by Les Hinton
Rivett died in 1977 of a heart attack, aged 60, an early death almost certainly brought on by the biggest story of his life. When I began at The News, John Tulloh, a tall, bony-faced cadet came to me with firm advice: ‘You must read Rivett’s book, Behind Bamboo. Everybody who comes here has to read it.’ When I did, a brief, half-forgotten sentence Rivett had uttered at my job interview was explained. ‘I lived in Singapore,’ he had said.
Behind Bamboo was the story of Rivett’s war, an epic of death, courage, cruelty, plague, starvation, and, for him at least, ultimate survival. When Japan entered the war in December 1941, Rivett, a cadet reporter aged 23 from Melbourne, had volunteered to go to Singapore to work for the Malaya Broadcasting Corporation. Behind Bamboo begins as Rivett performs the chilling duty of broadcasting stunning news to the world on 9 February 1942: ‘I took a deep breath and as the red light flashed on behind the microphone … I went on to read out the announcement which told the world that Britain’s Eastern fortress had been violated and that the Japanese had landed on Singapore Island.’
Behind Bamboo is about the three years Rivett endured as a prisoner-of-war, written secretly and hidden ‘in the roof of attap huts, in the bottoms of tins and bamboo containers, under the ground, in the framework of my bed and inside bandages strapped around my thighs and waist’.
He recorded life inside the broiling hold of a ‘Jap hellship’ carrying prisoners-of-war to slavery along the infamous Burma–Thailand railway. He wrote of summary executions in prison camps, prisoners beaten to death for violating minor rules, and of sick and dying men reduced to ‘cadaverous wrecks’ by their Japanese guards. ‘They cared nothing and did nothing as these men rotted to death before their eyes,’ he wrote. Rivett scorned them in defeat; their ‘cringing servility’ was ‘only equalled by their arrogance and brutality while they had been on top’.
More than sixty thousand Allied prisoners-of-war were forced into slave labour in Japan’s drive to carve a 250-mile path through Burma’s unyielding terrain of hills and dense jungle. For Japan, the railway was crucial to accelerating its advance across Asia, but it lives in history as the scene of one of the Second World War’s great atrocities. More than 12,000 prisoners-of-war were driven to their deaths.
Nothing about Rivett betrayed the three-year nightmare he had been through. I couldn’t imagine what he had witnessed, what demons haunted him, or even if he had any demons. He was tall, more than six feet, with academically rounded shoulders — a reader’s stoop — and he favoured double-breasted suits. His hair was fair and thinning, and his face was intense even when he was telling you what sandwich he wanted for lunch.
He was one of many war veterans working at The News. Among them, the ‘Japs’ were almost universally loathed, and none had better cause to hate than Rohan Rivett. But he stood apart from his wartime comrades and became a vocal advocate of reconciliation with Japan. I remember the impact of a memo he circulated after returning from a goodwill visit to Japan. The memo announced a change to the newspaper’s style book. Henceforth, the name of Japan’s capital city would no longer be spelt ‘Tokio’ but ‘Tokyo’. The old spelling, said the memo, offended the Japanese. To many of us, it was a small change, but a huge gesture; the bitter old war veterans in the office were not amused.
I performed many tasks for Rivett. Some were nerve-wracking, like making cash deposits into his bank account. As well as being forgiving, he was trusting. He once handed me £300 — a huge amount in 1959 — to deliver to his King William Street bank. I had never seen so much money. Another duty was updating the newspaper files in his office. He required all local, Melbourne, and Sydney newspapers to be maintained in orderly piles. This involved threading pink ribbon through a giant darning needle and lacing it through the newspapers so they stayed in tidy packs without being tied so tightly that the Editor could not turn the pages. It was not a demanding task, and I was daydreaming the day Rivett strode into the office and shook me with a booming and excited voice: ‘I must tell you that this is a day you will remember all your life. It is the day that Rupert Murdoch stepped beyond Adelaide to begin growing a great Australian newspaper company.’
I turned towards him with a puzzled look.
‘News Limited is now the owner of the Sydney Daily Mirror. It is one of many more newspapers this company will own,’ he said.
I don’t think Rivett — or even Rupert Murdoch — could have guessed at the scale of his understatement, and that the little ‘News’ of Adelaide was the genesis of the mighty News Corp. For the next half century, the word News existed in almost every subsidiary company name — News Limited (Australia), News International (London), World News in America, then News America Publishing. For years, the intro to every 20th Century Fox film, with its trumpet fanfare and searchlight beams, declared across the bottom of the screen ‘A News Corporation Company’. But that was before Fox became the big brother of the Murdoch corporations.
That was in May 1960. It was a heady day for Rivett, but two months later he was out of a job. The letter from Rupert was handed to him by his tearful secretary. It said: ‘I have never loathed writing a letter more.’
The office reeled with shock, and regret. Departing editors leave dread and uncertainty in their wake. I have, once or twice, seen these departures bring glee, but most often a newspaper suddenly without an editor is bereft. People who knew him said Rivett was deeply distressed. He had been a Murdoch family friend; in the early 1950s, when Rivett was a London-based correspondent, young Rupert, then an Oxford student, had been his regular houseguest.
Years later, Rupert described his fallen editor as ‘headstrong’ and told an interviewer: ‘I felt I just could not leave him in charge in Adelaide because he had become so emotional in his editorial writing. It was a very sad day for me.’
I knew Rohan Rivett for a short time, and not well at all, but he was the stranger — charismatic, and maybe headstrong — who gave me my first big chance. He never again set foot in the office, but a few times after he was sacked I saw him driving slowly by the office in his grey Humber, seeming to search for a familiar face. Upon seeing me he would wind down his window, wave, and drive on.
—
Not much made sense on my first day at work. It was a whirl of speed and noise and curses. My orders were to follow around an experienced copy boy and learn from him. His name was Trevor Bitmead, and he slicked back his red hair in a Tony Curtis style.
It was early morning and 20 reporters at three rows of desks were typing on pieces of paper large enough to contain only about 50 words. When a reporter cried, ‘Copy!’ Trevor seized a completed page, hurried it next door to the sub-editors’ room, and placed it in a metal tray. For about 90 minutes, Trevor and a dozen other boys carried these small pages to the same basket.
In the subs’ room, a large man with blue braces and a loose tie was in charge. He handed the pages to other men with instructions such as: ‘Ten inches of copy across eight ems. Two decks of seventy-two point Century Bold caps across four. Make the intro twelve point bold across fourteen.’ The sub-editors knew what he was talking about.
When a sub-editor finished writing on these pages he also called, ‘Copy!’ and a boy would fold the pages into a metal cylinder, and push the cylinder into a thick pipe that made a loud sucking noise. This pipe would carry the cylinder, rattling at great speed, across the ceiling and out of sight.
‘Trevor, where does that pipe go?’ I asked.
Trevor led me out of the newsroom to a place that was even noisier and also very hot. Men sat at a dozen gigantic black machines typing on keyboards with dozens more keys than a typewriter. As they worked, they studied the pieces of paper that had been typed by reporters and marked by sub-editors. Wells containing molten lead were attached to these linotype machines, and the reporters’ words and the sub-editors’ headlines were turned into lines of hot type.
This type was then carried to anoth
er room where yet another group of men put the lines of lead type into a frame on a heavy metal table. At the same time, they referred to large pieces of paper that were sketches of page designs that the sub-editors had also provided. When this was done, the men tapped gently over the entire metal page with a wooden hammer before wheeling it to the foundry, where other men used more molten metal to turn these pages into curved plates to be fitted to the rotary press.
The pressroom was the loudest place of all. It was also dangerous. When the press was running, it was impossible to talk. Some men working there wore hearing aids and had missing fingers.
I went home that night overwhelmed, exhausted, and fearful. Would I ever fathom the mysterious precision of the place, the chaotic choreography that somehow produced a newspaper? I didn’t know how I would manage the pace or the intensity. Everyone had seemed angry or anxious or both. Maybe the accounts department was the place for me after all. But, after a week or so, I began to get the hang of, and would soon fall in love forever with, the rowdy glamour of the newspaper world.
Copy boys were lined up each morning on a bench at the back of the reporters’ room. We were there to do whatever we were told: run copy, deliver new editions around the office, buy sandwiches or cigarettes, feed parking meters.
Hanging on the wall facing us was a big, black, square panel, which was perilous to ignore. When a buzzer sounded, the board displayed the name of an editor, beckoning from somewhere in the building, and the boy at the top of the bench would hurry to receive his orders. Any boy slow off the mark faced the anger of the Head Copy Boy. Despite the title, it was a tradition to give this job to a retiree. Roy Hussey was a short and growling man whose deeply lined face sank into hollows beneath the bulging cheekbones that supported his oversized black spectacles.
Mr Hussey was our boot-camp sergeant, there to knock us into shape. He went about this task with dour enthusiasm, sitting at his corner desk imperially surveying his boys as we sat in silent discomfort on the hard wooden bench, waiting for the call to action.
Each of us adhered to the strict Hussey dress code — suit and tie at all times. No slip-up was too minor to provoke his anger: not a moment’s lateness arriving for work or coming back from lunch; not a split second of delay when the dreaded buzzer sounded, or an impatient reporter’s cry of ‘Copy!’ went too long unheeded. Mistakes, or misconduct, could bring instant dismissal. Sometimes Mr Hussey was within his rights. He escorted out of the building the copy boy who took an elastic band and fired a large metal paper clip into a moving press, shredding the fast-moving newsprint and bringing the machine to a messy halt.
I had a near miss myself one night when Rupert Murdoch arrived unexpectedly at his office on the ground floor. The only television in the building was in this room. On Saturday nights, when it was slow, copy boys sometimes sat on the floor behind his leather sofa watching Westerns. I was alone when he arrived and I lay quietly panicking behind the sofa for an eternity — or maybe 90 seconds — the television still playing, before he turned it off and left. Rupert laughed when I told him this story years later, but didn’t disagree that he would have fired me on the spot.
I never felt closer to serious trouble than the day I lost the midday news bulletin minutes before it was to be broadcast on Adelaide’s most popular radio station. My job was to deliver the bulletin to 5DN, another News business, a mile or so away.
In the days before fax and email, this task was performed with a delivery mechanism relied upon for more than a century: a bicycle. I set off on the uphill trek with the noon bulletin tucked into my back pocket. This was not wise. When I arrived 15 minutes before midday, my back pocket was empty.
In all the experiences of my career — on the receiving end of a prime minister’s anger, sitting in the White House to be attacked over a television show I oversaw, the rain of shattered glass caused by a Belfast bomb, the Turkish rocket that exploded at my Cyprus hotel — none was worse than the grip of helpless terror I felt at that moment.
I ran into the studio to see the presenter, sitting alone at his microphone. He gave me a smile and a friendly wave through the glass soundproofing. I couldn’t bring myself to admit what I had done. I leapt back on the bicycle, retracing my journey, but felt doomed for sure. It was a windy day and the loose pages had been held together by a single paper clip. I felt no hope and saw no future.
And then there was a scatter of white paper blowing across the road on a downhill slope. Cars were running through it, single sheets were airborne. But there it was — my lost midday news — and I raced around the road, heedless of swerving traffic, reassembling every tire-marked page.
I sped back to the studio and delivered my errant bulletin moments before the strike of noon. The presenter looked up at me quizzically as he read, turning the smudged and crumpled pages, but the newscast went smoothly, and afterwards I went into the soundproof booth and confessed.
‘Why didn’t you tell me, mate,’ he said. ‘I’d have re-read the news from 10am and saved you the trouble.’
Some experiences never fade, and that is one. Here’s another. Early one morning, a plump-cheeked man with a cigarette turned away from the newspaper file at the bottom of the reporters’ room.
‘Can you buy me a ham sandwich, please?’ he said, handing me a 10s note.
‘Yes, sir,’ I said.
This was my first exchange with Rupert Murdoch. For 15 years we discussed nothing more elevated.
CHAPTER 7
‘Christ, Hinton, don’t you know . . .’
I was learning about newspapers, and I was also learning about a new country. This time, there was no plan to move on after a couple of years. My parents had bought their first house: a new three-bedroom L-shaped bungalow at 23 Minchinbury Terrace, Marion. We lived next to a vineyard growing grapes for ‘Minchinbury Champagne’, before the French seized back control of the word and made them call it sparkling wine.
Across from our narrow street was the railway station, and the regular din of diesel engines and brakes from commuter trains heading to and from the Adelaide city centre seven miles northeast. On hot evenings, with the windows open, the sound of our television — the first we owned — was overwhelmed by this noise. After years of wandering, my father, who was now 49, and my mother, 45, were here to stay.
The garden was an expanse of empty earth when we arrived, but everything grows fast and big in Australia. When he was not working in a kitchen, Dad spent much of his life weeding, planting, and mowing in his garden. On Saturdays, he kept his tiny transistor radio with him, listening to the races. He planted trees — an orange tree, a lemon tree, an apple tree, and gum trees. He grew dozens of flowers: from tulips and roses, to rambling bougainvillea. A vegetable patch flourished behind the garage that contained our new two-tone Hillman Minx with whitewall tyres.
Adelaide was a wonderful place: the weather, the air, the open spaces, and the ease of life in a small city. As for Australians, it took a while to understand them. For a young country built by immigrants, they didn’t seem to like newcomers much.
The British, who came in the largest numbers, were ‘Poms’. No one was sure why we were Poms. One theory held that it was an acronym of ‘Prisoners of Mother England’, harking back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when British offenders were transported to penal colonies in Australia. Another theory claimed that it came from Australian rhyming slang, and that pomegranate was the word for immigrant. Non-British immigrants were distinguished from us as ‘New Australians’, a description often uttered with disdain. New Australians were virtually all Europeans, largely from Italy and Greece. When we arrived Australia had a ‘White Australia’ policy, which resisted immigration from neighbouring Asian nations. It was already being dismantled when we arrived and had disappeared by the 1970s.
But I knew from Rohan Rivett that Australians were willing to give people a chance. Now I had to make the mos
t of it.
I had a lot to learn. While Mum and Dad discovered the joys of endless television, I locked myself away in my bedroom — the first of my own — and ploughed randomly through books of biography, history, and fiction. I read everything I could: Steinbeck, Faulkner, Dickens, Waugh, Greene, Defoe, Swift, Dumas, Melville, Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie. Many of them were books that kids my age were still at school reading. I checked every word I didn’t know in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary Dad bought me. There were a lot of them. I still have the remains of that dictionary, dismembered long ago by overuse. I read Churchill’s The Second World War — all six volumes — years before understanding that it might not be entirely objective, and his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. I browsed Fowler’s Modern English Usage. I read Time magazine every week, every page. I could see how it slanted things, and used words that didn’t exist, but I loved the exciting places it wrote about.
Every week, I went to the newsstand at the Adelaide railway station and bought a yellow-bound copy of one week’s editions of the London Daily Mirror. When I became a cadet sub-editor, I drove compositors crazy trying to copy Mirror layouts, insisting on wild column measures, complicated rules, and weird photo crops, which they had great difficulty creating.
I read about the history of newspapers, and how the ‘heavies’ were born at a time when printing technology was as miraculous as the internet would seem centuries later. I read the history of The Times of London, founded in 1785 by John Walter, and what Abraham Lincoln had told its fabled war correspondent, William Howard Russell: ‘The London Times is one of the greatest powers in the world — in fact, I don’t know anything which has much more power — except perhaps the Mississippi.’
I read about the eccentric founding fathers of Fleet Street’s popular newspapers: Lord Northcliffe, who created the Daily Mail and the Mirror, and the Canadian Lord Beaverbrook, whose Daily Express was both a huge success and his personal bully pulpit. I read about the yellow press war in New York between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst, and how they were accused of using their newspapers to provoke the Spanish–American War of 1898.