Stories from a Bygone Age : A Newspaper Memoir [1 ed.] 9781922454287, 9781925801361

Citation preview

John Tidey is a journalist and author who has worked in Australia, East Africa, China and the United Kingdom. During his 29 years at the Age he was a reporter, foundation member of the Insight team, an editorial executive and a member of the senior management group. After leaving the Age he taught at Deakin University in Victoria where he was also an adjunct professor. John Tidey has written biographies of Creighton Burns, Sir Andrew Fairley and Charles Hastings Barton (with Ric Barton). He is married to Jackie Tidey, a writer and publisher of books for children.

By the same author Class Act: A life of Creighton Burns One of a Kind: The life of Charles Hastings Barton (with Ric Barton) The Big Sheppartonian: A life of Sir Andrew Fairley Developing Tomorrow’s Newspaper Managers (with Rick Knowles)

© John Tidey 2018 First published 2018 by Arcadia the general books imprint of Australian Scholarly Publishing Ltd 7 Lt Lothian St Nth, North Melbourne, Vic 3051 Tel: 03 9329 6963 / Fax: 03 9329 5452 [email protected] / www.scholarly.info ISBN 978-1-925801-36-1 All Rights Reserved Cover design: Wayne Saunders

For Jackie, Sarah and Nick.

CONTENTS Introduction....................................................................... ix Part One: Before the Storm................................................. 1 Part Two: Working for Mr Big.......................................... 22 Part Three: Good Times and Bad News............................ 72 Epilogue............................................................................ 99 Notes................................................................................103 Appendices 1. Graham Perkin: A Personal Appreciation.............105 2. Gregory John Taylor: Obituary........................... 107 3. Creighton Burns: A Profile...................................110 4. John Hamilton: Obituary.....................................113 5. Tim Graham: Obituary.......................................116 Acknowledgements and Sources.......................................118 Index............................................................................... 120

vii

INTRODUCTION Graham Greene observed that the further back we research the past the more the ‘documents in the case’ accumulate and the more reluctant we feel to open their pages, to disturb the dust. About the accumulation phase he was certainly right. But the period under review in this book prompted no reluctance to open or disturb. Why would it? The years 1966–1975 marked a golden era at the Age newspaper in Melbourne. Most of the events recalled here occurred between 40 and 50 years ago and most of the key players – Graham Perkin, Creighton Burns, John Paton, Bill Bland, Allan Barnes, Greg Taylor and Keith Sinclair – are no longer with us. I have been surprised at the volume of ‘documents in the case’ that I had collected and held over all those years: letters, reports, scrapbooks, photographs, publications of many shapes and sizes. Together with a deep well of warm memories. The idea for the book followed private publication of a monograph entitled Recollections of a Bygone Age. Many people who read it said they would like to know more about those times. This memoir is not a history of the Graham Perkin years at the Age. Nor is it a biography of the inspirational editor himself. It simply recalls some of the people who, like the writer, had the good fortune to be there at the time; and some of the events that made those years so memorable. As the printed newspaper slides into decline around the world the era described here is surely worth recording and celebrating.

ix

PA R T O N E

BEFORE THE STORM Always an officer and a gentleman in the best sense of this term; a man of honour and high standards. Claude Forell’s tribute to former Age editor Keith Sinclair

Nobody ever did me a greater favour. It was September 1965 and I was in Melbourne for the first time when I bumped into Pam Fox in Collins Street. She was a reporter on the Age and a few years earlier we had been cadet journalists in Brisbane. Now I was back in Australia (briefly, I thought) to marry Jackie in her home town before returning to London where we had met. ‘Before you make any further plans,’ Pam had said, ‘call in at the Age and talk to the assistant editor, a dynamic bloke named Graham Perkin.’ It had never occurred to me to work in Melbourne but after I met him I changed my mind. Not long after I signed on Graham was appointed Editor and between 1966 and 1975 the venerable old broadsheet was transformed. Over those years three key figures shaped what turned out to be a second golden era in the long story of the Age. The first of them, Graham Perkin, was a force of nature, an inspirational leader, the outstanding newspaper editor of his generation. Some of us used to refer to him as Mr Big. Then there was the collegiate and quietly effective John Paton, a rare marketing talent; and finally Ranald Macdonald, the ring master, enabler and chief executive throughout the great adventure. All of the excitement 1

they engendered lay ahead when I started in the newsroom as a 25-year-old reporter in October 1965. Journalism is full of people who originally wanted to do something else. Ranald Macdonald, for instance, considered going to the Bar after Cambridge. Graham Perkin certainly developed a passion for newspapers and journalism but if his maths had been better (and they were not) would have liked to be an architect. Two of my contemporaries at the Age had been jackaroos and two others had been in the navy. The editor I worked for in East Africa had been a Royal Marine. My own career plan, originally, was to be a navy officer, a reasonable enough ambition given the number of seafaring men on both sides of our family. In the event there was no place for me at the Royal Australian Naval College, an outcome I soon realised had been best for both parties. Instead of navy traditions and discipline I found myself in the ‘unruly craft’ of journalism. By the time I arrived in Melbourne I had worked on the Telegraph in Brisbane, for the ABC news service in various parts of Queensland, on the Daily Nation in East Africa and for Visnews and United Press International (UPI) in London. There is no question that the Age of 1965 had seen better days. Much better days. The paper had been founded in 1854, ambitiously describing itself as A Journal of Politics, Commerce and Philanthropy. It was registered in the name of Francis Cooke and Co and a rival publication reckoned the new daily had ‘trembled’ into existence. Early the next year it was taken over by a co-operative of employees who pooled their resources to run a business that was struggling to survive. As the Age said at the time, this structure was one of the most interesting experiments in the way of co-operative enterprise that had ever been seen in Australia. But this new regime didn’t last either. The co-operative failed and in June 1856 Ebenezer Syme emerged as the sole proprietor of the Age. Ebenezer was an intriguing character, a Scot who had studied theology at university. He died, aged only 34, in 1860, leaving a wife and young family. One obituary described him as a valiant fighter and an incisive journalist, but no businessman. 2

His younger brother, David, had tried his hand at newspaper work in Scotland, gold prospecting in California and Victoria and road building in Victoria before taking over the Age when Ebenezer died. In the continuing battle to keep publishing he slashed the cover price from six pence a copy to three and then to two pence. When David reduced the price to one penny in 1868 the circulation of the Age doubled to about 15,000 in a single week. Historian Michael Cannon, once a reporter on the Age himself, noted that until David’s death (in 1908) the paper’s circulation remained about five times greater than its competitors. By 1894, when the population of the state of Victoria had reached a little over 1,100,000, the daily sales of the paper had passed 100,000. Far more significant than this business success was the power and influence of the Age on the development of Victoria. For the best part of 50 years ‘King David,’ as some called him, was to be found in the front rank of radical campaigns in the colony. He was a dominant figure in Victorian political life and it was claimed that at the peak of his political influence Syme ‘selected’ every Premier and almost every Minister. More lasting was his unmatched contribution to the development of free and independent journalism. Unfortunately for the future management and ownership of the paper, David Syme’s will decreed that the Age should be conducted in the form it was at his departure until the death of the last of his five sons. Long after his death an entertaining story was still circulating about the journalist assigned to write the great man’s obituary. It was said that he locked himself away for hours and when concerned colleagues forced the door to his room they found him slumped at his desk, surrounded by a sea of copy paper. On each discarded page he had managed a start to the difficult task at hand – an intro which began: Not since the death of Jesus Christ … The story is doubtless apocryphal. We will never know for certain but it does indicate the awe in which the old man was held and the power of the Syme name. A golden era had come to an end. What followed has been described1 as half a century of obscurity – not well known but also seemingly insignificant. Between 1908 and 1964 the paper faced a range of problems: a cumbersome ownership structure, 3

increasing competition (the Sun News-Pictorial appeared in 1922), the great depression of the 1930s and a sense that the Age should be maintained pretty much as David Syme had left it. The old man had left a detailed handwritten will which stipulated the paper remain in the possession of his sons until the death of the last of them with the imprints of the Age and its rural weekly The Leader unchanged. Historian Elizabeth Morrison has noted 2 that various provisions in the will were hedged around with extensive, detailed, specific conditions and requirements for investment and other uses of income. These would not only discourage change but even then a majority of trustees would have to agree. There was something faintly feudal about working arrangements at the paper in the 1920s and 30s. A staff list from 1936, for example, provides a snapshot of what was clearly a close ‘family’ of owners and their employees. Several members of the Syme family were among the paper’s listed complement of about 116 men and women. They included two of David’s sons, the general manager, ‘Mr Herbert’ as he was known; and the managing editor, ‘Mr Geoffrey’, who was later Sir Geoffrey. Several fathers and sons were on that list. Quite a few of the staff would be followed into the business by a son or a daughter, some of whom were still at the paper 30 years later. They had family names like Alston, Austin, Dugan, Bull, Sayers, Knox and Campbell. The Syme family seem to have been demanding employers but once you got a job with them it was usually for life. Apparently nobody was laid off at the Age during the long depression years. In 1936 the Age already employed four photographers and the editorial staff was divided into various teams, not that they were called that: finance, sport, social, with its three women reporters, and general reporting, sub editing and leader writing, all directed by a small group of executives. Among the journalists were future editors Harold (later Sir Harold) Campbell and Keith Sinclair. That year the lowliest of clerical positions (the post boy) was occupied by Bill Bland, a future general manager. Caroline Isaacson who was a journalist there in 1936 got her son Peter a job as a messenger-boy a year or so later. Peter Isaacson would become one of the most decorated 4

Australian airmen in World War II before establishing a publishing house with newspapers and magazines throughout Australia and in Singapore, New Zealand and Hong Kong. On a bench in the sub-editors’ room lay what was known as the ‘marked paper’. This was a copy of the Age on which reporters scrawled their names (no bylines in those days) across the stories they had written. Later in the day this copy of the paper would be circulated to Geoffrey Syme and other editorial brass so they could see what their staff had done in that day’s paper and how they had done it. Dennis Dugan joined the paper in 1937 from Melbourne University, where he had been a part-time correspondent. When I met him 28 years later he was chief sub-editor and had been a war correspondent in the Pacific on his way to the top subediting job. In the 1930s, he said, the Age building had been ramshackle internally and very much 19th century, but the office presented a handsome ground and three upper floors to Collins Street. Among his recollections 3 of the pre-war Age was this superb vignette of life in the sub-editors’ room: On the back wall, facing anyone who entered from the reporters’ room was The Old Sub, a large framed photograph of Jackie Stephens with an inscription stating that he had been chief subeditor of the Age from 1884 to 1934. This was a long stretch, which ended before my time, but many were the stories told of him by the older men who had worked with him. The one I liked best described his reaction when some reporter dropped a News of the Day column item in his copy basket. ‘Has it got something nasty in it?’ he would ask. It was not until the outbreak of World War II in 1939 that the Age started regularly printing news on page 1, previously reserved for classified advertising. Sales of the paper, which had fallen off during the depression years, increased during the war years and reached 120,000 a day by 1945. But the business desperately needed more capital to refurbish its plant and building and in 1948 the Victorian Supreme Court gave permission 5

for David Syme’s will to be altered. The Age became a public company, David Syme and Co Limited, still controlled by members of the Syme family. Ironically the closure of the rival Argus nine years later in 1957 put the paper under sudden financial pressure. It had enjoyed a welcome jump in circulation, about 20,000 copies a day. This had triggered a sharp increase in its newsprint bill but not much extra advertising revenue until rates could be adjusted. The Argus was first published in 1846, eight years earlier than the Age, and there was a clear point of difference between these two broadsheets. In the case of the Argus its reporting had a reputation for authority high enough to have it sometimes called the Times of the Southern Hemisphere.4 The reporting of the Age was regarded as more politically loaded, more aligned to the protectionist anti-conservative policy expressed in its leading articles.5 The death of the Argus was a tragedy for Melbourne which lost its finest newspaper. There was widespread anger when its owners, London’s Daily Mirror group, sold the paper to the Herald & Weekly Times group on the understanding that it would be closed. Nearly 1,000 employees lost their jobs. Some of the journalists who managed to find jobs at the Age were still there in the Perkin years (1966–1975). People such as Nigel Balfe, a future sports editor, Barrie Dunstan, John Lahey, Roy Stock, John Kiely and Ron Carter. Fortunately it was the Age that picked up most of the Argus classified advertising and by the 1970s ‘classifieds’ had turned into rivers of gold. In 1957, the same year as the Argus closed, a sister paper of the Age called the Leader also ceased publication. It had been founded in 1856 as the Melbourne Leader, a journal of politics, literature and agriculture, but by the time it closed it was basically a weekly rural newspaper. The Age, meanwhile, had drifted into the 1960s, going nowhere in particular, its life no doubt prolonged by the failure of the Argus When I joined the paper in 1965 Melbourne had a population of around two million and seemed pretty buttoned-up after 1960s London. In fact, on Sundays the city appeared to be closed altogether. There were many quaint aspects about the Age which was still edited, printed and published from crowded premises at 233 Collins Street. Major 6

renovations had been undertaken in the 1890s and the imposing result was a single Italianate façade. Towards the top of the building a statue of Mercury the Roman messenger god pointed skywards. Some cynics claimed to have mixed feelings about this feature: Mercury was not only the god of eloquence, messages and communication but also the god of trickery and thieves. On the editorial floor sub-editors still turned out in coat and tie as they went about their work and one or two of them still wore eye-shades. One of the older men had given up smoking and worked his way through a bottle of boiled lollies each night by way of compensation. Back then newspapers were highly unionised and journalists were employed on a grading list that began at ‘D’ and advanced to ‘A’ and the much-prized ‘Special A’. Associate editor Harold Austin often edited the Age on a Sunday night and one frustrated, usually well-stoked, sub-editor would regularly take this opportunity to press his case for a pay rise. With the acting editor out of sight in his office the suppliant would bellow: ‘Hey, Harold! Where’s my fucking B-grade?’ It may have been boorish behaviour and offensive too but somehow the show went on with no formal warnings and no counselling provided for the offended (if Austin actually was) or the offender (who never got his B-grade). In the reporters’ room, seated at slightly better furnishings than the rest of us, the News of the Day columnist wrote his three or four daily observations in the third person. Items of the ‘We were not amused’ variety. There were plenty of desks and chairs but a shortage of typewriters. This was not a problem for Fred Noble who had been on that 1936 list but was by now officially retired. He would still deliver occasional reports, hand-written, never having taken to these new-fangled machines. Fred, we were told, had dashed from his own wedding reception to chase a passing fire engine which had interrupted the celebrations. There were plenty of telephones and each of them was semi-enclosed in a little booth along one wall of the reporters’ room. The first mobile phones did not appear until the 1980s and when they did they were the size of a house brick. 7

Upstairs, somewhere, sat the formidable Miss Kathleen Syme, a grand-daughter of David and a director of the newspaper. She held a BA, an MA and a law degree from Melbourne University, a rare achievement for a woman in those times, indeed for anybody. She had joined the Age as a reporter in the 1920s. By the mid-1930s she was social editor of the paper. Miss Syme kept a close eye on our modest expenses and was ever alert to any lapse in ‘standards’ as she understood them. When Greg Taylor, later editor, was a young reporter he was summoned to her office one morning to be given some financial advice. ‘Mr Taylor,’ she said, ‘I have been looking at your expenses and you claimed for the tram ride to the football. You will find if you walk two blocks from the office and then catch the tram you can save a penny a ride.’ When Miss Syme was around it is fair to say that our general behaviour improved noticeably, journalists and everybody else. In one of her most famous interventions Miss Syme reprimanded Greg Stevens, manager of the pictorial department, even though she was outside the building at the time. Smoking was banned in the main building because of the high fire risk and this was where the editorial and pictorial departments were housed. It was permitted in the adjoining and more modern Age chambers. Stevens was alone in his second-floor front office overlooking Collins Street and decided it was ‘safe’ to light up. He had taken a few puffs when the phone rang on his desk. The caller was Miss Syme. ‘You know you’re not supposed to smoke in the Age building, Mr Stevens,’ she said. Stevens, taken aback, denied any wrong doing. How could she possibly know? ‘Look across the street’, Miss Syme advised. There she was, phone in hand, curlers in place, seated in her chair at the hairdressing salon high up in the building opposite. John Lamb, later an award-winning photographer, received some personal tuition from Miss Syme on the vexed matter of standards. He was a 14-year-old messenger, dressed in suit, green shirt and tie when she confronted him. ‘Go home at once’, Miss Syme ordered, ‘and report back to me in a white shirt.’ So off he went by tram and bus to suburban Pascoe Vale, a round trip of 30 kilometres (18 miles as we said in those days) and from where he returned suitably attired. 8

My most enduring memories of Miss Syme are her annual appearances at the Age Christmas party for children. At this much anticipated event in Melbourne’s Fitzroy Gardens there was a present for every child up to age 12 whose father or mother worked for the paper. These gifts were generous, carefully chosen and suitable for each different age group and they came with a kind of show bag of sweets. The company paid for all this. Imagine the mayhem on a hot summer’s day in December: hundreds of children, litres of ice cream, acres of wrapping paper, parents trying to keep order and sometimes succeeding. Miss Syme clearly enjoyed these occasions, but her chair, and sun umbrella if necessary, were in a small but secure roped-off area. My clear recollection is that some of us penetrated this inner sanctum to introduce our small children to her. What I now realise is that occasions (and attitudes) like this marked the end days of the old ‘family’ company. Noblesse oblige? Perhaps. But there was something quite special about it as well. At the time I started there E.K. Sinclair was the Editor. Keith – not that I ever used his given name – was a reserved, and to most of us, distant figure. He has had a poor press since his abrupt departure from the Age in 1966 and deserves better. Keith Sinclair was a war hero, a courteous and decent person, a man of his times. When he died in 1995 Claude Forell6 who had worked for him for years, remembered his former editor as always an officer and a gentleman in the best sense of this term; a man of honour and high standards. Sinclair spent 34 years as a journalist, all of them at the Age apart from a couple of years seconded to the news agency Australian Associated Press (AAP) and five years distinguished war service in the Royal Air Force (RAF). In the late 1930s after completing a cadetship at the Age he worked his way on a ship to the UK where he joined AAP in London. Subsequently he had been a special correspondent for the news agency in Germany and then a war correspondent in France. Nobody ever mentioned this to me at the Age but it turned out that our editor had interviewed Adolf Hitler at a pre-war Nuremberg rally. Not that long afterwards he was flying over Germany on bombing missions with the RAF. 9

Sinclair had given up his correspondent’s role as reporter and observer to join the RAF where he served as a bomber pilot, instructor, staff officer and CO of the famous 97 Pathfinder squadron. He was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross (DFC) after bringing his damaged aircraft home from a raid over Germany. The citation said that as a flight commander he has shown high qualities of leadership and by his cheerful courage, unselfishness and skill set a fine example for his subordinates. At the end of the war Sinclair was a Wing Commander. He was awarded an OBE and much later, a CMG. On returning to Melbourne he resumed his newspaper career at the Age where he became Editor in 1959. In February 1965 he was briefly back on the road – the ice actually – before filing a long report from the South Pole. It was titled Word from the Pole and it began: By E.K. Sinclair Our companion at the South Pole that mid-summer day last month was 77 years of age, white haired and sparse of frame in the manner of old men toughened by time. He looked around the wide, white, Polar plain at the radio masts and antennae, at the white circle of the sun diffused in a metallic sky, and at the Stars and Stripes lifting on its staff in the near-still air. Keith Sinclair’s companion at the pole was a Canadian, Sir Charles Wright who had been a young scientist with the ill-fated 1910–1913 British Antarctic Expedition. Back then he had led the team which found Captain Robert Scott, RN (Scott of the Antarctic) and two companions, dead in their tent on the Ross Ice Shelf 165 miles from safety and just a day’s march from a food depot. Sinclair’s dispatch was published in the Age of 4 February 1965. A contemporary of mine, Roger Aldridge, later recalled7 that our Editor was a distinguished and frosty eminence sometimes encountered in the lift; a man who employed me twice but to whom I never spoke and indeed never met. Chris Forsyth, a large young man of promise at the Age didn’t meet Keith Sinclair for more than two years, but when he 10

did he must have made a good impression. The Editor recommended Chris for a six-month Commonwealth Press Union Fellowship in the UK and off he went. John Jost, a Melbourne University law student had joined the Age not long before I did. After initial interviews with various executives he had been summoned to the Editor’s office at 9 o’clock one night. The two of them discussed his CV and then, to Jost’s surprise, Keith Sinclair asked him how he voted. Jost said he was a swinging voter and then ‘foolishly but respectfully’ asked why the Editor wanted to know such a thing. Sinclair had smiled and explained: ‘I don’t want to hire a communist.’ Graham Perkin had offered me a job subject to a final OK from the Editor and the conversation which followed was the only one I ever had with Keith Sinclair at the Age. We talked mostly about Africa and how I would like to return there, hardly surprising as I had been working in Kenya and on the Africa desk of United Press International (UPI) in London. The Age at that time had bureaus in London, Washington and Singapore and I wondered if there were plans for one in Africa? No there were not. As it turned out my interest would be indulged by the Age over the next 10 years with assignments in Nigeria, Rhodesia (as was), South Africa and Angola. Not to forget a memorable lunch in Canberra for His Imperial Majesty, Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia. While he was at the helm Sinclair enhanced and defended the editorial independence of the Age and increased its influence in public affairs. It was a conservative paper of record, old-fashioned in appearance with very few bylines. During 1961–62 the Editor stared down ferocious pressure from the Victorian Premier, Henry Bolte, and his own board at the newspaper in successfully campaigning against the execution of Robert Peter Tait. Late in 1961 Tait had been convicted of the gruesome murder of an elderly woman in a Melbourne suburban vicarage. Opponents of the death sentence he received protested that Tait was insane (officially he was not) and that common law forbade the execution of an insane person; there was also, by now, a national clamour for the abolition of capital punishment. After a huge public and legal controversy the Victorian State Government commuted the death sentence to one of life imprisonment, never to be 11

released. When he died in Melbourne after heart surgery on 19 February 1985 Tait was Victoria’s longest serving prisoner. Within weeks of the commutation decision in 1962 academic Creighton Burns had completed his book, The Tait Case, which was published by Melbourne University Press. In a radical piece of recruiting two years later Keith Sinclair lured Burns away from Melbourne University, where he was Reader in Politics, to be South East Asia correspondent of the paper, based in Singapore. Creighton made a great success of the role and would play a major part in the development of the Age during the coming ‘Perkin years.’ Ultimately he would become editor of the paper himself. Sinclair’s deputy was the aforementioned (and abused) Harold Austin, a courtly and helpful executive who was the associate editor. Like his boss he had come to the job with impressive credentials. Harold Austin (even 10 years later I still called him Mr Austin) had worked in London and Washington, had served in the Middle East during the war and was later a war correspondent. He was a former chief of staff and news editor of the Age. If you undertook a special assignment for him and he liked your work he would drop you a note and say so. The Editor did the same. During his 16 post-war years as Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies evidently held the Age in higher regard than other Australian newspapers. One reason for this, he explained, was that the Age would not hesitate to criticise him or his Ministers when it felt they deserved it. That said, the newspaper under Sinclair and his predecessor Sir Harold Campbell leant towards the conservatives at election time. When he retired in 1966 Sir Robert told the paper’s chief political correspondent John Bennetts that he hoped the Age would never change. But change it would; in some respects beyond recognition. There were five faces in the editorial department that were familiar to me when I arrived there: my benefactor, Pam Fox, Peter Cole-Adams, John Larkin, Ian Hatcher and John Dickie, an old school friend. We had all been cadet journalists in Brisbane. Cole-Adams had only recently joined the Age and was working on the foreign desk after a stint in London with Australian Associated Press. Hatcher and Dickie had both joined from 12

the (now defunct) Telegraph, the evening daily in Brisbane. Their Editorin-Chief, John Wakefield, was not pleased to lose their services. ‘You two won’t know what you have struck in Melbourne,’ he warned them. ‘They’ll eat you two bastards alive.’ Not true. Dickie8 found the Age of the early 1960s ‘a wonderful place to work. You were treated with respect. They took time for you to adjust to Melbourne. They took a while to look at your copy to see that it was accurate and then gave you an open go.’ Three of the five left the Age during the Perkin editorship: Pam Fox went to the Daily Mail in London; Ian Hatcher returned to Queensland where he became media advisor to the Police Commissioner and John Dickie moved to the Attorney General’s Department in Canberra. In time he would become the Commonwealth’s Chief Censor and then the first Director of the Office of Film and Literature Classification. Peter Cole-Adams stayed on much longer and was later Chief European correspondent in London and Washington correspondent. John Larkin and I ended up working closely together after the change of editor. For such a long-established Melbourne paper it was surprising to me how many of the younger members of staff came from somewhere else. Apart from the large Brisbane contingent there were several from Western Australia, at least three Tasmanians and a couple of New Zealanders. A Canadian left as I arrived and a South African came soon after. Two of the closest mates I would ever have I met at the Age in 1965: John Hamilton, subsequently a foreign correspondent for the rival Herald & Weekly Times group and later an acclaimed author; and Tim Graham, a New Zealander and future novelist who started as a reporter on the same day as I did (on the 2pm shift). A few months earlier Tim had interviewed Keith Sinclair who was visiting New Zealand and Sinclair offered him a job if he wanted to move to Australia. Years later I wrote both their obituaries9 for the Age: Tim Graham’s in 2008 and John Hamilton’s in 2017. By now – towards the end of 1965 – two cadet journalists who joined the paper in 1949 had made their way into the middle executive ranks of the editorial department. Graham Perkin and Greg Taylor were nicely positioned for the renewal that would happen within a year. In those days 13

few experienced Australian journalists had a university education and these two were no exception. Among the exceptions at the Age were veterans like Geoffrey Hutton, Bruce Grant and recent recruit Creighton Burns as well as a crop of graduate cadets, Len Radic and Claude Forell among them, who joined the paper from the 1950s. Graham Perkin was a Warracknabeal High School graduate who had briefly and unsuccessfully studied law before being hired as a cadet by the Age. But he knew a little about newspapers before moving to the city. Between the ages of 12 and 17 he had lived just 20 yards from the flat-bed press that printed the Warracknabeal Herald. The boy could hear (and smell) the paper going to press from his upstairs sleep-out, a sensation he would never forget. In March 1949 he started as a first-year cadet on the Age. It was the only newspaper he ever worked for. Along with the usual beginner’s chores Perkin spent the early months of his cadetship reporting the greyhound racing results and invariably finding a story to go with them. Colleagues, his future editor Keith Sinclair among them, were soon aware of his talent, his enthusiasm and his trademark restless energy. In 1955 he was awarded a prized Kemsley scholarship to study journalism and newspapers in the UK. The experience he gained, the people he met and the ideas he was exposed to provided a huge boost to his confidence. It was valuable time away from the old ways in Melbourne and something of a finishing school for an ambitious young newspaperman. There was quite a bond between former Kemsley scholars and Perkin later introduced me to two of them – Douglas Alexander, a South African who had been on the 1955 program with him; and Dennis Hawker, Editor of The Mercury in Hobart, and a Kemsley scholar in the early 1950s. On his return from England Perkin worked in the Age Canberra bureau and also gained notice as a feature writer. In 1959 he shared a Walkley award for a ground-breaking piece on heart surgery, Closing a Hole in the Heart. He was the first outsider to witness this operation and his report began:

14

Left

E.K. (Keith) Sinclair, Editor of the Age 1959–1966. Picture courtesy Fairfax Media Below

Ranald Macdonald, Managing Director of the Age, at 26

Above

Sub Editors’ room at the Age early 1960s. Standing to the left, in suits, Graham Perkin and Greg Taylor Left

Before he was Editor: Graham Perkin, wife Peg, son Steve and daughter Corrie. Picture courtesy Perkin family

First day copy of the Age

First day copy of the Australian

Master Robert Cavey, aged 4, at the Age Christmas Party

By Graham Perkin An exposed human heart is dark and filled with an inhuman independence. It throbs in the opened chest, contorts itself in formless movement and beats out the rhythm of life. Beneath it are the lungs; animate off-white objects like supercharged dumplings that slide from view into the outraged privacy of the chest, then pulsate into sight again, past the rim of the surgeon’s incision. Here is the fount of life and some of its mystery, bare, bleeding and exposed to the eyes of men. Here is life which might be death. Later as Perkin made his way through the lower executive ranks, first as deputy news editor, then news editor, the Age sent him on the 10-week advanced executive program conducted by the Australian Administrative Staff College at Mt Eliza. This demanding course provided a further boost to his self-confidence and left him in no doubt he could mix it with politicians and senior executives in business and the public service. He was certainly right about that. By the time I met him Graham Perkin was 35, a big, friendly man who seemed to be across the entire editorial operation as assistant editor. He was also a man of extraordinary presence and style, quite unlike anyone I had encountered before in the newspaper world. I instinctively liked him. Perkin’s contemporary, Greg Taylor, had decided he wanted to be a journalist when he was eight years old. Greg was a Tasmanian, a Hobart High School graduate and the son of a journalist. One of his brothers was a broadcaster and the other a journalist as was his father-in-law. Taylor’s career trajectory was also impressive and continued until he ultimately became chief executive of the Age and managing director of David Syme and Co Limited, its publisher. As a reporter he covered the Tokyo Olympics, the French nuclear tests in the South Pacific and the British ones at Maralinga in South Australia, before being appointed joint chief 15

of staff, his first step on a steep executive ladder. By the time I met Greg he was 34 and news editor, a job he was well equipped for after three years in New York and London on secondment to Australian Associated Press (AAP). Like Graham he proved to be an excellent colleague, albeit much less noisy. He was also unflappable, a valuable trait in a newspaper executive. But it was a young Geelong Grammar School (and Cambridge) graduate who would trigger the upheaval that delivered the ‘Perkin years’ at the Age. C.R. (Ranald) Macdonald, born in Melbourne in 1938, was a great-grandson of David Syme. His father, Hamish Macdonald, died on active service in World War II. His mother, Nancy, was the daughter of Oswald Syme, (one of David Syme’s sons) who was Chairman of the company when I joined the Age. Ranald had followed his father, Hamish Macdonald and his step-father, Lt. Col. E.H.B. Neill, to Jesus College, Cambridge where he studied history and law. Late in 1960 he returned to Melbourne and joined the Age where Greg Taylor remembered him as ‘an extremely keen reporter’. Next he completed a postgraduate degree, a combined journalism and management program, at Columbia University in New York. It was in America that Macdonald gained his understanding of what might be possible back in Melbourne, particularly in newspaper marketing, circulation management and classified advertising. His Masters’ thesis – which he was to draw on soon after at the Age – examined ‘the ideal newspaper.’ It may not have been a template but it certainly focused his thinking on many of the things which had to be done. After graduating from Columbia the publisher-in-waiting visited newspaper role models like The Miami Herald, the Louisville Courier Journal, Long Island Newsday and the Los Angeles Times. By now he was deadly serious about trying to ensure the development and independence of the Age and he returned to Melbourne determined to do both. The opportunity came sooner than he expected and before the year was out (1964) the Syme board had appointed him to the new position of Managing Director. Just in time. Earlier that year the game had changed for the newspaper industry around the country with the launch by Rupert 16

Murdoch of the Australian. A fresh and innovative competitor had arrived for papers like the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald and Macdonald was right to be very concerned. Murdoch’s national daily was certainly a threat but for someone in Melbourne with fresh eyes and new ideas it also offered a great opportunity. Media academic and writer Henry Mayer thought the appearance of Murdoch’s new paper was the best thing that had happened in Australian journalism for a very long time. Journalist Bruce Welch, later circulation manager of the Age, said little was known of Macdonald when he arrived back in Melbourne from the United States and that most of the staff probably did not know he existed. But once he took charge it was a different story. Welch said Macdonald was ‘a white knight’ a genuine Syme, someone capable of putting life and energy back into the paper.10 For much of the next 19 years Ranald Macdonald fulfilled this expectation. Until Macdonald’s appointment the company had been run by a powerful Editor, Keith Sinclair and a general manager, Dixon Brown; neither of them on the board. Initially Macdonald did not have editorial control and it would be the best part of two years before he secured the management structure he wanted. Even so his appointment had been a remarkable event in such a traditional and conservatively managed company. The board knew there was a big task to be done and David Syme’s great grandson had persuaded them he could provide the necessary leadership and drive. Ranald was 26 years old when he took charge of a newspaper he found ‘staid and self-satisfied.’ This judgement was probably accurate but the Age I joined the following year was still quite a good place to be for a general reporter. Newcomers to Victoria were given quite a few out of town assignments, some alone, some with a photographer, to help them get better acquainted with the state. We all had scrap books in those pre-digital times and mine has stories from country places such as Mallacoota, Jeparit, Camperdown and Timbertop, the Geelong Grammar bush campus where Prince Charles was about to begin a year as a boarder. My Africa interest was kept alive through covering the visit of the President of the Malagasy Republic and 17

writing the obituary of Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid who had been assassinated in South Africa. Most of these tasks were handed out by the chief of staff. Michael Macgeorge was a reserved man with an eye for detail who had joined the Age as a clerk when he was 15. Harold (later Sir Harold) Campbell, was editor when Michael moved to editorial two years later. Our chief of staff was also the grandson of J.S. Stephens, The Old Sub. In the Perkin era to come Michael Macgeorge would be London manager and later the two of us worked closely together when he became the company’s first industrial manager. He worked for the Age for 50 years. As a virtual teetotaller (Macquarie Port excluded) the advent of 10 o’clock closing in Victoria meant little to me personally. But it was a development of great significance in Victorian life, the start of a new social order. This was an assignment I was very pleased to be given. Among other things, that change marked the end of the notorious ‘6 o’clock swill’ at pubs around Victoria. At the Age this tradition had been honoured by a mass exodus of staff at 5.50pm or so each day. Reporters, photographers and sub-editors would hurry to local bars where drinks were bought (and lined up) before last orders just on 6pm. The most popular of these was the back bar at the Graham Hotel in Swanston Street, just around the corner from the Age. But the arrival of 10 o’clock closing was bad news for another Age drinking venue. This was the Sportsman’s Club, also close to the office and open to members and their guests after traditional bars were closed. It didn’t last long once its competitive (perhaps that should be noncompetitive) advantage was removed. There was no comprehensive editorial library at the Age until a journalist named Horace Chisholm was asked to put one together some time in the 1950s. In the previous decade management became aware of damage in the file room where bound copies of the paper and some other bits and pieces were stored. Rats had acquired a taste for some of the contents and were slowly chewing their way through what passed for a library. The cost of building a rat-proof room was considered prohibitive, so a carpenter was called in and a small hole cut in the door … then the company bought a 18

cat. Graham Perkin was so taken with this lateral thinking that he once used the story to make a point in an address at Adelaide University. Horace (Horrie) Chisholm was a kindly man with a wide range of interests and his editorial library was well established by the time I met him, and first used it, in 1965. These were pre-Google times so a great deal of our basic research was undertaken by consulting newspaper cuttings files in the library. A team of clerks cut up the Age and some other publications every day, dating and filing a vast range of information in hundreds of manilla folders. Horrie had arrived at the Age from New Zealand in 1937, a university graduate with quite a bit of reporting experience on the other side of the ditch. When he died, aged 92, his obituary noted a distinguished career as a journalist at the Age where he had covered the law courts and events that shaped our society, nation and world. Finally, it said, as chief librarian, he had created a modern metropolitan newspaper library. Outside the office Horrie pursued an eclectic range of hobbies and obsessions. He had a pilot’s licence, was an active member of the Clan Chisholm Society, a respected philatelist and a former federal office bearer of the Australian Journalists’ Association. During World War II he had served in artillery and intelligence in the Pacific theatre and finally was editor of the army newspaper Guinea Gold. If you didn’t bother to engage with him in his library you might have imagined that this busy little man was simply an older reporter who had opted for a quieter life. But of course there was much more to Horace Chisholm’s story than that. It never dawned on me back then that Horrie was a New Zealander and oddly enough both mentors who helped me throughout my newspaper years were Kiwis. I was still a cadet journalist when I met Jim Carney on my first visit to New Zealand in 1960. For the next 50 years Carney was a friend and long-distance mentor, a journalist who went on to manage newspapers in New Zealand and Fiji. It was Carney who recommended the management career path to me and when I got a foot on the first rung of that ladder advised: ‘Never sacrifice principles for power or money if you want to sleep easily at night. I came damn close to doing that and life was awful’. 19

The other Kiwi I learned a great deal from was Tony Whitlock, a fourth-generation newspaperman, a kind and generous friend. Tony had moved to Australia after active service in World War II. Among his talents he had the ability (not common among journalists) to quickly absorb technical information. In fact, to revel in it. Whitlock was one of the founders and the first executive director of the Pacific Area Newspaper Publishers Association (PANPA). Relations between the new Managing Director Ranald Macdonald and Editor Keith Sinclair had been strained from the beginning, to put it mildly. Even to a newcomer on the staff this was obvious. Macdonald11 told John Jost: ‘The first years were difficult. I used to call meetings that people would ignore, particularly the Editor.’ Years later Greg Taylor told me there was a simple explanation for the tension between the two men: Sinclair could not take the 26-year-old with three years’ reporting experience seriously. This was a big miscalculation as he was soon to find out. Macdonald – the last Syme to run the newspaper – proved to be a nimble and creative publisher of the Age. Critically he recognised what a successful combination outstanding journalism and outstanding marketing could be. In 1967 the new Managing Director made another appointment that would turn out to be of enormous significance for the Age and the expanding Syme organisation. John Paton, a career advertising man, was named assistant display advertising manager. His real job was to plan for the Sunday newspaper that the company thought it would be launching in the next couple of years. That didn’t happen. But the role Paton actually ended up playing would be pivotal in the development of the Age. It was clear to most of us that Graham Perkin was ready, keen and well equipped to edit the paper. There were two or three others in the frame for the job, we thought, but their prospects, if indeed they had any, came to nothing. One was Bruce Grant, former foreign correspondent, author and columnist. Like Creighton Burns he had served in the navy during World War II. Another was R.J. (John) Bennetts who was in the Australian army in the Pacific and had been head of the Age Canberra bureau since 1960. 20

There was also, of course, Harold Austin, the associate editor and Sinclair’s loyal and experienced deputy. One critical issue dwarfed all the others which dominated Macdonald’s thinking in his first two years in the job: the Age was ripe for a takeover. How could he secure the paper in Syme and other friendly hands? It was an urgent question as David Syme’s last surviving son, Oswald, was 87 years old in 1965. On his death the long-standing Trust estate would be broken up and divided equally among David’s surviving grandchildren, 16 women and two men. It was not until the end of 1966 that the newspaper’s future would be secured, at least temporarily. By this time Macdonald’s sparring with Keith Sinclair would be over and Graham Perkin Editor of the Age.

21

PA R T T W O

WORKING FOR MR BIG The Golden Age under Graham Perkin crept up on us like one of those cold grey Melbourne mornings when the sun breaks through and you don’t notice it until suddenly it strikes you how warm and bright it all is and the world has become your oyster. Roger Aldridge, the Age, 16 October 2004

The change of editor happened suddenly and in the middle of a busy news week. It was announced in the Age of Thursday, 20 October 1966, the same day that Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) began a whistle-stop visit to Australia, the first by a President of the United States. Graham Perkin, 36, would be the new editor. Keith Sinclair, 51, had resigned. There was no explanation for the upheaval, no statement of the new leadership’s intent. There was surprise in some quarters at the shock departure of Keith Sinclair and, when he got wind of the change, Sir Robert Menzies intervened at board level in a fruitless attempt to save an editor he admired. On the editorial floor I still remember one old-timer (he must have been 50) who announced to everyone within earshot: ‘I’ll give him (Perkin) six months.’ Keith Sinclair, who in fact had been forced out, behaved impeccably. Ted Cavey, deputy chief of staff at the time told me1 that in the early evening of Wednesday, 19 October, Sinclair had asked those who normally attended his news conference to meet in his office. Then he had made a dignified 22

speech, saying ‘as you know, I’m going’ and thanked everyone for their contributions while he was editor. He had added, ‘I think we produced some good papers.’ Around the editorial floor we heard at the time that the company had treated our departing editor generously and it has since been confirmed that this was the case. There would be plenty of professional life and satisfaction after the Age for Keith Sinclair. Soon after his departure the former editor was appointed as a speech writer and special consultant on media and public affairs by the Prime Minister, Harold Holt. He also served the Gorton, McMahon and later Fraser administrations in a similar role. I have no idea, if Prime Minister Holt’s memorable one-liner ‘All the way with LBJ’ was the work of E.K. Sinclair. But the one uttered by Holt before he went missing in the surf near Portsea certainly was not: ‘I know this beach like the back of my hand.’ Among his other post-Age activities, Keith Sinclair wrote The Spreading Tree: A history of APM and AMCOR 1844–1989. He was also a director and then deputy chairman of the Australian Tourist Commission. For Graham Perkin there were congratulatory messages from newspaper colleagues around Australia and abroad, from family and friends, businessmen, politicians, even some of his old teachers at Warracknabeal High School which he had left almost 20 years earlier. The Australian Administrative Staff College took pride in the success of yet another influential senior executive among its alumni. Principal Maurice Brown wrote to him: You have seen to it that your own preparation has been at the highest possible level and it is a great joy to see that your highly trained competence is being recognised and used. The public announcement which appeared in the Age described what it called a reconstruction of editorial executive appointments and it included two other changes at the top end of the newspaper. First, Ranald Macdonald, the Managing Director, had been given the additional responsibility of acting Editor-in-Chief, accountable to the board. In 23

fact Macdonald played no part in editorial policy, did not attend news conferences and never had to over-rule the Editor. Much later Graham Perkin was promoted to Editor-in-Chief. The other change announced in the Age that day was the appointment of Harold Austin, previously associate editor, to the new role of day editor. Looking back it seems odd to me now that Perkin had thought Austin might have been named Editor when the inevitable editorial changes were made by the Managing Director. He mentioned this to several of us but the fact was that Harold Austin, like Keith Sinclair, was a good man from an era that had suddenly come to an end. Another major story building when the Age changes were made was the campaign for the November 1966 Federal election, which Harold Holt would win comfortably. Just a few months earlier Sir Robert Menzies had finally retired as Australia’s longest-serving Prime Minister. As Sybil Nolan later observed, the nine years during which Perkin transformed the newspaper would be a most extraordinary period of Australian post-war public life, often politically and socially tumultuous, and marked both by great idealism and disillusionment.2 What a propitious time to take the editor’s chair at a newspaper that was ripe for renewal and renovation. Many of those who could tackle that job were already on the premises and others were waiting in the wings. The Age was about to go on a hiring spree and among those who would come were Allan Barnes, Les Tanner, Michelle Grattan, Bruce Postle and Ron Tandberg. I doubt that any of us, at the time, appreciated just how soon the Age would once again be a great and influential newspaper. Our new boss started out as he would continue till the end, an editor who spent much of his long working day, sleeves rolled up, cigarettes within reach, at the news desk on the editorial floor. We now had an inspirational leader, demanding and encouraging at the same time. We soon realised that he was a workaholic. Well before lunch each day he would be in his office, planning, reorganising, listening. His secretary, Pat Lawson, ‘Moneypenny’, said her new boss would arrive in his office like a whirlwind, usually about 11.30am. ‘His 24

extraordinary enthusiasm is what I remember most about Graham Perkin,’ she said. ‘It was impossible not to be infected by it.’ Pat had recently returned from a long working holiday in the UK and was informed before she started at the Age that the editor and Miss Kathleen Syme preferred women to wear skirts, not trouser suits. She obliged the pair of them for the first 12 months of her employment. The editor’s office itself was comfortably furnished, bar fridge included. This is where meetings such as the leader writers’ conference and the main news conference of the day were held, where visitors were entertained and where Perkin dictated a huge output of memos, correspondence and speeches. From early evening until the first edition appeared around midnight the Editor was out on the floor with his news executives and sub-editors, scowling, joking, taking and making calls, bellowing instructions as he put his final stamp on the next morning’s Age. We were left in no doubt that we were working for a master of our craft. It is not clear who coined that title ‘Mr Big’ but Les Carlyon, who I believed responsible, thought it might have been the laconic and gifted David Austin. Later on David Austin became sports editor and it was definitely him who made the classic observation3 that when you were with Perkin it was ‘almost like batting with Bradman.’ In a lifetime in journalism I never came across a more charismatic, talented and energetic Editor than Graham. When the writer Anne Chisholm met Perkin in London4 she said that she had encountered a large, fair, forceful man with a high colour and protruding blue eyes. She thought he had the feel of an unexploded bomb about him. Too right he did. This was the only time the two of them met. Years later her husband Michael Davie, the Observer journalist much admired by Perkin, was appointed Editor of the Age. There had been one early disappointment as the new order settled in at the newspaper. For years the Age had waged a battle against capital punishment, in principle and in practice. Keith Sinclair as Editor had mounted a successful campaign to save the murderer Robert Peter Tait from the hangman’s noose and the Victorian government led by Premier Henry Bolte had backed down at the last minute. It would not do so in the 25

case of Ronald Joseph Ryan. Graham Perkin continued the fight against capital punishment but the Age with huge political, media and community support was not able to save Ryan. Late in 1965 while escaping from prison Ryan had shot and killed a warder and was subsequently found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. A range of appeals and petitions failed and the Age campaign included an extraordinary nine editorials, many of them written by the Editor. It was all to no avail. The Premier, Sir Henry Bolte by now, was determined that the sentence would be carried out and his Cabinet supported him. At 8am on 3 February 1967 Ryan was hanged at Pentridge gaol. As it happened he would be the last person judicially executed in Australia. Graham Perkin’s first executive changes were designed to strengthen and deepen the paper’s gathering and presentation of news and features. Greg Taylor was given the new position of assistant editor (news) and David Thorpe, assistant editor (features). Their responsibilities were clear enough but from the start there was a contest between them, one Perkin encouraged. As time went by our Editor developed form in this respect, going on leave or away on business and leaving his key executives to work out among themselves who was doing which bits of his job while he was absent. Before long Greg Taylor would be night editor and Graham Perkin’s deputy. Years later Les Carlyon reckoned Taylor, who had done just about every job in journalism with distinction, would be best remembered for his extraordinary skills as night editor of the paper. As he put it: Greg was an expert finisher of copy, had a gimlet eye for reporters’ errors and loathed wordy first paragraphs. He could completely remake a paper between editions without once appearing flustered.5 Thorpe, an Englishman, had worked in London on the Daily Sketch and the Evening Standard, and had a certain Fleet Street confidence – some might say swagger – about him and a smart mouth. He was a very capable layout specialist and full of ideas. But Greg Taylor saw him off and Thorpe later left the Age and went into advertising. I have two clear memories of David, one of them warm, the other certainly instructive. He was the 26

London Evening Standard stringer in Melbourne and regularly asked me to cover for him whenever he was away. Stringers contribute copy for a fee to newspapers which don’t have a staff reporter where a story occurs. The Evening Standard had a healthy appetite for brief filler items from Melbourne for its first edition and paid quite well. The second memory I have of David Thorpe involved a three-month sub-editor’s training course for reporters. This was an early initiative of the new regime and may well have been David’s idea. The intention was to give reporters a better insight into the production process and what happened to our copy. There was also the thought that some of us might enjoy it so much that we would join the full-time ranks of sub-editors. Ted Cavey was the first to undertake the program and I was next. Fifty years on I recall my first attempt at a feature page layout. Far from confident I approached the oracle, David Thorpe, with the finished product and inquired: ‘Is this page too busy?’ The assistant editor (features) took one look at it and responded: ‘Busy? I’d say it was out of its mind.’ Despite my own brief and clumsy efforts the appearance of the Age was quickly transformed. Among the most noticeable early changes was a doubling of the editorial and comment space which was moved from page two to pages four and five. Typographical alterations to the paper’s masthead were the first for almost a century. An occasional item We Were Wrong appeared, explaining and apologising for mistakes that had been made in the Age. New specialist sections began to appear joining Accent which had been established a few months before Perkin’s appointment and targeted women ‘with flair, imagination and a spirit of gaiety.’ These sections would become major sources of new readers and extra revenue. Eventually they would range from education and travel to computers, food and drink and the flagship of them all, the weekly TV and radio lift-out Green Guide which appeared in 1976. Less than two months after the new editor was appointed the Age informed its readers that it was taking a Sydney partner. The arrangement was essentially to ensure that the Age continued as an independent newspaper of high quality; and that the influence of the Syme family 27

was maintained. Perkin may have known, probably did, but the rest of us had no idea at the time what a remarkable deal had been struck with John Fairfax Limited, publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald. In essence, while Syme family interests retained at least 10 percent of the issued capital of David Syme and Company they would have an equal voice with the Sydney partners in running the business. This and some other details of the partnership remained secret for another 15 years. The Syme–Fairfax arrangement lasted 17 years. One of the enduring myths about the Age is that it was founded by David Syme. In fact it was launched by a company of merchants, Francis Cooke and Co and was subsequently a co-operative for a while before Ebenezer and David Syme became involved. But the David Syme claim was repeated by the Age itself on 2 October 1967 when it reported the death of Oswald Syme (‘Mr Oswald’ as he was known). It described the old man as the last surviving son of the late David Syme, one of the founders of the Age 113 years ago. The last surviving son part was correct and with his death, at 89, the complex trust set up by his father came to an end. The Syme–Fairfax partnership signed less than 12 months earlier assured a much smoother transition than might otherwise have been the case. Other suitors for this valuable and prestigious property had included the Sydneybased Sir Frank Packer and an ambitious young newspaperman named Rupert Murdoch. But in the circumstances the Fairfax arrangement (and that company’s commitment to quality journalism) was preferable to either of those alternatives. Oswald’s death had severed the last direct link with David Syme and his campaigning newspaper. Now, under David’s great-grandson Ranald Macdonald and a new editor, Graham Perkin, a promising fresh chapter in the Age story had begun. Before the wave of editorial hiring began there were already quite a few people on the staff who would ‘go on with it’ in the Perkin era. Some of them like Peter Cole-Adams, John Larkin, Creighton Burns and Roger Aldridge have previously made a brief appearance in these pages and more will be heard of them. The stellar career of Les Carlyon, the next editor as it turned out, took off from the early days of the new dispensation. Like 28

Graham Perkin he had been brought up in country Victoria, in his case Elmore, near Bendigo. Les had soon developed into one of those rare people who could do anything on the newspaper: a gifted writer, very interested in production, a capable news executive. But he had another passion as well – thoroughbred horse racing: writing about it in newspapers and magazines and later writing books about it. Another of his books, Gallipoli, appeared long after the Perkin era and attracted critical acclaim and commercial success. When Perkin became Editor in 1966 Les was on the finance staff, as it was called then. His first appointment after the changes was as a leader writer, and thus exposed to the political, economic and social issues of interest to the Age. Next he became finance editor and during this time planned, designed and launched Business Age. After this he was news editor and then assistant editor. In the production department a young RMIT graduate named John Jennison joined the Age in 1966 as part of a project team working on plans for a new plant, away from the historic Collins Street site. Jennison became chief engineer and then production manager. At the end of our careers at the Age we were both part of the senior management group and working for Greg Taylor, by then Managing Director. These recollections are not intended to be a Who Was Who at the Age, but a few of my contemporaries intrude more than others when I think about those times. Ted Cavey, for example, a versatile reporter, deputy chief of staff of the Age, then chief of staff of both the Age and Newsday. Ted was later editor of the Courier in Ballarat and managing editor of the Standard in Warrnambool. Without doubt he was also the best after-dinner speaker I ever heard, a talent he applied after his newspaper days when he established a well-regarded (and much needed) Public Speaking Academy. There were always a few New Zealanders around the place. My friend Tim Graham was one and Kevin Childs another, both of them from the South Island. Childs had worked in London for the Daily Mail and we hired him from the Melbourne Herald. Kevin was an entertaining story teller and it would have been worth having him on the staff just for his tales of Fleet Street. 29

But he was also a prolific story-getter with the widest contact list of any reporter I ever worked with. Perkin once instructed me to sack him after some tired and emotional incident now lost in the mists of memory. Childs was sent home – maybe he just went home – but I sent him a telegram ‘reminding’ him that he was rostered to work the following Sunday. He turned up. Wrote the page 1 lead. All was forgiven. My first meeting with Claude Forell happened some time in 1970 when he returned after four years as the Age correspondent based in London. Claude began writing for the Age in 1952 as its University correspondent before joining the editorial department. Sixty years later his work was still appearing in the paper now and again, but he was no longer on the staff. The breadth and range of his contributions to the Age were quite extraordinary: European correspondent, shipping reporter (that used to be a very important job), political writer in Canberra and Melbourne, leader writer, restaurant reviewer, editor of the Epicure section, founding editor of The Age Good Food Guide. His weekly political column started when he returned from London and continued for more than 20 years and throughout this time Claude was said to be ‘an unflinching advocate’ for economic and social libertarianism. I wonder how many of his colleagues knew that he was also the author of the extremely popular text book How We Are Governed. First published in 1964 it was used in schools for 30 years and distributed abroad by Australian embassies. Primary Industry reporter Kevin (‘Farmer’) Boyle was subsequently editor of the respected rural newspaper the Weekly Times and then later, the Sunraysia Daily in Mildura. Geoff Barker, whose sense of humour was as warped as my own was the industrial reporter who became a leader writer, then news editor. Later on he would be a foreign correspondent in London and Washington. I now realise the opportunities Graham Perkin gave many of us were part of a careful strategy to build a widely experienced team as the Age developed. He was genuinely interested in our personal growth and professional satisfaction. There was quite a pattern of journalists moving into management at the Age in those days, people like Michael Macgeorge and Bruce Welch 30

who have been mentioned earlier. Macgeorge was the company’s first industrial manager and Welch became circulation manager. Ranald Macdonald should be regarded as a special case, advancing from general reporter to managing director in a single bound. Peter Alston, once a court reporter was the company’s first personnel manager and Roy Stock, a senior sub-editor, was later one of the night production managers. News editor Ian Stewart was the first editorial manager appointed at the Age. Harold Austin, associate editor to Keith Sinclair, finished a long career at the paper as company secretary. Philip Taylor, a former political reporter and news editor managed the general services function and was also company secretary. It might be helpful to provide younger readers, in particular, with a snapshot of Melbourne’s newspaper industry in the 1960s and some explanation of how we actually produced the Age. They will already know that since then, in this digital 21st century, print sales of newspapers have collapsed around the world. But they were certainly alive and flourishing in the 1960s and 1970s, when the second golden period of the Age occurred. At the change of editors in 1966 the circulation of the paper was 183,305. During Keith Sinclair’s seven years as editor sales of the paper had risen by just on nine percent. Graham Perkin’s nine-year tenure saw sales reach 221,811 an increase of 21 percent. In 1966 at the rival Herald & Weekly Times group, just a few city blocks away, the afternoon Herald boasted a circulation in excess of 485,000 and the morning Sun News-Pictorial a whopping 618,000. The production process back then has been likened to a vast orchestra with clacking typewriters and roaring presses, phones ringing all over the building, a great deal of shouting. Copy from the editorial and advertising departments – news, features, sport, business, classifieds and display – was sent to the composing room, set in lead type by linotype operators, made up by hand into a page which was then moulded and cast into lead semicircular plates for the presses. The linotype machines had been around for 100 years; the rotary letterpress machine for longer. It sounds primitive but it worked very well thanks to the considerable skills of composing, 31

press room and many other tradesmen (sic) and the burly efficient men in the publishing room who loaded the papers on trucks for early morning distribution throughout Victoria. Copy for the Age first edition had to be filed by 10.30pm and the presses were running by midnight. These were the papers distributed in regional Victoria. There were two other editions: the metro which began printing at 1.30am and the final between 2.30am and 3am. In 1966 there were at least 160 men and women in the editorial department, maybe more. They were artists and photographers, reporters and feature writers, sub-editors, a handful of executives, secretaries, clerical and library staff. From mid-morning the chief of staff would assign the jobs to be done, list jobs for the future and work on day, night, weekend and holiday rosters. Reporters on specialist rounds – police, courts, industrial, state political and the like – were responsible for these areas. The sports editor, business editor and features editor would brief their people and by early afternoon the first copy for the next day’s paper would start flowing. The Age bureaus in Canberra and Sydney would also start filing their stories and throughout the day news agency and other foreign copy would arrive. Local stories would be typed up on carbon paper with the original going to the chief sub-editor’s basket, one to the news editor and one to the radio news desk. The sub-editors who processed general, sports, foreign and business news would start work at 5 or 6pm with the ‘late-stop’ subs coming in around 8.30pm. Throughout the day there would be news, leader writers’ and picture conferences with the main event, involving representatives of all editorial departments, in the Editor’s office at 6pm. News executives, sub-editors and the copy taster would check facts and copy, rewrite material if necessary, write the story headings and design the pages using a ruler and a type book. In the end the challenge, invariably, was to fit a gallon into a pint pot. It couldn’t be done of course and stories were dropped, slashed, put aside for another day. By the time the Editor returned from dinner (and this one enjoyed his dinner break) the key executives – news editor, chief sub-editor, night editor and the Editor himself – would have a pretty fair idea what tomorrow’s paper would look like. Once the final edition 32

of the paper was out, about 3am, the newsroom fell quiet and would stay that way until 9am or so that morning when the first editorial staff would begin work. (Fifty years later, in these digital times, reporting and publishing the news has become a 24 hour a day operation. Reporters no longer just file their stories for the print newspaper. They may use audio, video or online platforms. But they still draw on traditional skills of the good reporter such as curiosity, contacts, enterprise and deadline awareness. Always trying to get it right. Always trying to get it first.) Probably the toughest thing about journalism in the 1960s was getting into it in the first place. Once you did – usually via a cadetship – it was up to you. If you were a dud the powers that be got rid of you or shuffled you off somewhere you didn’t want to be. That appalling term Human Resources Management (HRM) had not been invented and life on newspapers has never been the same since it was. (Stephen Lovass, long-time finance manager of the Age always referred to it (privately) as Human Remains.) Once you had a few years Australian experience you could get a job just about anywhere if you could speak the language. In the 1960s there always seemed to be jobs at the French news agency AFP in Paris and at Radio Free Europe in Munich. Fleet Street newspapers and news agencies like Reuters and United Press International were a magnet for Australian journalists. In my case I walked into the Daily Nation building in Nairobi, Kenya, and looked into an office where a man with a teddy-boy haircut glanced up from his portable, kept typing, and grunted: ‘What do you want?’ Me: ‘I was looking for the editor.’ Him: ‘I am the fucking editor. What do you want?’ Ten minutes later I had a job. The editor’s name was John Bierman and the newspaper was owned by the Aga Khan. The year was 1962. One of my contemporaries from Brisbane was already working in Africa. Phil Harrison was a sub-editor on the Friend, the oddly named English language daily in Bloemfontein, South Africa, where most of the residents spoke Afrikaans. Harrison was very taken with the advice to sub-editors in the Friend’s stylebook: Journalese and clichés must be avoided like the plague. 33

The cadetship that Gerry Carman got in 1967 was due largely to me getting into a lift in the Age building at exactly the right time. Jack Gavaghan, Melbourne bureau chief of Sydney’s Daily Telegraph joined me, complaining about an urgent staffing problem he had. The cadet in his office (like all cadets he did most of the chores) had resigned. Where was he going to get another one at short notice? I was able to settle Jack down: ‘I know just the bloke’, I told him. ‘His name is Gerry Carman and he has just arrived in Melbourne from Pakistan. I met him there a year or two back and he is mad keen to get into journalism.’ Carman had an interview the next day and started soon after in the Daily Telegraph bureau which was on the editorial floor of the Age building. A few years later he crossed the floor and joined the Age where he worked (twice) for a total of something like 20 years. But the best newspaper recruitment story I ever heard of happened to Tom Valenta, a young journalist at the Age. The assistant editor of the Rand Daily Mail, Raymond Louw, was in Melbourne from South Africa and went to the pub for dinner one evening with sports desk sub-editors including Valenta. A year or two later Tom pitched up in Johannesburg and phoned Ray Louw’s secretary (he was editor by then) to arrange a job interview. He was asked to call back at two o’clock and when he did there was a message for him: ‘Mr Louw remembers you. Can you start work this afternoon?’ So he did. On the 4pm shift. I know all this because I was in Johannesburg briefly a few months later and dropped into the Rand Daily Mail to visit Ray Louw. There, working away on the subs’ table, was Tom Valenta. In those early Perkin years quite a few other journalists left the Age to travel overseas and take work where they could find it. John Hall went to Canada and returned to a successful career as a magazine executive. Graeme Warner took a three-month contract at the United Nations in New York and stayed for more than 30 years. John Richardson from the foreign desk joined what became the Australian Tourist Commission and spent most of his career with them in the United States. John Allin went to Rhodesia, prompted by me, I like to think. When he came back the Age 34

sent him to Papua New Guinea for a while to develop a company project that didn’t pan out. Someone went to South America. I never saw Pam Fox of my Collins street encounter again. She went to England, worked on the Daily Mail and married a staffer on the Financial Times. Bruce Palling may have been the most peripatetic of them all. After leaving the Age in 1970 he worked, among other places, in Laos, the UK, Thailand, Rhodesia, Cambodia, Australia again before finally settling in London. It was hardly surprising that Bruce subsequently founded his own travel company specialising in grand and exotic destinations. When last heard of he was living in Notting Hill, London and writing about food and wine. In the late 1960s Palling was our in-house draft resister at the Age and spent a week or two in Pentridge prison. When it looked like he would go to jail for two years Graham Perkin made it clear we would be paying his full salary while he was incarcerated. In the end that wasn’t necessary. Those who stayed behind included our own wild bunch whose behaviour would have offended the HR protocols of a future Age. Quite possibly they would not have been hired at all. Others were simply memorable characters, people like Jim Soso, who grew up in British India and covered Gandhi’s funeral in 1948; and Ken, (‘Opportunity’) Knox, two metres tall, who was a teenager when he served in World War II as a commando. Rolf Lie wrote about economics, went to Japan for the Age and left the paper to make and sell very tasty meat pies. I know this last point for a fact. John Lawrence, a senior sub-editor and copy taster in those Perkin years, knew a bit about country matters and once or twice actually brought a ferret to work with him. I had never seen one of these curious animals before, but they have been domesticated for thousands of years and are related to weasels and badgers. It was John’s colleague, Aubrey McWatters, who leapt to his feet one night complaining loudly: ‘Something just ran up my leg.’ Lawrence put him at ease, or at least tried to. ‘Relax Aub’, he said, ‘It’s only a ferret.’ Soon after, at our request, Lawrence took my mate John Hamilton and me ferreting in the country one weekend. As I recall this involved placing a net over several rabbit holes and inserting the ferret 35

into an open one. There must have been pandemonium below ground with rabbits dashing about to escape our ferret, only to end up in one of the nets. I returned John Lawrence’s kindness by helping him leave the Age for 12 months to be training editor of my old paper in Nairobi … He stayed there for almost nine years. Part of the Age operation in those days was a ‘rip and read’ radio news service, a kind of news agency for radio station clients. It was run by a formidable figure, Karl Davidson, a former President of the Australian Journalists’ Association (AJA) in Victoria. Jim Wall, one of Karl’s capable assistants was famous for his parties. These took place at Barclay Manor, as it was known, the St Kilda residence of a number of Melbourne scribes. At the first party I attended their guests had to squeeze past an upright coffin in the hallway to get to the bar. I think it was empty. The coffin. Not the bar. One of the most engaging and popular figures in the editorial department was an Englishman, Stephen Hall. He attracted particular attention when he covered the opening of a new sewage plant by drinking a glass of freshly treated effluent and writing about it. God knows what impact his story had around the breakfast tables of Melbourne. Stephen disappeared from the staff from time to time, once to live on the Greek island of Hydra and later to build his own house and garden in Far North Queensland where sadly he died, far too young, at 59. A mysterious South African named Kevin Hamilton turned up in the reporters’ room as did a US draft dodger whose face I recall but whose name escapes me. Cadet reporter Don Hewitt’s transgression was so appalling, if amusing, that even in those days he was lucky to escape the axe. After a stop-work meeting on the Melbourne waterfront Hewitt was asked to write a caption for a ‘stand-by’ picture that was unlikely to be used in the paper. Unfortunately it was rushed into print at short notice and without careful checking. Hewitt had written a spoof caption which identified a union official in the crowd pointing to his ‘mother’ who had brought him a cut lunch and a thermos of vodka. Union men, it said, had cheered heartily and sung For she’s a jolly good comrade. The offending caption did not appear in 36

the second edition of the paper and somehow Don survived. But reporter Harry Lovett, a man with serious drinking and budgeting problems, was not so fortunate. Harry, better known as ‘the horse’, claimed Graham Perkin spoke only two words to him (maybe three) in his life: ‘You’re fired.’ Although I never clashed with Jack Darmody I kept pretty much clear of him after he was hired for the Age and then moved to our afternoon newspaper Newsday. Jack was a complex character, a brawler, dangerous when drunk and a reporter who broke some big stories. Darmody was something of a legend in Melbourne police and criminal circles. His obituary (in 2006) described him as an old school newspaperman. Jack’s biggest local story, in Newsday, was his revelation that the great UK train robber Ronald Biggs had been hiding out in Melbourne after fleeing England. That was in 1969. Five years later we would learn how Biggs had got away from Melbourne and ended up in Brazil; and how he had been holed up in our city at the home of a long-time associate who worked in the reading room of the Age. Nobody knew much about Henri Lachajczak who was a general reporter on the Age when I arrived from London. One thing we did know was that he enjoyed a good punch-up and could handle himself well. That said, Henri never threatened me at any time and on one occasion actually did me a considerable service. This involved him speaking firmly (very firmly I suspect) to a used car dealer in North Melbourne who had sold me a dud vehicle. It was a Volkswagen Beetle and the dealer replaced it within 24 hours of Henri’s intervention. In 1977 Henri shot and killed two men in a roadside drama at Pontville, just outside Hobart. After leaving the Age he had worked in Papua New Guinea and then moved to Tasmania. At the time of the Pontville incident he was employed by the ABC news service. Late one Saturday afternoon he had stopped his small yellow car in Pontville after an incident on the highway involving a large white car with six occupants, three men and three women. After the men approached his car Henri produced a hand gun and shot two of them dead. When police arrived he was arrested. His trial was held at the Supreme Court in Hobart where he faced two counts 37

of murder under the name Henri Lach. He was found not guilty, on the grounds of self defence. It was possible (if unusual) in the 1960s to be a useful member of the editorial staff without having the slightest interest in sport. In fact my recollections of the Age do not include a single sporting moment of significance. From the day I arrived there had been sales pitches from various colleagues recommending that I follow their football team, Peter McLaughlin (St Kilda) and what seemed like half the sports’ desk (Richmond). Fifty years later I still don’t follow a team. But I do regret that I never offered any encouragement or support to Sun News-Pictorial columnist Keith Dunstan, founding secretary (in 1967) of the Anti-Football League (AFL). (This body described itself as an organisation of individuals who were indifferent to the excessive fervour that afflicted supporters of Australian Rules Football.) Like the other papers in town we devoted enormous resources to covering many sports – particularly football (the Australian variety), cricket, tennis, golf and horse racing. Sports writers were the most travelled members of the editorial department – they watched test matches in England, always went to Wimbledon, turned up at golf tournaments in America and elsewhere. They followed the Sheffield Shield competition around Australia. There was a sports desk on the editorial floor led by the sports editor supervising a team of sub-editors with specialist writers sitting close by (when they were not travelling somewhere). It helped that sport was one of Graham Perkin’s passions. David Austin, sports editor for much of the Perkin era once said that Graham was the Editor of the Age from the front page to the back page. ‘No matter how important the stories on Page 1 there was always room for a sports story there if it was good enough,’ he said.6 ‘Like every golfer he wanted to be a good one’, Austin added. ‘Like most, he wasn’t’. Perkin was an avid cricket follower and a passionate Melbourne Football Club supporter during the football season. His boss, Ranald Macdonald, was an equally passionate Collingwood supporter and that club’s president for four years in the 1980s. 38

One of Perkin’s earliest staffing priorities was settled with his hiring of the political cartoonist Tanner in 1967. This might have been the best recruiting decision he ever made as Editor. Tanner – full name Leslie Mervyn Tanner – was the first of what can be described as a classy stable of cartoonists who would be accommodated at the Age. Tandberg the pocket cartoonist came next and in the years that followed they were joined by John Spooner, Peter Nicholson, Bruce Petty and Michael Leunig. Before joining the Age Tanner had worked for the Sydney Bulletin where his cartoon of Victorian Premier Henry Bolte angered the magazine’s proprietor Frank Packer so much that he pulped virtually an entire edition. Tanner was a ‘good bloke’ around the editorial floor of the Age, friendly, mischievious, cantankerous sometimes, invariably generous with his time and prodigious talent. Perkin had lured him to Melbourne from Sydney and given him free rein. In turn Tanner became a leader in the renaissance of Australian black and white art and for many, the social conscience of the Age.7 Tanner turned out to have a second prodigious talent – as a columnist with an eye for the amusing and the mordant. We loved him. Perkin certainly did. Ron Tandberg once said that when he began at the Age in the early 1970s he was stunned by the intensity and dedication of his new colleagues. His work in the newspaper of the Victorian Secondary Teachers Association had been spotted by an Age education reporter and soon he was being offered a trial as a pocket cartoonist on the story of the day. Tandberg reinvented the single column pocket cartoon. Mike Smith, a cadet in the Perkin era and later editor of the paper believes Tandberg created them better than anyone before or since. By this time I had left Melbourne but apparently Tandberg was one of the few people in the office under 40 not intimidated by Perkin’s considerable presence. Mike Smith again: ‘He would challenge Perkin, push boundaries, tease and stick up for his gag … but when rebuffed would accept it, grumble a bit, dust himself off and come back with something else.’8 In 2017, shortly before he died, Tandberg dedicated his last book, A Year of Madness, to Graham Perkin and Creighton Burns. As he explained: Their influence, guidance and kindness in my early years were of immeasurable benefit to me as a cartoonist and as a person. 39

The change of editor also ushered in a new era in the visual presentation of the Age and the encouragement and recognition of its photographers. Perkin would use a picture ‘big’ if the occasion warranted it, sometimes spreading a single image across a full half-page of the broadsheet. He supported the people in pictorial, as we called the picture department in those days, and took a great deal of interest in their work. In turn they respected him and appreciated the attention. One of the Editor’s early innovations was the introduction of by-lines to identify photographers’ outstanding pictures. He was always looking for exceptional local pictures for Page 1. There were many high-quality photographers on Graham Perkin’s Age. I remember Neville Bowler fondly and we did a few country jobs together; Neville driving very fast indeed. He had a charming, persuasive way about him, useful attributes for a press photographer. As a rule he didn’t bother with names, relying on ‘Pal’ for males and ‘Princess’ for females. Then there was the lanky Arthur De La Rue, formerly a plain-clothes police photographer. Two of the Age photographers, Bruce Postle and John Lamb, were fiercely competitive between themselves and ended up at the very top of their craft. They were vastly different characters, Bruce gregarious, confident, a risk taker; and John (Johnny) quieter, probably more reflective, very tenacious. Lamb was the former office boy whose attire had offended Miss Syme when he was a teenager. Despite that episode he had managed to get a cadetship in the pictorial department. Postle, yet another Queenslander on the staff, was recruited by Greg Taylor and arrived at the Age early in 1969. With him on the plane to Melbourne was Peter McFarline, another recruit, who would become a much-admired sports columnist. Postle was the son of a press photographer and had started on the weekly Queensland Country Life before joining the Courier Mail. One of the photographer’s tasks back then was to drive reporters around when they were on assignment. Bruce was the only photographer I knew who was driven around by reporters at the start of his career. He was too young to have a driver’s licence. On his first day at the Age Postle took a football training picture at Essendon 40

which ended up on Page 1 the next morning. The Editor, well pleased with his latest recruit, slipped him an envelope with $50 in it. That was quite a lot of money in 1969. Long after Perkin was gone John Lamb recalled9 his rivalry with Postle: When Bruce came to the Age and I was the No.1 photographer, it was pretty competitive. I’ d have the front page and knock him off and the next day he’ d knock me off and he’ d have the front page. But then we started to look at one another’s photography and we started to respect one another. We both realised that we were pushing each other along. A book celebrating the work of both of them – Images of Our Time: 30 Years of News Photographs – was published in 1985 and updated four years later. Since then a range of books featuring the work of Bruce Postle has been published. Staff photographers went on overseas assignments to places like New Guinea, New Zealand and South Vietnam. Pictorial editor Ray Blackbourn always reckoned his ‘junket’ (that’s what envious colleagues called it) was the best ever provided by the Age. As part of the newspaper’s sponsorship of new Round the World tours Blackbourn and journalist Ted Cavey circled the globe, first-class, on a trip that took six weeks. They called into many of the great cities, London, New York, Rome, Athens and others, filing picture stories from each of them. One of the most noticeable changes as the Age grew in authority and circulation was its focus on under-reported and neglected areas. Perkin knew, for example, that the environment was emerging as a major community concern. So John Messer, another Queensland import, was assigned to this area full-time. Coverage of the arts and education – primary, secondary and tertiary – was beefed up. Business Age set up by Les Carlyon and his team provided an unequalled package of news and analysis of finance, business and management. The story of Vince Basile is a striking illustration of the kind of change that took place. Vince, an Italian with no experience reporting news stories 41

in English, had been hired by Perkin shortly before he became editor. Jack Darmody had pressed his case for a job after Basile provided revealing background stories to Italian language newspapers about a series of mafiastyle murders in Melbourne. Darmody, then chief police reporter for the Age figured if Vince got a job there he (Darmody) would never be scooped on a mafia crime story. Basile got a job and within months was the de facto ethnic affairs reporter. His stories from the Italian, Greek, Yugoslav and other ethnic communities were often exclusives. The Age was now reporting and interpreting these communities and their customs and cultures which had previously been largely ignored. Basile believed that in 1966 he was the first reporter whose mother tongue was not English on the staff of a major metropolitan daily in Australia. For a while he was a lonely, but not unhappy, figure. Then the Sun News-Pictorial hired Joe Rollo and the Australian gave Pino Bosi a job in Sydney. It was not until 1972 and the arrival of the Whitlam Labor government that issues such as integration and multi-culturalism took centre stage in Canberra; that social policies were enthusiastically rolled out, advancing a diverse, vibrant and cosmopolitan Australia. When I asked Vince about these changes he told me: ‘All this Perkin had perceived and advocated well before the Whitlam social revolution. Graham was a pioneer in the creation of an Australian society like the one we enjoy today.’ Vince Basile was on the staff of the Age from 1966 until 1982. When he joined he had left behind a life as an art teacher in training at the Prahran Institute of Technology, now part of Swinburne University. After Graham Perkin died Vince sculpted a bust of the man who brought him into journalism, and presented it to the Age. With all its new energy and confidence the Age quickly developed what might be called ‘a big story temperament.’ The paper would pour unprecedented resources into an emerging big story, reporters and photographers, columns of extra space and plenty of promotion. The Tasmanian fires in February 1967 were the first event to attract such a response from the Age. Eight or nine reporters and photographers flew to Hobart to cover this natural disaster which claimed more than 60 lives. 42

They were the most deadly bushfires the state had ever experienced with scores of fires sweeping through about 2,600 square kilometres of southern Tasmania in a few desperate hours. Whole communities were wiped out, thousands were left homeless and damage was estimated at $40 million in 1967 terms. Fires even roared into the suburbs of Hobart. John Hamilton was one of the big Age team on that story and he won a coveted Walkley Award for his coverage of the destruction of the township of Snug. Walkleys, as they are known, recognise and reward excellence in Australian journalism. The accompanying citation described Hamilton’s work as ‘the best piece of reporting in Australia in 1967.’ The Burning of Snug began: By John Hamilton The town of Snug met death bravely yesterday afternoon. The holiday visitors who came to this little town on the seaside, 19 miles from the heart of Hobart, used to write on their postcards that they were ‘snug as a bug at Snug.’ The town had been the butt of jokes like these ever since a sea captain, 100 years or so ago, anchored in the little bay with six sick sailors aboard his ship. The sailors recovered in the restful surroundings and the captain called the place Snug. But yesterday, all hell broke loose in Snug. While the fires were still burning Graham Perkin briefed Roger Aldridge and me on a special assignment. We were to go to Tasmania, leave the day-to-day story to colleagues already there and conduct a major investigation into Why Hobart Burned. Our 2,500-word report10 on the origins of those terrible fires was published the following week. It noted instances of raw human courage, selflessness and first-class generalship which had saved scores of lives and hundreds of homes. But it concluded: To the extent that climatic and geographic conditions combined to make Hobart a fire trap Black Tuesday must be considered 43

a natural disaster. But there is no question that a number of precautionary measures which should have been taken were not. Clearly an apathy towards fire has built up in Tasmania over the years. And this, tragically, was a major ingredient in the set of circumstances culminating in the Black Tuesday holocaust. Although our investigation did not carry the Insight name, Why Hobart Burned was exactly the sort of journalism that the Insight team would undertake when it was established later in the year. Roger and I never worked together on a major story again. This gifted writer left the newspaper in 1975 to build and rebuild things, such as an old mill at Malmsbury in Victoria, before eventually settling in Tasmania. He left behind an impressive body of work from his 15 or so years at the Age. A generous and insightful obituary11 published at the end of 2017 was headed, appropriately: Writer shone in paper’s golden years. Massive resources were also directed at the other huge story of 1967 – the disappearance of Prime Minister Harold Holt while swimming. Despite an enormous land, sea and air search around Cheviot beach, near Portsea, the body of the PM was never found. A memorial service in Melbourne several days later was attended by national and international figures, including President Lyndon Johnson who returned to Australia to honour a man he had liked and admired. For his report on the occasion John Hamilton won a second Walkley award. That made two in a row, oddly enough both of them for work done in the same year. ‘Vale’ Harold Holt began: By John Hamilton We were the people who came to mourn. Not the Presidents and the Prime Ministers and the Ambassadors in their big, black, shiny cars. Not the security men with their walkie-talkie sets and their binoculars. Not the motor cycle escorts or the mounted police on their grey horses. But the general public. We came to 44

the city by tram or by train or by car. We came in our mini skirts and our business suits, in sombre black or dresses that glowed in the summer sunshine. A proud managing director, Ranald Macdonald, told his board when it met shortly after, that the Age of Monday, 18 December 1967 was widely considered to have the best coverage in Australia of the Holt drama. Of course he would say that. But he was right. It was certainly true that Rupert Murdoch’s new national daily the Australian had made metropolitan newspapers sit up and take notice. But it was Graham Perkin’s Age that actually broke the old established mould of the industry. Its bold and more comprehensive approach to the big stories was one factor. Another would be its commitment to a new type and style of investigative reporting. One that would bring a new dimension to Australian journalism. Establishing the expensive but game-changing Insight reporting team had been an early priority of the new editor and he took personal charge of it. Perkin’s initiative, the first of its kind in Australian newspapers, was explained to readers on page 1 of the Age on Saturday morning, 14 April 1967: Several members of The Age editorial staff have been detached from normal daily responsibilities to form the Insight team. The Insight team has been given time to research, time to assemble, discuss and write information that may be obscured by tomorrow’s news. It will deal with news which has not been reported, which has been inadequately reported, news which for any reason has not been brought to public attention with the emphasis it deserves. On the other side of the world the Sunday Times in London had ‘invented’ an Insight team in the early 1960s. It was boosted in 1967 by the arrival of Harold (Harry) Evans as Editor of the paper. He was 37 45

years old and would be a legendary figure in Fleet Street long before he moved on 14 years later to edit the Times where he would famously fall out with its proprietor Rupert Murdoch. Sensational Insight reports in the .

Sunday Times such as the Thalidomide scandal and Israel’s development of a nuclear bomb powerfully reinforced the reputation and identity of Evans’ newspaper. In Australia – admittedly dealing with less dramatic, yet important, domestic issues – the Insight stories did the same for the Age. Harry Evans understood, probably better than anyone, that team journalism was difficult to manage. But he had no doubt that it facilitated the best investigative journalism. A close personal and professional bond developed between Evans and Perkin and one of the tangible benefits for the Age was its acquisition of Australian rights to Sunday Times material. Years later Harry would say of his friend: ‘He certainly made an impact on me. It is not right to say he came into my life. He erupted into it – warm, boisterous, gregarious.’12 When Graham died Harry Evans delivered the eulogy at the London memorial service for him in St Bride’s church, Fleet Street. The original Insight team at the Age comprised John Larkin and myself. Our first report using the Insight name and a hastily assembled dinkus to anchor it, outlined the greatest industrial development in Victoria’s history soon to be announced for Westernport Bay. This new complex would include an oil refinery, a fertiliser plant, a steel works and new port facilities. It had all been a remarkably well-kept secret. Larkin and I were friends who had started in newspapers as cadet journalists on the Brisbane Telegraph in the late 1950s. Our pairing on Insight was an experiment by Graham Perkin but it soon became clear we were well suited for the task he wanted done. Larkin and I seemed to complement each other, support each other when the going got rough. Perhaps most importantly we respected each other, a sentiment that prevails to this day. Years later John told me: ‘not once can I recall our having a disagreeable moment.’ Larkin, in particular, also brought a strong sense of social justice to our small team. We both appreciated what a unique opportunity we had been given. Not only did we get along well we both shared a sense of the 46

absurd and a liking for Macquarie Port, two quite useful tools in this kind of work. Larkin was fascinated by the New Journalism of Norman Mailer, Hunter S.Thompson (both of whom he later interviewed) and Tom Wolfe. My particular interest, then and now, was Evelyn Waugh. When it came to motoring our interests also diverged wildly, Larkin with his Triumph TR3A, me with a second-hand VW. Although I began my cadetship on the Telegraph I left after a year for a brief (and entertaining) introduction to the infantry as a National Service conscript. From there I joined the ABC news service in Queensland to complete my journalism training. The ABC was a demanding task master but much more genteel than the Telegraph where Larkin completed the full four-year cadetship. His was a hot-house, but effective, training environment and when he moved south he found the change immediate and profound. More than 50 years later he recalled: ‘After I arrived at the Age I could hardly believe the considerate, civilised way people spoke to each other; the atmosphere in the reporters’ room of being calm, yet so alive and productive.’ The Insight job was done without the assistance of Google, emails, mobile phones or Trove, that magic on-line data base aggregator developed by the Australian National Library. This was the 1960s after all. In their absence we rifled through files, cuttings and reports, expended a great deal of shoe leather, went out and talked to a lot of people. A wide-ranging collection of Insight reports appeared in the months that followed the Westernport development story. There was a three-part examination of Australia’s foreign aid program, an investigation in which the team was expanded to include John Jost. Others ranged from the largely unreported spread of venereal diseases in Victoria to an examination of facts and fallacies surrounding suicide in the state. Reporter Rolf Lie joined us for a three-part inquiry into the renewal of Melbourne’s inner city area; and John Bednall was a member of the team which examined radical local government reorganisation proposals. My personal favourite was our twopart analysis of the emerging role and influence of public relations in the Australian community. The Age called it The world of the image makers. 47

After I moved on (to the Age Canberra bureau) Larkin was joined by Geoff Barker and they wrote the first Insight book, The Holt Report, after the Prime Minister was drowned. In 1968 Larkin was awarded a 12-month World Press Institute fellowship to study, work and travel in the United States. But it was Ben Hills in the 1970s who would lead a revamped Insight to its greatest heights and influence. I had not seen Ben since we both left Brisbane in the early 1960s and our paths crossed again covering the Tasmanian fires. Ben was a reporter on The Mercury in Hobart and prompted by me after our reunion applied for a job at the Age. During a visit to Victoria to meet Graham Perkin he was staying with Jackie and me at a beach house on the Mornington Peninsula when Harold Holt went missing not far away. Ben joined the Age the following year. Once on the staff he adopted a modus operandi that served him and the paper remarkably well. Although rostered on at 2pm – like most general reporters – he would appear in the office three or four hours earlier and sit around reading anything he could get his hands on. If a big story broke, or developed in some way during that time, it was Ben who was available, briefed and on his way before most senior reporters had arrived at the office. Insight was re-energised in the early 1970s after Hills was sent to the UK to look at the Sunday Times product and approach. I was in London then and still have a telex message from the Editor advising: Joy is Yours. Ben Hills arrives London September 23 and asking me to book him into a suitable hotel. On Hills’ return to Melbourne, a note to Age executives from the Editor outlined a more formal ‘position description’ than had been the case for Insight previously. Perkin told them he proposed to use (1) Ben Hills (2) David English and (3) a rotating cadet (the memo actually said that); the cadet for the time being would be Lindsey Arkley. The functions of the team would be ‘pretty much the same’ as in the past except that: It will be permanent and full-time. It will combine investigatory journalism and definitive background on topics such as the new 48

health scheme. We will aim at a frequency of about once a week. We will not be dismayed by travel costs and will send the team if a story justifies it. With its new lease of life Insight set out on what would prove to be its best work so far, including the ‘land deals’ scandal which cut down several tall poppies and lasted for the best part of 10 years. Hills developed into Australia’s best known (and most feared) investigative reporter of that era – a talented and difficult man. Ben died while this memoir was being written and one obituary13 caught him perfectly. Hills, it said, was a complex dilemma of a human being, oscillating between irascible, opinionated and cantankerous to erudite, funny, warm and occasionally, incredibly generous. Ben and I were friends of a sort for the best part of 60 years which is why I can confirm that judgement without hesitation. Even the generosity reference. We were in London together in 1976 and I was helpful to him in some small way. He responded by presenting me with a very expensive bowler hat. Long after his Insight days Hills came to the view that David and Ebenezer Syme, rather than Graham Perkin a century later, could fairly be called the fathers of investigative journalism in Australia. In his biography of Perkin he pointed to the reputation of the Age in the 1860s as a campaigner against corruption and incompetence in government; and to its exposes such as a devastating account of the exploitation of workers in Melbourne’s clothing industry. My own Insight involvement had ended suddenly towards the end of 1967 when an unexpected vacancy occurred in the paper’s Canberra bureau. It was offered to me and a few days later I left Melbourne. Jackie, expecting our first child a few months later, would (as they say) pack and follow. At that time the Age Canberra bureau was one of many serving newspapers and broadcasters from a rabbit warren of offices in what is now the ‘old’ Parliament House. The vacancy had occurred when Robert Macklin, yet another Queenslander, resigned to become press secretary for the Deputy Prime Minister John McEwen. 49

Canberra was an easy yet stimulating place to live in the late 1960s. The population was about 100,000. Fifty years later it would be more than 400,000. The company owned a number of properties including a small apartment where Jackie and I first lived, in Dominion Circuit near the fashionable Manuka shopping precinct. After our daughter, Sarah, was born the Age rented us a house in nearby Red Hill. When working on the 2–11pm shift it was still possible in those days to drive home for dinner and on return to the press gallery park pretty much right outside Parliament House. In just about every case access to embassies for national day and other social functions was within easy parking range. The Age head of bureau and chief political correspondent, Allan Barnes, had only arrived in Canberra himself in mid-1967. He replaced John Bennetts, who had been chief political correspondent for the paper since 1960. After leaving the Age and journalism Bennetts worked in a number of intelligence roles and was ultimately head of current intelligence for the newly formed Office of National Assessments (ONA). I can’t recall ever having a conversation with him. Allan Barnes was a terrific bloke to work for, always ready to help and never pinching a story off you just because he was in charge and he could. Allan was a man of great charm and exceptional talent and a popular figure in the press gallery. Ben Hill’s description of him as ‘a lean, leathery, knock about kind of guy’ was spot on. Someone else thought he was a Bluey and Curley sort of figure, certainly a pleasing image for anyone who remembers Alex Gurney’s much-loved Australian comic strip characters. Barnes was one of the new editor’s ‘surprise appointments’ because his Canberra job was his first major exposure to Federal politics. Barnes was 33 when he was poached from The Daily Telegraph in Sydney where he was a gossip columnist. But he had also worked in London and New York and was another one of those calm and capable journalists who could do just about anything. In the tumultuous political times ahead this gifted reporter established himself as one of Australia’s best informed and most impartial political commentators. Tumultuous times indeed. During those Perkin years, 1966–1975, Australia had five Prime Ministers: Harold Holt, John 50

McEwen (briefly), John Gorton, William McMahon and Gough Whitlam. If the Perkin era had lasted just a little longer that number would have been six, after the election of Malcolm Fraser. The highlights would be the arrival of the Whitlam Labor government in 1972 supported by the Age; and the defeat of the second Whitlam government in 1975, which was called for by the Age. The drama of the Whitlam era was still years away in 1967 but the Age editorial line – not its political reporting – was becoming more sympathetic to the Australian Labor Party. There is a view that the Perkin editorship probably coincided with a peak in the political importance of the Canberra press gallery. I don’t know about that. But I do remember being in awe of veterans like Alan Reid (aka The Red Fox) and having great respect for men (they were just about all men in the gallery) like E.H. Cox, Max Walsh, Ian Fitchett and, of course, Allan Barnes. One of the most companionable was Jack Fingleton, the famous Test cricket opening batsman who had convinced Prime Minister Robert Menzies to institute an annual cricket match in Canberra between the PM’s XI and the Press Gallery. Jack wrote for newspapers in the UK, South Africa and India. Another Canberra figure who made a lasting impression on me was not a member of the press gallery but the US ambassador in the late 1960s. His name was Bill Crook and a few of us from the press gallery would sometimes drop into the embassy residence after work talking long into the night while enjoying Bill’s hospitality. William H. Crook was quite a remarkable man: intensely patriotic, deeply spiritual, famously considerate and generous, invariably optimistic about the resilience of the USA. In those days the US embassy had its own plane in Canberra and Bill was constantly criss-crossing our country as the representative of his. Early in 1969 I flew on that aircraft with Bill and his wife Eleanor to Norfolk Island. During our stay the ambassador took steps to see that evidence of the American influence on the island – the graves of US sailors and whalers – was restored, recorded and preserved. This was a personal gesture at his own expense. Years later I was the guest of the Crooks at their home in San Marcos, Texas on the occasion of America’s 200th birthday, 4 July 1976. 51

My principal areas of responsibility for the Age bureau were immigration and trade, both of them very lively in the late 1960s. Under Immigration Minister Billy Snedden Australia was about to embark on its most ambitious and costly immigration program. The target (this was 50 years ago) was 157,000 new settlers. But Allan Barnes was also happy to indulge, indeed he encouraged, my interest in Africa resulting in quite a few stories on Canberra’s relations – or lack of them – with Rhodesia (as was) and South Africa. But for me the most memorable was the visit to our national capital of the 225th monarch of the dynasty established by King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. This was His Imperial Highness, Haile Selassie, the last emperor in the 3,000-year-old Ethiopian monarchy. Top people from the Governor General, Lord Casey, down, greeted him when he arrived in Canberra, both parties decked out in formal attire. The Royal Australian Navy even stretched the rule book to provide an after-sunset honour guard. The royal visitor was the first emperor to visit this country and only the second African head of state. What was His Imperial Highness doing in Australia? The frail and bearded emperor had come simply because he ‘wanted to see the fifth continent.’ His interest was first sparked by Australians who helped him recover Ethiopia from the Italians back in 1941. Accompanying the emperor at the start of a five-day visit to Australia was an official suite of 16. But Lu Lu, the tiny dog that went just about everywhere with the emperor did not make the trip. Our strict quarantine regulations meant that Lu Lu had to stay behind at his (sic) royal master’s previous stop-over, Jakarta. All stops were pulled out a day later when the Prime Minister John Gorton gave the visitor a parliamentary lunch which was also attended by the Federal Opposition leader, Gough Whitlam. In remarks translated from Amharic the guest of honour surprised many present by making a vigorous attack on Rhodesia and South Africa, prompting some ministers present to (privately) describe them as ‘rather un-diplomatic’. I suppose they were but what a magnificent occasion it was. Haile Selassie was deposed by a military coup in 1974 and died in a small apartment in his former palace a year later. He was 83. 52

Above

Well met in 1965. The author (left), John Hamilton and Tim Graham Left

John Larkin, foundation member of the Insight team at the Age

Left

John Dickie, one of many Queenslanders at the Age in the Perkin years. Later he was Commonwealth Chief Censor Below

Cartoonist Les Tanner. Courtesy the artist June Mendoza. Picture held at the State Library of Victoria

Left

Chief political correspondent Allan Barnes (with trademark cigarette) in conversation with Senator Brian Harradine. Picture courtesy Fairfax Media Below

Memorable lunch for Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia

Roles reversed: Photographer Bruce Postle of the Age pictured during the Brisbane floods of 1974. Copyright George Lipman

Melbourne moratorium crowd 1970, viewed from the top of the Manchester Unity building. Copyright Bruce Postle

Left

Vince Basile – reporter and artist Below

Bust of Graham Perkin by Vince Basile

Left

US ambassador Bill Crook in Canberra, 1969 Below

News executives and subeditors in the days (nights actually) before copy paper, glue, pens and type-books were replaced by editing terminals. Graham Perkin is at the top of the desk (referred to as the back bench) on the far left of the picture. Standing alongside him is Ron Lovett, pictorial editor. The author (shirt sleeves and vest) is at the other end of the back bench

It was in Canberra that I met Creighton Burns who would play such a critical role in the resuscitation and transformation of the Age. Like Barnes, Creighton had also been a ‘surprise appointment’, albeit one made by the previous editor. When I met him he had recently completed his first posting for the paper as Singapore-based South East Asia correspondent and was now Melbourne-based Diplomatic and Defence correspondent. His brief as South East Asia correspondent had been to report and interpret events in a vast ‘parish’ (his word) that included India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. The last of the legendary newspaper correspondents in Asia were still around in those days: people like Clare Hollingworth, the swash-buckling Donald Wise and the Australians Denis Warner and Dick Hughes. (Wise was one of the first foreign correspondents I met in East Africa – a very tall Englishman with a military bearing, always dressed in a pink shirt and bow tie.) Burns knew them, worked with them and revelled in their company. In the current era of the 24-hour news cycle, instant communications and mobile devices of various kinds we will not be seeing their like again. Creighton’s new job meant he was a regular visitor to Canberra. Before long he would be assistant editor and then associate editor of the Age. Burns had joined the Perkin team with the most impressive CV of anyone on the editorial staff, a rich mix of the practical and the academic, a published author and a respected foreign correspondent. Our colleague Peter ColeAdams always said he possessed the qualities of a natural reporter: curiosity, courage and an ability to get along with others. There was wide agreement that Burns was a class act in the rough and tumble world of newspapers; a ‘knock-about Rhodes scholar.’ Creighton had spent more than three years at sea during World War  II, a seaman in the cruiser HMAS Australia, the corvette Warrnambool and the destroyer Nepal. He said the navy itself had been an education and the fact that he survived the war entitled him to another education. That had been ‘where it all really started for me.’ After the navy, Creighton’s civilian trajectory took him to Melbourne University, to Oxford where he studied on a Rhodes Scholarship at Balliol and Nuffield, then home 53

to Australia where he became Reader in Politics at Melbourne University. Then, at the age of 39, he left university life for journalism. Actually it was to return to journalism. Creighton had been a cadet reporter at the Sun News-Pictorial in Melbourne before joining the navy soon after his 17th birthday. Two able executives had the Editor’s ‘back’ as the Age gathered momentum and circulation: Greg Taylor on the production and newsgathering front; Creighton Burns with the intellectual equipment and the political and diplomatic connections. Cole-Adams, who observed Burns at the daily leader conference, said Creighton had given Graham a kind of crash course in political philosophy. Throughout all the excitement and renewal of the Perkin years two major stories dominated the news and feature pages of the Age – the war in Vietnam and the rise to power of the Whitlam government in Canberra. Burns as leader writer, correspondent, columnist and advisor to his editor was intimately associated with both of them. After his return to Melbourne he continued to visit Vietnam regularly and it was while he was there in September 1968 that we shared Page 1 of the Age. Burns was in Saigon and I was in Lagos, Nigeria. After I arranged to visit South Africa to do some travel stories the Editor readily agreed I should also fly up to Lagos and have a look at the long-running Nigerian civil war. A few years earlier I had lived in the beauty and order of colonial East Africa and in recent times in the planned and pristine national capital of Australia. Neither had prepared me for the over-crowded, steaming hot, chaotic Nigerian capital. It was no surprise to learn that the Australian High Commission estimated there were only 10 or 11 of our countrymen living in Nigeria then. Lagos was the first (and last) place where I ever filed any copy by cable. There was no other way. The Age opened its feature pages to dispatches from Nigeria but the one that sticks in my mind was a story about a local four letter word, WAWA. In those days it stood for West Africa Wins Again and it summed up the frustration and resignation involved in trying to get just about anything done in that part of the world. Everyone had a horror story, particularly aid workers. That said, it turned out that what happened to Ken Whiting, 54

a visiting Associated Press (AP) correspondent, was not a case of WAWA after all. There were two recommended places to stay in Lagos and one of them was the Federal Palace hotel. Whiting checked into his room there, found there was no local phonebook, called up the front desk to get one and then took a shower. When he emerged from the bathroom 10 minutes later his room was empty. All his personal effects were gone. Alarmed and agitated he called the front desk again, only to be told: ‘Everything is good Mr Whiting. We have moved you to a room with a phone-book in it.’ There was a shortage of local phone books at that time. The few available were chained to the wall of most, but not all, hotel rooms. The other recommended hotel was the Bristol. I was staying there, one of only two diners in the vast breakfast room, when I met Martin Page. Our friendship would last for the next 35 years on three continents. His fellow correspondent Ronald (Ronnie) Payne said of Martin: With his large frame always conspicuously present at trouble spots around the globe Martin Page was admired as one of the sharpest pens among the post war generation of writers who made the Daily Express a great newspaper. By the time we met failing eyesight had forced him to quit the foreign correspondent life. He was in Nigeria doing a freelance job, questioning the performance of the Red Cross as I recall, for one of Britain’s Sunday papers. Martin was amusing company, his bluff manner concealing an inquiring mind always fizzing with ideas. He also wrote many well-received books, the most significant, The First Global Village: How Portugal Changed the World. This was first published in 2002 and continues to enjoy commercial success in many languages, around the world. The only other correspondent I remember clearly from Nigeria was even wetter behind the ears than I was. Nick Lloyd, however, was destined to become a Fleet Street editor and Sir Nicholas Lloyd. A few months later Martin turned up in Canberra at the end of a sweep through the Pacific writing a series for the New Statesman. Would I gather Australian songs from World War II for a book he was planning? Of course I would. Letters to papers around the country attracted 200 replies 55

and many bawdy contributions. Like so many of Martin’s bright ideas Kiss Me Goodnight Sergeant Major: The songs and ballads of World War 2 was well received. The introduction was written by 954024 Gunner Milligan, Spike. Publicity around a ban on the book in the canteens and other premises of the NAAFI (the Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes) also helped sales. Two separate incidents in 1968 took the lives of five Australian reporters going about their work near Melbourne and in Saigon, South Vietnam. Early that year one of the most promising young journalists of our generation – he may have been the most promising – was killed in an oil rig accident in Bass Strait. His name was Hugh Curnow and at 31 he was only a few years older than John Larkin and me when we knew him as a columnist on the Telegraph in Brisbane. Hugh had worked in Fleet Street on the Daily Mirror but returned home to Australia and when he died was working for the Daily Telegraph in Sydney. Peter Bourke, 19, from the Sun News-Pictorial in Melbourne was also killed. Among the others injured when a helicopter crash landed on the oil rig was Alan Lambert, an Age photographer who recovered and returned to work. There was worse to come a few months later. Three Australian journalists, news agency correspondents Bruce Pigott and Michael Birch and John Cantwell of Time-Life were ambushed and killed in South Vietnam. Much later, at the end of 1975, reporter Roger East and the TV newsmen known since as ‘the Balibo Five’ were killed (executed) while working in East Timor. In the late 1960s there were always four or five Age staff in the Canberra press gallery. Hugh Armfield was Allan Barnes’ deputy. Another was John Jost, the former cadet who had been hired by Keith Sinclair once it was established he was not a communist. John was best man at my wedding to Jackie in 1966. By the end of the Perkin era he was chief political correspondent of the newspaper. After leaving the Age Jost chalked up an eclectic range of professional achievements. Possibly the best writing he ever did was for the National Times but he also wrote two novels, a play and hosted a national TV current affairs show. Before starting a business career he was Australian editor of Playboy magazine. Another high-flyer from those days was Michael Richardson who joined the Age fresh from 56

studying in the UK and spent some time in Canberra before becoming South East Asia correspondent in Singapore. After that he worked in Asia for a long time for the now defunct International Herald Tribune but in the years since I have lost track of him. Readers will have noticed that the Age in this early Perkin period was essentially an all-male institution. Nothing unusual about that in those days. It was more than 50 years ago. Miss Syme in her command post at the Age building could be regarded as a special case. (The Editor had been shocked when Jackie and I returned to Melbourne in May 1969 and I told him we had taken an apartment in a block called Sheridan Close on St Kilda Road. ‘Jesus chap’, he said, ‘You can’t live there. That’s where Miss Syme lives.’ We moved in anyway and Miss Syme turned out to be a good neighbour. She took a particular interest in Sarah who was about 18 months old at the time. In that whole block she was the only small child.) Apart from Miss Syme there were just a handful of women reporters and cadets plus Nancy Dexter and Mary Craig. There were no women executives in the editorial department and none in the general management. Nor were there any women in the paper’s foreign posts, the Canberra bureau or the Sydney editorial office. It is true there were two highly effective, indeed powerful, women in the Editor’s office: Pat Lawson (Moneypenny) Graham’s first secretary; and Kathy Duffy who replaced her in 1971 and was later assistant to the Editor. In this overwhelmingly male environment Nancy Dexter and Mary Craig punched well above their weight (as you could say in those days). Nancy started writing her column Nancy Dexter Takes Note in 1967 venturing into what were new issues for our newspaper, and others around the country: abortion law reform was one, equal pay another. From 1972 she edited the Accent pages of the Age. On the reporting staff the most high profile – and flamboyant – female journalist by the mid Perkin years was Mary Craig the fashion editor. I can still see this tall, striking young woman striding around the newsroom in a big hat, sometimes with a small dog under her arm or peeping out of a bag she was carrying. Mary helped me out one or twice with my Christmas shopping although I recall 57

something she selected called a watusi bonnet did not go down as well at home as either of us had anticipated. Graham Perkin sent Mary to cover fashion shows in London and Paris, probably a first for an Australian daily. In fact the Editor was quite knowledgeable about fashion, an interest which came as a surprise to a few of us. Pat Lawson told me her boss loved design and fashion, bought all his wife’s clothes (Peg Perkin was a former model) and at Christmas distributed carefully chosen presents to the secretarial staff, usually gifts from the iconic Georges department store on Collins Street. Kathy Duffy said Graham had the rare ability (for a man) to buy just the right gift for women. In fact her most treasured possession is a distinctive chunky designer ring her boss brought back from New York for her. The Editor himself always seemed to be smartly turned out, hardly the natural order of things around a newspaper office in the 1960s. His suits were often doublebreasted, the brogues polished and the shirts long-sleeved, although rolled to the elbow as soon as took his coat off and got on with his work. When he became assistant editor in the late 1960s Creighton Burns encouraged the recruitment of several young women journalists who proved to be high achievers; in one case an extremely high achiever. Burns was much more aware than his editor of the rapid growth and influence of the women’s liberation movement in Australia. His university connections would have helped inform his views and Germaine Greer’s best seller The Female Eunuch provided a huge boost (and a significant framework) for the women’s movement in the 1970s. The first of the young female recruits was Iola Hack who joined the staff in 1969. She was a graduate who had been living abroad and was hired as what we used to call a mature age cadet. In 1972 Iola and Sally White were two of the women who established the Women’s Electoral Lobby (WEL) in Melbourne. The founders agreed that Australian voters, male and female, suffered a grave shortage of information about the individuals who sought their votes. Issues of importance to women – half the voting population – had been ignored as disproportionate numbers of men were voted into office. Sally had joined the Age in 1971 after working for the short-lived Newsday, and in television. In the future 58

she would work on a major campaign undertaken by the Age called the Minus Children and would become Arts editor of the paper. Jennifer Byrne, recruited as a 16-year-old cadet, would achieve national prominence in both publishing and television. The extremely high achiever was Michelle Grattan who joined the staff in 1970, went to Canberra the following year and in 1976 was appointed chief political correspondent. Later she was editor of the Canberra Times – the first woman to edit a metropolitan daily in Australia – and today (2018) is still reporting national politics for various outlets, undertaking university research and writing books. From the day she arrived in the newsroom Michelle was an intense, restless figure, hungry to learn everything she could as a new (never a junior) reporter who until then had been a politics tutor at Monash University. ‘Tell me this, comrade,’ she would ask. Behind her heavy black spectacles you could be sure she was taking it all in. Michelle was, and probably still is, a workaholic. Many years after Perkin was gone I asked her if she ever took a day off. Not really, was the answer. But she did keep a horse near Canberra and used to ride for an hour or two some Sunday mornings. Graham Perkin had been raised in a strict Methodist household and remained a church-goer till the end of his life. Until the pressure of his Age duties made it impossible he was also a member of the management committee of the Methodist newspaper New Spectator. After his death a church minister who knew him well said Perkin had put into action what the church had preached for so long: that a Christian’s place was primarily in the world. To those who were aware of his background our new editor presented as something of a paradox. He drank, smoked heavily (the unfiltered Camel was his cigarette of choice) and swore under pressure. But Pat Lawson, who worked so closely with him in the early years, said he would never drink in the presence of his parents and always spoke of them with great respect and affection. He was not interested in gambling, horse racing or the theatre. That said he realised the importance of expert racing coverage in the Age; and when he appointed Len Radic as theatre critic he had only two instructions: Call the shots as you see them. Stay till the 59

end. Radic certainly stayed till the end. His ‘famously balanced’ reviews appeared in the paper for just on 30 years. As a newcomer to Melbourne I often heard about ‘the anti-Catholic bias’ of the Age, though I never saw any evidence of it myself. There had obviously been a history, notably on the recruitment front. One memorable Friday night I was party to a telephone conversation about this very issue. The Catholic Bishop of Sale, Arthur Fox, had obviously referred to it and Graham, in very good humour and seated out at the news desk responded: ‘Let me assure you there is no such bias. In fact the three key executives with me tonight are members of your faith.’ Bishop Fox must have fallen silent on hearing this news. The call ended. That night ‘the three key executives’ on duty with Graham were John Stevens, acting as night editor, Clive Malseed acting as chief sub-editor and me filling in as news editor. My subsequent exchange with the Editor went like this: Me: ‘What was that members of your faith business about Graham?’ Him: ‘Well, John Stevens is married to a good Catholic, so he might as well be.’ Me: ‘But Clive Malseed isn’t a Catholic either’. Him: ‘That’s true. But Tom Taylor the chief sub-editor is and just happens to be on his night off.’ Me: ‘So I’m the only Mick of the three then’? Him: ‘Jesus chap. I didn’t know that’. Visitors entering the Melbourne Savage Club walk past a memorial to Phillip Schuler, the Age correspondent at Gallipoli and the youngest member of the Savage Club killed in World War I. Schuler distinguished himself as a war correspondent and author before he joined the AIF as a soldier and was killed in Flanders in 1917. The Melbourne Savage Club (the Savage) had been founded in 1894. Like the original Savage Club founded in London in 1857 it settled on a name which recalled Richard Savage, a minor 18th century poet and a colourful and well-connected figure of his generation. Savage died in a debtor’s prison in Bristol in 1743. From the beginning the Melbourne Savage encouraged bohemian behaviour among 60

members, many of them journalists, artists and entertainers. Chester Wilmot has been described as ‘the club’s most illustrious journalist.’ Keith Murdoch was a Savage (as members have always been known.) David Dow, author of the first history of the club published in 1947, was a journalist on the Age. Since the 1920s the club has occupied an elegant Victorian mansion on Bank Place in Melbourne’s CBD. Here members and their (male) guests have always been required to leave their dignity and their title – should they have one – at the door. This form continues today with the added instruction that all mobile phones must be turned off. My first visit to the club was in the company of Graham Perkin and Creighton Burns, both of them members. The pair of them had lunch and entertained there so often that at times it seemed like a branch office of the Age. There were four ‘gentlemens’ clubs’ in Melbourne then and there still are but the Savage was the club of choice of both men and the only one either of them joined. It is a place noted for its story-telling and camaraderie and Creighton excelled at both. This is where the pair of them often had lunch with Peter Ryan, war hero, publisher, writer, mischief-maker and for many years an Age columnist. Creighton delighted in telling, and re-telling, amusing stories from his wartime years at sea. None gained wider currency, at the club or at the office, than the shipboard tales of Peggy (the Beast) and Dougie. The off-duty interests of these two permanent navy sailors did not coincide with those of the teenage Burns, just out of Melbourne’s Scotch College. It was hardly surprising that quite a few of us from the Age and the Herald Sun joined the Savage. People like John Hamilton, Tony Walker, Harry Gordon, Simon Plant, Noel Bushnell, Mark Knight, Andrew Rule and Mark Baker. Long after the Perkin era both Creighton Burns and the writer served three-year terms as President of the Melbourne Savage Club. In 1969 the Age moved lock, stock and barrel from its cramped Collins Street building to a purpose-built plant at the corner of Spencer and Lonsdale Streets at the western end of the city. It was an enormous undertaking, very well planned and executed, and it opened up an array of new business opportunities through the increased printing and publishing facilities. This new five-storey headquarters featured a vast open plan 61

editorial floor, a state-of-the-art press room and parking for staff. Graham Perkin took a great interest in its development. The first newspapers had been printed there in January 1968 and the move of all operations and departments was completed in May 1969. My family was on the move as well. Planning had been underway for some time for the company’s new afternoon newspaper, Newsday, and editorial changes meant that two of us joined the executive ranks at the Age. My contemporary, Peter McLaughlin, was promoted to chief of staff. Previously he had a reporting portfolio covering science, education and medicine and it wasn’t long before one reporter was assigned to each of these specialist areas. At the same time I was brought back from Canberra to fill the new position of assistant news editor. In a warm letter of appointment the Editor warned me that I was on trial but he ‘expected’ I would do well. These appointments were made in April 1969 and a month later we moved to the third-floor newsroom at our newly fitted out building. A small, lasting and popular innovation from that time was the introduction of the daily Odd Spot still appearing on page 1 of the Age decades later. The Editor had picked up the idea from somewhere or someone, possibly John Stevens, and made me responsible for selecting one each night. My preference was for bizarre items but I noticed that after I moved to other duties there were fewer of these appearing. I doubt there has ever been a better Spot than one of my early choices about a man who died when he was run over by a truck load of coffins. Close behind was a man who fell to his death in a vat of blood at an abattoir, somewhere in South America. On a happier note it was reported that UK show business figure Lew Grade smoked 16 Cuban cigars a day. (They don’t seem to have done him much harm. When he died in 1998 he was within weeks of his 92nd birthday.) Across the Tasman, Christchurch police who turned out to investigate reports of a lion stalking through a city park found a horse wearing a rug. As things panned out the Newsday experiment was a disaster, for the company in particular and for many of the staff who lost their jobs. It had the wrong editor. It was up against a world class competitor, the Herald; 62

and it was launched not long before afternoon newspapers went into steep decline around the world. Several months before the launch of Newsday I met its designated editor Tim Hewat. We had arrived in Melbourne at the same time, Hewat from London, me from Canberra and we were staying temporarily at the same hotel. Impressive television CV aside – and it really was impressive – our new hope of the side turned out to be an overweight loudmouth. Flamboyant certainly, but uncouth to a degree I never encountered elsewhere in the politically incorrect newsrooms of those days. My editor in Nairobi, John Bierman, used to have difficulty speaking more than a few sentences without throwing in an expletive or two. Around the Melbourne newsroom and elsewhere Tim Hewat made him sound like a choir boy. Hewat had been a cadet at the Age and went to London where he did well in Fleet Street before switching from newspapers to television. Someone once described him as the ‘maverick genius’ of the early years of Granada television where he played a key role in the World in Action program and the much-loved Seven Up series which is still running and very popular more than 50 years later. Hewat’s return to newspapers did not go well and his tabloid Newsday never got Melbourne’s attention. It stumbled from the beginning and the editor was replaced after just a few months. When the paper was closed down, months before its first birthday, the circulation was less than 80,000. Across town the Herald sales were in excess of 500,000. The losses were considerable – maybe $3,000,000 in 1970 values – and we all had to tighten our belts at the Age for the next couple of years. The hundreds who had lost their jobs paid a much higher price than that. The Newsday debacle was a terrible personal and business setback for the company’s Managing Director, Ranald Macdonald. Of course the Fairfax directors were not best pleased either but they had, after all, agreed to the project with a few minor reservations. Macdonald quickly bounced back in an impressive display of courage and resilience. He would remain chief executive for another 13 years. But his cards had been marked. There was one major bonus for the company – and the Age in particular – with the demise of Newsday. This was the appointment of John Paton 63

to head up a new marketing services department, the first of its kind at a metropolitan daily newspaper in Australia. Paton had been at the Age for three years working pretty much behind the scenes in advertising, promotion and research. He was 50 years old and had spent his business life in the creative world of marketing and advertising. Now as our first marketing manager he would play a critical role in the development of the newspaper and the company. Sylvia Bradshaw, later marketing manager of the Age herself, joined Paton’s department as a copy writer. She summed up the boss she admired and learned so much from: ‘John was a chunky Don Draper14 without the infidelity – clean cut, decisive, in-charge and full of ideas.’ With Graham Perkin’s support Paton quickly established an easy and professional rapport with the news and feature departments of the Age. He was always welcome on the editorial floor. The Editor was in no doubt about his colleague’s enormous value as he explained15 on more than one occasion: A number of very talented journalists have made great contributions to the paper since I have been Editor but in my opinion – my prejudiced editorial opinion – few have made a greater contribution than a non-editorial executive named John Paton who runs a department called marketing services. His department regularly dumps statistics on my desk about our readers, about their interests, their habits, their frustrations, their socio-economic situation, their ambitions. It has been of extraordinary value in giving definition to normal editorial instincts and judgements. Paton also commissioned readership research which introduced the concept of ‘profile’ selling of newspaper advertising. This research was also the first to make large scale computer analysis of readership survey figures. Ranald Macdonald had been studying and observing newspaper marketing since his time in the United States and Paton often spoke of his Managing 64

Director’s ‘extreme dedication’ to the marketing function. Now the three of them – Macdonald, Paton and Perkin – were a tight team developing what was emerging as Australia’s best daily newspaper. In 1971 Age Poll appeared for the first time. It was a new scientific social index based on opinion polling and it quickly provoked other metropolitan newspapers into reassessing their work in this area. We all understood – and certainly should have appreciated – that our salaries, our journalism and our travels were paid for by the considerable commercial success of the Age. By its classified and display advertising in particular and also revenue from increasing daily sales of the newspaper. I have no idea who coined the term Rivers of Gold to describe our enormous volumes of classified ads, but that is certainly what they were. As early as 1964 the Saturday paper had reached 80 broadsheet pages, mostly classifieds. It climbed steadily to 144 pages and on one memorable Saturday, long after Perkin’s time, reached 300 pages. When we farewelled Colin McCall in 1971 he was retiring after 34 years as classified advertising manager. Colin had an international reputation in his field and was widely known as ‘Mr Classified.’ It was during his long watch that the Age developed ICPOTA a curious little character who promoted the paper’s remarkable strength in the Melbourne classified market in those days. The little fellow was extremely effective but few would remember now that the acronym ICPOTA meant simply In the classified pages of the Age. The business manager whose domain included circulation, display and classified advertising was W.G. (Bill) Bland. Later he was general manager and finally chairman of the company. Bill was actually the fourth vital player in the senior management team assembled by Ranald Macdonald. He had joined the Age as a teenager (mail boy on that 1936 staff list) and served in both the army and the RAAF in World War II. By the time Perkin became editor Bill Bland was the paper’s key commercial executive. He was religious and blessed with a fine, in many ways original, sense of humour. I found him to be a wise and helpful man, always worth listening to. Like quite a few of the old guard – people such as Colin McCall and 65

Harold Austin – he was a gentleman. Ranald Macdonald trusted him and relied on him. It is hardly surprising that with its new look, new energy and commercial success the Age was admired, copied and spoken of well beyond Melbourne and Victoria. Even Rupert Murdoch liked what he saw. Giving the 1972 A.N. Smith Memorial Lecture at Melbourne University Murdoch described the Age as perhaps the most interesting newspaper in Australia and thought it might reflect, in part, a change in taste in newspapers in this country. Murdoch added: Its form now is what I would call a tabloid broadsheet in which it presents the heavier material of the broadsheet with tabloid techniques. It has also, one would feel, shifted its audience slightly from an older, more conservative group to a younger group who may be in the same income bracket but have a different outlook and a wider range of interests than the older group. The newspaper was also being noticed internationally. American Journalism School professors voted the Age one of the top 10 newspapers in the world. Two Australian newspapers, the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald were included in profiles of the 40 ‘elite’ newspapers in the world. These appeared in The Elite Press: Great Newspapers of the World, by Dr John Merrill, an American professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. Locally there were constant invitations to Ranald Macdonald and Graham Perkin to appear on TV programs and to speak at conferences. They were both adept at promoting the Age and the newspaper industry to groups large and small, around the country. Graham liked to say there were two ways to edit a newspaper: one was to stay in your office. The other was to be upfront and vocal and public. And he explained: ‘I am the second sort because it is my nature.’16 The Bulletin magazine was so taken with all this activity that it published a long feature entitled What makes Ranald Macdonald run? This claimed that the Age chief executive spoke at more meetings, dinners, 66

conferences and seminars in a month than most other newspaper executives would do in a lifetime. Ranald believed – and how right he was – that Australian newspapers had a sorry history of participating in, or even allowing, analysis and debate of questions involving journalism and the media in general. Macdonald, with Perkin’s support, was an early advocate of a voluntary body to judge the performance of the press and improve the credibility of newspapers. That was 1972 but it would be 1976 before the Australian Press Council was formed. The Fairfax board in Sydney would have nothing to do with it for years but its Melbourne partner was an enthusiastic member from the outset. To my recollection the only publication in Australia constantly hostile to Perkin and the Age was the weekly Nation Review. It offered regular sniping and tittle-tattle courtesy of ‘C.M. Evans’, a pseudonym we all knew was often used by a disgruntled former Age journalist who had been sacked. On one occasion that particularly amused me, Nation Review readers were informed: Over all this reigns Perkin, the short-haired sun king of Spencer Street, working a 12 to 14-hour day, encouraging his Peterprincipled executives to follow suit. His closely cropped hair, monogrammed shirts and conservative dress is reflected among executives – leading to a Perkin personality cult. In an interview with the conservative Quadrant magazine Perkin was once asked about Nation Review and he responded: ‘A marvellous development…it drives you insane about twice a fortnight but it is good because it exists.’17 (Twice a fortnight appears to be Perkin’s way of saying that every edition of the weekly contained something that irritated him.) Washington correspondent Roy Macartney joined the Age about the same time as I did but it would be five years before I actually met him. The opportunity arose not long after Newsday closed when I was sent on a 30day US State Department sponsored tour of the United States. There were 13 of us, all journalists from the Pacific region. Our itinerary included New 67

York and Washington, San Francisco and Houston and in the mid-west, Sioux City, Iowa. This was 1970 and the motivation of the Americans was to interest us in their vast country, explain what was going on and, hopefully, leave us generally well disposed towards the USA. It worked pretty well for me, but all these years later the arrival of the Trump administration has finally undone some of the State Department’s good work. Roy Macartney was well and truly embedded in Washington. His home was a substantial property at 3308 Cathedral Avenue NW, a fashionable area around the corner from the residence of the Australian ambassador. News wires chattered away around the clock in an attic room which Roy had set up as an office and newsroom. His presence in Washington for the Age was a bit like having our own news agency in the US capital. There was a 14-hour time gap between Washington and Melbourne and Macartney operated at all hours when there was a big story on. His background had prepared him for this. After serving in the Middle East during World War II Roy covered the Nuremberg trials and the birth of the United Nations for Australian Associated Press (AAP) and was bureau chief in Singapore and Tokyo for AAP-Reuters. He was the first Australian war correspondent at the Korean War. His friend, the veteran correspondent Denis Warner said Macartney was the hardest working and most dedicated correspondent he had ever known. Quite a few people at the Age had ambitions to replace Macartney in the prized Washington job. But Roy was fiercely protective of his patch and they would have to wait. The Australian election in 1972 provided a defining moment – maybe the defining moment – of Graham Perkin and Ranald Macdonald’s Age. They by-passed their board and supported the election of the country’s first Labor government for 23 years. Elements of the Liberal Party which had been in office with the Country Party (nowadays the National Party) since 1949 were beside themselves at this policy switch by a major newspaper long considered part of their camp at election time. They should have seen it coming. The paper’s success since 1966 had allowed it to become increasingly ‘liberal’ in outlook. When Perkin was appointed Editor the 68

board had defined the Age as an independent liberal paper. The new Editor agreed with the definition, accepted it, and adopted what he called ‘a selfconsciously independent stance’ in the paper’s editorial attitudes to politics and society. Even so, the Age did not make its ‘Vote Labor’ recommendation with any sense of absolute conviction but argued that on balance it was time for a change of government. How did Macdonald and Perkin get away with what some described as defiance, even an ambush, of the board? In fact the board had delayed a decision on the election issue and the Managing Director and Editor simply went ahead without it. They had their way to a large extent because of the impact and reputation of the Age at that time, the enormous interest in the newspaper and the high visibility of both its campaigning editor and its chief executive. It also helped that circulation in the six months to September 1972 was the highest in the history of the paper at 206,396. Earlier that year, oddly enough, the Sydney (Fairfax) partners in the Age gained ownership of more than 50 percent of the shares in the company. The original agreement had anticipated this would happen some time, although perhaps not quite so soon. Meanwhile the Age promised the incoming Whitlam government its ‘sternest scrutiny’ for the next three years. It certainly provided that. An exclusive story on scandalous fundraising activities in the Age in July 1975 would fatally damage the Whitlam government. Macdonald had made his first international move four years earlier taking the Age into the newly formed Press Foundation of Asia. The PFA was based in Manila and had been set up by major newspapers in the region to uphold the freedom of the press (a particular Macdonald interest) and to help upgrade editorial and production standards. We supported many PFA initiatives particularly in editorial training and development and my initial involvement was representing the Age at their One Asia Assembly in New Delhi. With advance introductions from Graham Perkin I met Sunday Times Editor Harry Evans and his boss, Denis Hamilton, Editor-in-Chief of Times newspapers unaware that I would be seeing both of them again, quite soon, in the UK. 69

That conference was also the catalyst for meeting the eccentric adventurer and story teller Francis James, a friend of Perkin and Creighton Burns. I would see a lot of him in the UK in the years ahead. James had been a prisoner in China for four years and on his recent release (this was February 1973) Creighton had interviewed him in Hong Kong and negotiated a contract for his extraordinary story. I spent a couple of days in Hong Kong on the way to New Delhi and got along famously with the amusing and mysterious Francis. My two small services for him were to listen to his stories and to run some of his copy to the Reuter office from the Matilda Hospital where he was recuperating. Ranald Macdonald went on to occupy several PFA board positions over the years, useful background for his future role as Chairman of the International Press Institute (IPI). A few of our best ideas and discussions occurred late at night, typically while waiting around for the first edition to arrive off the press. This was also a time for darts, carpet bowls and indoor cricket. One night in May 1973, shortly after the election of the Whitlam government, a discussion turned to social welfare and to a group of people who could be regarded as ‘truly disenfranchised’ under the current system. Send me a note

18

the Editor said, and I did. It was three pages, on copy paper, about ten paragraphs in all. The vocabulary used to discuss the intellectually and physically disabled has changed significantly since then but at that time my note said, in part: Memo: The Editor The suggestion is that we mount a big campaign to expose the plight of Victoria’s mentally and physically handicapped children. The mentally handicapped are in the most tragic position. There is hardly anywhere for them to go: a couple of church places and some ill-equipped State places. Retarded children are NOT a ‘popular’ charity … our community either hides them away or doesn’t make any provision for them at all. 70

For most families the arrival of a retarded child is an enormous burden. Most cannot find a place in institutions so the mother (particularly) is automatically committed to a life of great trial and hardship. The memo went on to say that these children should have first call on Federal and State welfare funds. First call. It suggested the campaign be driven by a team of our best writers with TV and radio promotion. It would also need a good title, but didn’t offer one. The memo was dated May 3 (1973) and I left the top copy with the Editor. We didn’t discuss it further and two months later I left Melbourne. Then I forgot about it. On a Thursday morning early in July 1973, Graham appeared at my desk with a casual request: ‘When you go home tonight ask Jackie how she would feel about moving to London as soon as possible.’ He was offering me the Age London manager’s job. I was able to save all of us some valuable time by accepting on the spot. As I told him: Jackie and I had met in London in 1964. She loved it there and would be delighted to go back. I was certain of that without asking. The four of us – Jackie, me, Sarah, 5 and Nick, 3 – left Melbourne a week later. In that time we had rented our home, sold the car, packed up or stored our belongings, probably thrown a party and made our farewells. The London job had to be filled quickly but you can’t fly to the other side of the world with two small children without a stop-over or two. Ours were in Honolulu and Boston. By the time we got to London, my colleague Peter Cole-Adams, Chief European Correspondent of the paper, was beside himself with worry. And this was a man who liked a good worry. It was a superb summer in the UK, there were hordes of tourists and Peter had been unable to find temporary hotel accommodation for our family that met the Age budget. This was how we ended up staying for a week in the Goring, an historic property in Belgravia, and described as a grand hotel with impeccable manners. It was certainly a privileged introduction to our new life in England.

71

PA R T T H R E E

GOOD TIMES AND BAD NEWS We will say it straight, and clear, and at once. The Whitlam government has run its course; it must go now and preferably by the honourable course of resignation … From the final editorial Graham Perkin wrote as Editor of the Age, 15 October 1975

The last time I saw Graham Perkin was in Paris, a few months before his death in Melbourne in October 1975. Graham and his wife Peg were in France with a group of Australian VIPs on the inaugural flight of a new QANTAS service and we had dinner together. I can’t recall who else was in the visiting party apart from Fred Brenchley who I had known in Canberra and who was now a Fairfax executive in Sydney. Graham took me aside to tell me that Fred was seriously ill and would not be around much longer. In fact Fred lived for another 34 years and it was Graham who died before the year was out. It was two years since he had sent me to the UK and to the best job I ever had at the Age, or anywhere else for that matter. The London Manager role ticked several of the boxes that mattered to me then: lots of professional

72

satisfaction, location, some business travel. After years of night work there was plenty of family time and most weekends off. All of this happened 17,000 kilometres from head office in an era when email, mobile phones and even reasonably priced international telephone calls were unknown. The job had become vacant at short notice when the incumbent, John Stevens, was recalled to Melbourne to be the founding editor of the Sunday Press, a tabloid owned jointly by the Age and the Herald & Weekly Times group. Both companies had planned to launch Sunday newspapers in Melbourne but at the last-minute printing union problems made this impossible. Four years later, in 1973, the Sunday Press was set up to keep a check on an ‘outsider’, a Sunday paper called the Observer. The low-budget Sunday Press was produced by commercial printers and at the end of its first nine months was selling about 90,000 copies every weekend. Its editorial operation was in the Age building with staff drawn from both the Age and the Herald & Weekly Times and some hired from outside. Earlier the same year Graham Perkin had been named Editor-in-Chief of the Age and also the growing Syme business – regional and suburban newspaper interests and specialist magazines. Ranald Macdonald stepped back from the role to give some fresh challenges to the Editor he had appointed seven years earlier. Close involvement in the Sunday Press project was one of these. Beyond the Age Perkin was also a director of Australian Associated Press and the London-based Reuters news agency. While he had the over-arching role and title of Editor-in-Chief of the company he was still Editor of the Age itself and that is how we always thought of him. John Stevens was a very capable newspaperman but difficult to work for, as I found out when he was news editor and I was his deputy. So this change-over was a good outcome: John was an editor, which he wanted to be and back in Australia; and I was in the UK where I was simply delighted to be. Soon after I arrived in London our office moved from the Observer building in Blackfriars to the purpose-built headquarters of our new landlord, the Times and the Sunday Times in Gray’s Inn Road, not far from Kings Cross Station. It was called New Printing House Square. The real 73

Printing House Square near the Thames at Blackfriars had been the site of the Times’ operation since the newspaper first appeared in 1785 as the Daily Universal Register. The Age actually moved into the new building – not quite completed and home to countless field mice – almost 12 months before the Times. There were four of us in the Age bureau plus visiting ‘firemen’ from time to time: the others were the Chief European Correspondent Peter Cole-Adams, the office secretary Sandra (Sandy) Wynne and Carol, a filing clerk and messenger. Sandy was a Scot who came from North Berwick, home town of David Syme. Despite complex partnership arrangements with the Fairfax group – including the Sydney Morning Herald, the Sun and the Australian Financial Review – we still operated independently at the Age. Thus we had our own London bureau well away from the much larger Fairfax office in the Reuter building at 85 Fleet Street. Even so I particularly enjoyed the company of John Allan when he was Fairfax London manager. John had previously been editor of the Canberra Times and was a great story teller – in both verbal and written forms. There were correspondents from other foreign newspapers in our building, including our neighbour, the Irish Times. Its resident columnist Maeve Binchy was one of the most delightful human beings I have known. She was funny, warm, generous and enormously talented. Irish-Australian relations in our corner of that building were both cordial and noisy. This was before Maeve wrote the first of her 17 novels, Light a Penny Candle, which appeared in 1982. The last of them, A Week in Winter, was published posthumously in 2012. Maeve was an ‘accidental journalist’ whose work first appeared in Irish newspapers after her father sent them edited versions of letters his daughter had written home from a kibbutz in Israel. After I returned to Melbourne and with the support of Peter ColeAdams and Peter Smark, the Age ‘imported’ Maeve for a couple of months writing for us and for her readers back in Ireland. Her novels brought her enormous fame and wealth but the Maeve who would call on Jackie and me when she was in Australia on book tours appeared no different to us than the one-time London newspaper columnist. Each year on her Christmas 74

card she would include a notice, which had amused her enormously when I first brought it to her attention. It advised guests at a hotel somewhere in Ireland: Early morning tea will not be served after 12 noon. Maeve was married to Gordon Snell, a broadcaster and writer of books for children. When she died in Dublin in 2012 Prime Minister Enda Kenny of Ireland issued a statement which said: Across Ireland and the world people are mourning and celebrating Maeve Binchy. Most journalists know little about newsprint, or its production, understanding only that their words are printed on it. In September 1973 I was about to learn a great deal more. Back in Australia, an alarming situation had arisen: a world-wide newsprint shortage and local industrial trouble combined to force a major cut in newspaper sizes. The Melbourne Herald, still in its heyday, was wafer thin for a time. But the Age – reliant in those days on acres of classified advertising – pressed on as though its newsprint supplies were assured. Actually they were not, something management became aware of only when the shortage eased. Our secret weapon during this worrying period was Ural Ataman, a commodities broker in Turkey. Graham Perkin heard about him and instructed me to fly to Istanbul to talk with him immediately. Newsprint buyers had been scouring Europe and North America without success and Graham admitted that it seemed absurd supplies might be available in Turkey. At the same time he assured me his source for this valuable intelligence was well-informed. This was indeed the case. For a handsome fee Mr Ataman – soon my good friend Ural – introduced me to the Seka Mills at Izmit. This old city in the Gulf of Izmit on the Sea of Marmara is about 100 kilometres east of Istanbul. We pushed a couple of other desperate buyers aside and got the last available 2,000 tons of Seka’s production. My recollection is that we quite happily paid US$300 a ton, about double the world price before the crisis hit. That turned out to be the easy part. Exchanging specifications in Turkish and English between Izmit and Melbourne was certainly challenging. Arcane details beloved of production managers chattered back and forth over the telex machine for days. We never did find the Turkish equivalent of something the Age production 75

people called an adjustable chuck. After that it was comparatively easy (thanks again Ural) to charter a Yugoslav freighter, the Biokovo, on its way to the Canary Islands. It picked up our precious reels and took them on to Melbourne. The knowledge that 2,000 tons of reinforcements were on the water to Australia encouraged the Age management to draw more boldly on newsprint reserves than their competitors could. It was a punt that paid off handsomely. By the time our little ship came in the newsprint crisis had eased, the industrial trouble had ended. Just as well. The bulk of the Turkish newsprint was subsequently used but many problems had to be resolved first. Of the 2,990 huge reels that were shipped 850 were so badly damaged en route that they could not go direct into the press room and had to be rewound and treated. There were other issues as well, some of them I suspect to do with adjustable chucks and the lack of metal tips where these might have been expected to be. Back in London I thought it prudent to clear the air over this expensive exercise with Jim Denison, the chief production manager. Jim wrote to me saying that, yes, there had been a great deal of trouble with damage but the Turkish newsprint saved the bacon and no doubt we would be happy to get more now. Sounded fair enough to me. There was no position description for the London Manager’s job but the division of duties was perfectly clear: the Chief European Correspondent, Peter Cole-Adams, was responsible for news and feature coverage and the London Manager for everything else. The newsprint exercise in Turkey had been one of those ‘everything else’ activities. Relations between the two of us were excellent and our wives and children knew each other well. Peter and I went back a long way. He had been a second or third year cadet on the Courier Mail in Brisbane when I was a first-year cadet across town on the Telegraph. Cole-Adams – once famously described by an angry politician as ‘that hyphenated c – from the Age’ was also the first ‘boat person’ I ever knew. He had arrived in Australia as a four-year-old after being evacuated from British North Borneo just ahead of the Japanese invasion in World War II. 76

Cole-Adams spent a great deal of time in the Middle East, in Europe or in the mad-house that was Northern Ireland in the 1970s. He once told me he made 22 trips to Belfast during the ‘Troubles’. But there was only one occasion, one brief occasion, when I was seriously concerned for his well being. This happened when he was in Belfast and I was on a week’s holiday in Switzerland. It was a beautiful summer’s day and I was rowing my children on the lake near our hotel when all hell broke out on the shore, much waving and shouting and calling to us to return. Once we were back on land someone from the hotel – it was called the Waldheim au Lac – alerted me to an urgent phone call. Only the London office knew where I was, so this, I imagined, could be bad news about Cole-Adams. But no it wasn’t. The call was certainly from the Age London office but happily it went like this: Tidey: ‘What’s happened, Sandy?’ Wynne: ‘There’s a giant “moose” running around the office.’ (Sandy, the Scot, was terrified of mice.) Tidey: ‘Where are you?’ Wynne: ‘I’m standing on the desk in your office’. Once Sandy’s whereabouts had been established I placed a call from the hotel to Ralph Nodder, syndication manager of the Sunday Times who went to her rescue. In Belfast Cole-Adams went about his business, not only unharmed but unaware of all this. Nothing further was heard of the mouse. Cole-Adams was away so often that there was plenty of news and feature work for me in his absence and later that of his successor Cameron Forbes. It was mainly in London but there were also assignments in Scotland, Wales, South Africa, Rhodesia (as was) and Angola. Those were turbulent years in Britain, 1973–1976: a change of government from Heath’s Conservatives to Wilson’s Labour Party, continual industrial unrest and dozens of IRA bomb attacks in London and the provinces. Although the exotic paper chase in Turkey was not repeated over the next few years, the ‘everything else’ role of the London job turned out to be surprisingly varied and interesting. It helped that John Paton the Marketing 77

Manager sought and welcomed all sorts of newspaper promotion and marketing material from the UK and Europe. Swags of it were dispatched to Melbourne from the International Newspaper Promotion Association conventions in Stockholm and Vienna. Mindful that the Age was once run by a workers’ co-operative it seemed appropriate to visit Glasgow for the launch of the Scottish Daily News, the UK’s first daily newspaper owned and run by its workers. This was the only occasion I ever spoke with the tricky millionaire publisher Robert Maxwell who was involved, initially behind the scenes and soon more prominently. The SDN died after six months of falling sales, staff disagreements over content and concerns about Maxwell’s role. (Years later Maxwell tried, unsuccessfully, to buy the Age. A mysterious, sinister figure he was exposed in Britain as a major corporate crook and died in 1991 after apparently falling overboard from his yacht in the Atlantic.) The Age owned syndication rights to a number of UK publications. These, together with the purchase (or attempted purchase) of book, picture and other publication rights from time to time amounted to a small business in itself. Some advertising material and bookings passed through the London office and on my watch a couple of executive recruitment assignments were undertaken to fill Melbourne vacancies. One of these involved the hiring of Jack Beverley, at the time managing editor of the Westminster Press regional newspaper group in the UK. I knew Jack from my East Africa days when he was editor of the Sunday Nation in Nairobi. He was a Scot, had worked on several UK national papers and always seemed to be bursting with energy and ideas. As a junior during the closing stages of World War II Jack had written for a unique newspaper called Good Morning. It was published for the Royal Navy’s submarine service and was a mixture of news, family stories, quizzes and cartoons. Numbered rather than dated, bundled copies of the newspaper were placed in correct order in a submarine’s safe before it left on patrol. Once a day, when conditions permitted, the appropriate edition of Good Morning would be distributed. When Jack got to Melbourne many years later he quickly became a popular character and managed and developed a range of suburban and specialist 78

papers for the company. With John Lawrence and others he was one of the Age people who helped set up the China Daily. After that experience he was always known as ‘Peking Jack’. Another task that fell to the London office was to have an initial look at Beaverbrook Newspapers, publisher of The Daily Express, which was for sale in the mid-1970s. Just a look. It was quite a business opportunity, but I suspect beyond our resources back in Melbourne. Amidst all this activity and the routine banking, accounts and various business reports for Melbourne there was one vital annual task. This was undertaken on behalf of the company’s chairman, Lt. Col. E.H.B. Neill, who kept a flat in London and spent several months in England every year. He made few demands on us but we did have to make sure his Purdey shotguns were registered with the authorities before each shooting season. London – as I had already discovered in the early 1960s – was a great city to live and work in and it was even better when someone else was paying many of the bills. Jackie and I leased a substantial but rundown house in Childs Hill, north-west London, on the edge of Hampstead Heath. Part of the two-storey property was locked off but Number 22 Pattison Road proved to be a comfortable home in a most convenient and congenial location. We lived there for three years and never considered moving. There always seemed to be someone visiting from Australia staying with us, two or three of them for weeks on end. Francis James turned up for dinner a few times but when in London preferred to stay at the Naval and Military Club (aka the In and Out) in St James Square. A day or two after his first visit a handwritten note on club letterhead offered a critique of our other guests and a none-too-flattering assessment of the hostess. Jackie was bemused. Francis was the only person I knew in England who actually wore Spats. Speaking at his funeral years later Sir Marcus Loane described Francis James as a born entertainer, a complete extrovert and a real mischief maker who revelled in controversy. Nobody who spent any time with Francis would quibble with that. Another odd character who came to dinner was Roger East, a restless, often agitated reporter I had worked with in Brisbane and Nairobi. We 79

briefly shared a flat in West London in 1963. East was what used to be described as a ‘dapper’ figure, usually found in a cotton suit and a pork pie hat. All his worldly possessions were contained in one suitcase. This was a man who devoted much of his life to looking for trouble spots around the world, often, it should be said, out of genuine concern for others. Roger was openly anti-Semitic and not too fond of Rome, either, as I recall. He seemed to have worked everywhere – Australia, South Africa, East Africa, the Middle East, the UK – and often spoke of covering the 1956 British and French invasion of the Suez Canal ‘from the other side.’ East was in Cyprus during the EOKA terrorism campaign there against the British. When I last saw him he was on his way to Spain to join the legendary Australian journalist Steve Dunleavy and planning to work in Madrid on an English-language daily. From there he moved back to Australia and took a job in Darwin. The next I heard of him Roger had been executed by Indonesian troops during the invasion of East Timor. Not exactly a man to admire but certainly one to remember. The famous Hampstead Heath was a great local attraction, summer and winter. Another – for the children and their parents – was a large family of hedgehogs at the bottom of our garden. It was not unusual to see an occasional fox slinking around between our neighbourhood and the heath. The British were still very good at local newspapers in the 1970s and ours, the Hampstead & Highgate Express (aka the Ham & High) was outstanding. After we had left London a picture of our former home turned up on page 1 after the property was badly damaged by a fire. A muchneeded renovation followed, sadly too late for us. Childs Hill took its name, apparently, from Richard le Child who owned land and property there in the 14th century. The area still had the feel of a village about it – local pub, green grocer, butcher, newspaper shop – and sat between Finchley Road and Golders Green tube stations. The Moghul Room where we had our own table was close by and it was here that our children were introduced to and developed their love of Indian food. Sarah and Nick attended a small local school, All Saints, about 400 yards from our front door. Between London life and regular forays into the 80

English countryside these UK years turned out to be an idyllic time for our expatriate family. We had a small car in which we ventured as far afield as North Wales and often to the Sussex coast, the Cotswolds and Norfolk. It was stolen from outside our house a few days before we left London in 1976, an event initially treated with some suspicion by the insurance company. Later, back in Australia, we were advised it had been used in a bank robbery to finance some Irish Republican Army (IRA) activity. The thieves also helped themselves to several sets of brand new sheets and towels (destined for Australia) that were in the boot. These had been to the laundry as we prepared for the trip home. We were informed that when the car was found all the boot contained were several empty packets of soap powder. The amazing story of how the great train robber Ronald (Ronnie) Biggs escaped from Melbourne was finally revealed, not in the Age but in the Sunday Press on 24 February 1974. It was nearly five years since Newsday’s Jack Darmody had discovered Biggs had been living secretly in Melbourne. The great train robber had escaped from Wandsworth prison in the UK where he was serving a 30-year sentence for his part in robbing the Glasgow to London mail train. After three months on the run when Darmody rumbled him, Biggs left Melbourne and finally turned up in Brazil. But how did he get there? Who had looked after him in Melbourne? The answers to these questions would eventually be found in the Republic of Ireland. In our London bureau Cole-Adams could hardly be expected to cover for the Sunday Press as well as the Age and he didn’t. As a result any coverage from the UK for the Sunday paper was handled by me. This included some politics, quite a bit of crime and the odd review. But nothing as meaty and intriguing as the Biggs’ escape story. The Sunday Press devoted most of its front page to it plus two full pages inside. The Age had bought rights in the story from Stern magazine and these included access to the principal character (aside from Biggs) in the adventure. Much as I was delighted by the Sunday Press blitz I was puzzled why Graham Perkin held the story back from the Age. It might have been something to do with syndication as the Biggs’ escape also appeared in other Sunday papers around Australia. 81

The man who smuggled Biggs out of Australia was his old friend, Michael John Haynes. They had become close years earlier after Biggs saved Haynes’ life while the two of them were on a ‘caper’ in England. Haynes had slipped off a roof and was hanging high above the ground but Biggs went back for him, knowing that he would be arrested. Haynes put it to me: ‘Wouldn’t you do anything for a mate like that?’ What Haynes did for ‘a mate like that’ was put him up at his home in Noble Park after Biggs was almost caught by Victoria police in the Dandenongs. Three months later, after boarding the liner Ellinis as a visitor, Biggs sailed from Melbourne to Panama. In his pocket was a doctored British passport bearing the name Michael John Haynes. Biggs finally got to Brazil, where there was no extradition treaty with the UK. In all he spent 36 years on the run, most of it pursuing a playboy lifestyle in South America. Biggs surrendered to British police in 2001 and went back to jail for eight years. He was freed on health grounds and died four years later. Haynes was never questioned by police during the time Biggs was in Australia and left the country himself, to settle in Ireland, just outside Dublin. There was one final surprise in the Biggs escape story. It turned out that Michael John Haynes had worked in the reading room at the Age. I don’t know if his mate visited him there, but it would not surprise me if he had. The Sunday Press was the only joint publication of the Age and the Herald & Weekly Times (HWT ) group and it was a good example of cooperation between the two organisations when this was appropriate. The initiative started with the Age marketing guru John Paton and appealed to both parties as a way to protect their dominance of the Melbourne newspaper market. Although it was extremely competitive in the Perkin years the relationship between the editors of the Age and its mass circulation rival the Sun News-Pictorial was very good. As it happened Creighton Burns was standing in for Graham Perkin on Harry Gordon’s last night as Editor of the Sun News Pictorial. A note and a bottle of French champagne were sent across town with this message for Harry: We don’t know whether to be relieved or pleased that you won’t be there next Friday night. But tonight, turn down an empty glass for The Age. It was signed: Perkin’s poofter journalists. 82

Burns was by nature proper and correct but when the need arose had no trouble drawing on the rich vocabulary he had acquired below decks in the wartime navy. This Friday night effort was a perfect example. Many years later Harry Gordon was asked: why that expression on signing off? Was it because they were working on the broadsheet which was seen to be a bit more ‘hoity-toity?’ Harry agreed there were a number of reasons, tabloid versus broadsheet among them. ‘We did our best to upset those old attitudes about tabloid and broadsheet,’ he said. The Herald & Weekly Times management had always wanted ‘a tabloid man’ editing the Sunday Press joint venture. They got their way and Dallas Swinstead, sports editor of the Sun News-Pictorial replaced John Stevens. On most Tuesdays (Sunday paper editors have Monday off) Graham Perkin would review the paper with its new editor. ‘He did not hold back,’ Swinstead recalled. ‘He understood the HWT thrust for a popular paper but it did not stop him teaching me lessons I have not forgotten.’ As one of the few ‘outsiders’ to work at the highest editorial level with Perkin, Swinstead’s view of the Age Editor1 has independent credence: ‘He was a great man by all measurements. Yes, he could bully, but only in the moment. I still believe his great empathy for all people – and I mean all – was his greatest attribute.’ (The last edition of the Sunday Press appeared on 13 August 1989. A week later it was replaced by what has been called the ‘unholy trinity’, comprising the Sunday Age and two new papers from the HWT – the Sunday Herald and the Sunday Sun.) The greatest external threat Graham Perkin’s editorship ever faced blew up, then quickly blew over, early in 1974. Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, frustrated by a hostile Senate, had called a double dissolution election to be held on 18 May. Perkin and Macdonald agreed that as a matter of consistency the Age should again support Whitlam and Labor. It had been easy, indeed artful, to do this at the 1972 election. But this time there was a problem: the David Syme board was alert and ready for them. Though not a director of the company Perkin addressed the board which gave him an attentive hearing but insisted that the Age had a responsibility to support the opposition parties, led by Billy Snedden. Macdonald had 83

earlier negotiated an agreement that the Editor would not appear at board meetings except when explaining the paper’s editorial stance at elections; it had also been agreed that directors could not approach the Editor or his staff except through the managing director. The situation turned ugly when Perkin and Macdonald said they would quit if a suitable compromise could not be reached. The Age at that time was still published by David Syme and Co Limited operating under the unique Syme–Fairfax agreement that had been in place since 1966. In the end the issue was resolved in Sydney. Perkin flew north for a crisis meeting with the wily Rupert Henderson, a Fairfax director and former managing director of that company. Graham carried additional resignation letters signed by Creighton Burns, Les Carlyon and others. Draft editorials prepared in Melbourne were discussed and Perkin, after a phone conversation with Macdonald, agreed to a position the pair were not happy about but could live with. Perkin returned to Melbourne where he told Creighton Burns: ‘Forget about it. We’ll come out 50/50.’ Burns described the resulting editorial, which he and Perkin wrote, as ‘deliberately confusing.’ It must have confused some Age readers. The paper collected two fat files of letters to the editor complaining about ‘editorial bias’ – one from Coalition supporters, one from Labor supporters. On polling day the Age departed from its even-handed assessment of issues and definitely, though without enthusiasm, advocated a vote for the Opposition.2 When the results were in the Whitlam government had been returned with a slightly reduced majority in the House of Representatives and the Opposition still controlled the Senate. The Syme and Fairfax boards had got their way with Perkin and the Age yet not so brutally that key executives felt they must quit. Macdonald and Perkin had lost that battle, but they actually won the war. For the next 20 years the Syme board played no role in editorial policy at election times. Greg Taylor who was there throughout that time went as far as to say: ‘I believe editors around Australia since then (1974) have benefited from the Perkin-Macdonald victory.’3 Four months after the crisis that threatened his job Perkin offered some radical advice to the newspaper industry’s myriad critics: ‘First, study 84

yourself.’ It was not only newspaper proprietors, editors and journalists who were responsible for the standards of the modern press, he suggested. ‘The reader bears a great share of the responsibility.’ Perkin’s declamatory proposition (his words) came at the end of the Arthur Norman Smith Memorial Lecture which the Age Editor-in-Chief delivered at Melbourne University on 18 September 1974. ‘People get the papers they deserve’, Perkin told his audience. ‘No-one publishes garbage unless someone pays for it; no-one sensationalises unless someone is impressed by sensationalism; no-one consistently distorts unless gullible readers fail to detect its distortions.’ This prestigious annual lecture was first given in 1936 and honours Arthur Norman Smith, the first President of the Australian Journalists Association and an early advocate of education for journalists. It occupies a special place in Australia’s media and broader cultural history. Before Perkin was invited ‘the A.N. Smith’ had been given by Rupert Murdoch, John Pringle, the American W.Sprague Holden and one of my professional heroes, W.S.Hamilton, Controller of News at the ABC when I was a cadet journalist. There had also been a number of Age journalists invited to deliver the lecture, including a former editor, Leonard Biggs (1938) Geoffrey Hutton and Bruce Grant who would come under fire (and ire) in Perkin’s address. Perkin called his lecture The Hoo-Ha Machine4 and with the experience of eight years as Editor he used it to lay down markers on several critical issues, as he saw them. It was probably the most important address on journalism that he ever wrote and delivered. Hume Dow, chairman of Melbourne University’s Board of Studies in Journalism thought Perkin delivered one of the most stimulating and substantial A.N. Smith Memorial Lectures we have had. It was Perkin’s contention that the editorial stance of the Australian press had revived beyond anyone’s expectations in recent years and now presented a posture of vigour, independence and opinionated interference quite at odds with its previous 30 years. But he also knew that before accepting appointment, an editor needed a clear understanding of 85

his proprietor’s philosophical ambitions for the newspaper; just as the proprietor should clearly understand the convictions and beliefs of the man he proposed to appoint. In a veiled reference to his own recent troubles, Perkin added: ‘Even if this sort of understanding is established at the beginning, strains and tensions can arise. We have had them at the Age.’ If argument between proprietor and editor failed, he said, then the editor had three choices: modifying his convictions, resigning, or taking the sack. ‘But there is no question that the proprietor prevails.’ Turning to other issues Perkin admitted he had changed his mind and now believed it was time for a Press Council in Australia. (Agreement for that finally happened late in 1975 and the council was established the following year.) There was also a warning: ‘The Australian public is paying a high price for the libel laws it permits its politicians to inflict on us – a high price in governmental mismanagement and incompetence, in business malpractice, in anti-social behaviour.’ Towards the end of his address Perkin raised a situation which still rankled him almost two years after it occurred. The Age, he believed, had been seriously compromised, even if in retrospect, by the appointment of one of its senior staff as Australia’s Ambassador (High Commissioner, actually) to India, in 1973. The journalist in question, Bruce Grant, had been a distinguished foreign correspondent for the paper and by the early 1970s was an independent columnist in the Age. Perkin said that Grant had ‘suddenly emerged in the week before the election, as a principal organiser of the document later known as the Ken Myer letter, which received national publicity of great value to Labor’s election hopes. We read it first in the Melbourne Herald.’ He went on to ask: ‘How could I, at that moment, demonstrate to my readers that Mr Grant had indeed been, as we long claimed, an independent columnist? I suspended his column on the eve of the election.’ Shortly after the election the new Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, announced Grant’s appointment to New Delhi. This, according to Perkin, ‘was no doubt a reflection of Mr Whitlam’s regard for Mr Grant’s ability.’ When air-freighted copies of the Age arrived in London in mid-April 1975 they carried stories of the launch of the paper’s Minus Children appeal. 86

Its aim was to raise $1 million for the welfare and education of intellectually and physically handicapped children living in a State Government complex known as Kew Cottages. This housed 900 residents and was the largest facility of its kind in Victoria. The appeal followed a series of Insight articles on the Minus Children in 1973 and 1974 exposing the appalling conditions at the cottages. Remarkably it was supported – dollar for dollar – by the Victorian State Government and it would end up raising a great deal more than $1 million. The Age had called them the Minus Children because they were behind in everything from esteem to opportunity. I regret now that I never had a conversation with Graham about the campaign and the appeal, but I have always liked to imagine that my original proposal before I left Australia in 1973 played into his thinking. Whether it did or not the Minus Children initiative of the Age proved enormously valuable to these children. The plight of the Minus Children stimulated an astonishing response from all sorts of people throughout Victoria and led to a new community awareness and understanding of a confronting and challenging issue. Perhaps this was its most important achievement. The campaign must be considered one of the major achievements of Graham Perkin as Editor of the Age. Graham was one of 12,000 volunteers who turned out for a weekend door-knock in support of the appeal. Many of them were school children and the door-knock alone raised more than $300,000. John Larkin said the Editor came into the Age office on the Saturday afternoon of that appeal weekend. He was ‘positively beaming’ and Larkin had never seen him so happy. Graham had been on appeal duty at the Hampton Shopping Centre and was clutching a collection tin, full of money. A series of articles by Larkin, who spent six months on the project, and Sally White, supported the appeal by highlighting case histories; and by describing the children’s living conditions and their desperately sad shortcomings. None was more poignant than John Larkin’s story: What it means to the mothers. It began:

87

Apart from shopping, the only time Rhondda Paterson went out in six years was to take her retarded son to the Royal Children’s Hospital. They made 84 visits. She has two other children, but somehow she coped. By the time it was over the appeal had raised well over $2 million (a huge amount in 1975). It was two years later that the Victorian Premier, Dick Hamer, opened the Graham Perkin Centre – a four-building complex – at Kew Cottages. This honoured the memory of the driving force behind the Minus Children campaign. For the residents of Kew Cottages the centre presented a variety of new educational, therapeutic and recreational activities and services. The Premier believed the whole campaign had been one of the most heart-warming and fulfilling projects Victoria had seen. ‘Graham had the right mixture of aggression, humility and editorial brilliance to make the idea exciting to the public,’ he said. The Minus Children’s Fund distributed money raised and invested for another 25 years. It was finally wound up in 2000 when two final distributions were made: Special Olympics Victoria $20,000; and Kew Cottages & St Nicholas Parents’ Association Inc. just over $216,600. But its memory is still very much alive as a shining example of how a whole community, when shown the way, can unite to help those in need. Early in July 1975 the Age London bureau broke a huge political story – the Khemlani loan raising scandal – from which the Whitlam Labor government in Canberra never recovered. It would be swept out of office later that year. We had the story on our own and Perkin splashed it on Page 1 of the Age of July 4 using the Insight logo to underline the exclusive nature of this extraordinary report. These paragraphs were the first indication Australians had of the Khemlani affair: London, July 3 – The Australian Government would have paid commission of US$180 million on a US$4,000 million loan, according to documents now in the hands of The Age. This was the loan the Minister for Minerals and Energy 88

(Mr Connor) was trying to raise last December. The documents include five cheques for $US 20 million each, made out to ‘Bearer’ to be drawn on a London branch of the First National City Bank. The previous year the Federal Minister for Minerals and Energy, R.F. (Rex) Connor, had attempted to bypass normal loan raising channels and raise money through an intermediary named Khemlani. His plan was vigorously opposed by the Attorney General’s Department and the Treasury. Although ordered to stop, Connor continued to negotiate, secretly, for a huge petrodollar loan to fund ambitious national development projects. If he had succeeded it would be a triumph. If he failed nobody would know. Or so he thought. Among the documents Peter Cole-Adams got hold of was an original letter to a finance broker headed Australian Government Loan for US$4 billion only signed by Tirath Hassaram Khemlani, a commodities broker. Khemlani was an elusive and secretive businessman but he was nowhere to be seen when I visited his modest office in fashionable Belgravia. What I did learn was that he travelled constantly, darting around and across the world, always first class. One broker who knew him well said Khemlani rarely slept in a bed, but usually on a plane and claimed his diet consisted of salted peanuts, potato crisps and coffee. Another referred to him, dismissively, as ‘old rice and monkey nuts.’ From London Khemlani and his associates and clients were front page news for days. In Canberra there was confusion, embarrassment and dismay. From the UK end this was basically Cole-Adams story, possibly the biggest of his career. It was certainly the biggest story I worked on in my newspaper life. There were also elements of farce at the London end. When another mysterious character offered Cole-Adams a cache of loans’ material – cheques, telexes, memos – Perkin thought the story so important that he authorised payment for them. My role in that part of the exercise was to fill a red Qantas carry-on bag with small denomination notes at our bank, the National Westminster in Fleet Street. From there I took it to 89

Cole-Adams and his informant at an address in Half Moon Street (where else?) in Mayfair. I can’t remember the sum involved. It may have been ten thousand pounds. Not long after this triumph Cole-Adams was on his way home to Melbourne after five years as Chief European Correspondent. It had certainly been an eventful time for him – IRA bombings, political upheavals, trade union bastardry, a sterling crisis or two. And that was just in England. Quite a bit of those five years had been spent in Northern Ireland, Continental Europe (as we used to say) and the Middle East. While Peter’s long Farewell to Old England dispatch traversed many of the UK’s political, class and regional problems it was essentially an affectionate review of a country he loved and had enjoyed. It was published in the Age of Monday 18 August 1975. Some examples from that good-bye: Reporters are necessarily preoccupied with the immediate. We are trained to record change and tend to overlook what remains constant. By way of belated amends, I now report that Britain remains one of the most civilised places on earth to live, though it helps not to be poor, unemployed, or black. Cole-Adams said that he was leaving a London that was cleaner than when he arrived and where the river Thames was, as well. The public transport system was still ‘extraordinarily efficient’, he said, while common sense remained the rule, rather than the exception, on English roads. Then there was the unique appeal of rural, regional and coastal England: When you tire of the cities there is always the country-side and the less populated stretches of coastline. I know now that I will be haunted for the rest of my life by memories of the Yorkshire moors and dales, the Cotswolds, the Dorset coast and, most of all, mildly alcoholic spring days on a narrow boat chugging along an English canal. 90

However, Cole-Adams also believed he was leaving at a time when the ‘old order’ was under challenge on all sides, pointing out: Regionalism is rampant. The English, who never did understand the Irish, now cannot understand the Scots or the Welsh either. London would not be Cole-Adams’ last foreign posting. Several years after his return to Melbourne he replaced Creighton Burns as Washington correspondent of the Age. His own replacement in London was Cameron Forbes, another Queenslander, a friend of mine and a close friend of Cole-Adams. The two of them had studied together part-time at Monash University in Melbourne while first working at the Age. From my point of view the change-over in the London bureau was seamless. Like Peter, Cam was an excellent colleague and my recollection is that, before long, historic developments in Portugal and Spain saw him out of the office for long periods. (Forbes was subsequently a foreign correspondent in Singapore and Washington and is the author of several well-received books.) After Forbes had settled into his new role the Age indulged my Africa interest as never before – or, indeed, again. As usual there was a lot going on in southern Africa. South African troops had invaded southern Angola and the Rhodesians were holding out after their Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI). There were nasty civil wars in progress in both countries. Melbourne agreed to my proposal to take a few weeks away from London and have a look at what was going on in Rhodesia and South Africa. Years later – in this instance more than 40 years – it is the people you encountered that you remember clearly. The places themselves have changed beyond recognition and the events observed been forgotten or overtaken by later developments. This has been my experience anyway. It is tantalising to imagine the future Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) might have had if Joshua Nkomo had been its leader after independence. Instead this ‘food bowl of Southern Africa’ was exploited and trashed by Robert Mugabe and his crooked associates. There was a time when Nkomo 91

was widely considered to be the man most likely to lead his country; a brief window of opportunity for a progressive, peaceful, non-discriminatory and independent Zimbabwe. Fierce tribal rivalries, and later Mugabe and his thugs, put an end to that. My meeting with Joshua Nkomo was in a large house he used as his political headquarters in the township of Highfield, just outside Salisbury, now Harare. To spend time with him was to be in the presence of a huge man, friendly, approachable and clearly moderate in outlook. In fact, too moderate for key nationalist factions in a divided Rhodesia of those preindependence days. Mugabe and Nkomo were reconciled, after a fashion, in the late 1980s. Nkomo served as a vice-president of Zimbabwe from 1990 until his death nine years later. But he was just a figurehead. A meeting with Lady Wilson on her heavily fortified farm provided a stark contrast. She was the widow of Sir Ian Wilson, once a prominent local politician and Jackie (as she was known in the district) lived on Rhodesia’s eastern border with Mozambique, not far from Umtali. Two of us had made the hazardous drive there – my companion was Xan Smiley on assignment for the London Observer. Our hostess served drinks in a caged lounge room where the furnishings included a row of FN automatic rifles. The cage was heavy wire mesh, a precaution against grenade attacks and the rifles belonged to the police reservists who were guarding the house and the farm. Lady Wilson’s property – market gardening, timber and bee keeping – was right in the front line of the terrorist campaign (battle for independence, to others) raging in Rhodesia. But the only warning as we drove up to the gate was a sign which advised: Business bees. Close your windows please. Lady Wilson’s nearest neighbours were two and a half kilometres away but after 25 years on the farm she had no intention of going anywhere. As she put it to us: ‘I can’t see what one can do that’s more useful than just getting on with the job.’ With her – alert and restless – were four (white) police reservists, called up for two weeks’ operational duty. Lady Wilson called them her ‘bright lights’ and her protectors down from the capital, Salisbury, seemed suitably amused. 92

I have often wondered what happened to Lady Wilson. I also wondered what happened to the agreeable Xan Smiley who had shared this memorable trip. For more than 40 years I heard and saw nothing of him. Then, out of the blue, he turned up in Melbourne on his first visit to Australia, now Editor-at-Large of the Economist. Xan had no news of Lady Wilson either. Timing may not be everything but it is certainly important. When I called on John Lotter, a former Canberra contact, in Pretoria he was organising a South African Air Force flight into southern Angola for newspaper and television correspondents. Lotter and I had known each other since the late 1960s when he was Information Attache at the South African embassy in Canberra and he found a seat for me on that SAAF Hercules. Our destination, via Windhoek in South West Africa (now Namibia) was a war-scarred dot of a place in Angola called Pereira D’Eca. This was the northernmost base still occupied by South African troops and from here thousands of refugees were being ferried out of the country to Portugal. Pereira D’Eca was the last bolt hole for white refugees fleeing war torn Angola. Now, like countless refugees before them, they streamed into this outpost of safety with the acquisitions of a lifetime crammed into bulging suitcases and plastic bags. It was not easy – in fact not possible – to find out exactly what had happened but it looked as though the South Africans shot their way into the area as they drove local and Cuban forces before them during a deep sweep into Angola from the border. But how to file copy to the Age from a place in Africa nobody in Melbourne had ever heard of? Fortunately there was a man in Cape Town, South Africa, who did this kind of work for a living. Edmund van der Merwe, better known as ‘Fingers’, was a lightningfast telex operator. My one-time boss at United Press International, Mike Keats, was an old Africa hand who knew all about his operation. Fortunately Keats had not only shared this information with me, he also provided the vital Cape Town telephone contact number. After that it was a not-sosimple matter of getting a call through to South Africa, introducing myself to van der Merwe and explaining what I needed. ‘Fingers’ took me and my copy on trust and off those stories went to the foreign desk at the Age. 93

Years later in his book Banana Sunday: Datelines from Africa, Christopher Munnion devoted two pages to van der Merwe, describing him, warmly, as a deity worshipped by every hack from Cape Town to Cairo. One of our Angola party was Richard Cecil – Lord Richard Cecil although he didn’t use the title – a former Captain in the Grenadier Guards and the second son of the Marquis of Salisbury. Addicted to danger and excitement Richard was working as a freelance journalist in both print and television. What an amusing and friendly fellow he was, and I saw him once or twice again when we returned to the UK. Then he was gone, shot dead by guerrilla fighters while on assignment back in Rhodesia. Cecil was 30 years old; the first reporter killed since the Rhodesian emergency had begun in the early 1970s. Three months after the Khemlani story broke in London the man himself turned up in Sydney. This was another exclusive but this time it was the work of reporter Peter Game in the Melbourne Herald. The Age revelations back in July plus important new evidence turned up by Game ended Rex Connor’s ministerial career. Pressured by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam he resigned his portfolio in October. But Connor remained a member of the Federal Parliament. The Khemlani saga, played out in newspapers around Australia, had been a devastating indictment of our national government. Graham Perkin was cock-a-hoop about the central role the Age had played in uncovering and explaining the complex scandal and then calling the government to account. Yet according to Ben Hills5 Perkin had also felt a sense of betrayal by a government which had promised so much and behaved so badly. Hills claimed Perkin felt humiliated and came close to resigning. Humiliated? Privately, maybe. But considering resignation? Surely there was now too much going on for him to be even thinking of quitting. Unless it was on health grounds and over the past few years there had been plenty of those. Apparently Graham had been complaining of chest pains for months. The previous year he had a major heart scare and was hospitalised while on a visit to New York. All of this was pretty hush-hush, just like the Editor’s stay in hospital early in January 1974 was supposed to be. 94

Graham was in The Alfred hospital recovering from (successful) bowel cancer surgery, an event on the Top-Secret list at the Age. Only the family and a few senior executives were aware of it. A light plane crash – and the Editor himself – blew his cover. Reporter Russell Skelton and photographer Tony Feder were aboard the plane when it crashed into Port Phillip Bay. The two of them had been gathering material for a story on sharks in the bay but they ended up in The Alfred hospital. Soon after, that Saturday afternoon, they had a visitor. It was their Editor, clad in a bright red dressing gown and keen to know everything that had happened. Feder had been heavily sedated because of his injuries and woke to find an apparition (Perkin) sitting on the end of his bed. He told Skelton later that he thought he must have died and gone to heaven.6 We all knew that Graham smoked and drank too much, that he was a workaholic who had difficulty with what these days is called ‘the worklife balance.’ That said he had made a real effort to rectify the situation the previous year, taking Peg on what turned out to be an outstanding vacation in Europe. Health issues aside there was one major reason why Graham would not be resigning. For months he had been courted by senior figures at Fairfax (most notably R.A. (Rags) Henderson) to take one of the top jobs in Sydney. Graham had always said that after that ten years as Editor of the Age it would be time to do something else and now he was about to complete nine years in the job. As political chaos and uncertainty continued in Canberra Perkin sat down at his typewriter on Tuesday 14 October 1975 and composed an angry editorial which appeared in the Age the following morning. Under the heading ‘Go now, go decently’ it began: We will say it straight, and clear, and at once. The Whitlam government has run its course; it must go now and preferably by the honourable course of resignation – a course which would dispel all arguments about constitutional proprieties, historic conventions and ‘grabs’ for power. It must go because it no 95

longer has the degree of public support and acceptance that permits Governments to govern effectively. There are now too few people who will accept its policies, no matter how virtuous or commendable those policies may be. The Government is discredited. There is general agreement that this was the most powerful editorial Graham Perkin wrote while Editor of the Age. It was also the last. Although I was on the other side of the world when Graham died I have the clearest recollection of how and when I heard that startling news. The Age business manager Bill Bland and his wife Jan were in London and Jackie and I had dinner with them at Veeraswamis in Regent Street. The visitors returned to their hotel and when we arrived home ourselves the phone was ringing. It was Bill to say that Graham had died suddenly at his home a few hours before, early Thursday morning, Melbourne time, 16 October 1975. He was 45. Bad news always seems worse at night but what Bill told me would have been numbing at any time. How could the inspirational figure of Graham Perkin suddenly be gone from our daily lives? A remarkable era had ended. Just like that. Staff arriving at work in Melbourne later that morning found this bulletin, signed by Ranald Macdonald, on company notice boards: It is with the greatest possible sense of loss and sorrow to The Age, the company, and all of us, that I have to pass on the tragic news that Graham Perkin died, early this morning, of a heart attack. The Age has lost a very great Editor, and all of us a dearly loved and respected colleague. For the Perkin family, of course, his sudden death was devastating. Graham’s wife, Peg, and their children were home at the time. His elderly parents were still alive. On the Wednesday afternoon he had called Peg and told her he was not feeling well. That evening he appeared on the TV program This Day Tonight to explain why the Age believed time was up for 96

the Whitlam Government. Before he got home to Sandringham there had been a death threat from a crank caller. It was Steve Perkin, Graham’s son, who picked up the phone, but the caller thought it was Graham and told him: ‘We know where you live. You’re a marked man. You’re dead.’ Police went to the house immediately. Ironically Graham Perkin was dead a few hours later, after suffering a massive heart attack. His death was reported prominently on Page 1 of his newspaper on Friday 17 October. Around the country that day there were many reports and tributes but none more moving than the Age’s own ‘Personal appreciation’. It began:7 This newspaper lost its Editor yesterday. You are reading a lesser paper today because of this. A paper that has lost part of its soul. A paper choked up on its own sadness. Later that day 1,200 people packed Scots Church in Collins Street for the funeral, occupying every seat, standing in the aisles, spilling outside. The family were joined by academics and artists, sportsmen and politicians, a huge contingent of journalists and newspaper executives from Melbourne and interstate. Outside, the Age reported, the city stopped for Graham Perkin. As John Larkin8 noted: They switched off the traffic lights and laid the flowers along the footpaths. Then the city seemed to stand still. And Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who was not at the funeral, said this of the man whose newspaper a few days earlier had called time on his ‘discredited’ government: He was an outstanding journalist and a brilliant Editor whose integrity, professionalism and capacity for work made The Age one of the great newspapers of the world. Australian journalism can ill-afford the loss of a man of his ability and independence of mind.

97

In the London bureau there was one last assignment to undertake for Graham: to organise a memorial service for him in the newspaper world of Fleet Street. This was conducted by the Rev. Dewi Morgan at St Bride’s, the iconic church for newspaper people. During his memorial address the Sunday Times Editor, Harry Evans, described his friend as the Englishman’s ideal of the Australian – ‘warm, comradely and competitive.’ Of all the tributes to Graham Perkin I never heard a better one.

98

Left

Calling on British Prime Minister Edward Heath. Graham Perkin and Peter Cole-Adams at Number 10 Downing Street. Picture courtesy Fairfax Media Below

London life: Sarah and Nick at home in Child’s Hill, NW2

Left

Maeve Binchy. Amusing and talented neighbour at New Printing House Square, London Below

The author in Southern Angola

Tandberg’s farewell take as Ranald Macdonald left the Age – a ‘boy’ when he became Managing Director, Collingwood Football Club President when he left 19 years later

After the great paper chase: Lunch with Ural Ataman and his family in Istanbul

Left

Away from it all. Graham Perkin on holiday in Santorini, Greece, 1974. Picture courtesy Perkin family Below

Surprising news about ‘Ronnie’ Biggs

Left

Xan Smiley – 40 years after our Rhodesia assignment Below

The confidence of Quadrant magazine

EPILOGUE Graham Perkin’s death was a terrible loss for his family and colleagues. On a wider canvas it was probably a greater loss to the Australian newspaper industry than to the Age itself. In his nine years as Editor, Perkin had transformed the old broadsheet and he left behind a strong and well-led editorial team. In fact his job at the Age was done. The day he died Graham was booked to fly to Sydney where a senior job awaited him at Fairfax. It has never been clear exactly what post he would be offered there, possibly Chief Editorial Executive; even Chief Executive of the Sydney newspaper business. As the outstanding newspaper editor of his generation it is intriguing, if pointless, to speculate how much further his brilliant career might have progressed. A few days after Perkin’s funeral Ranald Macdonald announced the appointment of Les Carlyon as Editor of the Age. At the same time Creighton Burns began preparing to move to the USA following the sudden death of Washington correspondent Roy Macartney. It had been a grim couple of weeks for staff at the Age. Three of Graham Perkin’s editorial executives went on to edit the paper: Carlyon was followed by Greg Taylor and later on, Creighton Burns. Allan Barnes who was briefly deputy editor would doubtless have been among them, but he died of cancer in 1977 at the age of 43. In 1981 when Michael Davie was Editor – between Taylor and Burns – circulation of the Age peaked at just over 251,000. Two cadet journalists hired by Graham Perkin, Mike Smith (1969) and Michael Gawenda (1970), also edited the paper, the last of that lineage. In 1983 Ranald Macdonald resigned after 19 years as Managing Director of David Syme and Co Limited, publisher of 99

the Age. A great family newspaper tradition had come to an end and after 127 years the Syme family would no longer play a significant role in the affairs of the Age. The partnership between Melbourne and Sydney interests was over and full control passed to Fairfax. Macdonald is remembered as an outstanding newspaper publisher and a driving force in the establishment of the Australian Press Council. His commitment to the young Editor he had appointed in 1966 was just one indication of his often-underestimated acumen. Academic Sybil Nolan1 went further, arguing that Macdonald had been more than a willing accomplice in Perkin’s stand for editorial independence and was, in fact, its instigator. Greg Taylor, who followed him as Chief Executive said Ranald had earned his place as one of Australia’s great newspapermen. After leaving the Age Macdonald reinvented himself. He became a Professor of Journalism at Boston University in the United States and later the London-based director of its UK study program. The Perkin name continued in Australian newspapers with both his children, son Steve and daughter Corrie, becoming journalists. Their father’s legacy is sustained through the coveted media prize The Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year Award. In 2015, a memorial celebration dinner in Melbourne marked the 40th anniversary of his death. It featured prominent journalists who flourished during (and after) the Perkin years: people like Les Carlyon, Michelle Grattan, Peter Cole-Adams and Ben Hills. Ranald Macdonald spoke about ‘the two of us’ and from New York, Harry Evans, now Sir Harold Evans, sent a recorded tribute honouring his friend. Nobody has yet written a comprehensive history of the Age although the paper itself marked its 150th birthday in October 2004 by publishing a magnificent commemorative edition. Back in 1989 it had published a well-received book, 125 Years of Age, showcasing its best reporting and feature writing over that time. There have been a number of biographies of the remarkable David Syme, the latest and most comprehensive being David Syme: Man of The Age2 by Elizabeth Morrison, which appeared in 2014. There has been one biography of Graham Perkin: Breaking News: The golden age of Graham Perkin, by Ben Hills (2010). 100

The Age moved back to Collins Street, Melbourne in 2010. Fortyone years after leaving its historic site at 233 the newspaper relocated from Spencer Street to a striking, purpose-built headquarters at 655 Collins Street, gateway to Melbourne’s Docklands precinct. Graham Perkin and his contemporaries would be astonished at what goes on inside. The news desk looks like the control room in some kind of space facility and it is here that print, photography, audio, video and the web come together. It is all far removed from the news desk of the 1960s pictured on the cover3 of this book. No computer terminals back in those days, no audio gear, nobody who had even heard of a web site. Not even a mobile phone. But plenty of white shirts. Print in these digital times at 655 Collins Street is still very important but it is a declining part of the Age operation. Graham Perkin would be surprised to learn that the paper is now printed (2018) at a company-owned plant in Ballarat. Print circulation has tumbled as readers of the Age access its offerings on what are referred to as ‘other platforms’ such as mobile phones and iPads. Competition is tougher than ever. Newspapers including the Guardian (UK) and the Washington Post and the New York Times have digital editions (and editorial staff) in Australia. Unlike those print-only days of the Perkin era, the ‘news conversation’ never stops. It goes on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Many other significant changes have happened to the Age since the Perkin years ended in 1975. The newspaper has had several corporate owners and at the time of writing (2018) seems likely to become a small part of a multi-media company incorporating the Channel 9 television network, the Fairfax newspapers and various digital and radio operations. In 1989 the Age became a seven-days-a-week publication with the launch of the Sunday Age. In 2013 a new era began for the broadsheet that had been around for 159 years. The Age changed shape and appeared in a ‘compact’ format, a restrained and attractive tabloid. Changes aside, it is fair to say that 50 years after the first Insight team was established, the Age’s investigative reporting is better than ever.

101

As print declines and some newspapers fail, there is growing concern everywhere about their future, if they have one at all; at what will happen to their critical role in the functioning of democracies. Around the world there is rising alarm at attacks on press freedom. What I know is that in the period 1966–1975 we had inspired leadership and we responded by doing our best. I imagine the current team at the Age is doing the same. Who knows what lies ahead for the newspaper that ‘trembled’ into existence in 1854?

102

NOTES Part One: Before the Storm 1.

Nolan, Sybil. Half a Century of Obscurity: The Age 1908–1964, a paper delivered to the Australian Media Traditions Conference, 2001.

2. Morrison, Elizabeth. David Syme: Man of The Age, Monash University Publishing, 2014, p. 398. 3.

Dugan, Dennis. Recollections of The Age before World War Two. Unpublished essay, 1989.

4. Usher, Jim, editor. The Argus, Life & Death of a Newspaper, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2007, p. 7. 5.

Ibid.

6. Forell, Claude. Chronicles. Obituary of Keith Sinclair, the Age, 31 March 1995. 7.

Aldridge, Roger. Harvesting the best from the golden years, the Age, 16 October 2004.

8. Email from John Dickie, 19 December 2017. 9.

Both obituaries appear in the Appendix.

10. Welch, Bruce. Letter to the author. Undated. March 1996. 11. Jost, John interview with C.R.Macdonald in Australian Playboy magazine, April 1980 edn.

Part Two: Working for Mr Big 1.

Conversation with the author 5 March 2018.

2. Nolan, Sybil. What manner of man? Graham Perkin as Editor of the Age newspaper. Australian Journalism Review, July 2008. 3.

Hills, Ben. Breaking News The golden age of Graham Perkin, Scribe, Melbourne, 2010, p. 490.

4. Chisholm, Anne. Lamentation for a leader lost, the Age, 15 May 2010. 5.

Carlyon, Les. Email to the author, 16 December 2016.

6. Austin, David. Graham Perkin, a true sport, the Age, 17 October 1975. 7.

The Age, 150 Years – A Journey, Special Supplement, 16 October 2004.

8. Smith, Mike. Tribute to Tandberg, 3 May 2018.

103

9.

Lamb, John. 150 Years – A Journey, Special Supplement, 16 October 2004.

10. Aldridge, Roger & Tidey, John, the Age, 14 February 1967. 11. Obituary, the Age, 4 December 2017. 12. Evans, Harold. Recorded message for Perkin Memorial Dinner, Melbourne, 15 October 2015. 13. Verrender, Ian. Ben Hills: A giant of Australian journalism. The Sydney Morning Herald website, 15 June 2018. 14. Bradshaw, Sylvia. Email to the author, 30 June 2018. She was referring to Don Draper the fictional character in the popular TV series Mad Men. 15. Perkin, Graham. Arthur Norman Smith Lecture, Melbourne, 18 September 1974. 16. Perkin, Graham, The Age of Perkin, Quadrant magazine, October 1975. 17. Ibid. 18. Copy of original memo held by the author.

Part Three: Good Times and Bad News 1.

Swinstead, Dallas. Email and telephone conversations with the author throughout June 2018.

2. Souter, Gavin. Company of Heralds, Melbourne University Press, 1981, p. 497. 3.

Taylor, Greg. 20th Anniversary tribute to Graham Perkin, the Age, 17 October 1995.

4. Perkin, Graham, The Hoo-Ha Machine, A.N. Smith Lecture, Melbourne, 18 September 1974. 5.

Hills, Ben. Breaking News: The golden age of Graham Perkin, Scribe, Melbourne, 2010, p. 463.

6. Skelton, Russell. Email to the author, 9 July 2018. 7.

The Age, 17 October 1975, Graham Perkin: A personal Appreciation. Full tribute published in the Appendix.

8. Larkin, John, the Age, 18 October 1975.

Epilogue 1.

Nolan, Sybil. Australian Journalism Review, July 2008, p. 70.

2. Morrison, Elizabeth. David Syme: Man of The Age, Monash University Publishing, Melbourne, 2014. 3.

The cover image is the Age newsroom c.1969. News executives and sub-editors in the days (nights actually) before paper, glue, pens and type-books were replaced by editing terminals. Graham Perkin is at the top of the desk (referred to as the back bench) on the far left of the picture. Standing alongside him is Ron Lovett, pictorial editor. The author (shirt sleeves and vest) is at the other end of the back bench.

104

APPENDICES 1. GRAHAM PERKIN: A PERSONAL APPRECIATION Published in the Age, 17 October 1975

This newspaper lost its Editor yesterday. You are reading a lesser paper today because of this. A paper that has lost part of its soul. A paper choked up on its own sadness. Graham Perkin was for nine years the inspiration for this newspaper. He took over a century old paper with a history of radicalism. He edited it with flair and passion and guts. He made it a better paper. A great paper perhaps: it is not for us to say. But he was an Editor: not just someone who occupied the Editor’s chair. Sometimes he was the tough Editor, blustering and prodding, fired up with that urge to get it, and publish it, and make it jump out of the page. Because Graham Perkin either believed in his stories or he didn’t run them. Sometimes he was the conscience-stricken Editor, desperate to be fair, to balance things. And always he wanted – indeed loved – to be there when the story happened: he liked ink and bustle and the bustle of a sub-editors’ room; he liked the feel of a first edition still wet from the stacker, and he could always find something wrong with it. He had a resonant and imperious voice: you always knew he was there. And always, too, he was obsessed with the truth. Because that was what he thought journalism was about, what he argued and argued and argued. 105

Telling the truth. Being obsessed with the truth for its own sake, regardless of whom it hurt or favored. And by telling the truth, being unafraid of the truth, by publishing stories that others might not have published he moulded the Age into a paper of distinctive style and enterprise…and gave it some of his courage. Moulded it in his own image. For Graham Perkin was a man of great personal style …. a man who would not walk away. A great Editor, Australia’s greatest perhaps, a world figure in journalism. It doesn’t matter. He is irreplaceable. That says it all. Or nearly all. Some of us knew Graham Perkin personally. We were lucky. Yesterday we realised how lucky. Graham Perkin could be gruff and abrupt. He had a presence that, in a lesser calling, might have been called charisma. Yet everyone close to him, anyone who ever needed his help, anyone with problems, knew this outer presence to be no more than that: a façade. They knew another man. A man compassionate to a fault. They knew a man of charm and wit, a man with a sense of the absurd, who could laugh at himself, who could never (to borrow one of his favourite phrases) have become drunk with power. They knew a man who liked to give people a second chance, a third chance even, who liked to take chances with people, and who was usually right about them. And they also knew a man driven by his own integrity, a curiously deep and old-fashioned thing that at first you found hard to believe because it seemed so rare. But you eventually accepted it as the man’s most singular trait. A singular honesty, a lack of malice. A warmth. Journalism is diminished by his death. This newspaper is diminished by his death. And we, the people who worked with him, are diminished. But we were lucky, too. Because we knew him; we believed with him and were glad to stand up with him; we strived and argued and joked with him. We will not forget him.

106

2. GREGORY JOHN TAYLOR: OBITUARY Newspaper executive 31 March 1931–13 December 2016 by John Tidey *

There is no more appropriate tribute to the late Greg Taylor than to describe him as that rare creature, the complete newspaperman. Talented and widely admired, he devoted his working life to the Age. Taylor was the cadet journalist who became Editor and ultimately Managing Director of David Syme and Company, publisher of the newspaper. He was 85. Gregory John Taylor was a Tasmanian who was educated at Hobart High School and is said to have decided on a newspaper career when he was a small boy. His father was a journalist, as was his future father in law. His two brothers spent their lives in the media industry and one of them, Philip, was also a journalist and senior executive at the Age. In 1949 two cadet journalists who would later edit the newspaper joined the Age – Greg Taylor and Graham Perkin. After completing his cadetship and by arrangement with the Age Taylor spent several formative professional years overseas working in London and New York for Australian Associated Press. Many years later he would serve as chairman of AAP which was always one of his great media industry interests. On his return to Australia major reporting assignments he undertook for The Age included the Tokyo Olympics and the French nuclear tests in the South Pacific. In Melbourne he filled a range of editorial executive positions including chief of staff and news editor and after Graham Perkin became Editor in 1966 served as his indispensable night editor and trusted * John Tidey was a colleague of Greg Taylor at the Age. This obituary was published in the Age, 16 December 2016.

107

deputy. The Perkin years marked what has been called ‘a second golden age’ of the newspaper and during this time, and beyond, it once again attracted an international reputation. Greg Taylor was a vital part of the team led in those days by Managing Director Ranald Macdonald; people like Bill Bland, John Paton, Creighton Burns and, of course, Graham Perkin. Former Age Editor, Les Carlyon, said of his colleague and friend: ‘Greg Taylor did just about every job in journalism with distinction but will be best remembered for his extraordinary skills as a long-time night editor of the paper. He was an expert finisher of copy, had a gimlet eye for reporters’ errors and loathed wordy first paragraphs. He could completely remake a paper between editions without once appearing flustered.’ Between 1976–1979 Taylor was Editor of the Age and subsequently Editor-in-Chief of the Syme group. Unusually around a newspaper office he was a steady, seemingly unflappable presence. As Carlyon put it: ‘He was all about poise and composure, a man of uncommon decency, good humour and modesty. Few editors have worn their talents so lightly or been so universally admired.’ Ranald Macdonald described him as a ‘terrific newspaperman, a most effective executive and one of those people who performed calmly and quietly whatever the pressure from within or outside.’ Much of Greg Taylor’s working life was undertaken at night and around 7pm he could usually be found eating his regular evening meal, a packet of potato crisps and an apple. His main meal of the day was at lunch time before he left home for the office. Like his colleague Graham Perkin, indeed most of the news executives of that era, he was a heavy smoker. Even after he became Chief Executive he would stay at the office late into the night every Friday, helping to sort out the huge volumes of classified ads that would appear in the Saturday paper. In 1981 Taylor was named Group Operations Manager with overall responsibility for all production areas including introduction of a complex new copy processing system. ‘Introducing the ATEX system was the worst experience of my life’, he once told a colleague. In fact, installation of the system on his watch was a triumph. 108

When Ranald Macdonald stepped down after 19 years as Managing Director of David Syme and Company in 1983 it was Greg Taylor who replaced him as Chief Executive, first as general manager and from 1984– 1993 as Managing Director. Macdonald’s departure marked the end of the Syme–Fairfax partnership and henceforth the Syme organisation was a wholly owned subsidiary of the Sydney based Fairfax group. Max Suich, a senior Fairfax executive at that time, said that Taylor quickly forged a relationship with the Sydney board and Chief Executive (Greg Gardiner) that gave him an unprecedented and broad autonomy to run Syme as he wanted. But this, Suich added, was within a budget ‘that Age Editor Creighton Burns persistently complained was inadequate when compared with that of the Sydney Morning Herald.’ The Fairfax organisation went into receivership in 1991 after an illfated privatisation attempt by ‘Young’ Warwick Fairfax. There were four bidders for the company and the Melbourne based Australian Independent Newspapers was widely thought to be the front runner. Greg Taylor had agreed to be a director and chief executive of A.I.N. But when the political dust settled it was interests associated with the Canadian Conrad Black which gained control of Fairfax. In his long retirement years Taylor took a close interest in the industry he had devoted his life to and was appalled and frustrated by many aspects of its decline. If he had any hobbies I was not aware of them although he was occasionally seen at the football when St Kilda was playing. To escape the worst of the Melbourne winter he took to holidaying briefly in Far North Queensland once or twice a year. His battle with cancer over the last couple of years of his life was conducted with his trademark calm and stoicism. Greg Taylor was a family man, devoted to his wife, Anne, whom he married in 1955. She survives him together with a son and a daughter.

109

3. CREIGHTON BURNS: A PROFILE By John Tidey *

Creighton Burns, at 39, abandoned a stellar academic career to return to newspapers as a reporter. It was not an easy decision yet as a colleague observed years later, Burns possessed the qualities of a natural reporter: curiosity, courage and an ability to get along with others. His father Crayton [sic], whom he greatly admired, had been a respected political correspondent in Melbourne and Canberra. On leaving Scotch College in Melbourne Burns had become a cadet journalist at the Sun News-Pictorial but left the paper in July 1942 to join the wartime Royal Australian Navy. He was 17. His navy service – as an ordinary seaman and able seaman in a cruiser, a corvette and a destroyer – lasted for almost four years and proved an education in itself; it led to another education, as an undergraduate at Melbourne University. Burns completed an honours degree in history and was awarded the 1949 Rhodes Scholarship for Victoria. After three years at Oxford he returned home to academic appointments, first in Canberra and then in Melbourne where his mentor was the legendary Professor ‘Mac’ Ball. When the Editor of the Age, E.K. Sinclair, offered him the paper’s Singapore post in 1964, Burns was Reader in Politics at Melbourne University. He took a year’s leave of absence from the university but never returned. In this first posting for the Age he distinguished himself as a foreign correspondent during three years of turbulence and violent change in South East Asia. * John Tidey was a journalist and executive at the Age from 1965–1994. This profile was first published in Media Legends: Journalists who helped shape Australia, edited by Michael Smith & Mark Baker, Melbourne, 2014.

110

Burns returned to Melbourne in the early stages of the editorship of Graham Perkin and what would turn out to be another golden era at the Age. He played a major role in the revival and transformation of the newspaper and was promoted to assistant editor and later associate editor. Perkin died suddenly in 1975 only days after Roy Macartney, the Age Washington correspondent. Burns was the natural candidate to fill the US vacancy and by early the following year was filing for the paper from Washington. He spent five years in America and covered three US Presidents – Ford, Carter and Reagan. The truth is that Burns would have been happy to spend the rest of his career in America. He enjoyed being a foreign correspondent, particularly the camaraderie, the out of town assignments and the relatively easy access to high level policy specialists and academics. In the end he came back to Melbourne for the big prize, ‘dragged home’ he liked to claim. In July 1981 he succeeded Michael Davie as Editor of the Age. Nobody with the intellectual equipment or the contact list that Burns brought to the job had edited the Age before. In fact there was some early suspicion of his academic background and qualifications in the newsroom. But not for long. Mike Smith who was Burns’ news editor for four years and his assistant editor for another four followed him as Editor of the newspaper. In a tribute published after Burns’ death he wrote: ‘Creighton Burns was intellectually brilliant. He gave new meaning to our work by identifying issues and principles that we never knew existed in our daily essays. When he felt strongly about those issues and principles, he fought for them with formidable force, power and passion.’ Burns was a firm and committed believer in the role of the newspaper as a watchdog for the community, particularly in the monitoring of powerful interests and individuals. As Editor he championed the newspaper’s INSIGHT reporting team; together with the Canberra Times, it was the Age led by Creighton Burns that pioneered Freedom of Information (FOI) activities in Australia. But the defining story of his eight years as Editor (the longest time in the chair of any editor since Graham Perkin) was his decision, in 1984, 111

to publish details of the illegal NSW Police telephone recordings that became known as ‘the Age tapes.’ The tapes exposed corrupt connections among criminals, lawyers, judges and the racing industry. Burns and the newspaper came under ferocious pressure from the Federal Government and others determined to discredit the story. But he stood his ground, defending the story and his reporters and was vindicated when a Royal Commission confirmed the authenticity of the tapes. Several inquiries and dozens of successful prosecutions followed. High Court judge Lionel Murphy was prosecuted and convicted, a conviction quashed on appeal. In December 1984 Burns was the recipient of the Graham Perkin Award for the Australian Journalist of the year, the first working newspaper editor to win the prestigious prize. Late in his editorship Burns again demonstrated steely leadership in holding his editorial team together during the turmoil sparked by the takeover play for the Fairfax newspapers by the young Warwick Fairfax. With his second wife, Anita, gravely ill, Burns retired in October 1989. In the active years which followed he looked after his two younger children and returned to academic life as the first Chancellor of (the then) Victoria University of Technology. He was appointed an Officer in the general division of the Order of Australia in 1991. Creighton Burns died in January 2008. He was 82.

Further Reading Class Act: A Life of Creighton Burns, John Tidey, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2012. Breaking News: The Golden Age of Graham Perkin, Ben Hills, Scribe Publications, Melbourne, 2010.

112

4. JOHN HAMILTON: OBITUARY Journalist, author 16 December 1940–22 November 2017 by John Tidey *

As a young boy in Western Australia John Hamilton anticipated a life of adventure and service as an officer in the Royal Australian Navy. It was not to be. He found them, instead, as a distinguished reporter and author in a newspaper career lasting more than 50 years. John Charles Matthew Hamilton was born in Petersfield, Hampshire in 1940 the son of an RAF fighter pilot who immigrated to Perth in 1948. At the age of 13 he was selected for the Royal Australian Naval College at Flinders but after two years as a cadet midshipman returned to Perth and completed his schooling at Christ Church Grammar School. At 18 he became a cadet journalist at the West Australian and at 21 was sent to Kalgoorlie as goldfields correspondent for the newspaper. An exceptional career lay ahead. In 1962 Hamilton joined the Age where he won Walkley Awards for outstanding reporting – the Tasmanian bushfire disaster and the memorial service for Prime Minister Harold Holt – in 1967 and 1968. In 1970 he joined the Herald in Melbourne and was subsequently the bureau chief in Washington and London for the Herald & Weekly Times before returning to Australia as roving editor for the group. It was in Washington that he met and married his Southern belle, Charlotte Kay Ballard, who was a member of the personal staff of Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. They were a striking and formidable couple. * John Tidey and John Hamilton were friends for more than 50 years. This obituary was published in the Age, 18 December 2017.

113

Of all his reporting experiences a visit to Ethiopia covering the great famine of 1984 proved to have the greatest personal impact on him. Other notable assignments included the fall of President Suharto, the French nuclear tests at Mururoa Atoll and the civil war in East Timor. In 1996 Hamilton covered the Port Arthur massacre (35 dead) and the following year dashed from Norfolk Island to London where he described the extraordinary scenes accompanying the funeral of Princess Diana. He had been on Norfolk Island profiling its best-known resident, Colleen McCullough, author of The Thorn Birds. His Who’s Who of interview subjects over the years ranged from Sophia Loren and President Jimmy Carter to Sir Robert Menzies and a rare audience with the King of Tonga. Hamilton was for several years associate editor of the West Australian in Perth while it was still part of the Herald & Weekly Times group. On his return to Melbourne he spent four years on ‘the other side of the fence’ as General Manager, Media Affairs, for Carlton & United Breweries Ltd In a farewell piece when he retired from the Herald-Sun (as associate editor) in 2011 Hamilton summed up his newspaper life: ‘There have been the good times and the bad times. Moments of pure joy and exultation. Moments of horror and revulsion.’ But throughout his career, he said, he had always felt immensely privileged to be a reporter. The Melbourne Press Club honoured him with a Lifetime Achievement Award of which he was enormously proud as he was of an earlier Canadian award for international reporting. In 2015 he was awarded an AM for ‘significant services’ to the print media as a journalist and senior editor, as an author and educator and to the veteran community. Unusually among Australian newspapermen, Hamilton could be described as a courtly figure, urbane, stylish, well-spoken and considerate. On assignment he was deceptively competitive. He was not a man for hobbies, although he was a voracious reader and a convivial member of the Melbourne Savage Club. For many years he was an Australia Day Ambassador, a board member of Save the Children Fund Australia and a Director of the Court of the Royal Humane Society of Australasia. When

114

he retired from the Herald Sun he was appointed an adjunct professor at Melbourne’s Swinburne University of Technology. During his career Hamilton made several visits to Gallipoli and while still fully engaged at his trade of reporter he produced three well received books in a Gallipoli Light Horse trilogy – Goodbye Cobber, God Bless You (2004) Gallipoli Sniper (2008) and The Price of Valour (2012). Hamilton’s death followed a long and difficult illness. He is survived by his wife, Kay, their son Matthew and a son James from his first marriage.

115

5. TIM GRAHAM: OBITUARY Stockman, writer, journalist 11 October 1939–27 October 2008 By John Tidey *

A chance encounter in Christchurch in 1965 led to Tim Graham crossing the Tasman to work in Melbourne. He never worked in New Zealand again but made his mark in Australia as a gifted reporter, public relations executive, property writer and novelist. Graham, who has died of cancer in hospital at Mornington aged 69 was born in Christchurch and educated at Christchurch Boys’ High School. Turning his back on city life he pursued a ‘romantic impulse’ to work on sheep stations in the high country of the South Island. It was in lonely mustering huts in the mountains that he began writing before joining The Press in Christchurch as a cadet journalist. At the invitation of E.K. Sinclair, then Editor of the Age, whom he met by chance at the Press, Graham, accompanied by his wife Christine and their son Robert moved to Melbourne as a reporter on the paper. He drew heavily on this experience – and his time at the Press in Christchurch – for his novel The Paper Men, published in 1969. After leaving the Age (he returned for a second innings years later) Graham worked for the Commonwealth Government’s overseas information service before starting a long career in several commercial PR roles in Melbourne and Sydney. When he returned to the Age it was as real estate editor and his reporting and commentary took coverage of the property market in Melbourne to a * John Tidey and Tim Graham joined the Age on the same day and were friends for 43 years. This obituary was published in the Age, 4 November 2008.

116

new level. R.T. Edgar Real Estate director Warwick Anderson said of him: ‘He was never sensationalist in his reports, always factual, and told the story as it happened, not by guesswork.’ In recent years the Grahams moved from Melbourne to Mornington, a change of pace that pleased him. But his dream to run his own newspaper outweighed his usual hard nosed cynicism when he took on a weekly paper in Rosebud. There were high points of satisfaction but many more problems and in the end it failed. Graham was once a handy tennis player and always a voracious reader and movie buff, particularly westerns. Former colleague Mike Rosel recalls ‘a combative scrabble player, and a man always ready to give beyond measure to his friends.’ His physical toughness, to the end, was forged, he always said, by those hard years in the high country. His attitude throughout a long battle with cancer was an inspiration to everyone close to him. He remained calm and positive and when some more bad news turned up would say, simply: ‘Can’t do much about it. Let’s see what happens.’ Before the sudden decline which ended with his death the Grahams were able to take a long-planned holiday trip to England to see their daughter and grand-children and then to the United States where a highlight was a visit to Carmel in California. Tim had a great capacity for warm and loyal friendship and his great devotion to Christine and his pride in the achievements of their children were well known. He is survived by Christine, his son Robert in Tokyo, daughter Rebecca in London and son Ben in Melbourne and their partners Jenny, David and Inka; and in London by his doting grand-children Maddie and Jack.

117

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND SOURCES Many former colleagues at the Age were helpful when they learned of this project and I am grateful to all of them. At the risk of forgetting someone I would like to mention Vince Basile, Sylvia Bradshaw, Ted Cavey, Peter Cole-Adams, John Dickie, Kathy Duffy, Sally Dugan, Lorna Earl, Cameron Forbes, Chris Forsyth, Pat Lawson, John Lawrence, John Lamb, John Larkin, Peter McLaughlin, Ranald Macdonald, Michael Macgeorge, Bruce Postle and Russell Skelton. Michelle Stillman in the Age library went out of her way to assist me in the search for stories and pictures. Mike Rosel and Blaise Antony suggested sensible and invariably necessary changes as various parts of the text were shown to them. Dallas Swinstead helped with text and pictures. The contributions of Kay Cohen, Helen Duffy, Mike Keats, Corrie Perkin, Mark Sheehan and John Tulloh were much appreciated and in most cases acted upon. Stories from a bygone Age is dedicated to my wife, Jackie, who accompanied me throughout the Perkin years, and to our children. Jackie’s publishing expertise was on-call throughout the writing of this memoir and has been invaluable. Publisher Nick Walker was enthusiastic about the project from the outset and I thank him and his dedicated team for bringing it all together My principal sources were memory, personal scrap books and back copies, as we used to call them, of the Age. These were reinforced – in many cases expanded – by the recollections of the people mentioned earlier. Nobody should attempt a project like this without reading Ben

118

Hills’ Breaking News: The golden age of Graham Perkin (2010) and 125 Years of Age, edited by Geoffrey Hutton and Les Tanner (1979). The Age Commemorative Edition 1854–2004 (16 October 2004) was a particularly useful resource as was Elizabeth Morrison’s David Syme: Man of The Age (2014). I also drew on my MA thesis The Last Syme: Ranald Macdonald’s impact on The Age newspaper, 1964–1983, Monash University (1998); and my biography Class Act: A life of Creighton Burns (2012). Sybil Nolan’s detailed profile of Graham Perkin in Australian Journalism Review (July 2008) provided some valuable insights and context.

119

INDEX

Age circulation history 3, 5–6, 31, 69, 99 Collins Street sites 6–7, 101 ownership and control 2–3, 6, 21, 27–8, 69, 101 Spencer Street site 61, 101 Aldridge, Roger 10, 22, 43 Alexander, Douglas 14 Allan, John 74 Allin, John 34 Alston, Peter 4, 31 Argus 6 Armfield, Hugh 56 Ataman, Ural 75 Austin, David 25, 38 Austin, Harold 4, 7, 12, 24, 31 Australian Associated Press (AAP) 9, 12, 16, 73 Australian Press Council 67, 100 Barnes, Allan 50–1, 56, 99 Barker, Geoff 30 Basile, Vince 41–2 Bednall, John 47 Bennetts, John 12, 20, 50 Beverley, Jack 78–9

Bierman, John 33, 63 Biggs, Ronnie 37, 81 Binchy, Maeve 74–5 Birch, Michael 56 Blackbourn, Ray 41 Bland, Bill 4, 65, 96 Bolte, Sir Henry 11, 25, 39 Bourke, Peter 56 Bowler, Neville 40 Boyle, Kevin 30 Bradshaw, Sylvia 64 Brenchley, Fred 72 Bristol Hotel, Lagos 55 Brown, Dixon 17 Burns, Creighton 12, 14, 20, 53–4, 58, 61, 99, 110 Byrne, Jennifer 59 Cantwell, John 56 Campbell, Sir Harold 4, 12, 18 Canberra bureau 20, 48–50, 56 Cannon, Michael 3 Carlyon, Les 25, 28–9, 41, 99 Carman, Gerry 34 Carney, Jim 19 Cavey, Ted 22, 29, 41 Cecil, Richard 94 120

Childs, Kevin 29–30 Childs Hill, London 80 Chisholm, Anne 25 Chisholm, Horace 18–19 Cole-Adams, Peter 12–13, 53–4, 71, 74, 76–7, 81, 89–90 Connor, Rex 89, 94 Craig, Mary 57, 58 Crook, Bill 51 Curnow, Hugh 56

Game, Peter 94 Gavaghan, Jack 34 Gawenda, Michael 99 Gordon, Harry 61, 82–3 Goring Hotel, London 71 Graham Hotel, Melbourne 18 Graham Perkin Centre 88 Graham, Tim 13, 29, 116 Grant, Bruce 14, 20, 84 Grattan, Michelle 24, 59, 100

Daily Nation, Nairobi 2, 33 Darmody, Jack 37, 42, 81 Davidson, Karl 36 Davie, Michael 25, 99 Denison, Jim 76 Dexter, Nancy 57 Dickie, John 12–13 Duffy, Kathy 57–8 Dugan, Dennis 4–5

Hack, Iola 58 Hall, Stephen 36 Hall, John 34 Hamilton, John 13, 35, 43–4, 61, 113 Hamilton, Walter 85 Hampstead & Highgate Express 80 Harrison, Phil 33 Hatcher, Ian 12–13 Hawker, Dennis 14 Haynes, Michael John 82 Henderson, Rupert 84, 95 Herald, Melbourne 6, 75, 82–3 Hewat, Tim 63 Hewitt, Don 36 Hills, J. B (Ben) 48–9, 100 Holt, Harold 23–4, 44 Human Resources Management 33 Hutton, Geoff 14

East, Roger 56, 79–80 Emperor Haile Selassie 11, 52 English, David 48 Evans, Harold (Harry) 46, 69, 98, 100 Feder, Tony 95 Federal Palace Hotel, Lagos 55 Fingleton, Jack 51 Forbes, Cameron 91 Forell, Claude 9, 30 Fox, (Bishop) Arthur 60 Fox, Pam 1, 12–13, 35 Forsyth, Chris 10 Friend, Bloemfontein 33

ICPOTA 65 Insight, Age 44–5, 47–9, 88, 101 Insight, Sunday Times 45 International Press Institute (IPI) 70 Isaacson, Caroline 4 Isaacson, Peter 4

121

James, Francis 70, 79 Jennison, John 29 Jost, John 11, 20, 47, 56 Keats, Mike 93 Kemsley scholarships 14 Khemlani, Tirath Hassaram 88–9, 94 Knox, Ken 4, 35 Lachajczak (aka Lach) Henri 37–8 Lambert, Alan 56 Lagos, Nigeria 54 Larkin, John 12–13, 46–8, 56, 87, 97 Lawson, Pat 24, 57 Lawrence, John 35–6 Lamb, John 8, 40–1 Leader 4, 6 Lie, Rolf 35, 47 Lloyd, Nick 55 London bureau 71, 74 Lotter, John 93 Louw, Raymond 34 Lovass, Stephen 33 Lovett, Ron 37 McCall, Colin 65 Macartney, Roy 67–8, 99 McFarline, Peter 40 Macklin, Robert 49 Macdonald, Hamish 16 Macdonald C.R. (Ranald) 1–2, 16–17, 20–1, 23–4, 38, 63, 99–100 Macgeorge, Michael 18, 31 McLaughlin, Peter 38, 62 McWatters, Aubrey 35

Malseed, Clive 60 Maxwell, Robert 28 Menzies, Sir Robert 12, 22, 51 Melbourne Savage Club 60 Messer, John 41 Milligan, Spike 56 Minus Children campaign 70–1, 86–7 Morgan, Rev Dewi 98 Munnion, Christopher 93 Murdoch, Rupert 16–17, 28, 46, 66 Nation Review 67 Neill, Lt. Col. E.H.B. (Ted) 16, 79 Neill, Nancy 16 New Printing House Square 73 Newsday 29, 37, 58, 62–3, 67 News of the Day column 5, 7 Nkomo, Joshua 92 Nolan, Sybil 24, 100 Odd Spot 62 Page, Martin 55–6 Palling, Bruce 35 Paton, John 1, 20, 63–5, 77 Pereira D’Eca, Angola 93 Perkin, Corrie 100 Perkin, E.G. (Graham) A.N. Smith lecture 64, 83 before the Age 2, 14 board crisis 83 cadet journalist 14 death 96, 105 editorial executive 13, 15, 20 Editor 22, 26, 38–9, 40, 45, 57, 64–5, 95

122

Editor in Chief 73 health 59, 94 Kemsley scholar 14 Minus Children 70–1, 86–7 Staff College 15, 23 style 1, 25, 58, 105 Walkley award 14–15 Whitlam government 42, 51, 68, 83–4, 95 Perkin, Peg 58, 72, 95 Perkin, Steve 97, 100 Pigott, Bruce 56 Postle, Bruce 24, 40–1 Press Foundation of Asia (PFA) 69 Quadrant magazine 67, 70 Radic, Len 59 Reid, Alan 51 Richardson, John 34 Richardson, Michael 56 Ryan, Peter 61 Ryan, Ronald Joseph 26 St Brides Church, Fleet Street 46, 98 Schuler, Phillip 60 Scots Church, Melbourne 97 Scottish Daily News 78 Seka newsprint mills 75 Sinclair, E.K. (Keith) 4, 9–13, 17, 20–3, 31 Skelton, Russell 95 Smark, Peter 74 Smiley, Xan 92–3 Smith, Mike 39, 99 Snedden, Billy 52, 83 Snell, Gordon 75

Soso, Jim 35 Stephens, J.S. 5, 18 Stevens, Greg 8 Stevens, John 62, 73 Stewart, Ian 31 Stock, Roy 31 Sun News-Pictorial 4 Sunday Press 73, 81 Sunday Times, London 45–6 Swinstead, Dallas 83 Syme, David 3, 49, 74 Syme, Ebenezer 23, 49 Syme, Herbert 4 Syme, Kathleen 8–9, 25, 57 Syme, Sir Geoffrey 4–5 Syme, Oswald 16, 21, 28 Tait, Robert 11–12, 25 Tandberg, Ron 24, 39 Tanner, Les 24, 39 Taylor, Greg 8, 13, 15, 26, 29, 39, 54, 107 Taylor, Phil 31 Taylor, Tom 60 Telegraph, Brisbane 2, 13, 46–7, 56 The Female Eunuch 58 Thorpe, David 26–7 United Press International (UPI) 2, 11, 33, 93 Valenta, Tom 34 van der Merwe, Edmund (aka ‘fingers’) 93 Veeraswamis, London 96 Wakefield, John 13

123

Wall, Jim 36 Warner, Denis 53 Warner, Graeme 34 Warracknabeal 14, 23 WAWA 54 Welch, Bruce 17, 31 We Were Wrong 27 White, Sally 58, 87 Whiting, Ken 54–5 Whitlam, Gough 97 Whitlock, Tony 20 Wise, Donald 53 Wilson, Lady Jackie 92 Wynne, Sandra 74, 77

124