by Anne Summers
I ferreted out the article from New York magazine in which Tom Wolfe’s long essay described the ‘new journalism’.1 It was, I learned, a form of reporting where any topic was fair game, where the reporter could insert herself into the ‘story’, and draw on techniques of fiction to set scenes and create atmosphere, to evoke people’s appearance and explore their emotions rather than just state their age, their sex and, if they were women, their marital and maternal status, as was standard newspaper practice. One of Wolfe’s famous and trend-setting early pieces was entitled ‘Radical chic’,2 and it described a ritzy fundraising party at conductor Leonard Bernstein’s thirteen-room penthouse duplex on Park Avenue. The guests of honour were a bunch of Black Panthers, the militant African-American group raising hell on the fringes of the civil rights movement by combining black pride and community programs with aggressive, sometimes borderline criminal, political activities. Wolfe’s article was an exuberant piece of writing that managed simultaneously to enter the nightmares of the great conductor/composer, and to mock the pretensions (the ‘radical chic’) of the Park Avenue crowd cosying up to gun-toting, tight-pants-wearing men whose Afros had not ‘been shaped and trimmed like a topiary hedge’. Wolfe was rewriting the rules of journalism. The article was merciless in its mockery, but it wasn’t satire. The New Journalism depicted the world as it was, with its ugliness and profanities as well as its kindnesses and confusions. It was absorbing and addictive and, where editors allowed it, feverishly imitated by journalists in newspaper offices all around the world, at the least the English-speaking world. I was one of them.
One of my earliest articles, written ‘on-spec’ since I wasn’t sure that Suich would be receptive, described Christmas Day 1975 in Belmore Park near Central Railway in Sydney. A friend and I were driving past on our way to a festive lunch, when we noticed a number of homeless men sprawled on park benches. On the back seat of our car was an array of freshly cooked food, far more than would be needed at our lunch. We each had the same thought. We took one of the turkeys and, in our atheistic version of Christmas cheer, offered it to the men. My article was self-mocking. We had not foreseen how they would claw at the meat with bare hands, stuff it into stomachs so unaccustomed to food of such quantity and richness that they would spew it up immediately. Not only that. We fled, leaving behind our nice plate and our do-gooder naivety, as a couple of the men unzipped their pants and, fumbling for their penises, told us what they’d really like for Christmas.
The next day I left my story on Suich’s desk.
‘Did you write this?’ he demanded some hours later, brandishing my little composition.
I knew it was an unusual piece, I knew the National Times was not as adventurous as Nation Review, the other weekly newspaper that was enlivening the media scene in the 1970s. The transport magnate Gordon Barton had launched Nation Review in 1970 as a newspaper that characterised itself as ‘the Ferret: lean and nosy’ and in both tone and subject matter, it went where the rest of media seldom trod. Today, it would be seen as utterly misogynist and probably racist as well; it reflected the times, perhaps a little too faithfully.
‘It was just an experiment,’ I responded somewhat defensively. ‘I wanted to try a different way of writing.’
I can’t remember his exact words although they were along the lines that it was a great piece of writing, but that I’d better not think that I could spend all my time on this bleeding hearts stuff when there were real stories out there and we—or, to be more precise, I—was going to get them.
That was fine with me. I wanted to broaden my knowledge and I certainly wanted to avoid being typecast as only able to write about women or other subjects that were seen as ‘soft’. It annoyed me that there was such a hierarchy of status given to subjects and that I would not be taken seriously as a journalist if I was seen as only interested in ‘bleeding hearts’ stories. Politics and crime were the big stories of the era and the only way to build a reputation was to write about these. Later, with some of my male colleagues, we would find new ways of writing stories about particularly brutal or squalid examples of sexual abuse, stories the mainstream media in those days never touched outside their crime pages. We learned to bring in the victims’ point of view and to explore the murky terrain of he said/she said in ways that had never previously been done in Australian journalism. But for now I was finding my feet, learning as fast as I could and loving every moment of it. I was fortunate that I did not have to serve a cadetship, writing shipping news or covering town hall meetings. I was disadvantaged in that I did not learn shorthand, nor was I ever taught the basics of reporting, but I felt more than compensated by being able to go straight into the big, often very big, stories and to have as much time, and as much space, as I needed.
For the first time since I was a teenager when I’d worked in a bank, I had to go to the office each day. I was unaware until Suich called as I was sitting down with guests to a lunch I was hosting on New Year’s Day that journalists worked public holidays: ‘Get your arse in here,’ he’d commanded. I made my apologies and headed for Jones Street, Broadway. The compensation for working public holidays was an extra two weeks annual leave, I discovered. That certainly made up for it. I was in a real job, with deadlines, and working alongside a bunch of highly talented, very opinionated and extremely competitive individuals. I had met John Edwards when he worked for Whitlam’s Labor minister, Clyde Cameron, in Canberra; later, after writing some memorable political profiles for the Australian Financial Review, he was now writing politics for the National Times. I knew Yvonne Preston, renowned for her writing on social and political subjects, from around the traps. Both of them had put in a word for me with Suich. I knew a few other journalists who were part of the Sydney Push, that group of free-spirited and argumentative individuals, mostly self-styled libertarians and anarchists, I had gravitated towards soon after arriving in Sydney. Their numbers also included gamblers and labourers as well as academics, students, poets and people who proudly referred to themselves as layabouts. Our Friday night watering-hole was the Criterion in Sussex Street where, I now found, working for the ‘capitalist press’ was contentious. Our arguments became even more belligerent. I was leaving the safety of the crowd, I realised. I was on my own, I’d have to make my own way.
Eventually I wrote about everything from Defence procurement to children’s books, social workers to corrupt cops, rape to armed robberies, from the murder of police sources to the drug habits of the ‘gonzo’ writer Hunter S. Thompson. But that first week I had started with the familiar, writing a story about what happens to women once they leave a refuge, those safe havens recently established by the women’s movement for women and children escaping domestic violence. It was easy, being a subject I already knew, and the women who ran Elsie Women’s Refuge in Glebe, which I’d helped start the year before, were only too willing to help. Two women who with their kids had recently been moved into public housing agreed to be interviewed on the record. I found out how to organise a photographer and by Thursday I had the story, complete with pics, on Suich’s desk. It was my first published article but it had absolutely zero impact, including with my editor, because the paper came out the weekend of the emotional and rowdy federal election that saw Malcolm Fraser, the Liberal leader who had engineered the ‘constitutional coup’ that led to the sacking of Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam on 11 November 1975, confirmed in office and the dismissed Whitlam consigned to opposition.
Ironically enough, my very next story, which hit the mark with Suich for being tough, came from knowledge I’d acquired during my radical political activities. For the past several years I had been active in the women’s movement, working on a range of issues including publications (I’d helped start Refractory Girl, the first women’s studies journal) as well as being one of the group that had occupied a vacant house in Glebe and opened Australia’s first modern women’s refuge, Elsie. I’d also taken part in resident actions aimed at saving low-income housing and som
e of Sydney’s older buildings and in prisoner action groups where I met people on both sides of the law. I was able to use such knowledge several times and it resulted in some of my most successful stories. I would make my name, in that first year, by writing a series of articles about the New South Wales prison system that caused a political ruckus and put pressure on the recently established Royal Commission into NSW prisons. Much of the information that I ‘revealed’ was common knowledge among lefty lawyers and others who agitated for prison reform, but the rest of the press wasn’t interested. Once it was clear that Suich was willing to go down paths other newspapers shied away from, the scope for us to break major stories was almost boundless. The first time it happened was the result of Suich mentioning his suspicion that the police routinely disregarded the law requiring the destruction of fingerprints of people who had been charged but not convicted.
‘But everyone knows the cops keep them,’ I’d chipped in. ‘Where’s the story in that?’
‘We suspect they keep them,’ he corrected me. ‘We don’t know for sure.’
‘Yes we do.’
‘Can you prove it?’
‘Yes.’
It was common knowledge around the courts, with any number of lawyers having first-hand experience of a client’s prints being retained. I no longer have the story and I can’t remember how I assembled the proof, but I do know that it was not difficult and that the story when it was published caused all sorts of strife. After that, I got put onto a lot more police stories. But I also found myself needing to confront a fundamental question about what my life had become when Suich asked me to take down a large poster I had pinned to the wall beside my desk. It showed a stylised photograph of a NSW police officer with the words ‘tomorrow’s bacon!’ scrawled across the top. It was a striking piece of work, designed by the renowned graphic artist Chips Mackinolty for the Earthworks Collective, a group based at the Tin Sheds at Sydney University that produced powerful political posters. Now my boss was asking me—or was he telling me?—to take it down. I hesitated. I understood he was in fact asking me to decide whether I was still an activist, or if I was willing to take my heart off my sleeve and become an observer and reporter of events. Hadn’t I already made that choice by joining the National Times? Or was I trying to have it both ways? It was an argument that journalists continue to have. We were not expected to have no political views, but we were expected to not put them on display. In the US, this proscription extended to reporters being discouraged from taking part in political rallies, lest their presence be seen to compromise their objectivity. I was astonished to learn that Linda Greenhouse, who covered the Supreme Court for the New York Times, was criticised for joining the massive march in Washington DC in 1989 in favour of abortion rights. In Australia, the rules were not as stringent. In 2000 many journalists, including the editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, would join the several hundred thousand people who walked across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in the March for Indigenous Reconciliation. But in 1976 I was being told I could not display an anti-police poster in the newsroom. I had already been attacked by many of my friends for what they saw as ‘selling out’. I’d argued that the National Times was different, that we could expose the kinds of corruption and abuse of power that our political activism was all about. This was just a different way of doing it. And, I liked to think, perhaps a more effective way since we reached a much larger audience and we had the authority of the Fairfax media company behind us. Not many of my friends bought this argument. They were purists. Later some like Wendy Bacon, who I knew from the Sydney Push and who was also active in resident action and women in prison groups and who had attacked me the most vehemently, themselves joined the media. She wrote ground-breaking articles about corruption for the National Times. But early in 1976, you were a journalist or you were an activist. You could not be both, or at least not in the newsroom. For the rest of my life I would continue to be torn by these conflicting and, it seemed, incompatible desires. It had been a problem for me while I was writing Damned Whores and God’s Police, although that had been more about how I split my time between writing and activism. As a journalist working for a mainstream newspaper I would never have the latitude enjoyed by Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre, who were their own publishers, and so could engage politically while they wrote articles and novels (and continued to teach). I had to choose. I took the poster down. For now, at least, I was choosing journalism.
The National Times ran articles that were not just long but by the standards of daily newspapers, digressive. We used adjectives and ego-enhancing bylines at a time when the Sydney Morning Herald, the flagship publication of the stately Fairfax newspaper empire, regarded these as rare rewards for major pieces or favoured writers. You were more likely to see a piece ‘From our Canberra correspondent’ than one that disclosed who had actually written the story. The National Times was a unique publication. Without the obligation to report on the news of the day, or even the week (although since we went to press at 11 a.m. on Saturday for Sunday morning publication, we could update stories if necessary, to ensure they were current, and sometimes it was legally astute to do so), it became known for its magazine-style journalism. The paper and its reporting staff were free to roam as far as their editor would allow.
The paper had been established in 1971, the idea of Vic Carroll, the man who had turned the Australian Financial Review into a commercial and journalistic success during the 1960s. He had presided over the covering of the early days of the oil and minerals exploration booms and supervised political and business coverage that launched the careers of Max Walsh, Robert Gottliebsen, Peter Robinson and Trevor Kennedy. Carroll was a dour man who said little but who, you felt, was always sizing you up under those hooded eyes of his. He was, it turned out. I was amazed, and gratified, to discover later that he thought highly of my work. Carroll had once been a stockbroker and understood the ways of money but he knew that journalism was more than just reporting what was in front of you. The essence of journalism was ‘curiosity’, he said in 2013 after being awarded an Honorary Doctorate by Macquarie University.3 Carroll proposed that Fairfax start up a weekend paper that continued, and expanded, the Financial Review’s market. He was managing editor of both papers from 1970 to 1975 before, in 1980, being put in charge of transforming the Sydney Morning Herald into a modern, quality newspaper.
Max Suich was 33 when he became the paper’s second editor in late 1972. He’d been Japan correspondent filing mostly for the Financial Review, covering the big trade and economic stories of the relationship between Japan and Australia. He was single-minded and ambitious, and he succeeded in turning the National Times into a newspaper legend, attracting and then managing the egos of some extraordinary talent. Suich had reddish, rapidly thinning hair and a wicked grin; he could be decidedly brutal as an editor and brusque as a person, but he was nevertheless kind and even shy in some situations. He became embarrassed when a female reporter asked for the day off to have an abortion.
‘Take all the time you need,’ he said. ‘Just don’t talk about it.’
When it came to our work he gave us very free rein. He was adventurous and encouraging and willing to listen to any ideas his staff wanted to run past him.
‘What’s the story, morning glory?’ was Suich’s way of greeting every one of his reporters. Whatever the subject, however mundane, or potentially sensational, he was interested in hearing what we had. Everything was ‘a story’ which I found confusing at first, thinking stories were fiction, but I soon mastered the lingo and relished in the freedom of being able to write about anything that was interesting or, increasingly as I got into stories of crime and corruption, illegal. I began to write more about the police, including the activities of the Special Branch, and about the notorious but previously hard to prove role of some senior police in orchestrating and profiting from criminal activities. And I wrote a great deal about prisons, but also continued to write about subjects that were denigrated as
‘bleeding hearts’ journalism by Suich and his tough-minded contemporaries. Their Friday lunches, were always at a fancy restaurant, where Suich, Carroll, Walsh, Robinson, Fred Brenchley (covering politics in Canberra, but a frequent visitor to Sydney and later editor of the Financial Review) and Paddy McGuinness, the Financial Review’s economics editor and, also, later its editor would dissect the problems of the world and, just as importantly, Fairfax their employer. They were long and extremely liquid affairs. Occasionally, I would be invited to join them. Sometimes Valerie Lawson or Deborah Light from the Financial Review might be there, but it was mostly an all-male affair. I was keen to have these men respect me, and I knew there was no better place to be learning, but I did not see any contradiction between being interested in both the tough stuff and stories about the disadvantages or outright suffering of those who were being excluded from the overall benefits of society. They indulged my little one-woman stand, but no one took it seriously. That wasn’t where ‘the story’ was.
People today look back on the National Times in the 1970s as some kind of halcyon era of journalism and they are right. Our journalism was different, and so was our sense of ourselves. At first, we thought ourselves lucky to be at the pointy-end of the way journalism was evolving, but before long we took it for granted and I, at least, developed a certain smugness. Not only were we right, we were better.
Our office shared a floor with the Sun, the afternoon tabloid that favoured racy headlines and was in frenzied competition with the Daily Mirror, produced by the Murdoch stable a few blocks away in Holt Street, Surry Hills. Derryn Hinch, later well-known as a radio host in Melbourne, and in 2016 elected to the Senate as an Independent, was editor of the Sun. He was a friendly and approachable guy, with the equally affable Terry Hayes, now an internationally best-selling writer of fiction, as his sidekick. I used to see Hinch at the pub, or drop by his office occasionally, so I knew him well enough to storm in one day in May 1976 to protest the headline, ‘Rebel mum suicides in jail’. There were many ways to describe the German radical, Ulrike Meinhof, but ‘rebel mum’ was a bit too reductionist, even for a Sydney tabloid. Meinhof did have twin daughters but, in teaming up with Andreas Baader to form the Red Army Faction, or the Baader-Meinhof gang as it was colloquially known, she went way further than your average rebel, even in the 1960s. Meinhof advocated, and practised, urban guerilla warfare against the state and individual industrialists and was eventually caught, imprisoned and sentenced. There is still controversy as to whether she suicided—or was murdered—in her cell. The Sun, of course, had no room for such ambiguity.