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John Tidey is a journalist and author who has worked in Australia, East
Africa, China and the United Kingdom. During his 29 years at the Age
he was a reporter, foundation member of the Insight team, an editorial
executive and a member of the senior management group. After leaving
the Age he taught at Deakin University in Victoria where he was also an
adjunct professor. John Tidey has written biographies of Creighton Burns,
Sir Andrew Fairley and Charles Hastings Barton (with Ric Barton). He is
married to Jackie Tidey, a writer and publisher of books for children.
By the same author

Class Act: A life of Creighton Burns

One of a Kind: The life of Charles Hastings Barton (with Ric Barton)
The Big Sheppartonian: A life of Sir Andrew Fairley
Developing Tomorrow’s Newspaper Managers (with Rick Knowles)
© John Tidey 2018

First published 2018 by Arcadia

the general books imprint of
Australian Scholarly Publishing Ltd
7 Lt Lothian St Nth, North Melbourne, Vic 3051
Tel: 03 9329 6963 / Fax: 03 9329 5452
enquiry@scholarly.info / www.scholarly.info

ISBN 978-1-925801-36-1

All Rights Reserved

Cover design: Wayne Saunders

For Jackie, Sarah and Nick.
 CONTENTS

Introduction....................................................................... ix
Part One: Before the Storm................................................. 1
Part Two: Working for Mr Big.......................................... 22
Part Three: Good Times and Bad News............................ 72
Epilogue............................................................................ 99

Notes................................................................................103
Appendices
1. Graham Perkin: A Personal Appreciation.............105
2. Gregory John Taylor: Obituary........................... 107
3. Creighton Burns: A Profile...................................110
4. John Hamilton: Obituary.....................................113
5. Tim Graham: Obituary.......................................116

Acknowledgements and Sources.......................................118

Index............................................................................... 120

vii
 INTRODUCTION

Graham Greene observed that the further back we research the past the
more the ‘documents in the case’ accumulate and the more reluctant we
feel to open their pages, to disturb the dust. About the accumulation phase
he was certainly right. But the period under review in this book prompted
no reluctance to open or disturb. Why would it? The years 1966–1975
marked a golden era at the Age newspaper in Melbourne.
Most of the events recalled here occurred between 40 and 50 years
ago and most of the key players – Graham Perkin, Creighton Burns, John
Paton, Bill Bland, Allan Barnes, Greg Taylor and Keith Sinclair – are no
longer with us. I have been surprised at the volume of ‘documents in the
case’ that I had collected and held over all those years: letters, reports,
scrapbooks, photographs, publications of many shapes and sizes. Together
with a deep well of warm memories. The idea for the book followed private
publication of a monograph entitled Recollections of a Bygone Age. Many
people who read it said they would like to know more about those times.
This memoir is not a history of the Graham Perkin years at the Age.
Nor is it a biography of the inspirational editor himself. It simply recalls
some of the people who, like the writer, had the good fortune to be there
at the time; and some of the events that made those years so memorable.
As the printed newspaper slides into decline around the world the era
described here is surely worth recording and celebrating.

ix
 PA R T O N E

BEFORE THE STORM

Always an officer and a gentleman in the best sense of this term;

a man of honour and high standards.
Claude Forell’s tribute to former Age editor Keith Sinclair

Nobody ever did me a greater favour. It was September 1965 and I was in
Melbourne for the first time when I bumped into Pam Fox in Collins Street.
She was a reporter on the Age and a few years earlier we had been cadet
journalists in Brisbane. Now I was back in Australia (briefly, I thought) to
marry Jackie in her home town before returning to London where we had
met. ‘Before you make any further plans,’ Pam had said, ‘call in at the Age
and talk to the assistant editor, a dynamic bloke named Graham Perkin.’
It had never occurred to me to work in Melbourne but after I met him I
changed my mind. Not long after I signed on Graham was appointed Editor
and between 1966 and 1975 the venerable old broadsheet was transformed.
Over those years three key figures shaped what turned out to be a
second golden era in the long story of the Age. The first of them, Graham
Perkin, was a force of nature, an inspirational leader, the outstanding
newspaper editor of his generation. Some of us used to refer to him as Mr
Big. Then there was the collegiate and quietly effective John Paton, a rare
marketing talent; and finally Ranald Macdonald, the ring master, enabler
and chief executive throughout the great adventure. All of the excitement

1
they engendered lay ahead when I started in the newsroom as a 25-year-old
reporter in October 1965.
Journalism is full of people who originally wanted to do something
else.
Ranald Macdonald, for instance, considered going to the Bar after
Cambridge. Graham Perkin certainly developed a passion for newspapers
and journalism but if his maths had been better (and they were not) would
have liked to be an architect. Two of my contemporaries at the Age had
been jackaroos and two others had been in the navy. The editor I worked
for in East Africa had been a Royal Marine. My own career plan, originally,
was to be a navy officer, a reasonable enough ambition given the number of
seafaring men on both sides of our family. In the event there was no place
for me at the Royal Australian Naval College, an outcome I soon realised
had been best for both parties. Instead of navy traditions and discipline I
found myself in the ‘unruly craft’ of journalism. By the time I arrived in
Melbourne I had worked on the Telegraph in Brisbane, for the ABC news
service in various parts of Queensland, on the Daily Nation in East Africa
and for Visnews and United Press International (UPI) in London.
There is no question that the Age of 1965 had seen better days. Much
better days. The paper had been founded in 1854, ambitiously describing
itself as A Journal of Politics, Commerce and Philanthropy. It was registered
in the name of Francis Cooke and Co and a rival publication reckoned
the new daily had ‘trembled’ into existence. Early the next year it was
taken over by a co-operative of employees who pooled their resources to
run a business that was struggling to survive. As the Age said at the time,
this structure was one of the most interesting experiments in the way
of co-operative enterprise that had ever been seen in Australia. But this
new regime didn’t last either. The co-operative failed and in June 1856
Ebenezer Syme emerged as the sole proprietor of the Age. Ebenezer was
an intriguing character, a Scot who had studied theology at university.
He died, aged only 34, in 1860, leaving a wife and young family. One
obituary described him as a valiant fighter and an incisive journalist, but
no businessman.

2
 His younger brother, David, had tried his hand at newspaper work in
Scotland, gold prospecting in California and Victoria and road building in
Victoria before taking over the Age when Ebenezer died. In the continuing
battle to keep publishing he slashed the cover price from six pence a copy to
three and then to two pence. When David reduced the price to one penny
in 1868 the circulation of the Age doubled to about 15,000 in a single week.
Historian Michael Cannon, once a reporter on the Age himself, noted that
until David’s death (in 1908) the paper’s circulation remained about five
times greater than its competitors. By 1894, when the population of the
state of Victoria had reached a little over 1,100,000, the daily sales of the
paper had passed 100,000. Far more significant than this business success
was the power and influence of the Age on the development of Victoria. For
the best part of 50 years ‘King David,’ as some called him, was to be found
in the front rank of radical campaigns in the colony. He was a dominant
figure in Victorian political life and it was claimed that at the peak of his
political influence Syme ‘selected’ every Premier and almost every Minister.
More lasting was his unmatched contribution to the development of free
and independent journalism. Unfortunately for the future management
and ownership of the paper, David Syme’s will decreed that the Age should
be conducted in the form it was at his departure until the death of the last
of his five sons.
Long after his death an entertaining story was still circulating about
the journalist assigned to write the great man’s obituary. It was said that
he locked himself away for hours and when concerned colleagues forced
the door to his room they found him slumped at his desk, surrounded by
a sea of copy paper. On each discarded page he had managed a start to the
difficult task at hand – an intro which began: Not since the death of Jesus
Christ … The story is doubtless apocryphal. We will never know for certain
but it does indicate the awe in which the old man was held and the power
of the Syme name. A golden era had come to an end.
What followed has been described1 as half a century of obscurity –
not well known but also seemingly insignificant. Between 1908 and 1964
the paper faced a range of problems: a cumbersome ownership structure,

3
increasing competition (the Sun News-Pictorial appeared in 1922), the great
depression of the 1930s and a sense that the Age should be maintained
pretty much as David Syme had left it. The old man had left a detailed
handwritten will which stipulated the paper remain in the possession of
his sons until the death of the last of them with the imprints of the Age
and its rural weekly The Leader unchanged. Historian Elizabeth Morrison
has noted 2 that various provisions in the will were hedged around with
extensive, detailed, specific conditions and requirements for investment
and other uses of income. These would not only discourage change but
even then a majority of trustees would have to agree.
There was something faintly feudal about working arrangements
at the paper in the 1920s and 30s. A staff list from 1936, for example,
provides a snapshot of what was clearly a close ‘family’ of owners and their
employees. Several members of the Syme family were among the paper’s
listed complement of about 116 men and women. They included two of
David’s sons, the general manager, ‘Mr Herbert’ as he was known; and
the managing editor, ‘Mr Geoffrey’, who was later Sir Geoffrey. Several
fathers and sons were on that list. Quite a few of the staff would be followed
into the business by a son or a daughter, some of whom were still at the
paper 30 years later. They had family names like Alston, Austin, Dugan,
Bull, Sayers, Knox and Campbell. The Syme family seem to have been
demanding employers but once you got a job with them it was usually for
life. Apparently nobody was laid off at the Age during the long depression
years.
In 1936 the Age already employed four photographers and the editorial
staff was divided into various teams, not that they were called that: finance,
sport, social, with its three women reporters, and general reporting, sub
editing and leader writing, all directed by a small group of executives. Among
the journalists were future editors Harold (later Sir Harold) Campbell and
Keith Sinclair. That year the lowliest of clerical positions (the post boy) was
occupied by Bill Bland, a future general manager. Caroline Isaacson who
was a journalist there in 1936 got her son Peter a job as a messenger-boy
a year or so later. Peter Isaacson would become one of the most decorated

4
Australian airmen in World War II before establishing a publishing house
with newspapers and magazines throughout Australia and in Singapore,
New Zealand and Hong Kong.
On a bench in the sub-editors’ room lay what was known as the
‘marked paper’. This was a copy of the Age on which reporters scrawled
their names (no bylines in those days) across the stories they had written.
Later in the day this copy of the paper would be circulated to Geoffrey
Syme and other editorial brass so they could see what their staff had done
in that day’s paper and how they had done it. Dennis Dugan joined the
paper in 1937 from Melbourne University, where he had been a part-time
correspondent. When I met him 28 years later he was chief sub-editor and
had been a war correspondent in the Pacific on his way to the top sub-
editing job. In the 1930s, he said, the Age building had been ramshackle
internally and very much 19th century, but the office presented a handsome
ground and three upper floors to Collins Street. Among his recollections 3
of the pre-war Age was this superb vignette of life in the sub-editors’ room:

On the back wall, facing anyone who entered from the reporters’
room was The Old Sub, a large framed photograph of Jackie
Stephens with an inscription stating that he had been chief sub-
editor of the Age from 1884 to 1934. This was a long stretch,
which ended before my time, but many were the stories told of
him by the older men who had worked with him. The one I liked
best described his reaction when some reporter dropped a News
of the Day column item in his copy basket. ‘Has it got something
nasty in it?’ he would ask.

It was not until the outbreak of World War II in 1939 that the Age
started regularly printing news on page 1, previously reserved for classified
advertising. Sales of the paper, which had fallen off during the depression
years, increased during the war years and reached 120,000 a day by 1945.
But the business desperately needed more capital to refurbish its plant
and building and in 1948 the Victorian Supreme Court gave permission

5
for David Syme’s will to be altered. The Age became a public company,
David Syme and Co Limited, still controlled by members of the Syme
family. Ironically the closure of the rival Argus nine years later in 1957
put the paper under sudden financial pressure. It had enjoyed a welcome
jump in circulation, about 20,000 copies a day. This had triggered a sharp
increase in its newsprint bill but not much extra advertising revenue until
rates could be adjusted. The Argus was first published in 1846, eight years
earlier than the Age, and there was a clear point of difference between these
two broadsheets. In the case of the Argus its reporting had a reputation for
authority high enough to have it sometimes called the Times of the Southern
Hemisphere.4 The reporting of the Age was regarded as more politically
loaded, more aligned to the protectionist anti-conservative policy expressed
in its leading articles.5
The death of the Argus was a tragedy for Melbourne which lost its
finest newspaper. There was widespread anger when its owners, London’s
Daily Mirror group, sold the paper to the Herald & Weekly Times group on
the understanding that it would be closed. Nearly 1,000 employees lost
their jobs. Some of the journalists who managed to find jobs at the Age
were still there in the Perkin years (1966–1975). People such as Nigel Balfe,
a future sports editor, Barrie Dunstan, John Lahey, Roy Stock, John Kiely
and Ron Carter. Fortunately it was the Age that picked up most of the Argus
classified advertising and by the 1970s ‘classifieds’ had turned into rivers of
gold. In 1957, the same year as the Argus closed, a sister paper of the Age
called the Leader also ceased publication. It had been founded in 1856 as
the Melbourne Leader, a journal of politics, literature and agriculture, but
by the time it closed it was basically a weekly rural newspaper. The Age,
meanwhile, had drifted into the 1960s, going nowhere in particular, its life
no doubt prolonged by the failure of the Argus
When I joined the paper in 1965 Melbourne had a population of
around two million and seemed pretty buttoned-up after 1960s London.
In fact, on Sundays the city appeared to be closed altogether. There
were many quaint aspects about the Age which was still edited, printed
and published from crowded premises at 233 Collins Street. Major

6
renovations had been undertaken in the 1890s and the imposing result
was a single Italianate façade. Towards the top of the building a statue
of Mercury the Roman messenger god pointed skywards. Some cynics
claimed to have mixed feelings about this feature: Mercury was not only
the god of eloquence, messages and communication but also the god of
trickery and thieves.
On the editorial floor sub-editors still turned out in coat and tie as
they went about their work and one or two of them still wore eye-shades.
One of the older men had given up smoking and worked his way through
a bottle of boiled lollies each night by way of compensation. Back then
newspapers were highly unionised and journalists were employed on a
grading list that began at ‘D’ and advanced to ‘A’ and the much-prized
‘Special A’. Associate editor Harold Austin often edited the Age on a Sunday
night and one frustrated, usually well-stoked, sub-editor would regularly
take this opportunity to press his case for a pay rise. With the acting editor
out of sight in his office the suppliant would bellow:
‘Hey, Harold! Where’s my fucking B-grade?’
It may have been boorish behaviour and offensive too but somehow
the show went on with no formal warnings and no counselling provided
for the offended (if Austin actually was) or the offender (who never got his
B-grade).
In the reporters’ room, seated at slightly better furnishings than the
rest of us, the News of the Day columnist wrote his three or four daily
observations in the third person. Items of the ‘We were not amused’ variety.
There were plenty of desks and chairs but a shortage of typewriters. This
was not a problem for Fred Noble who had been on that 1936 list but
was by now officially retired. He would still deliver occasional reports,
hand-written, never having taken to these new-fangled machines. Fred, we
were told, had dashed from his own wedding reception to chase a passing
fire engine which had interrupted the celebrations. There were plenty of
telephones and each of them was semi-enclosed in a little booth along one
wall of the reporters’ room. The first mobile phones did not appear until the
1980s and when they did they were the size of a house brick.

7
 Upstairs, somewhere, sat the formidable Miss Kathleen Syme, a
grand-daughter of David and a director of the newspaper. She held a BA,
an MA and a law degree from Melbourne University, a rare achievement
for a woman in those times, indeed for anybody. She had joined the Age as
a reporter in the 1920s. By the mid-1930s she was social editor of the paper.
Miss Syme kept a close eye on our modest expenses and was ever alert to
any lapse in ‘standards’ as she understood them. When Greg Taylor, later
editor, was a young reporter he was summoned to her office one morning
to be given some financial advice. ‘Mr Taylor,’ she said, ‘I have been looking
at your expenses and you claimed for the tram ride to the football. You will
find if you walk two blocks from the office and then catch the tram you
can save a penny a ride.’
When Miss Syme was around it is fair to say that our general behaviour
improved noticeably, journalists and everybody else. In one of her most
famous interventions Miss Syme reprimanded Greg Stevens, manager of
the pictorial department, even though she was outside the building at the
time. Smoking was banned in the main building because of the high fire
risk and this was where the editorial and pictorial departments were housed.
It was permitted in the adjoining and more modern Age chambers. Stevens
was alone in his second-floor front office overlooking Collins Street and
decided it was ‘safe’ to light up. He had taken a few puffs when the phone
rang on his desk. The caller was Miss Syme. ‘You know you’re not supposed
to smoke in the Age building, Mr Stevens,’ she said. Stevens, taken aback,
denied any wrong doing. How could she possibly know? ‘Look across
the street’, Miss Syme advised. There she was, phone in hand, curlers in
place, seated in her chair at the hairdressing salon high up in the building
opposite. John Lamb, later an award-winning photographer, received some
personal tuition from Miss Syme on the vexed matter of standards. He
was a 14-year-old messenger, dressed in suit, green shirt and tie when she
confronted him. ‘Go home at once’, Miss Syme ordered, ‘and report back
to me in a white shirt.’ So off he went by tram and bus to suburban Pascoe
Vale, a round trip of 30 kilometres (18 miles as we said in those days) and
from where he returned suitably attired.

8
 My most enduring memories of Miss Syme are her annual appearances
at the Age Christmas party for children. At this much anticipated event in
Melbourne’s Fitzroy Gardens there was a present for every child up to age
12 whose father or mother worked for the paper. These gifts were generous,
carefully chosen and suitable for each different age group and they came
with a kind of show bag of sweets. The company paid for all this. Imagine
the mayhem on a hot summer’s day in December: hundreds of children,
litres of ice cream, acres of wrapping paper, parents trying to keep order
and sometimes succeeding. Miss Syme clearly enjoyed these occasions,
but her chair, and sun umbrella if necessary, were in a small but secure
roped-off area. My clear recollection is that some of us penetrated this inner
sanctum to introduce our small children to her. What I now realise is that
occasions (and attitudes) like this marked the end days of the old ‘family’
company. Noblesse oblige? Perhaps. But there was something quite special
about it as well.
At the time I started there E.K. Sinclair was the Editor. Keith – not
that I ever used his given name – was a reserved, and to most of us, distant
figure. He has had a poor press since his abrupt departure from the Age in
1966 and deserves better. Keith Sinclair was a war hero, a courteous and
decent person, a man of his times. When he died in 1995 Claude Forell6
who had worked for him for years, remembered his former editor as always
an officer and a gentleman in the best sense of this term; a man of honour and
high standards.
Sinclair spent 34 years as a journalist, all of them at the Age apart
from a couple of years seconded to the news agency Australian Associated
Press (AAP) and five years distinguished war service in the Royal Air Force
(RAF). In the late 1930s after completing a cadetship at the Age he worked
his way on a ship to the UK where he joined AAP in London. Subsequently
he had been a special correspondent for the news agency in Germany and
then a war correspondent in France. Nobody ever mentioned this to me
at the Age but it turned out that our editor had interviewed Adolf Hitler
at a pre-war Nuremberg rally. Not that long afterwards he was flying over
Germany on bombing missions with the RAF.

9
 Sinclair had given up his correspondent’s role as reporter and observer to
join the RAF where he served as a bomber pilot, instructor, staff officer and
CO of the famous 97 Pathfinder squadron. He was awarded a Distinguished
Flying Cross (DFC) after bringing his damaged aircraft home from a raid
over Germany. The citation said that as a flight commander he has shown
high qualities of leadership and by his cheerful courage, unselfishness and skill
set a fine example for his subordinates. At the end of the war Sinclair was a
Wing Commander. He was awarded an OBE and much later, a CMG. On
returning to Melbourne he resumed his newspaper career at the Age where
he became Editor in 1959. In February 1965 he was briefly back on the
road – the ice actually – before filing a long report from the South Pole. It
was titled Word from the Pole and it began:

By E.K. Sinclair

Our companion at the South Pole that mid-summer day last

month was 77 years of age, white haired and sparse of frame in
the manner of old men toughened by time. He looked around the
wide, white, Polar plain at the radio masts and antennae, at the
white circle of the sun diffused in a metallic sky, and at the Stars
and Stripes lifting on its staff in the near-still air.

Keith Sinclair’s companion at the pole was a Canadian, Sir Charles

Wright who had been a young scientist with the ill-fated 1910–1913
British Antarctic Expedition. Back then he had led the team which found
Captain Robert Scott, RN (Scott of the Antarctic) and two companions,
dead in their tent on the Ross Ice Shelf 165 miles from safety and just a
day’s march from a food depot. Sinclair’s dispatch was published in the
Age of 4 February 1965. A contemporary of mine, Roger Aldridge, later
recalled7 that our Editor was a distinguished and frosty eminence sometimes
encountered in the lift; a man who employed me twice but to whom I never
spoke and indeed never met. Chris Forsyth, a large young man of promise
at the Age didn’t meet Keith Sinclair for more than two years, but when he

10
did he must have made a good impression. The Editor recommended Chris
for a six-month Commonwealth Press Union Fellowship in the UK and
off he went. John Jost, a Melbourne University law student had joined the
Age not long before I did. After initial interviews with various executives he
had been summoned to the Editor’s office at 9 o’clock one night. The two
of them discussed his CV and then, to Jost’s surprise, Keith Sinclair asked
him how he voted. Jost said he was a swinging voter and then ‘foolishly but
respectfully’ asked why the Editor wanted to know such a thing. Sinclair
had smiled and explained: ‘I don’t want to hire a communist.’
Graham Perkin had offered me a job subject to a final OK from the
Editor and the conversation which followed was the only one I ever had
with Keith Sinclair at the Age. We talked mostly about Africa and how I
would like to return there, hardly surprising as I had been working in Kenya
and on the Africa desk of United Press International (UPI) in London. The
Age at that time had bureaus in London, Washington and Singapore and
I wondered if there were plans for one in Africa? No there were not. As it
turned out my interest would be indulged by the Age over the next 10 years
with assignments in Nigeria, Rhodesia (as was), South Africa and Angola.
Not to forget a memorable lunch in Canberra for His Imperial Majesty,
Haile Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia.
While he was at the helm Sinclair enhanced and defended the editorial
independence of the Age and increased its influence in public affairs. It was
a conservative paper of record, old-fashioned in appearance with very few
bylines. During 1961–62 the Editor stared down ferocious pressure from
the Victorian Premier, Henry Bolte, and his own board at the newspaper
in successfully campaigning against the execution of Robert Peter Tait.
Late in 1961 Tait had been convicted of the gruesome murder of an
elderly woman in a Melbourne suburban vicarage. Opponents of the death
sentence he received protested that Tait was insane (officially he was not)
and that common law forbade the execution of an insane person; there was
also, by now, a national clamour for the abolition of capital punishment.
After a huge public and legal controversy the Victorian State Government
commuted the death sentence to one of life imprisonment, never to be

11
released. When he died in Melbourne after heart surgery on 19 February
1985 Tait was Victoria’s longest serving prisoner.
Within weeks of the commutation decision in 1962 academic Creighton
Burns had completed his book, The Tait Case, which was published by
Melbourne University Press. In a radical piece of recruiting two years later
Keith Sinclair lured Burns away from Melbourne University, where he was
Reader in Politics, to be South East Asia correspondent of the paper, based
in Singapore. Creighton made a great success of the role and would play a
major part in the development of the Age during the coming ‘Perkin years.’
Ultimately he would become editor of the paper himself. Sinclair’s deputy
was the aforementioned (and abused) Harold Austin, a courtly and helpful
executive who was the associate editor. Like his boss he had come to the job
with impressive credentials. Harold Austin (even 10 years later I still called
him Mr Austin) had worked in London and Washington, had served in the
Middle East during the war and was later a war correspondent. He was a
former chief of staff and news editor of the Age. If you undertook a special
assignment for him and he liked your work he would drop you a note and
say so. The Editor did the same.
During his 16 post-war years as Prime Minister, Sir Robert Menzies
evidently held the Age in higher regard than other Australian newspapers.
One reason for this, he explained, was that the Age would not hesitate to
criticise him or his Ministers when it felt they deserved it. That said, the
newspaper under Sinclair and his predecessor Sir Harold Campbell leant
towards the conservatives at election time. When he retired in 1966 Sir
Robert told the paper’s chief political correspondent John Bennetts that he
hoped the Age would never change. But change it would; in some respects
beyond recognition.
There were five faces in the editorial department that were familiar
to me when I arrived there: my benefactor, Pam Fox, Peter Cole-Adams,
John Larkin, Ian Hatcher and John Dickie, an old school friend. We had
all been cadet journalists in Brisbane. Cole-Adams had only recently joined
the Age and was working on the foreign desk after a stint in London with
Australian Associated Press. Hatcher and Dickie had both joined from

12
the (now defunct) Telegraph, the evening daily in Brisbane. Their Editor-
in-Chief, John Wakefield, was not pleased to lose their services. ‘You two
won’t know what you have struck in Melbourne,’ he warned them. ‘They’ll
eat you two bastards alive.’ Not true. Dickie8 found the Age of the early
1960s ‘a wonderful place to work. You were treated with respect. They took
time for you to adjust to Melbourne. They took a while to look at your
copy to see that it was accurate and then gave you an open go.’ Three of the
five left the Age during the Perkin editorship: Pam Fox went to the Daily
Mail in London; Ian Hatcher returned to Queensland where he became
media advisor to the Police Commissioner and John Dickie moved to the
Attorney General’s Department in Canberra. In time he would become
the Commonwealth’s Chief Censor and then the first Director of the
Office of Film and Literature Classification. Peter Cole-Adams stayed on
much longer and was later Chief European correspondent in London and
Washington correspondent. John Larkin and I ended up working closely
together after the change of editor.
For such a long-established Melbourne paper it was surprising to me
how many of the younger members of staff came from somewhere else.
Apart from the large Brisbane contingent there were several from Western
Australia, at least three Tasmanians and a couple of New Zealanders. A
Canadian left as I arrived and a South African came soon after. Two of the
closest mates I would ever have I met at the Age in 1965: John Hamilton,
subsequently a foreign correspondent for the rival Herald & Weekly Times
group and later an acclaimed author; and Tim Graham, a New Zealander
and future novelist who started as a reporter on the same day as I did (on
the 2pm shift). A few months earlier Tim had interviewed Keith Sinclair
who was visiting New Zealand and Sinclair offered him a job if he wanted
to move to Australia. Years later I wrote both their obituaries9 for the Age:
Tim Graham’s in 2008 and John Hamilton’s in 2017.
By now – towards the end of 1965 – two cadet journalists who joined
the paper in 1949 had made their way into the middle executive ranks
of the editorial department. Graham Perkin and Greg Taylor were nicely
positioned for the renewal that would happen within a year. In those days

13
few experienced Australian journalists had a university education and these
two were no exception. Among the exceptions at the Age were veterans like
Geoffrey Hutton, Bruce Grant and recent recruit Creighton Burns as well
as a crop of graduate cadets, Len Radic and Claude Forell among them,
who joined the paper from the 1950s.
Graham Perkin was a Warracknabeal High School graduate who
had briefly and unsuccessfully studied law before being hired as a cadet
by the Age. But he knew a little about newspapers before moving to the
city. Between the ages of 12 and 17 he had lived just 20 yards from the
flat-bed press that printed the Warracknabeal Herald. The boy could hear
(and smell) the paper going to press from his upstairs sleep-out, a sensation
he would never forget. In March 1949 he started as a first-year cadet on the
Age. It was the only newspaper he ever worked for.
Along with the usual beginner’s chores Perkin spent the early
months of his cadetship reporting the greyhound racing results and
invariably finding a story to go with them. Colleagues, his future editor
Keith Sinclair among them, were soon aware of his talent, his enthusiasm
and his trademark restless energy. In 1955 he was awarded a prized
Kemsley scholarship to study journalism and newspapers in the UK. The
experience he gained, the people he met and the ideas he was exposed
to provided a huge boost to his confidence. It was valuable time away
from the old ways in Melbourne and something of a finishing school
for an ambitious young newspaperman. There was quite a bond between
former Kemsley scholars and Perkin later introduced me to two of them –
Douglas Alexander, a South African who had been on the 1955 program
with him; and Dennis Hawker, Editor of The Mercury in Hobart, and a
Kemsley scholar in the early 1950s.
On his return from England Perkin worked in the Age Canberra
bureau and also gained notice as a feature writer. In 1959 he shared a
Walkley award for a ground-breaking piece on heart surgery, Closing a Hole
in the Heart. He was the first outsider to witness this operation and his
report began:

14
Left
E.K. (Keith) Sinclair, Editor
of the Age 1959–1966. Picture
courtesy Fairfax Media

Below
Ranald Macdonald, Managing
Director of the Age, at 26
Above
Sub Editors’ room at
the Age early 1960s.
Standing to the left, in
suits, Graham Perkin
and Greg Taylor

Left
Before he was Editor:
Graham Perkin, wife
Peg, son Steve and
daughter Corrie. Picture
courtesy Perkin family
First day copy of the Age

First day copy of the Australian

Master Robert Cavey, aged 4, at the Age Christmas Party
 By Graham Perkin

An exposed human heart is dark and filled with an inhuman

independence. It throbs in the opened chest, contorts itself in
formless movement and beats out the rhythm of life.
Beneath it are the lungs; animate off-white objects like
supercharged dumplings that slide from view into the outraged
privacy of the chest, then pulsate into sight again, past the rim of
the surgeon’s incision.
Here is the fount of life and some of its mystery, bare,
bleeding and exposed to the eyes of men. Here is life which might
be death.

Later as Perkin made his way through the lower executive ranks, first
as deputy news editor, then news editor, the Age sent him on the 10-week
advanced executive program conducted by the Australian Administrative
Staff College at Mt Eliza. This demanding course provided a further
boost to his self-confidence and left him in no doubt he could mix it with
politicians and senior executives in business and the public service. He was
certainly right about that. By the time I met him Graham Perkin was 35,
a big, friendly man who seemed to be across the entire editorial operation
as assistant editor. He was also a man of extraordinary presence and style,
quite unlike anyone I had encountered before in the newspaper world. I
instinctively liked him.
Perkin’s contemporary, Greg Taylor, had decided he wanted to be a
journalist when he was eight years old. Greg was a Tasmanian, a Hobart
High School graduate and the son of a journalist. One of his brothers was
a broadcaster and the other a journalist as was his father-in-law. Taylor’s
career trajectory was also impressive and continued until he ultimately
became chief executive of the Age and managing director of David
Syme and Co Limited, its publisher. As a reporter he covered the Tokyo
Olympics, the French nuclear tests in the South Pacific and the British
ones at Maralinga in South Australia, before being appointed joint chief

15
of staff, his first step on a steep executive ladder. By the time I met Greg
he was 34 and news editor, a job he was well equipped for after three
years in New York and London on secondment to Australian Associated
Press (AAP). Like Graham he proved to be an excellent colleague, albeit
much less noisy. He was also unflappable, a valuable trait in a newspaper
executive.
But it was a young Geelong Grammar School (and Cambridge)
graduate who would trigger the upheaval that delivered the ‘Perkin years’
at the Age. C.R. (Ranald) Macdonald, born in Melbourne in 1938, was
a great-grandson of David Syme. His father, Hamish Macdonald, died
on active service in World War II. His mother, Nancy, was the daughter
of Oswald Syme, (one of David Syme’s sons) who was Chairman of the
company when I joined the Age. Ranald had followed his father, Hamish
Macdonald and his step-father, Lt. Col. E.H.B. Neill, to Jesus College,
Cambridge where he studied history and law. Late in 1960 he returned
to Melbourne and joined the Age where Greg Taylor remembered him as
‘an extremely keen reporter’. Next he completed a postgraduate degree, a
combined journalism and management program, at Columbia University
in New York. It was in America that Macdonald gained his understanding
of what might be possible back in Melbourne, particularly in newspaper
marketing, circulation management and classified advertising. His Masters’
thesis – which he was to draw on soon after at the Age – examined ‘the ideal
newspaper.’ It may not have been a template but it certainly focused his
thinking on many of the things which had to be done. After graduating
from Columbia the publisher-in-waiting visited newspaper role models like
The Miami Herald, the Louisville Courier Journal, Long Island Newsday
and the Los Angeles Times. By now he was deadly serious about trying to
ensure the development and independence of the Age and he returned to
Melbourne determined to do both.
The opportunity came sooner than he expected and before the year
was out (1964) the Syme board had appointed him to the new position of
Managing Director. Just in time. Earlier that year the game had changed
for the newspaper industry around the country with the launch by Rupert

16
Murdoch of the Australian. A fresh and innovative competitor had arrived
for papers like the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald and Macdonald was
right to be very concerned. Murdoch’s national daily was certainly a threat
but for someone in Melbourne with fresh eyes and new ideas it also offered
a great opportunity. Media academic and writer Henry Mayer thought the
appearance of Murdoch’s new paper was the best thing that had happened
in Australian journalism for a very long time.
Journalist Bruce Welch, later circulation manager of the Age, said little
was known of Macdonald when he arrived back in Melbourne from the
United States and that most of the staff probably did not know he existed.
But once he took charge it was a different story. Welch said Macdonald was
‘a white knight’ a genuine Syme, someone capable of putting life and energy
back into the paper.10 For much of the next 19 years Ranald Macdonald
fulfilled this expectation.
Until Macdonald’s appointment the company had been run by a
powerful Editor, Keith Sinclair and a general manager, Dixon Brown;
neither of them on the board. Initially Macdonald did not have editorial
control and it would be the best part of two years before he secured the
management structure he wanted. Even so his appointment had been
a remarkable event in such a traditional and conservatively managed
company. The board knew there was a big task to be done and David
Syme’s great grandson had persuaded them he could provide the necessary
leadership and drive. Ranald was 26 years old when he took charge of a
newspaper he found ‘staid and self-satisfied.’
This judgement was probably accurate but the Age I joined the
following year was still quite a good place to be for a general reporter.
Newcomers to Victoria were given quite a few out of town assignments,
some alone, some with a photographer, to help them get better acquainted
with the state. We all had scrap books in those pre-digital times and mine
has stories from country places such as Mallacoota, Jeparit, Camperdown
and Timbertop, the Geelong Grammar bush campus where Prince Charles
was about to begin a year as a boarder. My Africa interest was kept alive
through covering the visit of the President of the Malagasy Republic and

17
writing the obituary of Hendrik Verwoerd, the architect of apartheid who
had been assassinated in South Africa.
Most of these tasks were handed out by the chief of staff. Michael
Macgeorge was a reserved man with an eye for detail who had joined the
Age as a clerk when he was 15. Harold (later Sir Harold) Campbell, was
editor when Michael moved to editorial two years later. Our chief of staff
was also the grandson of J.S. Stephens, The Old Sub. In the Perkin era to
come Michael Macgeorge would be London manager and later the two of
us worked closely together when he became the company’s first industrial
manager. He worked for the Age for 50 years.
As a virtual teetotaller (Macquarie Port excluded) the advent of
10 o’clock closing in Victoria meant little to me personally. But it was a
development of great significance in Victorian life, the start of a new social
order. This was an assignment I was very pleased to be given. Among other
things, that change marked the end of the notorious ‘6 o’clock swill’ at
pubs around Victoria. At the Age this tradition had been honoured by a
mass exodus of staff at 5.50pm or so each day. Reporters, photographers
and sub-editors would hurry to local bars where drinks were bought (and
lined up) before last orders just on 6pm. The most popular of these was
the back bar at the Graham Hotel in Swanston Street, just around the
corner from the Age. But the arrival of 10 o’clock closing was bad news for
another Age drinking venue. This was the Sportsman’s Club, also close to
the office and open to members and their guests after traditional bars were
closed. It didn’t last long once its competitive (perhaps that should be non-
competitive) advantage was removed.
There was no comprehensive editorial library at the Age until a journalist
named Horace Chisholm was asked to put one together some time in the
1950s. In the previous decade management became aware of damage in the
file room where bound copies of the paper and some other bits and pieces
were stored. Rats had acquired a taste for some of the contents and were
slowly chewing their way through what passed for a library. The cost of
building a rat-proof room was considered prohibitive, so a carpenter was
called in and a small hole cut in the door … then the company bought a

18
cat. Graham Perkin was so taken with this lateral thinking that he once
used the story to make a point in an address at Adelaide University.
Horace (Horrie) Chisholm was a kindly man with a wide range of
interests and his editorial library was well established by the time I met
him, and first used it, in 1965. These were pre-Google times so a great deal
of our basic research was undertaken by consulting newspaper cuttings files
in the library. A team of clerks cut up the Age and some other publications
every day, dating and filing a vast range of information in hundreds of
manilla folders.
Horrie had arrived at the Age from New Zealand in 1937, a university
graduate with quite a bit of reporting experience on the other side of the
ditch. When he died, aged 92, his obituary noted a distinguished career
as a journalist at the Age where he had covered the law courts and events
that shaped our society, nation and world. Finally, it said, as chief librarian,
he had created a modern metropolitan newspaper library. Outside the
office Horrie pursued an eclectic range of hobbies and obsessions. He had
a pilot’s licence, was an active member of the Clan Chisholm Society, a
respected philatelist and a former federal office bearer of the Australian
Journalists’ Association. During World War II he had served in artillery
and intelligence in the Pacific theatre and finally was editor of the army
newspaper Guinea Gold. If you didn’t bother to engage with him in his
library you might have imagined that this busy little man was simply an
older reporter who had opted for a quieter life. But of course there was
much more to Horace Chisholm’s story than that.
It never dawned on me back then that Horrie was a New Zealander and
oddly enough both mentors who helped me throughout my newspaper years
were Kiwis. I was still a cadet journalist when I met Jim Carney on my first
visit to New Zealand in 1960. For the next 50 years Carney was a friend and
long-distance mentor, a journalist who went on to manage newspapers in
New Zealand and Fiji. It was Carney who recommended the management
career path to me and when I got a foot on the first rung of that ladder
advised: ‘Never sacrifice principles for power or money if you want to sleep
easily at night. I came damn close to doing that and life was awful’.

19
 The other Kiwi I learned a great deal from was Tony Whitlock, a
fourth-generation newspaperman, a kind and generous friend. Tony had
moved to Australia after active service in World War II. Among his talents
he had the ability (not common among journalists) to quickly absorb
technical information. In fact, to revel in it. Whitlock was one of the
founders and the first executive director of the Pacific Area Newspaper
Publishers Association (PANPA).
Relations between the new Managing Director Ranald Macdonald
and Editor Keith Sinclair had been strained from the beginning, to put
it mildly. Even to a newcomer on the staff this was obvious. Macdonald11
told John Jost: ‘The first years were difficult. I used to call meetings that
people would ignore, particularly the Editor.’ Years later Greg Taylor
told me there was a simple explanation for the tension between the two
men: Sinclair could not take the 26-year-old with three years’ reporting
experience seriously. This was a big miscalculation as he was soon to
find out. Macdonald – the last Syme to run the newspaper – proved to
be a nimble and creative publisher of the Age. Critically he recognised
what a successful combination outstanding journalism and outstanding
marketing could be.
In 1967 the new Managing Director made another appointment
that would turn out to be of enormous significance for the Age and the
expanding Syme organisation. John Paton, a career advertising man, was
named assistant display advertising manager. His real job was to plan for
the Sunday newspaper that the company thought it would be launching in
the next couple of years. That didn’t happen. But the role Paton actually
ended up playing would be pivotal in the development of the Age.
It was clear to most of us that Graham Perkin was ready, keen and well
equipped to edit the paper. There were two or three others in the frame for
the job, we thought, but their prospects, if indeed they had any, came to
nothing. One was Bruce Grant, former foreign correspondent, author and
columnist. Like Creighton Burns he had served in the navy during World
War II. Another was R.J. (John) Bennetts who was in the Australian army
in the Pacific and had been head of the Age Canberra bureau since 1960.

20
There was also, of course, Harold Austin, the associate editor and Sinclair’s
loyal and experienced deputy.
One critical issue dwarfed all the others which dominated Macdonald’s
thinking in his first two years in the job: the Age was ripe for a takeover.
How could he secure the paper in Syme and other friendly hands? It was an
urgent question as David Syme’s last surviving son, Oswald, was 87 years
old in 1965. On his death the long-standing Trust estate would be broken
up and divided equally among David’s surviving grandchildren, 16 women
and two men.
It was not until the end of 1966 that the newspaper’s future would be
secured, at least temporarily. By this time Macdonald’s sparring with Keith
Sinclair would be over and Graham Perkin Editor of the Age.

21
 PA R T T W O

WORKING FOR MR BIG

The Golden Age under Graham Perkin crept up on us like one

of those cold grey Melbourne mornings when the sun breaks
through and you don’t notice it until suddenly it strikes you how
warm and bright it all is and the world has become your oyster.
Roger Aldridge, the Age, 16 October 2004

The change of editor happened suddenly and in the middle of a busy news
week. It was announced in the Age of Thursday, 20 October 1966, the same
day that Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) began a whistle-stop visit to Australia, the
first by a President of the United States. Graham Perkin, 36, would be the
new editor. Keith Sinclair, 51, had resigned. There was no explanation for
the upheaval, no statement of the new leadership’s intent.
There was surprise in some quarters at the shock departure of Keith
Sinclair and, when he got wind of the change, Sir Robert Menzies intervened
at board level in a fruitless attempt to save an editor he admired. On the
editorial floor I still remember one old-timer (he must have been 50) who
announced to everyone within earshot: ‘I’ll give him (Perkin) six months.’
Keith Sinclair, who in fact had been forced out, behaved impeccably. Ted
Cavey, deputy chief of staff at the time told me1 that in the early evening of
Wednesday, 19 October, Sinclair had asked those who normally attended
his news conference to meet in his office. Then he had made a dignified

22
speech, saying ‘as you know, I’m going’ and thanked everyone for their
contributions while he was editor. He had added, ‘I think we produced
some good papers.’ Around the editorial floor we heard at the time that the
company had treated our departing editor generously and it has since been
confirmed that this was the case.
There would be plenty of professional life and satisfaction after the Age
for Keith Sinclair. Soon after his departure the former editor was appointed
as a speech writer and special consultant on media and public affairs by
the Prime Minister, Harold Holt. He also served the Gorton, McMahon
and later Fraser administrations in a similar role. I have no idea, if Prime
Minister Holt’s memorable one-liner ‘All the way with LBJ’ was the work
of E.K. Sinclair. But the one uttered by Holt before he went missing in
the surf near Portsea certainly was not: ‘I know this beach like the back
of my hand.’ Among his other post-Age activities, Keith Sinclair wrote The
Spreading Tree: A history of APM and AMCOR 1844–1989. He was also a
director and then deputy chairman of the Australian Tourist Commission.
For Graham Perkin there were congratulatory messages from
newspaper colleagues around Australia and abroad, from family and
friends, businessmen, politicians, even some of his old teachers at
Warracknabeal High School which he had left almost 20 years earlier. The
Australian Administrative Staff College took pride in the success of yet
another influential senior executive among its alumni. Principal Maurice
Brown wrote to him:

You have seen to it that your own preparation has been at the
highest possible level and it is a great joy to see that your highly
trained competence is being recognised and used.

The public announcement which appeared in the Age described

what it called a reconstruction of editorial executive appointments and
it included two other changes at the top end of the newspaper. First,
Ranald Macdonald, the Managing Director, had been given the additional
responsibility of acting Editor-in-Chief, accountable to the board. In

23
fact Macdonald played no part in editorial policy, did not attend news
conferences and never had to over-rule the Editor. Much later Graham
Perkin was promoted to Editor-in-Chief. The other change announced in
the Age that day was the appointment of Harold Austin, previously associate
editor, to the new role of day editor. Looking back it seems odd to me
now that Perkin had thought Austin might have been named Editor when
the inevitable editorial changes were made by the Managing Director. He
mentioned this to several of us but the fact was that Harold Austin, like
Keith Sinclair, was a good man from an era that had suddenly come to an
end.
Another major story building when the Age changes were made was
the campaign for the November 1966 Federal election, which Harold
Holt would win comfortably. Just a few months earlier Sir Robert Menzies
had finally retired as Australia’s longest-serving Prime Minister. As Sybil
Nolan later observed, the nine years during which Perkin transformed
the newspaper would be a most extraordinary period of Australian post-war
public life, often politically and socially tumultuous, and marked both by great
idealism and disillusionment.2
What a propitious time to take the editor’s chair at a newspaper that
was ripe for renewal and renovation. Many of those who could tackle that
job were already on the premises and others were waiting in the wings. The
Age was about to go on a hiring spree and among those who would come
were Allan Barnes, Les Tanner, Michelle Grattan, Bruce Postle and Ron
Tandberg. I doubt that any of us, at the time, appreciated just how soon the
Age would once again be a great and influential newspaper.
Our new boss started out as he would continue till the end, an editor
who spent much of his long working day, sleeves rolled up, cigarettes within
reach, at the news desk on the editorial floor. We now had an inspirational
leader, demanding and encouraging at the same time. We soon realised
that he was a workaholic. Well before lunch each day he would be in his
office, planning, reorganising, listening.
His secretary, Pat Lawson, ‘Moneypenny’, said her new boss
would arrive in his office like a whirlwind, usually about 11.30am. ‘His

24
extraordinary enthusiasm is what I remember most about Graham Perkin,’
she said. ‘It was impossible not to be infected by it.’ Pat had recently
returned from a long working holiday in the UK and was informed before
she started at the Age that the editor and Miss Kathleen Syme preferred
women to wear skirts, not trouser suits. She obliged the pair of them for the
first 12 months of her employment. The editor’s office itself was comfortably
furnished, bar fridge included. This is where meetings such as the leader
writers’ conference and the main news conference of the day were held,
where visitors were entertained and where Perkin dictated a huge output of
memos, correspondence and speeches.
From early evening until the first edition appeared around midnight
the Editor was out on the floor with his news executives and sub-editors,
scowling, joking, taking and making calls, bellowing instructions as he put
his final stamp on the next morning’s Age. We were left in no doubt that we
were working for a master of our craft. It is not clear who coined that title
‘Mr Big’ but Les Carlyon, who I believed responsible, thought it might have
been the laconic and gifted David Austin. Later on David Austin became
sports editor and it was definitely him who made the classic observation3
that when you were with Perkin it was ‘almost like batting with Bradman.’
In a lifetime in journalism I never came across a more charismatic,
talented and energetic Editor than Graham. When the writer Anne
Chisholm met Perkin in London4 she said that she had encountered a large,
fair, forceful man with a high colour and protruding blue eyes. She thought
he had the feel of an unexploded bomb about him. Too right he did. This was
the only time the two of them met. Years later her husband Michael Davie,
the Observer journalist much admired by Perkin, was appointed Editor of
the Age.
There had been one early disappointment as the new order settled
in at the newspaper. For years the Age had waged a battle against capital
punishment, in principle and in practice. Keith Sinclair as Editor had
mounted a successful campaign to save the murderer Robert Peter Tait
from the hangman’s noose and the Victorian government led by Premier
Henry Bolte had backed down at the last minute. It would not do so in the

25
case of Ronald Joseph Ryan. Graham Perkin continued the fight against
capital punishment but the Age with huge political, media and community
support was not able to save Ryan. Late in 1965 while escaping from prison
Ryan had shot and killed a warder and was subsequently found guilty of
murder and sentenced to death. A range of appeals and petitions failed
and the Age campaign included an extraordinary nine editorials, many of
them written by the Editor. It was all to no avail. The Premier, Sir Henry
Bolte by now, was determined that the sentence would be carried out and
his Cabinet supported him. At 8am on 3 February 1967 Ryan was hanged
at Pentridge gaol. As it happened he would be the last person judicially
executed in Australia.
Graham Perkin’s first executive changes were designed to strengthen
and deepen the paper’s gathering and presentation of news and features.
Greg Taylor was given the new position of assistant editor (news) and
David Thorpe, assistant editor (features). Their responsibilities were clear
enough but from the start there was a contest between them, one Perkin
encouraged. As time went by our Editor developed form in this respect,
going on leave or away on business and leaving his key executives to work
out among themselves who was doing which bits of his job while he was
absent.
Before long Greg Taylor would be night editor and Graham Perkin’s
deputy. Years later Les Carlyon reckoned Taylor, who had done just about
every job in journalism with distinction, would be best remembered for his
extraordinary skills as night editor of the paper. As he put it: Greg was an
expert finisher of copy, had a gimlet eye for reporters’ errors and loathed wordy
first paragraphs. He could completely remake a paper between editions without
once appearing flustered.5
Thorpe, an Englishman, had worked in London on the Daily Sketch
and the Evening Standard, and had a certain Fleet Street confidence – some
might say swagger – about him and a smart mouth. He was a very capable
layout specialist and full of ideas. But Greg Taylor saw him off and Thorpe
later left the Age and went into advertising. I have two clear memories
of David, one of them warm, the other certainly instructive. He was the

26
London Evening Standard stringer in Melbourne and regularly asked me
to cover for him whenever he was away. Stringers contribute copy for a
fee to newspapers which don’t have a staff reporter where a story occurs.
The Evening Standard had a healthy appetite for brief filler items from
Melbourne for its first edition and paid quite well.
The second memory I have of David Thorpe involved a three-month
sub-editor’s training course for reporters. This was an early initiative of the
new regime and may well have been David’s idea. The intention was to give
reporters a better insight into the production process and what happened
to our copy. There was also the thought that some of us might enjoy it so
much that we would join the full-time ranks of sub-editors. Ted Cavey was
the first to undertake the program and I was next. Fifty years on I recall my
first attempt at a feature page layout. Far from confident I approached the
oracle, David Thorpe, with the finished product and inquired: ‘Is this page
too busy?’ The assistant editor (features) took one look at it and responded:
‘Busy? I’d say it was out of its mind.’
Despite my own brief and clumsy efforts the appearance of the Age
was quickly transformed. Among the most noticeable early changes was
a doubling of the editorial and comment space which was moved from
page two to pages four and five. Typographical alterations to the paper’s
masthead were the first for almost a century. An occasional item We Were
Wrong appeared, explaining and apologising for mistakes that had been
made in the Age. New specialist sections began to appear joining Accent
which had been established a few months before Perkin’s appointment
and targeted women ‘with flair, imagination and a spirit of gaiety.’ These
sections would become major sources of new readers and extra revenue.
Eventually they would range from education and travel to computers, food
and drink and the flagship of them all, the weekly TV and radio lift-out
Green Guide which appeared in 1976.
Less than two months after the new editor was appointed the Age
informed its readers that it was taking a Sydney partner. The arrangement
was essentially to ensure that the Age continued as an independent
newspaper of high quality; and that the influence of the Syme family

27
was maintained. Perkin may have known, probably did, but the rest of
us had no idea at the time what a remarkable deal had been struck with
John Fairfax Limited, publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald. In essence,
while Syme family interests retained at least 10 percent of the issued capital
of David Syme and Company they would have an equal voice with the
Sydney partners in running the business. This and some other details of
the partnership remained secret for another 15 years. The Syme–Fairfax
arrangement lasted 17 years.
One of the enduring myths about the Age is that it was founded by
David Syme. In fact it was launched by a company of merchants, Francis
Cooke and Co and was subsequently a co-operative for a while before
Ebenezer and David Syme became involved. But the David Syme claim
was repeated by the Age itself on 2 October 1967 when it reported the
death of Oswald Syme (‘Mr Oswald’ as he was known). It described the
old man as the last surviving son of the late David Syme, one of the founders
of the Age 113 years ago. The last surviving son part was correct and with
his death, at 89, the complex trust set up by his father came to an end.
The Syme–Fairfax partnership signed less than 12 months earlier assured a
much smoother transition than might otherwise have been the case. Other
suitors for this valuable and prestigious property had included the Sydney-
based Sir Frank Packer and an ambitious young newspaperman named
Rupert Murdoch. But in the circumstances the Fairfax arrangement (and
that company’s commitment to quality journalism) was preferable to
either of those alternatives. Oswald’s death had severed the last direct link
with David Syme and his campaigning newspaper. Now, under David’s
great-grandson Ranald Macdonald and a new editor, Graham Perkin, a
promising fresh chapter in the Age story had begun.
Before the wave of editorial hiring began there were already quite a
few people on the staff who would ‘go on with it’ in the Perkin era. Some
of them like Peter Cole-Adams, John Larkin, Creighton Burns and Roger
Aldridge have previously made a brief appearance in these pages and more
will be heard of them. The stellar career of Les Carlyon, the next editor as
it turned out, took off from the early days of the new dispensation. Like

28
Graham Perkin he had been brought up in country Victoria, in his case
Elmore, near Bendigo. Les had soon developed into one of those rare people
who could do anything on the newspaper: a gifted writer, very interested in
production, a capable news executive. But he had another passion as well –
thoroughbred horse racing: writing about it in newspapers and magazines
and later writing books about it. Another of his books, Gallipoli, appeared
long after the Perkin era and attracted critical acclaim and commercial
success.
When Perkin became Editor in 1966 Les was on the finance staff, as
it was called then. His first appointment after the changes was as a leader
writer, and thus exposed to the political, economic and social issues of
interest to the Age. Next he became finance editor and during this time
planned, designed and launched Business Age. After this he was news editor
and then assistant editor.
In the production department a young RMIT graduate named John
Jennison joined the Age in 1966 as part of a project team working on plans
for a new plant, away from the historic Collins Street site. Jennison became
chief engineer and then production manager. At the end of our careers at
the Age we were both part of the senior management group and working for
Greg Taylor, by then Managing Director.
These recollections are not intended to be a Who Was Who at the Age,
but a few of my contemporaries intrude more than others when I think
about those times. Ted Cavey, for example, a versatile reporter, deputy chief
of staff of the Age, then chief of staff of both the Age and Newsday. Ted was
later editor of the Courier in Ballarat and managing editor of the Standard
in Warrnambool. Without doubt he was also the best after-dinner speaker I
ever heard, a talent he applied after his newspaper days when he established
a well-regarded (and much needed) Public Speaking Academy. There were
always a few New Zealanders around the place. My friend Tim Graham
was one and Kevin Childs another, both of them from the South Island.
Childs had worked in London for the Daily Mail and we hired him from
the Melbourne Herald. Kevin was an entertaining story teller and it would
have been worth having him on the staff just for his tales of Fleet Street.

29
But he was also a prolific story-getter with the widest contact list of any
reporter I ever worked with. Perkin once instructed me to sack him after
some tired and emotional incident now lost in the mists of memory. Childs
was sent home – maybe he just went home – but I sent him a telegram
‘reminding’ him that he was rostered to work the following Sunday. He
turned up. Wrote the page 1 lead. All was forgiven.
My first meeting with Claude Forell happened some time in 1970
when he returned after four years as the Age correspondent based in
London. Claude began writing for the Age in 1952 as its University
correspondent before joining the editorial department. Sixty years later his
work was still appearing in the paper now and again, but he was no longer
on the staff. The breadth and range of his contributions to the Age were
quite extraordinary: European correspondent, shipping reporter (that used
to be a very important job), political writer in Canberra and Melbourne,
leader writer, restaurant reviewer, editor of the Epicure section, founding
editor of The Age Good Food Guide. His weekly political column started
when he returned from London and continued for more than 20 years and
throughout this time Claude was said to be ‘an unflinching advocate’ for
economic and social libertarianism. I wonder how many of his colleagues
knew that he was also the author of the extremely popular text book How
We Are Governed. First published in 1964 it was used in schools for 30 years
and distributed abroad by Australian embassies.
Primary Industry reporter Kevin (‘Farmer’) Boyle was subsequently
editor of the respected rural newspaper the Weekly Times and then later, the
Sunraysia Daily in Mildura. Geoff Barker, whose sense of humour was as
warped as my own was the industrial reporter who became a leader writer,
then news editor. Later on he would be a foreign correspondent in London
and Washington. I now realise the opportunities Graham Perkin gave
many of us were part of a careful strategy to build a widely experienced
team as the Age developed. He was genuinely interested in our personal
growth and professional satisfaction.
There was quite a pattern of journalists moving into management at
the Age in those days, people like Michael Macgeorge and Bruce Welch

30
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
"Now we send one time machine back to 1868 by means of the
other. Then one of us travels to 2068 from 1868 while another goes
to that allegedly same year 2068 from the present, from 1968. See
what I'm getting at?"
Shaheen slowly nodded his head and then closed one eye.
"If there's free will," Blackburn mumbled, "they won't meet."
"Let's look for exclusion principles," Freylinghuysen commented,
putting the balls of his fingers together and staring at the ceiling.
Rowan, ignored, watched them for a few seconds and sat down
again. After a while he began to wonder how many experiments it
would take before Pendelton found the proof he was looking for.
THE END
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