2

No Respecter of Persons or Parties

It appears that these people have come to regard themselves as an entirely self-contained publication, with the assistance, of course, of our organisation and our money.

Memo from Sir Warwick Fairfax, September 1971

The role played by Fairfax in the 1961 federal election is alarming by today’s standards. Not only did the company take a stick to the Menzies government but it virtually ran the Labor Party campaign. It proved to be a watershed for the Fairfax papers, and for Australian journalism in general. It further damaged the relationship between Warwick Fairfax and Rupert Henderson, and it was to lead eventually to a generation of feisty editors and the loosening of management’s tight grip on editorial comment.

Warwick Fairfax resumed the chairmanship of the company in March 1961 with renewed vigour. His wife, furious at the manner in which her husband had been forced to relinquish the chair, now took a deep interest in the internal politics of Fairfax and urged her husband to take more control. The timing of Warwick’s return was significant. It was nine months before the most critical federal election in a decade.

Robert Menzies and his Liberal–Country Party Coalition were in power, and had been for twelve years, but the government was far from popular. It had imposed draconian policies to deal with an overheated economy. There had been a huge property boom in Australia, import quotas had been abolished, and there was a balance of payments crisis. It was a significant moment in Australia’s economic history—right up there with treasurer Paul Keating’s ‘banana republic’ outburst in 1986, followed by his tough economic policies and then his controversial statement as prime minister in the early 1990s that this was ‘the recession we had to have’.

Menzies had reacted to the economic problems with a crippling credit squeeze, which was strongly criticised by the press, particularly the SMH and the Fin Review, before and during the election campaign. At the time, Tom Fitzgerald was the finance editor and economic leader writer of the SMH and Maxwell Newton was editor of the Fin Review. These two individuals would play key roles in the upcoming shake-up of Australian journalism, but it was the role of Fairfax management that was most shocking during the 1961 campaign.

Warwick Fairfax and Rupert Henderson were both highly critical of the government and felt it needed to be taught a lesson. Henderson thought that the SMH should not advocate the return of the government but nor should Fairfax discard its conservative tradition. ‘A plague on both their houses’ was his attitude. In his view, the SMH should play the role of a detached critic. Warwick was a little less measured than his managing director, asserting that Fairfax would give assistance to Labor behind the scenes. Henderson disagreed but deferred to the chairman.

And so Arthur Calwell, the leader of that same Labor Party that the SMH had castigated for most of its existence, began making frequent visits to the newspaper’s offices on Sydney’s Broadway. Gavin Souter, in his officially commissioned company history, The Company of Heralds, describes what eventuated:

Henderson in effect became Calwell’s campaign manager, providing hard headed advice on policy, very reasonable rates for television time, and the writing services of two of John Fairfax’s best men. For most of the campaign, Lou Leck, assistant to the general manager, and Maxwell Newton, managing editor of the Financial Review, worked in what became known as the ‘Labor Ward’ on the executive floor preparing speeches and statements for Calwell. These were written to Henderson’s brief; the drafts were submitted to Henderson for approval; and the finished products were conveyed to Calwell, who either delivered them as speeches or issued them as handouts.

So much for editorial independence.

But the chairman was about to take it one step further. On 30 November, just a week out from the election, he let it be known that he was writing an editorial for publication in the next day’s SMH. Warwick didn’t hand over his missive until 6.30 p.m. that night, after Henderson had left the office. It was headed ‘Herald’s political principles’ and was an unequivocal endorsement of Labor, the first time in the history of the SMH that the newspaper had ever advocated a vote for the Labor Party.

It read in part:

Since after 12 years in office, the Government can offer no further suggestion except to stand on its record, we would prefer to take the alternative and to give Labor its opportunity. It is to be greatly hoped that, if forced into Opposition, the Liberal and Country Parties would take stock of the position, reorientate their thinking and reconstruct their political philosophy. Probably not until that happens will they ever be able to take up the proud position they once held as guardians of the true Liberal tradition.

Angus McLachlan, then general manager and Henderson’s deputy, refused to publish the editorial without his superior’s approval. Henderson argued forcefully with Warwick by telephone that they should stop short of endorsing either party. But Warwick would not yield and eventually Henderson gave in.

The chairman had backed the wrong horse, as it happened. Menzies scraped back into power and then devoted much of his first speech in the new parliament to a critique of the SMH. Warwick, predictably, soon became disillusioned with the Labor Party. But his muscular approach to interference in the Fairfax papers’ editorial policy continued. Within a few years, Tom Fitzgerald and Maxwell Newton would become casualties of this meddling.

Fitzgerald, who had gained an economics degree before starting out in journalism, was well respected as a first-class economist and an investigative business writer. His articles led to a shower of defamation writs for the SMH but he was sharp and accurate. Four of his subjects from Sydney’s finance world ended up in jail at the same time. He introduced a new form of finance and economic journalism into the SMH—it was ‘break and enter’ reporting, taking readers inside boardrooms and uncovering corruption.

In 1958, while keeping his day job with the SMH, Fitzgerald had launched his own fortnightly newspaper, Nation. This publication, together with Donald Horne’s Observer, heralded a break from the crippling conservatism and tabloid sensationalism that typified Australian newspapers of the day. It published writers like Sylvia Lawson, Robert Hughes and Manning Clark, and it took a radical approach to politics and economics. Rupert Murdoch’s launch of The Australian in 1964 is generally credited with forever changing Australian journalism, but Nation was an earlier, similarly influential pioneer.

Brian Johns, former managing director of the ABC, SBS and Penguin Australia, was a young journalist in the early 1960s. He considers Fitzgerald to have been one of his mentors. ‘Nation breathed fresh air and hope into newsrooms across the country’, he recalls.

Newton had a big larrikin personality and an even bigger brain. The Western Australian was educated at Perth’s Modern School and was a contemporary of Bob Hawke’s. He later won a scholarship to Cambridge, where he earned a first-class honours degree in economics and won the Adam Smith Prize. He came to the notice of SMH editor John Pringle in the mid-1950s thanks to a series of intelligent letters to the editor, became the SMH’s political correspondent in Canberra in 1957, and eventually forced his way into the managing editor’s post at the Fin Review, where he proceeded to give the newspaper a geopolitical edge and recruited journalists like Maximilian Walsh and David Love.

‘Newton’s real strength was that he understood the relationship between the public service and politics’, says Brian Johns. ‘And he understood the economic base of politics. Previously, gallery reporters had understood politics but not the role of the bureaucracy and of economics.’

Both Fitzgerald and Newton were favoured sons of Rupert Henderson and Warwick Fairfax. They were nurtured and protected. According to Gavin Souter, in his Company of Heralds, Henderson said in his later years that the only person he had ever really regarded as his equal was the young Maxwell Newton. And the fact that Fitzgerald had been allowed to set up his own newspaper while staying on at the SMH is an indication of the support he enjoyed. But this only went so far.

Fitzgerald and Newton both bristled about having to prepare editorials under the oppressive hand of Fairfax management. There had been fiery disputes with the chairman over Fitzgerald’s line on the federal Budget as early as 1956, when Fitzgerald criticised the government for not being courageous enough to budget for a substantial surplus and for being weak in the fight against inflation. Warwick felt that Fitzgerald’s comments were devoid of political reality. ‘No government would ever refrain from spending such a surplus’, he said in a memo to Henderson, before concluding, ‘I feel the Editor himself is being put in an impossible position by Fitzgerald’s difficulty and also by the fact that I have to keep intervening’. But it was the 1963 federal election that brought matters to a head.

Henderson and the editors were of the view that the SMH’s credibility would suffer if it abruptly reversed its position of 1961 and swung its support behind Menzies. Detached criticism was the sensible course. It was important to be consistent. Also, Fitzgerald and Newton remained sceptical of the government’s economic policies. But Warwick, who had resumed contact with the Liberal Party and had dined with Menzies at the prime minister’s residence in Canberra, The Lodge, took matters into his own hands, once again writing the SMH’s election editorial without consulting Henderson. This time, the SMH gave its unequivocal support to the government.

Henderson was devastated, his confidence severely shaken—at one point, he burst into tears when discussing the matter with a Fairfax senior executive. His reaction arguably had more to do with his concern over the chairman’s continued meddling in editorial and management matters than the actual content of Warwick’s writings.

Fitzgerald and Newton took a harsher view. They were quoted in an internal memo as having said that the chairman’s comments in the editorial on the Labor Party and on the economy represented a ‘public repudiation’ of what they had written in the lead-up to the election. Fitzgerald submitted his resignation but was persuaded to stay on. Newton remained furious and the final straw for him came a few months later, when there was a disagreement over the Fin Review’s take on the new Trade Practices Bill. The SMH had been more critical of the proposal than had the Fin Review, and the Fin Review was now expected to step into line. Newton had had enough. In his March 1964 letter of resignation, he said, ‘I have lost confidence in and respect for the policies of the board’. In a letter to a colleague, he elaborated: ‘Lines of policy are being handed down, like tablets, from one man’.

In an earlier time, Newton may have stayed on and fought. But by 1964, journalists on newspapers across the country had a new and exciting alternative to consider. Rupert Murdoch had set up The Australian, a national newspaper based in Canberra that had a mandate to shake up public debate. Newton promptly joined News Limited to become The Australian’s first editor, and he took a swag of top Fairfax journalists with him. Fitzgerald was to join him five years later, to take up the post of editorial director.

Within management, the blame for losing one of Fairfax’s top economic reporters and several other journalists to the opposition was slated home to Warwick, whose relationship with Henderson had descended into cold disdain. When Henderson mentioned he might retire from his executive role at some point, Warwick took him up on it immediately and he was gone by the end of 1964. Henderson had been general manager for eleven years and then managing director for fifteen years. He would remain on the Fairfax board but Angus McLachlan would take over the managing director’s role.

But Warwick’s power also was to be reined in. McLachlan made his acceptance of the role conditional on answering to the board, after becoming a member of it. The chairman would have no executive role in either editorial or management issues. Warwick didn’t like it, but Vincent and James Fairfax concurred with Henderson’s view that the chairman had to be nobbled if further damage to the company was to be avoided.

McLachlan’s stance was the beginning of a genuine transfer of editorial control from the board to the editors. It was not a smooth transition.

McLachlan, in one of his first moves as managing director, brought back John Pringle as editor of the SMH. A veteran of the Manchester Guardian, the London Times and The Observer, Pringle had edited the SMH for five years in the 1950s before taking his leave in 1957 to return to England. Warwick had been a distant presence during this first editorship, but Pringle had nevertheless felt constrained by the strict editorial control exerted by Henderson. On his return to the SMH in 1965, he insisted on more independence.

That wasn’t the way Warwick wanted to operate, however, despite the arrangement made with McLachlan. There were soon clashes between Warwick and his editor over Pringle’s line on monarchism, film censorship, even the fact that the paper published two reviews of the then controversial musical Hair. But the crunch came with Pringle’s Easter editorial. Pringle made the grave mistake of approaching Easter from a humanist rather than religious perspective. Warwick was incensed. He wrote a long memorandum to Pringle.

It has been a tradition of the Sydney Morning Herald from time immemorial to have a religious leader [editorial], usually on Good Friday, on the significance of Easter … This tradition should not have been broken, least of all without consulting me, and I would not have agreed … Instead we had a long leader discussing human values from a moral viewpoint without so much as mentioning that religion or Easter existed. To adopt a humanist or rationalist approach can only suggest that the Herald is less concerned with religion as a moral force and less convinced that it is an essential part of the basis of the values on which civilisation depends. That may be your view; you must have been aware that it is not the view of the Herald.

In reply, Pringle wrote:

What is obvious is that you have now lost all confidence in my judgement. This is naturally very embarrassing to me. So long as I remain editor I shall either be in constant apprehension as to what you want me to say or running to you every day to discuss what leaders we should write.

Within three weeks, Pringle was gone. By the end of 1965, Tom Fitzgerald had gone too.

While the SMH was labouring under the chairman’s heavy hand, the Fin Review was producing some of the group’s best journalism. A revolution in journalism was underway, sparked by publications like Nation, but it was happening more in Fairfax’s satellite publications than in its flagship. Maxwell Newton had given the Fin Review life before bouncing off to The Australian, and the editor who succeeded him in 1964, Vic Carroll, sustained it.

Carroll had come to Fairfax in 1960 from The Courier-Mail to be finance editor of The Sun-Herald. He had worked in the same office as the Fin Review staff and had commanded their respect. He was a stern, quiet man but he had a sharp intellect and a background in stockbroking. He had more commercial nous than Newton and focused on increasing advertising as well as practising a ‘take no prisoners’ editorial approach. As a smaller newspaper, the Fin Review was off the board’s radar much of the time—journalists like Max Walsh, Trevor Kennedy, Peter Robinson and Robert Gottliebsen were given their head by Carroll.

It was significant that The Australian was launched at the same time as Carroll took over the Fin Review. Murdoch’s pitch for national attention had a cleaner layout, a more modern typeface and an energetic editor in Newton. It jolted the journalistic community and Carroll and his team were ready, and had enough freedom, to take up the challenge.

‘Vic was such a clever bastard in causing trouble and being persuasive’, says Max Suich, Fairfax’s former editorial director. ‘You have to persuade both reader and the board that it is justified in what you are doing.’

Carroll could handle Fairfax management in a way that others could not. ‘He would say he was going upstairs to get the cuts’, Suich says, evoking a schoolboy going to the headmaster’s office to get the cane. ‘He used to sit there and just look at them. There was a lot of tension but there always is tension in a good publishing house. Journalists want to go too far; management don’t want to go that far. Journalists make stupid mistakes; management have commercial desire. Vic understood that.’

The circulation of the Fin Review more than doubled in the late 1960s, though this wasn’t entirely due to pioneering journalism. It was during this period that the first shipment of iron ore was made from the Hamersley Range in Western Australia’s Pilbara region, that oil was discovered in Bass Strait and nickel at Kambalda near Kalgoorlie. The economic boom was good for financial journalism and good for advertising.

But the Fin Review did not completely escape the chairman’s notice. The newspaper’s coverage of Labor’s policy platform in the lead-up to the election of the Whitlam government in December 1972 was felt by Warwick (or, rather, Sir Warwick; he’d received a knighthood five years earlier) to be far too sympathetic. It caused him, five days after the election, to put pen to paper for a memo to Robert Falkingham, then Fairfax’s general manager.

There was not one leader or one sentence that said positively that, summing matters up, the policy of the Government was to be preferred to that of Labor.

This follows the pattern of a number of other matters I have had to take up with Mr Carroll and Mr [Peter] Robinson during the last couple of years. They have usually defended themselves. They have never refused to carry out directives, but on a number of occasions they have gone away and taken no action or repeated the practice to which I took objection.

He continued, now focusing on Max Walsh:

Another point of issue is Mr Max Walsh. I have over and over again tried to point out that he is doing the paper harm through intemperate criticism, constant nagging, and apparent failure to see much good in anything or anybody … It appears that these people [the Fin Review] have come to regard themselves as an entirely self-contained publication, with the assistance, of course, of our organisation and our money.

In dealing with this problem we have to consider the really excellent work that Mr Carroll is doing … the virtual impossibility of replacing him, and, of course, the effect on our reputation if he should resign on an issue in which the nation has quite obviously accepted his point of view rather than ours.

I am quite prepared to take action, but it must be carefully considered and carefully timed, and I want to discuss it with the Board before making any final decision.

The board decided that Vic Carroll, now the Fin Review’s managing editor, was indeed too valuable to lose and it managed to calm Sir Warwick down. Nor was any action taken against Carroll’s able accomplice, Peter Robinson, the publication’s editor. Robinson had a prodigious intelligence and a journalistic pedigree rare for Australia at that time. He had been the SMH correspondent in Tokyo from 1954 to 1964. On his return to Australia, he had joined the Fin Review and placed Australia’s defence spending under the microscope, judging it from an economic rather than a political perspective for the first time.

While Vic Carroll and Peter Robinson were antagonising Sir Warwick with their push for independence and more vigorous journalism, an even bigger revolution was in progress at The Age in Melbourne. The once passionate newspaper of David Syme had lost traction during the 1940s and 1950s. It had become more conservative and was eclipsed by its local competitors—The Herald, the Sun News Pictorial and The Argus. But this changed when, in 1964, a Syme family descendant, Ranald Macdonald, was appointed managing director of David Syme & Co. at the age of just twenty-six, bringing a new energy to the paper. Two years later, Macdonald appointed a feisty and talented reporter, Graham Perkin, to the Age editorship and together they transformed the paper.

Perkin saw the newspaper as an instrument of social change, not just a journal of record. He was an interventionist and campaigning editor who appointed an investigative team of reporters and an environment writer—the latter unheard of at the time. Under his guidance, The Age exposed financial scandals within the Victorian government and its police force. It took on the government of Sir Henry Bolte over the death penalty with its emotional coverage of the hanging of Ronald Ryan. It championed environment and planning issues, attacked corruption in the public service and criticised the police’s handling of anti-apartheid demonstrations.

Perkin also supported the election of the Whitlam government in 1972, sparking a stand-off with Fairfax management. When Perkin wanted to support Whitlam again in 1974, Sir Warwick and the board intervened, and only a compromise negotiated by Macdonald whereby The Age effectively supported neither party prevented Perkin’s resignation. Yet Perkin went on to become one of the harshest critics of the Whitlam government when The Age exposed attempts by Rex Connor, Whitlam’s minister for minerals and energy, to raise $4 billion from the Middle East using the services of shady Pakistani loan broker Tirath Khemlani. Perkin’s last editorial for The Age, written in 1975 on the eve of his death from a heart attack at age forty-five, called for the Whitlam government’s resignation. It was headed ‘Go now, go decently’ and began, ‘We will say it straight, and clear, and at once. The Whitlam Government has run its course’.

During Perkin’s nine-year editorship, the circulation of The Age increased by 22 per cent to 220 000 and it was declared one of the ten best newspapers in the world. Perkin’s success undoubtedly had an impact on Fairfax editors in Sydney and emboldened them to stand up to the chairman and the board. Vic Carroll in particular kept pushing the envelope with management, and with the reading public.

Well before the controversy of the 1972 election, Carroll had felt it was time to extend the influence of the Fin Review. He wanted to produce a separate weekend publication with the word ‘national’ in the title. The advertising agency Young & Rubicam duly came up with ‘The National Times’. The board agreed with the move, but from their perspective, it was another defensive measure. Murdoch was planning a Sunday edition of The Australian as well as a financial weekly called Finance Week, to be produced in collaboration with the London Financial Times, and Fairfax was keen to get first-mover advantage.

The first edition of The National Times appeared on 7 February 1971, three weeks before The Sunday Australian and almost a year before Finance Week. Soon, it was the only serious alternative to the more down-market tabloid Sunday newspapers—The Sunday Australian merged with The Sunday Telegraph and disappeared without trace in June 1972, while Finance Week’s run ended after just three months.

The National Times’ first editor was 28-year-old Trevor Kennedy, who had a tough time launching the paper and countering the early, strong (though short-lived) opposition from The Sunday Australian. After Kennedy was poached by Packer in November 1972 to edit The Bulletin, a long-running weekly magazine on politics, business and the arts, Max Suich stepped in and guided The National Times over the next six years, initially through the turbulent period of the Whitlam government. Suich, who had worked on Fleet Street, was tough and uncompromising and had a good nose for talent. He appointed to the editorial staff a young academic, Anne Summers, author of a history of Australian women called Damned Whores and God’s Police. She wrote on NSW prisons and covered the emergence of the women’s electoral lobby. Max Walsh wrote a column for the paper. Paul Kelly and Andrew Clark, two young reporters who would go on to be ranked among Australia’s most significant political commentators and authors, were in the paper’s Canberra bureau. Patrick Cook was its young cartoonist. It was a formidable line-up and under Suich’s direction they pushed the boundaries of reporting and analysis. Their informal motto was later described by James Fairfax as ‘no respecter of persons or parties’.

It was left to Vic Carroll to take the flack from the Fairfax board and management, which he did unflinchingly. As Sir Warwick pointed out in his memos, Carroll listened and was polite, but took no notice of what was said.

An early flare-up occurred over a Max Walsh profile of Billy McMahon titled ‘Public McMahon and private Billy: the facts and the myths’. The chairman was not happy:

This view is superficial and unfair and if Max Walsh sells Billy McMahon short he is showing he has a great deal to learn, both about Billy McMahon and about politics … In short, he seems to give the impression that no-one in the country is smart enough to gain the approval of Max Walsh.

But the most serious confrontation, which came a few years later, was over the Vietnam War. This time Carroll would be punished, removed from his post and sent to the Fairfax version of Siberia—women’s magazines.

The SMH’s coverage of the conflict in Vietnam had been scant. It was a great supporter of Australia’s involvement in the war but had not sent its own correspondent, instead relying on syndicated coverage by Denis Warner, of the HWT group in Melbourne. Warner’s reports, it was felt, were in line with the Fairfax board’s own views on Australia’s right to participate in the civil war. In 1974, Suich and Carroll sensed that Australia would prefer to wipe clean the slate on Vietnam, to just forget about it. So they commissioned Evan Whitton to write a series of articles on the issue.

Whitton was a latecomer to journalism. He was a former teacher and English master at a Catholic boarding school in Toowoomba who had been recruited to The National Times by Carroll and had won three Walkley Awards, Australian journalism’s highest accolade, by the early 1970s. He had authored long and highly acclaimed post-mortems on the HMAS Voyager disaster, involving a collision between two warships in Jervis Bay that took eighty-two lives, and the Petrov affair, the dramatic 1954 defection of two Russian spies. On Vietnam, Whitton also delivered in spades—or, rather, in 26 000 words. He visited Saigon and gained access to key Department of Foreign Affairs documents, to a previously unpublished US Army study and to the Pentagon Papers, which had already been published in the United States.

Whitton’s first article, ‘For the first time the truth about Vietnam’, appeared on 28 April 1975, just days before the Americans left Saigon and ten years after Menzies had formally announced Australia’s entry into the war. It began:

Sir Robert Menzies’ Vietnam policy is now seen, in its own terms, to have been a disaster of the first magnitude. At one stroke, Australia earned the enmity of a number of Asian nations, and lost the protection of the country we hoped would protect us from those nations.

How did Australia’s leaders, and those of our one-time great and powerful friend, so grossly miscalculate events, and the effects of their actions?

Whitton revealed that Menzies’ decision to enter the war had been unilateral—he had not bothered to tell the Saigon government, the Australian people or even the rest of his Cabinet. The journalist laid out how Australia had later to ask a reluctant Vietnam for an invitation to enter the war. And Whitton pulled no punches.

This little effort, loaded as it was with both farce and deception, was the culmination of 15 years of incompetence, naiveté, deceit, fear, misconceptions and stupidity on the part of the Australian government and its principal advisers in the Public Service.

Whitton’s articles stood as a contradiction of what had been the SMH editorial line on the war for nearly a decade. The pieces, and The National Times itself, were the number-one item on the agenda of a Fairfax board meeting held just two days after their publication. The chairman wanted somebody’s head for this calumny. It is all noted in the minutes.

The chairman said he was astounded and completely baffled … Mr Whitton might be sincere, but his presentation of the Vietnam situation was quite dishonest—a typical communistic approach. He said the person responsible was Mr Carroll and to a lesser extent Mr Suich who both must have known about it beforehand. As a result of this, Mr Whitton could not remain as assistant editor of one of our papers. He said if Mr Carroll and Mr Suich supported Mr Whitton, we would have to deal with them. Unless strong action was taken now we might wake up one morning and find the communist line taken in any of our papers.

Two months later, in June 1975, Carroll was transferred to Fairfax subsidiary Sungravure as its chief executive. Later that year, Whitton won another Walkley Award, for the Vietnam series.

Carroll’s resistance to board intervention is worth canvassing for just a little longer because it represented a significant change at Fairfax. It had been happening at The Age but, without dismissing the importance of this, it seems fair to say that the Melbourne newspaper had been imbued with the more liberal Syme culture since the 1850s. And the Fairfax board had less control over that paper—watertight agreements were still in place governing the independence of David Syme publications. The newspapers produced at Broadway, however, had to break through the iron-fisted conservatism of the Fairfax family (or, at least, of Sir Warwick Fairfax). The revolt had begun in the smaller satellite publications—the Fin Review and The National Times—but it would eventually spread throughout the organisation. It would be irrepressible, not least because The Age, under editor Graham Perkin, had provided an example of how independent journalism could boost circulation and advertising revenues.

Vic Carroll was one of the first truly to stand his ground at Fairfax headquarters in Sydney, and it clearly discomfited the hierarchy. What follows is an excerpt from a report by then executive editor David Bowman on his discussion with Carroll in the wake of the Vietnam articles. Bowman was acting on detailed instructions from management.

Mr Carroll is an extremely able man. The executive editor’s report of his discussion with Mr Carroll sheds some light on the problem: that Mr Carroll wants to run his own ship, in his own way, and is determined not to cooperate. He is, in the executive editor’s judgement, chronically incapable of cooperation with anyone up the ladder who must of necessity take a close interest in the content of his papers. He responds neither to friendliness nor to kicks. The present episode will not change anything for more than five minutes …

I said the [Whitton] article was totally unacceptable. It was tendentious, abusive and emotional. He asked whether we wanted cool balanced journalism like the Herald leader that day. [‘A government we cannot trust’, which ended with the editor’s sentence, ‘It should be brought down’.]

Now Carroll was gone, for the time being anyway. But Walsh, now editor at the Fin Review, and Suich, at The National Times, remained. The Age, under Graham Perkin and later Les Carlyon, also maintained its independent voice, particularly during the time of the Whitlam government and its eventual sacking by Sir John Kerr.

An equally noteworthy sign of the transformation of Fairfax was that Sir Warwick himself was headed for the door. The three principal board members—Rupert Henderson and Vincent and James Fairfax—had become increasingly disenchanted with his performance. To begin with, Sir Warwick considered himself to be de facto general manager as well as chairman, though he had good reason for believing this.

In 1969, when then managing director Angus McLachlan resigned, Robert Falkingham was named general manager, but Sir Warwick believed he was not ready to take full charge. Falkingham had no background in journalism—he had joined Fairfax as treasurer, or chief financial officer, in 1957, after a career with the Bank of New South Wales—whereas both Henderson and McLachlan had been noted journalists before being promoted to management. Warwick noted Falkingham’s lack of newspaper experience and urged the board to create a new management structure: Falkingham would report to a board committee on all operational and editorial matters. It was a committee of one—Sir Warwick himself. This was a delicious turnaround for Sir Warwick, who had had his wings clipped by the board in 1961, when he returned as chairman, and again in 1964, when Henderson left and McLachlan was appointed managing director. Now that an accountant had taken the top job, Sir Warwick had justification to claw back more editorial control, albeit through Falkingham. The trouble was that the chairman wasn’t playing by the rules. He was circumventing Falkingham and giving senior executives instructions without keeping the general manager in the loop.

Sir Warwick would tell his son James over and over again: ‘Don’t forget you can tell them [the editors] anything you want’. There was a clear message—‘You can tell them to print it upside down and they have to’. But James didn’t agree. In his view, his father could never rid himself of the idea that the family was still in control. He’d never accept the fact that Fairfax was a public company and that the family held less than 50 per cent of the shares.

There was also a sense that Sir Warwick at seventy-four was not as sharp as he had once been, and there was increasing resentment about the influence of Lady Mary Fairfax on her husband in regard to company matters.

In August 1976, it all came to a head. Henderson and the two Fairfaxes, Vincent and James, effectively ganged up on Sir Warwick and informed him that they wanted him to step down as chairman. It was time to hand the baton to the younger generation—namely James.

Sir Warwick was in a weak position. Some twenty years before, he had controlled 74 per cent of the company. But the public listing in 1956 and then the gradual transfer of his shareholding to his son James (under the estate-planning strategy engineered by Henderson in 1959) meant that he now controlled just 12 per cent of the company’s shares. James and Vincent together could outvote him—James held 16 per cent of the company, while Vincent and his family held 14 per cent.

Vic Carroll wrote in his 1990 book The Man Who Couldn’t Wait that the initial share transfer in 1959 amounted to a ‘declaration of hostilities between Henderson and Mary Fairfax, the start of a 28-year siege between Fairwater and the company’s top executives, including James Fairfax, which culminated in young Warwick’s takeover of the company in 1987’. Indeed, the conflict was to have tragic consequences for the company.

As for James, he had to sack his own father. For him, it was the hardest task he was ever to undertake at Fairfax. But he says he has never regretted it, not for a minute—not even during the four years following the 1976 sacking when Sir Warwick refused to speak to his son.

There was a significant upside for the Fairfax editors. The ascension of James Fairfax to the chairman’s position ushered in a new era for all the newspapers in the company’s stable. The group’s 1978 annual report confirmed the renunciation of the former doctrine of central authority: ‘It is a policy of the group that each newspaper, magazine and broadcasting activity maintains a high degree of autonomy and freedom in attitudes to news and general editorial content’.

It was in 1980 that James Fairfax truly placed his own stamp on the company. That year, Robert Falkingham retired, joining Rupert Henderson in the ranks of the departed—Henderson had left the board two years earlier. This gave James Fairfax and the board the opportunity to introduce a new form of management. The role of managing director, previously held by Henderson and McLachlan, was effectively split in two. Greg Gardiner, just thirty-six and the company’s chief financial officer, became general manager, succeeding Falkingham. And Max Suich, the former editor of The National Times, became the chief editorial executive with responsibility for the editorial administration of the five Sydney newspapers—the SMH, The Sun-Herald, The Sun afternoon newspaper, the Fin Review and The National Times.

This reflected James Fairfax’s belief in the importance of diversity of editorial opinion across the group, and his support for the editorial independence of The Age. He was less conservative than his father and he set a very different tone at Broadway. The appointment of Max Suich was particularly bold and proved to be a game changer for the company.

One of the first moves Suich made in his new position was to change the editorship of the SMH, dismissing David Bowman and bringing Vic Carroll back from the magazine outpost of Sungravure. Then Carroll set about changing the SMH. He brought on board Chris Anderson from The Sun-Herald, Evan Whitton from The National Times and Eric Beecher from The Age. An irreverent column, ‘Stay in touch’, edited by David Dale, was placed on the back page and, in 1982, four new magazine sections were launched—‘The guide’, ‘Good living’, ‘Life and home’ and ‘Metro’, each overseen by an editor under the age of thirty. Carroll, Anderson and Beecher were clearly aiming to attract a more youthful readership, people between twenty and forty-five years of age.

This led to concern at the board level about alienating existing readers. The board discussed the fact that there were no quality newspapers anywhere in the world adopting this magazine approach, and that there seemed to be less emphasis on news at the SMH under Carroll. There was even a complaint from John B Fairfax that Dale had used the word ‘orgasm’ in his column.

But the changes continued apace. Suich appointed David Marr as editor of The National Times. Marr, just thirty-two, had been recruited by Suich four years earlier as an arts writer. He had since proven that he was a very gifted journalist. And at the Fin Review, Suich appointed political journalist Fred Brenchley as editor after Max Walsh, who had been overlooked for the SMH editor’s position, defected to the Packer group.

Guidance on editorials and news content also no longer operated as it had in the past. James Fairfax would meet once a week with Carroll and Anderson in Carroll’s office. The long, agonising discussions about editorial policy that had taken place in the directors dining room on the thirteenth floor between Henderson, McLachlan and Sir Warwick were gone forever.

The passing of the baton at Fairfax from Sir Warwick to his son James and the subsequent decision to allow the group’s newspapers to present a diversity of opinion, to reflect that of its editors and readers rather than that of the board, unleashed some brilliant journalism and great newspapers. But by the mid-1980s, Fairfax’s aggressive editorial and business approach had created a powerful pack of enemies. It had overplayed its hand.