The Front Page of Graham Perkin

Perkin was now recruiting from across the country, building a formidable staff for the day when he would run the show. When that happened he would be partnered with Ranald Macdonald, a character for the pages of a Wodehouse novel, who had wanted to be marketing and promotions manager.

But the conversation he had with his grandfather, the boss, typically went all over the place and the old bloke misheard, thinking the 26-year-old wanted to be managing director.  And so it was to be. Macdonald proceeded to launch a doomed afternoon paper and other disastrous ventures.

One of Hills’s scoops is to read the diaries of Angus McLachlan, written every day and lodged with he National Library in Canberra. Rarely have the inside events of a great and influential corporation been so detailed as by McLachlan, a brilliant journalist who rose to be general manager of Fairfax and a board member.

Tantrums and infidelities, backstabbing and plotting, they are laid bare. As Hills writes, “…greed, intrigue and treachery…would temporarily reprieve The Age (of Fairfax control), but ultimately lead to its demise as independent company”.

We learn that the Fairfax chairman, Colonel E.H. (Call me Tiger) Neill secretly tried to sell his major stake in the company to the rival Herald and Weekly Times; a century after David Syme clandestinely bought and shut the rival morning Herald.

As Fairfax manoeuvres for a stake in Syme, Rupert Murdoch, Frank Packer and the Herald and Weekly Times start circling. High farce ensues with a courier from Murdoch scouting a Syme board meeting with an offer. He is to seek an old man with a stick, Oswald Syme. But Syme enters through the rear and the letter is foisted on another executive, who simply pockets it.

Fairfax, Syme and the Herald group colluded to share news and pictures so long as no Melbourne evening paper was launched. Hills doesn’t mention it, but this led to a weird amalgam, the Sunday Press, run by the Herald and Age in order to shut down the interloper Max Newton’s Sunday Observer.

Of course it all turned to tears with the Herald and Weekly Times capitulating to Murdoch in 1986 and Fairfax going into receivership four years later after a failed buyout. James Packer’s sell off of his media interests meant that within 40 years three major media dynasties disappeared, leaving the field to Murdoch.

He tried to hire Perkin, who turned for advice to Tom Fitzgerald, founder of Nation magazine and a former Sydney Morning Herald finance editor who joined Murdoch as editorial director. After three years Fitzgerald said he had been humiliated and given no real editorial authority, that Murdoch was a cheat, utterly unreliable and untrustworthy, a man who flatters someone to their face and immediately afterwards savagely disparages them “Fitzgerald said that no one working for Murdoch would have any editorial independence.” He interfered with the most senior executives, humiliating them by going to relatively junior executives with instructions. And he liked going to the composing room and on an impulse remaking a page while the editor stands by.

As a sidebar, it is intriguing to learn that Packer hired him for an extravagant wage, a house, gardener, cook, and chauffeur-driven car. But when Perkin signed he was told to write everything he knew about the Syme family. Packer wanted inside oil in his fight to grab The Age. Perkin demurred to the old tyrant’s fury.

At 36 he finally gained the Editor’s chair in Melbourne, hiring the superb cartoonist Les Tanner (whose anti-hanging cartoon of Henry Bolte made Packer pulp an issue of the Bulletin) and other wunderkinds, such as Michael Leunig, Ron Tandberg and John Spooner. Perkin shuffled out the duds and dead wood, appointed foreign correspondents, did deals to get stories from the world’s great English-language papers and enlivened his baby.

Some crack reporters, such as the now seemingly ageless Michelle Garattan, veteran Canberra correspondent, were hired and the power of the sub-editors broken. It became largely a writers’ paper, limited by Perkin’s conservatism. His cry of “Jesus, chap, you’ll make me the laughing stock of Melbourne” when he thought a reporter had gone too far told the story.