by Mark Baker
Minna Schuler would work briefly as a journalist at The Age and develop her talent as a painter before embarking on another high profile affair. Edward Dyason was a wealthy stockbroker, economist and mining engineer with powerful political and business connections. He was also a champion royal tennis player, a lover and patron of the arts, a flamboyant intellectual—and a married man with two daughters. Ann Dyason suffered mental illness and the couple separated in the late 1930s, around the time that Edward Dyason met Minna, but they never divorced. Dyason is believed to have bankrolled the shop Minna opened in 1938 in Kurrajong House, at the top end of Melbourne’s Collins Street, selling exotic herbs, creams and lotions. Describing himself as a ‘militant pacifist’, Dyason moved to Argentina at the outbreak of World War II, convinced that Japan would succeed in invading Australia. Minna joined him in Buenos Aires in 1942. After the war they relocated to London. Dyason died in October 1949 aboard the liner Queen Mary after leading the Australian delegation to the British Commonwealth Relations Conference in Ottawa. He bequeathed half of his substantial estate to be shared equally between his two daughters and Minna. A few weeks after his death, Wilhelmina Henrietta Schuler changed her family name by deed poll to Dyason. She would live another fourteen years in ‘The Hayloft’, the stylish home that she and Edward Dyason had shared in London’s Hyde Park.
After the death of Nelly Rabinovitch in 1920 her faithful lady’s maid, Netta, stayed on to care for her daughters Chickie and Sacha, first in the unhappy household of their stepfather and later with their grandparents. Netta was more a sister than a servant to the girls and she willingly assisted Nelly’s parents when they decided to snatch the children back from the custody of Max Debbane.
Netta—Antonia Sustic—had been born into a poor family that settled in the town of Goritzia, at the foot of the Julian Alps near Venice. Then part of Slovenia, the area was ceded to Italy at the end of World War II. Netta was still in her teens when she moved to Cairo in about 1913 in search of work. After being employed by Nelly and Alexis Rabinovitch, she would diligently save what she earned. As often as she could, Netta would send home a gold sovereign to help support her family. Three of the coins she would keep and give to her own children later in life.
‘She formed a bond with these two girls, Sacha and Chickie, because she was bringing them up,’ Netta’s son Danilo would recall:
My mother was the assistant nanny to the English nanny. She would refer to her as ‘the old English woman’. She was the classic nanny; an unmarried spinster. The English woman was charged with bringing up the children and with discipline. My mother was on the other end of the spectrum. She was young; they were children. They would enjoy life together. The girls loved her. It was a bond for life.9
Netta returned in 1926 to Goritzia where she married and raised her own family. But she would keep in touch with the girls in Cairo, especially after one of Nelly’s sisters moved to the town with her husband, an Italian army officer. The trauma of World War II, during which her husband died, would transform Netta’s life once more. Like tens of thousands of other displaced Europeans, she decided to make a new start on the other side of the world with her sons Rihard and Danilo and daughter Miriam. It was a big choice. They could apply to migrate to the United States, Canada, Argentina or Australia. In the end it was memories of Phillip Schuler that helped sway the decision.
As a child, Netta had read a book in Slovenian called Australia and its Islands. It sowed a seed in her mind with exotic visions of the strange and vast southern land. Those images would be embellished by Phillip Schuler and the stories he would tell Nelly, Netta and the girls in Cairo in 1915. ‘He was so warm,’ Netta would tell her own children. ‘He used to come often to the house and tell us about Australia, about himself and about his family back in Melbourne.’10 Schuler would beguile them with tales of the sun and the sea in Australia, about the flora and fauna, and he would boast about the best cakes in the world. Netta liked the boisterous young journalist who was so full of energy and life. They heard too about Schuler’s family; his mother who was blind, his father and his sisters. It was a connection that would convince Netta and her children to move to Melbourne in March 1951.
Several years after the family settled in the Melbourne suburb of East Brunswick, Rihard Nemec, Netta’s eldest son, decided to seek out the family of the man who was largely responsible for their decision to come to Australia. He knew Phillip Schuler had been a journalist but did not know which newspaper he had worked for. After visiting The Argus offices, he was redirected to The Age. There he was given an address in the eastern suburbs for Dorothy Denholm, Phillip Schuler’s sister. Rihard rang and he and Netta were invited to afternoon tea.
It was almost 40 years since Netta had last seen Phillip Schuler. She had lived through the trauma of his death with Nelly and her daughters and then, just a few years later, the tragedy of Nelly’s own death. Now, at last, was an opportunity to connect with Schuler’s family, to talk about his time in Egypt and the loss they shared. Before sailing for Australia with her children and just a few suitcases, Netta had disposed of most of her possessions. But she had kept three photographs of Phillip Schuler that she had put away after Nelly’s death. She took them with her to the afternoon tea to give to Dorothy Denholm. When they arrived at the house, one of the same portraits—a photo of Phillip in army uniform before he had left Australia—was sitting on Dorothy’s mantlepiece. Across the world and the years, a circle was closed.
‘When we were children my mother would talk about the great sadness of Mrs Rabinovitch dying,’ says Danilo Nemic. ‘She was so young and so beautiful and with two little girls. My mother felt very strongly the cruelty of her fate. From the way my mother talked, Phillip Schuler and Nelly were genuinely, truly in love. They were to be married. It was such a tragedy.’
Frederick Schuler in 1900, the year he became editor of The Age, a position he held for a record 26 years. Phillip’s father was a brilliant but enigmatic journalist who weathered antagonism towards German-born Australians during World War I. (Su Strafford)
Deborah Schuler, c. 1900. Phillip’s mother—a teacher, church chorister and lover of books—vowed ‘never to marry a little man’ but accepted the proposal of Frederick Schuler (who stood less than five feet tall) after they met at a Melbourne art gallery. (Su Strafford)
Frederick at leisure at ‘The Hermitage’, Narbethong, captured by his close friend and celebrated photographer John William Lindt. The editor loved to take long bush walks, mostly alone. (Su Strafford)
‘Malford’, 10 Lisson Grove, Hawthorn, in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, the Schuler family home for almost half a century. (Su Strafford)
Phillip’s sister Dorothy in 1919 with her son, Robin Denholm. (Su Strafford)
A portrait of Minna Schuler, Phillip’s youngest sister, by the famous Impressionist painter Penleigh Boyd in the loft at 10 Lisson Grove. The painting, exhibited in 1923, was one of only three portraits in Boyd’s catalogue of work. (Photo by Mark Baker)
Minna—artist, musician and journalist—would scandalise her family with two very public affairs with prominent married men, one of them Penleigh Boyd. (Su Strafford)
The recluse: Frederick at work at The Age office in Collins Street, Melbourne, at a desk he built himself. ‘Only the small circle of his colleagues who came in direct touch with him in his work really knew the man,’ one of them would write. ‘The anonymity was Mr Schuler’s deliberate seeking.’ (The Age)
Roy Bridges: Journalist, playwright, prolific novelist and one of Phillip’s best friends. (John Oxley Library)
Deborah Schuler in 1937, a decade after her husband’s death and two decades after the death of her son. Blinded after a fall, she learned Braille and maintained her regular ‘literary coterie’ of friends at 10 Lisson Grove. (Su Strafford)
Lieutenant Phillip Schuler of the Australian Intelligence Corps in 1911. His service in the pre-war militia gave him an appreciation of military service and a uniform that
smoothed his passage on the Melbourne social circuit. (Australian War Memorial (AWM) A05158)
Father of the chapel: The Reverend Edwin Bean (left) in 1914 with his son, Charles Bean, Australia’s official war correspondent, Archie Whyte of the Sydney Morning Herald and Phillip Schuler. (AWM A05379)
Phillip Schuler’s first assignment as a war photographer: the crew of SMS Emden taken prisoner after the German warship’s defeat by HMAS Sydney in the Cocos Islands are brought aboard HMAT Orvieto. (AWM PS0249)
Phillip Schuler aboard HMAT Orvieto by Charles Bean, October 1914. (AWM PS1404)
Charles Bean aboard HMAT Orvieto by Phillip Schuler, October 1914. (AWM G01561)
Charles Bean on the Great Pyramid of Cheops by Phillip Schuler, New Year’s Eve 1915. (AWM PS1399)
Phillip Schuler on the Great Pyramid of Cheops by Charles Bean, New Year’s Eve 1915. (AWM G01651)
Sir Ian Hamilton, the poet general: brave and brilliant but lacking the ruthless bastardry of the greatest generals. In 1915 he was assigned one of the most ambitious and risky tasks of World War I—the biggest amphibious assault in the history of warfare. It was an appointment poisoned from the outset. (Bain Collection)
George Renwick of the Daily Chronicle, W.T. Massey of the Daily Telegraph and Phillip Schuler of The Age inspect the Aswan Dam. ‘We would become a council of three for the four months we were together in Egypt,’ Schuler wrote. (AWM PS2053)
Australian Light Horsemen pass through the streets of Cairo in late 1914, by Phillip Schuler. (AWM PS0462)
Phillip Schuler at a hotel in Cairo. ‘He was a boy of delicate, almost fastidious tastes, fond of flowers, scrupulously neat even under conditions of discomfort,’ Charles Bean would write. (AWM PS1405)
Camping out: Schuler stayed with Padre Walter Dexter at Mena on Christmas Eve 1914. ‘He felt it because he was used to the soft beds of the Continental,’ the chaplain wrote. ‘I don’t think there was an extra quality of flints mixed in the sands where he slept, just the usual quantity.’ (AWM J04104)
The Grand Continental Hotel, Cairo, by Phillip Schuler. Staying in the room next to his, the correspondent found the great love of his life. (AWM PS1351)
Alexis Rabinovitch, the doctor from Odessa who stopped in Cairo on a journey around the world and fell in love with the daughter of an Italian lawyer before madness brought his early death in 1915. (Gabriel Josipovici)
Nelly Rossi: beautiful, rich and admired at the highest levels of Egyptian society. Her life would be beset by a series of tragedies. (Gabriel Josipovici)
Nelly and Alexis on their wedding day, 16 June 1908. ‘Ali and his wife were so beautiful . . . that when they made love the angels in heaven wept,’ a family friend once said. (Gabriel Josipovici)
Nelly with her daughters, Sacha and Chickie. (Gabriel Josipovici)
Nelly in mourning with Chickie and Sacha: the sadness of the two young girls at their father’s premature death would endure until the ends of their own lives. (Gabriel Josipovici)
On the eve of the Anzac landings, Schuler gets his bearings from the summit of Mount Elias on Imbros: ‘I looked down on the wonderful crowded harbour of Mudros. I saw the vast fleet lying placidly at anchor.’ (AWM PS1954)
Sir Ian Hamilton and his chief of staff, Major General Walter Braithwaite, are rowed ashore to Anzac Cove after the landings. (AWM G00328)
Keith Murdoch: Prime Minister Andrew Fisher thought he would make ‘an indifferent soldier’ whereas ‘journalism was his own special job.’ (National Library of Australia)
Lord Herbert Kitchener, Secretary of State for War: ‘No one, from the Prime Minister down, dared challenge the Hero of Khartoum,’ Alan Moorehead wrote. (AWM A03548)
Lieutenant General William Birdwood, the Anzac commander: target of a ‘malicious lie’ in Murdoch’s Gallipoli letter. (AWM P03717.009)
Lieutenant General John Monash: Murdoch argued that the greatest Australian general of World War I was better suited to administrative work. (AWM A02697)
Charles Bean in the ‘Great Sap’ communication trench at Gallipoli, by Phillip Schuler. Bean wrote of Schuler’s Gallipoli reporting: ‘He covered that fighting quite fearlessly and more closely than I think any correspondent in the war.’ (AWM PS1580)
The beach at Anzac Cove, by Phillip Schuler. (AWM PS1484)
The scene in a trench after the Battle of Lone Pine, by Phillip Schuler. Captain Leslie Morshead—a general and hero of Tobruk and El Alamein in the next World War—surveys the bodies of Australian and Turkish dead. (AWM PS1515)
Australian soldiers in a captured Turkish trench after the Battle of Lone Pine, by Phillip Schuler. More than 3000 men were lost in the intense fighting of 6 August 1915. (AWM PS1514)
Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett: the brash, querulous British correspondent whose explosive Gallipoli letter became Keith Murdoch’s. (National Portrait Gallery, London)
Keith Murdoch during his four days at Anzac Cove in September 1915: he came, he saw, he condemned. (AWM A05396)
Lieutenant Colonel Alexander White of the 8th Light Horse Regiment: ‘Men you have 10 minutes to live,’ he called, before charging with them to his death at the Nek. (Author’s collection)
Sir Maurice Hankey: the top British bureaucrat with gallant Australian connections who vainly argued against the Gallipoli evacuation. (Author’s collection)
The last supper: Hamilton on the deck of HMS Triad before a farewell dinner following his sacking in October 1915. From left, Commodore Roger Keyes, Vice Admiral John de Robeck, Hamilton and Major General Walter Braithwaite. (AWM H10350)
Hamilton arrives back in London after his sacking: history would vindicate his determination to keep pressing the Turks, but he would never again have a fighting command. (Author’s collection)
Winston Churchill: the architect and political casualty of the Gallipoli campaign who would live to fight another day. (Hulton Archive)
Andrew Fisher: the former Australian Prime Minister who gave Keith Murdoch his official commission and defended him at the Dardanelles Commission. (AWM H16067)
Kitchener and Birdwood in the trenches at Gallipoli before the British Cabinet decided to abandon the campaign. (AWM G00573)
Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes in France with Keith Murdoch, ‘his personal publicist . . . fixer, speech editor and errand boy,’ biographer Desmond Zwar wrote. (AWM E02650)
Australia in Arms
The first full account of the Gallipoli campaign by an Australian, published in late 1916, was a success at home and in Europe and secured Phillip Schuler’s reputation as a correspondent and a writer with a great future. (Mark Baker)
The Battlefields of Anzac
The 34-page picture booklet was one of the first publications to predict that 25 April 1915 would be venerated by future generations. ‘By the fame of her army, Australia won in a day, a position which a century of peace couldn’t have bought her,’ Schuler wrote. (Mark Baker)
From war correspondent to soldier: Driver P.F.E. Schuler of the Australian Army Service Corps in the garden at 10 Lisson Grove, Hawthorn, before his embarkation for France. (AWM P07692.001)
Trois Arbres, Steenwerck, France: the former hospital yard where Phillip Schuler was buried after succumbing to his wounds in the aftermath of the Battle of Messines. (Mark Baker)
Man of the Times: Keith Murdoch after a lunch at The Times before his return to Australia in 1921. Murdoch (with gift golf clubs) sits to the right of his patron Lord Northcliffe (with cigar and Stetson). Billy Hughes is seated at the press baron’s left. (Newspix)
‘My dear Mrs Howard’: Polly Howard, who consummated her long-standing friendship with Phillip Schuler shortly before he left to fight on the Western Front. (Richard Howard)
Max Howard, the son of Phillip Schuler. He would never know his father and his father never knew him. (Richard Howard)
The odd boy out: Max Howard with his sister Noel and brothers Tom and Tony. (Richard Howard)
The portrait that hung on the wall of Roy Bridges’ home
alongside that of their mutual friend Neville Ussher, who was killed at Gallipoli. ‘Phillip’s portrait . . . Neville’s . . . in their youth, which the First World War took and flung away.’ (Roy Bridges)
Postscript
Oh, sure, it may not have been fair but it changed history, that letter.
Rupert Murdoch1
There is a photograph of Ian Standish Monteith Hamilton that has come to define popular perceptions of the man. He is standing on the deck of HMS Triad off Imbros with his chief of staff Major General Walter Braithwaite, Vice Admiral John de Robeck and Commodore Roger Keyes. Hamilton wears a high-collared army tunic adorned with military campaign ribbons. He gazes at the camera with a detached, quizzical expression. The general liked the image. He chose it as the picture facing the title page in the first volume of his Gallipoli Diary when it was published in 1920. But the Australian journalist Alan Moorehead, author of one of the best accounts of the Gallipoli campaign, was disturbed by the spectacle: