Unfettered and Alive

by Anne Summers

  Suich’s deputy was Evan Whitton, a tall long-faced man with a deadpan sense of humour that often got lost in translation when his words were interpreted literally, but he had a ferocious dedication to, as he put it, ‘naming the guilty men’. He had been a prominent reporter at the Melbourne tabloid Truth when it exposed the abortion rackets in the late-1960s—where police protected, and thus perpetuated, abortionists who were not always too particular about the safety or even the lives of the desperate women who sought their services. Later he had worked for News Ltd, first at the Weekend Australian and then the Daily Telegraph before Vic Carroll brought him over to the National Times where he brought the same forensic intensity to organised crime and police corruption in NSW as he had to the Victorian abortion industry. He and I worked closely together on many of my big reporting jobs.

  It is difficult to think of any of the reporters engaged by Suich who were not—and, those who survive, mostly still are—stars of journalism. During my three years there I was fortunate enough to work with these writers of extraordinary and distinctive talent—Andrew Clark, John Edwards, David Marr, Paul Kelly, Robert Milliken, Adele Horin, David Hickie, Glennys Bell, Meryl Constance, Yvonne Preston, Bruce Stannard and John Jost—and to count many as lifelong friends. Patrick Cook was the cartoonist and Ward O’Neill drew caricatures. I was thrilled when cartoonist Jenny Coopes, came on board as well. I knew Jenny from the Push but she was also a star in feminist circles for ‘The Adventures of Super Fem’, a witty regular strip she had drawn in the Whitlam era that parodied Elizabeth Reid, Whitlam’s women’s adviser, and was published in Liberaction, the publication of the iconoclastic Hobart Women’s Action Group.

  As well as being economics editor for the Financial Review P.P. (Paddy) McGuinness contributed an economics column and reviewed films for the National Times. His picture byline, showing the dark glasses he always wore because his pale Irish eyes could not tolerate bright light, led to lots of jokes about us being the only newspaper to employ a blind film reviewer. Paddy wore nothing but black long before it became de rigueur for the rest of us, and seemed unconcerned about his rapidly expanding girth. He loved his food and drink and was unconvinced of the merits of any form of physical exercise.

  Elisabeth Wynhausen was probably my best friend at the office. She was a tough-talking, soft-hearted, eternally optimistic, nervously energetic woman with a thin thatch of soft dark hair, who’d come to the Natty Times (as we’d started calling the paper) from the Bulletin. We’d known each other through the Balmain Push and the literary world; she aspired to be a ‘real’ writer and no one I’ve ever met agonised more over every word. She often pulled all-nighters in the office in order to meet a deadline. We’d come in the next day and she’d be still clacking away, her ashtray piled high, and the floor around her desk littered with ripped, discarded pieces of the three-ply slips of paper we used to type our stories on.

  We were a tight and rowdy bunch, banging away on our typewriters, most of us with a cigarette on the go as we typed, pushed the carriage return, ripped out the three-ply, inserted another set and knocked out a few more pars. If we needed space on our desks, to read, or to take notes while we interviewed someone on the phone, we’d simply upend our typewriters onto their backs. There was nothing fancy about the setup; the desks were well-used, the floor was a ghastly pale linoleum which could, and often did, absorb a cigarette butt ground underfoot. If we’d been in a proper newsroom, we could have yelled ‘copy’ when we’d finished our story and a boy—later there were copygirls as well—would scoop up the story and run it over to the subeditors. But we were a small outfit, about a dozen of us, in a windowless space that had been carved out of the cavernous expanse of the fifth floor of the Herald building in Jones Street, Ultimo, that is now occupied by the University of Technology Sydney. We would separate and collate the three-ply ourselves: one copy for the subs, one for the editor and one to keep. That was seldom the end of the process. Apart from any queries the subs might have, there would be wrangles with Max, decisions about what could be cut so as to fit one of Patrick Cook’s acerbic cartoons and, increasingly often with my stories, there would be long hard Friday night negotiations with Frank Hoffey, our defamation lawyer.

  Once it was all done, we would stroll across Broadway to The Australian hotel. It was routine for us to have a few rounds after work and on Friday nights to stay on until very late. We mostly drank beer, but the first time I joined my new colleagues I was astonished to see they were drinking Veuve Clicquot. I was embarrassed, too, because I had no money. When it came time for my round, I had to borrow from John Edwards. If you went to the pub any other time, Suich would most likely already be there. The amount of time he, and we, spent at the pub is startling by today’s standards. Today if you needed a private chat with a staff member, you would do it over a coffee. In those days, if Suich, or any of the blokes, wanted a really private chat they could go to the front bar where women were still banned. A bunch of Sydney feminists were working on that, staging protests and ‘drink-ins’ at pubs just a few kilometres further along Parramatta Road. Before long, the ‘ladies lounges’, those rooms at the back of pubs where, notoriously, women would shell the peas for tea that night while downing a shandy or two, went the way of the girdle and other restricting irritants in the lives of women.

  On the fourth floor of the Fairfax building was the photo-compositing room where the pages of the newspapers were laid out and where journalists were mostly forbidden. Sometimes, late on a Friday, I would be allowed to go down to check the final version of my story on ‘the stone’, as it was still called although the old hot-metal process of making up pages with metal letters had been superseded. Union rules remained the same, however, and there were few unions as protective of their sphere as the Printing and Kindred Industries Union (PKIU). On the fourth floor, photocopying was printers’ work, as I discovered when I attempted to make a copy of a page and found myself inadvertently precipitating a potential demarcation dispute. Below us the presses hummed, less noisy than they’d once been but you knew they were there. The only contact we had with the men who ran the presses was at the pub. The father of the chapel, as the head of the PKIU onsite was known, liked to drink with journalists. Especially women journalists.

  Women were increasingly being employed in journalism and no longer just on the social pages, which themselves were undergoing a makeover. In 1971 the Sydney Morning Herald had replaced its fashion, housewifery, society notes and social pages with ‘Look!’ a livelier, lifestyle approach that at least nodded to the emerging ideas of women’s liberation. Suzanne Baker, a journalist with a background in film, was brought in to do the job although she had moved back to film by the time I started at Fairfax four years later. Gavin Souter’s history of Fairfax records that from a ratio of about one woman to every eleven men in the 1950s and 1960s, the numbers of women doubled between 1969 and 1973, from 15 to 31.4 But although I was part of a distinct minority, it did not feel that way at the National Times. Perhaps this was because the ratio of women was greater there than on the other titles, but also because we were not restricted in what we could write. In fact, it was often the other way round, with me wanting to write stories about women and being encouraged, instead, to do the tough pieces about the so-called ‘real world’.

  The culture of newspapers was undeniably masculine. It wasn’t just that the pub was our hangout, or that rough language and swearing were our common parlance; it was that the assumptions about what was important, or what was scandalous, or what was funny all derived from a view of the world that had been built around men’s experiences and expectations. Women journalists are as tough and resilient as the men, and certainly none of the women at the National Times were shrinking types. Meryl Constance, who Suich had poached from Choice to write about consumer issues, and Yvonne Preston, who in the mid-1970s had gone to China as the Fairfax correspondent, were the only women on staff who had children and were less likely to go to the pub after work. But
the rest of us—Elisabeth Wynhausen, Adele Horin, Glennys Bell and Jenny Coopes breasted the (back) bar along with the boys. We were assertive and unshockable. That did not mean that I, at least, sometimes wondered what universe I was in. As when Suich told us the story of a renowned American journalist who had broken many international stories during his time in Southeast Asia. On this particular evening, Suich recounted, the journalist was ‘rooted’ because he’d worked for days on end filing a particularly important scoop.

  ‘Then, instead of going home, he took himself to X.’—Suich named a place that, he had to explain to everyone, was a notorious brothel in that particular city.

  His avid listeners roared, whether with admiration, awe or envy, I, the only woman present, could not say. All I knew was that while I wasn’t prudish, nor was I able to identify in any way with the story of a journalist who recovered from a hard day at the office by surrounding himself with pliant young Asian hookers.

  I was certainly not a pioneer as a woman journalist. Those honours went to women like Margaret Jones, a tall and somewhat stern woman who had been the Herald’s literary editor (and given me a reviewing assignment when I had first arrived in Sydney). She had been correspondent in Washington where as a woman she was denied admission to the National Press Club and thus prevented from reporting key political stories, and in December 1973 became the paper’s first China correspondent. She liked to tell of riding her bike in Peking, as Beijing was still called, and often passing the Chief of the US Liaison Office, as the top American representative was titled before the US formally recognised China in 1979, who was riding his.

  ‘Good morning, Miss Jones,’ he would say.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Bush,’ she’d reply to the man who in 1989 would become the 41st President of the United States.

  Margaret became something of a mentor to me for the few years she was in Sydney before being sent off to Europe in 1980. We regularly went to the theatre together and she gave me advice on how to handle my job. We were dissimilar in temperament (and politics) and there was a significant age difference which meant I often thought her advice a bit off the mark, but I valued her friendship and that she took time to spend with me.

  The stories that earned me my reputation—and a Walkley Award before the end of my first year in journalism—were a multi-part series on NSW prisons. Like the story on police fingerprinting, they began with my being able to establish as true a number of stories that had been circulating around newsrooms and which were widely known to people who worked in the legal system. Lawyers like Tom Kelly, Rod Madgwick, Jim Staples and Jack Grahame often represented men who were in and out of prison and were outspoken in favour of prison reform, as were academics such as David Brown from the University of New South Wales and a number of newly established prisoner action groups. I was active myself in one of these; I visited prisons and I knew prisoners, some still serving, others who were now out. Much of what I wrote was widely known in these circles. It just hadn’t been written about in the press before. And I was able to add a great deal more detail and to get on-the-record corroboration from prison officers and others which added to what was already known. It was information, much of it shocking, that the government, in the form of the Minister for Justice and the Department of Corrective Services, which administered the prison system, had gone to great lengths to keep covered up. For instance, I was able to get a prison officer to confirm that a number of prisoners had been shot during the Bathurst riots of 1974, a couple of them receiving bullet wounds in the back, and that one man had become paraplegic as a result. Prison administrators had always denied this and no one in the media had been able to corroborate it.

  NSW prisons were archaic and barbaric, even by the punitive standards of the times. The living conditions of prisoners were appalling and the punishments administered for the most minor infractions were brutal. The prisons became hotbeds of simmering resentment and rage. In 1970, Bathurst jail erupted with a riot that was unable to be kept from the public and which led to calls for an inquiry and reform. Nothing happened. Four years later, the same prison went up again, this time with far more serious consequences. Large sections of the prison were destroyed and the government could not ignore reports of prisoners being savagely beaten and even shot. A Royal Commission was appointed with Justice John Nagle of the Supreme Court heading it. The first day of formal hearings of the Royal Commission was 14 April 1976, two days after my first article appeared. I was encouraged by Suich and Evan Whitton to put together a series of articles reporting on what conditions in NSW prisons were really like. I think we saw ourselves as providing some context to the official inquiry, but also, given the long history of evasion and cover-ups in previous investigations, we wanted to put pressure on the commission to look hard and unflinchingly at a system that, in some places at least, would have given Stalin’s gulag a run for its money. I put things on the public record that could not be ignored. My articles have often been credited with forcing the government to establish the Royal Commission. They didn’t, but I do like to think they helped ensure that, finally, the veil was lifted. I published material that, in any honest investigation, would have to be thoroughly tested. Under Justice Nagle’s leadership, it was.

  The first of my six articles, ‘The days the screws were turned loose’,5 provided a detailed account of the bashing of four prisoners who had attempted to escape from Sydney’s Long Bay prison in October 1973. I followed this with the first-ever published account of the ‘reception biff ’—the systematic beating of newly arrived intractable prisoners at Grafton Prison by officers with rubber truncheons. I also reported on the new Katingal sensory deprivation unit at Long Bay, designed to replace physical punishment with psychological torture; on the women’s prison at Mulawa; on the way the prison officers and their union were dealing with the impending spotlight on their violent and illegal behaviour; and, finally, my detailed eye-witness account of what really happened at Bathurst in 1974. It is true that the public does not really care about prisons, or prisoners (so long as they are safely locked up) and so this was not regular media fare, but it was also true that, by not having these things reported, the public was ignorant of the archaic and inhumane conditions of prisoners in NSW. This was an era of reform in so many other areas of our society. Anti-discrimination legislation was being passed, homosexuality was being decriminalised, institutions such as the public service were being shaken up, first in Canberra by the Whitlam government, and in the states by Labor leaders like Don Dunstan in South Australia and now Neville Wran, who in May 1976 had led the Labor Party to victory in NSW. Few areas of society were not being scrutinised by avid reformers. It was inevitable that prisons would come into focus.

  My first article caused a big stir—and not just with the reading public. Fairfax management summoned Suich. The subject matter was unsavoury, he was told: ‘Our readers’ did not care to know about such things. Suich was told that there should be no further articles about prisons. Then something totally unexpected happened.

  For the first time, I took the lift to the 14th floor. It was hard to believe I was still in the same building. No fluorescent lights, or makeshift room dividers. No metal desks with peeling veneers or office chairs lurching drunkenly off their wheels, and certainly no clacking or yelling or raised voices of any kind. The 14th floor was mahogany panelling, Persian carpets, oil portraits of Fairfaxes and whisper quiet. I was shown into an office that I remember as large and elegant and shook the hand of the 75-year-old proprietor of the company, Sir Warwick Fairfax. He was tall and thin with a beaked nose and lots of dark grey hair. He was courteous, but he also seemed to be quite angry about what he’d been confronted with by my story. He was a compassionate and gentle man and he could scarcely believe that such things as I reported were happening in New South Wales.

  ‘Is this true?’ he demanded to know.

  I handed him two pages on which were pasted a copy of my article together with my annotations. I had treated it like a
university essay and documented it with footnotes. I had two and, in most cases, three sources for every single assertion. Sir Warwick looked at me with astonishment. Journalism was definitely changing. It would no longer be enough to tell your editor that your source was a cop you’d had a drink with the night before. These days, as I was soon to find out, the cop was just as likely to be the object of your story, not its source.

  After this, I was free to pursue prisons and I did so with zest.

  The initial stories, or tips that might become stories, often came from crims or lawyers or academics—but then it was a matter of classic reporting, of following leads, interviewing people and, often, strategising about how to get unwilling people to talk. I liked to just turn up at people’s houses, exploit the surprise factor, look them in the eye and—what a phone call, let alone an email can never reveal—assess whether they were telling the truth. It came to be known as ‘investigative reporting’—although that was not a term we used then—but since it was the only kind of reporting I had ever done, I did not know it was special or unusual. It was just journalism. It was also similar in all sorts of ways to the kind of research I had done for my book. Looking up facts, interviewing people, scouring old records, making educated guesses. It did not matter whether I was looking at the rioting of convict women at Parramatta jail in the early years of settlement or the conduct of prison officers during uprisings at Bathurst jail in the 1970s; I was trying to find out what happened. The advantage with researching current stories was, of course, that the players were more likely to be around and could often be persuaded to talk.