The Best Australian Humorous Writing Read online

  The Bulletin scarcely deserved its good fortune. Horne found it “a clumsy souvenir of long ago”, printed on inferior stock, sustained by infestive readers: “Of the dozen and a half jokes in each issue … there was always an ‘Abo’ joke, and often a reffo joke, although the reffos no longer had Yid noses, but the largest single category was jokes about the daftness of old women and the bodily curves of young women.” Horne rewrote its manifesto, committing it to give “an informed picture of the life we lead in this country and its extraordinary diversity”, and forbore the frenzied hostility of the response to his changes: at least one reader sent several used pieces of toilet paper.

  Horne’s two spells as editor, separated by the tenures of Peter Hastings and Peter Coleman, more than doubled the circulation. The editorships of Trevor Sykes and Trevor Kennedy doubled it again, seeing off challengers like Gordon Barton’s Nation Review and John Fairfax’s National Times. The by-lines were as bejewelled as Barry Humphries, Xavier Herbert, Hal Porter, Thomas Kenneally, David Williamson, Frank Moorhouse and Gwen Harwood (who took her leave with piqued acrostics whose first letters spelt S-O-L-O-N-G-B-U-L-L-E-T-I-N and F-U-C-K-A-L-L-E-D-I-T-O-R-S). Few Australian journalists of note, meanwhile, did not serve at least a brief tour of duty at the magazine, including some with big plans. Wannabe Labor player Bob Carr never stopped networking: he used his position as state political roundsman to introduce the likes of Paul Keating, Graham Richardson and Barrie Unsworth to his proprietor. Aspiring conservative politician Tony Abbott was known for his iron discipline: after running at lunchtime, he would plant his head on a cleared desk, sleep for exactly ten minutes, and immediately resume work. Speaking at Malcolm Turnbull’s thirtieth birthday, Kennedy jested that the prime ministership was a mere bauble: Turnbull would be satisfied only by world domination.

  The Bulletin duly became part of the Packer inheritance that Kerry valued. If he no longer had the Telegraph at his disposal, like his old man, the Bulletin lent him perceived influence—almost as good, when it came to it, as the real thing. It was fun, too, a sort of knockabout intelligence unit. The scion got to muck about with a few of his father’s old retainers, such as Alan Reid and David McNicholl, and to cultivate a few of his own, like Laurie Oakes, a peerless political seer, and David Haselhurst, whose tips for the “Speculator” column outstripped the All-Ordinaries index in 30 of 34 years, including nine years of triple-digit growth.

  In the 1970s, in fact, Packer actually trusted Haselhurst to run two investment companies on his behalf, with discretion to place buy-orders up to $40,000. Some might have found the experience of punting their boss’s money daunting. The insouciant Haselhurst spent it with abandon, on one occasion leading a plunge into Launceston Gas that inadvertently netted him scrip worth $60,000, the surplus third of which he laid off among Bulletin colleagues. It happened that Packer chose that day to whisk staff to Chinatown in four stretch limos, where he was confused by the lunchtime chatter. “Why is everyone talking about Launceston Gas?” the mogul demanded. “I’ve been meaning to tell you, Kerry,” said Haselhurst hastily. “You’re now the biggest shareholder there, and we’re in it with you.” Packer grinned at his minions: “Ah well, when Haselhurst takes me down the gurgler, at least you’ll all be coming too.” Haselhurst became such a favoured son that when his marriage broke down, Packer lent him $50,000 free of interest to buy a house in Darlinghurst.

  Expensive to adequately resource, the Bulletin was never massively profitable. And when in the 1980s newspapers invaded the glossy-advertising market by expanding their weekend editions with colour supplements and news reviews, it again became financially marginal. It was even cramping the style of its sister publications. Fairfax, for example, was building a profitable franchise with its Business Review Weekly, but Packer dithered over gearing up the fortnightly Australian Business as a challenger, out of consideration for the Bulletin. For all his personal caprices, Packer was a proprietor who hastened slowly.

  To shake the ACP tree, Packer hired Richard Walsh, the former wunderkind of Oz, POL and Nation Review who for the preceding 14 years had run Angus & Robertson. In Walsh’s opinion, the magazine market had been changed irrevocably by the arrival of the American news magazines Time and Newsweek, reliant upon cover prices of almost give-away cheapness to build the circulation that would in turn impress advertisers. But where such businesses could amortise their costs worldwide, the Bulletin had only a slow-growing domestic base. The newspaper glossies Good Weekend and the Australian Magazine, moreover, also had an edge on the Bulletin, being spared the newsstand gauntlet by coming out free each Saturday, with a guaranteed circulation. Walsh spent a lot of time considering the Bulletin’s predicament and came up with … well, not much. “I couldn’t work out how on Earth we were going to get out of it,” says Walsh. “When you looked at it logically, there simply didn’t seem any strong reason for the magazine to exist.”

  Above all was the inhibition of his proprietor’s conservatism. Walsh’s first idea was to eliminate some of the Bulletin’s discretionary costs. He planned to merge the commercial, marketing and distribution structures of the Bulletin and BRW in a 50-50 joint venture with Fairfax, and sell the magazines as a subscription package. Initially interested, Packer cooled on the idea. “Kerry seemed to understand,” says Walsh. “Then he decided he would rather lose money.” Walsh next reconceived the Bulletin as a journal of “vigorous opinion”, a weekly in the style of the Spectator or the New Statesman. He headhunted David Dale—the pithy “Stay in Touch” columnist of the Sydney Morning Herald who had written for Oz as a teenager at Randwick High School—and mandated him to perk the magazine up. With Fairfax in disarray after Warwick Fairfax’s botched buyout, others were willing to follow, among them Patrick Cook, business columnist Glenda Korporaal and photographer Lorrie Graham.

  Dale ran a very readable, very attractive magazine. Cheeky covers, a punchy news section called “Reporter”, and comprehensive arts, books and entertainment coverage substantiated a McSpedden Carey advertising campaign boasting of the Bulletin’s new “brio”. But Dale’s style and ACP’s ways remained oil and water. To Trevor Kennedy, now ACP’s managing director, the Bulletin’s makeover was too clever, too cute, a little effete. “There’s only one thing you need to save this magazine,” he lectured. “Fucking good stories.” It was the voice of the veteran newsman, at home with scoops, scorchers, bombshells and ball-tearers. Nor did Dale warm to ACP’s testosterone-and-profanity-laden culture, where success seemed to be based on “your capacity to fit the word ‘cunt’ into the sentence more often than the next person”. Enemies outside and inside the Bulletin were ready to exploit any misstep when Dale gave them opportunity.

  In July 1988, Dale and his colleagues selected “The 100 Most Appalling People in Australia”, an undergraduate but ecumenical exercise that lumped Paul Keating in with Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Manning Clark with Geoffrey Blainey, Patrick White with John Farnham, with a few Bulletin alumni—among them Phillip Adams and Malcolm Turnbull—for good measure. It also included several of Packer’s “pick and stick” circle—Alan Jones, John Singleton, Graham Richardson—and news of their displeasure was firmly communicated to Dale. “Kerry didn’t read the Bulletin,” says Walsh. “But he knew people who did.” For Packer, the cover resonated with his own impression of news-media negativism, and he inveighed against journalists to one of his loyal foot soldiers, Bruce Stannard, in the Bulletin in November 1989: “Unfortunately, many Australians want to pull down anyone who achieves. And journalists are no exceptions. They have become a law unto themselves.”

  Dale’s attempt to reprise the cover as “The Great Australian Balance Sheet”, with assets as well as liabilities, was never likely to endear him to his boss. Today the Bulletin of 20 March 1990 reads like a fairly mild survey of bien-pensant opinion, with a few disarming twists: John Howard was an asset (“demonstrates a loyalty to party and principle that makes it possible to believe that politics isn’t all bad”), Joan Coxsedge a lia
bility (“bores for Australia where possible”). At the time, it loomed rather larger. Most of the barbs were safe enough, like Susan Renouf (“Enouf! Enouf!”); but Singleton was given another touch up (“Good at playing to the lowest common denominator and making a virtue of the vulgar Australia”), while Jones received a rather low blow (“Created an eternal mystery by surviving a spot of bother with the police in London. His friends at home stood behind him”).

  Uneasy calm prevailed for a few days, and Dale’s next issue was one of his most profitable, Toyota paying a premium to buy every single advertisement in the magazine: the sort of deal for which advertising departments break out champagne. It counted not, and the story of Dale’s sacking haunts him rather as Sir Peregrine Worsthorne will forever be associated with the story of his sacking as Sunday Telegraph editor over perfectly poached eggs on buttered toast at Claridges. When Walsh resigned, rather than comply with Packer’s request to sack Dale, Packer did the job himself. “I’m going to fire you,” he told Dale. “Can I speak?” Dale asked. “You can speak,” Packer replied. “But it’ll do you no good.”

  Walsh has no doubt that Packer loved the Bulletin:

  Kerry was pretty much a philistine, but he had his own pretensions. He would scoff, of course, at anything that smacked of high art. But he had a certain respect for Australian traditions, and he understood that his own dynasty was rooted in one of the golden periods for Australian culture, the period of Smith’s Weekly and Australian Women’s Weekly, Ross Campbell, Lennie Lower, Ken Slessor. In that sense he understood the idea of continuity.

  But Dale’s dismissal was a warning to all his Bulletin successors, indeed, all editors at ACP—that in the innovative entrepreneur of 60 Minutes, Cleo and World Series Cricket now beat the heart of a true reactionary.

  The 1990s were mainly fallow years for the Bulletin. Walsh, who was induced to return by Trevor Kennedy, promoted Lyndall Crisp as editor: the first woman to hold the job. But the young James Packer, who had come into the family business as a general manager reporting to Walsh, then advocated the installation of former 60 Minutes producer Gerald Stone as editor-in-chief. Stone filled the magazine with the flaccid clichés of television current affairs. Apathy prevailed. “Sure, progress brings about great social upheavals but it doesn’t change human nature,” Stone droned in the Bulletin’s 6000th edition, in December 1995. “A good read is a good read.” That the world was thoroughly over-endowed with such “good reads” did not seem to penetrate Park Street. The Bulletin had Laurie Oakes at one end, Patrick Cook at the other, and David Haselhurst making money in between. Otherwise the magazine stood for an awful lot of nothing in particular; yet the formula was not to be tampered with for almost a decade.

  Again, the catalyst was an outsider, John Alexander, former editor-in-chief of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Financial Review, a news executive with elbows as sharp as his instincts. Joining ACP as group publisher, he made the Bulletin a special project—partly, some felt, because he understood it as a short cut to an affinity with his proprietor. Running into Packer at Park Street was a possibility few relished. Not everyone was so poised as Jack Marx, then a senior writer at the Picture and Ralph, who once found himself in a lift stuck between floors with the mogul and had the presence of mind to say, “I sure hope this lift starts moving soon. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got work to do.” But suddenly Packer was to be glimpsed in the Bulletin’s office—a sight not seen for 20 years, and an auspicious one now.

  Alexander gained Packer’s fiat to assemble a hand-picked team of former Fairfax cronies: Max Walsh as editor-in-chief; Paul Bailey as editor; national-affairs editor John Lyons; business correspondents Alan Deans, Deborah Light and Peter Freeman; Melbournebased feature writers Garry Linnell and Virginia Trioli. These heavy broadsheet hitters he complemented with a gifted magazine specialist. After spells running the Independent Monthly, Rolling Stone and HQ, Kathy Bail had the perfect CV and sensibility to take on the deputy editorship. On the day of her farewell lunch from HQ, at Tetsuya’s, her mobile rang constantly with calls from Alexander, brimming with bonhomie.

  Suddenly the Bulletin was the place to work, with big opportunities and salaries to match. One of Walsh’s first recruits was Maxine McKew, who had been his co-host on the ABC’s The Bottom Line, and who now received $3000 a pop for her weekly “Lunch with” column. A former staff member recalls being taken to lunch by Catharine Lumby, who insisted on picking up the bill because she earned more from her fortnightly column than as an associate professor. Contributors accustomed themselves to $1 a word, and the coincidence of the relaunch with the irrational exuberance of the dotcom boom meant that there was plenty to go around. In truth, the magazine still occupied an insecure market niche, and was still spending money faster than it was making it. Former sub-editor Jim Hope recalls, “When we did the first of our big issues, [chief sub-editor] Col Klimo told me that Packer had given an assurance we would not go below 132 pages for at least six months. Within two months we had started shrinking again.” But Alexander’s close collaboration with Packer did the trick: in March 1999 he succeeded Colin Morrison as chief executive of ACP.

  Alexander is cast these days in media circles as the dark prince of Packerdom. Certainly, it is hard to find much affection for him among refugees of the Bulletin. “If he decides you’re worth knowing, he’s all over you,” says one. “If he takes a set against you, he’s vindictive and spiteful.” Says another: “You look at most key media figures in Australia and they’ve all created something. All Alexander has created is a career for himself.” This is harsh. At the Bulletin, Alexander secured significant resources from a hard-to-please proprietor, and paid talent sometimes-exorbitant tribute. It is arguable, nonetheless, that he was as interested in what the Bulletin could do for him as vice versa. For when the Bulletin’s unresolved problems re-emerged later, he was a force neither so present nor so positive.

  Under editors-in-chief Walsh and then Bailey, the Bulletin put on an impressively brave face. But the magazine remained a captive of the news cycle: when in doubt, it was always easiest to home in on the week’s biggest issue. Such a configuration has advantages: a weekly news magazine can be choosy about what it throws resources at. Yet Australian news is seldom naturally national. As Rupert Murdoch has learned from his stewardship of the Australian, a lot of what Australians want to read is local and regional. This funnels the resources of anything with countrywide ambitions towards Canberra, business and sport: fields already amply covered by the metropolitan dailies.

  Selling advertising was tough. How did you placate picky advertisers who wanted to know what might be the cover of the edition they supported? News, alas, is unpredictable. And exactly who were you reaching when you placed an ad in the Bulletin? The readership was now so fragmented that nobody was quite sure. “The magazine was always sold on the basis that it was read by the powerful, by the influential,” says one senior executive. “When you drilled down, there were a lot more Cs [the second-tier demographic, after the much-sought-after ABs] there.” The magazine was also eternally beset by its size. As other magazines worked towards creating “‘beautiful” and “inspirational” artefacts with edgier layout and higher-quality stock, the Bulletin looked increasingly inky and dowdy. The Bulletin probably put together the best subs desk in Australia—all full-time staff and all genuine wordsmiths—and had eye-catching artists and cartoonists. But its pages remained obsessively busy, jazzed up with entry points that sometimes had the effect of confusing readers about where to start. The executive with the most magazine experience, Bail, was attractively making over the arts, books and entertainment coverage when space came under pressure with the shrinkage of advertising following the collapse of the tech boom in April 2001, and the last-minute confiscation and cancellation of pages became routine.

  Structurally, the magazine seemed stuck in the past. Certainly, it was stuck on Wednesday. That was thanks to the strange archaism of the Bulletin’s selection
of stories from the American Newsweek, an arrangement which dated to July 1984. When it was decided to renegotiate the deal, the original contract was found to be so ancient that it had been prepared on a typewriter. “Everything about the Bulletin seemed very old,” says Newsweek’s assistant editor, Ron Javers. But there was no shifting the Bulletin’s publication day without also shifting Newsweek’s, and that was never going to happen.

  As for the theoretically limitless vistas of cyberspace, the Bulletin took one step forward and two back. In August 2001, it launched an online edition on ninemsn, the Packers’ joint venture with Microsoft. But it was just that: the Bulletin online, which probably cost the magazine more newsstand buyers than it gained. For reasons nobody at the magazine understood, moreover, the online edition was not searchable by Google News, and it was possible neither to blog nor to post pictures much bigger than a postage stamp. The Bulletin had access to one of Australia’s mightiest pictorial archives—that of the old Daily Telegraph—but almost no means of using it.

  Only one factor made the Bulletin model viable: Packer. His commitment never weakened, and even won him a certain admiration. It made him un homme sérieux in the Australian media, as his combustible father had never been. His indulgence, however, was a mixed blessing, for he seemed happier to brazen out losses than to take the chance of succeeding by another means. And in a sense, this rather suited his journalists. Journalists are vain. We will always want to believe that our writing can change the world; that if we break good stories and find the right words, then the market will flock to us as a matter of course. Week in, week out, the Bulletin was actually demonstrating that news, in commercial terms, was scarcely worth the trouble of breaking it. When Laurie Oakes divulged Gareth Evans’ long-term affair with Cheryl Kernot in July 2002, for example, the Bulletin had no way of monopolising the story: such profit as accrued to anyone did so across all news outlets. Yet here was a proprietor who, albeit for reasons less to do with his munificence than with his own distaste for change, apparently subscribed to journalists’ belief in the redemptive qualities of their craft. When Packer anointed Garry Linnell as editor-in-chief in December 2002, he issued him resoundingly simple instructions: “Son, just make ’em talk about it.” What journalist would not feel their sap rise, given such a charter? The trouble was that the arrangement would never outlive Packer long. The leading indicator of the Bulletin’s fortunes in its last years, then, was not its circulation, but Packer’s vital signs.