by Mark Dapin
On the Home Blokes page were snapshots of naked men – initially with their genitals covered but later shown in full frontal (and finally, in the incredibly strange magazine 100% Home Girls, with penises erect). Home Blokes came at the bottom of every readers’ poll, but it would be a strong reader who could resist the urge to glance across the invisible urinal and peek at the competition.
The Picture invented its own language, partly to get around censorship restrictions that prohibit pornographic magazines from using the words ‘penis’ or ‘vagina’ on their covers. Instead, The Picture popularised ‘smoo’, a word for vagina taken from a reader’s letter, and ‘tockley’, a Newcastle word for cock. People who understood the new pornographer’s argot felt special, included, and the staff used it with promiscuous abandon. If The Picture had not bubbled with photographs of nude women, it would have been difficult to understand what it was supposed to be about.
I was introduced to The Picture Style Book (Incorporating Fouler English Usage) one of the strangest reference works in publishing. A sub stumped for a synonym for breasts needed only to turn to the appropriately numbered ‘page three’ to find eighty alternatives, from apples through breasticles to noras, norgs, norgards, norks and norvilles. Poignantly, it recorded 112 words for ‘sex’ (including ‘sink the salami’ and ‘exercise the ferret’) but none for ‘love’. Less poignantly, it included the definition of ‘reader’ as ‘a complete idiot . . . who drinks lots of beer, watches TV, hates gays and Orientals and likes big tits. They pay our wages, and are therefore champions, but are otherwise frightening people’.
There were other reasons for being nice about everyone in The Picture: the P-mags had recently been the target of perhaps the only demonstration against magazines ever held in Australia. Even though he was still editor-in-chief of both The Picture and People, David Naylor worked from an office in People and devoted most of his energy to that title. Suddenly, he had found himself locked in a duel with Brad, whose The Picture sales continued to rise every month while Naylor’s People fell. People was wordier than The Picture and not as funny. It remained a wacky barbershop weekly, obsessed with oddity and the outback, leering at breasts only when there was no lizard racing at Eumundi. This was the magazine that Naylor had always wanted to edit but, it seemed, readers no longer wanted to buy.
Naylor also had problems with his advertising salespeople, who were under pressure to meet targets set by ACP management that could not possibly be reached without selling pages to the sex industry. The advertising was actually illegal. While it is within the law to advertise R-rated videos in an unrestricted publication, it is an offence to advertise X-rated videos. The difference between R and X is, essentially, penetration. An alien watching R-rated porn (and we have to assume that is something they do regularly) would assume human beings reproduced by rubbing waists, and men and women had the same genitals.
X-rated movies are often cut to produce R-rated versions, and the videos sold in the advertising pages of The Picture and People could conceivably have been those versions – but they were not, and everybody knew it. They were mailed from the ACT, the only place in Australia where X-rated videos are permitted to be sold. (In fact, they can be bought from almost any sex shop in the country. The police rarely bother to enforce a law that would have them close down an entire retail industry.)
A few mainstream advertisers used People or The Picture. Coupon-based promotions attract a strong response from weekly magazines, whose readers like to send away for things and pay them off in instalments. Terrible ornaments such as porcelain cats always found a market. For unfathomable reasons, Dr Seuss books went well. The main thing the readers wanted to receive in the post, however, was X-rated videos, and People began to look like a pornographic movie catalogue, the masturbator’s Deals on Wheels that Packer had envisaged.
At the height of adult-video advertising, the P-mags had twenty clients, all running pages honeycombed with video sleeves. The industry became saturated with cheap product. The big players squeezed out the smaller operations by slashing their prices to $9.95, advertising two free videos for the cost of postage and packing, just to build up mailing lists. Within a decade, the price of a movie fell from $60 to $20, and the vendors began to run out of customers. In the early 1990s, however, the industry was still healthy and growing. The tireless multiplication of shabby, kinky video sleeves in People’s pages undercut its pretensions to be anything other than dunny fodder. The rise and rise of The Picture brought into question Naylor’s commercial judgement.
Brad saw Naylor as holding back The Picture, keeping it from being the magazine it could have been. Naylor thought Brad’s approach would push the P-mags to the back of the newsagents, where Leg Show and Asian Babes languished in their shrink-wrapping.
In the end, it was Naylor’s own actions that caused the magazines to be marginalised, censored and loathed. He was angry at ACP, and angry at Brad. Just as The Picture had succeeded in out people-ing People, he set out to out-picture The Picture. The issue dated 4 March 1992 featured the so-called ‘dog-collar’ cover, on which a woman wearing a jewelled collar with a lead of pearls crouched on all fours over the coverline ‘Woof! More wild animals inside’. When a North Adelaide newsagency put up a poster advertising the dog-collar People, a group called Women Against Rampant Sexism (WARS) smashed the glass door and threatened to break windows at five other newsagencies if the posters were not removed. Hundreds of demonstrators occupied the foyer of the ACP building on Park Street, and a window there was damaged, too.
The demonstrators felt that all women were insulted by the cover, that People saw them as objects, creatures to be fucked and controlled with collars and chains. The dog-collar girl did not even count as human. The strange insert picture – illustrating the story ‘Drunk Elephant Gropes Girls’ – only added to the feeling that women belonged in zoos. The other coverlines ‘Fugitive Cop Spills Torture Secrets’ and ‘Video Killers Tape Slaughter’ made People look like a house magazine for sadists. Seventeen pages of sex-industry advertising touted love dolls (‘Blow her up, dress her up, take her to a party or give her to a friend. She won’t complain and never has a headache’); strap-on penises (‘Yours let you down? Try ours’); suspect-sounding mail-order magazines (Sweet Little Sixteen, Teenage Schoolgirls, Teenage Sex); and hardcore videos of every persuasion (including the transsexual blow-job movie She-Male Suckers).
After the dog-collar demonstrations, all soft-core magazines were required to submit every page of every issue to the Office of Film and Literature Classification (OFLC) for approval. The offending issue of People was classified ‘Category 2’ – which meant it could only be sold in sex shops – and it was supposedly removed from newsagencies, although most of the copies would have been sold already.
Packer was furious with Naylor, whom he regarded as commercially incompetent for not understanding the likely consequences of the cover – even though Walsh had given him approval. ACP was in its early days as a public company, and shareholders twice turned up to its AGMs asking why the dog-collar issue had ever been printed. The company was attacked by feminists and Christian fundamentalists, in a rare and oddly potent alliance. Australia’s magazine censorship regime – previously a casual affair in which editors consulted voluntarily with OFLC officers – began to evolve into the baffling bureaucracy it is today. David Naylor, who had been so reluctant to include naked women in his magazines, briefly became Australia’s most reviled pornographer.
At The Picture, I specialised in funny animal stories, and Brad turned to me in the lift one day and told me how much he had enjoyed a hamster-and-ferret piece I had written, which parodied my argument with D about financial planners. I told D about my triumph at The Picture, how they kept offering me jobs. Surely, this meant I was right. You did not have to believe in something to do it, you simply had to have the ability. No amount of standing up in seminars declaiming ‘I am a writer!’ was going to make somebody a writer. You had to be able to write
. D did not take it that way. She implied the reason I was successful at The Picture was that I, like its readers, was a pebble-brained, cock-stroking, tinnie-slamming ape.
So I took a job as deputy-chief sub at Woman’s Day. At least D could never accuse me of being a royals-watching, pattern-knitting, horoscope-reading, celebrity-worshipping housewife.
Brad did not give up on me, however. He asked me to create a character and write a weekly column for him. My column, ‘Tapeworm’, tended towards funny-animal yarns seen from the perspective of an intestinal parasite, and it had a life about as long as the average tapeworm.
I was always going to get a job at the Australian Financial Review, because D once said I could not be a good business journalist, since I did not know enough about business. I thought I knew everything about business: buy low, sell high and lie, lie, lie. The AFR was a daily tabloid, decorated with black-and-white pictures of men in black suits and white shirts, telling lies.
Late in 1994, I heard the AFR was launching a monthly colour supplement, and Maggy Oehlbeck had mentioned my name to the editor as a possible chief sub. I didn’t want to leave Woman’s Day’s banally surreal world of sex pests and love rats, wedding heavens and divorce hells, diet madness and cruel fat taunts, but I did want to get into Fairfax Newspapers. Fairfax published The Sydney Morning Herald in Sydney, and The Age in Melbourne. Fairfax journalists were the elite of the trade. They were highly regarded – by themselves, as much as anyone else – for their independence and craft. Most Australian journalists aimed to be Fairfax journalists. The union was strong, management was gentle, and all the papers were bought by the middle class, which meant the journalists’ friends would read what they wrote and tell them how great they were.
I had worked in the building before, a graceless 1950s industrial tower on the corner of Jones Street and Broadway. I had completed a month-long internship at the SMH as part of my MA. It was friendlier than ACP, and the staff had a different kind of confidence.
The newspapers were printed in the same building as they were written. The lower floors trembled as the presses rolled. Every journalist loves to watch their paper being produced, to smell wet ink on fresh newsprint, and to see their own name repeated, thousands of times – Mark Dapin, Mark Dapin, Mark Dapin, Mark Dapin – as if they were the news the readers were paying to buy. At Jones Street, the nearness of the heavy plant to the offices made it seem as though we were creating something solid that would go out and furnish the world, rather than typing words into a computer, packing them into a file, then watching them disappear.
The building was infested with printers – in the canteen, in the corridors, in the stairwells and on the roof – wearing black-stained blue overalls, and sleeping. Journalists had to step over or around prone tradespeople several times a day. Either the presses were overmanned, or printing was exhausting work, or it was something men did in their sleep, like stealing the doona. The sleeping printers lent a working-class feeling to the operation: the canteen served pies and battered meats, roast of the day with chips. Journalists used the back bar of the Australian Hotel on the other side of George Street. Printers drank in the saloon, dour and sullen, still in their overalls and probably still on their shifts.
The Fairfax building was an anomalous birthplace for a magazine dedicated to luxurious living. The editor of the new title was William Fraser, a former deputy editor of Good Weekend, the weekly colour insert in the SMH and The Age William was a big, stylish gay guy, who filled a well-cut suit more beautifully than any man I have seen. He could wear a shirt like a mannequin, and the knots of his silk ties were wound with exquisite care. He hired me on Maggy’s word, and we worked from a small, dark room tucked away from the rambling, tangled offices of the newspaper. Fraser’s art director was James de Vries, an innovative designer who turned the early issues into coffee-table currency that executives could leave placed in the living room at a considered angle, to impress guests with their casual élan. It looked unlike any magazine in Australia. De Vries deftly used refined illustration and artistic photography, black-and-whites with thick black borders, colour shot through filters, studies with chiaroscuro.
The AFR Magazine had an idea. I did not think it was a particularly special idea, but I did not realise how scarce were any sort of ideas in magazine publishing. The fact that the AFR Magazine had an inspiration made it stand out in the marketplace like a giant among jockeys, or an art director who can spell. Fraser’s vanity was that every page should directly relate to the central concern of its readers’ lives: money. Nobody bought the AFR for entertainment, except for the dismal fun to be had from vicariously experiencing other people’s financial lives. They bought it because it was about money and they loved money and they wanted more of it, and they thought perhaps by reading it, they might get some ideas about how to make more money to go with all the money they already had.
When the AFR Magazine wrote about food, it would examine the business of food; when it covered art, it would study the mechanics of staging an art exhibition. Everything would relate back to the core values of the host newspaper. There would be stories about business people, talking about their wealth: how much they made, how they made it, what they did with it. These often turned out to be drooling hagiographies, illustrated with dark, quirky portraits, elevating the subjects to levels they would not normally have known in life – but sometimes they were solid, well-researched pieces of journalism.
Fraser’s formula could have produced a crass, vacuous rag, a simple celebration of a full wallet, a fat belly and the joys of downsizing, but Fraser’s own character determined the personality of the magazine. Fraser was an aesthete. He loved painting, opera, architecture and literature. He was uninterested in cars, so the magazine had no motoring pages. He adored gardens, so it boasted a pleasing but largely unread gardening column.
When the magazine launched in March 1995, it was the first tabloid-sized newspaper supplement in Australia. The UK broadsheets had been inserting tabloid magazines for years, but the local versions had been flimsy, A4-sized afterthoughts that never realised their potential for carrying advertising. There had been a cursory attempt at an old-style add-on the year before. It had a brief life as a quarterly, but the content was unexciting and the gaps between issues kept it from building up commercial momentum.
Fraser had argued forcefully for his magazine to be presented on matt paper stock in the large size. He was not in a strong position politically, but he had an ally in John Alexander, who had been removed from his position as editor-in-chief of The Sydney Morning Herald and had been appointed editor-in-chief of the AFR. Alexander shared Fraser’s aesthetic. He was urbane and cultivated. He attended the opera and collected art. He had the lifestyle the AFR Magazine would affect to reflect. With Alexander’s support, the board was won over to Fraser’s vision.
Like Alexander and Fraser, the AFR Magazine was more sophisticated than its consumers. With an eighty per cent male readership, it was as much a men’s magazine as The Picture. In 1995, there were no mainstream men’s lifestyle magazines, and men were thought to buy magazines only if they were looking for a car, a motorbike, a boat, or a wank.
The AFR Magazine came free with the newspaper on the last Friday of every month, so readers did not have to make a decision to buy it. The host paper had the youngest readership of any newspaper, and a near-pornographic penetration into the AB demographic, a wet dream for media buyers. It sold, in part, to the young barbarians of advertising and marketing, the pin-eyed, coked-up drunks of banking and finance, the boisterous fools who tore the pockets off each other’s shirts in the CBD hotel on York Street. They bought it because they needed it, to keep up with news of their industry. They would rather have read the Daily Telegraph. Surveys repeatedly showed they most enjoyed the AFR’s strip cartoon ‘Alex’, and their next favourite read was the Telegraph’s gossip column, Page 13.
The first AFR Magazine readership survey found the majority of the magazine’s readers dran
k VB, liked to watch bands play in pubs, and followed Rugby League. We gave them a magazine focussed on high culture, with 5000-word meditations on the significance of public buildings, and the history of intellectual property. We treated them as if they had travelled Europe on the Grand Tour, instead of backpacking from the Aussie theme bars of Earls Court to the piss-soaked tents of the Munich beer festival. We talked to them in a vocabulary they did not possess about things they did not understand, as if they attended every gallery opening, and read modern literary fiction – rather than SAS thrillers – for recreation. We gave them a different picture of themselves, or what they could be, and they liked it, perhaps because they thought it might get them laid.
I am not sure whether they read it, however. They were readers in the sense of Gary Morgan’s ‘readership’ surveys, in that they saw the magazine and acknowledged it. Many of the AFR Magazine’s stories – including those I wrote – were far too long. Three thousand words is a big magazine feature; 5000 is a chapter in a book. De Vries’s design made them look beautiful from a distance, although impenetrable close up, but the AFR Magazine was difficult to read for a more fundamental reason: many Australian journalists cannot write.
AFR staff contributed to the magazine for the prestige of having their stories run at length and on matt paper. One writer, the late Robert Haupt, was brilliant; others were good, but the worst wrote with the parched, exhausted prose of people who sweat out each word as if it were a toxin. The least capable among them were the ones who demanded the closest control of the sub-editing, to ensure nothing could be done to improve their work.
