Hot metal days.(The Argus: Life and Death of a Newspaper)(Book review)

The Argus: Life and Death of a Newspaper, edited by Jim Usher; Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2007, $39.95.

THERE WAS A JOKE among Melbourne journalists in the 1950s that whenever reporters from the city s morning papers were ushered .into Government House (for a rare reception or press conference), an aide would introduce them in order of rank: "Your Excellency, may I present the gentleman from the Age, the man from the Argus and the bloke from the Sun.'" Paul Ormonde used to tell that story (he may have invented it), and it had a special piquancy for those who remembered the Argus in earlier days as the leading voice of Melbourne's conservative establishment. The Argus was once a far more gentlemanly paper than Age, and certainly, in its last years, a more blokey paper than the Sun News-Pictorial.

Its last years are the subject of this warm-hearted and wonderfully nostalgic book, edited by Jim Usher-a collection of reminiscences and documentary memorabilia written and compiled by surviving Argus journalists and their contemporaries. On the night the paper died--January 19, 1957--I was in the Melbourne office of the Sydney Morning Herald. We were at the other end of town (in the Herald building in Flinders Street) and the news reached us after the last issue of the paper came off the presses. Argus journalists themselves had been told of their fate only two days earlier. Nothing had been allowed to leak out--perhaps in the hope that the decision would be magically reversed at the last minute. But when the blow fell the shock was palpable. Journalists are not the only people who will tell you that nothing in public and corporate life is sadder than the death of a newspaper, even one in marked decline and largely deserted by its traditional readership. We drank long and hard into that Saturday morning.

For most of its 111 years the Argus had been the paper of record for Victoria's moneyed class. It represented, in particular, those nineteenth-century pastoral and trading interests opposed to higher tariffs for Victorian secondary industries. As it happened, the battle between free-traders and protectionists was won by David Syme and the Age, whose campaign for greater tariff protection is said to have given Victoria its industrial edge in the years before Federation. But the Argus remained Melbourne's foremost and most respected conservative daily--"The Times of the Southern Hemisphere"--until well into the twentieth century. News didn't make it to the front page until 1937. Then, in 1949, the paper was acquired by the London Daily Mirror group, which set about transforming a stodgy broadsheet into a paper with livelier stories, bolder layouts and a mildly progressive editorial line. It was the end of an era. The Argus was to last another eight years before its new owners shut it down.

What killed the Argus? The official reason--continuing heavy losses and rising costs--is no doubt true. But what caused those losses, and whether the closure could have been avoided, are harder questions to answer. For two years before the paper folded the company had shown a modest profit. Circulation was always well below that of the Sun (which gained thousands of readers after the Argus died), and a costly investment in new colour presses added to the paper's losses in the early 1950s. But many were convinced the Argus could have carried on. Bob Murray and others have speculated that Cecil King, head of the London Mirror group, and his editorial chief Hugh Cudlipp wanted the Argus closed because they feared a "colonial proprietor" might take them on successfully in Fleet Street. (Something similar happened twelve years later when Rupert Murdoch bought the ailing London Sun and beat the Mirror at its own game.)

It now seems clear that no one in Australia wanted the Argus closed. Usher quotes a former circulation manager, Ken Jenkins, as saying that the Melbourne Herald and Weekly Times group, which finally bought the Argus company and its assets, would have been happy to keep the paper going. But executives in London had made it clear that any sale of the Argus--to the Herald and Weekly Times or anyone else--would be only on condition that the paper was closed. One story has it that Frank Packer, boss of Consolidated Press and the Sydney Daily Telegraph, flew to Melbourne when he heard of the impending sale but was too late to make an offer. But would any offer have succeeded? In Usher's words: "What they said, in effect, was that they didn't want any 'colonial proprietor' to take the paper over and make a success of it where they had failed." There are witnesses to say that Jack Williams, managing director of the Herald and Weekly Times, prayed for hours in St Patrick's Cathedral before complying with London's demands.

WHAT THE ARGUS LACKED in those days were friends in high places. Big advertisers were losing faith. Old-guard conservatives were wary of the political influence of the Mirror group, traditional supporters of the British Labour Party.