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The Front Page of Graham Perkin

By Kevin Childs - posted Monday, 3 May 2010


The proofreaders out the back warmed themselves with sherry from an enamel kettle. One would read the proof of an article, while the other corrected any misprints. Hearing a drunken voice galloping through a religious minister’s sermon was a Sunday highlight on some papers in those days.

Rat-infested, lacking a clippings library (thrown out a window by a librarian who cracked up), the place was ruled by the Syme family, its chairman’s office unchanged from the days of David Syme 50 years before.

In this Miss Havisham-like world the deadly dull Age lagged well behind its livelier rivals in Flinders Street, the warm and cuddly Sun News Pictorial -, with its love of beach girls (navels usually painted out) and the high-octane evening Herald.

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When Perkin walked in that summer in 1949 it was to find sub-editors in suits and waistcoats, some with green eyeshades, pots of glue in front of them, with razor blades to cut the copy and metal spikes for the discarded words (a newspaper I worked for banned spikes after an editor impaled his hand on one when laying down the law).

These sub-editors dominated the paper, banning the word sex and ruling that no sentence was longer than 24 words. Colour and comment were cut: a juicy murder, which came in early, was simply put into the back pages for convenience. The chief sub would take the tram home to St Kilda for dinner with his wife while his team raced to the pub. Two-and-a-half hours later it was back to work.

The keen Perkin soon realized that if he could write a heading to fit his story it would be well used.

Hills has a pub full of anecdotes, including the late-night editor who ignored the 1956 news about Egypt annexing the Suez Canal on the grounds that the stretch of water was already in Egypt. Intriguingly, it’s Egypt that produces an early example of proprietorial interference when correspondent Bruce Grant, later High Commissioner to India, is recalled for opposing the absurd Suez intervention by Robert Menzies.

From Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, the reporter on the spot has often been ignored.

Perkin, meanwhile was thrown into a world of dog racing, pro `wrestling’ at Festival Hall, reporting the weather, and began to get noticed, especially when he wrote about the likes of the `wrestlers’ Big Chief Little Wolf (Venturia Tenario) and Killer Kowalski as vaudeville. An offer from the Sun arrived and at 22 he was let loose by The Age to  write long “colour” pieces around the countryside: wild pig hunting in Hay, an Ouyen bush concert, a winery, a ghost town, struggling wheat farms. His career trajectory zoomed when he when to England on a scholarship, meeting the great and not-so-good of Fleet Street, royalty, church leaders and even 80-year-old Winston Churchill.

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Back in Melbourne he started making his mark, covering British atomic test at Maralinga, researching and writing an obituary of Essington Lewis, founder of BHP, in 90 minutes, and being promoted to the Canberra bureau. There he worked for the renowned Ian Fitchett. Known as `the doctor’ for his tweedy suits and little moustache, Fitchett was famous for revealing the contents of a budget. Menzies rebuked him at the entrance to Parliament next day: “You’ll eat your words, Fitchett!”

“Gladly, Prime Minister,” came the Wildean response, “provided they are garnished with the sauce of your embarrassment.”  Perkin soon found how the old boys’ network operated, with senior journalists lunching with members of the Cabinet, by writing nothing of what they knew. Hills says that years later Perkin would send out of town reporters to Canberra for sensitive stories.

A groundbreaking series on road deaths, a piece on pioneering heart surgery and other blockbuster features ensured his rise as he took on executive responsibilities. Which meant getting the blame for a spoof picture caption mocking a touchy wharfies’ union boss, who paid for his home with the libel money.

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About the Author

Kevin Childs is a freelance journalist and author, and a member of the board of the United Nations Association of Australia, Victoria.

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