Journalism

Before you settle into this ‘random history of the twenty-first century’, grab an atlas: Andrew Mueller is one well-travelled hack. A fatalist philatelist, he has spent most of his career collecting the types of stamps that adorn passports, not envelopes. In I Wouldn’t Start from Here, Mueller reports on and from some of the most exotic sites of international strife imaginable: Jerusalem, Baghdad, Gaza, Kabul. There are also trips to places of lesser renown, aspirational statelets and breakaway provinces in countries as far-flung as Georgia (Abkhazia). All of which, as his publishers congratulate him in their press release, is ‘[n]ot bad for a guy who originally hails from Wagga Wagga’.

Ken Inglis is now as much a part of the history of the ABC as any of the charismatic broadcasters, mercurial managers or audiences – devoted and indignant – that his two monumental histories chronicle. He has become the repository, the source, the critical race memory of the ABC, ‘just three years older’ than the phenomenon he examines.

The list of corrigenda at the end of the new edition of This Is the ABC (first published by Melbourne University Press in 1983) underscores the point: insiders, listeners, viewers and politicians have inundated him with corrections and information to refine and expand his already minutely detailed volume one of the history. Listeners plead with him to include the story of the newsreader who announced that a lady had been bitten on the funnel by a finger-webbed spider. Other responses are less benign. Solicitors for Sir Charles Moses, for thirty years the ABC’s general manager, write to Inglis in 1983 listing ‘imputations’ in his book which they claim are grossly defamatory of Sir Charles’s good name and reputation. Sir Charles himself, at the Broadcast House launch of the first volume in 1983, greeted the disconcerted author with the news that he would be hearing from his solicitors. ‘I did my best to look and sound at ease when Dame Leonie called me to the dais’, recalls Inglis. The case was not pursued, and the relevant documents are now deposited in the National Library. But it is characteristic of the man and the historian that Inglis should ‘remain sad that although my admiration for the ABC’s principal maker was evidently clear to reviewers and other readers, the subject himself could not see it’.

In the first volume of his memoirs, In Time of Trouble, Claude Cockburn described his introduction to The Times of the 1930s, on a visit to its foreign desk. There he found one sub-editor reciting Plato’s Phaedo from memory, while another translated it into Chinese: they had a bet it could not be done without loss of nuance. Another sub-editor, a grammarian of Polynesian previously employed as a professor of Chinese metaphysics at the University of Tokyo, spent the entire evening over a two-line item concerning the Duke of Gloucester’s arrival in Kuala Lumpur. ‘There are,’ he explained to Cockburn, ‘eleven correct ways of spelling Kuala Lumpur, and it is difficult to decide which should receive the, as it were, imprimatur of The Times.’

One of the three central protagonists of Neil Chenoweth’s book, Graham Richardson, famously titled his autobiography Whatever It Takes (1994). Despite the title’s hints at candour, Richardson’s book eluded all but the most passing references to Kerry Packer. As Chenoweth points out in his alarming new book, this, from the man John Button had dubbed the Minister for Kerry Packer, represented storytelling at its most elliptical. More than Richardson’s book, Chenoweth presents the tale of Whatever it Took. It is not an edifying spectacle.

Many older readers of ABR would remember Peter Russo – whether fondly or otherwise – for his newspaper columns (principally in the Melbourne Argus) from 1941, and for his ABC radio broadcasts, which continued until his death in 1985. As for younger readers: picture a journalist–commentator (his career defied easy description) who was as controversial in his day as any of our present ‘shock jocks’, but who actually knew what he was talking about. Leading politicians approached Russo not to curry favour with his audience but to understand matters within his areas of expertise: Asia and international affairs. Such expertise – including fluency in eight languages – made it difficult to ignore his contributions to public discourse which, as Prue Torney-Parlicki’s biography makes clear, were substantial. Until this biography (the first comprehensive study of the subject to be published), Russo risked being remembered not for what he said or did but, rather, for what others said about him.

There is no minimal safe exposure to free asbestos fibre. It is the most lethal industrial material of the twentieth century. Asbestosis and mesothelioma are the common diseases arising from exposure to it. Mesothelioma, a cancer, is distinctively brutal in the way it causes its victims to die. Typically, there are no symptoms for as many as forty years; when the disease appears, death follows after a few excruciatingly painful months. James Hardie, a conservative icon of Australian industry, was established in 1888 and its core business was fibro-cement manufacture, the fibre being asbestos. Gideon Haigh traces the postwar success of the company and its turning away from the gathering evidence of asbestos’s toxicity. Asbestos, it dissembled, was dangerous (like many industrial materials) rather than lethal. Hardie comforted itself in the belief that the incidence of disease reflected past periods of exposure and not the current changed practices. At the same time it failed even to meet these inadequate dust standards in its workplaces.

For 175 years the Sydney Morning Herald has recorded the annals of colony, state and nation, never missing an issue. When the paper was established in 1831, the colony of New South Wales was still being opened up by exploration and settlement. Sydney’s population was little more than 15,000, while the colony itself numbered around 50,000 Europeans, including 20,000 convicts. Less certain was the extent of the indigenous population. To the first Australians, the Herald was initially unsympathetic. It called them savages and in 1838 campaigned against the trial and subsequent hanging of the men involved in the massacre at Myall Creek; to its credit, that view was soon recanted. In 2006 the Herald reflects the aspirations of the majority of Australians for a decent and just reconciliation with the Aboriginal people.

Judith Johnston and Monica Anderson have assembled a book full of quotable quotes for future scholars: ‘The typical Australian is an Englishman with a dash of sunshine in him’; or ‘Why has God given to England nearly all the waste places of the earth, unless she is to fill them?’ (1899). Perhaps even more chilling: ‘the acknowledgement of sin amongst a good many blacks proves the working of the Spirit of God’ (1861). Australasia might be ‘the Paradise of the working man’, but it was ‘the Sahara of the scholar’ (1895). The book reminds us how commonly ‘Australia’ was imagined as ‘Australasia’. The idea of a ‘Federated Australasia’ embraced the Australian colonies, Fiji, British New Guinea, and ‘any other British territories in the South and West Pacific’ – not least, of course, ‘the Britain of the South, New Zealand’ (1896). On the other hand, ‘of all the disunited states of Greater Britain, Australasia appears to be the most disunited’ (1890).

‘There is no Australian city other than Melbourne which could have produced Keith Dunstan,’ writes Barry Humphries in his foreword to this collection. Indeed, Dunstan, journalist and writer, has long been a Melbourne institution, particularly remembered for his daily column in the Sun News-Pictorial, ‘A Place in the Sun’. While working as a journalist, he was also busy as a writer of popular history: among his many works is that splendid trilogy, Wowsers (1968), Knockers (1972) and Ratbags (1979), the juxtaposition of those titles telling us so much about the character of Australian culture.

The foreign correspondent Eric Campbell is lucky to be alive. In March 2003 he was filming in Kurdistan, Northern Iraq, with Paul Moran, a freelance cameraman whom he had just met, when a car bomb exploded in front of him. Moran was killed instantly, his body shielding Campbell from the worst of the blast. Both Moran and Campbell were new fathers. Although vastly experienced in covering conflicts, both men had decided at the start of the Iraq war that they would stay at the tail of the media pack when entering dangerous areas. They wanted to see their children grow up; Moran’s daughter was only six weeks old.