In the latter case, probably not. Yet it is in so many ways both the most intriguing first choice — who, after all, would expect the creator of James Bond to allude to the nineteenth-century Swiss philosopher Charles Secretan? — and the most portentous revision. The decision to eschew the clumsy homage and instead appropriate the dull name of an American ornithologist underscores Fleming’s ruthless pruning of anything that might unnecessarily adorn the instrument he created in 1952.

That creation, and the long story of its making, is at the heart of Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, an immense biography by Nicholas Shakespeare. Building on earlier efforts by John Pearson (1966) and Andrew Lycett (1995), the book was prompted by the Fleming estate’s willingness to give Shakespeare access to unreleased archival material that illuminates the real-life source material embedded in the Bond novels. That openness may also have been the estate attempt to adjust the dominant view of Fleming as a man who, where he is not defined by Bond, is derided as a misogynistic, alcoholic wastrel with a penchant for whipping who showboated during the second world war and spent postwar summers in Jamaica fantasising about British grit, foreign villains and sexual conquest in exotic locales.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man has plenty of whipping and wantonness, but it adds nuance to a life whose early years seem to have been spent in guileless and unknowing preparation for important wartime work — work for which he turns out to have been unusually gifted. In fact, it is the observation of one journalist — that Fleming, in this moment, with all his gifts and talents finally in use, was a “complete man” — that gave Shakespeare his title.

But what freight it brings to the book: an intimation of comprehensiveness underscored by its bulk and the vivid cultural history woven through it; an implied claim to being definitive bedevilled by the persistent haze of uncertainty around Fleming’s war record. Then there is the dramatic portent — that Fleming, even as he created the character that secured his fame, was somehow lesser or incomplete in those postwar years.

But perhaps that was merely a reversion to form. Fleming’s early life was monied but grim. His miserly Scottish grandfather was a banker who had survived considerable bereavement (three siblings had been buried before he was born, and three more, plus his mother, would follow by the time he turned fifteen) to become one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Robert Fleming’s greatest stroke of luck, however, was to be a constituent of a young Winston Churchill, who called on him for donations and provided in his friendship a glow of respectability for Robert’s sons, Val and Philip, whom Churchill nicknamed the “Fleming-oes.”

Val, elected a Conservative MP in 1910, fathered four sons — Peter (1907), Ian (1908), Richard (1911) and Michael (1913) — with socialite Evelyn Sainte Croix Rose, whom he had married in 1906. But his influence as a father was defined by his absence. After war broke out, he joined Churchill’s regiment, trained alongside the future prime minister, and was killed while serving on the Somme in 1917.

Robert Fleming is said to have bellowed in grief at the news, Evelyn painted every room in the house black, and Churchill wrote an obituary for the Times, a copy of which, framed and hung above Ian’s bed, gave the eight-year-old a nightly reminder of the greatness that he could never hope to match.

Val’s estate, meanwhile, gave Evelyn enormous wealth, but in terms that invited her to endure a lifetime of dutiful widowhood: should she ever remarry, the money would be immediately transferred to her children. She responded by elevating her dead husband “from an absent, pipe-smoking, deer-stalker to an iconic figure in the clouds with whom she alone enjoyed privileged communication,” writes Shakespeare, in one of many deft summations.

Controlling, insecure and extravagant, she played her boys off against one another, guilt-tripping them and blackmailing them with threats of disinheritance, pulling out all the stops to ensure they might never suffer the consequences of taking responsibility for their actions.

For Ian, this manifested most acutely in endless reprieves from failure and ignominy, and repeated diversions from paths that might well have led him away from Evelyn. He was pulled out of Eton ahead of trouble over a relationship with a girl and sent to Sandhurst with hopes of joining the Black Watch infantry battalion. Out less than a year later after contracting gonorrhoea in a London brothel, he was dispatched to the Tennerhof, a private school in the Austrian town of Kitzbühel, with freshly adjusted plans that he would pursue a diplomatic career.

Distance from Evelyn allowed promise to flower: linguistic versatility, some artistic ambitions, an engagement to a Swiss woman. But on his return his mother stomped on all these green shoots. After his failure to find a position in the Foreign Office she intervened to get him a job at Reuters, where he made a decent fist of covering a famous Soviet show trial of six engineers employed by a British machinery manufacturer. Then he was off again, moving at Evelyn’s insistence to join a firm of merchant bankers in the City.

Fleming had little to no interest in commerce and even less in maths: “I could never work out what a sixty-fourth of a point was,” he wrote. Yet he flourished to the point of becoming a partner at another firm only eighteen months later. The succession of environments into which he had been dropped had given him a charming veneer that allowed him to adapt and conform while keeping people at a safe distance. Even the jaded journalists he tried to scoop in Moscow had been disarmed to the point that they were willing to help him with his boss: one vouched that Fleming was “a pukha chap.”

The elite education and time spent among the privileged had also knitted Fleming into every club and network that was worth knowing about, giving him vast contacts and points of reference that he wielded readily. The “stockbroker” Fleming would talk to clients about investment strategy, wine and dine them at an appropriate club or hotel, and then turn them over to the pointy heads and bean counters in the office who could make the money flow. On the surface (and, to some, that was all there was), all this made Fleming a Wodehouse character: paid too much to do too little, all charm and glamour and self-obsession.

And yet, Shakespeare suggests, Fleming had by this time planted “miscellaneous seeds.” He could speak several languages, had solid journalistic experience, and was friendly with several notably crotchety press barons. He had contacts and networks across the financial, commercial and intelligence worlds. He even had literary credentials, via the reflected glow of elder brother Peter, who had become a successful travel writer, and his own efforts as a collector of first editions of books that had “signalised a right-angle in the thought on that particular subject.”

The book collecting might not have seemed helpful when war broke out in 1939, but the miscellaneous seeds sprouted once Fleming was recruited to the Department of Naval Intelligence as a personal assistant to its director, rear-admiral John Godfrey. His ability to deal with the press and with people — not least his irascible boss — made him indispensable. His myriad contacts became invaluable. His knowledge of distant worlds and their connections made him insightful. But perhaps most surprising of all was his creativity.

In this vein he was much like Churchill, whom Fleming grew to resemble with his polka-dot bowties and “daily prayer” memos (“Pray, could you find out…”). Under Godfrey, Fleming brainstormed all sorts of schemes, many impractical and far-fetched, to gain an advantage over the enemy. For every hare-brained idea — to have a fake U-boat captain send messages in glass bottles railing against the Third Reich, to create a fake treasure ship packed with crack commandoes (which sounds suspiciously like the Trojan horse) — there was something promising. Perhaps most notable was what Fleming took from a little-known novel, The Milliner Hat Mystery: the germ of what became Operation Mincemeat, a successful tactical deception of the Axis powers.

Placed at the near-centre of British intelligence efforts, Fleming had a wide ambit of activity that Shakespeare believes to have extended to a role in the creation of America’s foreign intelligence service. He was hardly the “chocolate sailor” some contemporaries called him. Godfrey certainly thought highly of his assistant. He called Fleming a war “winner” who was owed a debt that could never be repaid, and Shakespeare adds to this the findings of other historians: “It has taken time to realise how central Ian Fleming is,” says one. “What he was doing touched on so much of the war,” says another.

But ascertaining exactly what Fleming touched, and how lightly or heavily, is difficult. Even the claim to Operation Mincemeat is made via inference, analysis of stylistic tics and coincident timetabling. Secrecy is the issue. With friends and colleagues, Fleming was generally reticent about his wartime service; bar the blurred fantasies of the Bond books, he left few hints of his activities. Shakespeare adds to this the need for confidentiality during the war and, later, during the cold war, when archives were both weeded and closed to access. Then there is the material simply lost to time — damaged, forgotten, burned — and the records that are exaggerated or simply mistaken.

None of this is unusual, yet at other times Shakespeare strains to explain Fleming’s absences from records, or even to gainsay what exists and inveigle Fleming’s way in. “Simply because Ian is not listed in the minutes of a high-level meeting,” he writes at one point, “does not mean he was not there in the room.”

Enough well-documented rooms exist to make arguments like this unnecessary. The array of material Shakespeare proffers is enough to convince this reader, at any rate, that Fleming was an active, engaged, important and unconventional wartime player. While Shakespeare labours the point, it also serves to establish a key fact about Fleming’s literary efforts: while James Bond was depicted in a cold war world, with its dubious moralities and shifting principles, he was fundamentally a creature of the second world war and its starker divides between allies and enemies, good and bad.

The oft-made comparison with John le Carré has never been to Fleming’s advantage, but Shakespeare draws out so many connections, echoes and resemblances between Bond and the second world war that any comparison between Bond and George Smiley or between Fleming and le Carré seems like a category error. In fact, given Shakespeare’s attention to literary antecedents, the better comparison is between Bond and characters such as Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond, Richard Hannay and perhaps even Sherlock Holmes — Britons who, with vigour, smarts and a willingness to do violence, save the world.

Shakespeare is a restless writer. As though to jolt the reader awake, lengthy passages of third-person past-tense narration suddenly crystallise into the first-person present as he tracks down a long-lost colleague of Fleming’s or a vague acquaintance or — in more self-indulgent moments — the descendent of some vague acquaintance. These moments fold into the story of Fleming’s life the story of the stories — of the Pearson and Lycett biographies of Fleming, and of Shakespeare’s biography.

Shakespeare quotes people crowing about their efforts to mislead his predecessors or their determination to shut up shop: “Poor Pearson,” Godfrey writes, of Fleming’s first biographer, “is like a famished man gazing, his mouth watering, into the butcher’s and confectionary shop windows and having to be content with a stale turnip (or swede) from the greengrocer.”

Shakespeare doesn’t conceal his similarities with Pearson, noting his own eager anticipation of new discoveries. But he adds in the dynamics of his interviews, poignant notes about the contingency of historical research, and observations about the dark material at the heart of the Bond novels.

In one scene he arrives in the rain outside a bungalow at Milton Keynes to interview the last surviving member of 30AU, a wartime intelligence gathering unit set up under Fleming’s influence and operating, effectively, under his command. Bill Marshall is ninety-four years old and feels a decade older. He tells Shakespeare he is a week early but beckons him inside anyway. “Later, I am glad I got the date wrong,” Shakespeare adds. “Bill Marshall will be hospitalised five days after our conversation. Had I come at the right time, I would never have heard what he tells me.”

Inside, Shakespeare listens as Marshall — who only days before has received the Légion d’Honneur and a letter from Emanual Macron praising him as a hero — confesses to murder:

On 26 June, Bill watched as German snipers fired through the windows of a hotel, killing one medical orderly and shooting another through the knee as they attended wounded American soldiers in the street. It was raining when the German riflemen surrendered. Another witness told Nicholas Rankin how not long afterwards he had seen their blood flowing in the rainwater.

Bill grows quiet, withdrawn. “I shot four Germans in cold blood.”

“What did you feel?’

“Nothing. How do you feel seeing two men trying to attend being shot?”

What happened next, whether he was reprimanded or Returned to Unit, he does not say. He has said enough. I think of another character who inherited Bill’s licence to kill. This was the compost out of which James Bond emerged.

Much as he had come into his own, Fleming was in an invidious position by the end of the war. Bound by secrecy, he could not dispel or rebut jibes about him being the “Sailor of the Strand.” He was carrying considerable emotional turmoil: his brother Michael had died in 1940 as a prisoner of the Germans; a serious romantic relationship with Muriel Wright, begun in 1935 in Austria, had come to an end with her death in a German bombing raid in 1944. He could too easily see a future in which the skills and talents he had wielded so well went to waste. He was hardly alone in this plight: in the United States, Allen Dulles described his return to the legal profession as an “appalling thing” after heading a spy network. “Most of my time,” he wrote, “is spent reliving those exciting days.”

Where Dulles went to the CIA, Fleming returned to journalism. In 1945, he took a position in the Kemsley newspaper group, handling a network of foreign correspondents. A journalist Shakespeare interviews recounts how Fleming sat in front of a canary yellow map of the world equipped with tiny flashing light bulbs — one for each man.

Shakespeare cautiously ventures that this might have been cover for continuing intelligence work, but the whole portrait has the tragic comedy of a Graham Greene novel: Fleming’s use of naval intelligence lingo with his journalists, his retention of a code and cipher book in his office, the derisive whispers of younger colleagues that his vaunted contacts were nothing but old duffers. Then, of course, there are the corporate machinations: Fleming took the position with Kemsley, which also owned the Sunday Times, on the intimation that he might become the paper’s editor and the hope that he might even get a seat on the company’s board. He also fantasised that the foreign news service he was managing might one day become a rival to Reuters — at which point Fleming would be a press proprietor in his own right.

If true, it was only ever to be a sideline, for alongside a salary of £225,000 in today’s pounds Fleming negotiated an iron-clad policy of two months of paid holiday each year. He would spend those months in Jamaica, at the rather uncomfortable bungalow he had built and initially named “Shamelady Hall” before choosing a name that harked back to a wartime operation — Goldeneye. Here, in daily bursts of 2000 words, he wrote Bond.

In Shakespeare’s telling, the novels came shortly after a burst of disappointments and disillusionments. Fleming’s hopes of advancement at Kemsley had vanished; his long-term paramour, Anne Charteris, had been divorced from her husband and fallen pregnant (again) to Fleming, necessitating a hasty marriage that neither of them much wanted. With fatherhood imminent, wedlock complete, he was looking back to a life he once had and could still have had — in intelligence, on one hand, but also in literature.

Signs of Fleming’s desire for this life recur in the book, especially during Fleming’s time attending the Tennerhof. There, according to Shakespeare, the youthful Fleming was steeped in European history and literature and imbued with ambitions to write a serious novel in the vein of James Joyce or Thomas Mann. He made attempts to act on those ambitions, planning but then aborting a co-authored translation of Paracelsus and, in 1928, self-publishing a volume of poetry titled The Black Daffodil only to become deeply embarrassed by it. “He took every copy that had been printed and consigned the whole edition pitilessly to the flames,” wrote one of Fleming’s friends.

A factor in Fleming’s constant withdrawals, Shakespeare argues, was his elder brother’s success at writing. “Of course, my brother Peter’s rather brilliant as a writer,” Fleming would say, “but I wouldn’t know how you set about writing a book myself.” In the postwar years, however, his attitude changed. One prompt was his belief that he could better his brother’s effort at an adventure novel; another was his sense that he would not be trespassing on his brother’s turf if he did so. Then there was a sense of resentment, aggravated by his failed hopes at Kemsley, as friends, acquaintances and other writers churned out thrillers and spy novels that, in many cases, claimed experiences and actions Fleming saw as his own to write about — the gag of secrecy notwithstanding.

Perhaps too there was a sense of how he might slip that gag: Shakespeare posits that Graham Greene’s difficulties with the intelligence services — it was felt he drew too closely on his first-hand knowledge — may have influenced Fleming to increase the fantastical elements of the Bond stories even as he drew on the real-life material of his wartime experiences and insights. “I think he wrote the books primarily because he had a great deal of knowledge of things like this within him, and he had to get it out,” says one acquaintance.

It is a conflux of influences that Shakespeare presents with considerable verve. He plays with the book’s internal clock, changes style and tone, moves into scenes and back out of them, and in doing so creates vivid juxtapositions and drama. The chapter on Bond’s first appearance on the page follows immediately on Fleming’s decision to marry to create the convincing argument that Bond was an escape for Fleming as much as for an exhausted postwar Britain:

Suddenly, as he floated over the reef [at Goldeneye], above barracuda he had named after battleships, Ian saw an exhilarating path back to bachelorhood — by creating a contemporary naval hero in the tradition of Drake, Morgan and Nelson, loyal to the Crown, who would reaffirm England as a world power, wipe out the shame of the Burgess–Maclean defection, and re-establish SIS as “the most dangerous” Secret Service in Russian eyes. And he would be a bachelor. “If he were to marry and settle down he would be of little value to the Secret Service.”

A chapter later, Shakespeare is looking ahead again, foreshadowing how Bond would consume Fleming. It was not only that Bond’s fame quickly came to define his author’s public persona; it was also that Fleming became reliant on Bond. Advised that it was no good to write just one book, that he had to “hit the nail again and again with the same hammer until it’s driven into the head of your potential public,” Fleming became a factory working on a one-year schedule, the brunt of the work to be done during a spell at Goldeneye.

Fleming went into this routine clear-eyed, seeing it as wholly compatible with his working life as well as a path out of financial difficulties caused by a spendthrift Anne. As he wrote to his publisher Jonathan Cape during negotiations over Casino Royale, “I am only actuated by the motives of a) making as much money for myself and my publishers as possible out of the book, and b) getting as much fun as I personally can out of the project.”

But the fun, in Shakespeare’s telling, dwindled as the money poured in. Lawsuits over film and television rights, accusations of plagiarism, negative reviews and laughter from friends all corroded this late-life literary success. Then there was Fleming’s knowledge that, at some point, he would run out of material. Philip Larkin famously detected in the posthumously published Octopussy (1966) an allegory for how Fleming had used his war experiences as treasure off which to secure his heart’s desires — Bentleys, caviar, Henry Cotton golf clubs. It was acute insight that Shakespeare agrees with. “This was the draining exchange,” he writes. “Once Ian gave birth to Bond, he relied heavily on the hard-earned secret capital of the war. Each book was a different slice of stolen gold until the material ran out.”

The poor quality of Octopussy and The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), also published after Fleming’s death, suggests Shakespeare’s assessment is right. But at play in the preceding Bond books too is a sense of Fleming butting up against the limits imposed on a writer tilling in a single genre. For Your Eyes Only (1960) abandons the novel form in favour of the short story, one of which — the horribly titled “Quantum of Solace” — eschews gunfights and villains in favour of a parable about marital compassion delivered after a disappointing dinner party in a manner reminiscent of Somerset Maugham. The response to this deviation was lukewarm at best.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), meanwhile, is unique among the Bond novels for being framed by a meta-fictive introduction from Fleming, for adopting the first-person perspective of a woman, and for its brutally sleazy and violent story. The book contains the most rounded and complex of Fleming’s female characters, but its reception was so virulently hostile that Fleming, taken aback, suppressed a paperback edition, refused to allow anything but the title to be used in the film adaptations, and went back to his safe patch with the Bond that followed, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963).

One might wonder whether Fleming still yearned to write something that his younger, more highbrow self would have been proud of, and whether he had come to believe that, thanks to Bond, he could not. If so, it is all the more tragic for being a knowing compromise signalled by the early change he had made to the draft of Casino Royale.

A homage to a nineteenth-century philosopher was never going to fit into that work, into that world, and Fleming saw it quickly. He slashed a blue line through Secretan and above it wrote a new name. His protagonist would introduce himself bluntly, almost monosyllabically: “Bond. James Bond.” •

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man
By Nicholas Shakespeare | Harvill Secker | $42.99 | 830 pages

The post Grand days appeared first on Inside Story.

The link: over a period exceeding fifty years the two have collaborated on five volumes of biography, four of them dealing with the same man. One a decade. Big, fat books, each a thousand pages or more in length. Doorstoppers.

Outside work, they have little contact. They aren’t particularly close. Each lives a quiet life, working, sleeping, seeing his family.

That’s it. That’s the story. That’s the movie.

And yet from these unlikely materials, Lizzie Gottlieb has made a wonderful film, Turn Every Page: a witty, loving portrait of two lions in winter, one of whom — Gottlieb — is her father.

In some ways the two men are quite similar. Urbane New Yorkers, each with his memories of reading books as a child in Central Park. And yet they are very different men — Gottlieb is opinionated and dripping with self-regard; Caro is quiet, thoughtful and modest.

Gottlieb is the former editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and the New Yorker. He’s been responsible for hundreds of books and a stable of authors that has included Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, John le Carré, Toni Morrison, Joseph Heller and Bob Dylan. He’s fun, charming.

Caro is the winner of multiple Pulitzers and National Book Awards. He has written just five big books (along with a slim memoir); each of his bigger works is incredibly detailed, immersing its reader in particularities of times and places, and describes in great detail the ways in which talented, driven individuals — US president Lyndon Johnson and New York planner Robert Moses — made things happen that would not otherwise have happened (or that would perhaps have happened more slowly, and slightly differently).

This ability — of making things happen — Caro calls “power.” It is for his deeply informed and sensitive analyses of the particularities of power — intoxicating, deeply evidenced, personality-driven — that Caro is famous.

The title of the film nods to the lengths Caro goes to in researching his books. “Turn every page,” his first editor told him; certainly, that is the advice he has followed.

The accusation can be made — reasonably in my view — that Caro’s work sometimes verges on “great man” history, because it focuses so heavily on the acts of pivotal individuals, of men who sat at the heart of formal power structures, and pays too little attention to structural shifts and history-shapers that lie further out of the focus of state archives.

This criticism is not entirely fair; Caro’s greatest strengths lie in the deep effort that he puts into contextualising the lives of his subjects and explaining the cultural and political constraints — the power blocs, institutions and hidden barriers to change that locked in the status quo — within which these ingenious and creative people worked.

Caro is very popular; and the way he breathes life into these topics — which can seem so abstract — is the reason for that popularity.

Turn Every Page is at its best when it seeks to show how Caro went about adding this texture and depth to his research.

It describes, for instance, his decision to move from Manhattan to the Hill Country of Texas so as to better immerse himself in the world from which Lyndon Johnson came. It shows Caro and Ina, his wife and lifelong research partner, visiting the LBJ Memorial Library, home to forty-five million pages of documents. The two are filmed poring over document boxes as Caro talks of how happy he and Ina are working there, bathing themselves in presidential minutiae.

Interspliced through the whole is (wonderful) archival footage — snapshots of a past when these men were handsome, young and ambitious. When they were shapers of the future, rather than survivors from the past.

The film’s pathos lies in how it captures these elderly men continuing — fighting against the dying of the light — to live deeply analogue lives. One scene involves Caro and Gottlieb wandering around their publisher’s office looking (in vain) for a pencil. In others, we see Caro, dressed as always in a full suit and tie, sitting at his desk writing longhand drafts, before transcribing them, two-finger typing on an ancient typewriter.

We see him stuffing carbon copies into a cupboard for safe keeping.

Perhaps the best insights the film has to offer are at the level of craft. “He’s a word painter… he paints with words,” says Gottlieb of Caro. Gottlieb is certainly a man who knows a little about word artistry, and what he says is true.

Caro talks of finding writing hard, of how he struggles to get the details right. Of how important that struggle is. Non-fiction that lasts, he says, is non-fiction in which mood, setting and context are given as much attention as they are in the best novels.

Turn Every Page is a great little film. Nearly two hours long, it doesn’t outstay its welcome. I watched it on a train journey from London to Edinburgh, ears hidden under big noise-cancelling headphones, and I laughed the whole way through. •

Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
Directed by Lizzy Gottlieb | Streaming on Amazon Prime and other services

The post Does anyone have a pencil? appeared first on Inside Story.

Mindful of the precedent of Oxford and Cambridge university presses, some members of the board were aware that for the University of Melbourne to have projection — to display its wares, promote research — a publication program was desirable. But given the restricted market, the press would have to feel its way forward. Its first publication was Myra Willard’s History of the White Australia Policy to 1920, the work of a Sydneysider (ratified locally by her having won a University of Melbourne prize for an essay on the subject). The book was authoritative and crisply written, if plainly produced in brittle and unattractive paper wrappers. MUP found it expedient to co-publish this and other titles with the long-established firm Macmillan.

The press began without a full-time director. Stanley Addison, a key figure in its establishment, doubled its management with his other job as the university’s assistant registrar. Even so, considerable progress was made. From a mass of submissions emerged important books in economics, public policy, Australian history and literature. Publications extended to a metrical translation of the psalms, and a comparative work on Melanesian languages. In its first decade, MUP produced fifty-six titles.

But Addison was not as scrupulous as he should have been, nor was he supervised in financial matters. There were dubious withdrawals from the firm’s account and doubtful conduct by his brother, whom Addison had appointed to the staff. But he was known to be ill — largely attributable to his war experience — so was simply relieved of his duties. The governance of the press was tightened immediately after.

MUP’s first full-time director was Frank Wilmot, a socialist, who had already run a significant press of his own, had been a bookseller, and as “Furnley Maurice” was one of Australia’s best-known poets. From a field of one hundred, he was the stand-out applicant — despite having no academic qualifications. Wilmot proceeded to expand the list, extending to philosophy, education, demography and, most notably, poetry and Australian literature and history. In poetry, his business sense balanced enthusiasm. “Is it so good that it is our duty to lose money on it?” he asked his reader of an R.D. Fitzgerald collection. In history, Brian Fitzpatrick’s radical The British Empire in Australia: An Economic History 1834–1939 was the most notable publication. MUP’s historical and scholarly books began to rival those produced by Angus & Robertson in Sydney.

But it was still necessary to co-publish, this time with Oxford University Press, itself a useful endorsement. In the decade Wilmot was at the helm, ending with his sudden death in 1942, around a dozen titles each year were published by the press. Wilmot had steadied it during the Depression.

The next director was a history lecturer who’d already had some dealings with the press. Gwyn James was an Englishman with a gritty Midlands accent who was drawn to book production in all its aspects. A fastidious editor, he was also driven and temperamental, some said irascible. (There would be fireworks when Clem Christesen brought Meanjin to Melbourne and MUP, for he had a similar personality.) But James had flair and a vision. He insisted on bringing publication to the fore, dramatically expanding the list. He wanted a book-binding plant, indeed the capacity to print books, for MUP should match the best American university presses in scale and quality. At one point, to get his way, he submitted his resignation; the board allowed him to withdraw it, and provided its first subsidy — not as big as he would have liked, but enough to set about realising his plans.

As Kells explains, “James’s strategy, and his answer to any problem, was growth.” MUP operations soon extended across eight sites and three capital cities, and the staff expanded. But James lacked the necessary managerial capacity. The overdraft steadily rose: by 1961 it was £150,000. Alarmed, the registrar went so far as to lobby the council to have the press shut down. There was a reconfiguration, some scaling down. James would henceforth be styled “Publisher to the University” — something he had dreamed of — but would now be responsible to a director. He resigned.

MUP’s next director, Peter Ryan, would be in harness for a quarter of a century. Not long after leaving school he had enlisted in the army and fought in Papua New Guinea: this created a lasting attachment to that country, and engendered what would be regarded as Australia’s best war memoir, Fear Drive My Feet. Despite a notable quirkiness, Ryan would always retain something of a military manner, and ran the operation with commendable efficiency. Publications followed in the tracks of his predecessors, with a notable return to poetry, but there were in addition some blockbusters. One was the three-volume Encyclopaedia of Papua and New Guinea, which appeared in 1972, an intellectual Domesday Book assembled on the eve of independence. Another was the first eleven volumes of the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

There were also the six volumes of Manning Clark’s History of Australia. The first (1962) sold extraordinarily well and had an enormous impact (as well as attracting fierce criticism). Vividly written in a high literary style, it placed Australian history in a world context. In fact the History was a James legacy that Ryan saw through, but with increasing reluctance.

In Clark’s subsequent volumes, considerable editing was needed to correct errors, tone down the prose and remove hackneyed phrases. This was done so successfully that the History rolled on, collecting prizes. Ryan bided his time, and then years later wrote an attack on Clark and the History in Quadrant. As MUP had profited from the publication, and Clark had died only recently, many felt the article was a betrayal.

After Ryan’s retirement in 1988, there was a period of instability. The brilliant publisher John Iremonger was lured back to Sydney; Brian Wilder occupied the directorial chair twice. At this stage the press was producing up to eighty books a year. It received no regular subsidy from the university, but the bookshop was one of the most profitable in Australia, while the Grimwade bequest was tweaked to enable MUP to produce quality books under the imprint of the Miegunyah Press. But by the end of the nineties the press was facing recurring deficits: John Meckan, a notable “money man,” took the director’s chair.

Meanwhile the University of Melbourne was entering a decisive new phase. Alan Gilbert was appointed vice-chancellor: the scholar of religious history became a high priest of economic rationalism. His hallmark was the launching of Melbourne University Private, an auxiliary fee-paying institution. Touted as MUP, it helped itself unblushingly to the well-known acronym of the press.

The press itself was subject to an exhaustive review, urging it to adapt to the new world of online publishing, ebooks and print-on-demand technologies. Separation from the bookshop was also recommended and implemented, to clarify publishing purposes. The board would now be more commercial, bringing in accountants, journalists, politicians. As Melbourne University Publishing Limited, the press would become a “profit centre” of the university. That, at least, was their hope. In its first year its operating loss was $646,830.

Enter Louise Adler. No one else in Melbourne had so much experience across universities, publishing and the arts, or was so well networked (she was also married to the actor Max Gillies). To gusto and single-mindedness she added a capacity to charm. Adler’s appointment made her the first female head of MUP; it was unkindly suggested that it might be “an attempt to resurrect, if not a dead duck, certainly a dying one.” For in the six previous years, Kells tells us, MUP “had been burning equity.” To use management speak, Adler was expected to act as a “change agent.”

Part of Adler’s brief — aligned with her flair for publicity — was to produce books that were noticed, and that would feed debates in the community. “Commercialisation” became the watchword. MUP would now seek to compete directly with trade publishers, not least in the high advances paid to chosen authors. “The point is not to have more,” Adler said, “the point is to have less. The trick is to have less that you sell more of.” So the outlook was broader, the tone decidedly different. “You’re not to write for your peers,” she told Stuart Macintyre as he collaborated with Anna Clark in The History Wars. “You’re writing for me.”

As Mark Dreyfus has said, Adler viewed every politician as a potential author. MUP published The Latham Diaries and, to balance, Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington’s authorised biography, John Winston Howard, Tony Abbott’s Battlelines, and the conspicuously successful Costello Memoirs, which sold 40,000 copies. These did promote public discussion. But publication of the autobiography of an underworld figure, a book by a celebrity chef, and the story of the first female jockey to win the Melbourne Cup raised eyebrows.

Meanwhile the academic list became, as one MUP observer scoffed, “Siberia.” Of this I had some personal experience. Adler originally welcomed the idea of a biography of historian Keith Hancock, venturing a print run of 3000 copies. I suggested a sober 2000. I was therefore surprised to receive, ten days later, an email saying that she had decided not to publish it. No reason given. But I soon worked it out: after having published a book on the History Wars, this one would have appeared too retro. Ah well. A Three-Cornered Life went on to win four major awards, including the Prime Minister’s History Prize.

The publication of Louise Milligan’s Cardinal — which Kells sees as having created the climate that led the police to lay the charges of sexual misconduct — added to the university’s dissatisfaction. It had, after all, pumped $26 million in subsidies into the press over fifteen years. Another review was undertaken, urging structural changes and a renewed emphasis on scholarly books. Adler resigned soon after, followed by five members of the board, including Bob Carr, shaking his head: “It is a sad, sad day, that an independent publisher so important to Australian publishing gets snuffed out to be replaced by a boutique, cloistered press for scholars only.” The tail should always wag the dog.

Stuart Kells gives an even-handed account of the Adler experiment, and this is characteristic of the book’s sound judgement. This history benefits from Kells’s broad knowledge of books and the book trade; there are short sections on topics such as publishers and dust-jackets, which while discursive are always illuminating. He is particularly good on the participation of women, and how they were habitually taken for granted by the press and the university. A stalwart of MUP was the tough and exacting Barbara Ramsden, who at times — between male appointees — sat in the directorial chair. But women’s proper place was held to be editing. When the directorship became vacant before the appointment of Wilmot, the advertisement specified that applications would be taken from men only.

At the same time, Kells brings out the two basic tensions operating. First, between the publication of scholarly works (which rarely pay) and the publication of more marketed-oriented books (which may make money but could be frankly populist). Hence the second tension, between the university’s desire to exert influence (or why have a university press at all, if not scholarly?), and the press’s need for independence and flexibility in order to survive.

Once it was simpler: as Gwyn James put it, making a comparison with trade presses, “A university press must create demands: it must aim to bring the best books within the range of as great a number of people as possible.” In the 1950s, that sense of mission could be propounded: less than 1 per cent of the population were university graduates. Now it reeks of elitism.

So Nathan Hollier, MUP’s publisher and CEO of three years’ standing, has his job cut out for him. He speaks of “producing scholarly books for the trade.” Academically credentialed, but also weathered by editing Overland and establishing Monash University Press, he’s in with a chance to square the circle. •

MUP: A Centenary History
By Stuart Kells | Miegunyah Press | $60 | 544 pages

The post MUP’s book of Kells appeared first on Inside Story.

I’ve been back in Alice Springs since October 2018 to make repairs to my unit and live cheaply while I finish writing a book, Into the Loneliness, about two women who roamed outback Australia last century. I first moved here in 2003, and even after I shifted to Melbourne in 2010 I was never entirely absent, returning to Central Australia every few months to work on a research project.

January is typically when Alice people flee to the coast to avoid the heat, but this year it’s even hotter and more humid than I remember it during the noughts. In summers past, say long-term residents, the temperature usually fell to 15°C at night, but high maximums these days are accompanied by high minimums. One morning when I was making breakfast the temperature was already 39°C.

“Heat wave” — the term that’s used on the news — is surely a euphemism for what we’re experiencing. A 2015 CSIRO report says Alice Springs averaged seventeen days above 40°C each year during 1981–2010 and forecast the figure rising to thirty-one days by 2030. When fifty-five days exceeded 40°C between July 2018 and June 2019 I began to wonder when the desert capital will become uninhabitable.

By the year’s end, the town is awash. On Christmas Eve 2019 I wake to see brown water churning between the normally barren Todd River’s banks across the road from my townhouse.

During the year I’ve struck up an acquaintance in the library with a Luritja woman from Papunya, chatting with her whenever she brings in her grandkids to use the computers. When I admire how the rain overnight brought out the fresh bush scents, she disagrees. She didn’t like it at all; it was too hard to find anywhere dry to sleep. She’d been sleeping rough, of course, maybe in the saltbushes hemming the Todd or in the riverbed.

That’s where some of the library’s local Arrernte regulars sleep, along with the Warlpiri, Anangu, Alyawarr and Warramungu who come into Mparntwe from their communities, sometimes hundreds of kilometres away, for cultural purposes, or to shop for supplies, use services or catch up with family and friends. Some stay with relatives in one of Alice Springs’s seventeen town camps or sleep overnight in or around the riverbed, then eat and shower at the Salvos before coming to the library.

Local Indigenous leaders fear that climate change will drive many from their traditional homelands to towns like Alice, escaping from flooded communities and overcrowded houses unsuited to extreme temperatures. “We are already suffering through hotter, drier and longer summers in our overcrowded hotbox houses,” says Central Land Council chair Sammy Wilson.

After the deluge, the usually bare slopes of the West MacDonnell ranges, flanking the town, are festooned in green. It would be tempting to see this as a La Niña bonus if not for the fact that much of the greenery is buffel grass (Cenchrus ciliaris), an insidious invasive species introduced by pastoralists to feed cattle. Buffel overwhelms native grasses, driving out bilbies and other small creatures and impeding local people’s collection of bush foods. Because of its intense flammability, traditional fire management practices no longer work. As Arrernte Anmatyerr poet Patricia Perrurle Ansell Dodds writes, “It’s too dry now. / The summer is too hot. / That buffel grass is everywhere.”

Back in January a boy had appeared in my peripheral vision as I drove out of the library car park one steamy evening. When he rolled across my bull bar in a loose, graceful motion I slammed on the brakes, fearful of hurting him, then bit back my irritation, waiting for him to move. How old was he? Eight; ten at the most. He was playing chicken, trying to provoke me, and when I failed to respond, he staggered away melodramatically.

I eased out of the car park, a little shaken and annoyed, although I’d soon be home sipping a G&T on my balcony with its view of the MacDonnells. I regained my equilibrium, distanced myself from what this scene ws a reminder of — the youth crime wave said to be plaguing the town.

When I first lived in Alice during the noughts, youth crime was expected to rise over the summer holidays. Since then, reports suggest it has reached epidemic proportions all year round. Aboriginal kids as young as eight are said to be roaming the streets in packs at night and “running amok.” Most of my friends have a story about a window being smashed, a house broken into, or a car being taken for a joyride, sometimes repeatedly.

This time round, the youth crime wave has become the main topic in what writer Robyn Davidson wryly calls The Conversation — the constant discussion about First Nations people among progressives in Alice Springs. Davidson, famous for walking with camels from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean, has been dipping in and out of the town since 1977 while many of the “white do-gooders” (as they are called by their detractors in town) associated with the land rights movement and Aboriginal-controlled organisations in the 1970s and 80s have retired or moved to the coast. Over the past decade, in their stead, my gen-X contemporaries have shifted into the senior ranks of the local chatterati while millennials have refreshed many creative and political spaces in town with their artistic and digital agility. An Indigenous middle class has also emerged, often holding key managerial roles in Aboriginal-controlled organisations.

To live in Alice Springs, regardless of whether you were born here or why you came here, is to be caught up in The Conversation. The reasons relate to Mparntwe’s role as what the late Arrernte artist W. Rubuntja called a “little Central Australian Rome — too much Tywerrenge [or Law].” It is a cultural, social and economic focal point for First Nations people from the cross-border region of the Northern Territory, South Australia and Western Australia.

Because colonisation occurred later here than in the southeast, First Nations people consequently make up a greater proportion of Alice Springs’s population of 25,000 (a shade over one in five, according to the 2021 census) than of densely populated coastal cities. With the fallout from the encounter between First Nations people and settlers more evident in daily life, The Conversation in Alice Springs is more direct and less notional than the talk on the east coast.

Within eighteen months of my return to Alice Springs in 2018, my van’s passenger window has been broken repeatedly — once in my carport and three times in the library car park. Around the complex where I live, shattered car windows often glint in the grass like dew-encrusted cobwebs. Friends advise me to leave the van unlocked with a window half down so people can break in without shattering the glass. The windows remain intact but I sometimes find signs — an open door or glove box, a cigarette butt — that someone has rummaged around overnight.

A local glazier says he replaced thirty car windows each day during the recent midyear school holidays. Most shop windows in Todd Mall, the main business drag, are shuttered to protect them overnight, dampening what was once a colourful tourist precinct. Windows in the town council chambers and the library were often smashed while I worked there; once the aquatic centre fell victim to a midnight vandalism spree, with eighteen windows shattered and computers thrown into the pool.

The town is “under siege,” one headline declares. On community social media forums people cite the continued break-ins, loss of property and vehicle damage as reasons why they’re leaving town, posting photos and footage from home security cameras of break-ins. The issue of race frequently surfaces:

Sorry but the way I see it now is that anybody with white skin is simply not welcome.

Time to leave.

Where are the parents? comes the cry, along with exhortations to get tough on crime and employ more police to ensure no kids are on the streets after a certain time.

A friend who works with children in care in Alice Springs tells me about how, when she encouraged a boy to reflect on the consequences of theft, he replied, “Whitefellas have lots of stuff. They can always get more stuff.” One possible interpretation is that the rise in crime is an up-yours to the coloniser — to those who’ve taken so much and have so much — by young people exiled to the shadow zones of intergenerational trauma and poverty.

Whatever its causes, statistics lend weight to the perceptions of rising crime and rising rates of recidivism among young people. In 2019–20, NT Police proceeded more than once against 54 per cent of offenders aged ten to fourteen and 37 per cent of offenders aged fifteen to nineteen (with the older cohort making up 82 per cent of all offenders), indicating high rates of reoffending. Young people detained by NT police are overwhelmingly Indigenous.

That youth crime should have burgeoned in Alice Springs over the past decade seems no coincidence. During the noughts, the main Conversation topics within local social justice organisations were violence against women and substance misuse. Central Australia was experiencing record rates of alcohol consumption and associated harms, including assaults, mainly against Aboriginal people. These declined over the next decade following the introduction of alcohol harm-reduction measures, including the NT government’s Banned Drinkers Register, a Labor policy implemented in 2011–12 and then resumed in 2017, when Labor resumed office.

Many young people were consequently born to parents who drank alcohol to harmful levels and mothers who experienced family violence. According to an NT government report, “at least one child is subjected to domestic and family violence every day of the year in the Northern Territory.” Other children live with the effects of having witnessed family violence; still others leave unsafe and overcrowded living situations and gain a sense of identity in street gangs.

Central Australian Youth Link Up Service report seeing a rise in children with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and other neurological conditions. While the current incidence of the disorder is unknown, a 2003 study calculated its prevalence in the Territory’s Aboriginal children to be between 1.87 and 4.7 per 1000 live births, compared with an estimated national rate of 0.02 per 1000 non-Indigenous children. Parents and educators find these young people, afflicted by limited attention spans, hyperactive behaviour and other learning difficulties, difficult to engage in educational, social, recreational and other activities.

Their parents are often young: in 2019, a fifth of Aboriginal mothers who gave birth in the Alice Springs region weren’t yet twenty. Often they haven’t completed school and face limited job opportunities, especially in remote areas. Around half remote-living Indigenous people don’t receive income from either wages or a Centrelink allowance, so they fall back on families for support, lifting poverty among the broader group. Census data indicates that between 2006 and 2016 Indigenous poverty rates increased to 50 per cent in very remote areas while falling to 22 per cent among Indigenous people in the major cities.

Food, fuel and other essentials were already more expensive in regional centres — and higher still in remote communities — but have hiked further in Alice Springs and its satellite communities since late 2021. Petty crime can be driven by something as basic as hunger.

The rise in crime and poverty also coincided with the implementation of the Howard government’s NT National Emergency Response and Labor’s Stronger Families policy. The BasicsCard, an income management tool introduced in town camps and prescribed communities in 2007, was extended to all welfare recipients in the Territory in June 2010. Fifty per cent of recipients’ Centrelink payments and 70 per cent of child protection payments could be spent only on food, clothing and rent. Financial penalties applied if, for example, children failed to attend school.

The BasicsCard was accompanied by the Community Development Program, a work-for-the-dole program that required remote participants to work for longer hours than their non-remote counterparts. Unlike its predecessor, the long-running Community Development Employment Projects scheme, the CDP was designed without any input from local communities.

Because allowances under these schemes were suspended if participants were unable to meet requirements, poverty rose. An ANU analysis found increased rates of infant mortality, child abuse and neglect, and a rise in low birth weights and child deaths from injury — a sad irony, given that the first round of reforms came in response to the Little Children Are Sacred report.

The rate of family violence in the Territory remains staggeringly high, and in 2021 recorded the greatest annual increase (12 per cent) in family and domestic violence-related assault victims across the country. NT police data indicate that nine out of ten victims were Aboriginal, and eight were Aboriginal women. “It is not an exaggeration to say that intimate partner violence committed upon Aboriginal women in the NT is pervasive,” NT coroner Greg Cavanagh said in 2016. “Almost three quarters” of NT Aboriginal women have been victims of intimate partner violence.

The Tangentyere Women’s Family Safety Group in Alice Springs has developed resources and initiatives to assist women and men in tackling family violence, but the lack of women’s refuges and other services, especially in very remote areas, and long waiting times for already overburdened clinics exacerbate the risks for those seeking to escape violence.

Although the fallout from this crisis is devastating, even the most distressing incidents scarcely rate a mention in national media. Which is why campaigners from the Tangentyere group held a vigil one Sunday in July this year to mourn the deaths of a mother and child, allegedly shot by the woman’s forty-one-year-old partner in a murder-suicide out of town. About one hundred of us gathered on the lawn outside Alice Springs Court and laid flowers on the grass and wrote messages of support to the family. Friends and relatives spoke about the impact of the loss of this thirty-year-old Aboriginal woman and her fourteen-week-old baby.

While the campaigners hoped the vigil would raise national awareness of the high incidence of family-violence-related deaths among First Nations women, the deaths received little attention outside Alice Springs. Indeed, more coverage was given to the shooting of three whitefellas in a property dispute in north Queensland the following month. And the small turnout for the vigil seems telling, too, in a town that focuses so much outrage on property crimes.

Strange things happened in Central Australia during the pandemic. After the first lockdown was announced on 23 March 2020, the streets of Alice Springs became abnormally quiet. Heeding the strong messages carried by remote Indigenous and national media about Covid-19’s risks, people stayed inside their houses or returned to their communities.

Behind closed doors in the library, we continued to provide borrowing and printing services, and moved storytelling and other educational programs online. But we wondered what had happened to our regulars. What were the tjilpis (Pitjantjatjara for older men) who watched westerns in the library doing every day, and the cheeky kids who enjoyed using computer apps to make videos and create emojis?

That was the town’s longest lockdown. By mid May we were dining al fresco in cafes; by early June we were allowed to go camping again (the ban had been a great privation for locals). On the last day of May, about one hundred people gathered at the Olive Pink Botanic Gardens for the launch of local author Dani Powell’s book, Return to Dust — the first sign for me of a return to a fragile normality.

For almost two years, as we resumed life in our own Truman Show in the middle of the desert, the virus seemed hypothetical. We went through the motions of sanitising and physical distancing (mask wearing never became widespread, except where mandated). Because of the Territory’s relative isolation, sparse population and, most of all, strict border controls, the virus’s spread was curtailed until quarantine restrictions were lifted for vaccinated travellers just before Christmas 2021. For me, the pandemic’s most difficult aspect was not being able to visit family in Sydney because of the prohibitive cost of fourteen days’ quarantine when I returned.

Alice Springs didn’t experience its first Covid-related death — an Aboriginal woman from Mutitjulu, who was the third fatality in the Territory — until 31 January this year. By the time five-day Covid isolation ended nationally, the Territory had recorded seventy-three Covid-related deaths and a fatality rate of 0.07 per cent. While any loss of life is tragic, these figures are remarkably low given that the region’s indices of disadvantage are among the worst in the country.

The effectiveness of the Territory’s Covid response stems from advocacy early in the pandemic by the Combined Aboriginal Organisations and peak Aboriginal health bodies, and especially by Donna Ah Chee, the chief executive of the Central Australian Aboriginal Congress, who initially lobbied for strict border controls.

The pandemic’s first year was also an unwitting social experiment. Property crime rates plummeted from April to August 2020, which some local commentators attributed to the existence of a curfew of sorts. A more compelling hypothesis is that crime fell after the coronavirus supplement lifted the JobSeeker and Youth Allowance by $550 fortnightly in March 2020, temporarily raising welfare recipients’ income above the poverty line.

“For the first time some households have been able to afford basic needs like accommodation, food, winter clothes, whitegoods or repairs to motor vehicles,” reported the Northern Territory Council of Social Service in October 2020. As the supplement was phased out from late September through to December that year, property break-ins resumed their previous high levels.

When people ponder the distance, the climate and the crime they often ask me and my friends how we can live here.

Despite the town’s extremes, it’s possible to experience many things here that have been lost in other urban areas. You can usually commute to work in ten minutes from any direction. You can escape to the bush for a walk or a swim in a waterhole, or to camp overnight, often without much preparation. You can immerse yourself quickly in the dramatic landscape — giant orange rocks cast by ancestral beings, wild dogs (Akngwelye) and caterpillars (Yeperenye, Ntyarlke and Utnerrngatye) churning across the land — and its moodiness, all bold primary colours in bright sun one day, brooding pastels in overcast weather the next. You can enjoy a sense of social ease, bumping into anyone at any time, and you can slot quickly into the town’s social, cultural and sporting lives.

To me, Alice Springs’s greatest strength has always been its community-driven activities, of which it boasts an extraordinary number. The town wheels through a calendar of iconic and idiosyncratic creative and sports events, including Parrtjima, the country’s only Aboriginal light festival, the Anaconda mountain-bike race, the Finke Desert Race, the Beanie Festival, Word Storm (the NT Writers Festival, every second year in Alice), the Bush Bands Bash, the Desert Mob exhibition, Desert Song and the Desert Festival.

In early October, composer Anne Boyd’s Olive Pink Opera was performed with the support of the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir in the botanic gardens, on the site where the eponymous anthropologist camped in a tent during the 1950s.

While Alice Springs is best known for its visual arts — Albert Namatjira’s landscapes, the central and western desert art movements, the annual Papunya Tula Art Exhibition — it is also an incubator for experimental work by Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. A recent exhibition, Footy Show, at Watch This Space, showcased First Nations artists exploring their relationship to football. Indigemoji, Australia’s first set of Indigenous emojis, was produced by young people guided by senior Arrernte cultural advisers, and Awemele Itelaretyeke is an app with two audio walking tours made by traditional owners to help users learn about Mparntwe’s history, culture and language.

Some of Centralia’s most hard-hitting creative achievements over the past decade have been in film and television: Warwick Thornton’s prize-winning Sweet Country (2017), which premiered at this year’s Sydney Film Festival, is a Western based on the local story of Willaberta Jack, and Penelope McDonald’s Audrey Napanangka (2021) explores the life and work of the Warlpiri artist. Dylan River (Thornton and McDonald’s son) directed Finke: There and Back (2019) for Brindle Films, which follows several Finke Desert Race participants, including local filmmaker Isaac Elliott, who competes on a modified motorbike after an accident left him confined to a wheelchair.

Alice-based production company Brindle Films, founded in 2011 by Rachel Clements and Trisha Morton-Thomas, produced the ABC TV comedy series 8MMM Aboriginal Radio (2015), and The Song Keepers (2018), the NITV/SBS documentary about the Central Australian Aboriginal Women’s Choir on tour. Isaac Elliott also worked with Brindle Films on the Netflix TV series MaveriX (2022), about dirt bike riders in the red centre.

Locally made documentary In My Blood It Runs (2019), which screened on ABC iView and Netflix, introduced viewers to the challenges encountered by ten-year-old Arrernte/Garawa boy Dujuan Hoosan in navigating cultural life and Western educational systems in Alice Springs. SBS crime series True Colours (2022), created by Erica Glynn (Thornton’s sister), portrays First Nations people’s social and cultural realities in Central Australia in a way rarely seen on TV. With white characters appearing as marginal figures, it features strong performances by untrained locals including singer Warren H. Williams, Arrernte elders Sabella Kngwarraye Ross Turner and Rosalie Kumalie Riley, and lead actor Rarriwuy Hick.

Books and publishing also have a high profile in Alice Springs. Although Dymocks closed its local store in 2013, local bookseller Red Kangaroo Books, run by the Capper–Druce family in Todd Mall since 2007, battled on, featuring on one list of “21 of the Best Bookshops in Australia to Visit in 2021.” As “the only bricks-and-mortar independent bookshop still standing in Australia between Port Augusta, Darwin, Broome, and Broken Hill,” the shop attributes its success to its “fiercely local” focus, stocking (often hard-to-come-by) books on Central Australian subjects and by Centralian authors.

Community-publishing outfits have long flourished in Alice Springs, especially those dedicated to producing books by First Nations people. The Institute for Aboriginal Development Press, which has published First Nations dictionaries and resources since 1969, has recently been joined by Running Water Community Press, which has produced anthologies of local women’s poetry including Campfire Satellites: An Inland Anthology (2019) and Arelhekenhe Angkentye: Women’s Talk: Poems of Lyapirtneme from Arrernte Women in Central Australia (2020). The first book in its new truth-telling series is local stolen generations survivor Frank Byrne’s Living in Hope (2022), an earlier version of which won the Small Press Network’s Most Underrated Book Award in 2018.

Other notable First Nations publications include Central Land Council’s collective memoir, Every Hill Got a Story (2015), and ninety-year-old Kanakiya Myra Ah Chee’s memoir, Nomad Girl (2021).

Among the most inspiring local ventures are the First Nations children’s books published by intergenerational Arrernte learning initiative Ampe-kenhe Ahelhe Children’s Ground. Led by local Arrernte elders, Ampe-kenhe Ahelhe began providing education to First Nations children on Country and in people’s communities, combining Arrernte and Western educational priorities. Since 2019, its Arrernte educators have produced nine educational resources featuring seven local languages, the latest of which include Tyerrtye Atyinhe (My Body), Althateme (McGrath’s Dam) and Intelhiletyeke, a First Nations colouring book.

“We’ve been following government nearly all our lives — this is a new beginning,” says Ampe-kenhe Ahelhe director M.K. Turner. “We are following a new path, our own path as First Nations people for the future of our children. At Children’s Ground, the community is taking the lead. We are very proud of that. We are the government of ourselves.”

When the Yiddish poet Melekh Ravitsh arrived by train in Alice Springs in 1933 he experienced “an uncontrollable joy and fear.” “One feels,” he wrote, “that one is in the middle of the hot, wild heart of the most remote of all continents — Australia.”

I can relate to the intensity of Ravitsh’s response. Unsettling feelings take hold of you on being confronted by Mparntwe Alice Springs, destabilising your perception of Australia. The town continues to draw people like me — rootless wanderers above the ground, as a Māori elder once described the Pākehā — back to the Centre. With its sharp light throwing so much into relief, there is rawness about living in the place.

Here you live on the precipice of the prosperity so many Australians take for granted, where the marginalisation, the poverty, the trauma and the damage to Country that resulted from dispossession of First Nations people are all too apparent. At the same time, it is a privilege to see this other, remote Australia, to live and work alongside First Nations people, to catch a glimpse of what Country means to them, even if the depth and complexity of this relationship is hard to grasp.

“The town grew up dancing,” the late W. Rubuntja wrote. “And still the dancing is there under the town… We still have the culture, still sing the song… It’s the same story we have from the old people, from the beginning here in the Centre.”

May the dance never end. •

Funding for this article from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Hot, wild heart appeared first on Inside Story.

During his golden years as editor of the Northern Echo (1961–66) and Sunday Times (1967–81), this rare blend of qualities propelled a chain of power-shaking scoops on many topics: from air pollution and cervical smear tests, through corporate tax avoidance and espionage cover-ups, to the blighting foetal deformities caused by an unsafe pregnancy treatment produced by the multinational Distillers company. Such hard-won breaches in the ramparts of official and corporate secrecy helped change laws and lives.

These two decades of editorial clout, fortuitously aligned with the liberalising arc of the 1960s and 70s, were the pinnacle in a working life of astounding longevity. Their foremost legacy is a perpetual glow around the very name of Harold Evans. Understandably so, for by turning both the Sunday Times’s “investigative journalism” and its “Insight” team into kinetic brands — then, at their climax, invoking editorial independence to resist Rupert Murdoch’s effort to sack him — he made himself one too.

The overlaid memory of that joust, as of Insight’s prosecutory storylines and courtroom skirmishes, would seal Evans’s reputation, and be reflected in many awards from his peers, from the worthy (two press institutes’ gold medals for lifetime achievement) to the cringy: an ever-trumpeted 2002 choice by a self-chosen handful of readers of the British Journalism Review and Press Gazette as “greatest newspaper editor of all time,” above twenty other nominees, all British and male, many distant and long unsung.

In the latter case, Evans’s tour de force acceptance essay (“My first thought was to check out the obituary page of The Times for reassurance”) paid those forerunners rich tribute, claimed a retroactive vote of his own, drew precepts from a tour of his greatest hits — and thus, in overall effect, flattered the wisdom of the exercise and its verdict. At seventy-four, Harry’s showmanship and genius for self-promotion, as much as his sheer panache in making words sing, were undimmed.

Decades earlier at the Sunday Times, a thriving paper known for “exposure reporting” long before Evans’s arrival, many had shared in the credit for its next-generation coups. Its burgeoning Insight squad, with Phillip Knightley, Bruce Page and Murray Sayle among the paper’s self-styled “Australian mafia,” continued to deliver the goods, far-sighted editor-in-chief Denis Hamilton the guidance, munificent proprietor Roy (Lord) Thomson the funds. The unstinting Evans, a wizard of publicity to match his editorial flair, was the catalyst. “Harold could be wild and impulsive, but he had the sort of crusading energy a Sunday editor requires,” Hamilton would say of his appointee, this much-recycled utterance invariably losing a qualifier: that Harold had “need always for a stronger figure behind him to see that his talents were not wrecked by his misjudgements.”

A midlife switch was to freeze Evans’s newspaper romance in aspic, and his early fame with it. In plain terms, a vain year-long shutdown of Times Newspapers Ltd from November 1978, sparked by printing unions’ staff demands and resistance to new technology, led to the company’s papers (including the daily Times) being auctioned. From a scrum of financial and political intrigue, Rupert Murdoch’s News International emerged in March 1981 holding the murky ball (“the challenge of my life,” said the tycoon, describing Evans as “one of the world’s great editors”).

Evans was persuaded to become editor of the Times, across a short bridge at the papers’ joint works at Thomson House on Gray’s Inn Road. But a fractious year later he was asked by Murdoch to resign, which he did after holding out for a week (itself a media sensation). Evans’s eventual formula was that he resigned “over policy differences relating to editorial independence.” His embittered memoir of the saga (Good Times, Bad Times) complete, he relocated to New York in 1984 with his second wife, zippy magazine editor Tina Brown, working there for Atlantic Monthly Press, editing US News & World Report and launching Condé Nast Traveler. Then, from 1990, he was publisher at Random House, where Joe Klein’s (initially “Anonymous’s”) Primary Colors was among his successes. Propulsive coupledom, reaching its zenith in the mid 1990s, buoyed his profile, as would his steadfast bashing of Murdoch (not least during the Leveson press inquiry of 2011–12) and of resurgent threats to the type of journalism he cherished.

This disjunction in Harry’s career — the ultimate British newspaperman turned transatlantic celebrity publisher — would always make it hard to see the whole. More so, as the surface contrast between its two halves was acute. Where the fitful second was laced with high-end networking and lucrative dealmaking, the first had a perfect narrative arc whose climactic duel simulated a mighty clash of values. The fact that martyr and villain stuck fast to their allotted roles (or could easily be portrayed as such) kept the storyline ever exhumable. On occasion their paths would cross, as when Murdoch’s own manuscript briefly landed on Evans’s desk. “The wheel of fortune makes me your publisher as you used to be mine,” wrote Harry, leading Rupert to call the whole thing off.

In that first half, the dramatic symmetry of Evans’s long rise and slow-motion fall also fitted the culturally potent image of the valiant journalist or editor. His Panglossian autobiography My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times, published in 2009, evokes the “newspaper films” of his childhood: “I identified with the small-town editor standing up to crooks, and tough reporters winning the story and the girl, and the foreign correspondent outwitting enemy agents.” That art’s blessing was a life in its image conferred on Evans a halo, dutifully polished in Britain’s media circles whenever his name came up, to which the details of his American experience (including citizenship, in 1993) would add not a speck.

As in the movies, uneven reality — in this case Evans’s editorial virtuosity, the feats (ever more roseate) of those Northern Echo and Sunday Times years, and the events of 1981–82 — was tidied into a seamless fable. His exit from London allowed it room to grow; fond tales of the press’s glory days gave it regular watering. A trade entering the digitised rapids could do with a hero to muffle its fears, and Evans, epitome of the age now under siege, was in a class of his own.

The campaigner

In a longer view, fate and chance, as well as exceptional will and ability, won Evans that esteem. Harry Evans’s steep ascent from modest origins in Patricroft, a district of Eccles — an “L.S. Lowry landscape of bent stick figures scurrying past sooty monuments of the industrial revolution,” in his words — was testing all the way. Equally, his early years were a good foundation: deeply loved as the eldest of four brothers, the family edging beyond poverty and upwards, remarkable parents who “[took] it for granted their boys would climb Everest.”

My Paper Chase’s portrait of his parents — father’s “phenomenal numeracy” and comedic gift (“We were part of the performance and his performance, like good theatre, always seemed fresh”), mother’s “ambitions for a better life,” which led from factory floor to her turning the terraced house’s front room into a grocer’s shop — signal that no child had a better start. Pride in his parents, whose evocative 1924 wedding-day photo is a highlight of the book, joined that in the leap from his mid-Wales grandfather, who left school at nine in 1863 for a labouring life, to his editorship of the Times. Yet Harry was phenomenal in his own right: such was his preternatural energy, it is tempting to imagine almost every obstacle in the route from Patricroft’s Liverpool Road via Gray’s Inn Road to Broadway giving up the ghost at the first encounter. Harry would never stop earning his charmed life.

Here he is as captain of St Mary’s school in Manchester in 1943, for example, where “[the] English teachers nominated a handful of candidates” for a planned magazine “and I was utterly shameless in campaigning to win the editorship,” or applying for his first newspaper job a year later and redrafting his headmaster’s testimonial (excising “too impetuous at present,” inserting “I wish him the glittering success he so deserves.”) Already, the ballast of Harry’s ultra-competitive spirit was a fervent attachment to the idea of newspaper journalism as his life’s purpose.

That sense of vocation had been seeded, he would often recall, by a holiday encounter with “weary and haggard” British soldiers in coastal north Wales in mid 1940. The mood of these survivors of the Dunkirk evacuation, sent across the country to recuperate, so contrasted with uplifting press reports of strong morale that the nearly twelve-year-old Harry — trailing his “compulsively gregarious” Welsh father, a train driver, who strode over from the beach to talk to the men — was bewildered. “Only two years later, when my ambitions to be a newspaper reporter flowered, did I understand that Dad was doing what a good reporter would do. Asking questions. Listening.”

This “epiphany on Rhyl beach,” the “first vague stirring of doubt about my untutored trust in newspapers,” also crystallised Harry’s eagerness to “involve myself in their mysteries.” Arrival at the Ashton-under-Lyne Weekly Reporter in 1944 would yield graphic social history, also in My Paper Chase, in the language of rapture: the huge Linotype “iron monsters” operating with the “autocratic urgency of hot metal marinated by printer’s ink,” men “crouched in communion” before them, an office “piled high with papers, telephone directories, pots of glue, spikes and a full-size glass kiosk with a chair and a candlestick telephone inside.”

Harry was never one to under-egg the pudding. Completing a portrait that mirrors, doubtless with its own fictive touches, the ennui of Michael Frayn’s evergreen “Fleet Street novel,” itself published in 1967 but set a decade earlier, are a “ginger-haired middle-aged reporter with a pipe clenched in his teeth” and “another wizened walnut of a man hunched over a desk [at] a window overlooking the market square,” working with “ancient typewriters on even more ancient desks that were sloped for writing by hand.” .

Two years’ solid experience at this century-old local paper with its thirteen daily editions was followed by two more of national service, where Evans created a newspaper for fellow Royal Air Force conscripts. That opened a channel to university study at historic Durham, a north-east cathedral city, where he edited the student magazine and went on to complete a masters in American foreign policy. Back home as assistant editor at the Manchester Evening Times from 1952, and soon married to Enid Parker, a biology graduate and now schoolteacher, he was awarded a Harkness fellowship in 1956-57 to study in the United States, where the young couple’s extensive travels provided a close-up view of the civil-rights tumult.

Harry, still under thirty, going places for sixteen years, was now a coming man. The Guardian, sister paper of the Evening Times, was mooted as his next berth, a move stymied by the top brass’s opposition to internal staff transfers. Instead, in 1961 he became editor of the Northern Echo, a historically Liberal daily based in Darlington, a market town and railway hub twenty miles south of Durham. A prominent regional paper, its main rival the Leeds-based Yorkshire Post, the Echo had been edited through the 1870s by W.T. Stead, daredevil inventor of popular journalism in Britain, for whom the job was “a glorious opportunity of attacking the devil.”

Evans soon made a splash. His team spotlighted the malodorous, lung-busting pall issuing from Middlesbrough’s chemical plants and the ear-drilling roar of mega-lorries through Echo readers’ towns and villages. A brief Sunday Times item on British Columbia’s cervical cytology program led to his reporter Kenneth Hooper’s landmark 1963 series, “Saving Mothers from Cancer,” its full-page opener, “The Tragedy of Thousands Who Need Not Die,” kindling the armoury of pressure that a year later saw cervical smear tests available in principle to every woman in Britain.

So often, that knack for noticing, and being nagged by, an issue already in circulation would produce a big story — one, moreover, that came to be associated chiefly with Harry himself, in part by his insistent coverage, in part by the way (expansively selective, it might be said) he orchestrated the plaudits.

There had, for example, been four books, a joint press effort and a parliamentary debate airing claims of a miscarriage of justice over Timothy Evans, a pliant Welshman hanged in 1950 for killing his infant daughter in a Notting Hill flat (and charged too, though not tried, for strangling his wife, Beryl). When a local Liberal manufacturer wrote to the paper exhorting a new push to exonerate a man whose bad breaks in life included having a mass murderer as a downstairs neighbour, the Echo’s newsroom initially featured the letter as a slow day’s stopgap. But Harry’s promotional nous swiftly made his namesake the Echo’s new lead cause, with “Man On Our Conscience” following “The Lorry Menace,” “The Smell,” and more.

A senior judge’s review of the case denied full vindication to Timothy Evans, even perversely deducing that he was innocent over the baby but had murdered Beryl. Yet the momentum for redress did secure the executed man a pardon in 1966, and three years later Harold Wilson’s Labour government, having already suspended the death penalty, abolished it. That Harry reworked the saga with himself as the linchpin might have led even W.T. Stead’s glowering portrait on the Northern Echo’s wall to crack a smile.

The moment

The high road to London was opening. Evans was already known there, and not just by Fleet Street’s talent spotters. In 1962, he had joined the presenters’ roster on What the Papers Say, a pacy late-night weekly round-up on Granada, the groundbreaking Manchester-based arm of Independent Television. The program displayed choice extracts from the week’s headlines, reports and columns, each given a pitch-perfect comedic slant by offscreen voice actors, threaded by pithy scripts from a single, straight-to-camera journalist. With his dapper good looks and dry Mancunian tones, Harry was a clever hire among a rolling mix of seniors and thrusters.

Such opportunities arose in a definite social moment, from 1957 to 1963, when the abrasions of rapid social change were most vividly felt in industrial northern England. In these years, “the north,” that country of the mind — far from coterminous with the actual region, as with Fleet Street and the newspaper industry — was catapulted to an unexpectedly modish berth in the national imaginary.

The northern vogue had been heralded in its ur-text, Richard Hoggart’s celebratory lament The Uses of Literacy, published in 1957. It spread via a tranche of emotionally truthful novels, films and plays, as well as Granada’s Coronation Street serial, which dramatised the theme of generational tension (while offering London a voyage of discovery to an outlying planet). Just as quickly, against a backdrop of exultant ridicule from the concurrent, largely Oxbridge, satire boom, it sank into imitation and canny nostalgia.

Above all, the Beatles’ early success brought the phase to a suitably ambiguous close. The group’s electrifying jolt added joy, wit and optimism to the north’s new–old connotations (authenticity, poverty, melancholy, communalism, boorish masculinity, dreams of escape often thwarted). In crowning the region’s enhanced appeal — and hauling its centre of gravity west to the Atlantic port city of Liverpool — the Beatles also made its previous terms look antiquated.

The moment’s principal benefit was to Harry’s cohort: northern working-class boys born just too late for a wartime call-up, adolescents in the 1940–51 Churchill–Attlee era, nourished by family, public library and welfarism, their sound basic education providing a ladder to grammar school, perhaps university, two years of national service fuelling impatient ambition. Together, these influences formed an apprenticeship to the middle class, even to the part of creator or activator.

Evans was among the older of the group, like Stan Barstow (A Kind of Loving), Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall (Billy Liar) and Tony Richardson (the middle-class director who adapted Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey) — all bar the precocious Delaney born in 1928–29. Its members carried the uncharted ambiguities as well as the enticements of their newly mobile class and regional status. Some of those who, unlike Billy Liar, did jump on the train south became luminaries of British public life by making an asset of their northernness, while others did so by shedding local attachments, and accents, in order to fit in. Harry’s was a third way: when he invoked his northern background to New York audiences, most often to deride England’s taints of class, this would serve as a measure of how far he had come.

The mentor

Within the newspaper world, Evans’s performance at the Northern Echo and on What the Papers Say turned into an audition for the London stage. The big break, in 1966, came as an invitation from Sunday Times editor Denis Hamilton to work as his assistant. A year later Evans landed the editorship when the Thomson organisation, owners of the paper, purchased the Times and Hamilton became editor-in-chief of both. The venerable pair (the daily being founded in 1795, the weekly in 1822) were thus brought under the same owner for the first time, a factor — often masked by their similar titles — that took on greater significance as Times Newspapers Ltd, or TNL, entered crisis in the late 1970s.

Now Evans was again walking in Stead’s shoes, the earlier Northern Echo editor having become deputy to John Morley at the Pall Mall Gazette in 1880 then, three years later, succeeding him in the chair. Stead had quickly netted an array of scoops, culminating in an 1885 exposé of the business of child sexual exploitation by London toffs under the authorities’ blind eye. Procuring a thirteen-year-old girl as evidence of the traffic, Stead was sent to jail for three months via a parliamentary bill rushed into law in response to his own story.

The Stead–Evans parallels are resounding. Many colleagues would come to speak of Evans in terms that eerily chimed with those of Stead’s assistant at the Pall Mall Gazette, Alfred Milner: “I cannot recall one who was anything like his equal in vitality… I don’t suppose any editor was ever so beloved by his staff… It was such fun to work with him. The tremendous ‘drive,’ the endless surprises, the red-hot pace at which everything was carried on… His sympathy, his generosity, his kindliness were lavished on all who came within his reach.”

Also akin to Harry’s finest were Stead’s walloping, if in his case prurient, taste in headlines (“The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon”) and eclectic investigative unit — veteran feminist reformer Josephine Butler, the Salvation Army’s Bramwell Booth and brothel-keeper turned activist Rebecca Jarrett. And if Evans wasn’t locked up for his principles, he raised the prospect, with a touch of melodrama, in replying to Phillip Knightley’s tip that rivals, disregarding legal qualms, were about to usurp him over the thalidomide story: “I’m tempted to publish anyway. I’ll go to jail. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll go to jail. Bloody hell, it’d be worth it!”

The audacity of Stead and Evans, each a decade younger than their patrons, led them to eclipse the latter in what passes for journalism’s collective memory. Ineluctable or not, that is a disservice to Morley, a principled, scholarly Liberal from Blackburn, north of Manchester, who eventually left journalism for politics; and to Hamilton, a Middlesbrough reporter in his teens who rose by his mid twenties to acting brigadier in war and returned to steer a newspaper group before himself editing the Sunday Times. Equally, it is a disservice to history, for it hoists the whirlwind talents of the more glamorous pair above the singular weave (of inheritance, relationship, contingency and action) in which these talents were enmeshed.

Hamilton, for his part, as well as recruiting Evans laid the groundwork of the latter’s good times in London. He had spent a decade running the Kemsley stable, a mix of national and provincial papers, when in 1958 he made use of his war service under Montgomery to clinch serialisation of the field-marshal’s memoirs for the Sunday Times, a coup that widened a circulation lead over its Observer rival opened by the 1956 Suez crisis. Hamilton became editor in 1961, two years after Thomson’s buyout of Kemsley, and in his six years at the helm took the paper’s sales from under a million in 1959 to a record 1.5 million.

If by this time Denis Hamilton was a consummate establishment insider, eventually to be knighted, his distinction was to be an innovator with foresight. From the editorial plan, graduate training scheme and “big read” of the Kemsley era to the colour magazine, Insight and business section of the Thomson one, Hamilton made the newspaper a weekly event, outpacing the rival Observer and new Sunday Telegraph, while keeping the horizon in view. “More and more I was convinced the Sunday Times should analyse and amplify the news and what lay behind it [in order] to do what television didn’t do,” he reflected, thus drawing “potential readers with greater leisure and affluence.” Hamilton’s strategy, from the big read (“our secret weapon”) to “Atticus,” vignettes of upper-class life by Kemsley’s influential foreign manager Ian Fleming, anticipated the blockbuster weekend newspapers of the 1980s.

The original Insight team of Ron Hall, Clive Irving and Jeremy Wallington was enlisted by Hamilton in 1962 after the youthful trio’s experimental, admired news-in-depth weekly Topic had folded after a few months. At the Sunday Times, their exposure of London’s rental housing underworld (symbolised by the figure of Peter Rachman), a fake Beaujolais scam, and the Profumo affair’s tentacles added punch to the paper. Working on the scandal that brought down Britain’s defence secretary, said Irving, “would tip us into the future of long-form, narrative reporting.”

The nous that had led Hamilton to these bright sparks informed his choice of a replacement when Kemsley’s purchase of the Times forced a company reshuffle. Roy Thomson, self-made son of a Canadian barber, now domiciled in his ancestors’ Scotland, strictly upheld editorial independence (“no person or group can buy or influence editorial support from any newspaper in the Thomson group” was his “creed”) but also took against Frank Giles, number three at the paper and the obvious choice. “Harold’s north country cheek matched Roy’s own,” recalled Hamilton. “In order to convince myself — and others — that Harold was the man, I asked him to set out his ideas of where, over the next few years, the Sunday Times should go. This paper, written over a weekend, was an impressive document that tipped the scales.”

To adapt an old phrase, those who talk of Harold Evans shouldn’t be silent about Denis Hamilton. The British Library’s former head of newspapers, Ed King, wrote of his memoirs: “I was struck time and again by Hamilton’s great capacities: for dealing with people successfully, for being able to take criticism, for delegating work and responsibilities, for learning, for sustained hard work, for seizing the moment, for his incorruptibility. Above all, he had the (constantly exercised) ability to reflect on gaps in the newspaper market, to think ahead, to plan a campaign of action for the future. For many years, Fleet Street was a sufficiently large canvas for his abilities to show at their best.”

For Hamilton, hiring Evans was a conscious act of rejuvenation, one of many. Yet as with Morley vis-à-vis Stead, collaboration sharpened differences. Evans “proved himself an editor with immense flair,” Hamilton would reflect, but “had a great weakness for self-projection” and “was the world’s worst recruiter”; Harry, invited to read a poem at Denis’s funeral in 1988, called him “my mentor for some twenty years,” a note never repeated, even in My Paper Chase (whose 500 pages and ample bibliography, moreover, contained zero reference to his own Good Times, Bad Times). For all that, their partnership — and Roy Thomson’s fortune — helped deliver another decade of dominance for the Sunday Times, until in the late 1970s the paper’s share of Britain’s fracturing social contract brought the whole operation to an impasse.

The boy scout

“I’m handing you a Rolls Royce,” Denis told Harry as they descended to the composing room to see off the last edition of the Hamilton era at Gray’s Inn Road in January 1967. The weekly, sixty-four page (later seventy-two) ad-friendly package of features, serials, comment and foreign reportage, strong on graphics and photographs, had maintained a firm commercial lead. Harry soon made its reportorial language more direct and its presentation more appealing, its muckraking busier if increasingly distended.

Above all, the Sunday Times took on a distinct swagger, which tended to make it more envied than admired in press circles. That had a rationale, for the paper’s assets — market dominance, cash to burn, abundant staff, a hotshot editor-ringmaster touting his wares on TV chat and quiz shows — were hardly those of an underdog. And when Harry sued the satirical magazine Private Eye for needling him as “Dame” (he saw its feeble link to the actress Dame Edith Evans as an “imputation of effeminacy”), the crusader evinced a censorious instinct and odd sense of priorities.

Yet even taking account of the unlimited resources at his disposal, Evans’s exploits as editor were substantial. Several of the major Sunday Times investigations of the next decade entered journalistic folklore, in large part because they entailed positional or legal tussles with a state intent on the lid staying clamped. Among them were the backstory of Kim Philby, the suave British NKVD agent who infiltrated MI6 at the top level and in 1963 fled to Moscow; reporting of Northern Ireland’s conflict that filleted the official version of key episodes; publication of Labour cabinet minister Richard Crossman’s diaries, penetrating thick walls of confidentiality; and exposure of negligence and cover-up over the birth of thousands of disfigured babies (mainly between 1955 and 1962) whose expectant mothers had taken thalidomide for morning sickness.

In each case, a “state of knowledge” timeline was the basis of a detailed narrative, constantly updated, with plenty of personal dramas and cliffhanger moments. It might branch in all directions — Elaine Potter’s meticulous research into the pregnancy drug’s testing failures, and Marjorie Wallace’s tender interviews with stricken families, for example, counterpointed by reports and graphics on the issues at stake: press freedom, state secrecy, corporate powers, citizens’ rights. A book-length Insight-branded digest could soon follow, its sales (as of the Philby or Ulster potboilers) recouping much of the newspaper’s costs. Chance and design had made for a winning formula: albeit the hunt for more makeweight quarry, and there was plenty, exposed little beyond Insight’s style of portentous urgency.

At its best, the Sunday Times’s journalistic alchemy saw Evans’s sparkling life-force, quicksilver judgement and ire at restrictive laws — libel, contempt of court, official secrecy — kindle his smart newshounds’ ingenuity and grit. Evans was an “all-rounder, a brilliant technician, famously courageous,” recalled Godfrey Hodgson, Insight editor for four years. “He could grasp the point and scope of a story at speed. When Anthony Mascarenhas brought in his 1971 scoop on the repression in then East Bengal, which led to the birth of Bangladesh amid millions of refugees, a cholera epidemic and war, Evans swept away a pedestrian headline (written by myself) and replaced it with a single word, “Genocide,” in 72-point type.” Then, “after the first edition had gone on a Saturday night” his “seminars over a glass of scotch were models of instruction and motivation.”

Harry’s lessons went beyond the inner sanctum. On broadcast media and contributions to the weekly Listener or New Society, he was a lucid champion of bold journalism as pillar of a free society, and the more persuasive for his framing the case in moral and empirical, as opposed to doctrinal, terms. In the same spirit, his Northern Echo proselytising had been circumstantial rather than planned, he declared, “arising from frustrations and disquiet as we encountered instances of a vast carelessness in public life,” while at the Sunday Times, seeing London’s hidebound institutions at close range, he had come to detect “a chronic but unsuspected malaise in the functioning of British democracy.”

If such sentiments dovetailed with the social progressivism of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Evans was more inclined to finesse anti-establishment sentiment than inhale it. In the spirit of Stead’s “government by journalism,” he wanted to clean up the temple, not pull it down. This disposition marked his whole career: just as at Durham’s student debates, a natural Labourite and go-getter, he had recoiled from “the warriors of cold reason,” he was averse to the heavy radicalism of the 1960s and 70s, and — this time born just too early — rueful in missing that elusive thing, the sexual revolution.

For all his cogent justifications of dragon-slaying, Harry remained the boy scout he had in fact been: neither cynic, ideologue, nor even much of a political animal at all (an “apolitical liberal,” his buddy Robert Harris called him). Proximity to the exalted, with their titles and trappings, could beguile as ideas did not. “He sometimes seemed too keen to please the powerful,” the scrupulous Hodgson listed among his faults.

At root, this deferential streak was just another part of Evans’s all-embracing, all-consuming personality. The tendency might be overt, as when he held back Murray Sayle’s timely dissection of the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972, or enfolded into investigative work’s grey zones, such as liaising with MI6-adjacent personnel during the Philby story to keep the intelligence agency in the loop and at bay. Harry was too bumptious for artifice anyway: in an office lie-detection experiment in 1979 with visiting celebrities he “failed to lie successfully” (as did Sunday Times reporter Isabel Hilton, who wrote a deadpan account of the episode).

That personality, always more consequential than any public views Evans might espouse, drove (and could also block) the paper. Insight’s investigations bore its imprint, from their often drawn-out gestation to the way their ambivalent endings were oversold as victories. Harry’s divided attention, and his intoxication with a process under his nominal control, could entail a loss of focus. The Philby story, for example, had to be rushed out when it was found that the Observer was splashing on the memoirs of Eleanor Philby, third wife of the “third man.” Similarly, the trigger for launching the thalidomide campaign in 1972 was that a trio of Daily Mail features on an afflicted family had got ahead of the Sunday Times’s long delayed coverage after Mail editor David English decided to brave legal constraints. Worse, the resolute father was now telling lead reporter Phillip Knightley that Murdoch’s News of the World had its own thalidomide series in the works.

Knightley, going to his editor with the information (and aware that “Rupert doesn’t give a damn about the Attorney-General”) found a panicky Evans “determined not to lose the story.” Looking back in his 1997 autobiography A Hack’s Progress, he cited the Sunday Times’s snail’s pace, as well as families’ distress over skewed compensation and media exposure, to argue that the whole thalidomide effort “was not the great success it was made out to be, and that the full story is as much about the failures of journalism as about its triumphs.”

Fleet Street’s competitiveness was central to investigative journalism in the period. So too, and also barely recognised, is the role of Denis Hamilton before and after Evans’s arrival at the Sunday Times. In his own account Hamilton found that the “emotional and highly strung” Evans needed “constant counsel and comfort — for instance, when we took on the law over the Thalidomide case (which was his idea) I controlled the whole campaign. No sentence appeared in the newspaper without my having seen it beforehand, and I ran the strategy, as I did the fight against the Cabinet Office over the Crossman Diaries. [In] the end we won the right to publish the diaries, though in the book which Harold Evans later commissioned to record the case my name did not appear, to my great interest. I didn’t object — I came to know, over the succeeding twelve years, Harold Evans’s strengths and weaknesses better than any man in Fleet Street.”

This blunt rectifying impulse is alone of its kind in Hamilton’s overview of his career, taped during cancer treatment by his historian son, Nigel, and published in 1989 as Editor-in-Chief: The Fleet Street Memoirs of Sir Denis Hamilton. The reams of exalted make-believe that two decades later would fill Evans’s own My Paper Chase, treating Hamilton (where present at all) as in effect a hapless extra in Harry’s biopic, were his posthumous reward. That aside, an Evans-centric prism impedes grasp of these Sunday Times years. They are far more complicated, and thus far more interesting, than chronic romanticism and veneration allow.

The lord of misrule

The Sunday Times’s illumination of shadowy worlds added to its own glare. But Harry, the editor as impresario, always had much more on his plate — as well as in his pockets, up his sleeves and under his hat. On the inside, life at the paper became more of a rollicking Range Rover ride across bumpy terrain.

Prue Leith, a freelance food writer, once entered Harry’s office as he faced the window, doing star-jumps. “As he shook out his arms and legs, he said, ‘Oh, I just have to get rid of some energy.’” Skiing was a new passion, he went on, and — anticipating reality TV by decades — he intended to commission a band of journos also in their forties to learn its joys. He did too, and a book (How We Learned to Ski) came out of it. All the while, he was completing the instructional Editing and Design: A Five Volume Manual of English, Typography and Layout (comprising Essential English for Journalists and Writers, Handling Newspaper Text, News Headlines: An Illustrated Guide, Pictures on a Page: Photojournalism, Graphics and Picture Editing, and Newspaper Design).

Harry “understood the craft of journalism better than any of us,” said his colleague Magnus Linklater, editor of the “Spectrum” pages, who also recalled daytime squash games at a Pall Mall club where he “would turn up late, clutching a sheaf of papers and gallop to the telephone. Then he’d scurry into the changing rooms, talking nineteen to the dozen. I can never remember him motionless. His walk was a half-run. He was exhausting to compete against… and liked beating me, partly because I was fourteen years younger.” Linklater, an urbane Scots Etonian, also spoke of Harry’s “combination of intellectual ferment with almost naiveté,” as when he would buttonhole the corridor “tea ladies” to ask if they found the paper’s stories offensive.

At Gray’s Inn Road he managed to be at once ubiquitous and elusive. “‘Where’s Harry?’ was the cry that went up most days on the editorial floor,” wrote features sub Elizabeth Grice, where the editor “was quite often a blur. A slight, mercurial figure, he moved so fast and with such will-o’-the-wisp unpredictability between the editorial floors and the print room that it was impossible to locate him with any certainty. Sightings were passed from reporter to reporter in the event that someone needed to know. He boasted that his door was always open but he was not always inside it.”

Harry’s relentlessness could irk colleagues, as when at the last moment he would needlessly sub-edit copy (or duplicate the paper’s chess notation on a miniature set to confirm its accuracy). It could also elicit awe, in terms again reminiscent of Milner on Stead: “He would go on debating, with the printers screaming for ‘copy,’ till he sometimes left himself less than half an hour to write or dictate a leading article; then he would dash it off at top-speed and embody in it, with astonishing facility, the whole gist and essence of the preceding discussion.”

Richard Dowden recalls a 10pm alert that a rival paper was reporting the collapse of DeLorean, a flagship sports car company in Northern Ireland. When Dowden got through to the owner, Harry, “dancing with agitation,” seized the phone, “scribbled some notes and threw them at me. ‘Clear the front page!’ he shouted. I couldn’t read Harry’s shorthand so he began to type at frenetic speed. He gave it to the compositor. In a matter of minutes Harry Evans had taken lightning shorthand, typed out the story, and relaid the front page, making the interview with [John] De Lorean most of it. He then went to the stone, where the hot type was set, and within minutes the presses were rolling again. He then began calling government ministers. The problem was that the story was wrong. But as a newspaperman Harry Evans had an unsurpassed brilliance.”

Dowden’s vignette is in fact from Evans’s Times coda, a month before his sacking by Murdoch, thus evidence that he hadn’t changed. Many colleagues’ fondness is similarly fringed with ambivalence. The Sunday Times’s literary editor Claire Tomalin compared working under Evans to “being at the court of Louis XIV. When he beamed his attention fully on any one of us, we were all, men and women, a little in love with him… Harry was loved, even if we sometimes swore at him when his attention was distracted or his favours divided.”

The sense of a quasi-monarchy under arbitrary rule persists, albeit infused with genuine warmth. Philip Norman, whose competition entry had earned him a place on staff, was touched by the editor’s balm: “With Harold Evans it was more than working for a newspaper, you felt personally that you worked for Harry. Editors tended to be sulking autocrats… but Harry was everywhere, running from the subs desk to the writers, perpetually in motion… He was the boy king, Henry V, and anybody would have done anything for him. He didn’t overlook anybody, we were all special.” For Godfrey Hodgson, the editor “was, in fact, loved by most of his staff, not an easy thing for a man with power over the careers and reputations of ferociously ambitious and competitive people.”

A recollection by Knightley hints at the ambiguities at play. “[Harold Evans] wore his editor’s skills so lightly. He was master of every branch of journalism. He could lay out a page, choose a photograph, dash off a leader, write a headline. The only thing he couldn’t do was say ‘No.’ So he gave a job to anyone who asked, which meant that the Sunday Times was wildly overmanned. It had so many curious staffing arrangements that I doubt anyone really knew how many journalists worked there. Or what they did. Evans never tried to bring order to the editorial department’s creative chaos. He simply encouraged journalists to get on with whatever appealed to them. Such freedom was unprecedented and I mourn its passing.”

Where some regarded his anti-method as wasteful and damaging, Harry saw only benefit, citing his promotion of Elaine Potter to work alongside Bruce Page: “She’d not had a great deal of experience in journalism, but she’d acquired an Oxford Ph.D., and, as important, squatter’s rights to a freelancer’s chair in the features department. Some of our most successful recruits were squatters; they were tested by the exigencies of sudden demands for labour and the best, like Elaine, survived with the complicity of editors until I could find a place on staff.”

Potter, commending Harry as “fierce in pursuit of wrongdoing,” and for his stress on “the importance of repetition, of staying with a story if you wanted to make a difference,” says — with much unspoken between the lines — he “surrounded himself with forceful journalists, all of whom wanted to be heard, none of whom would readily give way to the considerable editor of a great newspaper. Undaunted he would do battle with this fierce crew who spent even more time jousting with each other.”

Harry’s support, job-enhancing and moral, could inspire great loyalty. Marjorie Wallace, enlisted at a Highgate tennis club by a figure of “missionary zeal” whom she at first thought “slightly crazy” as he insisted on finding her a child-minder that very afternoon so she could start work, found him “a true crusader with fierce moral purpose who put his head above every parapet.” Well into her stint at the Sunday Times, she expected to lose her job after confessing to her editor that, under family pressures, her copy had long dried up, but instead was told with a smile: “Don’t worry. Every journalist has a fallow period.” Yet she also writes that Harry “could be capricious, frustrating and infuriating. When a promotion came up at the paper, he would offer at least five of us the job before leaving us to sort out who got it between ourselves. It created a highly competitive environment that had its ruthless side.”

Harry thrived as lord of this misrule, all of it kept afloat by the most innocently enlightened of press moguls, Roy Thomson, who had defined “the social mission of every great newspaper” as in part “to provide a home for a large number of salaried eccentrics.” But misfiring appointments and ballooning payrolls did cause strain between Evans and Hamilton. “In a couple of extreme cases I had contracts rescinded, which led to a showdown with [Evans] in which I said that recruitment above a certain salary had to have my permission,” the editor-in-chief recounted.

Such reproval cut no ice with Harry, whose derision for his paymasters was a career motif. He had paid big sums to get inside information on thalidomide and Paris’s DC-10 crash in 1974. His ill-starred year at the Times featured rapid turnover where incomers were better paid than those who left or were let go, both factors triggering staff resentment. Visiting the Northern Echo in 2000, having received an award at the nearby university, he was asked by its newish editor for a word of advice. Harry’s pithy reply, with its show-off expletive, was: “Don’t take any notice of the fucking beancounters.” No editor ever regarded a proprietor’s bounty with as much airy contempt.

The liberated zone

In the many-ringed circus that was the Sunday Times of the 1960s and 70s, the colour magazine — design pioneer, aesthetic blast, sales magnet, radical chic show — went its own way. It too would be embroiled by tensions over cash, authority and personnel during Harry’s time at the paper, its redoubt on Thomson House’s fourth floor becoming, he confided, a “source of enormous frustration.” The awkward dance that ensued between its autonomy and his search for control doesn’t fit easy accounts of his brilliant career, which means it gets no traction there.

Dreamed up in 1961 by Roy Thomson and the marketing department, brought to fruition in February 1962 by Hamilton, the then “section,” or informally “supplement” — the law barring magazine publishing on a Sunday — had withstood gigantic losses in its first year to become an editorial success and lucrative advertising funnel. Hamilton’s strategic confidence plus intrepid marketing had overcome that nervy start. Capping the turnaround was the team’s anniversary “Moscow picnic” in February 1963, when the chirpy Roy Thomson interviewed Khrushchev and offered to buy Pravda.

Under a coterie of independent, exacting spirits — notably artist-editor Mark Boxer and literary editor Francis Wyndham, art director Michael Rand and graphic designer David King — the magazine’s blend of big subjects, top names and bold visuals rivalled Insight in defining the Sunday Times to the public. And its renown was as great, imaginative openness to swirling Sixties currents making it part of the decade’s “revolt into style.” The newspaper’s id to Insight’s super-ego, it might be said.

The magazine was piloted in its first three years by Boxer, another astute Hamilton pick. (“I felt he had the necessary kind of iconoclastic attitude, a chap I’d have to restrain rather than ginger up.”) Mark “lived on the front edge of life,” said his successor Godfrey Smith, himself more a Falstaff, under whom the lotus years took wing, with their epic lunches and staff jaunts, one such, to Sarajevo for the feature “A Day in The Life Of,” spawning no copy at all because Michael Rand judged the photographs too weak to use.

Hamilton’s personal attachment to his baby (“perhaps the most successful innovation in postwar quality journalism,” he called it) was such that he had kept the magazine out of Evans’s hands, ostensibly to allow the new editor to focus on the main paper, though he later elaborated: “I confess that in my heart I was really worried stiff about [Evans’s] at times impulsive approach.” The magazine was granted years of latitude to resist intruders and replenish itself.

The fourth floor had the seductive thrill of a liberated zone. For those outside, it was a problem child: “frivolous, self-absorbed, anarchic, [prone to] self-indulgence and money-wasting” were the vibes picked up by a young James Fox as he went to work alongside Wyndham and “hard-working, hard-typing” fashion editor Meriel McCooey, their office the magazine’s “subversive cultural centre and magnet for visitors.” That the latter included depraved gangsters with contrarian appeal, from the Kray twins to the predatory far-left guru Gerry Healy, whose acolytes included the Redgrave theatrical family, had a taste of self-styled vanguards paying court to each other.

Evans recoiled more from the magazine’s distinct angle on news stories, as for example when the texts accompanying Don McCullin’s photographs of Nigeria’s civil war had greater sympathy for the Biafran side than the paper’s reporting. He “would want to pull out articles — usually on grounds of taste — when they were already on the cylinder, at the cost of thousands of pounds,” wrote Fox. A chance to bridle the magazine came in 1972 when Godfrey Smith’s move to associate editor at the paper freed Evans to deploy the versatile Magnus Linklater behind enemy lines. (“Go in and sort that lot out,” was the brief.)

The new broom soon warranted the choice by unearthing £70,000 worth in paid-for commissions lying idle. But the magazine’s uncommon ethos and “brilliant people” inveigled Linklater, whose expensive advance to Patagonia-bound Bruce Chatwin convinced Evans that the magazine was “self-indulgent, mired in triviality, out of touch.” Linklater rode accusations of “going native” for two years before Harry abruptly replaced him with the breezy populariser Hunter Davies, a pal from Durham and Manchester days, whose stab at curbing the renegade took a year to fail. The struggle for control, in Fox’s words, was “eventually settled by Murdoch.”

Linklater’s farewell party, within hours of returning from lunch to be told of his transfer to assistant news editor (no one was ever pushed out of the old Sunday Times), had combined mutiny and wake. Harry dared to come, Meriel McCooey, his very antithesis, yelling at his ashen face: “You! I mean you! William fucking Randolph Hearst! Do you know what you’ve done?” In the silence, Michael Rand’s remark to art assistant Roger Law rippled across the room and sank deep: “The party’s over, boys.”

The twilight

Fleet Street’s teeming warrens, marinated in alcohol and trade gossip, rarely spilled their own guild secrets further than Private Eye’s “Street of Shame” column. Newspapers’ domestic life was off limits, as the playwright Arnold Wesker found in 1971 when Evans gave him permission to “wander freely through the offices of the Sunday Times to gather material,” only to find that his dramatic theme — journalists’ corrosive desire to cut everyone down to their size — made his work unwelcome. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Wesker’s 1972 play, The Journalists, based on his eight weeks at the paper, was scuttled when the actors refused to perform it. Between artistic defects and the tug of Healy’s cult, the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, there was a lot of blame to go round.

A whiff of the power games and raw emotions at the Sunday Times did filter into intellectual journalism’s periodic overviews of the news machine. Two liberal observers were notably alert to the paper’s internal fissures and shrewd about Evans’s capacity to handle them. Anthony Sampson, in the third, 1972, edition of his Anatomy of Britain, sketched a publication “driven on a loose rein” by Evans, who is “pulled in several directions” by journalists “competing fiercely with each other for exposures and scoops.” The Sunday Times “likes to give something for everyone: it has left-wing politics and right-wing politics, exposures and court circulars, and it has romped ahead on this formula. But its corporate character, partly as a result, is uncertain.”

In a similar vein, an anonymous New Statesman profile in 1975, bearing the stamp of the magazine’s editor Anthony Howard, used W.T. Stead’s demise aboard the Titanic to propose that Evans’s “unwieldy vessel” needed its pilot “to set a course”:

“The major decisions he takes; the more mundane ones he puts off. The result is a paper where no one quite knows what is happening, where the wrong men are left in the wrong jobs, and an almost accidental ‘policy’ of divide-and-rule causes some unhappiness and irritation. The man who did not like taking unpleasant decisions on the Northern Echo still fears unpopularity. If Harold Evans realised how much actual authority, and professional respect, as well as affection, he commands among his staff, he might (as one of his executives put it) ‘calm down and organise a better newspaper.’ But his combination of talents is also his weakness: intelligent, charming, a brilliant journalist, he still has to prove it, still has to be seen to be good.”

These judicious appraisals of the upper deck skirted the iceberg below: the unremitting war between management and print unions, with journalists caught in the middle. Newspaper production was at the mercy of “chapels,” or union branches, each led by a “father” who acted as a spiky guardian of shop floor customs and his extended family’s interests. There were fifty-six chapels at Thomson House alone. A stoppage by one, on the flimsiest of grounds, would halt the paper. In the mid 1970s, the Sunday Times was losing millions of copies a year. (“Industrial anarchy,” Harry called it.) “The management lived in fear of strikes, and we were all obliged never to offend a printer,” wrote Claire Tomalin in A Life of My Own.

The Sunday Times’s revenues were badly hit, its ambition to grow sales to two million long busted, though it stayed profitable. The Times, less secure in the tough weekday market, was in dire trouble, draining each year £2 million from Thomson’s coffers, fortunately swelled by his agile investments in television, travel and North Sea oil. William Rees-Mogg, the paper’s editor, likened the beleaguered Times to “a man at the end of a windswept pier in some cold and out-of-season resort.” Tim Austin, its long-serving style guru, voiced despair in more prosaic terms: “You didn’t know if the paper was going to come out at night. You would work for it for ten hours and then [the unions] would pull the plug and you had wasted ten hours of your life.”

To his last breath, Roy Thomson implored Denis Hamilton to introduce modern typesetting, already operating across his American stable. The proprietor, comically frugal in his own life, lavish with his cherished papers (“Spend what you want, Denis, but never tell me the amount!”) died in 1976, ownership passing to his less engaged son, Kenneth. After two more years of attrition, a frazzled TNL board stopped the presses in hope of forcing a quick agreement to introduce new technology in phases, along with pay and staff reforms. Instead, most TNL workers took jobs at the papers’ rivals, who eagerly boosted output to draw homeless readers.

The Gray’s Inn Road hiatus lasted through most of 1979, that hinge year, a mammoth £40 million loss, and a silo of resentments primed to burst. And all for nothing: when the presses again rolled, war instantly resumed. In 1980, the journalists — who had been paid through the lockdown — joined the fray, striking for a second big increase in months. For Hamilton, “it was the last straw. Without the journalists’ loyalty we had nothing left to fight for.” Kenneth, the new Lord Thomson, tired of the hassle, put the group on the market.

While the Sunday Times was still a going concern, the Times faced the abyss, as Rees-Mogg’s leader (“How to Kill a Newspaper”) had grasped on their restart. A disentangling of ownership would doom the establishment flagship; a joint purchase might see it unloaded anyway after a decent interval. Any new proprietor needed tools to deal with that implacable iceberg. The papers were back on the streets, at the behest of the chapels. This time, the party really was over.

The seachange

It took until March 1981 for Rupert Murdoch to clinch the title deeds to Thomson House. His News International Ltd, the British arm of his group, was the last viable bid once Lord Rothermere’s Mail stable, which coveted only the Sunday Times, was discounted, and Evans’s fundraising for a buyout of his paper by management, senior editors and advisers had got nowhere (those damned beancounters). “Harold Evans, though he made a great show of leading a cavalry charge intent on buying out the owners, soon threw his hat in with Murdoch’s camp,” recalled Hamilton, while Linklater said Evans was “open to the charge of bad faith [as he] switched sides.”

It was an endorsement Evans spent the rest of his days wriggling away from. In January, following their first conversation, he had described Murdoch as “robust and refreshing. I liked him hugely. There is no doubt he loves newspapers,” and — having consulted staff who he said were of similar mind — confirmed his “preference” in a private note to the Thomson executive Gordon Brunton (“between Murdoch and Rothermere I myself would choose Murdoch for a variety of reasons [though as you know I believe systematic safeguards are required]”).

Harry, like most of those involved, had come to believe that News International was the least worst outcome in business terms. But the deal’s mesh of personality, politics and law made it an enduring source of dispute. It had been smoothed by Murdoch’s courting of Margaret Thatcher, prime minister since May 1979 (when Harry was among a chunk of London’s liberal-left dignitaries to vote for her), and by her trade minister John Biffen’s non-referral of the Murdoch company’s bid to an oversight commission that might have barred it on grounds of excessive market share. These episodes were later invested with ever more tortuous conspiratorial significance, Harry still swinging the lead pitchfork long after the crowd had melted away.

The larger truth is that there were no good options. TNL’s woeful stalemate crystallised that of British society in the period. In each case, years of dislocation were unavoidable, though its precise form was full of contingencies. In the shorter term, the Times could well have gone under without a quick resolution. For his part, Evans ever regretted accepting Murdoch’s invite to edit it (“my ambition got the better of my judgement”) and leaving the Sunday Times (“my power-base as a defender of press freedom”). But had he stayed, it would be under a more vigilant owner and exacting financial regimen. For things to stay the same in his fiefdom, they were bound to change.

In the event, he did go over to the Times, clutching Murdoch’s non-interference guarantees, which were to prove worthless once Rupert’s henchmen Richard Searby and managing editor Gerald Long started turning the screws. The editorial floor was uneasy too. Did Harry metamorphose in the crossing? Not at all, he was ever his ebullient self. This hardened the disfavour of senior Times staff, who (the newspaper’s official historian wrote), “looked upon Evans and the smart and cocky journalists he brought with him from the Sunday Times as aliens from the planet Lower Class. The foot soldiers too went into shock. Here was an editor who rewrote their copy and their headlines, redesigned pages and didn’t go home until he had conducted a post-mortem of the day’s work.”

Yes, good old Harry. One who saw it coming was Denis Hamilton, who added to this litany the editor’s “taking over the duties of his leader-writers, leaving them unemployed” and “constantly (as he had done with me) overspending, or temporarily disguising expenditure.” Hamilton, who as TNL’s chair was key in endorsing Murdoch (“not a perfect purchaser” but “the best available”), had warned him against the choice of “my own protégé from the Sunday Times” (an equally rare note): “I told Murdoch it would turn out disastrously, and it did.” Evans’s appointment was “Murdoch’s fault, from start to finish, a great error of proprietorial judgment,” and not the only one, for he “was a poor picker of men.” In deprecating Evans’s and now Murdoch’s calibre as recruiters, Hamilton does not reflect on his own; but the undertow of regret over Evans in his memoirs (not Murdoch, it was far too late in the day for that) is tangible if unadmitted.

Evans’s tenure began in March 1981 amid a morass on the home front that offered news riches: Thatcher vulnerable, an economy sunk in recession, urban riots, IRA hunger strikes, Labour’s Bennite left on the up, a breakaway to the party’s right, much talk of political “realignment.” For six months, he wrote of the company’s new boss, “Murdoch was an electric presence, vivid and amusing, direct and fast in his decisions, and a good ally against the old guard… I did find his buccaneering, can-do style very refreshing.” Soon those same qualities ended the romance, hitched as they were to overt editorial interference in the paper’s coverage of Mrs Thatcher’s economic travails.

Without Murdoch’s support Harry was exposed, even more so as he lacked aides with a reliable political compass. At the Sunday Times, olympian political editor Hugo Young had been Harry’s lodestar. A belated bid to entice Hugo to the Times culminated on 2 March 1982 with a desperate memo in third-person style, filed in Young’s outstanding archive: “his editor would be utterly committed to him,” vowed Harry, even suggesting Hugo might “be well placed as an insider to succeed to the chair.” The pleading bullishness was all too forlorn, as was soon confirmed by Young’s diplomatic reply (“I feel I can pursue my journalistic interests, and help maintain our shared interests, here for the moment,” was its gist), the last clause presaging his move to the Guardian in 1984 when Murdoch denied him the Sunday Times editorship.

The fin de siècle air of this bleak exchange was appropriate: a week later, Murdoch told Evans to step down, which he did after six histrionic days. An always unwise and often strained cohabitation — both men having arrived at the Times as brash interlopers with differing ambitions — had met its foretold end, leaving rival accounts to pick over the carcass for decades. In this context, Andrew Knight’s coda to the Times’s own obituary of Evans is apt. Knight, a long-term News International affiliate and chair of Times Newspapers since 2012, recalls that Harry’s early choice of Bernard Donoughue as leader-writer and “opinion guru” introduced a “personality ingredient” that “signalled to me his likely demise at the Times.”

Knight observes that the “undogmatically centrist” Harry’s “lack of nous” in hiring Donoughue — who had advised Labour prime minister James Callaghan before working for Knight at the Economist — “caused loss of sympathy inside the paper” and “gave extra ammunition” to a Times staff “who did not enjoy Harry the way his tight-knit Sunday legion had done.” It still surprises, he writes, that Harry, “though a man of action and warmth rather than strong politics, did not divine the likely office politics of his new daily newspaper when it played so effectively to Murdoch’s ‘clear-water’ world view. Murdoch’s was a post-Seventies view already in course of being borne out by events. I was not there but I suspect it was not was not a hard decision, knowing the staff turmoil on The Times, for the independent national directors of Times Newspapers to agree to replace Harry with [his deputy] Charles Douglas-Home.”

In principle, Donoughue was well placed to grasp the politics of his own arrival at Gray’s Inn Road, for he had noted (and in doing so would make famous) a quiet, back-seat remark made by the avuncular Callaghan during the 1979 election campaign. Bernard had said that “with a little luck, and a few policy initiatives here and there, we [Labour] might just squeeze through.” The PM replied: “I should not be too sure. You know there are times, perhaps once every thirty years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now a sea-change and it is for Mrs Thatcher.”

Callaghan’s intuition proved sound, though a bodyguard of auxiliaries would be needed to bend history in the right direction. Murdoch’s rout of the print unions in 1985–86, enabling the newspaper industry’s makeover, added oil. By that mid decade, the world of Harry Evans in his pomp on the Gray’s Inn Road was becoming as remote as the Ashton-under-Lyne Weekly Reporter. But a casualty of progress, a music-hall remnant in the film-star age? Far from it. With trademark élan, Harry reached the other side having pulled off a rare midlife combo: Atlantic crossing, new career footing, revamped private life. If that too would link Murdoch and Evans, deeper still was the reciprocity of their casting: menacing dark versus radiant light, with nothing in between.

The second life

This second life had a long gestation. Donoughue’s diary on 27 October 1976, in the midst of a British financial crisis, records: “I went to see Harry Evans in the flat of his lovely new girlfriend — Tina Brown. He told me that the Sunday Times had got its story that the IMF would insist on a sterling parity at $1.50 from Washington… Harry is still angling for the Director Generalship of the BBC.” The two men were players at the game of power: Donoughue had ambitions of his own to run the Bank of England. But over the private life of “one of my closest friends,” he was well behind the curve.

Tina, at twenty-two, was a kinetic Oxford graduate whose pen, vim and allure had by then felled an eclectic swathe of London’s male glitterati. It was three years since Harry, given Tina’s New Statesman clippings by the agent Pat Kavanagh, had asked Sunday Times features editor Ian Jack to commission her, sponsored her stay as a New York freelance, and lined up a staff contract (blocked by the journalists’ union chapel as Tina hadn’t served time on a local paper, to Harry’s fury at Jack’s expense). From late 1974, wrote Harry, “[we] corresponded about her work, and then about newspapers and literature and life, and so our relationship began. I fell in love by post.” Private Eye, already taunting Harry’s new motor-bike-and-black-leather look, was soon noting events where “[the] Dame was accompanied by his beautiful and talented young discovery Tina Brown.”

Enid Evans, wife of Harry for twenty-five years until their 1978 divorce, and mother of their three children, continued to teach, work as a magistrate, and support educational initiatives in the family’s Highgate, north London home patch until her death in 2013. “We preserved an affectionate friendship that has endured to this day,” wrote Harry in 2009, describing their union as “serene.” (Harry’s gestures at self-inquiry work to deflect it: “I told myself it was a typical mid-life crisis”; “Hamilton was a master delegator. I was a meddler. He was reticent. I wasn’t.”)

Harry and Tina married in August 1981 at the East Hampton, Long Island retreat of the Washington Post’s Ben Bradlee, who had “made a second marriage with his paper’s intrepid and glamorous young Style writer, Sally Quinn.” (In fact a third.) “After champagne and cake, we drove into Manhattan for a honeymoon, all of one night at the Algonquin.” Work called: Tina back to London as editor of the high-society Tatler, Harry “to meet Henry Kissinger at the Rockefeller family estate in the Pocantino hills of New York State where I was editing a second volume of his White House years.”

The event stands as a fitting entrée to luxuriant decades of professional and social whirl, the British duo’s super-networked celebrity at once status marker and career enhancer. While Tina edited Vanity Fair (1984–92), the New Yorker (1992–98) and the Daily Beast (2008–13), in between blowing upwards of $50 million on her Miramax-funded Talk magazine (1999–2002), Harry spent a protracted New York apprenticeship editing US News & World Report, perennial third to Time and Newsweek, then a sleek travel monthly with an ethical tinge (“The Harry Evans called back and said: Malcolm Forbes and some other billionaires are taking their yachts up the Amazon. Would you be interested in covering that for our first issue?”) before reaching the big league in 1990 as editorial director of Random House, where over seven years his penchant for star names, vast advances and hyperactive marketing swelled then near burst his own repute.

Through a frenetic period, Tina and Harry gained extra cachet as A-list, paparazzi-buzzed Manhattan party hosts to grandee celebrities (think Bill Clinton, Nora Ephron, Bianca Jagger, Henry Kissinger, Madonna, Salman Rushdie, Simon Schama), each gathering signalled by their triplex apartment’s furniture being consigned to a giant truck which would trundle around Manhattan for the duration. A book might be its pretext, the author its prime guest, “social butterfly” Harry doing a turn at the microphone — which, as Jacob Bernstein says in a neat portrait of these vanished times, “Mr Evans did not have to be an expert on a subject to monopolise.”

The apogee of their power coupledom, and perhaps of a brief age of liberal swank tout court, lay in Harry’s fundraising for Tony Blair before the 1997 election, when New Labour’s made men would fly in to parley with wealthy influencers such as investment banker and New York Review of Books contributor Felix Rohatyn. The journalist and Clinton ally Sidney Blumenthal hosted a Washington party where Tony’s speech had its obligatory self-deprecating jest, his “I remember Tina well. We went to Oxford together. She gave the most fabulous parties to which she never invited me” the cue for Tina to complete the double act with “We’ll soon put that right!”

Such jaunty mateship provoked transatlantic chatter that Tina or Harry might take a big job in a Blair administration: envoy in Washington for her, arts minister for him? In turn, their London media slots, charity hooplas, or honours (Brown’s CBE in 2000, Evans’s knighthood in 2004) gave plugged-in locals a vicarious taste of their Manhattan aura. But distance mainly kept apart the two segments of the Tina-and-Harry show and of their individual careers. In London, Harry was journalism’s departed knight, the local head boy made vaguely good across the pond; in New York, he was Tina’s consort — dubbed “Mr Harold Brown” by the gossip queen Liz Smith — then, via an opportune vault, her co-star. The prescribed terms had no room for seeing Harry’s story as one, noting its recurrences, or considering that his American trajectory might cast retrospective light on his British one.

Most snippets that did reach London matched the frame, as when Evans’s sponsoring of disgraced Clinton aide Dick Morris’s memoir unleashed a “wave of indignation” in New York; so “shaken” was he by the furore, reported the Independent’s John Carlin, that “were [Evans] to receive a flattering offer back in Britain, he might be tempted to return. After all, back home he is regarded by his peers as a rock of journalistic integrity. In America, whose culture he has manifestly understood but cannot wholeheartedly embrace, he has come to be regarded as an unprincipled opportunist — in much the same way, in other words, that he regards his nemesis, Rupert Murdoch.”

The souring mood led to investigative auditing of strains in the couple’s media dominion. Suzanna Andrews’s “The Trouble with Harry,” a formidable New York magazine cover profile in July 1997, sparked by the “amalgam of theatrics, money and controversy” that Evans had “gleefully detonated” in promoting Morris’s work, went on to track how “the marketing champ of the book business,” noted for his “eager courting of the famous and powerful,” had become “the poster boy for the publishing crisis.” A Random House shuffle that raised Ann Godoff to editor-in-chief and marginalised Evans, plus evidence of colleagues’ dislike of his way of operating (variously “cynical,” “tasteless,” “downmarket and shameless”), gave the investigation further topicality.

Evans was moved to a top-floor office — piquantly, days after Blair entered Downing Street — for what became a six-month sojourn before his departure. In an echo of his unhappy Times finale, the backdrop to Harry’s ousting from the Random House frontline was a divided staff. Again, most insiders were relieved. Robert Kolker’s “Waiting for Godoff,” published in March 2001, quoted one that “Evans’s event-planning department came from Hollywood, and his mammoth book advances sometimes seemed to come from there too,” while a “long-established star” said of Godoff: “Harry thought he was a character playing a publisher. She’s the real deal.” Marlon Brando (a $5 million advance on another fiasco) was out; Arundhati Roy, Susan Orlean and Zadie Smith in. Ruth Reichl, food writer and memoirist, describing Godoff as “probably the anti-Harry,” illustrated the point by distinguishing “people who constantly try to remind you of how important they are, and people who constantly try to make you forget it.”

Another sign that New Yorkers were cooling on the Tina–Harry show was a book-length dissection of the hot couple’s Manhattan years. Judy Bachrach’s Tina and Harry Come to America, an acrid if thorough account of the couple’s “uses of power” in the city’s circuits of wealth, glamour and literary commerce, proved ill-starred in its release date, July 2001, and its racy tone. Yet Bachrach’s argument, and Andrews provides more discreet back-up in Evans’s case, has a kernel: that Tina–Harry’s forte was to be the advance guard in American upper-end publishing’s move from seriousness (if also sluggishness) to vaudeville.

The patronage of two moguls was central to the couple’s ascendancy: S.I. Newhouse Jr. (owner of Condé Nast, the New Yorker from 1985, and Random House 1980–98), Mort Zuckerman (owner of US News and World Report and several papers, plus Atlantic Monthly Press 1980–99). A third, broadcasting magnate Barry Diller, was a key Tina patron. An ad hoc part of the deal was Si and Mort’s resort to expediency in handling their charges. When Harry was catapulted to Random House, the “whole editorial wing — Bob Loomis, Jason Epstein — was against him,” and staff were “openly defiant,” an editor there told Suzanna Andrews. “Everybody was sure that Harry had gotten the job because Si wanted to keep Tina happy.”

But Si, “the Howard Hughes of the media world,” in Nicholas Latimer’s term, and Mort, the mercurial real-estate tycoon and “ultimate parvenu,” also godparent to one of the couple’s two children, found Tina and Harry equally adept in the uses of expediency, which in their case lay on a spectrum from tawdry via crafty to creepy. At the former end was a light pre-publication mugging of William Shawcross’s Evans-sceptical biography of Murdoch, carried in Tina’s second issue of the New Yorker, which sparked the wrath of Shawcross’s friend, novelist John Le Carré.

The pincer at work on the New Yorker’s Daniel Menaker struck him on the way to meet Harry following an out-of-the-blue call, as described in his wry memoir The Mistake. “Where are you going at this time of day?,” a colleague asked. “‘To see Harry Evans,’ I say. ‘Oh, no!’ she says. And at this point, with a cold, sick feeling, I realise what’s going on: Tina now wants me out of the magazine and has persuaded her husband to offer me a job.”

Menaker would flourish as a book editor, starting with Primary Colors (his title too). But still. “In work,” Harry wrote in My Paper Chase, “Tina and I remained the mutual support team we’d always been in editing and writing at all levels.” This opus, par for the course, had no mention of Menaker, nor of Dick Morris, nor Wyndham or McCooey, nor Wesker, to name just these. Donoghue pops up once, unavoidably, for his diary is quoted: a cabinet minister is daunted by Harry’s “granite” toughness on open government. Mort Zuckerman, a mainstay for fifteen years — one of those “capricious billionaires” to whom Evans was a “courtier,” wrote media analyst Michael Wolff — gets two condescending references (“I told my boss Zuckerman he’d completed his apprenticeship as an owner in record time,” goes one).

The creepiness quotient soared when Harry’s $2.5 million advance for Morris’s dud provoked the New York Times’s Maureen Dowd to imagine Evans entreating J.D. Salinger (“Look, Jerry, fiction is in big trouble. This is the age of the memoir. I got Colin [Powell] $6 million. I got Dick $2.5 million, I got Christopher Reeve $3 million… I’m an expensive hustler… Join the party, Jerry… Tina will serialise it”). Brown’s New Yorker — whose advertisers she had hosted at an event promoting Morris’s book, with the author as star guest — got further into the mire by disparaging Dowd in its pages, again without mention of its editor’s interest. Evans, in his often brittle interview with Andrews, referred to Dowd as “that silly woman in Washington.”

Evans’s gaucherie towards some women, hinted at in Andrews’s coy reference to his “famously flirtatious manner,” is pursued with relish in Judy Bachrach’s book. Elsewhere, a Manchester pal and later Sunday Times colleague, Peter Dunn, says that “in truth, there was always a puppyish innocence to [Harry’s] games.” That aside, his intolerance of criticism — or even alarm at its prospect — could go much farther than being “magnificently aggrieved” (Andrews again) when interviewers proved other than fawning. Evans sent frequent hassling letters to Bachrach and her publishers as she researched her work, then used Britain’s litigant-friendly defamation laws to thwart its release in the country. Bachrach says she was “bent out of shape” by Evans’s sheaf of “ominous” preemptive complaints, including an enigmatic warning that the author “would see [the couple’s] whitened bones as you walk through the desert.”

Tina and Harry’s brazenness was a motif of their two New York decades of “ghastly chic” (Dunn’s label, in a New Statesman review of Bachrach’s proscribed book, dated 10 September 2001). Harry’s writs blitz on Private Eye continued, securing one win, Donoughue on that occasion his joint plaintiff. “There is something to be said for British libel law because it encourages better journalism,” he would say as he went on to intimidate the gadfly Toby Young, then half Evans’s seventy years, whose latest piece had teased that Evans, given a post-Random House berth by Mort Zuckerman at the tabloid New York Daily News (to its staff’s dismay), might be running out of friends. Evans — who had the nerve to tag Young a “journalistic stalker” — demanded via London’s courts an apology, legal fees, damages and that he “desist forthwith from further defaming, denigrating and ridiculing Mr Evans and his wife.”

Evans would then upset even Mort, to whom he was “the decathlon champion of print,” by gratuitously puffing Tina’s buzzy new venture, Talk, on the Daily News’s front page. In the wake of Talk’s hyped-to-the-Miramax launch party at the Statue of Liberty, costing half a million dollars — “a decadent fin-de-siècle bash for Hollywood stars, supermodels and assorted cultural and business titans” — it now had Harry’s “outer-borough, lean and mean tabloid machine” rooting for it.

There is enough material here for an entire conference, as the psychiatrist says in Fawlty Towers. The point is underlined when Bernard (now Lord) Donoughue’s diaries — at their worst a cloying inventory of Labour and establishment cronyism across five decades — reach May 1996, twenty years on from that night at Tina’s, and a lunch with Harry at the Garrick club:

“Harry was in great form. We discussed all our past deeds and misdeeds. He was delighted I had defeated Murdoch on the Broadcasting Bill, sharing the sense of revenge for Murdoch’s appalling treatment of us on the Times. We both agreed we made a mistake in 1982 in not joining Melvyn Bragg in taking over Tyne-Tees television. We would all now be multimillionaires (Melvyn is anyway)… He and his wife Tina Brown have done very well in America, an astonishing success story… Today he still refers to lovely Enid as ‘the wife’ and Tina as Tina. Nobody can help loving Harry and he gets forgiven for everything. At lunch we discussed friendship and loyalty. He said there are no true friends in New York… once you have failed at something no one wants to know you. Drinks in the evening with Melvyn Bragg, another true friend. He is very keen to take over the Arts Council when we’re in government.”

The Murdoch motor

Tina and Harry adjusted to a less flamboyant epoch with several gear changes. Brown launched her Women in the World network in 2009, a year after the Daily Beast, and added The Vanity Fair Diaries to The Diana Chronicles; Evans’s long, late phase as oracle wended through Guardian columns, BBC radio talks, editorship-at-large with Thomson Reuters from 2011, chairing the European Press Awards jury, the hagiographical 2016 documentary Attacking the Devil: Harold Evans and the Last Nazi War Crime, and his last book, 2017’s Do I Make Myself Clear? Why Writing Well Matters, whose didactic spirit was in character if out of fashion. Through it all, one thing that never receded was Harry’s obsession with Rupert Murdoch.

Invariant as this was, its substance could veer from unremitting rancour. Four years after the Times bust-up, Wapping’s newspaper revolution — anticipated by Eddy Shah’s short-lived Today and crowned by Andreas Whittam-Smith & co’s Independent — eventually led Harry, long averse to the print unions’ militant arm, to stand with his enemy’s enemy. “Rupert Murdoch did a great service to the British press when he defeated real gangsters in the press unions who were killing newspaper after newspaper. He beat them by ruthlessness and cunning,” he told the Indian author Seema Chishti in 2007, depicting Rupert almost as the star of one of those newspaper films of old.

My Paper Chase, as honeyed as his 1983 memoir was jaundiced — retrofitting his life’s every episode into an uplifting yarn — struck a yet more effusive note: “Wapping was brave in concept and brilliant in execution… a redemptive blow for the freedom of the press… [Murdoch] proved positively heroic.” He went further: “Today [2009] I have no residual hostility towards him. On the contrary, I have found many things to admire: his managerial effectiveness, his long love affair with newspapers, his courage in challenging the big three television networks in the US with a fourth, and altogether in pitting his nerve and vision against timid conventional wisdom.”

That tone reverted to outright loathing with the 2011–12 Leveson inquiry into “the culture, practices and ethics” of Britain’s press, when Murdoch’s Sunday tabloid News of the World was one of the titles arraigned for a decade’s accessing of messages on the cell phones of royals, celebrities, and people in the news — an intrusion that unravelled when the desperate family of a missing thirteen-year-old was given false hope by the deletion of voice messages from her phone.

The Guardian’s front-page lead blaming the tabloid turned out to be false (a phone setting was the cause); but the News of the World, for once target rather than instigator of a media frenzy, was closed down by Murdoch in July 2011. Murdoch prefaced his testimony to a Commons’ committee days later with “This is the most humble day of my life,” and later told the Leveson panel that the practice “was totally wrong, I regret it and it’s going to be a blot on my reputation for the rest of my life.”

Evans, at eighty-three Murdoch’s elder by three years, seized the occasion as one of supreme personal vindication. Both witness to the furore and pundit, long treated by a reverent media claque as the voice of history itself, he used Leveson’s capacious terms of reference to squeeze every press violation in modern Britain into the bottle of Murdoch’s purchase of Times Newspapers: “[The] seminal event was thirty years ago,” he instructed Brian (Lord Justice) Leveson, the inquiry chair: “All flowed from the excessive concentration of power in a single media corporation.”

With Leveson as fortuitous lubricant of the attention he craved, Harry was again in his natural zone as the anti-Rupert made flesh (so snug that he dared to tell Leveson without fear of rebuttal: “It’s not nice to see Britain become the tourist libel capital of the world”). As well as delivering his own testimony on the 1981–82 imbroglio, he scorned Murdoch’s in (where else?) Tina’s Daily Beast, then retrieved Good Times, Bad Times from the memory hole with a score-settling new preface excoriating his adversary. Brian Leveson’s weary references to “who said what to whom in 1981,” after having endured Evans’s punctilious monologues, well conveys the hallmark of all three.

“I’m a radical again now, you know, Peter,” he had told Dunn while writing his Times memoir, an oddly revealing admission of pliability. Three decades on, Leveson’s providential summons to the unfinished battle supplied another warrant for self-radicalisation. Reheated epithets sold as fresh propelled him to the headlines, from 1994’s “Murdoch is the stiletto, a man of method, a cold-eyed manipulator” to his 1982 vent, preserved by Hugo Young: “evil incarnate, the very personification of it,” a man who “had his heart removed long ago, together with all his moral faculties.” And the new preface, drawing on Ian Kershaw’s notion of “working towards the Führer,” even invoked Hitler to explain Murdoch — though a day after the Observer published it, Evans’s own Reuters cut the reference from its otherwise identical version.

If Murdoch’s shame justified Evans’s return to venomous attack mode, it also revealed the grip of a fixation that had gnawed away at him since 1981–82. (And had bitten others too, as David Elstein shows in a remedial essay.) Losing to his enemy-rival had been a visceral offence to Harry’s winner-takes-all spirit. Now, towards the end as at the start of his career, fate and chance had given his exceptional will and ability an opening. Leveson’s inquiry was the culmination of his overwrought, one-sided combat. With his nemesis on the run, life once more had risen to the level of myth.

The truth shift

Leveson’s spectacle fortified Evans’s media platform as righteous scourge of past abuses by the wrong sort of newspaper and, increasingly, of new threats to media freedom. Award events cascaded with fellow senior editors’ pious declarations of “love” and “worship” of the great man. These would continue to attend Harry on his next years’ tireless round of high-grade conferences and festivals, summits and interviews. There was also an acclamatory tour to promote Do I Make Myself Clear?, whose skeletal biography described Good Times, Bad Times, the only book cited, as “the story of political intrigue in a dispute with Mr Rupert Murdoch over the integrity of the political coverage by the Times.” To the end, Harry remained an avid curator of his brand (and updater, as he would gild oft-told anecdotes with fresh details, none ever picked up).

In 2018, Tina oversaw Harry’s ninetieth birthday party at Cliveden House, a sumptuous aristocratic pile southwest of London whose “rich and decadent past [is] speckled with intrigue.” As his British chums paid tribute on a “cloudless summer evening,” Robert Harris “didn’t so much interview Harry about his working life as press ‘play.’” That covers just about every such encounter over his last two decades, though Decca Aitkenhead’s approach in 2005 was a rare pearl in an ocean of treacle; had it been allowed to set the standard, it might even have done him, and certainly reportage of him, more credit.

That said, each late contribution had its moment of seasoned advice: “The most important thing a journalist can do is to ask questions,” “It’s more important to find out than to sound off,” “I was much more interested in truth than I was in campaigning,” and (quoting “Mr Bannon’s” comment, “the press is the opposition”) “Do not regard that as a compliment. That is a disaster, because you lose the defence of ‘we’re only telling the truth.’”

Evans’s death from congenital heart failure last September released an avalanche of tributes, their core of affection perhaps best expressed by two American colleagues: Klara Glowczewska, a Condé Nast Traveler editor (“what I cherish most were those two years with Harry: the pleasure and privilege of being in close proximity to the delightful ferment of such a creative, kind, driven, and enthusiastic mind”) and Roger Friedman, publicity director at Atlantic Monthly Press (“Harry’s vital enthusiasm for life, his electric energy, how he communicated that there was nothing you couldn’t do — and let’s do it now — changed my life. Thirty five years have passed and there isn’t a day I don’t think about him at least for a second”).

Harry’s own posthumous reward was that many obituaries and accolades were brimful of versions of events that he had helped inculcate. Around these, other elements gathered: a proper De mortuis nihil nisi bonum instinct, misty nostalgia for his galvanic editorial years, his allies’ custodian and partisan impulses, the coercive sanctimony of twittified media.

A few panegyrics hit every target: “The long life of Sir Harold Evans — Harry to those of us lucky enough to be among his friends — was an epic of decency, courage and moral determination… At a time when the press is fighting back defensively against the caricatures of populist ranting — that print and news media are just the echo chamber of the liberal elite — Evans’s own career is a supreme reminder of the indispensability of fearless journalism to democracy grounded in truth.”

Such effluvium, with its stifling pomposity of language, worked well enough for its main aim, to hail Evans’s entry to the pantheon. (Typical of the eulogies, it is also strewn with crass errors of a kind that made Harry lunge for his pencil.) Harry’s memorial there was assured long before the Leveson year’s wave of adulation, and reinforced by the post-Leveson decade’s media turmoil — truth wars, trust deficits, tribal rifts. Now it was time formally to anoint him. Who better than Harold Evans to symbolise all that is noble about journalism, especially of the newspaper and investigative kind?

In that turmoil, however, lay a catch. Through the twenty-tens, a new psychic dispensation was being quickened by stark geopolitics, hectic social media, and the chill political economy of newsprint. With truth under assault, from Moscow and Damascus to Washington and London, and its enemies in plain sight, its defenders were upholding a universally virtuous cause. The catch — which struck the more zealous rather as temptation, then opportunity — was to feel and speak and act as if they were not just standing for truth but in possession of and wielding it. Truth was acquiring an extra register as password to associate membership of a newly anxious clerisy, if still with great institutional power and cultural capital. Again, who better than Harold Evans, foremost champion of truth-seeking as journalism’s foundational value, to help finesse the shift?

Together, those encomiums and this lexical nudge are a foretaste of Evans’s afterlife as accessory of the truth-owners. No doubt, his own emphasis on “how hard it is to get to the truth” rested on the bedrock of principle that underlay a free society’s journalism, one that guarded its practitioners even as they might chafe against it. To slide from truth-as-ethic (the “raw integrity of truth,” in his term) to truth-as-instrument (“my/our truth” masquerading as ecumenical) was unthinkable. Yet in performing to the max his headline role as journalistic icon, Evans ever indulged his friends’ sycophancy and their own infractions of media codes. Each side’s bad faith was permissive of the other, and in its way — each forgiven for everything — also restraining. That equilibrium over, the Evans brand is now in the hands of its trustees, and at least as important, of the times.

Could it be otherwise? In principle, this attempt to see Evans “as he really was,” protean gifts and grating flaws together, might open his whole career to more rounded scrutiny. There are stiff barriers to any such opening, however. The incurious reverence is calcified, and for the romancers of journalism self-servingly useful. Just to get to the starting point — recognising that the self-inflating bubble of adulation benefits neither history, nor journalism, nor truth — would require a mental spin.

The perverse effect of that adulation is to reduce what it exalts. Once and forever mythicised, Harold Evans is trapped — and so is the history he was part of. Release holds the chance to see both in their fullness, of which the sense of life as fable is itself an ingredient. In truth there is nothing to fear. Evans will retain an elemental lustre. He did climb Everest from Eccles, after all. He got the job, the story, the place, the glory and the girl. He etched an indelible imprint, recast every tale in his image, and left the world trusting in his myth. Always with a newspaper to hand and a deadline in mind. Avē atque valē, Harry. •

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Thirty years later I didn’t so much leave book publishing as swap sides, becoming a full-time writer in 2020. Thankfully, agitation about better representation had continued, latterly picking up pace and ambition. The game-changing impact of the Stella Prize, created in 2012, led to the Stella Count, which moved in turn from measuring diversity on the basis of a male–female binary to recasting diversity in a more intersectional way. Not long before my official last day, a brilliant young colleague sent a thoughtful reply-all email to our CEO asking what we were doing to improve representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and people of colour as in-house staff, freelance editors, designers and, indeed, authors on our list.

Craig Munro’s engaging Literary Lion Tamers made me think about all this, describing as it does an arc of change — and sometimes a lack thereof — much longer than my own career. But this book is not so much about how the publishing industry, by closely reflecting society and culture, thus reflects readers’ own society and culture back to them. Instead, it focuses on the labours of getting those books out. And while I say “industry,” this book suggests that Munro would be the first to agree that the term overstates what were well-intentioned but often shambolic local publishing efforts.

At least before the 1950s, that is, by which time being published no longer meant being published in London. By then, Angus & Robertson employed almost 600 staff in Australia, London and New Zealand, a figure greater than I expected. What didn’t surprise me was that most employees worked in the company’s bookshops and in its Kingsgrove printery in Sydney rather than at desks wielding red pencils.

Munro’s book is a hybrid — anecdotal memoir, literary history, publishing history and a collective biography of editors and the writers they worked with. I liked the strong title, though many of the “lions” were less kings and queens of the jungle than alcoholic, broke, stuck or resistant to having their words cut. (Looking at you, Xavier Herbert.) As I considered the book’s subtitle, I could hear the voice of a marketing manager I worked with saying, “Do we need to say ‘book editors’? The reps will hate it.” But the title and subtitle describe what the book is about, if hyperbolically, which means they are doing their job just fine.

Literary Lion Tamers is a companion to Munro’s previous book, Under Cover, a more detailed personal history of his years at the University of Queensland Press in the Brisbane suburb of St Lucia. His illustrious career there started unpromisingly, as so many do, with the endless photocopying of proofs. But, apropos the subtitle, Munro ended up making history himself, first as UQP’s fiction editor and later as publishing manager. Less gossipy than Under Cover, given the focus here is on other editors, this book complements the first. They have complementary cover designs, too, and overlap in content. A priceless account of Peter Carey and a boozy recording gone wrong, for example, appears in both.

The current book ranges through editors, authors and books with which the author has some connection, tenuous or not, or that he admires. In the case of writer and editor P.R. “Inky” Stephensen, whose move from the radical left to the nationalist far-right he covers here, Munro displays what we might call an obsession; his early promise that Stephensen will be the book’s most flamboyant literary lion tamer is true. Munro once slogged through Stephensen’s papers, thousands of hours of primary research that led to his 1983 PhD, a prize-winning 1984 biography and many pages of this book.

Craig Munro’s own career shows that sliding-door moments don’t always block off alternatives. A writer as well as a publisher, he has also worked as a journalist and an academic. Indeed, the first anecdote in the book is about attending a Commonwealth literature conference in Fiji, which takes on the air of one of the Somerset Maugham stories he read on the plane to Suva. He has a novelist’s eye for detail. In one passage about critic and editor A.G. Stephens, who he says would now be described as a public intellectual, Munro writes that Stephens’s wife Constance used to cut up his food into small pieces so he could read and eat at the same time.

The “perennial problem of sales” — that need to balance literary art, schlock and everything in between with commerce — is a theme of the book and, let’s face it, the biggest theme of publishing itself. As anxious publishers hoping for a bestseller click to check the latest BookScan figures, they will concur with Munro’s rueful comment: “I was often disappointed when the books I’d edited failed to generate any profits at all.”

If Inky Stephensen is the main character in the book, the Bulletin would be the main literary institution. Munro quotes an article from the Bulletin’s famous Red Page in which Stephensen rashly predicted sales of 6000 for each new title to be published by his Endeavour Press, just launched. There’s no surprise in the revelation that Endeavour Press didn’t last long.

I enjoyed Munro’s evocation of the process and craft of book publishing: dog-eared manuscripts read, assessed, rewritten and later marked up and typeset before proofing. It’s a world of sharpened pencils and delicate negotiations. He delights in the book as an object and knows what it takes to make a beautiful one. “Under white dust-wrappers, the black-and-gold case lining of these small squarish books felt — and looked — like snakeskin,” he writes at one point. “Each volume shared the same attractive typography and page layout. The generous point size and line spacing meant that a novella, or even a few short stories, filled more than a hundred pages.”

Critic and writer Geoffrey Dutton criticised Stephensen in the 1960s for being “more than twenty years out of date,” and many of the books by the literary lions are coming up to being a century out of date. Some, such as Joseph Furphy’s Such Is Life (edited by A.G. Stephens) are still in print, as is They’re a Weird Mob, both reissued by Text. Finding Steele Rudd’s On Our Selection is easy enough, but I can’t imagine many seek it out. Who can be surprised that bestselling travel and history writer Frank Clune, many of whose books were ghostwritten by Stephensen, is no longer in print?

Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, meanwhile, will last longer than Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia, and deserves to (though Herbert’s Poor Fellow My Country, supposedly the longest Australian novel ever published, is available as an ebook). Writers such as D.H. Lawrence, who makes an appearance thanks to Stephensen’s involvement in London with an edition — possibly pirated — of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, are simply unfashionable.

When famed A&R editor Beatrice Davis enters the scene, she brings more books and authors likely to pass the test of time. We get a sense of her deep commitment to her authors, though not to Frank Moorhouse — she argues against A&R’s publishing The Americans, Baby. I published Jacqueline Kent’s revised biography of Beatrice Davis and Eleanor Hogan’s (forthcoming) biography of Daisy Bates and Ernestine Hill, so I’m definitely among the target audience. But reading Davis’s correspondence with Ernestine Hill was compelling, if excruciating, and Davis’s — and Munro’s — descriptions of the troubled Eve Langley, author of The Pea Pickers, are as tragic as when I first read them.

Falling within the span of my own career are the New York diary entries of Rosie Fitzgibbon, Munro’s long-time UQP editorial colleague and recipient of the first Beatrice Davis Editorial Fellowship. The immediacy of Fitzgibbon’s accounts, and their practical wisdom, accentuate her loss to the publishing world. “In New York everything requires time-consuming investigation,” she writes, “and the constant need to present yourself in the best possible light to so many new people day after day is exhausting.”

Fitzgibbon was clearly up to meeting the challenge. Her papers, like so many others that form this book, are in the Fryer Library at the University of Queensland, which Munro describes as his own literary Tardis. The book begins and ends there.

Munro was no doubt gentle with his authors, and the book has that tone, with no false nostalgia. Corporatised and digitised modern publishing may be, but in its warm, discursive way this book makes the point that the work that publishers, editors and writers do hasn’t changed as much as we might think. •

The post Between the covers appeared first on Inside Story.

Patrick Mullins is the recent winner of the NSW Premier’s Douglas Stewart prize for his previous book, Tiberius with a Telephone: The Life and Stories of William McMahon (Scribe, 2018). His new book takes us on a fascinating journey through the final years of Australia’s literary censorship system, deftly telling the story of the many obscenity trials prompted by sales of Roth’s controversial novel in this country.

Australia’s censorship regime was a complex one, involving federal and state mechanisms designed to prevent offending books from being published, sold and circulated. Dating back to the late nineteenth century when the novels of Émile Zola, Honoré de Balzac and Guy Maupassant were considered too racy and radical for the Australian reading public, the multilayered system grew especially fierce through the interwar period. As Nicole Moore shows in her 2012 book, The Censor’s Library, the system brought together the customs system, postal regulation and various other legal mechanisms. The federal government had also added a Literature Censorship Board, on which a mix of scholars and bureaucrats determined the fate of books.

Many books had been banned from importation from the 1930s to the 1960s. They included Radcliffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1929), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber (1945), J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1953), Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place (1959), and James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962). Locally, Norman Lindsay’s Redheap (1930) was among the books placed on the prohibited list.

Sex was the main objection — especially anything suggestive of “deviant” sexuality, which at the time was considered to include homosexuality, masturbation, obscene language, pornographic scenes and sex without consequences. But radical politics was also suspect, as was contempt for religion. Proponents of censorship believed that people needed protection from the corrupting and depraving effects of such material. Scholars have shown how the system created a culture that was conservative, timid and quarantined from intellectual and cultural influences flourishing abroad. As Dymphna Cusack concluded when her own book (written with Florence James) Come In Spinner (1951) could only be published with severe cuts, Australians were basically wowsers.

By the time Portnoy’s Complaint came along, resistance to censorship was growing. Occasional challenges had been launched and voices raised in opposition since the 1930s. By the 1950s, many books had been removed from the banned list on the basis of their literary merit. But the 1960s was the decade that really saw a concerted effort to overturn the system. The student and radical alternative press — which included magazines such as Oz — aimed to provoke reaction by testing its boundaries. Plays like Alex Buzo’s Norm and Ahmed (1968) began making use of offensive language. But the real test came with the Australian publication of a controversial novel by an American writer.

Portnoy’s Complaint is written from the point of view of Alexander Portnoy, a sexually frustrated young man narrating his erotic experiences to his psychoanalyst. There are a great many descriptive scenes of masturbation in the novel; a memorable one (often cited by the prosecutors in the trials) involved Portnoy masturbating into a piece of liver that his mother then serves for dinner. Roth also made use of a litany of obscene words to punctuate his text, including such profanities as “fuck,” “cunt” and “prick.” The book was a sensation, and the US critics praised its originality and creativity of language.

But was Australia ready for such a book? The Literature Censorship Board, divided as to whether Portnoy could be allowed into Australia on the basis of literary merit, decided to ban it. Outraged, many Australians, including publishers and the literary community, resolved to have the decision overturned.

The censorship regime was already wobbling. Politicians were divided over its effectiveness, especially given emerging differences between federal and various state views. The appointment of a relatively young MP, Don Chipp, as customs minister seemed to offer the possibility of a more liberal approach. But although Chipp was sympathetic to critics of censorship, many in the community still supported the system. Portnoy was going to remain banned.

And so began Penguin’s campaign. With great speed and secrecy, Portnoy was printed and distributed across the nation. Once it went on sale (usually from behind the counter rather than openly displayed), it sold out almost immediately. Enforcing the ban was in the hands of state governments, though, and this is where things started to go wrong for the censors. South Australia, under Labor premier Don Dunstan, declined to prosecute as long as the book wasn’t on view, a decision that revealed a lack of unity among the states from the start. But other states raided bookshops and proceeded to take booksellers to trial.

A significant part of Mullins’s book is devoted to describing the trials, and they make for entertaining reading. Prosecutors did what they could to demonstrate the offensive nature of Portnoy: in the Victorian trial, for example, they contended that sexual references and four-letter words appeared, respectively, on 28.1 per cent and 17.5 per cent of the book’s pages. In the NSW trial, prosecutors tried desperately to prove that the book was being sold to schoolgirls, yet they couldn’t produce proof it had actually happened.

Witnesses for the defence made up a who’s who of Australian literary and academic circles: Patrick White, Stephen Murray-Smith, Nancy Keesing, T.A.G. Hungerford, Alec Chisholm and Dorothy Hewett were just some of them. All testified to the literary merit of Portnoy. Patrick White commented on the stand that he had no problem with “fuck,” “cunt” or “prick” as he used such words himself, daily. After his cross-examination at the second NSW trial, he wrote to publisher and writer Geoffrey Dutton: “the prosecutor [P.J. ‘Jack’ Kenny, QC] I can only describe as a cunt.”

The trials would ultimately have mixed results. In Western Australia, the book was found to be obscene but also to have literary merit, and so it could be sold. In Victoria, the verdict went against Penguin, but an appeal was lodged. In New South Wales, the courtroom drama dragged on: two trials were held, but no verdict was reached. Shortly after NSW authorities decided on 28 May 1972 not to go to a third trial, Chipp took Portnoy off the banned list. In December, Gough Whitlam and Labor won office and the old censorship regime was swept away in favour of a classification system. Literary works would not be in the firing line again, at least not because of sex and four-letter words.

Mullins’s compelling account of these last days of the old censorship regime skilfully draws on a rich range of sources, including interviews with many of the key figures involved. He gives an insight not just into how the system operated and the politics involved, but also into a significant cultural moment in Australia.

Australian publishers were beginning to flourish in this period. While the case centred on an American novel, Penguin was establishing itself in Australia as a publisher of both imported and homegrown literature. A more diverse Australian cultural and literary scene would result from the work of such publishers as well as the lifting of stultifying censorship.

The Trials of Portnoy is a very welcome contribution to the small but significant literature about the history of censorship in Australia. While Mullins chooses, perhaps wisely, not to weigh in with any reflections on current, all too complex, questions raised by “cancel culture,” no-platforming and other limits on freedom of speech, this book provides some much-needed context for thinking about the issues raised by controversial and offensive material.

While we will likely never see this kind of literary censorship again in Australia, we should not assume that our creative and intellectual freedoms will always be protected. Nuanced discussions about the meanings of such freedoms are vital — as is thinking about how best to balance them against the damaging impact of discriminatory language, hate speech and other expression that might offend some members of the community. •

The post Literary censorship’s last gasp appeared first on Inside Story.

It was 1986 and I was working in Canberra as foreign affairs and defence correspondent for the Age. Turnbull, who had dabbled briefly in journalism before realising there was a bigger future and a lot more money in media law, was a cocky young lawyer about to secure an outsized international profile. The publicity would launch him towards his lifelong ambition of becoming prime minister.

On the morning in early November I picked up my home phone to find Turnbull on the line. I had landed a minor scoop that had appeared on the front page of the Age. On the basis of a cabinet leak, I reported that the Hawke government had resolved to join a case in the NSW Supreme Court in support of the British government’s bid to block publication of Spycatcher.

Former MI5 agent Peter Wright, then living in retirement in Tasmania, had spent much of his twenty-five-year career with the British spy agency hunting Russian moles — a busy enterprise during the era in which top agents Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean were revealed as traitors. Wright had investigated Roger Hollis, head of MI5 from 1956 to 1965, and his book set out his case that Hollis was another double agent and should not have been cleared. The Thatcher government had obtained a preliminary injunction to stop the book’s publication in Britain and now wanted to stop its release in Australia.

The revelation that Hawke’s Labor government was getting into bed with Britain’s Tories to silence a whistleblower was significant news, although ultimately its support would have little impact on the outcome of the case.

The morning phone conversation began cordially enough, with Turnbull complimenting me on a “great story” before requesting that I tell him who my source was. When I gently pointed out that, as a former journalist, he should understand that revealing sources was the equivalent of breaching the seal of the confessional, the caller exploded, describing me in terms that might make even sophisticated Inside Story readers blush. Before slamming down the phone, he declared, “Don’t ever expect anything from me.”

It had never occurred to me that I might expect anything from Malcolm Turnbull, and in the years since he left with a dial tone I was relieved never to find myself in a situation of needing anything from him — beyond, perhaps, the republic he was supposed to deliver and some serious action by his faction-riven government on global warming.

A few days after the morning call, I was seated in courtroom 8B of the Supreme Court in Sydney for the commencement of the Spycatcher hearing. While I’ve forgotten most of what happened over subsequent days, two indelible memories remain.

The first was the brash and theatrical style with which the thirty-two-year-old Turnbull conducted himself, and how much his antics were indulged by Justice Philip Powell, who seemed almost in awe of the young Rumpole. The other was the starkly contrasting presence of the urbane Sir Robert Armstrong, cabinet secretary and head of the British civil service, who had been sent by Thatcher as her government’s principal witness.

In an immortal moment, Turnbull was questioning Armstrong about Andrew Boyle’s 1979 book The Climate of Treason, which effectively outed Anthony Blunt as the fourth member of the Cambridge ring of Russian spies. Turnbull was seeking to demonstrate that the British authorities had turned a blind eye to the disclosure of official secrets in Boyle’s book and shouldn’t be treating Spycatcher differently.

Turnbull had established that the British government was well aware of the Boyle book before its publication and had, indeed, obtained a copy, yet Armstrong had written to the publisher asking whether Thatcher could be provided a copy to enable her to be fully informed should she need to make a public statement. Turnbull pressed Armstrong as to whether the letter was calculated to mislead. Armstrong conceded the point but insisted that creating a misleading impression did not amount to lying.

Turnbull: What is the difference between a misleading impression and a lie?

Armstrong: A lie is a straight untruth.

Turnbull: What is a misleading impression — a sort of bent untruth?

Armstrong: As one person said, it is perhaps being economical with the truth.

The delicious phrase might have danced straight out of a script for Yes Minister, the classic TV series at the height of its popularity at the time. And while it may have originated with Edmund Burke’s expression of “an economy of truth,” it was propelled into the lexicon of global political commentary by Sir Robert Armstrong in an austere Sydney courtroom in November 1986.

These memories have been stirred with the arrival of Malcolm Turnbull’s memoir A Bigger Picture. And big it certainly is — a 700-page, densely typeset tome landing, fortuitously for its author, in the time of national home detention when surely no one has anything better to do than relive the career of our most recently superannuated statesman. (And should any reader bridle at the size of the task, be thankful the author only lodged at The Lodge for just under three years.)

Turnbull had already gained prominence working in the early 1980s as general counsel for media mogul Kerry Packer and successfully running his defence against scurrilous allegations raised in the Costigan royal commission into union corruption and tax evasion. But the Spycatcher trial would take his brand to another level.

As Turnbull writes, he was approached to run the case by a London solicitor representing the book’s publisher, Heinemann. The pitch was hardly enticing for an ambitious lawyer who had only started in private practice a few months earlier. He was advised that Heinemann was depressed about the British injunction, was ready to throw in the towel and would only proceed if it could be done cheaply.

In the end, Turnbull agreed to do it for a flat fee of $20,000. It would turn out to be the best low-budget commission of his fabulously well-remunerated career as a commercial lawyer and, later, merchant banker.

Thanks largely to the admissions he extracted from the hapless Sir Robert, Turnbull won the case. Justice Powell ruled that having failed to take action to prevent the publication of Their Trade Is Treachery and other books with similar content to Spycatcher’s, the British government had “surrendered any claim to the confidentiality of that information.” When the case went to the NSW Court of Appeal later in 1987, Turnbull won again.

Obstinate to the end, the British then took the case to the High Court, where in early 1988 their repudiation was complete — the judges voted seven–nil in favour of Spycatcher. The road to greater fame and fortune now unfolding before him, Malcolm Turnbull found no need to be economical with the truth.

“I’d taken on the UK government and its army of top lawyers, fought the case through a trial and two appeals and won,” he writes. “What appalled many of my former colleagues at the Bar was that not only was I absurdly young, at thirty-two, but that I hadn’t appeared as a barrister, but unrobed as a solicitor. Surreally, the case was much bigger news in London than in Australia. I was being encouraged to capitalise on my international notoriety — move to the Bar in London or New York; head spinning really.” •

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Tim’s last major board role was as chair of the international crop conservation organisation, the Crop Trust, with its seed vault in Svalbard, Norway. After a full day of public speaking engagements, with radio interviews conducted on the go in the car (“There’s a little scoopette for you, Ron”), he would get up at two in the morning to chair the trust’s meetings. Addressing the students of the John Monash Science School last year, he spoke of the “creepy statistic” revealing the ice melting around that vault.

He was an advocate for and official “friend” of the ABC. He supported a tax on excessive sugar in food. He played an important, positive role in East Timor’s path to self-government by leading an Australian all-party delegation to East Timor in 1999 and reporting back on the security situation and the political desires of the people. He was a friend of other nations in the region, particularly Bhutan. His knowledge of trains was truly encyclopedic.

He was also, of course, a vocal critic of US governmental inaction on gun control, at one stage calling for stronger travel warnings for Australians visiting that country. Those of us who grew up in rural Australia, especially, can understand and admire the courage it took for him — for anyone — to stand up to gun enthusiasts in those areas and declare, over their interjections, that no civilian in this country needs to own a semiautomatic weapon.

Tim’s energy was phenomenal. I asked him once if he ever got tired during his busy professional life. “I did. I did get tired,” he replied, looking a little disappointed in himself. “Last year when I was having the chemo I just got tired.”

“I’m not asking about when you were having chemo, for Christ’s sake,” I exclaimed. “Anyone would have gotten tired then. I mean in general, in your working life!”

“Oh no, no, no!” he said. “You just pace yourself.”

He had an astonishing memory for detail and an insatiable desire to learn. “Why? Why can’t I remember the name of that bookshop on Swanston Street?!” he chastised himself on the other end of the phone one day, after reeling off the names and addresses of six other shops. As an author he wanted to know why we used one font size instead of another, one form of punctuation instead of another. Why this paper stock? Why that heading font?

He loved and revered books and scholarship. He had been planning to go to university, he said, before he was conscripted for Vietnam. In the army he undertook officer training, became a lieutenant and, though he didn’t have to go, served in Vietnam. He was wounded there and later wondered if his cancer, his “half-baked leukaemia,” as he called it impatiently, derived from that period.

I got to know Tim after he wrote a book about John Monash and his legacy. He thought it should be published by a university press and, Tim being Tim, reasoned that Monash University Publishing should be the first port of call. He rang me, as director of that press, at around 4.30 on a Friday afternoon, apologised for troubling me at that time of the working week, and explained the project.

In the book he argues that Sir John Monash should be posthumously promoted to the rank of field marshal, as he should have been in his lifetime. “The historians will hate it,” he told me, which seemed to me a potentially insurmountable problem for a university press. But, as I was to learn, Tim was not put off easily. He remained relentlessly positive.

In discussing the contract, he wanted a higher royalty once the book sold more than 10,000 copies. As the chances of that were precisely zero, I readily agreed. It has now sold around 12,000 copies and continues to move steadily.

Tim’s capacity to sell books was incredible. He was a magnetic and inspiring speaker and more than once not only sold more books at an event than there were people in attendance but sold more books than there were books there to be sold. The booksellers would ring me after an event at the Gympie Prayer Breakfast or the Tumbarumba Men’s Shed or the Monash RSL and let me know I needed to send copies for them to give to people who had paid for them after the copies had run out.

Tim also loved kids. He told me this unabashedly while, as I recall, introducing me to the concept of the “working drink” at the Windsor Hotel. When he spoke to me about why he had been criticised as supposedly anti-Israeli, it was with reference to the children in Palestine. He would always ask after my kids, by name. And it was revealing to hear him speak on the phone with great tenderness to his son Harrison, who has autism.

It was Jesus who said something about the value of remaining childlike. People trying to make the world a better place can’t simply be childlike, but maintaining the affections and enthusiasms of that time of our life can help us to connect with others unlike ourselves, as we need to do, rather urgently, if we are to save ourselves and our planet.

I will cherish the message of good wishes and “good luck, mate” that Tim left on my phone when I moved to my job at Melbourne University Press earlier this month. I could hear he was also, in his oblique, traditional Australian male way, saying goodbye. I will miss him as a friend and kind of big brother. My heart goes out to Judy, Harrison and Dominic. And with many others I will feel Tim’s loss for our country and our world. •

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The walk finished at 24 Russell Square, where the publisher Faber & Faber had its offices in Orwell’s time. Established in 1929, the firm was immediately notable for the fact that its founding director and editor was T.S. Eliot, whose 1922 poem The Waste Land came to be considered a founding work of literary modernism. The firm quickly became a leader, publishing emerging poets, playwrights and novelists like W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Siegfried Sassoon, Samuel Beckett and James Joyce.

George Orwell, though, was never published by Faber. That was the reason we were at 24 Russell Square. “TSE” rejected Down and Out in Paris and London in 1932: “decidedly too short… and too loosely constructed.” Then, in July 1944, he turned down the manuscript for Animal Farm in one of publishing’s most famous rejection letters.

“We agree it is a distinguished piece of writing,” wrote Eliot. “The fable is very skilfully handled… the narrative keeps one’s interest on its own plane — and that is something very few authors have achieved since Gulliver. On the other hand, we have no conviction… that this is the right point of view from which to criticise the political situation at the present time.”

This was just over a month after D-Day. There was a war to be won and Britain’s allies included the target of Orwell’s “fairy story,” the Soviet Union. Eliot was “very sorry, because whoever publishes this, will naturally have the opportunity of publishing your future work: and I have a regard for your work, because it is good writing of fundamental integrity.”

Animal Farm was eventually published by Secker & Warburg in Britain and Harcourt, Brace in the United States in 1946. By then the war was over but a new one had begun, a cold war, where the Soviet Union occupied the other side of an Iron Curtain. Orwell’s future work turned out to be 1984, published in 1949 shortly before he died from tuberculosis. TSE was right: Secker & Warburg and Harcourt, Brace got that one too.

Faber & Faber: The Untold Story is written by a grandson of Geoffrey Faber, the firm’s founder. Toby Faber, a former managing director of the firm and still a director, has curated and edited an archive of extracts from letters, internal memos, board minutes, diary entries, promotional materials, and newspaper and magazine articles, covering the period from the firm’s founding until 1990. He annotates many of the extracts to provide context and explain details. Chapters are organised chronologically and each is introduced with an overview of the main incidents and trends in the period. Together with an introduction and afterword, it adds up to an absorbing account of the creation, evolution, near death and survival of an important enterprise in what some would now call the “creative industries.”

At the heart of that enterprise are the authors who wrote the manuscripts, the staff who accepted some and rejected many, and the books Faber & Faber published. Readers looking for delicious publishing industry gossip will find a feast. Within a month of starting work as a junior editor in 1953, Charles Monteith pulled a few manuscripts off the slush pile to occupy a train journey to Oxford. He thought more of one titled Strangers from Within than the reader who had already annotated it with “Absurd and uninteresting fantasy… Rubbish and dull. Pointless. Reject.” The author, William Golding, submitted a revised version of this, his first novel, with a new title, A Cry of Children. Faber published it in 1954 as Lord of the Flies. About thirty years later, Golding won the Nobel Prize in literature.

Monteith was not so impressed by Ted Hughes’s first book of verse, The Hawk in the Rain, even though it had won a prize in the United States. “The quality seems to me very uneven… [H]e might perhaps have a letter of encouragement.” T.S. Eliot was more enthusiastic: “I’m inclined to think we ought to take this man now. Let’s discuss him.” Faber made an offer, Hughes accepted it, and they published him for the rest of his life. Artful correspondence followed about work from Hughes’s wife, Sylvia Plath: her early poems and initially pseudonymous novel The Bell Jar went to Heinemann; Faber published her posthumous collection Ariel and, later, a paperback edition of The Bell Jar, licensed from Heinemann.

The archives of a publisher whose authors won four Nobel prizes in the 1990s alone (Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, Wislawa Szymborska, Günter Grass) and another four since (Harold Pinter, Orhan Pamuk, Mario Vargas Llosa, Kazuo Ishiguro) hold many such stories of wooing, signing, editing and sometimes rejecting or losing famous authors. The signings often express the power imbalance between awestruck young authors and a prestigious publishing house; the losses show creators pressing the value of their work, increasingly via the agents that unsettled the dominance of haughty publishers. Spencer Curtis Brown thought books by his author C.P. Snow should be selling 35,000–45,000 copies “and I am sure that you believe that too and that you will be full of exciting and enthusiastic ideas towards that end.” Snow moved to Macmillan.

Alongside the Nobel and Booker prize winners, Faber published a lot of books that did not have such high literary aspirations. Asked to spell out the kinds of books she liked and those she didn’t, the editor of the gardening and farming list, Eileen Brooksbank, wrote in 1976, “I can’t help remembering that on many an occasion when I have asked the travellers what is selling they simply reply ‘the usual things, bridge books, cookery and gardening.’ So we must try to keep them supplied.” Commenting on an internal memo criticising the humorous NOT 1982 calendar that sold massively, Toby Faber observes that “many Faber employees never quite understood that the firm could only publish great literature if it also made a profit.”

In different hands, the “untold story” of Faber & Faber might have given less space to the business side. As a former managing director and a member of the family that still controls half the publisher’s shares, Toby Faber reveals a great deal about the enduringly private Faber & Faber. He includes a table of sales, pre-tax profits and gross dividends paid each year, showing the big swings between struggle and fortune. He also shows sales revenues predicted by “Dr Morley’s Parabolic Prediction or Futurity Revealed,” a formula one of the early directors derived from the pattern of sales between 1926 and 1931. By the late 1930s it was wildly out, but the figures in the late 1980s were eerily close to Morley’s ancient model.

Like the founder of any start-up, Geoffrey Faber had to work out what his business would do, where it would get the money to do it, and who would do the work and where. Initially, it wasn’t even his business. He had published two volumes of poetry and had a little experience in publishing with Oxford University Press before the first world war, enough to encourage the inheritors of a business called the Scientific Press to appoint him chairman and managing director in 1924.

The new owners wanted to diversify away from medical titles. Someone suggested Faber talk to T.S. Eliot, who was working at Lloyds Bank and editing the literary magazine The Criterion as well as writing his own poetry. Eliot, of course, was not yet the Nobel Prize winner he would become in 1948, but The Waste Land was already famous and Faber was told he was “the best and most learned [critic] of his generation and is respected (and a little feared) by the young.”

Faber bought into the business through a complicated family transaction — a loan from the “relatively large” trust estate left by his father’s cousin — that needed both the widow’s and Faber’s mother’s approval. The partners in the business then fell out, separating their interests by selling the profitable Nursing Mirror for a sum that enabled Faber to pay back his loan from the estate and emerge as the sole owner of a new company that acquired the marginal books business. Choosing “Faber & Faber Limited” from four possible names, he inspired ageless speculation and jokes — the Russell Square twins, Fabber & Fabber, Fabberdum and Fabberdee — about the second Faber.

The business of becoming what Toby Faber calls “the literary publisher… for most of the period since it was founded” needed various forms of cross-subsidy from the start. For most of the three decades he was in charge, Geoffrey Faber also drew a salary as an “estates bursar” at All Souls College in Oxford. Among the college’s investments during this time was a country property in Sussex that was leased to Faber, who spent weekends there with his wife Enid.

Most spectacularly, Faber & Faber earned immense profits from Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats, which turned T.S. Eliot’s collection of children’s verse, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, into a blockbuster musical theatre show. In the financial year to March 1986, net revenue from Cats was just over £1 million while pre-tax profit for the company as a whole was £246,000, implying the rest of the business lost around £750,000.

In the especially difficult 1970s, a similar role was played by John Seymour’s The Complete Guide to Self-Sufficiency and its sequel. It sold over a million copies in different formats, “riding a wave generated by the TV sitcom The Good Life.” The money was real, but the book was “essentially conceived and produced by [book packager] Dorling Kindersley.” Faber & Faber was “very lucky” that Seymour insisted it should be the publisher.

On the other hand, once established, the books business could cross-subsidise new businesses. A music publishing arm was created in the 1960s, initially for Benjamin Britten’s works. He was delighted to bring his music to “such a splendid publisher,” and Geoffrey Faber’s wife Enid wrote that “frankly I would sooner lose my money over this, than over something duller.” It turned out to be a very handy business indeed, which T.S. Eliot’s widow Valerie (nee Fletcher) insisted should handle the music rights for Cats.

At several points, Toby Faber describes the sometimes excruciating male-ness of the enterprise and the industry — in evidence in the remarkable photo, reproduced above, of Louis MacNeice, Ted Hughes, T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender at a Faber party in 1960, which Sylvia Plath described in a letter to her mother: “Ted looked very much at home among the great.”

But huge roles at the company were played by women. Geoffrey’s wife Enid was deeply involved in the business: she “largely ran” the Faber stand at the first Sunday Times Book Exhibition in 1933, which later became a national book fair at Earl’s Court. Perhaps she was the other Faber? The cover blurb for Derek Llewellyn’s 1971 Faber bestseller Everywoman: A Gynaecological Guide for Life, calls it “the most compassionate, pleasing, authoritative and informative treatise on the business of being a woman that I have so far seen,” reproducing the verdict of Dr Donald Gould in the New Statesman. In 1989, as part of a restructure to preserve the company’s independence, it was Valerie Eliot who set up a trust to acquire the other half of Faber & Faber, alongside and equal to the Faber family interests.

Toby Faber identifies luck, a publishing philosophy “focused on excellence and the long term,” good editorial taste, regular editorial renewal, and the “crucial business decision” to publish both hardbacks and paperbacks as major factors that helped the business founded by his grandfather to survive not just to 1990, when this book ends, but to the present.

In July, Faber & Faber announced that it will publish twenty-seven-year-old Australian author Gabriel Bergmoser’s “full-blooded” debut. The title has not been settled — it will be Sunburnt Country or The Hunted — but it will be “a short, sharp shock of a novel” and the manuscript has been optioned for a movie by “a major film company in LA.” It feels some way from the mid 1930s, when the hot front-list competitors were The Faber Book of Modern Verse, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse edited by W.B. Yeats, and I.M. Parsons’s The Progress of Poetry.

Yet Toby Faber’s rich account of the history of “the literary publisher” also reminds us that talk of literature’s demise is always in fashion. In 1965, when Charles Monteith was unenthusiastic about a novel by Barbara Pym, Philip Larkin lamented:

Personally… I feel it is a great shame if ordinary sane novels about ordinary sane people doing ordinary sane things can’t find a publisher these days. This is the tradition of Jane Austen and Trollope, and I refuse to believe that no one wants its successors today… I like to read about people who have done nothing spectacular, who aren’t beautiful or lucky, who try to behave well in the limited field they command, but who can see, in little autumnal moments of vision, that the so-called “big” experiences of life are going to miss them. •

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The guest might have passed up the invitation altogether had she not been intrigued. Her hostess is engaged to a well-known Australian writer — the oddest couple imaginable, according to the gossip — and the fiancé will be there. On such whims, great stories are born.

Predictably, the talk around the table is about money: the size of advances, the prospective returns. Book people, probably more than most people, like talking shop. Publishing is a risky business, and in Australia is rarely underwritten by independent incomes as it is in England. All this the guest knows well after several hungry years nibbling at the edge of the London book world.

Surprisingly, the writer-fiancé has little to say about this, or much at all in fact. He sits in near silence, detached from the company. He gives the impression he is doing all he can to resist the temptation to get up and leave. Even when asked about his own writing he says only that he’s working on a couple of projects. The guest cracks a joke at his expense but he seems to take no offence. On the contrary, she has piqued his interest. And so the story takes flight.

Kenneth Cook, or Ken as he was known in these circles, wrote twenty books, but his reputation still rests on Wake in Fright, his first published novel. On its strength he could give up his work as a rural journalist, reporting on everything from Country Women’s Association meetings to sheep sales, and devote himself to fiction full-time.

If he’s remembered at all today it is because of that book, a bleak, frankly horrific depiction of the rampant, unthinking savagery of the white man let loose in the outback, a book that turns the traditional Australian bush tale on its head. In 1968 it came out as a movie, directed by the Canadian director Ted Kotcheff, a film so violent it was almost too difficult to watch.

The closest parallel I can think of is John Boorman’s film Deliverance, also based on a novel, in that case by the American author James Dickey. Deliverance garnered several Oscars and found its place in the pantheon of revered American movies. Wake in Fright had appeared two years earlier, scandalising Australian audiences, and only after its recent remastering has it come to be considered a classic.

At the time of his first meeting with Jacqueline Kent, the author of this engrossing memoir, Ken Cook knew his star had faded. He was fifty-five, a member of a passing generation of writers, and his approach to his craft was resolutely old-fashioned. He prized above all the narrative art, the ability to turn out a story and turn it out well. He was contemptuous of language deployed for its own sake, the language of, say, Patrick White, whose influence on younger writers was at its peak at the time.

Cook had read none of the works of those who had emerged in the seventies and eighties — writers like Kate Grenville, Helen Garner, Frank Moorhouse and Tim Winton — nor did he feel obliged to. Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of Kent’s memoir is her sensitive record of the waxing and waning of literary fame. Also, if obliquely, she reminds us of how difficult writers’ lives were before government-funded systems of grants and festivals and university creative writing degrees. All these have contributed mightily to the efflorescence of the Australian book culture we celebrate today.

In short, there’s a certain heroism to Ken Cook’s story. Few writers’ lives are easy; even today, contrary to the hype over huge advances, film options and overseas publication, the average author’s annual income from writing is a bit over $13,000.

Beyond Words opens with this revealing description of Cook’s last exercise book, an emblematic beginning if ever there was one:

On the shelf above my desk is a battered exercise book, the kind used by generations of Australian primary school children — one that, in defiance of calculators, has tables of cubic tonnes and hectares and other measurements marching across the back cover. On the front cover is a small panel with these words printed carefully by hand: Name: Kenneth Bernard Cook School: Fort Street Boys’ High Age: 56 and 3/4.

All his writing life Cook wrote his novels in books like this, using a fountain pen. Not so unusual, even today. What was distinctive, however, was his fluency, and what he did on the rare occasions when it failed him. He either embellished the page with cartoon portraits of Australian animals, or filled the margins with numbers. The numbers related to his money troubles, which were plenty.

Typically, Wake in Fright never made him much. After its publication he kept afloat by repeatedly selling the film rights until the book found the producer who actually went ahead with the film. But he said he was diddled grandly by another Australian writer — Morris West — who refused to write an endorsement for the cover of the American edition but then took up the film option and reaped the profits for himself.

Cook’s first novel, accepted by Hodder and Stoughton, had been pulped before it appeared, owing to libel concerns. As his family — a wife and four children — grew, he tried to support them with a host of ill-starred ventures, including a company producing children’s films and a butterfly farm on the Hawkesbury, which was wiped out by two massive floods. It was this disaster that bankrupted him, shackling him through to the end of his life and binding his family, including Kent, for years thereafter.

All the while, stoked by cigarettes and whiskey, he kept writing books, some of which were less than he was capable of, others never receiving the critical praise they deserved. Like many writers who punished themselves as if they were machines for spurting words — Balzac comes to mind — he died an early death, not long after he’d started that last exercise book. Had he lived longer, the market might have been kinder to him.

But that’s just it, Cook was a man of contradiction, proud but self-deprecating. Passionate about politics (he ran for office twice, protesting Australia’s involvement in Vietnam), only to learn he hadn’t the temperament for it. It’s not hard to see his attractiveness, or why a woman years younger, like Kent, could find herself loving and marrying him. The shock of his death in 1987 reverberated for years, compelling her to write this memoir.

All I’ve given is the nub of it, but little of the powerful strength of its weave. It’s what might be expected from an experienced editor and author in her own right — a beautifully woven tale of love and loss, with a fascinating figure at its centre. Worthy of mention too is the quality of the production. Beyond Words is also a tactile experience, a book as all books should be, a pleasure to hold in the hand. •

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I could not have predicted that Adler would be out of that job on the day I arrived back in Sydney, and that most of the MUP board would have resigned in solidarity with her. For any university press to become breaking news is unusual, let alone for it to go viral on social media. But Louise Adler and her publishing house had been the story as often as the books they produced, and this occasion was no exception.

I doubt that the official in Delhi would have been able to recall another Australian publisher by name if we’d had all night rather than a ten-minute chat. We publishers — particularly those of us who publish nonfiction — tend to be anonymous, except when thanked in a book’s acknowledgements, which I imagine only other publishers read, or when mentioned by an author at a book launch. Few publishers have become public figures like Louise Adler has, largely thanks to her appearances on Q&A.

During her term as president of the Australian Publishers’ Association, she was a book-industry lobbyist, supporting campaigns about territorial copyright, for example. She has also been a political player, as deputy chair of the federal government’s Book Industry Strategy Group, which sought to obtain funding for scholarly books, and later as chair of the ill-fated Book Council of Australia, which was to be funded by money diverted from the Australia Council. (The announcement that it was to be scrapped was made by the then treasurer Scott Morrison the day after the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in December 2015.)

Louise seemed to have every single politician or journalist on speed dial, backed by her formidable powers of persuasion. Of course that caused resentment and in some cases serious disquiet. “Gatto,” for many, became shorthand for everything that was wrong with MUP. More details of the MUP drama will emerge over time, and the future direction of its list will become clearer, but the place and purpose of university presses in Australia and throughout the world will continue to confound.

University administrators, academics, booksellers and librarians grapple with our role, but those of us who are employed by university presses do not. We have a clear idea of what we are for, but the publishing models that allow us to survive and prosper vary from press to press.

Questions will often arise at the point where commercial concerns clash with scholarship. A university press is, by its very nature, set apart from the demands of shareholders and media conglomerates that a major trade publisher faces. Yet sometimes a book on a university press list could just as easily appear on the list of a major trade house or an independent publisher, and vice versa. Yes, we are part of a university community, with distinct values. But we are part of the publishing industry too, and we all spend time looking at spreadsheets. Universities everywhere have become increasingly corporatised, and most university presses must function as businesses — not for profit, to be sure, but for financial sustainability. A university press’s values and aspirations mean that often the decision to publish will not solely be a commercial one.

Louise Adler made my working life harder by outbidding us on books and writers I sought for our list. But these were often books that informed public debate, presented new voices and developed fresh ideas. In this, most university press publishers are singing from the same song sheet. As a university press publisher for more than twenty years, I can say categorically that I want to publish the best books by the best writers, not all of whom will be academics presenting publicly funded research to the world.

Sometimes that research is simply too narrow to work in book form for an Australian audience. But if an academic has bold, fresh ideas that I think will resonate, I want to work with her to shape them so we reach as many readers as possible. I want to publish books that will find readers, not always in the mass-market numbers that a trade publisher would hope for, but enough to ensure we don’t go broke. Like many other academic publishers in Australia and around the world, we frequently compete with trade publishers for the same authors — who may be academics themselves — and the sales that publishers of all kinds aspire to.

The publishing model for most international scholarly presses has traditionally assumed they are an extension of their parent university. So university presses have either been directly subsidised by them or by large endowments — or, in the United States in particular (and, in MUP’s case, with the Miegunyah bequest), both. Some multinational presses are large and profitable enough to remit money back to their (Oxbridge) parent universities. Building a prestigious list is competitive; presses with strong lists in particular subject areas, say Chinese art or moral philosophy, will fight for the best academic authors in those disciplines. And in countries with larger markets, books can be priced high.

For many academic authors, the economics of publishing are irrelevant. They need a book contract to secure a job or a promotion, to get tenure and to feed the ever-hungry beast called “metrics,” the endless ranking of journals and other publications to measure research outputs. University presses are a central part of this complicated ecology of employment and promotion.

But scholarly works about Australian subjects in the humanities and social sciences don’t generally travel, so we must rely on our own small market. And many of the best academics want to engage a general reading public. Books for specialised readers must be subsidised directly by bequests, parent universities or other sources, or by more commercial books from other parts of the list — or sometimes by other parts of the business, as is the case with UNSW Press.

We’re a company owned by the university rather than a department of it, and while we haven’t received annual operational funding comparable with other university presses, UNSW supports and invests in its press in many other ways. We manage the bookstore on campus — recently renovated and relaunched as a cultural hub — and run a distribution business that represents international and other Australian university presses, including Monash University Publishing and UWA Publishing, and many general publishers too, including Giramondo and Brow Books, which both happen to be housed within universities. Meanwhile, the long-established University of Queensland Press continues to develop its strong local list and publishes brilliant fiction, particularly Indigenous fiction.

Collegial but also competitive, university press publishing in Australia is more energetic and diverse than the media coverage of MUP this week would suggest. (In fact, I would suggest that the publishing landscape in general — including serious, provocative books across a range of subjects, as well as collaborative highly illustrated books published with museums and galleries — is bigger and livelier than this week’s discussion implies.) And we connect into global publishing networks, including the US-based Association of University Presses.

Incoming board members, new vice-chancellors, librarians, provosts and consultants will all arrive with different ideas about what a university press is for. Meanwhile, publishers, editors, designers, and sales and marketing teams will try to get on and do what they have always done, juggling the competing concerns of all parties to try to do the best by authors and their books.

All university press publishers in Australia seek to put meat on the bones of rhetoric about “national interest” or “national benefit.” These phrases became loaded after the most recent Australian Research Council funding controversy late in 2018, as the humanities and social sciences again become part of the culture wars. A central part of our job, which must always be outward-looking, is to promulgate scholarly ideas in accessible, sustainable ways. For a book of ideas, written by an emerging or established scholar, to find its way onto the shelves of Dymocks in a suburban shopping mall, and then into the hands of the reader who has heard the author talking on the radio, is surely the kind of outreach and community engagement that universities and funding bodies have in mind.

Readers may also find a university press book in an airport bookstore. Of all the arguments thrown around over the past week, the one that has most amused me is the idea that it is somehow beneath a respectable publisher to sell its titles in an airport bookstore. I’ve yet to meet any author, whether an elderly tenured professor, a junior academic, a journalist or a writer of any stripe, who isn’t over the moon when she sees her book in an airport bookshop. I’ve also received calls from authors inside the terminal asking me why their new book isn’t there. Anyone who goes to the extraordinary effort of writing a book wants to connect with readers. At base, that is what all university presses are about. •

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His provenance, as the Nagasaki-born younger son of Japanese parents who arrived in Guildford, southwest of London, when he was five, gave him initial distinction in that world, as well as providing the themes of his first two novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986). It seemed to matter at a time when the publishing industry was learning to market authors, and authors to become personalities, their points of social and cultural differentiation now a potential new lure.

Like Ian McEwan and Rose Tremain, Ishiguro enrolled as a student at the University of East Anglia’s soon-to-be-famous creative writing course, founded by the novelists Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson. His sparring over technique with Angela Carter bled into lasting comradeship. He featured in the Book Marketing Council’s list of best young British novelists in 1983. A flashy new generation of writers that included Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie solicited reams of copy about their biographies, politics, romances, feuds and — these were the early years of Thatcherism, after all — publishers’ advances.

They were also the years of proto-multiculturalism, albeit in a British, into-the-future-sideways mode that went with the metropolitan mood but against the dominant political grain. Ishiguro had a ready place available within the emerging circuits, which he was able to modify as well as occupy. By his mid twenties, living with his wife Lorna MacDougall, a social worker from Glasgow, playing guitar and composing songs as well as stories, the self-possessed English guy of Japanese origin began to make fertile use of his dual-yet-singular inheritance.

What was interesting about Ishiguro in this formative period is that he quietly declined the persistent invitations to self-exoticise. The Japan of those early novels drew on history’s sweep but was invented, not recollected or researched. (In a 1986 interview, he was “slightly dismayed” by reviewers who saw his books in documentary terms, as a “unique opportunity to get an insider’s view of Japan.”) He spoke its language only with his parents and first returned to the country at the age of thirty-five, eight years after becoming a British citizen. He frequently recalled the normality of his upbringing and the evenness of his transition to a new country.

The bubble years of the 1980s contributed to a Japan boom of sorts, and Ishiguro embodied the ties between the two nations. His background was a natural, if often trite, part of every review and profile. But with deft assurance he averted the enchantments that were by then moving from an accessory to a staple of literary marketing.

In every respect, his third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), was a breakthrough: for its use of the classically English setting of a country house to explore tensions between calling, heart and public morality; for its enduring success, a Booker prize win reinforced by an effective film adaptation; and for its reception as evidence of Ishiguro’s status as a major and, more subliminally, a British writer, no longer defined mainly with reference to his ancestry. Yet those fixated on otherness or orientalism found it impossible to let go: Ishiguro’s understated and elliptical register in conveying the butler Stevens’s self-deceptions could even be depicted in terms of an imported sensibility or a bridge across the two strands of Ishiguro’s identity.

The definite uplift in his reputation was also a vindication of Faber, his publishers, whose editor Robert McCrum (now literary editor at the Observer) had championed him from the first. And at this point, the resources Ishiguro had ingathered and the space he had established in those early years — including support from his long-term agent, Deborah Rogers — were deployed to striking effect. For his next novel, The Unconsoled (1995), was another kind of breakthrough: the hallucinatory interior narrative of a concert pianist, Ryder, whose imminent performance in a central European city is snared in unceasing small anxieties. The delicate social manners of the earlier works, so often their characters’ shield, were stripped back, exposing the abyss (as the Nobel committee would put it) that always lay beneath.

The 500-page book, twice the length of its predecessor, divided reviewers. Some, noting in its modernist discordance the traces of Robert Musil as well as Franz Kafka, recognised that it was far more a deepening than a departure. Anita Brookner, as astute a critic as a novelist, was one who ventured the word masterpiece. The more conventional narrative of When We Were Orphans (2000) soon accreted the same dreamlike quality. Christopher Banks, the London detective narrator, visiting Shanghai in the late 1930s to investigate his parents’ disappearance, is another who finds the reality around him, this time pervaded by Japan’s military occupation, elusive: “My memory of these moments is no longer very clear.” That is the Ishiguro sentiment, to be found in many variations.

A passage near the end of When We Were Orphans about a character’s “sense of mission and the futility of attempting to evade it,” seems to point forward to Never Let Me Go (2005), whose group portrait of children at an English boarding school melts into the gothic as awareness grows that these are cloned beings raised for the purpose of organ harvesting. Life is reduced to a brief, pitiless interlude. Yet within their cocooned world they inwardly ache towards the light.

Never Let Me Go’s Booker prize nomination and film version cemented its joint status with The Remains of the Day as the novelist’s most accomplished works. But Ishiguro seems immune from any audience expectation to stay in a groove, much like his lifelong hero Bob Dylan (also, to his great pleasure, the current laureate). Thus did The Buried Giant (2015), set in a ravaged Anglo-Saxon landscape where a traumatised couple are searching for their lost son, reconfirm both his imaginative daring and ability to perplex. A haunting theme is the creeping forgetfulness over even the couple’s own earlier lives, amid the larger unspecified calamity that has befallen the realm.

In Axl and Beatrice’s quest, the echoes multiply of the many Ishiguro characters whose private troubles secrete an era of public turmoil. The theme also comes up in his interview with a Nobel media representative after the announcement, where he says the “personal arena in which we have to try and find fulfilment and love… inevitably intersects with a larger world, where politics, or even dystopian universes, can prevail. We live in small worlds and big worlds at the same time and we can’t forget one or the other.”

Ishiguro has rarely spoken as a public intellectual. Of his generation, far more prominent in this respect have been the much missed Angela Carter, along with Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Hanif Kureishi, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie. “I always felt that for novelists, it’s better not to appear on television,” he told a documentary by Japan’s public broadcaster, NHK, in 2010. “I want people to relate to my stories, not to me as a person.”

That makes the views Ishiguro does choose to express all the more telling. In the foreword to a 2016 edition of An Artist of the Floating World, for example, he said the novel was “very much shaped” by the divisive years of Margaret Thatcher’s rule in the early 1980s. Those years, he said, were characterised by “the pressures on people in every walk of life to take sides; the rigid certainties, shading into self-righteousness and sinister aggression, of ardent, often youthful factions; the agonising about the role of the artist in a time of political change. And for me personally: the nagging sense of how difficult it is to see clearly above the dogmatic fervours of one’s day; and the fear that time and history would show that for all one’s good intentions, one had backed a wrong, shameful, even evil cause, and wasted one’s best years and talents to it.”

These very topical reflections, written in January 2016, acquired even greater force with the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union in June. The edition was published on schedule a week later. That weekend he wrote in a Financial Times essay of his anger at the outcome, the dangers of a far-right revival, and the need to “unite a sharply divided, bewildered, anxious, leaderless nation around its essentially decent heart.”

By default, the Nobel award gives such interventions extra significance. Ishiguro clasped this in his early comments, referring to the great uncertainty today about values and leadership in the Western world, and to people feeling unsafe. How his voice, as much as his art, matches this new status will be fascinating to see. So will be the media and political response. At this stage, broadcast and print news coverage is perfunctory, though literary pages feature warm tributes. Ishiguro’s prize has no propulsion as a national-cultural story compared to those of the recent British laureates: V.S. Naipaul (2001), Harold Pinter (2005) and Doris Lessing (2007). No doubt the atomising, decentring impacts of cyber revolution, and the erosion of critical arts journalism, are (related) factors in this. But it also has to do with these one-time pioneers’ vast political hinterland, provoking opinions, and celebrated vendettas. Their local fame was too set, their careers too advanced (Naipaul, the youngest, was sixty-eight), and — pace Ishiguro — their dogmatic fervours too aggravating for the Nobel to make anything new.

This time is different. Ishiguro is way beyond stereotype. True, a man whose heart beats on the left can expect a Daily Mail treatment with meagre praise, as well as a Craig Brown parody in Private Eye following sublime ones of Naipaul and Pinter. But alongside his work and his personal qualities, Ishiguro’s eschewing of petty strife or political idiocy across four decades gives him a rare moral authority.

More widely, the decade following those three awards has shaken the UK’s body politic and its collective psyche. Similar tremors are erupting across the world. Dealing with them is not intrinsically a writer’s job. But by exercising genuine imaginative freedom, a writer can sometimes find the wellspring of a truth that everybody knows but, until that point, has not been able to feel. And that can make something new. At this moment, Kazuo Ishiguro is the best possible shot. ●

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I’ve been writing stories for as long as I can remember, but it was only in 2014 — after two decades of practice — that I finally finished my first novel, Greythorne, a Gothic mystery set in Victorian England. The writing process itself had been relatively short, just twelve months from the idea to a manuscript I was comfortable submitting to publishers. In November 2014 I took it to an Australian Society of Authors Literary Speed Dating event in Sydney, where I pitched to various agents and editors, and five months later one of those contacts bore fruit.

My contract was with a digital-first imprint of one of the Big Five (the five biggest book publishers in the United States: Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette, Pan Macmillan and Simon & Schuster). Digital-first meant it would be available only in ebook and print-on-demand formats, so there’d be no big print runs or distribution to bookshops unless it happened to do very well. At the time I didn’t care; it was a foot in the door.

What followed was a stripping away of any illusions I might have had about the traditional publishing industry. I thought publishers were in the business of marketing books — because they presumably want them to sell. Once upon a time they were, but those days are long gone. These days, a new release has to fend for itself, and if it doesn’t strike paydirt within the first month, then it’s done its dash. But getting lucky is far more likely to happen in some genres than in others — romance and crime, for instance, have hugely dedicated readerships. It certainly doesn’t happen in Gothic mystery.

I baulked at the thought of going indie; deep down, it still felt like the easy way out, or second best to endorsement by a traditional publisher.

Of course, I was lucky to have been offered a contract at all. The market for my kind of book is relatively small, and Greythorne is short as novels go, at only 55,000 words, or a bit over 200 standard paperback pages (most publishers prefer them to be around the 80,000-word mark). The development of digital-first imprints — which several major publishers have started in an attempt to tap into the ebook market — means that publishers will sometimes take chances on books like mine, whereas they wouldn’t necessarily consider them for a traditional print run. But these imprints are also often tiny, run by a dedicated but small team of people within a very big company, without the resources to properly market their wares. Essentially, they’re often set up to fail, and this failure then reinforces everything the publishers think they know about the ebook market, namely that it’s impossible to make a go of. (It’s not — trade publishers just don’t do it very well — but more on that later.)

In mid 2016, the imprint I’d been contracted by closed down unexpectedly, or at least it was unexpected for those of us on the outside. A number of authors, me included, were left stranded. On the one hand, our contracts were with the parent company, so they were still valid as long as our books continued to be made available for sale. They were, but what little marketing support there’d been had disappeared. On the other hand, the publisher offered to give us back our rights, but then we’d have to decide what to do with them. I queried an agent about the possibility of pitching the book to another publisher and was basically told not to bother — it’s extremely difficult to resell an already published novel unless it’s a bestseller. I decided to leave Greythorne where it was for the time being, because at least people could still buy it. Then I started looking at options.

In the meantime, I’d begun working on another novel, The Iron Line. This was another Gothic mystery, this time set in Australia in the 1880s. The imprint’s collapse had taken away any temptation to take the path of least resistance by pitching it to them, but it also meant I was essentially back to square one in terms of finding a publisher and/or an agent. It was a demoralising thought.

Around the same time, an author friend introduced me to a Facebook group for “indie” authors. Indie, or independent, authors are what used to be known as self-publishers — people who produce and publish books themselves, in this case using ebook and print-on-demand technology. Indie publishing is very different from vanity publishing, where unscrupulous companies charge inexperienced authors to publish through them, often to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, for little or no meaningful return. Indie authors subcontract services like editing and design themselves, and retain full control of all their intellectual property.

The indie scene underwent a renaissance in the late 2000s, spurred on by Amazon’s release of Kindle Direct Publishing, which allows authors to publish directly to Amazon’s Kindle ebook platform rather than having to go through a third party. In the ten years or so since then, indie publishing has developed into a thriving industry, with an array of services blossoming out of nowhere to support it. Self-publishers are no longer stereotypical narcissists with thousands of badly printed books in their basement; these days they’re businesspeople, and often quite successful ones at that.

Discovering just how many options are available to the modern author — far beyond the “contract or bust” model of yesteryear — was a revelation. But at the same time I baulked at the thought of going indie; deep down, it still felt like the easy way out, or second best to endorsement by a traditional publisher. So I left Greythorne languishing there in limbo, but nevertheless decided to find out exactly what this indie publishing thing was all about.

Entering the indie publishing world is a little bit like entering a parallel universe. Up in the firmament are a whole host of superstars you’ve probably never heard of — Hugh Howey, Joanna Penn, David Gaughran, K.M. Weiland, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, James Scott Bell — many of whom are making five-, six- or occasionally seven-figure incomes from their writing. Further down are the mid-list — people who aren’t quite indie superstars but who are making perfectly respectable money through savvy marketing. Of course, there are still traces of the old self-publishing problem evident in those books that lack decent design and/or editing, but that’s what happens in a democratic marketplace. You could sit the best-quality indie books next to traditionally published books and most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

One characteristic of the most successful indie authors that I noticed early on is that they’re not just authors — they’re businesspeople. Many of them run mini-empires, built around not just their fiction work but also non-fiction, speaking gigs, workshops and other services. To succeed, indie books need to harness a whole marketing ecosystem — an email list, free giveaways, a spot in the coveted BookBub newsletter (which sends free or discounted deals to its subscribers every day and can add thousands to a book’s sales), and so on — and the most successful authors have learned how to make this work for them.

Hybrid strategy: Hugh Howey capitalised on his self-publishing success by striking print deals with major publishers but retaining lucrative ebook rights.

Strangely enough, though, techniques that would be a closely guarded secret in other industries are willingly shared in the indie world. Whether it’s through free sources such as Facebook groups and podcasts, or through non-fiction books, webinars and other media, indie authors are almost always ready to help each other out. In the indie Facebook group I’m part of, members regularly (and constructively) critique each other’s covers and blurbs, offer feedback on drafts, and answer questions about platforms and marketing strategies, even sharing the results of particular promotions they’ve launched and offering lessons learned. You might think that an industry in which members are competing to get their own work noticed would be incredibly vicious, but in fact indies across the board are really nice.

Even those who’ve had enormous success seem to see value in giving back to the community. Hugh Howey became famous as the first indie author to sign a print-only deal (retaining ebook rights because he’d done so well with them on his own) after his dystopian science-fiction trilogy, Silo, was picked up by Simon & Schuster for a six-figure sum. But he’s also known in the indie community as the brains behind the Author Earnings website, which is one of the few sources of sales statistics that don’t come from the major publishers (which don’t usually include ebooks or indie books). It aims to crunch the data across the entire marketplace and give a more accurate snapshot of exactly which types of books are selling and who’s producing them.

The traditional publishers hate this kind of thing because sales figures have always been a tightly held secret, but Author Earnings is in keeping with the openness of the indie community, which is all about sharing information to help authors make informed decisions. Likewise, one of the longest-running podcasts on indie publishing, The Creative Penn, run by British author Joanna Penn, regularly hosts guests from all over the world who share information on all aspects of indie publishing, from writing techniques to exploiting audio rights to getting the most out of Amazon ads. The amount of information available, often for free, is simply extraordinary.

All the same, indie publishing is a huge learning curve, and it’s not for everyone. Some writers just want to write, and that’s fine. As an indie author you have to do it all, and that means being comfortable with marketing. Once upon a time, highly introverted authors were able to hide behind their publisher’s marketing department, but not any more. Even in trade publishing, authors have to do the lion’s share of the work when it comes to getting their book out there, and in indie publishing this is magnified. If that’s not your thing, or if you’re not technologically savvy, you’re going to struggle as an indie author.

The other thing to bear in mind is that some types of books sell better than others. Romance readers, for example, are voracious and loyal, so romance is the perfect genre for indies because the market is huge. Likewise, crime tends to do well, especially “cosy crime” (think Agatha Christie) and thrillers. Speculative fiction — science fiction, fantasy, horror and all their various sub-genres — also has a pretty strong market, especially because the ebook retailers’ categories go into quite some detail, so readers can browse very specific varieties of the genre according to their taste. Steampunk, for example — a speculative fiction subset that has fantasy or sci-fi elements set in an alternative Victorian-era world — is a growing market, but not big enough for many traditional publishers to touch it.

On the other hand, middle-grade fiction (chapter books for children aged eight to twelve) is generally accepted as difficult to publish independently. Kids’ books in general are hard to sell this way because you have to market to the parents as well as the child, and these works tend not to be so popular in ebook form anyway. Likewise, if you write literary fiction then indie publishing is a bad idea, because it won’t sell — but then, literary fiction tends not to sell very well in any format, which is why traditional publishers use the earnings from genre fiction bestsellers to cross-subsidise it. Literary fiction authors also depend disproportionately on literary reviews and prizes, neither of which are particularly accepting of indie-published books. But for genre fiction authors like me, there are far more opportunities than ever before.

In early 2017, I decided to dip my toe in the indie publishing waters with a non-fiction book, Communications for Volunteers: Low-cost Strategies for Community Groups, which I’d written as an asset for my consultancy business (because, like most writers, I also have a day job). In this case, there was never any question of finding a traditional publisher; I deliberately decided to go indie because I wanted to retain full control over the intellectual property rights. I knew I’d be using material from the book in other aspects of my business, such as training courses, and I didn’t want to have to go running to a publisher for permission every time I wanted to do that. So indie it was.

As an entree to the industry I probably couldn’t have picked a more difficult book. It was full-colour with lots of lists and diagrams, so was a lot more complicated and expensive to format and print than a traditional black-and-white novel. Marketing non-fiction is also quite different from marketing fiction, and there are fewer resources available. But I got there in the end, and it made me realise just how much freedom and control you have over the entire process, from what you write, to design, release dates, sales and giveaways

I watched Greythorne’s sales ranking slide without being able to do anything about it. If you can’t control the price then you can’t run sales, give books away for free, or implement any of the marketing mechanisms that will actually help it to sell.

By this point I’d finished the first draft of The Iron Line and was getting started on rewriting. It had taken longer than Greythorne (it turns out that starting a new business and finishing a novel aren’t always compatible) but it was rapidly reaching the point where I needed to decide what to do with it. I’d been toying with the idea of indie publishing from early on in the process, but had come up against the stigma that still exists around self-publishing. A successful author friend epitomised this when she said, on hearing that I was thinking of going indie, “Oh no, don’t do that — your writing is far too good and it’d be a waste of your talent.”

So I continued to weigh up my options — agent, major publisher, small press — and in July this year I again went to a Literary Speed Dating event. I had some muted interest, but also “we can’t sell Gothic” and some concerns about the length of The Iron Line, which, although slightly longer than Greythorne, is still on the short side. Even the fact that I already had one book published (and so was slightly less of a risk than a debut author) seemed to make little difference.

In the meantime, I watched Greythorne’s sales ranking slide without being able to do anything about it. If you can’t control the price then you can’t run sales, give books away for free, or implement any of the marketing mechanisms that will actually help it to sell. I knew that the dismal sales figures weren’t because it was a bad book — it had got good reviews, and I’d actually made some pretty decent money, albeit by buying print-on-demand copies and on-selling them myself, which is ultimately an unsustainable way of doing things. Finally, I decided that I wasn’t getting anything from the publisher that I couldn’t get myself, so I got my rights back and have recently re-released Greythorne under my own imprint. Suddenly a whole world of possibility has opened up, and I’m cursing having waited so long to do it.

I started thinking about The Iron Line systematically. What could a traditional publisher give me that I couldn’t get for myself? These days, publishers tend to outsource design and editing to freelancers, so these can be obtained at the same quality you’d get if you went through the trade press. Indies obviously have to finance these themselves, but then the potential returns are also far higher.

The one thing traditional publishers can provide is print distribution into bookshops. But the reality is that most books only stay on the shelves for a month or two, unless they happen to take off. Certainly books in niche genres, like mine, won’t hang around for long. And in any case, bookshops (much as I love them as a reader) only give access to the Australian market, which in global terms is minuscule, whereas indies have access to the entire English-speaking world — and beyond just the usual Western suspects. Some of the places I’ve gained the most traction have, oddly enough, been India, Malaysia and South Africa, and one of my longer-term projects for Greythorne is a Hindi translation.

Another important consideration, and the main reason why the indie mid-list is thriving while it’s all but disappeared from the traditional industry, is royalty distribution. On Amazon, which is still far and away the biggest ebook retailer, any books priced between US$2.99 and US$9.99 yield a 70 per cent royalty (for books outside those parameters it’s 35 per cent). This means that for every US$4.99 copy of Greythorne sold, I make US$3.50. I can’t divulge the royalty rate from my original contract, but I can tell you it was a lot less than that. If you choose to publish exclusively with Amazon, you can also enrol in their subscription program, Kindle Unlimited, which gives readers access to an unlimited number of books in exchange for a monthly subscription, with authors paid by the number of pages read as well as for normal sales.

Other retailers, such as Kobo, give authors a 70 per cent royalty regardless of price. Plenty of research has shown the sweet spot for ebooks — the point where the author will move the most copies but still get a decent return — to be around the three-to-five-dollar mark, which is why indie authors who are savvy with their pricing and marketing are often able to make a decent living. In contrast, most trade publishers still use ebook pricing primarily to drive sales to paperbacks (which is where they make their money), ignoring the many reasons why readers might choose to read ebooks instead. This is why you often see ebooks from traditional publishers priced at anywhere between $10 and $25, which means, of course, that they don’t sell anywhere near as well as their more reasonably priced cousins.

Even though most indie authors still make the majority of their income from ebooks, developments in print-on-demand technology have made indie paperbacks a huge industry. Gone are the days when a minimum print run was 1000 books, which you then had to store until you could sell them. These days, you just upload a file and it gets printed as people order copies. Amazon has its own print production company, CreateSpace, while one of the world’s largest producers of traditionally published books, Ingram Content Group, also runs a print-on-demand arm, IngramSpark, designed for indie publishers. IngramSpark also markets indie books directly to retailers and libraries in the same way that Ingram sells its traditionally published books, meaning that it’s easier than ever for indies to get their work out there.

The other exciting area where indies are leading the way is audio. In the last five years, the audiobook market has taken off, driven in large part by the ubiquity of the smartphone and the resultant podcast revolution, which changed people’s listening habits. Most traditional publishers, realising just how valuable audio rights are, will now force authors to sign them over (whereas previously you could choose to retain these and nobody cared), even if they have no intention of exploiting them, which deprives authors of a valuable asset. In addition, unlike with print books, it’s not possible for authors to pitch directly to audiobook publishers such as Bolinda. They deal directly with print publishers, so even if you retain your audio rights, there’s no way you can get an independent deal with them.

Unsurprisingly, Amazon is leading the way in indie audiobook production, like it did with ebooks, through its own platform, Audiobook Creation Exchange. ACX pairs authors with narrators, through either a fee-for-service or royalty-sharing arrangement, and then publishes the audiobook to Amazon’s massive Audible platform, as well as to iTunes. Books published on Audible are also made available for sale on Amazon alongside the ebook and paperback versions, and it’s becoming increasingly common for customers to buy both the ebook and the audiobook, especially as they sync on a smartphone or tablet to allow seamless transitions between the two formats. (You can read up to a certain point in the ebook, and the audiobook will pick up where you left off, and vice versa.)

But ACX isn’t available everywhere — Australia, as you might expect, is one of the places yet to receive it — and other companies such as Findaway Voices are rapidly filling the gaps. The growth of in-home voice-activated services such as Google Home and Amazon Echo is also likely to bolster the audiobook market, and indies are in a prime position to take advantage of it.

Looking at it this way, in cold, unemotional business terms, it was clear to me what the best option was. But if this sounds like an easy decision, it wasn’t. Indie publishing is hard work. It also, strangely, felt a bit like admitting defeat. I hadn’t realised how deeply I’d internalised the idea that the only people who self-publish are those who can’t get a traditional contract.

Thankfully, this perception is gradually changing, especially as more and more well-known authors start choosing the hybrid model — some books published traditionally, some indie. In December 2016, bestselling Australian author John Birmingham (He Died with a Felafel in His Hand) announced that, although he still had some trade contracts, he was going to be indie publishing a lot of his work from now on, after a falling-out with his publisher. Such high-profile defections help give legitimacy to indie publishing, as does the fact that many publishing awards are now increasingly open to indies. In fact, the annual ACT Publishing Awards are open only to books published either independently or by small presses, in recognition of the fact that high-quality work exists outside the publishing mainstream.

For me, ultimately, it came down to freedom. I certainly don’t expect to make my fortune overnight — indie publishing is a long game — but I have control over my own destiny, and that’s hugely important to me. Indie publishing gives me freedom not just in the business sense of deciding release dates, pricing and when to run sales, but also creatively. The accepted wisdom in traditional publishing is that once you publish your first novel you need to keep writing more of the same in order not to confuse readers, but in indie publishing, you can write whatever you want. It’s true that deviating hugely from your normal genre may not be the best business decision, at least under the same name, but if I want to jump from Gothic mystery to steampunk, for instance, that’s not such a huge leap. Realising I have the freedom to experiment creatively and to take risks (some of which may not pay off, but some of which I’m hoping will) is incredibly liberating. And even if I lose the respect of many in the traditional publishing industry, I can connect directly with my readers, which is one of the things I love most about being an author.

For many writers, a traditional publishing contract will still be the pinnacle of success, and others just want to write without the pressure of running their career like a business. And I haven’t ruled it out entirely; if the right trade contract came along, I’d happily be a hybrid author. Considering that just a decade ago everyone seemed to be decrying the death of the book industry, it’s incredibly exciting to realise that it’s not just surviving but thriving. It may not look exactly like it used to, but as both an author and a reader I feel there’s great cause for optimism. •

The assistance of the Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund in providing funding for this article is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Publishing’s parallel universe appeared first on Inside Story.

“THE phenomenon of Superstars… seems to be increasingly important in the modern world,” wrote economist Sherwin Rosen in 1981. Comedians were earning “extraordinary sums,” especially from TV. A few hundred classical music soloists earned much more than second-rank musicians, though most consumers couldn’t tell the difference. Economics textbook sales were dominated by a few bestsellers, despite the availability of lots of “good and highly substitutable alternatives.”

Why was this happening? Rosen identified two related reasons. First, “lesser talent often is a poor substitute for greater talent… Hearing a succession of mediocre singers does not add up to a single outstanding performance.” Second, technologies that enabled “joint consumption,” especially of entertainment products, made it “advantageous to operate in the largest overall market – and increasingly advantageous the more talented one is.” The best artists sold their work “in the great markets of New York and Paris, not Cincinnati.” Violinists made more money than accordionists. Tennis players were better-paid than ten-pin bowlers.

Technological change had magnified the benefits of scale, Rosen argued. Recorded music, movies, radio, TV and other changes in communications “had increased the scope of each performer’s audience.” Outside entertainment, “secular changes” in transport and communications technology had “expanded the potential market for all kinds of professional and information services and allowed many of the top practitioners to operate at a national or even international scale.”

Rosen remembered economist Alfred Marshall’s observation, many decades before, that “the operations, in which a man exceptionally favoured by genius and good luck, can take part, are so extensive as to enable him to amass a large fortune with a rapidity hitherto unknown.” Marshall too thought technology was part of the explanation: “the development of new facilities for communications by which men, who have once attained a commanding position, are enabled to apply their constructive or speculative genius to undertakings vaster, and extending over a wider area, than ever before.”

Early in the twenty-first century, Wired editor Chris Anderson argued that newer technologies were having a quite different impact. In virtually all markets, he argued, niche goods greatly outnumbered bestsellers. The cost of supplying those niches was falling dramatically and tools enabling consumers to find them were improving. Because there are so many niche products, “collectively they can comprise a market rivalling the hits.”

“Once all of this is in place, the natural shape of demand is revealed, undistorted by distribution bottlenecks, scarcity of information, and limited choice of shelf-space.” That shape – which Anderson called the Long Tail – is “as diverse as the population itself.” It is “culture unfiltered by economic scarcity.”

DO AUSTRALIAN sales of cinema tickets, DVDs and books support the superstar or Long Tail argument? To find out, we looked at the evidence from a decade of purchases of these three different products. The Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia provided cinema data for 2002–11, and the market researchers GfK Australia gave us figures for DVDs. For books, we had access to Nielsen BookScan figures going back to 2003, the year it began collecting data in Australia.

This was the period in which a new Harry Potter book came out every year or two, followed about four years later by a movie version and, four months after that, by a DVD. At the start of the period, The Lord of the Rings movies and Star Wars prequels were huge in cinemas and on DVD; towards the end, the Transformers and Twilight franchises emerged. Instalments of Pirates of the Caribbean, Shrek and Ice Age appeared throughout the decade. In the final year of the period, 2011, the first of the three Fifty Shades novels was published, achieving astonishing sales figures.

The overall data for cinema sales, DVDs and books show striking similarities and differences. For much of the period, total revenues, adjusted for inflation, were remarkably similar. Between 2004 and 2010, each sector earned between $1 billion and $1.4 billion in 2011 dollars. DVD (including Blu-ray) sales rose sharply into that range at the start of the period and fell just out of it at the end. Book sales rose through the decade but fell in 2010 and 2011. Cinema revenue grew, though not steadily.

The numbers of titles sold in the three markets differed markedly. In 2011, 437 films screened in Australian cinemas (including 342 new releases during the year), a tiny fraction of the number of DVDs (around 36,000) and books (around 630,000) that sold at least one copy.

The rates of change in these figures were also very different. The annual number of movies screened in cinemas increased by a quarter over the decade. The number of books selling at least one copy more than doubled. The number of DVDs increased nearly tenfold between 2002 and 2009 but then fell 20 per cent in the two years to 2011.

This growth in the number of titles suggested a lengthening “tail” for all three products. But what of the revenues earned in these longer tails?

USING one type of measure – what we call the “relative metric” – all three markets look like blockbuster businesses. We calculated the proportion of total revenue earned by the top 10 per cent, the top 20 per cent and the bottom 50 per cent of titles. In cinema, the figures were fairly steady over the decade: the top 10 per cent generated an average of 62 per cent of revenue each year, the top 20 per cent averaged 83 per cent – quite close to the clichéd “80–20 rule” – and the bottom 50 per cent averaged 2 per cent.

By this measure, DVDs and books got more “blockbustery” over the decade. The top 10 per cent of DVD titles generated 70 per cent of revenue in 2002 and 78 per cent in 2011; the top 20 per cent grew from 83 per cent to 91 per cent of total revenue in 2011; the bottom 50 per cent fell from 4 per cent of total revenue in 2002 to 1 per cent. The top 10 per cent of books also increased from 83 per cent to 88 per cent of total revenue and the top 20 per cent from 91 per cent to 93 per cent. The bottom 50 per cent averaged just 2 per cent of revenue throughout the period.

So is that the end of the Long Tail thesis? We thought not. The problem with using a “relative metric” in markets where the number of titles is growing strongly is that many more titles get counted in both the “head” and the “tail” as time goes on, but the head reaches much further down the list of bestselling titles.

An alternate approach is to use what we call an “absolute” metric, in which the head is defined as the revenue earned each year by a fixed number of titles and the tail as the rest. This approach isn’t perfect – selecting the sets of top titles is fairly arbitrary and interpreting what is meant by those titles can be tricky – but it looks at the data in a different way.

We chose three measures of the head – the top twenty titles, and the number of titles represented by the top 10 per cent and by the top 20 per cent in the first year. For the top 20 per cent, this meant the revenue earned in each year by the top eighty movies, the top 1000 DVDs and the top 50,000 books.

For the tail, we chose a single measure – everything other than the number of titles in the top 50 per cent of titles in the first year. This meant all titles in each year selling less than number 200 on the list of top-grossing movies, number 2500 on the list of DVDs, and number 125,000 on the list of books.

Applying this metric hardly changed the results for the cinema data. Independent of measurement technique, a fairly small share of movies consistently generated the vast majority of Australian box office revenue. Box office might not quite be a winner-takes-all market, but it has been and continues to be “winner-takes-most.”

For DVDs and books, however, the absolute metric produced very different results from the relative metric. The top 1000 DVDs earned 84 per cent of total revenue in 2002 but only 53 per cent in 2011. Revenue generated by the tail increased from 3 per cent to 30 per cent. For books, revenue generated by the top 50,000 titles fell from 91 per cent to 85 per cent over the decade. The tail grew from 2 per cent to 7 per cent of revenue.

So changing the way we defined the head and the tail led to a different conclusion – that a significant Long Tail had emerged, or lengthened, in DVDs and books.

HARVARD Business School’s Anita Elberse has been analysing these issues for years. Her book Blockbusters, published recently in Australia by Scribe, uses a range of examples – from the Hollywood studio Warner Brothers to the football team Real Madrid – to argue that the best-performing companies invest a relatively large proportion of resources in a few superstar titles and people. They maximise their chances of success with big marketing budgets, aiming to stand out in increasingly competitive markets. Analysing Warner Brothers’ projects, Elberse concludes that the biggest bets have been the most profitable. Not pursuing a blockbuster strategy, she says, can be riskier, because you simply cannot afford to end up in the long, but decidedly thin, tail.

Blockbusters is an important counter to the Long Tail thesis. Elberse demonstrates just how important big stars, big titles and big franchises continue to be for the entertainment business. But she makes an even bigger claim: not only is the importance of individual bestsellers not diminishing over time, it is growing. “Rather than a shift of demand to the long tail, we are witnessing an increased level of concentration in the market for digital entertainment goods… the entertainment industry is moving more and more toward a winner-take-all market.”

We’re not so sure. To draw that conclusion, you have to be very confident the datasets you are using are not just internally consistent, but also continue to capture or describe the same thing over time.

Of the three media we analysed, the oldest and most open market – books – had, by a narrow margin, the strongest blockbuster characteristics (on either the relative or absolute metric). This supports Elberse’s view and the old observation that, by allowing people “to apply their… genius to undertakings vaster… than ever before,” superstar rewards might increase over time.

We also found, like Elberse, that although the tail has grown for books and DVDs, it is very long and, especially for books, very, very thin. Of the 625,000 books that sold at least one copy in 2011, the bottom 500,000 sold an average of just five copies each. That is useful for businesses that can cheaply aggregate a lot of such titles; it is not so useful financially for small-scale producers of the titles that sit, largely unwanted, on the server or shelf.

But neither Elberse’s nor our data covered the universe of relevant consumer behaviour. The cinema data captured all the movies that got a theatrical release in commercial cinemas; it did not cover those screening in the growing number and range of film festivals. The Nielsen BookScan data counted books sold in Australian retail stores but not e-books or any purchases from overseas retailers like Amazon, and it tells us nothing about what people were actually reading. The GfK DVD data alone doesn’t tell us what consumers have been doing with their content choices and leisure time as they have bought fewer DVDs.

Our analysis also shows that how you define the head and the tail has a big impact on the results. Describing and understanding rapidly changing marketplaces is like photographing a fast-moving object – you can accept a blurred object, or a blurred background, or set a very fast shutter speed to get a sharp but unnatural image of both. Each picture will be interesting but incomplete.

How you turn your conclusions about recent history into guidance for future activities is also crucial. Betting on blockbusters often means investing in proven formulas – people, stories, teams and sports that can be put before audiences with “pre-awareness.” But identifying, for example, the Harry Potter books and movies as the triumph of superstar economics emphasises the size of the bet Warner Brothers made on the movies, while perhaps under-appreciating the nature of the risks that Bloomsbury took with an untried author and that Warners took with untried actors.

Blockbusters doesn’t avoid the obvious question: if big bets are the most profitable, why make any small ones? Because, Elberse answers, they can serve as test cases for bigger projects, they can keep distribution pipelines full and spread their fixed costs, they can attract outside investors with different risk profiles, and they can offer prestige projects to fussy stars.

The overwhelming message, however, is that the way to succeed is to be big, and the way to get big is to be big already, or enter into partnerships with big people.

There is clearly a lot in this. But it is primarily an assessment – an extraordinarily useful one – of how some large enterprises are trying to stay large, sometimes successfully. It is less satisfactory as a comprehensive explanation of the competing, even contradictory, forces affecting entertainment markets and the wider economy.

Does YouTube’s rise tell us more about the power of the established company that took it over (Google), or about the initial, disruptive power of a newish idea brilliantly executed? Or about how hard it has still been for them to generate big profits, even from a wildly popular activity, in a media landscape that is difficult not just to predict, but also to measure. •

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