Secret sandwiches to ASIO raids: my life intertwined with this newspaper
Soon after I joined The Canberra Times 54 years ago, as a copyboy, I was taken aside by a senior journalist and allocated a discreet, clandestine and confidential task which created an unlikely alliance with a considerable impact on my career.
Frank Cranston, a New Zealander who was a former and future chief of staff, was defence and aviation correspondent, who from time-to-time reported hot gossip from ASIO mates and was bylined "From a special correspondent". He was ferociously right-wing and, though I was a Vietnam protester and soon-to-be draft-dodger, an unlikely ally of mine (indeed a colleague, Bruce Juddery, once christened our friendship the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact).
Former editor, current columnist, and legendary longtime Canberra Times journalist Jack Waterford reflects on the newspaper's centenary. Pictures by Rohan Thomson, supplied
Frank's devoted wife made a brown-paper bag of sandwiches for his lunch every day. Sometimes they were Vegemite. Sometimes peanut butter. Sometimes tuna. My task - there were predecessors, but not always reliable ones - was to eat the sandwiches and to remember to tell Frank before he departed about 7pm what had been between the slices. It was important. His suspicious wife would be sure to ask him.
I was not being a party to the concealment of infidelity as such. There was enough of that at the newspaper, some of which a copyboy could hardly overlook. Frank adored his wife but was terrified of her. He did not like her sandwiches, and in any event often had a working lunch at some lobbyist's expense or went for a stroll and a snack. But he dared not tell his wife that.
Jack Waterford surrounded by his reference books at the time of his retirement. Picture by Rohan Thomson
One pay-off from this occurred in 1973 while early in the morning I was working on a feature. Frank's phone rang, but Frank was not in. I answered it, but before I could introduce myself, a voice said, "Frank, I haven't got time to talk, but you should know that [Attorney-General Lionel] Murphy raided Canberra ASIO last night, and he is now on a plane heading for Melbourne, where he is going to raid it. He's had the Commonwealth Police seal it up. Must go, but I will ring you later".
Now this was sensational information, but it was not mine. Frank waltzed in after about 10 minutes, and I told him the message. We talked about it. He said that he did not think the story would hold without anyone knowing during the day. But we had some information others did not have. He would tip off the Melbourne Herald to the raid going on at St Kilda, without telling them about the earlier Canberra raid. They would owe The Canberra Times, and him, one.
Murphy had not even arrived at ASIO when he saw a phalanx of Melbourne Herald photographers gathered around the gates. It was his first inkling that his raid, made at Commonwealth Police urging, could be a serious political mistake.
There were two sides to this story, and thanks to Murphy's office, with whom I was good friends (with Frank being anathema), we were especially well informed on both. But we did it cooperatively. Along the way I learnt quite a few tricks of the trade, including arts of concealing the provenance of sensitive information otherwise difficult to get out.
I had been at that stage a cadet journalist only for a few months, taking up the job only when the warrant for my arrest under the National Service Act had been withdrawn. My first appointment was as police roundsman, Frank thinking it a great joke that police who knew me well from demonstrations would now have to be answering my polite questions.
The commissioner, Roy Wilson, rang Frank to complain that it was unfair that they had to endure my walking around reading notices in the police station when they had been used to arresting me on sight. Frank told him to get used to it, and to be ready for a lot of hell if anyone treated me other than professionally. As it happened I made enduring friendships, based on mutual trust, among police - the better, as I rose up the ranks, for the fact that the contacts were doing the same.
Frank Cranston, who became an unlikely newsroom ally of Jack Waterford.
I spent time in the press gallery, during the Whitlam years, working alongside David Solomon, who was chief political correspondent and later press secretary for Gough Whitlam, and who impressed upon me the need to read documents and understand legal and political processes.
Tony O'Leary, later press secretary to John Howard was also there. I was given several bits of good advice from Alan Reid, a veteran journalist and political mischief maker, who seemed to like me. He once told me that I should always remember that one could work in the zoo without liking the animals. He also told me that when I got to his age, I should never walk past a lift or a toilet.
I broke service in 1977, soon after writing a story which provoked the then federal attorney-general, Bob Ellicott, to resign, accusing the prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, of leaking on him to me. I left, on effective leave without pay, to work with Professor Fred Hollows, of the national trachoma program, and to start drafting his report, but returned in 1979, initially to work in the parliamentary press gallery alongside Gay Davidson, the first woman to be chief political correspondent in the parliamentary gallery.
Later I was to report the High Court, public administration, and to supervise the newspaper's pioneering coverage of freedom of information, and write editorials and book reviews. In 1987, soon after returning from a three-month fellowship in the United States, I became deputy editor, later editor, editor-in-chief, and finally editor-at-large before retiring in 2015. Of the last job, a roving one without administrative duties, a letter writer once wrote that if it was true that I was at large, I ought to be promptly recaptured and locked up.
Over this career I knew all but two of those who had edited the paper and later the news source over its full 100 years. The first, Arthur Shakespeare, was a legend, of whose influence one could never be unaware.
Both John Pringle and David Bowman had moved from The Canberra Times to the Sydney Morning Herald by the time I arrived, but I knew them both. All the rest were colleagues, mentors, and in cases people I helped appoint and whose careers I had helped guide. For me, the paper itself, including its advertising and administrative staff and its printers, was a living institution, over which I felt a strong sense of duty as a steward and a trustee.
Jack Waterford, then editor Michelle Grattan and chief of staff Bob Ferris at news conference.
A golden age for print journalism was coming to an end, marked most obviously by a dramatic decline in advertising revenue, particularly the "rivers of gold" of classified ads, which sometimes led to a 136-page broadsheet paper. I was there from when I could have still explained our hot-metal production system to Gutenberg through to the advent of the computer, the mobile phone and Google. Pre-Google, I had thousands of research books for checking facts; nowadays I can scarcely remember my processes of research.
But the essential tasks of journalism have not changed much, whether it is produced on paper, broadcast or placed online. It is still about getting important information to our customer. Important, and accurate information they need to know. About their community. About their region and about the world. About health, and education, and community services. About courts, law and order, culture and sport and community groups. About politics, at local and national levels, and other matters affecting lives, including these days consumer matters, personal relationships, and what is being said in social media.
It's generally for the time-poor, who need summarised information, if with access to sources so that more detail can be obtained. But it is also, sometimes, for long reads, detailed accounts of what has occurred, and the explanations of experts and people advocating different sorts of action.
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And all for a sophisticated audience. The Canberra market is a very sophisticated one, with high education levels and extensive background knowledge of current affairs. I used once to remind reporters that on most of the issues on which they wrote, at least a third of the readers knew more about the subject than they, the reporters, did.
Many Canberra readers were public servants, involved in governing the nation or absorbed in defence and foreign affairs. Many came from elsewhere, other parts of Australia or from overseas, and remained closely interested in matters affecting their families and friends. They were not to be talked down to, even as reportage had to cover material with which most readers were unfamiliar.
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That The Canberra Times has lasted, and is by this anniversary girding itself anew for the task of informing its audience about what they want and need to know, is in major part due to the energy, professionalism and sense of duty of its founders.
Thomas Shakespeare first came to Canberra with his sons in 1913, 11 years before Federal Capital Press had any physical presence here. He told his sons that he would, at an appropriate moment, start a newspaper, and that the boys ought to prepare themselves for their partnership in that enterprise. Arthur, the eldest, was to train in journalism, ready to assume the task of editor. Chris (Jack), James (Bill) and Clarence were to learn the arts of newspaper production and printing, advertising and business management.
Thomas Mitchell Shakespeare, the founder of The Canberra Times.
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Thomas Shakespeare was an ardent federalist, and had owned newspapers around Forbes and Grafton. He took four of his sons to the ceremony naming the new capital Canberra in 1913, telling them he had wanted them to be there at this moment of the capital's history because he planned, at the right moment, to launch the capital's first newspaper.
The newspaper would grow with the city, and become in time a great civilised metropolitan daily, quoted around the world.
He did not mean by that that The Canberra Timeswould be remote from the local news and the life of Canberra. To the contrary. It would be intensely local, and a great champion of the city, its citizens and the federal idea. At least pending self-government - which was being talked about then but recognised to be some time off - it would be the primary forum of ideas and conversation with the community, talking to its governors on behalf of the people.
NSW had many daily country newspapers in 1913, many with reasonable circulations because big city newspapers did not typically arrive until the day after publication. Shakespeare wanted such a daily newspaper, and its influence and advertising revenue, reporting not only the lives of its citizens, but their role and functions in political and public administration.
Immediately behind the site, in Mort Street, Civic, after all, was to be the proposed Canberra railway station, coming over from Queanbeyan through Kingston and across the river approximately where the Kings Avenue Bridge now stands. It would proceed through Reid to Civic, then onwards to Yass.
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The NSW government had agreed to build the Yass line as a part of the 1913 treaty by which the Commonwealth acquired the lands of the Australian Capital Territory. It had also agreed to build a railway to Nowra and Jervis Bay and given the Commonwealth eminent domain over the Molonglo and Queanbeyan rivers, and over the Snowy River if the Commonwealth wanted it for hydro-electric purposes.
The task was conceived in 1913, before the devastation of World War I and the slowdown in Canberra development which that and the slump afterwards involved. But the Commonwealth was still determined that Parliament would sit in Canberra rather than Melbourne in 1927, and Shakespeare was determined that the paper would be publishing by then.
The Canberra Times newsroom of the 1970s that Jack Waterford entered.
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His expansion plans were much restricted by the Great Depression and later World War II. It was not until the mid-1950s, with many precarious years for a newspaper geared for a much larger circulation, that Robert Menzies decided to let Canberra grow, to bring most of the policy-focused federal public service to Canberra, and, of course to embark on the massive task of house building, and the provision of schools, shops, hospitals and services that this implied. After that Canberra began to grow rapidly, if with at times, 1990s abrupt pauses and stops brought on by changes of government.
As the sons aged, they began to look for a succession. They decided that they would sell if a major competitor emerged, but not to that competitor.
They made a secret deal with the Fairfax organisation that it could buy it if Sir Frank Packer or Rupert Murdoch appeared on the horizon. In 1963, Murdoch arrived with surplus presses from his purchase of the Mirror in Sydney, and decided to start a new newspaper, to be called The Australian. This paper, with superior resources would swamp The Canberra Times and grab its classified advertising base, already the third biggest in Australia. But Murdoch inadvertently tipped off Arthur Shakespeare, and by dawn, the Fairfax agreement was in effect. Fairfax promptly hired many more journalists, determined to kill off The Australian before it got established. Arthur Shakespeare was to remain chairman of the Federal Capital Press board, and it was agreed that, though part of the Fairfax empire, it would be directed locally.
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The efforts of young Warwick Fairfax to guarantee his succession to the interests of his father, Sir Warwick, saw the collapse of the old Fairfax empire in the late 1980s. The Canberra Times was sold to Kerry Packer to buy out his Fairfax shareholding. But he wanted only the Fairfax magazines, and secretly, it appears, he promptly on-sold it to Rupert Murdoch. But the ACCC quickly ruled out such a sale, and Packer later sold it to Kerry Stokes. Stokes invested in the newspaper, including purchasing a modern printing press, but ultimately sold to the Rural Press network, of whom the chief shareholder was John B. Fairfax, a second cousin to young Warwick Fairfax who had bought out his old Fairfax holdings. Rural Press had substantial country newspaper and agricultural newspapers, including The Land.
Soon after buying The Canberra Times, John B. told of his ringing the then prime minister, John Howard, to tell him. Howard congratulated him, saying The Canberra Times would make a great flagship for Rural Press. So, what do you think of it? asked John B.
"Oh it's a terrible paper," said Howard. "The worst metropolitan paper in Australia. Worse even than The Age. Sort of like the ABC in print."
John B. did not attempt to control the newspaper's editorial line. Indeed, on buying he had endorsed the newspaper's code, which had enshrined editorial independence. If he disagreed, he said so in a letter to the editor - always, of course, promptly published.
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Rural Press used The Canberra Times and its other holdings to launch a type of reverse takeover of the remaining Fairfax newspapers - the SMH, The Australian Financial Review and The Age. But the glory days were over for newspapers, with advertising revenues in serious decline, and staff numbers affected accordingly. Old newspapers have continued to be published, but they have become focused on subscription audiences online. The Nine television network acquired the new Fairfax, but soon after, sold all but the core Sydney and Melbourne newspapers to ACM.
The vocation of the journalist - to bring news of importance and interest to the audience, and in a manner that is fair, and honest and correct - has not changed, but the way that we communicate, and the services that media organisations can offer readers are much extended and more challenging.
A hundred years from now the task, and the duty, will likewise be similar, but no doubt the way news and information is shared with the audience will have changed enormously again and beyond my powers of imagination. It is all, however, built on foundations laid down here over the past 100 years.
- Jack Waterford is a former editor of The Canberra Times. jwaterfordcanberra@gmail.com
