Early habits become habits of a lifetime. Every morning when we got to work at the Telegraph the cadets had to come up with three news topics for the day. All the way in the tram from West End to Queen Street, after crossing the river from St Lucia, I would be looking about me for newsworthy topics. If we got to the office without a news story of our own, we would ‘suggest follow-up to the Courier-Mail story on such and such …’. We were never allowed to sit idle. If it appeared we were, Mrs P would pop a piece of copy paper into our typewriters with ‘Bubble, bubble!’ scrawled on it. And bubble we did, thinking desperately for a story idea.
Our training was carried out on the job, in spite of going to university. We worked alongside senior reporters who gave us tips of the trade, and we started with menial jobs, such as reporting on the markets (food not finance) and posting the results of the Golden Casket, the state lottery. As the Telegraph published five issues a day, we also experienced the very real tension of meeting a deadline for each edition.
As a cadet I also learned the more cutthroat aspects of the newspaper business and got a taste of how competitive journalism could be. I had gone to Surfers Paradise to interview the manager of the newly upgraded Chevron Hotel. After our chat, the manager turned to a colleague and said, ‘Shall I give her my daughter from behind the Iron Curtain?’ And he did. His teenaged daughter had escaped from communist East Germany; her photograph and the story made the front page of the paper with my name on it. This was in the days when having your name on a story was very special. My excitement and pride were dashed a few days later when the editor, John Wakefield, passed me in the corridor and said, ‘Good story, Miss Kerr … that Mrs Parker wrote for you!’
I was too stunned to reply. But I learned the valuable lesson that generosity doesn’t always come with success and sometimes insecurity does. This lesson would stand me in good stead later, when I found that credit isn’t always given to the person to whom it’s due and that a competitive streak lurks just below the surface in most human beings. It would be useful knowledge in the political sphere.
I learned, too, the lessons that come with failure – of not only getting up again but of benefiting from it. I failed my driving test five times, then I wrote a story about it for the Telegraph. I did pass a few years later. My future brother-in-law Tony Atkinson gave me lessons and my future mother-in-law came with me to the test. She sat in the back seat, clutching an unopened bottle of champagne and chatting gaily to the policeman-examiner who was presumably quite happy to accept it when I passed.
I moved into a flat in New Farm with two school friends. It was a one-bedroom flat with a pull-down sofa in the living area and we had a rotating system where every third week you slept on the sofa, and the other two weeks in the bedroom. While I was living there I had my very own Queensland Police adventure. Studying late one night, I decided to go for a walk in nearby New Farm park, then considered one of Australia’s top three rose gardens. I needed to clear my head, and was jumping over rose bushes when a cruising police car pulled up beside me. A policeman leaned out and said roughly, ‘Get in.’ So I did.
They started questioning me and asked what I was doing.
I said I was just going for a walk.
They asked: ‘How old are you?’
I told them I was 18.
The policeman said: ‘Don’t give us that. You’re not a day over 14.’
Until then I had been thinking it was all a lark, a bit of a giggle, but then I started to get worried. So I said, ‘I’m a reporter on the Telegraph and I work with Pat Lloyd.’
This had an effect and after a bit more questioning they drove me home. I was hoping none of the neighbours were looking. The next morning I went into the office full of outrage at being treated in such a way. But the police had already been in touch with Pat Lloyd, whose outrage certainly outclassed mine. He tore strips off me for being stupid and said, ‘That’s a very dangerous area at night. It’s where the sailors go from the ships nearby.’
The real thrill in journalism came from the unexpected stories that you came upon by accident. I went one evening to an art show at the gallery at Finney Isles store (now David Jones), from which I was to buy my first painting. At the event I saw the artist Jon Molvig throwing a pie at Roy Churcher, for reasons that I’ve now forgotten, but which gave me a colourful news story.
Ever restless, after two and a half years with the Telegraph I decided it was time to move on. Those were the days when really successful young Australian writers, artists and journalists went to London. Those of us in Brisbane went to the ‘big smoke’ of Sydney or Melbourne. I had not finished my four-year cadetship, but wrote off to David McNicoll, editor-in-chief of Australian Consolidated Press, asking for an interview. Off I went to Sydney, and was offered a job as a D-grade reporter. It was the lowest rung of the ladder, but at least it was on the ladder. McNicoll was a big racing fan, and my mother’s close friend’s husband, Noel Richard, was secretary of the Australian Jockey Club. McNicoll later said he was impressed that I hadn’t mentioned it at the interview.
Working on the Daily Telegraph in Sydney was very different from working in Brisbane. For one thing it was a morning paper – we started at 2 pm and finished at 11 pm. I lived with my grandparents in Cremorne and for the life of me I can’t remember how I got home. It must have been by bus, for I remember walking up to Cremorne Junction to catch one into town. But coming home? The safety of young women was apparently not such an issue.
I was at last a real reporter. In Brisbane we had always gone out on assignments with a photographer who drove the car. In Sydney we had to find our own way from the Telegraph building on the corner of Park and Castlereagh streets. My first Sunday I was sent to cover a church service up at Kings Cross.
‘How will I get there?’ I asked the team in the newsroom.
‘You walk up Palmer Street to the Cross,’ they directed.
When I got back, the boys were waiting for me with big grins. ‘How’d you go?’
‘Oh, very well,’ said I. ‘All these nice men in cars kept stopping and asking me if I wanted a lift.’ There was great mirth all round. What they hadn’t told the little girl from the country was that Palmer Street was the prostitutes’ beat.
The Daily Telegraph was not the world’s greatest literary journal, it was rough-and-tumble journalism. Owned by Sir Frank Packer in the days when a proprietor really did own a newspaper and could fashion it to his whims, the sub-editors could, and did, yell with impunity at young reporters. Every evening all the blokes would rush in a horde to the King’s Head pub for the six o’clock swill, which meant downing beers as fast as possible because the government tried to curb drinking by closing the public bar at 6 pm. Women were not allowed to drink in public bars so my friend Jillian and I, two of the four female journalists, would dream of a major story – the Town Hall up in flames, the Sydney Harbour Bridge falling down – for which we would get the scoop by being the only reporters in the office.
Sir Frank was very much a presence around the building. At that time he was attempting to win the America’s Cup with his yacht Gretel and any stories involving sailing always got a good run. There were apocryphal rumours about him. Oft-repeated was the tale of the boy in the lift whose tie Sir Frank didn’t like, or maybe it was a tune he was whistling. Sir Frank asked, ‘How much do you earn, son?’ When the boy told him, Sir Frank pulled out some cash and said, ‘Take this and don’t bother coming back to work.’ The bemused boy had only been delivering a telegram.
There was another yarn about Sir Frank sacking a chap in the lift because he was carrying a six-pack of beer. This was Ced Culvert, the highly esteemed and valuable police roundsman. Chief-of-staff Jack Toohey told Culvert to hide for a week until Sir Frank had forgotten the incident.
There was a rumour that the reason the Daily Telegraph was pro-Prime Minister Bob Menzies and the Fairfax-owned Sydney Morning Herald was anti-Menzies was because the PM had had an affair with the wife of a member of the
Fairfax family.
In those days there were four Sydney papers, the Daily Telegraph and Sydney Morning Herald in the morning and the Sun Herald and Daily Mirror in the afternoon, and there was great rivalry between them. When Pope John XXIII was dying in June 1963, the great question for us was: When would he die and which paper would get the scoop? Every evening that he lived past the Daily Telegraph deadline would take him onto the front page of the Sun and the Daily Mirror, and then he would hang on past their deadline. I actually can’t remember who finally got the story of the death of this very popular pope.
In Sydney I had a particularly significant lesson about the importance of preparation, and of honesty. One Sunday afternoon I was told to go down to the Australia Hotel, then Sydney’s poshest, to a news conference for the minister of finance from Singapore. Because it was Sunday and a quiet news day I thought there would be a lot of reporters there asking questions, so I didn’t bother to look up the minister in the library or find out anything about Singapore. When I was shown up to the minister’s suite I found, horror of horrors, no one else there. I had to confess to him that I knew very little about Singapore and absolutely nothing about finance. He was charming and I’m sure secretly pleased, because he was able to tell me exactly what he wanted and I got a satisfactory story. I learned never to go unprepared, and that if you don’t know something, it’s always best to admit it.
The biggest story of my time at the Daily Telegraph was the Bogle–Chandler murder case, still unsolved. Dr Gilbert Bogle, a CSIRO scientist, and Mrs Margaret Chandler, the wife of a colleague, were found dead on the banks of the Lane Cove River on New Year’s Day 1963, cause of death not obvious. They had been at a party in Lane Cove. The story had all the elements of a scandal: murder, mystery and sex. It was further spiced up by the fact that all the people surrounding the deaths were ‘clever’ people, scientists and the like, at a time when Australians were deeply suspicious of too much intellect. The fact that Chandler and Bogle were married, though not to each other, further scandalised Sydney. The police bungled their investigations, as always seemed to happen with crimes at Christmas or New Year; evidence was tampered with. For example, Mrs Chandler’s dress was pulled down ‘for reasons of modesty’.
The media were in a fever of excitement and investigative reporting. Margaret Chandler’s husband, Geoffrey, who later wrote a book called So You Think I Did It, belonged to a bohemian set known as ‘The Push’ who drank at a particular pub. I was despatched there to mingle and see what I could find out, but I had only been there five minutes when one of the other drinkers said, ‘So, what paper are you from?’
Another day I was sent to the home of Mrs Bogle to get an interview with the grieving widow. I knocked on the door, and of course she didn’t want to talk to me, so I just muttered my apologies and fled. A pushy reporter I was not. One Saturday a photographer and I spent the whole morning up a tree outside Geoffrey Chandler’s house waiting for him to appear so we could get a picture. After a couple of hours the photographer said, ‘I’ve had enough of this. I need a beer.’ We shinned down the tree and went to the pub around the corner. When we got back Geoffrey Chandler’s car had gone and so had he.
A scientist at the University of Queensland named Robert Endean had a theory that the couple had been poisoned by the venom of the box jellyfish, Chironex fleckeri, whose name I remember to this day. It was one of many and varied theories, including suicide, murder (Dr Bogle was working on a matter of national security), and accidental overdose of some mysterious unknown drug. But the case has never been solved, or the reason for their being on the banks of the river on New Year’s Day, or the truth of their relationship.
One of the best things about newspapers then was the rivalry between them, which meant you had to get your facts straight, your spelling right, and make sure the other paper didn’t get the story you hadn’t. This kept reporters on their toes and made for healthy creative tension. I think it gave us a better media. It also meant that systems were devised. When I went up to Queen’s Square to cover courts, I was told by the three other court reporters that ‘the system’ was that one of us sat in the court and took notes while the other three went to the pub. This person would then share their notes so that no one was ‘scooped’ or missed the story. The only problem for me was that I wasn’t interested in going to the pub and really wanted to stay in the court. One night I was at the airport and left the reporters’ room, where we pooled our information, to go to the bathroom. On my way back I recognised my hero, Sir Edmund Hillary, waiting for his plane. Of course, I rushed over to him and started talking. Fairly quickly the other reporters saw us and came over, and I was accused of trying to grab a story for myself.
Some journalistic practices were dodgy to say the least. If a Sunday afternoon was particularly quiet we would ring up the Minister for Works at his home (because we could), and say we had heard that the Opera House was such-and-such an amount over budget. He would say, or yell, that this was rubbish. The next day’s story was, ‘Minister denies Opera House blowout’. The Sydney Opera House, finally opened in 1973 and one of the wonders of the modern world, controversially cost over $100 million to build. It was well over budget.
It was a friendlier, more personal time. Not only could you ring ministers at home, but there was not the oppressive security around them there is today. Sent to Sydney airport to farewell the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh in early 1963, I walked out across the tarmac to the plane with the prime minister and his party. It was raining and Sir Robert held his umbrella over this young girl reporter.
I had been part of the Royal Tour by accident. The two senior reporters covering the Northern Territory leg had got into a fight and I was sent up to replace one, probably as the reporter least likely to have a stoush. There was a roster of reporters to cover events and I got to cover an official royal lunch. The main point of my story was that the Queen powdered her nose at the table, something that would have horrified my mother.
After a year in Sydney I was missing Brisbane, and returned home to the Courier-Mail newsroom. I moved into a flat in Clayfield with friends, a step up in sophistication from the student flats I had shared before. We had parties with candles stuck in chianti bottles and one night I brought home half the cast from Fidelio, the opera playing at Her Majesty’s Theatre.
I also came back to pursue my rather short television career. Meet the Press was a popular Sunday evening program, the forerunner of many current affairs shows. It was hosted by Reg Leonard, the overall boss of the Courier-Mail and the Telegraph, and later to be knighted, like so many of his contemporaries. Each week a guest would be grilled by a panel of journalists and Reg would sum up the discussion at the end. One evening, the chief-of-staff wandered through the newsroom and told me I would be on the program the following Sunday night because they wanted a female journalist. The show was broadcast live, which would have been daunting if I had not been even more scared by the fact that the one regular panellist was John Wakefield, former editor of the Telegraph.
It must have turned out alright, as I went on to join an afternoon panel show, Beauty and the Beast, with four women as the ‘beauties’ and Eric Baume as the ‘beast’. People (mainly women) would write in with their problems which would then be discussed by the beauties, whose answers were loudly scorned by the beast. Well-known women, such as Maggie Tabberer, Pat Firman, Noeline Brown and Hazel Phillips were on the show. Eric Baume was succeeded by Stuart Wagstaff, John Laws and Rex Mossop among others. The show, which began in 1963, was produced in Sydney but once a month would be filmed in Brisbane’s Channel Seven studio on Mt Coot-tha. A couple of the Sydney ‘beauties’ would come up, and very worldly they seemed. The Brisbane panellists included the glamorous Karen Brady and Shirley Bushelle. I was the youngest panellist, newly married at the time and I also seemed to be permanently pregnant, which provided a good talking point, as most of the Sydney beauties were divorced. I actually went into early labour during a recording and C
hannel Seven’s publicity department put out a release saying I had called the baby Eric, which caused some family hysteria. (He was actually Damien, and he didn’t get a name for three weeks.)
All the while I continued studying externally at the University of Queensland. On the Brisbane Telegraph one of my cadetship subjects had been political science. I had absolutely no knowledge or understanding of politics and my parents and grandparents had always voted for Robert Menzies, who had been prime minister for almost my entire life. It was some sort of omen that political science was the subject I found most fascinating, although I never would have guessed what a big part it would play in my future.
THE SWINGING SIXTIES
The so-called swinging sixties was an era all of its own. It was the time of the Beatles, fashion icon Mary Quant, of John F. Kennedy in the White House, Neil Armstrong on the moon and Sean Connery in the first Bond film. The Beatles did come to Brisbane and Sean Connery married our own Diane Cilento, but apart from that Brisbane wasn’t really swinging.
In our world sex before marriage was taboo; the risks enormous, the consequences great. My mother used to say she’d rather have a daughter in jail for murder than one who came home pregnant, which was a strong deterrent. Girls who ‘fell’ were an embarrassment to their families. There were shotgun weddings and large babies born ‘prematurely’, some after only seven months! Various churches set up homes for unmarried mothers, presumably those whose families had thrown them out. There was one at Toowong, not far from the university.
It’s difficult for young people today to comprehend all this. They find it impossible to believe that we were virgins at our weddings, for instance. A year or so ago, in a speech at a Catholic girls’ college, I said we went up the aisle as virgins and came down the aisle pregnant, a reference to the pressure on young Catholic wives to be ‘in the family way’ as soon as possible. There were giggles all round.
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