The Best Australian Humorous Writing (22 page)

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 liability (“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.