens next’.”
IF genes are anything to go by, Paul Bevan was destined to use his voice as a work tool.
His parents, Trevor and Margaret, were from Kurri Kurri, and both were singers. Trevor Bevan came from a large family, with enough sons to form their own choir. They were renowned singers.
“When the Bevans were rehearsing, people would stand outside the house in order to listen to them,” Paul explains.
Trevor Bevan was also an acrobat and tap dancer, so with his kit bag of skills, he joined the J.C. Williamson theatre group, performing in musicals and touring in productions around Australia and the Pacific region.
When he was about 40, Trevor Bevan retired from a life of touring, returned home and married a Kurri girl. He and Margaret had a daughter, Glenda, then, in 1958, Paul was born.
In the Bevan household in Mayfield, the singing continued. Trevor and Margaret would perform on ABC radio broadcasts, and the whole family sang at the local Methodist church.
As much as he enjoyed singing, young Paul didn’t imagine using his voice for a job.
Actually, the “insufferable nerd” who loved science didn’t know what he wanted to pursue when he matriculated from Newcastle Boys’ High School.
Then he had an appointment with a careers counsellor.
“She was a very attractive young woman, and I was 17, 18,” Bevan recalls. “I said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. What did you do?’. And she said, ‘I’m a psychologist’. I went, ‘Sounds fine’. So that was the next six years of my life.”
In 1977, Bevan enrolled in an Arts degree, majoring in Psychology, at the University of Newcastle. He particularly enjoyed the scientific aspects of his course, “so I quickly got into the rats and stats and brain chemistry, all of that stuff”. On the university campus, Bevan reconnected with music - and music connected him with the love of his life.
One Monday night, Bevan was walking past the uni’s Great Hall, when he heard voices drifting out into the evening. The university choir was rehearsing Verdi’s Requiem.
“I’d never heard anything like it,” he recalls. “I just wandered into the Great Hall, and it was this huge dawning. It all just opened up for me.”
For Paul Bevan, singing has been a constant joy through the years, introducing him to great music and dear friends. He loves performing, especially in small groups: “I don’t particularly like singing in choirs, although I’ve done a lot of that. My favourite thing is a small group, four, six, that sort of number, just performing and having that camaraderie on stage, that’s what I love.”
In 1983, while performing at the Great Hall, Paul met his future wife, Julie.
“We met through the Passions of J.S. Bach,” Bevan says.
A violinist, Julie Farrar was leading one of the orchestras for a concert featuring the St John and St Matthew Passions. Paul and Julie’s was a relationship that grew on music.
They married in 1986. When their son was born three years later, they named him Matthew, inspired by Bach’s music.
Matt is now an ABC broadcaster. Paul and Julie also have a daughter, Joanna. She has recently married Phillip Costovski, who is training to be an opera singer. Paul Bevan is yet to sing with his son-in-law, but “we will at some stage”.
Before meeting Julie, Paul had been considering moving to Canada to study for a PhD. But those plans quickly changed.
“I could see her passion for what she was going to do was so much greater than my passion to go and further my studies there,” he muses. “I realised I was more into music than I was into maths and psychology.”
In the mid 1980s, the couple worked with acclaimed conductor Ulric Burstein to help found The Hunter Orchestra.
“He was astonishingly inspiring,” Bevan says of Burstein. “He introduced me to coffee, and to all these classical composers I’d never heard of. Mahler!”
Bevan then moved on to a job fostering grass roots music locally. His role involved doing a “what’s on” segment on the ABC: “I got into a chat with one of the producers and asked, ‘What do you do? That seems pretty cool!’.”
He secured a short-term contract with 2NC, as it was known then, in 1986. The short term turned into a career. For a decade, Bevan worked mainly as a producer, learning from presenters such as John Clarke and Mickey de Stoop.
When an opportunity to present came up, Bevan thought, “I might try that now!”. He worked for eight years as Morning presenter, then, in 2005, moved to a national audience and tapped into his love of music, as a presenter on Classic FM: “It was almost like doing a PhD every day, learning all this stuff I didn’t know.”
Yet Bevan missed talking to people, doing interviews, so he returned to local radio in Newcastle in 2011.
He is “terrified” he will miss those on-air conversations .
“I will miss that magic, where every so often you go, ‘This is magic! This is irreplaceable!’,” he says.
While his voice has been a reassuring part of Hunter life for 21 years, Bevan reveals he has to manage anxiety.
“I have ongoing, career-long problems with anxiety,” he says. “Sometimes I’ll just find I’m not in full control of my voice, my mood, and it’s always caused a problem, and it particularly caused a problem early on.”
Sometimes, without warning, he can feel like, “I don’t know what to do! I can’t do it! I can’t do it!”.
Since being diagnosed about five years ago, Bevan has been practising yoga, and he relies on his “astonishing” producer, Nathanael Little, and the opinion of his wife.
“I’ll come off air and phone Julie, my predominant sounding board, and go, ‘How did it sound today?’ And she’ll go, ‘It sounded fine.’ ‘It was a bad day.’ And she’ll go, ‘It didn’t sound like a bad day, it’s fine’. And I go, ‘OK’.”
While he considers he’s had the best job in the world, Bevan believes now is the time for him to change. Especially since technological change is impacting on radio, and on how organisations, such as the ABC, respond.
“Is it still the best job in the world? Increasingly no, because you’re pulled in all these different directions. I’m quite capable and happy to be pulled in all those different directions, but the thing I really love is radio.”
In thinking about his future, Paul Bevan is also thinking about the planet’s.
“There are some things I find I’m restricted in at the ABC … that I wouldn’t mind getting more involved with, things to do with climate change,” he says. “If I can find a constructive way to move that agenda forward, I’d be very keen to do it.”
No, Paul Bevan is not planning to enter politics. He wants to work on climate change issues from within, perhaps in a role in the power industry, which he sees as a “dynamic space”.
“I have no skills in industry, but if I can figure a way forward there I’d be interested to do it.”
Until then, there will be a lot more wearing of casual shirts, spending more time with Julie, their two children and two grandchildren, and turning off the radio.
“For a while it won’t be there,” Bevan says. “But Julie will want it on.”