In memory of Barrie Watts

Barrie Watts died last Tuesday. That name may not resonate in the public consciousness now, but it certainly did once. Barrie was one of the most notable New Zealand journalists of his generation, although he spent most of his working life in Australia. Older newspaper devotees on this side of the Ditch may remember his Watts in the Wind column in the Dominion Sunday Times, which broke new ground in mainstream New Zealand journalism with its withering contempt for the establishment at a time when the press was overwhelmingly conservative and deferential.

Barrie, who suffered from dementia in his last years, died aged 83 in a Melbourne retirement home. His beloved wife Elizabeth pre-deceased him in 2018.

Spiro Zavos was one of several former colleagues who paid tribute to Barrie, comparing him with the legendary New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin. “In my working life as a journalist in New Zealand,” Spiro wrote to me in an email, “there were two standouts, journalists of personality and ability who were the equals of any in the rest of the world – Warwick Roger and Barrie Watts.” Barry Durrant, the leading New Zealand news photographer of his era, described Barrie as one of the best journalists he ever worked with. And former National Business Review managing editor Nevil Gibson, who as a young sub-editor worked under Barrie at The Dominion, recalled: “Barrie had a great impact on my early journalism and I count him as one of my main mentors.”

I have a personal reason to mourn Barrie’s death. Like Nevil, I regarded him as a mentor. In a journalism culture not much given to praise, he took the trouble to write me a note complimenting me on a feature story I wrote for The Dominion when he was its features editor and I was a floundering junior reporter with not a clue about what I was supposed to be doing. He was to exercise a lasting influence on my career, encouraging me to move to Australia in 1972 and finding me a job there, and later recruiting me to work with him on a newly launched Victoria edition of Sydney’s Sunday Telegraph as part of a tiny team that also included a very young Mandy Wilson, who ended up decades later as editor of the Sydney Morning Herald.

More importantly, Barrie was a close and generous friend with whom I stayed in regular contact until his cruel illness robbed him of the ability to communicate in the last months of his life.

If any phrase could summarise Barrie’s career, it would be square peg, round hole. He had his own firm ideas about how things should be done and too often they didn’t correspond with those of his employers.

A Lower Hutt boy (his father managed the Griffin’s biscuit factory), Barrie was educated at Hutt Valley High School and began his career, like several other outstanding New Zealand journalists of his era, as a cadet reporter at The Dominion. It was an idiosyncratic working environment where, in his own words, “prodigious quantities of alcohol and universal lack of respect sustained a newsroom staffed by anti-social misfits and amusing psychopaths”. He felt instantly at home.

A short stint followed at the New Zealand Herald, then a bastion of political and journalistic conservatism, but the Herald proved ill-suited to Barrie’s temperament. He pronounced it the world’s most boring agglomeration of dull-witted conformists.

Australia beckoned, as it did for many ambitious New Zealand journalists craving excitement that our own papers couldn’t offer. Barrie joined the staff of Sir Frank Packer’s Daily Telegraph in Sydney, where he made his debut as a columnist, and later moved to the Melbourne Sun News-Pictorial, then Australia’s biggest-selling daily.

He thrived in the rumbustious, swaggering, almost piratical world of Australian tabloid journalism in the 1960s and was more than capable of holding his own against larger than life, alpha-male reporters and columnists such as Jack Darmody, Tom Prior, Ron Saw and Barrie’s fellow New Zealander Neal Travis.

By his own admission he became a byline addict and his stories soon attracted the attention of an upstart young newspaper publisher named Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch at the time had acquired a majority interest in the Wellington Publishing Company, owners of The Dominion – his first acquisition outside Australia – and thought the paper could benefit from some lively, aggressive Australian-styled tabloid journalism. Who better to show the locals how it should be done than one of their own? So Barrie was head-hunted on a 12-month contract and ended up spending six years back in the Dom’s Mercer St offices, where he served as features editor while also covering major news events such as the Wahine sinking and the anti-Vietnam War protests that greeted US vice-president Spiro Agnew in Auckland in 1970. (I specifically remember the latter occasion because I happened to be the reporter to whom he dictated his copy late at night from a pay phone. Barrie called it the Battle of Waterloo Quadrant, after the street where the protesters clashed with the police outside Agnew’s hotel.)

That was the start of Barrie’s long association with Murdoch, though The Dominion’s Wellington managers were distinctly less enthusiastic about the arrangement. Barrie liked Murdoch personally and admired his enthusiasm for newspapers, but it would be fair to say that as time went on he became less enamoured of the way the Australian magnate used his media power to wield political influence.

Barrie would later say that he preserved his sanity at The Dominion by undertaking lengthy assignments to Europe, the US, Southeast Asia and Australia. Spiro Zavos remembers Barrie's coverage of the infamous 1968 Chicago Democratic Party Convention for the Dom’s sister title, the Sunday Times (which was absorbed many years later into the Sunday Star-Times), as “reportage of the highest calibre. With no back-up or support staff he wrote a set of brilliant, colourful and insightful reports that trumped the big guns like [Norman] Mailer et al.”

Barrie brought what was then an unconventional approach to New Zealand news reportage: highly personalised, full of what journalists call colour – observed detail, not necessarily central to the story – and often archly opinionated. Unlike standard, formulaic news reports which excluded anything not considered strictly factual, his stories were usually animated by quirky observations and his fondness for clever word play.

His Sunday columns often infuriated the Wellington establishment and caused acute discomfort to the management of the Wellington Publishing Company. Barrie didn’t care who he offended and never took a backward step. He had the backing of the Sunday Times’ then editor, the late Frank Haden, who had a similarly disrespectful disposition (and eventually lost his job because of it).







In the early 70s, Barrie, by now married to Elizabeth (pictured above on their wedding day), returned to Australia, where he worked in the Melbourne bureau of Murdoch’s Sydney-based flagship daily The Australian. He was subsequently shoulder-tapped to launch a Victoria edition of The Sunday Telegraph, which by then had become part of the Murdoch empire. It was a valiant but fatally under-resourced attempt to break the iron grip of the Melbourne-based Herald and Weekly Times group, which responded by starting its own Sunday title. The bid was abandoned and Barrie returned to The Australian as its deputy bureau chief in Melbourne.

Never one to back away from a fight, in the mid-1970s he initiated a celebrated court case in which he alleged that Bob Hawke, then the president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions (and later prime minister), had defamed him at a press conference by attacking him over a derisive comment Barrie made about Hawke in what was supposed to be a private telex message to The Australian’s Sydney office. The outcome of the case is lost to memory, but it said something about Barrie that he wasn’t afraid to take on one of the most powerful men in Australia. He shared with many good journalists a contrarian, iconoclastic streak.

The vendetta with Hawke had nothing to do with Barrie’s politics. He leaned sharply to the left, a tendency that became more pronounced as he got older. But he was admirably – and volubly – even-handed in his scepticism toward all politicians and his suspicion of their motives.

The defamation action created an awkward situation for Murdoch’s News Limited group which Murdoch resolved by removing Barrie from the scene, transferring him to New York to beef up the reporting team on his freshly launched US tabloid weekly The Star. That was never going to work. Barrie’s assignments took him all over the US, but he eventually drew the line at writing for a paper that specialised in salacious stories about celebrities, not to mention the occasional scoop about babies born to aliens. By 1978 he was back in Sydney with the Sunday Telegraph.

The Murdoch connection was eventually severed when Barrie quit in the midst of an acrimonious strike. A subsequent gig as editor of the newly launched Packer magazine Sydney City didn’t last either. Barrie was constantly at loggerheads with the magazine’s owner (you can see a pattern here) and was fired after two years.

Robin Bromby, another old friend and colleague from Dominion days, wrote several articles for Sydney City and blamed the magazine’s failure on the conservatism of Sydney advertisers and readers who weren’t ready for such a publication – a lament that would have sounded familiar to the late Warwick Roger, who encountered similar resistance when he launched Metro in Auckland.

Barrie subsequently took up a position as communications manager for the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation, a statutory body charged with regulating the wine industry. Barrie noted the irony that he (a) was colluding with authority for the first time in his life, and (b) had crossed to the dark side by becoming a PR man. But the job suited him, enabling him to immerse himself in an industry he believed in and whose products he had long consumed with gusto. He was knowledgeable about wine, enjoyed the company of winemakers and made long-lasting friendships in the industry.

He subsequently used his PR experience to set up his own editorial services company, Editors Ink (Barrie always had a weakness for puns), which he ran with Elizabeth’s help. The firm won contracts to edit professional journals and technical publications – not exactly Barrie’s natural metier, but it had the great virtue of being his own show. He eventually retired in 1988 to, as he put it, shout daily invective at a semi-literate society that no longer had any decent newspapers and wouldn’t read them anyway.

It goes without saying that Barrie was opinionated and not averse to saying exactly what he thought, no matter to whom or about what. The same lack of restraint pervaded his journalism. One of his old Daily Telegraph colleagues recalls a column in which he described Elizabeth Taylor, then visiting Sydney, as looking like a dumpy hausfrau. 

He also had an uncanny knack for provoking a reaction from pompous or thin-skinned interview subjects. I remember his account of a press conference at which Patrick McNee, the English actor who played the urbane and unruffled John Steed in The Avengers, was visibly discombobulated by Barrie's line of questioning. "Mr Unflappable Blows His Cool" was Barrie's gleeful headline in The Dominion the following morning. On another occasion, the singer Nina Simone objected to what seemed a legitimate question from Barrie about performing in South Africa and chased him from a press conference at Tullamarine Airport, trying to hit him with her shoe. (It should be noted that Simone was mentally fragile, as became painfully obvious to her audiences on that Australian tour.)

He had no patience for little men (metaphorically speaking) who insinuated themselves into positions of power, and he had a rich vocabulary with which to express his disdain. It probably helped that he was a big, physically imposing man himself.  

But he knew how to enjoy life. He was a bon vivant who loved good food, good wine and whisky (especially Irish whiskey) and congenial company. In his Australian wife he found an ideal match, which is not to say she was a yes-woman – in fact anything but. Elizabeth was a woman of sharp intelligence and strong character in her own right, and not beyond putting Barrie in his place when he stepped out of line.

Though he spent most of his adult life in Australia, Barrie remained an emphatically patriotic New Zealander and All Black supporter. In his last years he often spoke fondly of Wellington and the Hutt Valley, to which he hoped one day to return permanently. Sadly, it wasn’t to be.

He is survived by his unstintingly devoted daughter Megan, his brother Tony and sister Cheryl, and four grandchildren.