Labor wasn’t his only victim. John Grey Gorton, Liberal prime minister from 1968 to 1971, felt Reid had brought him down on Sir Frank Packer’s instructions, crossing the line between reporting party room plots and shaping them. Gorton described Reid as a ‘slightly built balding man with little darting eyes and an expression of perpetual cynicism… peeping under a drooping eyelid from the corner of one eye… one expects momentarily to be nudged in the ribs with a confidential elbow and given a hot tip for the 3.30 at Randwick’.

Reid’s 50-year career reporting federal politics started in 1937 at the Sun. He switched to the Frank Packer-owned Telegraph in 1954. When he died in 1987, Reid was Kerry Packer’s personal emissary in Canberra, his lobbyist, as well as a reporter for the Bulletin and Channel 9. This was a brazen conflict. Yet his professional success subsumed all: he delivered scoops with mischief and relish, and MPs spilled secrets to him like stricken sinners in the confessional.

His most remembered front page appeared in March 1963 and put paid to the ALP’s chances of beating the Menzies government in that year’s federal election. A special ALP conference had met in Canberra’s Kingston Hotel to determine the party position on a US communication station at North West Cape in Western Australia.

Under the then party rules, leader Arthur Calwell and deputy leader Gough Whitlam were not delegates. They were caught loitering, somewhat pathetically, under a street light waiting for unknown union and party officials to arrive at a policy and hand it to them. Reid grabbed a passing photographer and captured the humiliation of the Labor leadership at the hands of what became immortalised as ‘the 36 faceless men’. It was instant political devastation for a profoundly unworldly Labor party.

Reid wrote three books, but none on the affair that sealed his journalistic reputation: the Labor split of 1954 -7. It was Reid, in the Sun, who had unveiled B.A. Santamaria, the leader of the so-called Movement, which was mobilising within the unions and party: ‘…in the tense melodrama of politics there are mysterious figures who stand virtually unnoticed in the wings, invisible to all but a few in the audience, as they cue, Svengali-like … the actors on the stage.’

Reid was fond of the John Curtin-Ben Chifley era of Labor leadership and hostile to Santamaria, whom he portrayed as an ‘exotic’ force. He even advised H.V. Evatt on his 1954 statement attacking the Santamaria forces. The statement provoked the split, but was entirely unnecessary as Santamaria’s influence was containable and, as leader, Evatt should have been able to straddle his party’s factions as Curtin and Chifley had done.

Reid recoiled from ‘the Doc’ as the flailing Evatt resorted to anti-Catholic sectarianism, as reflected in this exchange with Reid, patched together from Reid’s oral history:

Evatt: Alan, you’ve left me… You’re anti-Santamaria but you’re not with me in this campaign… I’ll tell you something Alan, for every Catholic vote I’ll lose I will get two Protestant votes.

Reid: You’re out of your cotton- picking mind, Doc.

In their biography of Reid, Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt refer to Evatt’s ‘rapprochement with communists and fellow travellers in the broader labour movement’. This is a good insight, the key to Evatt’s position through the split. This accommodation of a pro-communist Left was documented by Reid in story after story, especially after he joined the Telegraph and his contempt for Evatt merged with Sir Frank Packer’s fierce conservatism.

When Ross Fitzgerald told me he and Stephen Holt were going to write a biography of Alan Reid, I told him the material would be too scant, the result too meagre. The authors have proved me wrong. They have written an invaluable history of the interaction of the Press Gallery and politicians.

When I launched the book, I quoted the American writer Susan Sontag, who said in 1982: ‘Imagine the preposterous case of somebody who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and somebody else who read only the Nation between 1950 and 1970. Who would be getting more truth about the nature of communism? There’s no doubt it would have been the Reader’s Digest reader.’

The same is true here, I suggested. Through the Fifties and Sixties, Reid and his tabloid insights into Labor, communism and Evatt would have offered more truth than the pages of Meanjin or Outlook.

Reid would have found little to disagree with in The Family File. On the surface this is surprising, because Mark Aarons’ book is the story of four generations of a family of communists. But it is told through the archives of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), hence its unique flavour. The author’s good sense — he let lapse his communist party membership in 1978 — rescues it from being another soft-headed memoir of heroic revolutionaries struggling for peace, workers’ rights and democracy.

As a boy in 1959, Mark Aarons saw a car pulling into the backyard of the family’s Fairfield home and a suitcase being handed to his father, Laurie, then general secretary of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). Opened, it revealed wads of cash: 45,000 Australian pounds from the Soviet Union, he later learned, sent through a Romanian trade union to keep Australian communism afloat.

The book confirms that the Soviet Embassy delivered orders to the leadership of the CPA and, when the party criticised Russia after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia, the embassy worked with a pro-Soviet faction to create a pro-Soviet breakaway party.

The revelation at the epicentre of the book, however, is the story of the party’s involvement in Soviet espionage. Enter stage left the conspiratorial figure of Wally Clayton who, from 1943 to 1949 and at the direction of the CPA leadership, worked with the Soviet embassy in Canberra. He collected files from party members and sympathisers in the public service in Canberra and delivered them to the TASS correspondent in Kings Cross, Sydney, who was the local KGB man.

After the CPA dissolved itself in 1991, Laurie Aarons, who had been the party’s national secretary from 1965 to 1976, taped an interview with Clayton, by then 90 years old. Clayton admitted in this tape that he delivered material to Soviet intelligence, something he had insolently denied at the Petrov Royal Commission into Soviet Espionage (1954-5), and that he had done it at the request of then party secretary Lance Sharkey. This revelation should nudge Australian historians towards a more benign view of the Petrov Royal Commission, which had been denounced so thoroughly by Evatt and criticised by Labor-inclined historians.

After the commission, Laurie Aarons claims he terminated any dealings with the Soviet embassy that may have fed intelligence to Soviet spies. Mark Aarons quotes him as saying: ‘The thing about spying is that it’s a very dangerous thing to have alleged against you.’ True indeed. Yet Mark Aarons reports that a first secretary of the Embassy, Ivan Skipov, was to beat a path to Bill Brown, a CPA leader and later a leader of the pro-Soviet breakaway party, who gave him the names of sympathisers. To people like Brown, the Soviet Union was the country of the mind, the object of their patriotism.

For Labor party people, the most arresting material in Mark Aarons’ book is the confirmation that the CPA recruited and managed dual ticketholders, that is, left-wingers who held secret membership of the communist party while they held office in the ALP. The big fish here was Arthur Gietzelt, eventually a minister in the Hawke government. This practice, of course, magnified the influence of a relatively tiny Marxist-Leninist party, giving it a say — how much of a say can be debated — at ALP conferences.

Some leftists have said in reference to Aarons’ book: ‘Big deal. Everybody knew it.’ Maybe. But we’ve never had a combination of ASIO file notes and a member of the Aarons family laying it down for the record. Moreover, no dual ticketholder has ever admitted it; Gietzelt continues to deny it. And historian Stuart Macintyre in his writings on the history of the CPA never revealed it.

A book is now being written on Gietzelt and research taking place on others on the Labor Left who may have held dual membership. A number of ALP leftwingers could be revealed as long-term CPA plants. As a result, some leftist activism could be exposed as less indigenous Labor radicalism and rather emanations and diktats emerging from a Marxist-Leninist party that could never poll one per cent at a general election under its own name.

This has implications for the historiography of Australia in the Cold War era. It strengthens the indictments of Evatt and Calwell because they accommodated what we can probably now objectively define as a pro-communist Left and thus made Labor close to unelectable. It elevates Gough Whitlam’s role as the leader who broke the power of the Victorian ALP executive and prevented Jim Cairns becoming Labor leader. In acres of speeches and writings on foreign policy by Cairns, a single criticism of the Soviet bloc would be a discovery of gem-like value. Perhaps not a dual ticketholder, he wore the appellation ‘fellow traveller’ like a second skin.

The revelations are also a historic justification for the existence of a NSW-based Labor Right with a lineage embracing Premiers McKell and Cahill (the later warded off both Santamaria and Evatt forces as his government of 1952-59 became the only state Labor government to survive the split) and machine man John Ducker, who blocked a Gietzelt-led takeover of the ALP’s biggest branch in 1970-71. Gietzelt-led? Knowing what Aarons and his ASIO files have confirmed one can write, rather, communist-led. Paul Keating took over from Ducker when control in NSW Labor again wobbled in 1979-80. From his time in Young Labor, the hard Left have always been ‘the comms’ to Paul Keating.

Gietzelt’s wife Dawn was once overheard saying she ‘did not care which labour party her children favoured’, and clearly meant the CPA was to be regarded as another labour party. Obviously no reader of Solzhenitsyn, she — like the ALP Left of her generation, including Cairns — could never see the difference between the totalitarian and democratic brands of socialism. I always suspected their spiritual homelands were the ‘people’s democracies’ of Eastern Europe, and was inclined to imagine some of our lefties as members of an Australian Politburo, wolfing pork and caviar at banquets for visiting Soviet delegations and, with a bark or two, despatching social democrats and liberals to the Gulag.

Aarons is blunt about these forces in his dad’s old party. Other communist memoirs cast a rosy hue over the comrades, idealistic fighters for the rights of workers and Aborigines. Of course, idealism is never a defence. Isaiah Berlin identified the desire of idealists for a ‘rational reorganisation of society’ as the very source of totalitarianism. ‘The search for perfection,’ he wrote, ‘does seem to me a recipe for bloodshed, no better even if it is demanded by the sincerest of idealists, the purest of heart.’

Former Tribune editor Rupert Lockwood once told me that in a lifetime in the CPA he had met people perfectly capable of lining enemies against a wall and machine-gunning them.

ASIO penetrated the CPA comprehensively. Its agents were present at every meeting and even worked as full-time staff. If this were overkill, then the espionage of the Forties, now confirmed, provides the justification. I find myself hoping that ASIO now demonstrates the same spycraft as it infiltrates every Islamist cell that harbours the faintest enthusiasm for blowing us up. And I’m struck by ASIO’s restraint. After all, a leaked copy of Gietzelt’s ASIO file could have killed Labor’s chances at any number of elections.

I know one journalist who would have torn a half-proffered copy from an agent’s gloved hands. He, above all, understood the implications. The adjective ‘explosive’ or the noun ‘time bomb’ would have been in the first par of his Telegraph exclusive.

Bob Carr on two new books that reveal the extent of the Labor Left’s overlap with the Australian Communist Party during the Cold War.

Bob Carr was Labor premier of NSW from 1995 to 2005. Alan ‘The Red Fox’ Reid: Pressman Par Excellence is published by University of New South Wales Press, price $49.95. The Family File by Mark Aarons is published by Black Inc, price $34.95.
Spectator Australia, 17 July 2010

The book’s author, Mark Aarons, came under the “adverse notice” of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation in early 1965 when he was only 13, while his father’s ASIO files began when he was 14, in the early 1930s. Indeed, one of the great strengths of The Family File is the extensive use made of the detailed reports of the many ASIO agents who successfully infiltrated the communist movement in this country, and especially the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) and its many and varied offshoots.

Remarkably, ASIO’s surveillance files on Laurie Aarons – a “professional revolutionary” born in August 1917, the year of the Russian Revolution and three years before the founding of the CPA, amounts to a massive 85 volumes, while that of his third son, Mark, boasts nine volumes of text and photos – up to the time when such ASIO files could be officially “released”.

There are at least two important revelations in The Family File: the first concerns the radical Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett and the second the Soviet Union’s Australian spymaster, Walter (Wally) Clayton.

The fact is that throughout his life, Burchett, who developed a close friendship with Ho Chi Minh and leading revolutionaries throughout the world, repeatedly claimed not to be a communist. Yet Mark Aarons’s communist grandfather, Samuel Aarons, who met Burchett when he boarded a ship in Noumea on the way to Europe to “try his luck”, puts paid to this. Samuel Aarons clearly stated that “Burchett had previously applied for membership of the CPA in Melbourne, but claimed he never received a response”. Burchett later wrote with considerable warmth about his time on board a ship with Samuel and his wife Esme. The author simply puts the situation thus: “It is possible that Sam finally recruited Burchett to the party on the voyage.”

The other crucial revelation in The Family File concerns an interview that Laurie Aarons taped with Wally Clayton shortly before the latter died in October 1997. This makes it crystal clear that Clayton not only admitted to be the senior CPA member who co-ordinated the KGB’s operations in Australia, but that he was also entirely unrepentant about being the key spymaster, identified by ASIO and MI5 officers as “KLOD”.

The Family File contains an excellent black-and-white photo of a bespectacled, gaunt and harried-looking Wally Clayton at the time of his appearance in March 1955 at the highly explosive Royal Commission on Espionage. As the book makes clear, in 1943 Clayton was recruited as the Soviet’s Australian spymaster.

Throughout his crucial undercover career, Clayton handed over highly classified Western secrets to his KGB handler in Australia for direct transmission to Moscow.

One crucial weakness in Mark Aarons’s important study is that the book contains no endnotes or footnotes. This means that it is utterly impossible to trace and check the many sources he has relied upon for the hundreds of quotations that grace The Family File. Annoyingly, the contents page contains no chapter titles, and no chapter breakdowns. Whether this is deliberate or a typesetting mistake is unclear.

As the narrative proceeds, it is illuminating to be told the names of key Australian politicians who were, at least for a time, “dual members” of the Australian Labor Party and the CPA, and also for it to be demonstrated just how many ASIO spies had penetrated the communist movement in this country.

Even more so than in the Labor Party, deeply acrimonious “splits” were common among Australian communists. Indeed, towards the end of their formal existence, there were up to eight communist groups or parties co-existing at the same time. It is worth remembering that, even today, there is still a Communist Party of Australia that was largely formed from the largely Russian-oriented Socialist Party of Australia. In 2010 the CPA produces its own newsletter and, perversely, seems flushed with funds.

In The Family File, Aarons deals with honesty and aplomb about the many and varied weaknesses of the CPA and, perhaps even more so, in the other communist parties in the country. Yet he also chronicles how dedicated “communist revolutionaries” played a useful and important role in the anti-apartheid and anti-war movements, as well as helping to promote indigenous self-determination, green bans, feminism and the independence of East Timor.

As he points out, militant communists were at the forefront of promoting workers’ rights in Australia, as well as successfully lobbying for improved wages and conditions. Thus until the 1980s many ALP supporters regularly voted for communists in trade-union elections. This was because card-carrying communists were “often effective unionists, immune from bribery, prepared to fight the bosses and use effective tactics to win concessions for union members”.

The Family File, Mark Aarons, Black Inc, #34.95
Review by Ross Fitzgerald in The Sydney Morning Herald, 24 July 2010

This concisely written, effectively illustrated “history from below” focuses on all those rebels and political malcontents banished by British authorities to the ends of the earth in the Antipodes.

Death or Liberty: Rebel Exiles Transported to Australia 1788-1868 usefully adopts the historiographical approach of the leading 20th-century scholars E.P. Thompson, Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude to understand and elucidate the forces producing rebellion in the mother country. As Moore explains, studies by these and other progressive historians have demonstrated “how the uprooting of Britain’s agrarian communities by the forces of capitalism, industrialisation and urbanisation and the expansion of the empire led not only to class division, social breakdown and crime, but also to revolution, riot and organised resistance”.

Moore clearly argues in the early chapters of this fine book that Thompson, Hobsbawm and Rude have successfully recast many so-called “political criminals” as democrats and progressive reformers who were transported to Australia as a penalty for the “advance of self-determination, universal suffrage, free speech and assembly, workers’ rights and social justice”. Indeed, it is hard to resist the conclusion that transportation removed political threats from “home” in England and elsewhere in Britain and at the same time intimidated other potential rebels who might have contemplated active dissent and revolution.

Death or Liberty cogently examines the continued use over nearly a century – from 1788 to 1868 – of this “system” by successive British governments. It had the specific aim of suppressing radical political movements by means of exiling rebels to what Robert Hughes so tellingly called “this fatal shore”.

This thoroughly researched, thematic, social and political narrative has chapters dealing with different groups of political prisoners. They range from the Scottish and Tolpuddle and Young Ireland Martyrs to the Canadian Patriots, the Chartists, the United Irishmen and the Fenians. Perversely, with the conspicuous exception of the Irish rebels, while many of these other radical political exiles are now honoured in their countries of origin, there is still relatively little “to commemorate their time on our soil or contribution to our history”.

As Moore points out, this book has been written so that 21st-century readers, and especially the young, might learn the stories of “the rebels, radicals and protestors” who can be seen as sacrificing their own liberty to help achieve the egalitarian democracy we enjoy in Australia today.

Transportation to the British colony of New South Wales, Moore powerfully argues, was invented to “soak up the wave of criminality caused by the tectonic shifts in traditional British social relations”. But very soon after the arrival in Australia of the so-called First Fleet, transportation was embraced as “the best way to excise from the body politic both radical malcontents who wanted to import foreign systems of government like republicanism, and dissenters from the lower orders who threatened the King’s peace and property”. Indeed, by the 1790s transportation was also seized upon as the solution to Irish lawlessness and the “habit of rebellion”.

While in the past few decades interest in Australia about Irish rebel traditions has grown, it does seem passing strange that – at least until the advent of this brilliantly conceived, chronologically based narrative history – there has been little official and even historical acknowledgement of the debt our democracy owes to our varied and diverse political convicts, ranging from the Chartists and the machine-breakers and the North American patriots, through to both the Scottish and Tolpuddle Martyrs. It is pleasing to report that Moore has gone a long way to remedying this unfortunate situation.

As it happens, he was awarded the NSW History Fellowship by the NSW Government and Arts NSW to help research and write Death or Liberty. In the opinion of this reviewer, it was money well spent.

Review of Death or Liberty by Tony Moore. Review by Ross Fitzgerald in The Sydney Morning Herald, July 10, 2010

Reid was already a legend of Australian political reporting. In the 1950s he’d been the first to expose the activities of B.A.Santamaria and his ‘groupers’. In the 60s it was his ‘36 faceless men’ scoop that helped keep Menzies in power but also eventually allowed Whitlam to break the unions’ grip on parliamentary Labor. When I returned to Canberra a decade after my first meeting with Reid (to work for the ABC), he still commanded his favourite lookout spot in King’s Hall, and the same desk in the Telegraph office. More than any other gallery journalist, The Fox embodied both the history and standpoint of political reporting in Australia.

Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt have now written an admirable account of Reid’s journalistic career. He was a notoriously private man who – perhaps wisely – culled many of his personal papers in retirement. But while the domestic details of his life are scant, this survey of his 50-year innings reporting federal politics is impressive. The book uses the great events of national affairs from 1930 to 1985 as its chronological framework, with Reid’s involvement as a reporter the constant sub-plot. What’s remarkable to learn is how often this esteemed journalist was prepared to sprint ahead of history’s footprint in an attempt to change its course.

Reid, like so many gallery tragics, was fascinated by power, not policy. (It’s no surprise that he named the alter-ego character in his unpublished novel about politics “Macker Kalley” – Machiavelli.) Almost everything he wrote, or later said on TV programs such as Meet the Press and Federal File, was concerned with leadership, threats to leadership and winning or losing elections. From the earliest days of his Canberra career with The Sun (1937-53), plots and conspiracies – indeed any form of conflict or melodrama – were his perennial themes. He was a tabloid man, through-and-through. Policy development and the legislative work of government rarely interested him, even as a commentator for The Bulletin in the last few years of his working life. For Reid, politics boiled down to who held power and who wanted to grab it from them – the rest was inconsequential fluff.

But despite his legendary status, he didn’t always get it right. Three times he was on the wrong side of major defamation actions prompted by damaging stories he could not substantiate sufficiently. At least twice he attracted the attention of the House Privileges Committee for breaches of parliamentary convention or confidence. And his habit of sometimes drawing an exceptionally long bow on the basis of unsourced quotes or information – and then splashing that speculation across the Telegraph front page – earned him a reputation for poisonous cunning. Paul Hasluck dismissed Reid as “a competent though somewhat venal purveyor of political gossip”, while Arthur Calwell called him “the lowest thing to crawl around this House”. (Reid was a good hater: he castigated Calwell at every opportunity for the next 20 years.)

At the centre of this book (although not specifically explored in any depth) is the most contentious issue of national affairs journalism: to what extent – if at all – should we tolerate the intrusion of a gallery correspondent’s personal views, or the interests of their proprietors?

Reid, almost every time he sat down at his typewriter, crossed what today would be recognised as the threshold where opinion begins to seep into straight political reporting. Fitzgerald and Holt document scores of occasions on which he not only wrote from a plainly biased standpoint, but actively inserted himself into events with the avowed intention of influencing their outcome.

So addicted was Reid to the processes of political power that for more than 40 years he acted as much as a participant, go-between and adviser – often even conspirator – as he did as a reporter. Yet despite his staunch and lifelong membership of the Australian Journalists’ Association it appears he never recognised the ethical obligation of disclosure in these situations. It was as if he believed the men’s club of Parliament House conferred on him a cloak of mutually-agreed invisibility.

Worse, at least to my mind, were the frequent occasions on which Reid took, and carried out, direct instructions from his Daily Telegraph proprietor, Frank Packer. These went well beyond the customary subtle indications from Head Office as to which policies or politicians might be favoured in tomorrow’s news report or column. Packer expected his man in Canberra to toe the company line unquestioningly, and often to take an active role in precipitating events (for instance, the undermining of Gorton’s prime ministership and ludicrous championing of Billy McMahon in his place).

The patient historical research of Fitzgerald and Holt confirms what any half-aware journalist of his period already knew: Reid pushed plenty of private agendas, but in the end he always did what he was told by Park Street. It’s disheartening that a man whose lifelong socialist sympathies were formed during the Depression (and often called his mates “comrade”) could have so comprehensively sold his soul to one of the most unprincipled buccaneers in Australian media history. As Laurie Oakes remarks in his judicious Foreword to this book, Reid “combined the best and some of the worst aspects of political journalism”.

Reviewed for The Walkley by David Salter. David Salter has been an independent print and television journalist for more than 40 years. He is currently Editor-in-Chief of THE WEEK magazine.

Professor Ross Fitzgerald’s speech about ALAN (“THE RED FOX”) REID at Dalton’s Books, 54 Marcus Clarke St, crn Rudd Street, Canberra, Wednesday June 30, 6 pm.

Thanks indeed Laurie (Oakes). As recent events here in Canberra demonstrate, in the ALP the faceless men and the factional warlords certainly live on! In many ways, the tiny Machiavellian world of Alan Reid is virtually the same world that made Julia Gillard PM.

In his excellent review of ALAN (“THE RED FOX”) REID in ‘The Canberra Times’ (June 12, 2010,p.25) the formidable Jack Waterford claims to have heard, although he does not name, “an altogether more believable story of the identity of the photographer of the “36 Faceless Men” episode” than the one provided in our book.

However in an earlier email Waterford says it was a photographer working for the Canberra Times.

Also, Peter Rees, who started his journalistic career as a copy boy on the Daily Telegraph in 1966, says that the late Peter Hardacre told him that he, Hardacre, had taken the photos. At the time, Hardacre was the staff photographer for the Daily Telegraph in the press gallery.

Without wanting to take Waterford or Rees to task, Stephen Holt and I maintain that there is reliable evidence that the famous 1963 photographs of what became known as the ALP’s 36 “Faceless Men” (and which at the time Reid termed “36 virtually unknown men”) were taken by a Canberra friend of Alan Reid’s named Vladimir Paral – known as Val – who was a scientific photographer at the John Curtin School of Medical Research.

As ALAN (“THE RED FOX”) REID makes clear, Reid got Vlad, who lived in south Canberra, not far from the Kingston Hotel, to take the photos, develop them in a dark room at the John Curtin School of Medical Research where he worked, and they were then dispatched to Frank Packer for publication in ‘The Daily Telegraph’. Reid never revealed Paral’s role to protect him – the use of ANU property for political purposes was highly irregular – but Val Paral can be named because he is no longer in the land of the living.

The 1963 photos of then ALP federal leader Arthur Calwell and his ambitious deputy Gough Whitlam waiting in the dark under a lamppost outside the Kingston Hotel in Canberra, where a special ALP party conference was in session, and which Calwell & Whitlam were not allowed to attend, significantly helped the Liberals win the next two federal elections.

With regard to finding the source of the photos about the Night of the Faceless Men, my appeal for information about Alan Reid in THE AUSTRALIAN newspaper’s STREWTH column flushed out the story about Paral from Mr Ralph Westen of Canberra who had worked with Val Paral at the same dark room at the John Curtin Medical School in 1963. Mr Westen (who is here tonight) saw the developed photos when he turned up to work on the Thursday morning. When asked, Paral, who told Western about the previous nights events, said he had taken them for his fishing mate and nature-loving pal, Alan Reid.

At page 111 of his book ‘The Gorton Experiment’ Alan Reid wrote that “the man who took the (Faceless Men) photos was an amateur, not a professional (press) photographer”, which would rule out a photographer from The Canberra Times, as it would also rule out Peter Hardacre – a professional photojournalist who worked for various Packer publications. Hardacre died in 1979.

All the available evidence, we submit, strongly suggests that the amateur photographer in question was Reid’s friend and fellow angler Vladimir Paral.

In The Gorton Experiment there is a photograph of Reid and Paral together at a fishing campsite. Reid would have told Paral about the special conference and Paral attended either as a spectator, or in his capacity as a part-time taxi driver – according to Alan Reid Jr, who is also here tonight. It was certainly no accident that Paral was there to photograph what became known as the “36 Faceless Men.” Paral’s presence was a direct result of Alan Reid’s request and the rest, as we say, was History!

In fact, at the ALP’s special conference at the Kingston Hotel there were 35 male delegates, and one woman – Mrs Phyllis Benjamin MLC – a member of the delegation from Tasmania, whose Edna Everage look-a-like photo is shown below.

But in the 1960s “36 faceless persons” wouldn’t have had the same cachet & lasting media power as “the 36 faceless men”, if you get my drift.

Later in 1963, Australia’s first televised election results featured Creighton Burns, then a lecturer in Political Science at Melbourne University, armed with a state of the art computer. The 9 Network telecast began at 8pm. A mere ten minutes later, Alan Reid, wreathed in tobacco smoke, announced, “The government’s back in.”

At 9pm, despite Burns continuing to announce that Calwell still had a good chance of winning the election, Reid reappeared in the telecast in front of a news-board, which proclaimed “MENZIES WINS”.

The wily pressman opined: “Menzies is back with a majority of about thirteen.” Confident that his man Reid had bested the machine, then and there Sir Frank Packer ordered Burns’ computer to be removed from the telecast!

As many of us here would know, this was the very same Creighton Burns who later edited The Guardian on the Yarra i.e. The Melbourne Age – from 1981 to 1989.

Thank you all for coming here tonight.

Ross Fitzgerald is a writer, broadcaster, historian and political commentator who contributes a regular Weekend Australian column for Inquirer. He has published 33 books, most recently ‘My Name is Ross: An Alcoholic’s Journey’, also published by New South Books.

FYI – to check for verification, but not for general publication, here are Mr Ralph Westen’s phone & email details:
02-6292 4992 riejac@hotmail.com

Mrs Benjamin MLC from the Tasmanian delegation was the one ‘faceless’ Woman amid the 35 ‘faceless’ Men.

Surname: BENJAMIN
Given Names: Phyllis Jean
Title and Honours: Mrs, AO, MBE, Hon (12 August 1976)
Qualifications:
Date and Place of Birth: 30 August 1907 – Mosman, NSW
Date of Death: 6 April 1996

Legislative Council: 10 May 1952
Electorate: Hobart
Party: ALP
Positions Held: Leader for Government 1968-69
Date of Departure: 22 May 1976
Reason for Departure: Retired.

Speaking of photos, in our biography of Alan Reid the mystery of the ALP’s Faceless Men story and photos has been solved. There is absolutely reliable evidence that the famous 1963 photographs of what became known as the ALP’s 36 “Faceless Men” were taken by a Canberra friend of Alan Reid’s named Vladimir Paral – known as Val – who was a scientific photographer at the John Curtin Medical School.

Ross speaks at the launch of Alan ("The Red Fox") Reid

As ALAN (“THE RED FOX”) REID makes clear, Reid got Vladimir, who lived in south Canberra, not far from the Kingston Hotel, to take the photos, develop them in a dark room at the Australian National University, and they were then dispatched to Frank Packer for publication in The Daily Telegraph. Reid never revealed Paral’s role to protect him – the use of ANU property for political purposes was highly irregular – but Val Paral can be named because he is no longer in the land of the living.

Ross introduces former NSW Premier Bob Carr at the launch - Alan ("The Red Fox") Reid

This needs to be mentioned tonight, as many punters under 50 won’t know that this revelation is indeed something special!

The 1963 photos of then ALP federal leader Arthur Calwell and his ambitious deputy Gough Whitlam waiting in the dark under a lamppost outside the Kingston Hotel in Canberra, where a special ALP party conference was in session, and which Calwell & Whitlam were not allowed to attend, significantly helped the Liberals win the next two federal elections.

Ross signs books at the launch of Alan ("The Red Fox") Reid

Throughout his life, Alan Reid never disclosed who took the damning photographs, despite considerable pressure and speculation, including suggestions they had been taken by a working pressman. But that night there were no press photographers at the Hotel Kingston in Canberra.

With regard to finding the source of the photos about the Night of the Faceless Men, and Vladimir Paral’s identity, what happened is that my appeal for information about Alan Reid in THE AUSTRALIAN newspaper’s STREWTH column flushed out the story about Paral from Mr Ralph Westen of Canberra who had worked with Paral at the same dark room at the ANU in 1963. Westen saw the faceless men photos when he turned up to work on the Thursday morning.

Ross signs books at the launch of Alan ("The Red Fox") Reid

Westen responded to my appeal, and as my co-author Stephen Holt (who is here tonight) lives in Canberra he had a chat with him to verify what Westen had told me. So there we are. The riddle of who photographed the 36 unelected delegates in 1963, with Calwell & Whitlam waiting meekly outside in the dark, has been solved.

Later that year, Australia’s first televised election results featured Creighton Burns, then a lecturer in Political Science at Melbourne University, armed with a state of the art computer. The 9 Network telecast began at 8pm. A mere ten minutes later, Alan Reid, wreathed in tobacco smoke, announced, “The government’s back in.”

Guests at the launch of Alan ("The Red Fox") Reid

At 9pm, despite Burns continuing to announce that Calwell still had a good chance of winning the election, Reid reappeared in the telecast in front of a news-board, which proclaimed “MENZIES WINS”.

The wily pressman opined: “Menzies is back with a majority of about thirteen.” Confident that his man Reid had bested the machine, then and there Sir Frank Packer ordered Burns’ computer to be removed from the telecast!  And as many of us here would know, this was the very same Creighton Burns who later edited The Guardian on the Yarra i.e. The Melbourne Age – from 1981 to 1989.

Guests at the launch of Alan ("The Red Fox") Reid

A final point. Unlike much of my previous work, Stephen Holt and I have deliberately written this book, without editorialising, so that you, and you, the reader, can make up your minds about the efficacy and morality of Alan (the Red Fox) Reid as a journalist, a participant, and a person, who played such a pivotal role in twentieth century Australian history and politics.

Thank you all for coming here tonight.

Author, Professor Ross Fitzgerald’s speech at the launch of Alan (“The Red Fox”) Reid, June 8, 2010

Guests at the launch of Alan ("The Red Fox") Reid

Reid, who died in 1987 after covering 20 federal elections, is worthy of a book as he combined some of the best and worst aspects of political journalism. Not only was he a superb chronicler of the news, he was also a player, using his contacts to shape the events themselves.

At the beginning of his career, Reid was close to Labor prime ministers John Curtin and Ben Chifley, but changed sides after the Labor split of the 1950s. This is a must-read for any student of Australian politics, because it provides a well-researched, readable history of the events that ripped open the ALP and kept it out of office for 17 years. By the time Reid started working for Sir Frank Packer in 1954, he had moved to the Right, crafting his coverage to suit his boss and boost the prospects of Robert Menzies and Billy MacMahon.

The book was launched in Sydney last night by Bob Carr, who said that although Reid was a superb journalist, he was occasionally wrong: “for instance he was the last journalist to stop calling Bob Hawke a left-winger”.

“He asked some fundamentally big questions. Was the ALP fit to govern, who should rule and where should power lie? He saw that in the 1950s; Australian Labor was in a pretty wretched state.”

Reid thought people with communist backgrounds were trying to manipulate Labor leaders Doc Evatt and Arthur Calwell, Carr said — “it was a pretty ramshackle and dishevelled ALP”.

The news veteran broke many stories, but he is best remembered for his 1963 piece about Labor’s “36 Faceless Men”, a phrase that has now entered the lexicon. What gave it such impact was the photographs Reid commissioned of Calwell and his deputy, Gough Whitlam, waiting for instructions under a street lamp outside Canberra’s Hotel Kingston late at night. Inside, the machine men of Labor’s national conference were deciding a key policy issue.

“That will be history in the making, my friend,” he told the photographer, Vladimir Paral.

In his story, Reid said that the photographs indicated a “sad commentary of the decline in status of Labor’s parliamentary leadership”. The article created a furore by presenting Calwell and Whitlam as wholly dependent on decisions made by invisible forces in the party machine. It damaged Labor badly in the next two elections, before Whitlam finally succeeded in reforming the party’s structure.

The book also relates a prescient conversation between Reid and Evatt, the then leader of the opposition, in 1955. They were discussing the consequences of the ALP split, which led to the formation of the Catholic-dominated DLP.

Evatt: “I’ll tell you something, Alan, for every Catholic vote I’ll lose I will get two Protestant votes.”

Reid: “You are out of your cotton-picking mind, Doc. The Church of England mob belong with the Protestant party which is the Menzies party; they will applaud you but they won’t shift. You have all the non-conformists that Labor ever is liable to pick up, so all that is going to happen is that you’re going to lose the Catholic vote.”

Press gallery doyen Laurie Oakes, in the foreword to the book, says “it is not possible to write the political history of Australia without including a section on Alan Reid”:

“Nor is it possible to discuss the evolution of political journalism in this country sensibly without an examination of Reid’s methods, motives and influence.”

Later in the book, the authors relate an exchange between Reid and a group of young reporters on the day of Whitlam’s dismissal in 1975.

“What do you think of this?”, they asked the 61-year-old newsman. “It’s a great story,” he replied.

“You wouldn’t have said that if it happened to Menzies,” one tearfully retorted. Reid said: “I’d say it if it happened to my own mother — it’s a great story.”

As is this book.

By Margot Saville, www.crikey.com.au

As the introduction to this superbly illustrated book explains, it discovers “the street corners where they spoke, their union offices and lecture halls, the pubs and cafes in which they socialised”, and so much more.

A pivotal chapter concerns Australia’s famous short-story writer and poet Henry Lawson (1867-1922) and his mother, Louisa Lawson, one of this nation’s most important feminist authors and longstanding editor of that edgy journal for Australian women, The Dawn.

It is crucial to understand that alcoholism, depression and debt plagued Henry Lawson’s life and, as a direct result, this led in 1903 to the breakdown of his seven-year marriage to Bertha, a nurse, and stepdaughter of Sydney’s radical bookshop owner William McNamara, who is featured in a lively and illuminating chapter by one of seven contributors to this book, Bruce Scates.

Louisa Lawson died in Sydney’s Gladesville Mental Hospital in August 1920, two years before her deeply troubled son. Many of our most talented writers and intellectuals were plagued by mental instability, including that world-renowned archeologist, historian and labour activist Vere Gordon Childe who, after being hounded out of Australia by conservative forces, returned to Sydney in 1957.

Soon after, he committed suicide, on October 19 that year, by jumping off the edge of a cliff in the Blue Mountains. As the fine chapter on Childe concludes, his friend, the leader of the federal Labor Party, H.V. (Bert) Evatt, “spoke at a service for him at the church in North Sydney where Childe’s father had been the rector”. The authors rightly insist that it is worth remembering that, during World War I, many professors in Australia “worked for military intelligence as censors”. But they could not effectively move against Childe until he publicly associated himself with “the radicals” by delivering an anti-war paper at a peace conference in Sydney.

Many chapters in this excellent book are subtly interconnected. Thus contributions range from documenting the struggles for defending free speech at a number of stumps throughout Sydney in 1915, to the role at that time of the local branch of the incendiary Industrial Workers of the World, to the foundation by a number of activists impressed by the 1917 Russian Revolution of the Australian Communist Party in Sydney in October 1920, and to the role in the 1950s of fiery poet, playwright and activist Dorothy Hewett and the so-called Redfern Reds.

This chapter features a photograph of the fiery Hewett’s house in Marriott Street, Redfern, in which she squatted and organised clandestine communist activities in the community and in the local sewing mills, and another of the community Billiards Parlour at 103 Regent Street in 1940, which became the Communist Party’s Henry Lawson Hall.

It is worth remembering that the statue on a grassy Domain knoll overlooking Woolloomooloo Bay in tribute to Henry Lawson was unveiled in 1931 by NSW governor Philip Game, who sacked Labor’s maverick premier Jack Lang who in latter years was to be such an influence on flamboyant prime minister Paul Keating.

In a powerful symmetry, one of the book’s final chapters deals with Survival Day, January 26, 1984, and Koori Redfern. The telling text is underlined by a black-and-white photograph of the former Empress Hotel in Regent Street, Redfern, a site that featured significantly in the world of Sydney’s Black Power militants in the 1970s and that was renamed the Regent Hotel.

Radical Sydney does not shy away from the offensive attitudes of many early Australian radicals and of their journals of opinion, including The Worker and especially The Bulletin, which in 1888 proclaimed: “No nigger, no Chinaman, no lascar, no kanaka, no purveyor of cheap coloured labour is an Australian.” Such poisonous and persistent racism led to the labour movement in particular insisting, in the year of Federation, 1901, that the nation should be, and should remain, a white Australia.

Terry Irving and Rowan Cahill’s Radical Sydney is so much more interesting, revealing and crisply written than Jeff and Jill Sparrow’s Radical Melbourne (2001) and Raymond Evans and Carole Ferrier’s Radical Brisbane (2004). Indeed, it is a most enjoyable and illuminating history.

Terry Irving & Rowan Cahill, Radical Sydney:Portraits and Unruly Episodes, UNSW Press, 384pp, $39.95.

The Weekend Australian, June 5-6, 2010

This is the fundamental thesis of What were They Thinking? It is an argument that Walter and his research assistant Tod Moore (who wrote two key chapters) advance with skill and clarity. Indeed, to carry the notion further, Walter quotes from Don Watson’s classic portrait of Paul Keating, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: “Politics and history are alike in that the craft of both is storytelling.”

As Walter points out, one of Kevin Rudd’s responses to the global financial crisis was to write an essay, while Tony Abbott’s successful challenge for the Liberal Party leadership was preceded by a well written and cogently argued book, Battlelines, which he immediately updated for a second edition.

Unsurprisingly, Walter’s narrative of political thought in Australia gives prominence to Rudd’s exegesis, The Global Financial Crisis, published in The Monthly in February last year.

Drawing on the diverse intellectual and ethical example of John Maynard Keynes, Rudd expounded the notion that “from time to time in human history there occur events of truly seismic significance, events that mark a turning point between one epoch and the next, when one orthodoxy is overthrown and another takes its place”. Such changes were indeed under way last year, the Prime Minister argued, with “fault lines yielding to fractures which in time may yield to even deeper tectonic shifts”.

Rudd’s other great intellectual and moral influence, he claims, is heroic German theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In his trenchant February 2009 critique of the “alleged excesses of neo-liberalism”, also published in The Monthly, Rudd presented social democracy as “rejection of both state socialism and free market fundamentalism”.

As Walter explains, Rudd’s elaboration of the “social democratic” task, as opposed to ideological neo-liberalism, borrowed much from the so-called third way that had been pushed by Tony Blair, which in turn was “said to have been adapted from [Bob] Hawke and [Paul] Keating”.

Walter helpfully examines the background to the “socialist objective” of the Australian labour movement and the ALP, and usefully illuminates the historic 19th and early 20th century battles between the proponents of free trade and protectionism.

In his conclusion Walter reveals that he began this exploration of the politics of ideas with the present Prime Minister, “not because he was specially gifted, or his message was unusually deft”, but because Rudd “illustrated something that is a recurrent feature of effective leadership”: that “crafting a narrative for the times” is essential for any effective political leader.

He also quotes John Howard in support of this idea, from February 2009: “Those who triumph politically are those who have not only superior arguments but also the capacity to present those arguments in a compelling fashion.”

Yet as Rudd’s essays make manifest, the influences of distinctly Australian ideas seem few and far between. Indeed, as Walter writes, when Robert Manne sought responses to Rudd’s GFC essay for publication in The Monthly in May last year, he “deemed Australian reaction so disappointing that only the great and good of other metropolitan cultures were commissioned to reply”. The Monthly published pieces by Eric Hobsbawm, David Hale, Dean Baker, Charles R. Morris and John Gray, which seemed a prime example of Australian intellectuals still looking to “the great elsewhere”, to use Sylvia Lawson’s memorable line.

However, that cannot be said of Goodbye to All That?, edited by Manne and David McKnight, a collection of essays in which most of the contributors (all of whom are from Australia) tackle what they regard as the economic and fiscal failure of neo-liberalism.
Most also canvass the urgency (or not) of policy change, especially when it comes to climate change and the economy, which they maintain are interconnected.

In a section headed The Economics of Greed and Risk, the editors open with a reprinted version of Rudd’s GFC essay, which is treated with something akin to undue deference. This is probably because the editors — Manne in particular — applaud what they take to be the end of the era of extreme free-market capitalism and excessive private greed, which they enthusiastically argue “was founded on the belief in the superiority of the market over government intervention”.

Yet as even Manne and McKnight concede, many previous books that have suggested that “civilisation had reached a moment of crisis” have proved to be exaggerated or radically wrongheaded. The wolf has not appeared, despite cries to the contrary.

But with “the looming danger of catastrophic climate change”, Manne, McKnight and their carefully selected contributors argue the situation now is fundamentally different: “With the arrival of this threat, the wolf is finally at the door.”

So what is there to differentiate Goodbye to All That? from other precautionary tomes? Even though the editors stress “the very real harm” that neo-liberalism and human-induced climate change has inflicted, my guess is very little. Human experience suggests that even if wolves sometimes do appear at our door, usually they can be handled.

Moreover, if the economic and fiscal fault lies with the conservatives, as the Manne group implies, what are we to make of the British Labour Party and its recently departed leader Gordon Brown, beside whom Rudd has regularly stood with pride? During the period Brown wielded power as chancellor and then prime minister he advocated “regulation with a light touch”. For all this time, with the Conservatives out of office, London was a centre of the world’s financial system, yet the economy was approaching crisis. About this crucial fact the contributors to Goodbye to All That? are strangely silent.

Fortunately, not every contributor to this collection toes what seems to be the editors’ party line. Thus, while John Quiggin suggests that in his GFC essay Rudd had “struck the right rhetorical notes”, he rightly points out that in practical terms the Rudd government has shown “little evidence” of a renewal of social-democratic thinking. Quiggin also points out, again quite rightly, that Australia has “suffered only modest and indirect effects from the global financial crisis”. In part, he maintains, “this favourable outcome reflects good management; but good luck has been at least as important”. Trusting to luck that Australia will be “similarly favoured in the future”, would be unwise.

The most thoughtful contribution is Anne Manne’s essay on The Question of Care. While all her co-contributors agree we face “the looming catastrophe of global warming”, Manne maintains that “this is not simply caused by the burning of fossil fuels” but it “derives from a fatal flaw in our system of accounting”. As she points out, we “track social progress” by the “narrow measurements of economic growth and gross domestic product”. Although she does not mention it, the sacred cow of GDP is worshipped not only in Western countries but in the rapidly growing economies of China and India as well.
But we do not measure the cost of that growth, in terms of climate change but also in terms of quality of life, which ought include care and concern for the young and old and the impoverished and disposed in our societies. Climate change, Manne maintains, has “dramatically confronted us with the folly of our obsession with growth at the expense of every other aspect of human existence”.

Mainstream assessment bodies, including the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, she argues, are recognising this crucial point. As OECD secretary-general Donald Johnston wrote in 2005, “What does gross domestic product really tell us about economic and social progress?” It is hard to argue with his conclusion: as an indicator, not much. It is certainly hard to disagree with Robert Kennedy, who once remarked that the GDP “does not capture the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play — it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile”.

One consequence of ever-rising GDP that Manne does not mention is ever-increasing population growth, which is ravaging human societies across the planet. This is a problem even for Australia, with our population estimated to reach 35 million by 2049. In his contribution to this book, Ian Lowe writes that “delusion that economic growth could continue seamlessly forever” was dispelled by the GFC, then usefully adds: “We will have [to stabilise] our population and our per capita consumption so that the sum total of human demands can be met sustainably by natural systems.” That whole question of global population control is worth a book of its own.

By Ross Fitzgerald, Australian Literary Review, 2 June 2010.

What Were They Thinking? The Politics of Ideas in Australia, By James Walter, UNSW Press, 400pp, $39.95

Goodbye to All That? On the Failure of Neo-Liberalism and the Urgency of Change. Edited by Robert Manne and David McKnight, Black Inc, 278pp, $32.95

It was the late 1950s and Reid, by then the most influential figure in the Canberra press gallery, had already twice failed at fiction. He had written a 100,000-word novel about the crucifixion of Christ. It was a tale of politics, not religion, and publishers in London rejected it as too controversial.

Then Reid read The Man from Laramie in The Saturday Evening Post and decided to write an “Australian western” set in the Snowy Mountains, one of his favourite bush places. He wrote 50,000 words in a fortnight and sent them to the Post. Rejected again: unfamiliar setting, strange idiom, too Australian.

So here was Reid, three years after the Labor split, hunched over a typewriter, a roll-your-own dangling from his lips, a cup of black tea within reach, tapping out a novel in which H. V. Evatt, the Labor opposition leader, and B. A. Santamaria, the Catholic activist and anti-communist, appear as Kaye Seborjar (a play on Cesare Borgia) and Carr Domenico respectively. Seborjar is cranky, untrustworthy and ambitious to the point of megalomania. Domenico hides fascist sympathies behind “the surface mildness of an oriental sage”. Just about everyone in the novel is unlovely. Politics, Reid is saying, is grubby and ignoble and idealists are mugs.

But, for our purposes, the most interesting character in the manuscript is a 40-year-old political insider called Macker Kalley (a play on Machiavelli). He enjoys reading and going bush. He is drawn to plots and intrigues and likes to think he influences the course of events. He sees politics with a pitiless eye:

In the final analysis, energy, tenacity, ambition and, above all, luck were more rewarding political attributes than integrity, ability or originality of mind . . . All politicians are bastards, but some are bigger bastards than others.

Kalley tries to quarantine his wife and daughter from this world. The calling is, by definition, degenerate.

This novel didn’t get published either (it got to final proofs before fears of defamation actions arose) and maybe this was just as well. Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt, the authors of this biography of Reid, have read the manuscript, which is in the National Library of Australia. The characters, they write, are wooden and the dialogue flat. There is not “a robust sense of background or a loving re-creation of detail”, just “a lifeless hothouse air”. But the question that arises is this: is Macker Kalley the alter ego of Alan Reid?

Reid, who died in 1987 after covering 20 federal elections, lives on as one of the grand figures of the Canberra press gallery. Those of us who saw him towards the end of his career remember a small and wiry man in a rumpled suit, his red hair (hence the nickname “the Red Fox”) thinning and thatched with grey. He was invariably sucking on a cigarette and staring out with hard eyes that narrowed under bristling eyebrows and seemed to be taking the measure of everyone around him. He was kind to newcomers to the gallery, free with advice and wisdom, but, for all that, they probably saw him as the past rather than the future.

He was almost a caricature of the blokey reporter before the era of media studies and live crosses. John Gorton (a jaundiced witness, it should be said) wrote that Reid wore an expression of perpetual cynicism and spoke from the corner of his mouth. “One expects momentarily to be nudged in the ribs with a confidential elbow and given a hot tip for the 3.30 at Randwick.”

Few broke more big stories than Reid. He exposed the offstage manoeuvrings of Santamaria that led to the Labor split of 1955, a great festering wound that helped keep Labor out of office for the next 17 years. In 1963, Reid had the wit to summon a photographer to Canberra’s Hotel Kingston to capture Arthur Calwell, the leader of the opposition, and Gough Whitlam, his deputy, waiting under a street lamp late at night while inside the 36 machine men of the national conference, most of them unknown to the electorate, debated the conditions under which Labor might allow an American base to operate in Australia.

Calwell and Whitlam looked like lackeys waiting for their orders, largely because, in this instance, they were. Thus were born the “36 faceless men”, and Robert Menzies, the prime minister, would trot them out with the aplomb of a police inspector staging a line-up.

Reid also broke many of the stories that led to Gorton’s fall as prime minister. There were so many scoops in a career that took in 14 prime ministers. Reid had better contacts than the other Canberra journalists. He had the instincts of a bloodhound, which was right enough because he thought he was covering a blood sport. Other reporters had pencils in their pockets; Reid carried a gambrel as well, and every now and then politicians wandered up and impaled themselves on it. Sometimes he knew more about what was going on than cabinet ministers. Everyone felt they had to talk to him.

Late in this book the authors tell of an exchange on the day John Kerr sacked the Whitlam government in 1975. Reid, still working but no longer the eminence he had once been, ran into a group of younger reporters, some with tears in their eyes.

Reporters: What do you think of this?

Reid: It’s a great story.

Reporters: You wouldn’t have said that if it had happened to Menzies.

Reid: I’d say it if it happened to my own mother — it’s a great story.

It was the perfect answer, a proper journalist’s answer. Get the story. Stay detached. Weep, if you need to, when you get home.

So, if we stop here, the subtitle of this book, Pressman Par Excellence, stands up well. Reid was a supreme example of the energetic newsman, a role model, to use a silly phrase. But we can’t stop here because it is only half the story, the sunny bit, the fluffy stuff of mythology.

Reid was also a political player, much more so than the reporters weeping for Whitlam when they should have been chasing the story. He was a plotter and a schemer who had read too much Machiavelli, a man who not only reported conspiracies but also fired them up like a frenzied stoker on a tramp steamer. He was in love with intrigue and the intrigues he uncovered mostly pleased his boss, Frank Packer, proprietor of The Daily Telegraph and the fledgling Nine Network.

Packer saw the existence of the Labor Party as a threat to the propertied classes, so Reid’s stories on Santamaria and the 36 faceless men came as manna. Packer wanted Billy McMahon as prime minister, probably because he knew he could manipulate him, and Reid helped bring this about. Reid, an intelligent man, must have known that McMahon, a leaker with the leadership qualities of a small insect, was unfit to be prime minister, but he went along with the boss.

Reid wasn’t simply another journalist in the gallery, another seeker of truths. He was also there to look after Packer’s corporate interests which, one is entitled to assume, made him a seeker of favours. Trying to reconcile these two roles is the sort of exercise that gives cynicism a bad name.

Pressman par excellence? One thinks not, good as Reid was at sniffing out a story. Still, it is this dark side that, when set alongside Reid’s front-page triumphs, makes him a hopelessly interesting subject for biography.

And, in fairness to the authors, they never seek to hide or justify Reid’s double life. They are on to it on the opening page with a quotation from Laurie Oakes of the Nine Network at a Walkley ceremony more than a decade ago:

If you want to talk about the medium being a participant, when I was first posted to Canberra about 30 years ago, I suppose Alan Reid was the king. And Reidy was also the champion of being a participant in politics. He was much more a player than a journalist. He used to spend more time advising politicians than reporting on them.

Oakes, as fine a reporter as the gallery has produced, pens a stylish foreword to this book. While he clearly has affection for Reid the man and respect for Reid the news breaker, he acknowledges the dark side as well. Oakes joined the press gallery 40 years ago. “I thought then, and still do, that Reid combined the best and some of the worst aspects of political journalism.” And elsewhere: “While Reid’s growing disapproval of Gorton was genuine enough, his role in the campaign to install McMahon in the Lodge was squarely in line with the Packer agenda and it went well beyond mere journalism.”

Reid’s life makes for good biography because, as they say in Hollywood, there is a dramatic character arc, and the authors have brought this out well. Reid, born in Britain in 1914, grew up in poverty in non-gentrified Paddington. He left school after obtaining his leaving certificate and, shades of Billy Hughes, worked at odd jobs in outback NSW and Queensland before being hired by Robert Clyde Packer (father of Frank) as a copy boy on the Sydney Sun.

Reid did the stock exchange quotes, reported the fish and produce markets and had a stint captioning photographs, as punishment for a drunken episode. He was already a Labor man, having joined the party after leaving school. Sent to Canberra in 1937, he became an admirer of John Curtin and Ben Chifley. Chifley would remain his favourite prime minister.

Reid was a true believer and Chifley at one point suggested he run for parliament. Reid’s best contacts were with Labor, which he saw as the serious player. As he wrote later, Liberals thought of politics as an amateur game for gentlemen, whereas Laborites saw it as “a tough professional fight for existence”. There may still be truth in this observation.

Reid in 1954 moved to Frank Packer’s Daily Telegraph. That was the year when the overture to the Labor split set off sectarian hatreds similar to those that marked the conscription debates of 1916 and 1917. Reid was on his way to becoming the great news breaker. He was kicked out of the Labor Party in 1957, but its numbers men kept leaking to him and he kept uncovering feuds and plots. Labor, as the authors say, was fighting for its soul. Reid had grabbed the best seat at ringside. Between rounds he rushed from one corner to the other to rasp out advice and occasionally climbed into the ring himself.

Here was a world now long gone. The class war was alive. Unionists called each other “comrade” and trades hall council meetings were sometimes adjourned to the nearest pub. Capitalists harrumphed in their clubs. Strikes were common and often nasty. Trotskyites, groupers and Maoists skirmished around the edges of the Labor Party.

The Cold War was alive, too: spies and defections and questions of loyalty. Menzies worked this war well and Evatt didn’t. Older reporters, Reid included, wore hats, thumped rickety typewriters and could still get stories into their papers at midnight. There was a pecking order in the Canberra press gallery. The veterans set the agenda and sometimes exchanged carbon copies of stories.

Then Reid’s world began to change. Younger reporters arrived: Oakes, Allan Barnes, Alan Ramsey, Paul Kelly, Michelle Grattan and others. They did things their way. Whitlam and Bob Hawke found new constituencies for Labor among the middle classes. Schoolteachers became as important as shop stewards; doctors’ wives would come later.

Reid thought Whitlam was favouring an “articulate avant garde”. He was bothered, too, by the rise of multiculturalism and the Aboriginal land rights movement. It all seemed a long way from shearers’ strikes and unity tickets.

Packer sold The Daily Telegraph, Reid’s main outlet, in 1972 and died two years later. Reid got on well with Kerry, Frank’s son, but Kerry, whatever his personal beliefs, was a pragmatist. He knew he could make money under a Labor government just as easily as under the Liberals. There was no need to keep attacking Labor, as his father had, simply because it was Labor. Reid, on the other hand, was still seeing tiny fissures in the Labor monolith and thinking they might be cracks.

Fitzgerald and Holt have given us a biography that reads better than most Australian political tracts. Their research is impressive. They strive to be fair and never lapse into hagiography. The book picks up pace nicely after its opening chapters, where the authors seem less sure of their material than later in the narrative and are inclined to generalisations and the odd lazy sentence.

But the best thing about this book is the light it shines on murky places. It tells us much about how the Canberra gallery works, and not just back then, because mischief making did not end with the Reid era. It reminds us that journalism can be as morally hazardous as politics and that journalists can get too close to their sources.

Above all, it shows us what happens when journalists become players.

Not long before Reid died, a local priest called on him offering spiritual consolations. “I’d be a hypocrite if I accepted them,” Reid told him. “But remember this, Father, keep your running shoes on, because you might get an important call and there’ll be a swift deathbed repentance. I’m a great believer in each way betting.”

Tired and shrunken, he could still do the numbers. Reid was a brilliant getter of stories and he was also Svengali. That is the triumph and the tragedy of his journalistic life. In the end, he was out of time and place, but we should not be too judgemental. It will happen to all who play at journalism, especially those of us who look back fondly on smoky newsrooms and still hear the clatter of linotype machines.

By Les Carlyon The Australian Literary Review, June 2, 2010
Alan “The Red Fox” Reid: Pressman Par Excellence, by By Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt, New South, 384pp, $49.95 (HB)