The Walkley Foundataion an Alliance Initiative

 Ben Hills’ book is the well-told tale of a great love affair with journalism and newspapers – and an editor, Graham Perkin of The Age from 1966-1979, who died at the age of 45 when his reputation and influence were at their zenith.

Graham Perkin joined The Age in 1949 when cadets paid for their own shorthand and typing tuition. If you wanted to type your stories – the newsroom had a single machine – you bought your own typewriter for £30, and that had to come out of a £3 a week wage. Across all sections of the paper there were perhaps 40 reporters and a total of 80 staff (today The Australian has a total editorial staff of 300+).

Hills writes: “The reporters’ room... was a dingy smoke-filled back office with an enigmatic boot dangling by its laces from over a beam. It contained one upright cast-iron typewriter... Along one wall was a row of cubicles each containing a black Bakelite telephone. To one of these nooks the Supreme Court reporter of the day, ‘Hec’ Scholl, would adjourn after a boozy lunch, press a telephone against his ear as if he were working and doze off. Towards edition-time, the news editor’s secretary would gently prise his notebook from his hand, type up the story from his immaculate shorthand, write ‘Case continuing’ on the last page and hand it to subeditors.”

According to Hills, Perkin cultivated “the lonely lighthouse keeper of Gabo Island in Bass Strait, a man whose solace during stormy nights was rum and who bore witness to several nocturnal apparitions which enlivened the dull pages of The Age under headlines such as ‘Mysterious Monster Menaces Shipping’. Was it a huge whale? A Soviet submarine? A sea serpent? Such stories were known in the trade as ‘beat-ups’ and Perkin soon mastered the knack of titillating the readers’ imagination without straying into outright invention…” which is the neatest and kindest definition of a beat-up that I have come across since Peter Smark summed them up as “Good story. Could be true.”

By 1966 Perkin was under offer from other papers and he was the logical next editor of The Age – as long as he waited his turn.

That turn came early because Ranald Macdonald, a member of the Syme family which owned the paper, precociously sought and was given the managing director’s job at age 26. He turned to Perkin to play catch-up with modern Australia at The Age.

Perkin took on Victoria’s ruthless premier Henry Bolte over capital punishment, commissioned expensive and aggressive investigations into Bolte’s public service, land development agencies and police corruption, began political polling, started a higher education section, saw the promise of Whitlam’s social agenda and supported his election in 1972.

He was the first editor, Hills asserts, to put an immigrant’s by-line in an Australian paper (an Italian, Vincent Basile). He published opinions from his staff with which he did not agree and he was socially and politically conservative – and never embarrassed about it.

To my mind, one of his greatest achievements was to provide generous space and unprecedented freedom for cartoonists and black-and-white artists. It’s the cartoonists who get down to the gristle and bone of a political issue or personality and expose the meek and the weak in editors.

By 1970 he began to recruit women, the last great untapped resource, though he lagged John Pringle at The Sydney Morning Herald and the editors of The Australian and the Financial Review.

He advised his talented daughter Corrie to stay out of journalism – it would make her “ tough” – she ignored the suggestion. He was concerned that Michelle Grattan might be embarrassed by the vulgar language of the Trades Hall.

The circulation grew, the reputation of The Age rose to something like the days of its founder David Syme and the celebrations in the office pub, the Golden Age, grew more extravagant. The pub provided a variety of services. Perkin lunched with his executives there. The publican also made available a taxi service and discount rates at an associated motel for couples of an amorous persuasion after lunch. The nights were noisier. The sports writer Peter McFarline and the publican Ian Cotter stripped to their underwear and walked the bar in a “beautiful legs” contest judged by Clare, the barmaid, and Jennifer Byrne, now matron of the First Tuesday Book Club.

But in 1974 the board of old Syme appointees and the new financiers from the Fairfax partners in Sydney rebuffed Macdonald and Perkin and took control of election editorial policy. Rupert Henderson brought Perkin to Sydney, where he gutted Perkin’s leader commentary in support (with reservations) of Whitlam and supervised a rewrite to “commend” a vote for Billy Snedden and the coalition. It was the harshest lesson of Perkin’s career.

The following year, and two days before he died from a heart attack, Perkin wrote the powerful leader in The Age that gave critical support to Malcolm Fraser’s ruthless rubbishing of convention to block the budget in the Senate and provoke Whitlam’s sacking by the governor-general.

“GO NOW. GO DECENTLY...” was the headline on a demand for the Labor government to resign, as Fraser persuaded his senators to block the budget.

Precisely because Perkin, Macdonald and The Age had previously backed Whitlam, this leader echoed through parliament.

In his book Hills has turned up a notable scoop – the daily diaries of Angus McLachlan, the loyal lieutenant to Rupert Henderson. The diaries reveal much about the manoeuvrings in the media, including McLachlan’s insider account of how Fairfax came to a partnership with the Syme family and eventually to control of The Age. It’s fascinating stuff for those who remain interested in those days and deals.

Hills also denounces the present Fairfax group board and management for locking up the corporate archive of its Sydney and Melbourne newspapers and refusing him and others access to historic board records that would have helped unwind some of the corporate manoeuvres of 35 years ago.

These Fairfax records, which were made available by the family and the board of the time for two volumes of corporate history in 1981 and in 1991, are almost certainly the most valuable historical documents that corporate Australia possesses. After all, the company and its archives go back more than 150 years and cover company and editorial decisions concerning the development of the colony of NSW, two world wars, the Depression, Federation and the great post-war controversies in politics and economic management.

All the material made available to the company historian, Gavin Souter, for his two volumes should surely have been deposited with an archive open to historians – and Souter has argued this to the company without success. Hills suggests the lockout may arise from the neglect of the care of the records which, if correct, makes their archiving even more vital.

Perkin’s flaws are not ignored. He romanticised his family background, inventing some fine old Scottish antecedents to improve his Mallee bush upbringing. He also disguised the fact that he studied law and failed before entering journalism. He had what can only be described as a peculiar relationship with ASIO and perhaps ASIS.

But precisely because the book is zeroed in so tight on Perkin and The Age, it tends to exclude the broader picture of newspaper journalism in the Perkin era.

By the mid-1960s when Perkin took over The Age, a combination of factors contrived to shake up the constipated centres of establishment power and influence of the traditional newspaper groups, and offer journalists, newspapers, their editors and their readers new opportunities and excitements.

There was the formidable and shocking (to the establishment) new pressures of competition provoked by Rupert Murdoch when he launched The Australian in 1964, and the consequent promotion of some brilliant editors – Max Newton at Fairfax and The Australian, Adrian Deamer at The Australian, and Vic Carroll at the Australian Financial Review – as well as Perkin.

Perkin and his kind gave newspapering a special zest. At The Age you could easily persuade yourself that journalism could make a difference.

Hills’ achievement, though, is to make his book much more than an anthem for the good old days. It is a genuine contribution to Australian newspaper history... although my bones so ached from nostalgia when I finished that I thought I had the flu coming on – or perhaps I had raised the ghost of a 1970s-era morning after.

Breaking News: the golden age of Graham Perkin by Ben Hills, published by Scribe, RRP $59.95.

Max Suich was chief editorial executive of the Fairfax Sydney and national newspapers (1980–87) and founding publisher and editor of the Independent Monthly (1989–96)