The Best Australian Humorous Writing (21 page)

The last 18 months of the
Bulletin
's deathbed vigil had been gruelling. There was a sense, in some of its more panting covers, of a publication running hard to stand still. There had been a constant cycle of farewells, 20 staff reading the signs and moving on. Most of the senior staff members were replaced by less seasoned reporters, where they were replaced at all.

Much of Lehmann's time had been devoted to doing more with less, sometimes with nothing at all, as when he invited politicians to contribute to the
Bulletin
during the election campaign. “Who can I get?” was the question by which he became known. Sometimes
this had an unconscious comedy. “Who can I get to do a cartoon?” he said, emerging from his office one day, apparently oblivious to his having just let go his last two cartoonists.

In these austerities he was watched over by his publisher, Paul Myers, a short, bossy figure installed by PBL Media CEO Ian Law, who had previously run the RM Williams magazine,
Outback
. Myers might have fitted in a century earlier, when the
Bulletin
had rejoiced in its reputation as the “Bushman's Bible”; staff now referred to their cheeseparing publisher as “Small Pliers”. Some economies were noticeable, such as the replacement of Jana Wendt as “Lunch with” columnist by the lighter and less costly Juanita Phillips; some seemed niggardly, like canning
The Chaser
's droll headline news summary. Others became the stuff of legend. Book reviewers? Who needed them? “Why do we have to pay these people?” griped Lehmann one day. “Don't they like reading?” Myers stormed: “We've got 26 people on staff! Get one of them to do something!”

The
Bulletin
, nonetheless, had soldiered on, and continued to punch above its diminishing weight. Its ace Darwin correspondent, Paul Toohey, broke the story of Therese Rein's business interests; its dogged investigator Jennifer Sexton revealed the shady past of Paul Keating's business associate Bruce McDonald, and the bizarre mores of Rene Rivkin's inner circle. The magazine had unearthed one excellent young reporter, Katherine Fleming from
Medical Observer
, and manufactured another, Joey Catanzaro, promoted from manning the front desk to touring Iraq. By the end of last year there was the kind of euphoria that comes from having apparently cheated the hangman. Cook remembers that where the Christmas lunch of 2006 had been “thinly attended and resentful”, that of 2007 had involved “a vast amount of enthusiasm, goodwill and yippee”. So, despite all the grim tidings, it came as a shock when group publisher Phil Scott introduced ACP Magazines CEO Scott Lorson in the
Bulletin
office that Thursday morning.

Lorson arrived like a man bearing bad news—dark suit, navy blue shirt, scuffed loafers—and wasted no time sharing it. He herded staff into a tight group in front of him, as though they were soldiers on parade or children at a school assembly, and told them they had published their last issue, efforts to sell the magazine having failed. Phones in the office were ringing before he had finished his address: a press release announcing the closure was already in circulation. How long did it fucking take? In the end, about 20 minutes. In hindsight, probably closer to 20 years.

During his three vigorous years as editor-in-chief of the
Bulletin
, Lehmann's predecessor, Garry Linnell, toyed occasionally with the strapline “Setting Australia's Agenda Since 1880”. His news editor, Tim Blair, would laugh: “Are you sure you want to remind people of some of the agendas we've set?” After all, earlier straplines had included “Socialism in Our Time”; then “Australia for the Australians”; and, most infamously, “Australia for the White Man and China for the Chow”.

For much of its history, the
Bulletin
was chauvinistic to the point of isolationism, denouncing foreign wars and foreign capital with equal ardour; it was also unblinkingly anti-British, especially when the empire was in its view insufficiently racist. “There is nothing to lead us to believe,” it editorialised a hundred years ago, “that [John] Bull, bloated with pride over the possession of over 300,000,000 nigger subjects, has a vestige of sympathy with, or comprehension of, the White Australia ideal.” It was variously anti-Semitic and anti-communist; it was content to yield Spain to Franco, and Italy to Mussolini; it advised appeasement of Hitler (“Far from being a megalomaniac,” said the
Bulletin
, three weeks before the invasion of Poland, “Adolf Hitler is probably the most modest man
in Germany”) and counselled scorn for Churchill (“Mr Churchill is the Dangerous Dan McGrew of Imperial politics,” said the magazine in January 1940, “and he is far more dangerous to us than to the enemy”).

At its best and boldest, however, the
Bulletin
was more than a periodical. “It was
Australia
,” said the writer–adventurer Randolph Bedford. DH Lawrence's alter ego, Richard Somers, exempted the
Bulletin
from his drear view of Australian culture in
Kangaroo
(1923): “He liked its straightforwardness and the kick in some of its tantrums. It beat no solemn drums. It had no deadly earnestness. It was just stoical and spitefully humorous.” There were the writers: not just Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, but Steele Rudd, CJ Dennis, Joseph Furphy, John Shaw Neilson, Dorothea Mackellar, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Frank Dalby Davidson, Christopher Brennan, Ethel Turner, Barbara Baynton, Vance and Nettic Palmer. There were the artists and cartoonists: Hop (Livingston Hopkins), Phil May, Norman Lindsay, Fred Leist, Will Dyson and David Low. “Perhaps never in the history of world journalism has a paper stood nearer to the heart of a country than the
Bulletin
,” thought Sidney Baker, who studied the publication intently for his classic
The Australian Language
(1946). “Perhaps never again will so much of the true nature of a country be caught up in the pages of a single journal.”

Every journal has a lifespan, of course, and founder JF Archibald had no illusions about the
Bulletin
's, foretelling that his “clever youth” would inevitably “become a dull old man”. His prophecy seemed to have been fulfilled 50 years ago, when the
Bulletin
's circulation was barely 27,000, having more than halved since World War II, burdening the Prior family, its owners since 1927, with heavy losses. Its survival was a fluke. Frank Packer, publisher of the
Daily Telegraph
and impresario of Channel Nine, wanted to neutralise the Priors'
Woman's Mirror
, a rival to his own
Australian Women's Weekly
. Packer was not quite sure what to do
with the unprofitable, inert
Bulletin
, which came as part of the purchase, in October 1960. He rang Donald Horne, editor of his new fortnightly, the
Observer
. “I've bought the
Bulletin
,” he said. “Which will we kill off? It or the
Observer
?” The
Bulletin
endured on Horne's whim: it was, if you like, the Lucky Publication.

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.