A Certain Style

by Jacqueline Kent

  Penguin and Sun Books – a new paperback publishing company set up in 1965 by former Penguin staff members Geoffrey Dutton, Max Harris and Brian Stonier, with George Smith – found Angus and Robertson exasperating to deal with. Whenever Beatrice or Douglas Stewart was asked to release the paperback rights to various A&R titles, they often refused on the grounds, usually spurious, that they intended to issue those books in paperback themselves. Geoffrey Dutton said he grew tired of having Sun Books act as talent scouts for A&R, particularly when a title had been out of print for many years.2 When A&R did agree to relinquish a title, their judgement let them down: they gave Sun Books the rights to Judah Waten’s Alien Son, which turned out to be one of the new company’s bestsellers.

  A new generation of ‘larrikin publishers’ was taking on A&R at their own game, showing entrepreneurial skill and creative flair.3 Andrew Fabinyi, who had come to Australia as a postwar refugee, was building up F.W. Cheshire in Melbourne; Frank Eyre was running Oxford University Press in Melbourne. During the 1950s and 1960s it was these companies, not Angus and Robertson, who published Australia’s most significant non-fiction, including A.A. Phillips’s The Australian Tradition (1958), Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend (1958), Robin Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness (1960), Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country (1964) and Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance (1966). Oxford University Press were developing a list of children’s books to rival A&R’s. The Angus and Robertson speciality, books that should be published regardless of profit, was no longer their monopoly; Manning Clark’s History of Australia and the Australian Dictionary of Biography came from Melbourne University Press. Brian Clouston and Lloyd O’Neil (who had started his publishing career as a bookshop assistant at 89 Castlereagh Street) co-founded Jacaranda Press in the 1950s, publishing educational books, natural history, fiction and poetry – again, A&R’s traditional areas. In 1960 O’Neil left Jacaranda to establish Lansdowne Press, which made a killing with books about sport. And the Americans could not be kept out of the Australian market forever: a number of US-based companies were publishing books for the tertiary educational market.4

  At a time when almost all worthwhile Australian books had been stamped with A&R’s logo of the thistle and waratah, it had made sense for A&R to publish right across the range, from novels to poetry to children’s books, natural history, biography and educational texts. But now, with increased competition from other publishers, A&R was casting around for a niche to call their own. In October 1969 John Abernethy expressed his concerns to George Ferguson:

  Time and again in New York I got the impression that the A&R general list, as expressed in the current Sydney and London catalogues, was at best puzzling and at worst off-putting, for New York editors … it was clear that many editors wondered how anyone with a list as relatively small as ours could make a good job of being so many different kinds of publisher at once … We came away, in fact, with the feeling that except in educational and children’s books (the only parts of our list that appear to have unity of character and direction) A&R presents a disturbingly diffuse and unkempt image to the world.5

  A&R were also slow to respond to new trends in publishing. Though the company spent time and money establishing a presence in Asia, they continued to use Halstead Press to print their full-colour books, while their competitors had turned to the Hong Kong and Singapore companies that produced better-looking books more cheaply. A telling anecdote in this context is the story of Neville Cayley’s What Bird is That?, which had been a good seller for A&R since its first appearance in 1931. In the early 1960s it came up for yet another reprint, but the original blocks with their small coloured drawings were too worn to be printed from. Books on natural history with large and detailed photographs were doing well in the USA and in Britain, and A&R had the opportunity of revamping the book’s format. But management decided to leave it just as it was: Cayley, they said, was a classic and readers would expect no changes. The original drawings were scaled down so the tiny pictures looked just as they had always done. Lansdowne soon began publishing natural history books intended for use in the field, and sales of Cayley – and other old-fashioned-looking A&R natural history books – dropped dramatically.

  As Frank Thompson pointed out, to stay in business publishers need to be attuned to what people want, have a feel for new trends, work out which books will catch the public eye. They need to be able to catch the next wave – and there were times when A&R didn’t seem to realise the surf was up.6 George Ferguson’s ‘we are dispensers not prescribers’ – his precept that A&R’s job was not to decide what people should read but to give them what they wanted – was altogether too passive, too reactive for the new publishing scene.

  Watching Angus and Robertson with frustration and foreboding was Ken Wilder, managing director of Collins Australia and the Collins representative on the A&R board.7 His position was a difficult one. When Collins bought Packer’s A&R shares in 1962, they had agreed to keep them only until they could be sold to a friendly buyer without loss, which everyone anticipated would happen within three years. But eight years later Collins still had almost £1 million tied up in A&R, money that could have been financing their own Australian publishing operation. Collins had also agreed not to interfere in the running of A&R in any way, but Wilder found George Ferguson’s less-than-dynamic management style increasingly frustrating (and Ferguson, of course, was uncomfortable about having a rival publisher present at board meetings). The situation pleased nobody, though apparently Angus and Robertson had come to accept Collins as a permanent feature of their managerial landscape.

  Then, early in 1969, Ken Wilder dropped a bombshell. Collins had decided to cut their losses and withdraw their shareholding from Angus and Robertson. Their own local publishing program had been successful, they wished to expand, and they needed the money to finance this and to set up a new distribution plant near Moss Vale south of Sydney. They would not pull out immediately, but would give Angus and Robertson a year to find a friendly shareholder. To George Ferguson Collins’s decision was not merely a blow but an affront, almost a betrayal. He and the board had clearly forgotten that Collins had bought into A&R simply to prevent an American publisher from controlling the company, and that the arrangement had never been intended to last forever.

  One way out of A&R’s dilemma – and an argument for the view that what happened next could have been prevented – was to raise money on the value of the shares, rebuild 89 Castlereagh Street and develop the property, or sell it to a developer and lease it back. Here was another opportunity for A&R to realise their assets, capitalise on their real estate and, by becoming liquid, get themselves out of trouble. But despite their narrow escape from Burns a decade before, the board maintained their traditional view: Angus and Robertson were publishers, not dealers in real estate. For them, selling or borrowing against their property was like trying to run a shipping company by selling the ships. The board did nothing, and early in 1970 Collins pulled out of Angus and Robertson. And, just as there had been ten years before, someone was waiting in the wings.

  Gordon Barton was a young businessman whose company, the International Parcel Express Company (IPEC), had made large profits in the transport business and who was looking to expand. He already had an interest in publishing, though not through books: his newspaper Nation Review was essential reading for anyone under thirty-five who wanted a quizzical and irreverent slant on Australian life and politics. He ran a think tank called Tjuringa Securities, cheekily named after the sacred Aboriginal objects but with the even cheekier twist that Tjuringa Securities removed objects from other companies. They were in fact asset strippers, corporate raiders, among the first in Australia.

  Barton not only had his eye on Angus and Robertson but he could see exactly how to go about acquiring it. It wasn’t difficult. IPEC had a share in the Anthony Hordern office building on the southern side of the CBD, which was coveted by the AMP Society. AMP also wanted the Angus and Robertson bookshop a
t 89 Castlereagh Street to complete their Centrepoint development. IPEC and AMP did what amounted to a straight swap. AMP put up the money, IPEC did a deal with Collins, who got cash for their shares, and Angus and Robertson’s shareholders got cash and IPEC shares. AMP got the site at 89 Castlereagh Street, Collins the value of its shareholding, IPEC the company. By the end of 1970, after more than eighty years as a family concern, and without a struggle, Angus and Robertson belonged to Gordon Barton.8

  Many people could not understand why George Ferguson and the board failed to act sooner to keep the company in their hands. There is an argument that the Barton takeover need never have happened. At the time George Ferguson apparently considered it as something of an act of God. He wrote to Rohan Rivett in mid-1970:

  We withstood the battle and the breeze for nearly ninety years on our own and could have gone on doing it. But we have to take life as it comes and make the best of it and this we here are prepared to do, providing that Barton is fair dinkum. He says that he intends to carry the place on as it is, etc., etc., but one knows that these things are usually said on occasions like this and only too often they are not meant. Whether he means it or not I don’t know yet … The big question is whether in fact we are really going to have a say in things or not. If not, then there’s no point in staying and I should probably say goodbye to the old firm after forty years’ service. But we’ll see.9

  The swiftness and efficiency of the Barton takeover left A&R employees confused, almost shell-shocked. ‘It feels strange to know we are the property of someone else,’ wrote Beatrice to Hal Porter at the end of 1970.10 At least Gordon Barton didn’t want to close down A&R’s publishing: Beatrice and her colleagues had to take what comfort they could from that.

  Shortly after he took over Angus and Robertson in 1970 Gordon Barton hosted a staff party at the Phillip’s Foote steakhouse in the Rocks area. With its bare flagstone floors, rough wooden benches and tables, and nineteenth-century-style handbills on the walls, the restaurant might have been deliberately chosen as the backdrop for the speech Barton made. He was well aware, he said, that Angus and Robertson was part of Australia’s history, a great Australian institution whose character he would always recognise and respect. He would never relinquish A&R, he did not want to change things: the message was ‘steady as she goes’. As Beatrice listened to these reassuring words, she must have wondered whether Barton’s assurances of continuity were as ersatz as the restaurant’s gas-fed log fires.

  Rumours were flying. Paul Hamlyn, who had made a fortune publishing big commercial picture books, was alleged to have told Barton to turn the bookshop into a supermarket and to publish only non-literary works. It was also said that Barton intended to abandon publishing altogether and sell off A&R’s list to the highest bidder. No one knew what to think, everybody was jumpy. ‘The situation made us all slightly eccentric,’ said Barbara Ker Wilson. ‘People went slightly mad for a while. It was like a divorce, I think.’11

  The first round of changes in management came quickly. Gordon McCarthy, the young accountant who had helped broker the AMP deal for Barton, was put in charge of A&R’s publishing and bookselling, a huge job. Under him were John Abernethy, who continued to be the publisher of fiction and general books – McCarthy never had any great interest in publishing – and Bruce Semler, director of the education division. Barbara Ker Wilson went to run children’s book publishing from A&R’s London office. One person Barton had to handle carefully was John Ferguson, not only a friend but the assumed heir apparent. Barton sent him off to manage the London office with broad hints to the effect that it was not unknown for a general who was sent to the provinces to return later and lead Rome.

  Everybody had been wondering when George Ferguson would go. He had been almost completely marginalised, and early in 1971 he resigned after forty years with A&R. His decision was not unexpected: the last few years had been difficult for him. He had always been interested in publishing politics and over the years had cultivated friendships with Hamish Hamilton, Sir Stanley Unwin, Sir William Collins, and other leading British publishers; now those contacts would prove useful in his new position as the first staff director of the Australian Book Publishers’ Association. Ferguson was sixty, two years younger than Beatrice. His departure was another nail in the coffin of the old A&R, and it must have underlined Beatrice’s sense of insecurity and apprehension about the future.

  An even more decisive break with A&R’s past came later in 1971 when Angus and Robertson left 89 Castlereagh Street. Ever since David Angus and George Robertson set up their bookselling business, number 89 had been a Sydney institution. Now the stock was moved to a more modern store in Pitt Street, part of the Centrepoint complex. To Australia’s book buyers, the demise of the bookshop was the most obvious and the saddest symbol of the changes in Angus and Robertson. Number 89 Castlereagh Street stood empty, a dismal cavern, until the building was finally demolished in 1975.

  With the bookshop went many employees who had spent their working lives there, including the head fiction-and-general buyer Hedley Jeffries. His domain was vanishing and he had little interest in the new premises in Pitt Street. For years his ambition had been to work in Hatchard’s bookshop, Piccadilly, and he decided to retire and go to London to fulfil his dream. Alas, Hatchard’s management considered him too old to be on their staff and he returned sadly to Australia.

  Other changes struck further blows to A&R’s heart. First under George Robertson, then under George Ferguson, the company had taken pride in the number of men who had worked for the company all their lives, literally ‘man and boy’. Perhaps a dozen were left, mostly in their eighties, and they were working not out of love for the company but because they could not afford to retire. With all its paternalistic attitudes, Angus and Robertson (like other companies of its vintage, admittedly) had never had a proper superannuation plan. Halstead Press, for whom most of these men worked, had also become a liability, unable to compete with cheaper offshore printing prices. Gordon Barton sold Halstead Press to John Sands in 1972 and the old printers and typesetters were dismissed with ex gratia payments. The following year the education division was sold to McGraw-Hill.

  In March 1972 the publishing department moved from 221 George Street across the harbour to a boxlike new two-storey office at Glover Street, Cremorne. Beatrice thoroughly disliked the change, not least because she would have to give up her studio at 219 George Street. She conceded that the new offices were within easy reach of Folly Point and close to Aunt Enid’s apartment, but this was just one more upheaval she could do without. She thought the new quarters ‘hideous’ and hated the colour scheme. ‘The new office … is painted bright yellow, inside and out, to cheer us all up,’ she commented acidly to Hal Porter.12

  The move to Cremorne heralded a change in management that would affect her more than she ever suspected at the time. Gordon Barton announced that he was appointing a new publisher so that Gordon McCarthy could concentrate on the retail side of the business. This development immediately caused an outbreak of turf wars. John Abernethy, Bruce Semler and John Ferguson all felt entitled to the job. While Beatrice had never had managerial aspirations outside her own department, with another level of management above her she was now just one of the working editors, which she did not like. The other editors who worked with her were resentful on her behalf as well as their own. With all these clashing ambitions and disappointments, the atmosphere at A&R was thoroughly unpleasant, so Gordon Barton decided to appoint a publisher from outside the company. When he made his choice, the staff, and others in the industry, were stunned. Richard Walsh? The gadfly publisher and editor of Barton’s cheeky, scrappy Nation Review? Why would Barton choose an abrasive thirty-year-old iconoclast, the former editor of the satirical magazine Oz whose natural habitat was apparently hot water, to find and publish books for a traditional company like Angus and Robertson? Shaking their heads, A&R’s competitors considered Barton’s choice downright eccentric. ‘Richard’s bright,
but he doesn’t know anything about book publishing,’ was the general view.

  But Barton wasn’t looking for an experienced publisher. He liked what Walsh was doing on Nation Review and could see that this young medical graduate turned magazine editor, ten years younger than he, represented the assertive, well-educated, progressive generation that would shortly sweep Gough Whitlam’s Labor Party into office. There was a youthful impatience about Walsh, a willingness to chop away dead wood, to bring in fresh ideas, and Barton thought that was just what Angus and Robertson required.

  From the beginning Walsh was keen to take on the job: he loved books, could see that A&R was creaking, and he was bristling with ideas. He and John Abernethy were friends, on the same wavelength, with similar tastes; Walsh approved of Abernethy’s attempts to make A&R’s fiction publishing less conservative. The change in career direction – dodging defamation writs on the Review one minute, running A&R’s publishing the next – didn’t faze him at all, but he wanted to hang on to Nation Review. He and Barton reached a compromise – reluctantly on Barton’s part – whereby Walsh would spend half his working week in Sydney, half at the Review in Melbourne. Walsh handed over the Review’s editing to George Munster and John Hepworth, though in effect he continued to run it. He was soon doing two full-time jobs simultaneously, running from one to the other, devoting only two days a week to the more difficult and demanding, which he would have to learn from scratch. He was frequently seen hurrying out of the office on the way to the airport with a colleague running beside him, into the street or the car park, needing a decision.

  Walsh began overhauling the editorial department. For many years the royalty records system had been in the hands of Bert Iliffe, who had devised a Byzantine system for recording and paying royalties that was the bane of A&R’s authors’ lives and that nobody understood. A member of the clerical staff was seconded to help streamline the system and shortly afterwards Iliffe, then in his eighties, left the company.