by Bruce Page
Trollope may be thought a reliable witness, for he noticed, in addition to the urge to publish, other durable national attributes, such as an addiction to competitive sport and a collective, hair-trigger resentment of alien criticism, however modestly offered. He records a country progress via several wellappointed homesteads, at one of which bugs invaded his belongings. Trollope thought he should mention this, but tried to avoid offence by suggesting that the insects might have joined him at an earlier staging-post. ‘I don’t think so,’ was the unyielding response. ‘You must have had them with you when you got there.’
Reasons for a headlong love-affair with what we now call the media are not too hard to find. Australia and New Zealand were the last-born infants of the West: technologies and notions of democracy which had been evolving with dramatic speed since the early seventeenth century often reached nineteenth-century Australia in full working order. Like the rabbit, they found few natural opponents. Also like the rabbit, they expanded without delay.
The newspaper is just such a case – until 1800 and later both its legal status and its content had been the subject of arduous experiment. In John Peter Zenger’s famous case of 1735, American jurors had to consider whether seditious libel had been committed by publishing scandalous but admittedly truthful claims about the government of New York. Andrew Hamilton brought them out on what we today would call the right side. Even so, in 1773 a printer could be jailed for publishing the proceedings of the South Carolina legislature. No linear process in one country created the journalist’s right to report the activity of government. As the historian Thomas Leonard observed, throughout the 1780s ‘when Americans found a speech in their newspapers it was more likely to have been made in the Parliament of the kingdom they had rejected than in the assemblies of the new nation they had joined’.
Nor was this just a matter of law and politics, for issues of technique and style were also involved. Newspapers could be printed well before people knew what to put in them (just as it is easier now to generate a website than find a use for it). One of the first serious editors, John Campbell of Boston, conceived the immense idea of a newspaper as a record, but could not master the flow of events – by 1718 his arrears were such that he was publishing material twelve months old. Our casual trick of skipping to the most recent events was beyond him.
Australian colonists, rather more than a century later, felt no uncertainty about making a newspaper or asserting its rights. Great changes lay ahead of them, but they had arrived in possession of a pattern (one we can still recognise) and they wasted no time applying it. The Port Phillip Herald’s first issue promised ‘the latest information of recent events’, and inside two weeks it produced ‘a long list of the wants and wishes of this community’. Should authority procrastinate over supplying them, said the paper grimly, ‘we must … try what the power of the press can effect’. Attempts were made to import antibodies such as enabled existing privilege in Britain and America to delay universal literacy and universal suffrage – those notorious vectors of barbarism. Most came to grief, often amid ribaldry, like William Wentworth’s attempt to create a hereditary nobility in New South Wales.
So – through an absence of inhibitions – the orthodoxies of present-day government first reached full growth as far as possible from where they germinated, and such a thing was surely improbable. When New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia – separate self-governing colonies – became states of a federal Commonwealth in 1901, they were accustomed to manhood suffrage, complete (soon to be compulsory) registration, secret balloting and an assumption of electoral equality for women. Two years later, the first federal elections were contested under universal adult suffrage. Nothing so extreme had been in Lincoln’s mind when he spoke of ‘government by the people, for the people’. But it may be hard now to recall that ‘democracy’ ever meant anything less.
Did this breakneck expansion of citizenship produce barbarism? Not everyone, certainly, has admired the result. Another English novelist, D. H. Lawrence, turning up fifty years after Trollope, thought Australia the most democratic place he had seen, concluding that ‘the more I see of democracy, the less I like it’. Within Australia itself there is a strain of conservative distrust for a supposedly reckless populace – curiously, because the country’s political history, though quarrelsome in detail, has been remarkably stable overall – and this produces intermittent spasms of intense reaction, some of which become part of our story.
Considered commercially, democracy created an opulent market for newspaper and periodical publishing. Australia was arguably the first country in which the press was authentically popular – that is, formed part of the life everybody led. It was from early on a powerful and important industry, provincial only by virtue of its extraordinary geographic remoteness. Much of this was true also of New Zealand, but there is a distinction. Until quite recently New Zealand’s population had a large rural component, but even before federation Australia was essentially urban.
Where the wealth serviced by Australia’s harbour cities came from agrarian industry – and, with the mighty exception of gold, it mostly did its operatives viewed the vast dry spaces as factories, and themselves as industrial workers. Wool production needed only a scattered workforce, and was hard to unionise. But unionised it was. The result of such processes was that in Australia even the minority living in rural circumstances shared urban attitudes, including a huge thirst for newspapers and magazines.
In 1883 Richard Twopeny produced his small classic of observation, Town Life in Australia. This life, he said, existed in what was ‘essentially the land of newspapers. The colonist is by nature an inquisitive animal, who likes to know what is going on around him.’ By this time the six colonies had some 600 newspapers. The major cities were rich enough to afford substantial railway networks and advanced lighting systems, so that people found it easy to get papers, and comfortable to read them. Democratic politics – which often struck visitors used to a narrower franchise as raucous or worse – provided entertainment, and serious accounts of sporting events were staple material. Australia’s first federal institution may have been its cricket team. When it took ship to the northern hemisphere in 1882 and crushed the horrified English, every detail was reported by the press back home, at a telegraph cost of about $300 a word in the country’s present-day money.
And of course there was crime. Colonial society was not violent by most standards, but journalists made the best of the available action. It would be hard to outdo the assurance of the Herald’s two-column eyewitness account of the great bushranger Ned Kelly’s execution in 1880, minutely detailing (in service to deterrence) the hangman’s grim visage, the victim’s last sardonic words (‘Such is life’) and the spasms of the dying body. But the Kellys were Irish, and the Herald
– which believed itself popular with Irish readers – was careful also to record Ned’s ‘courage and address’, his humane moments, and the ‘surprise and amusement’ he had caused by shutting two New South Wales cops in their own cells during the great Jerilderie bank raid. Demonstrations calling for his reprieve were scrupulously reported.
Twopeny wrote as an English gentleman rather than as a resident colonial and, while he approved the Australians’ sporting enthusiasm, he thought their view of crime far too relaxed. How could members of the colonial legislature agitate for the reprieve of a criminal whose murders ‘were not to be counted on the fingers’?
– and do so just because the fellow ‘had for over two years set the police at defiance’. But of course it was not only Kelly’s criminal eminence that prompted the agitation. It was because the agitators too were Irish. And the point is that the colonial power structure, though dominated by people of Twopeny’s background or similar, did not exclude the growing Irish middle class. It is not quite true to say that Kelly is remembered as a hero – for he was indeed a murderer – but he came to represent a belief that style and daring are adm
irable wherever they exist.
Twopeny wrote before the age of audited circulation figures, but he is convincing about the sheer popularity of the press (and he is supported by other witnesses): ‘Nearly everybody can read, and nearly everybody has the leisure to do so. Again, the proportion of the population who can afford to purchase and subscribe to newspapers is ten times as large as in England; hence the number of sheets issued is comparatively much greater.’ They produced, in many cases, great wealth for their owners conspicuously for the Fairfaxes of the Sydney Morning Herald, with advertising revenues enviously described as ‘rivers of gold’. (The gold flows still, but the Fairfaxes have argely dispossessed themselves by feud. Now Rupert Murdoch and other predators are greedily assessing the abandoned inheritance.)
This was a press which was popular – and, in aggregate, prosperous but Twopeny agreed with Trollope that it was mostly serious and reliable. There was strong competition between the numerous titles, but he did not think:
the quality inferior to the quantity. On the contrary, if there is one institution of which Australians have reason to be proud, it is their newspaper press.
Almost without exception it is thoroughly respectable and well conducted … Reports are fairly given; telegrams are rarely invented; sensation is not sought after … Neither directly not indirectly does anyone ever think of attempting to bribe either conductors of journals or their reporters; the whole press is before everything honest.
Twopeny contradicts himself a little in one or two instances – notably in what he has to say about the Age, the Melbourne paper on which Keith Murdoch began his career a generation later. And he wrote before the rise of John Norton’s scabrous Truth chain – eventually bought by Rupert Murdoch – which Cyril Pearl chronicled in Wild Men of Sydney. But it can fairly be said that Australian newspapers of the later nineteenth century show that the version of media history in which ordinary working people ignored newspapers until Northcliffe sought to reinvent them as juvenilia (saying that his readers were ‘only ten’) is misleadingly crude.
In 1889, seven years before Northcliffe launched the Daily Mail in London, the Herald in Melbourne decided that the standard format of the nineteenth-century newspaper was obsolete. This had long been a single sheet folded into eight broadsheet pages, with advertising on the ‘outside’ surfaces. The Herald developed a ‘front page’, with illustrations and headlines designed to seize the reader’s attention without delay (the Mail did not get around to the same idea till it was aged rather more than ten).
Although the paper was editorially adventurous – excessively so, for some respectable folk – its first half-century was not a competitive success, and it was often near to closure. The man who made it the city’s chief publishing business, taking the lead away from the Argus, eclipsing David Syme’s Age – and becoming, to his great subsequent discomfiture, Keith Murdoch’s first major patron – was Theodore Fink, who was born in Guernsey to German-Jewish parents and arrived in Victoria as a child in 1861. Fink’s character displays the contradictions of urban Australia in classic form. He was, at the financial level, a fairly ruthless crook. But he was also a patriotic liberal, a man of literary sensibility and a serious advocate of social and educational reform.
He was subtle enough to see that journalists could not follow pharmacists, electrical engineers and other practitioners in the new skills of industrial society into becoming exclusive professions, like the law. A free society may limit the right to concoct medicines but not the right to concoct words, even if (as Kipling says) they are ‘the most powerful drug used by mankind’. But Fink also saw that the communications industry – not his name for it – was developing professional requirements which the traditions of Grub Street and the procedure of a hiring-fair could not satisfy. He became one of the first newspaper managers to admit that their employees needed systematic training.
Fink opened a law practice in 1877, specialising in insolvency and electoral disputes – lucrative work in a state with a gold-driven economy and an expanding political franchise. During the ten-year land boom which got under way in 1880 he became an energetic speculator himself, and spent some of his profits on buying an interest in the Herald. He was certainly a smart, or over-smart, practitioner of law. But politics and literature fascinated him much more – he might have started out in newspapers had not his newly respectable family noticed that most journalists then lived precariously on payments-by-the-line and consoled themselves with whisky. At eighteen Theodore addressed a remarkable four-part lecture on newspapers to the members of the Jewish Philosophical Society of Melbourne, who may have learnt more than they cared to about printing machinery and New York advertising practice. Clearly, he understood the technical advances being made in American papers, though this was in 1873, ten years before Pulitzer’s acquisition of the New York World. As a law student he produced reviews, verses and scraps of social news; and as a prosperous practitioner he found time to write for the Age (a weekly gossip column called ‘Under the Verandah’).
Then, during the panic which shook the financial world in the early 1890s, Theodore went bust twice inside twelve months. The detonator the first Barings collapse – was in London, but the ferocity of Melbourne’s local effect came from the rupture of a property-market bubble swollen over a decade or more. Its inflation owed much to absurd ‘improvements’ attached to savings legislation when it was imported from Britain: they allowed money subscribed in mutual societies for house-building to be diverted easily into generalised, often fraudulent speculation.
Fink escaped multiple bankruptcy by ruthless use of ‘secret composition’, an astounding feature of business law in Victorian Victoria, under which any group of creditors (often unrepresentative) could agree to clear all the liabilities of an insolvent (usually one with whom they were engaged in other business activities). The vote was by simple majority, taking no account of the volume of debt a voter might represent. Nothing then appeared in public records – and, though there was some contemporary gossip, the secret compositions made by Fink and various allies of his lay hidden until revealed by the work of present-day historians, chiefly Michael Cannon. A decent insolvency law, of course, is based on the equality of creditors. Really, this was just fraudulent preference legitimised.
Many details of Fink’s manoeuvres remain obscure even in Professor Don Garden’s most recent research on the Fink family. But there is no doubt that Theodore managed, most improperly, to insulate his Herald shareholdings from his creditors, and make them part of a new portfolio. In the aftermath of the busted boom there were more than sixty ‘secret compositions’, and many of the families involved – like the Baillieus were counted then and later as pillars of the local business aristocracy. Nobody ever doubted that Sydney, the old penitentiary, was hazy on ethics. But, until modern research uncovered Melbourne’s past, people liked to suppose things were otherwise in a city where the pioneers were businessmen rather than convicts.
In 1897 Victoria’s financial regulations were modestly reformed, and secret composition was never again used with such bravura. Over the years, though, other and equally dubious means have been found to help powerful businessmen stave off the impact of their own recklessness. And a persistent component in the story of Australian media industries is the haphazard character of the country’s financial regulation, a contradictory feature in a society where order and method are often valued highly. (The pinpoint organisation of the Sydney Olympics in 2000 surprised many people, but not those familiar with the country.)
Twopeny, writing just before the land boom broke, made it clear that the editorial honesty of the press existed alongside – or in spite of – a cavalier attitude to financial morals. Victoria, which was protectionist, he judged especially deplorable: ‘In Melbourne the heavy protectionist tariff has brought about an almost universal practice of presenting the customs with false invoices so skilfully concocted as to make detection impossible. Within my knowledge this practice has been resorted
to by firms of the highest standing.’ The speculative nature of all business and the consequent frequency of insolvencies, he added, meant a generally relaxed attitude to business regulation: ‘Even when there has been swindling, it is soon forgiven and forgotten … The fact is, that so much sharp practice goes on, that the discovered swindler is rarely a sinner above his neighbours; he has simply had the bad luck to be found out.’
Parallels have been drawn by Australian historians between the land-boomers of the 1880s and the eyeballs-out entrepreneurs who ranged the land in the 1980s, such as Alan Bond, Laurie Connell and Christopher Skase. Rupert Murdoch, who shared many of their follies, has survived if sometimes narrowly – where they failed, because he has had superior access to overseas capital, and because he has been remarkably successful in restricting American understanding of his empire’s actual characteristics. In March 1999 the Economist wrote that accounting standards in Australia, ‘among the most lax of the developed economies’, prevented Newscorp’s financial performance – particularly its actual profitability and its extraordinary freedom from tax – being compared realistically with those of major international competitors such as Disney Corporation. If Australia happened to be a torpid backwater its deficiencies in corporate legislation and accounting discipline would not matter beyond its own frontier. But it is a society of much talent and energy which makes far more impact on the world than its remote location and modest population would suggest.
Professor Walter Murdoch – Rupert’s great-uncle, and a cultural critic of some standing – once suggested that nations were like children buying sweets with limited pocket-money. Unable to indulge all tastes, each child indulges in the confection he or she fancies most. He argued that cultures, like individuals, can’t have everything desirable: England, for instance, has no Olympian composer because the English binged on poetry. One might follow the professor and say that Australians have excelled in literature, sport, art and war – even politics, for this is a highly stable democracy. Financial regulation, however, seems rarely to have caught their interest.
