Today, some old school radio  celebrity rabble-rousing, disturbing rumours about Adelaide’s future as a submarine base and the angst that journalists don’t like to talk about.

Grab-a-great-granny

Radio royalty turned out in big numbers last night for the launch of The Bazz & Pilko Years, an irreverent look back at Adelaide radio’s golden days

“Its amazing what free beer and party pies attract in this town,” Barry Ion observed.

The venue – the Top Room at The Arkaba – was a reminder of the days when Adelaide didn’t need to convince itself it could be vibrant, because it was.

Jeremy Cordeaux, Bob Francis, Graham Cornes, Jon Blake and a string of industry legends shared the room with SANFL stars from the 60s, 70s and 80s.

South Adelaide and State side captain Peter Darley dropped in from Penang and Woodville legend Ralph “Zip Zap” Sewer kept his group entertained.

The gong for best-on-ground, however, had to go to the evening’s MC David Shipway.

“Shippie”, a SANFL landmark, told the assembled crowd that he was asked by Bazz to host the show “because all Barry’s media mates wanted money and I’m doing it for free”.

He reminded us that the Top Room at The Arkaba had been “the place to be” in the 70s and later evolved into the renowned “grab-a-grannie” bar “as those that first met here gravitated back after their divorces”.

“Just looking around here tonight, it’s fair to say it’s no longer ‘grab-a-grannie’, more like ‘grab-a-great-grannie’.”

We’re not sure how The Arkaba’s owner Peter Hurley took that, but he was enjoying himself anyway.

What made Shipway’s contribution most noteworthy was the fact that he was there.

He’d kept his promise to Barry Ion, despite having the funeral of his father earlier in the day.

Sub-optimal

South Australia’s ASC still has the maintenance contract for the nation’s Collins Class submarines, but The Outsider hears that any extension beyond 2017 may be problematic.

The Osborne-based company rolled over its maintenance contract for another five years in mid-2012 – a deal valued at hundreds of millions of dollars.

The defence industry, however, is abuzz with news that Australia is in the final stages of signing off on a deal with the USA, the UK and Germany for a joint submarine base to be built in Darwin Harbour.

The northern capital’s harbour is seven times the size of Sydney Harbour, currently houses a patrol boat base and is home to one of our biggest resources projects – the Inpex natural gas project that takes WA offshore gas via a 500km sub-sea pipeline to the Darwin Harbour LNG plant.

The gas is then shipped to japan to run Tokyo’s power plants.

If the defence deal is correct, it will be big news for Darwin – and not so good for Adelaide.

Just remember where you heard it first.

Untold angst

Journalists don’t talk publicly about such things (why is that?), but there is considerable angst in Adelaide’s fourth estate about the Sunday Mail’s naming of a Government adviser accused of leaking internal documents to its sister paper, The Advertiser.

With the Murdoch journos crunched together in one unified newsroom, the question is whether the Mail should have named the alleged leaker (even though her name has been widely talked about behind closed doors, and revealed previously in one report). Weren’t they essentially revealing a colleague’s source?

On that question, The Outsider is happy to sit on the fence. Different journos have different sources, and don’t usually tell each other about their confidences. It is a grey area (although many journos are viewing this in stark black and white).

In any case, the more interesting story is exactly how the Government established very strong suspicions about the source of the leak within hours of The Tiser publishing the leaked documents.

Watch this space.

Suffice to say, the leakers of old had the right idea when they dealt in hard copies of documents, mailed to reporters in plain envelopes or handed over in the corner of a dark bar late at night.

Technology can be a curse.