READING a biography of the controversial and legendary Australian journalist Alan Reid, it’s hard not to be nostalgic for the days when journos chain-smoked at their desks, wore hats, and got their best tips over the poker table.
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 …

RADICAL Sydney is primarily about remembering and restoring some of the most radical and unruly elements to the history of Australia’s largest and most demographically diverse city.
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 …

JAMES Walter, who co-edited with Brian Heads the 1988 study Intellectual Movements and Australian Society, has produced a valuable account of the politics of ideas in Australia. Walter, professor of political science at Monash University, argues at the outset that in endeavouring to understand politics, “nothing is more important . . . than recognising that it deals in ideas”.
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. …

LIKE many journalists of his generation, Alan Reid ached to write a novel. He wasn’t thinking of something twee and literary, something that might be praised for its light touches and teasing ambiguities. He envisioned a roman a clef about contemporary political life, blunt and boisterous, the whiff of the abattoir strong in the nostrils, something that would get people talking and cash registers tinkling, as Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory had done a few years earlier. It would be loaded with conspiracies. It had to be. Reid loved a …

A PHALANX of press gallery veterans is expected to turn out next week to the launch of Ross Fitzgerald and Stephen Holt’s biography of Alan “The Red Fox” Reid. The doyen of the Canberra press gallery during the Menzies era, Reid set new boundaries in political journalism, becoming a player as much as a reporter. He organised the photo that led to Menzies coining the phrase “36 faceless men” to describe the 36 Labor delegates who dictated the party’s policies to the exclusion of party leadership in 1963. His standing …

THE Canberra press gallery was once prowled by political reporters said to be more influential than many Ministers.
The biggest scoop, by one of the most fearsome in their ranks, Alan Reid, is chronicled in a new book.
In the autumn of 1963 the major national political issue in Australia was the Labor Party’s response to the Menzies government’s new security agreement with the United States, under which a communications station to control Polaris nuclear-armed submarines was to be established at North West Cape (also known as Exmouth Gulf) in Western Australia.
The …