The sad, ignoble decline of Frog City

On a recent Monday morning, my wife and I had breakfast at Bordeaux Bakery on Thorndon Quay, Wellington. I expressed surprise that the place was empty. A couple of years ago it would have been humming.

We sat by the window with a view over the street. What we saw was a forest of traffic cones and red-and-white posts designating the cycle lanes that have spread like a cancer all over the city (a city, it should be noted, whose topography makes it singularly unsuited to cycling because many of its main thoroughfares are narrow and winding).

Cyclists rode past in dribs and drabs on their way to work but there were no cars outside because there were no parking spaces. One guy took his chances, stopping illegally for a few minutes while he came in for a takeaway coffee. Other than that, it was just my wife and me.

I felt sorry for the staff. Working in a business with no customers must be demoralising.

It was no surprise, then, to read the depressing announcement only days later that the three Bordeaux cafés around the city were closing, causing the loss of 40 jobs. The owner of the company was blunt about the primary reason: “Everyone keeps telling us how hard it is to get to us,” he told the NZ Herald.

And so continues the slow, torturous death of a city that 20 years ago was buzzing with vitality, ideas and promise. Wellington today is a hostile, alien environment, unfriendly and often bewildering even to its own residents, to say nothing of hapless outsiders trying to navigate streets that resemble obstacle courses. I spent most of my working life in Wellington but sometimes barely recognise the moribund city it has become.

Who’s to blame? The decay began in 2010 when Wellington voted out the last in a long run of capable mayors and perversely allowed itself to be persuaded its future lay with a Greenie blow-in from Britain. Three more useless mayors and Left-dominated councils later, the city has become so terminally dysfunctional that government intervention looks both likely and necessary.

But while it’s easy to pin the blame on ideologically driven zealots at the council table and the tone-deaf, unelected commissars and planners who really run the show, not to mention their media enablers (the Dom Post, under a former editor, harangued its readers almost daily with lectures on the virtues of cycling), it has to be said that the citizens and voters of Wellington can’t entirely escape responsibility.

It’s an old cliché that people get the governments they deserve and the same can be said of councils. New Zealanders en masse tend to be passive, complacent and apathetic. The late Gordon McLauchlan, in his book The Passionless People, called us smiling zombies. We gormlessly stand by while stupid and dangerous things happen, then shriek with indignation when the damage has been done.

We’re all familiar with the parable about the frogs in a pot of water that heats so gradually they don’t realise they’re being cooked alive. By the time the temperature reaches boiling point, it’s too late to reverse the process. The scientific veracity of the analogy has been challenged but it’s apt nonetheless. The city's steady decline, so obvious to occasional visitors, may not seem so apparent to the people who actually live there. 

In this case, the frogs are the people of Wellington who allowed a clique of barmy activists to take over their once-proud city. My good friend Neil Harrap points out in a letter in The Post today that Wellingtonians who voted in the last local government elections were far outnumbered by those who couldn’t be bothered. There’s the problem, right there.

The rising stars of the Southern Cross

 

[An abridged version of this article was published in the September issue of North & South.]

You know you’re getting old when you can look at a 1949 Christmas card illustrated with caricatures of the editorial staff of the Labour Party newspaper the Southern Cross and not only recognise many of the names, but recall knowing them personally.

I didn’t know them then, of course; I hadn’t quite been born. But I worked and drank with them two or three decades later.

The Christmas card (above) is reproduced in Pressing On, the second volume of Ian F Grant’s monumental two-part history of New Zealand newspapers. Volume I, Lasting Impressions, covered the period 1840-1920 and was published in 2018. The sequel, which was launched in May, brought us up to the year 2000 – a cut-off point sensibly chosen because after that, things got messy and chaotic in the print media, with no clear picture of where all the turbulence would lead. (It’s probably safe to say there will be no Volume III, or if there is, it will be a lot shorter than the 670 pages of Pressing On.)

The Christmas card reproduced in Ian’s book was drawn by John McNamara, aka “Mack”, the Southern Cross’s resident illustrator. The subjects were identified in spidery writing so tiny that I had to use a magnifying glass.   

In those days newspapers pompously referred to reporters and sub-editors as their “literary” staff. I couldn’t help letting out little yelps of recognition as I identified those depicted on the Southern Cross Christmas card. Not all of them, but quite a few.

They were journalists of a generation that now seems as distant and archaic as clunky Imperial 66 typewriters, wads of copy paper, metal spikes on sub-editors’ desks (on which to impale stories that didn’t make the grade), Lamson tubes (pneumatic suction tubes for dispatching stories to the printer to be set in type) and overfilled ashtrays – all standard newspaper office appurtenances in that era.

Even the Southern Cross itself was a thing of antiquity. The idea of a daily paper published by a political party is unimaginable now, but the Southern Cross was born out of frustration with newspapers that were seen at best as unsympathetic, at worst downright hostile, to the political and industrial wings of the Labour movement.

Launched in Wellington in 1946, the Southern Cross was Labour’s attempt to even the score, or at least the odds, in the battle for the public’s hearts and minds. But the paper lasted only five years before being brought down by a combination of inadequate capital, incompetent management, struggles for control between competing party factions, and not least by the departure of journalists who, although sympathetic to the cause, became fed up with being told what to write by the likes of party leader Peter Fraser and trade union tyrant Fintan Patrick Walsh.

Seventy-five years on, the Southern Cross is notable chiefly for the talented people it employed, many of whom went on to positions of prominence as writers, editors and broadcasters – which brings us back to the faces and names on that 1949 Christmas card.

In the top row, I see Ian Cross, Noel Hilliard and Winton Keay.

More than two decades on from his stint as a young reporter at the Southern Cross, Cross would become the Listener’s most successful editor ever, albeit helped by a state-imposed monopoly on the right to publish weekly TV and radio programme schedules. Long before that, he had attained fame as the author of The God Boy, a novel partly inspired by a murder trial he had covered as a young reporter but also incorporating elements of his own Catholic childhood. Published in 1957, The God Boy was acclaimed by the New York Times as “a brilliant first novel”.  Its success wasn’t replicated by his later literary efforts and Cross vanished into the PR game before resurfacing at The Listener in 1973.

I first dealt with him after he was appointed chairman of the Broadcasting Corporation in 1977, effectively making him the supremo over virtually all television and radio, which was then still under tight state control.

Cross was a zealous defender of the Listener’s sole right to publish TV and radio programme information in advance. Daily newspapers were allowed to publish programme listings no more than 24 hours ahead, giving the government-owned Listener a huge competitive advantage.  On one occasion, when a paper challenged the monopoly by breaching the rules, Cross punished the entire daily press by withholding all programme information – a petulant response that penalised the public at large. I edited the Evening Post’s TV page at the time and wrote a column accusing him of behaving like a teacher who placed the whole class on detention because of one pupil’s transgression.

I interviewed Cross at length for the Listener in 2014, in the big, chilly Kapiti Coast house where he rattled around with his wife Tui. Cross was a hard man to read; not cold, exactly – that would be overstating it – but rather distant and aloof. Like many good journalists, he always retained something of the quality of an outsider. When he died in 2019, I was privileged to write his obituary for the magazine he had once edited.

Noel Hilliard was another who became famous as an author. His 1960 novel Maori Girl, which was followed in 1974 by Maori Woman, broke new ground by tackling the taboo subject of racism in New Zealand. He and I worked together in the 1970s at the Evening Post, where Noel was a sub-editor. We lived a short distance away from each other in Titahi Bay, and on the rare occasions when I had the use of an office car I would sometimes drive Noel home, he never having had a driver’s licence (a peculiarity he shared with several other male journalists of his vintage). I would sometimes sit with Noel’s wife Kiriwai on the bus from Porirua station; she hailed from the Far North and had been introduced to him by the poet Hone Tuwhare. The Hilliards’ daughter Hinemoa babysat our kids.

Noel personified many of the characteristics of a particular type of journalist from that era: a natural leftie from a deprived working-class background whose political views were forged by his experience of the Depression and its impact on his parents. In pub conversations he was always polite and affable, in fact almost courtly, but his politics were never far from the surface and you could sense a controlled anger. He had been a member of the Communist Party but like many others, had quit in disgust after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. 

Noel had previously worked at the Listener and was a veteran of a famous stoush over the 1972 sacking of the magazine’s editor, the stroppy Alexander MacLeod (whom Cross succeeded). MacLeod’s dismissal, which resulted in a commission of inquiry, was widely seen as punishment by the Broadcasting Corporation board (heavily dominated by National Party figures and chaired by Major-General Walter McKinnon, father of Sir Don) for taking a defiantly liberal editorial line on such issues as race relations and the Vietnam War. It didn’t help that MacLeod’s people skills weren’t great. He had a strained relationship with some of his staff and his firing triggered a bitter schism that left its imprint for years. I can’t recall which side Noel took, but I would guess from his political leanings and his subsequent departure from the magazine that he was in the pro-MacLeod camp.

Next to Noel on the Christmas card is Winton Keay, who in 1949 was the Southern Cross’s editor. By the time I knew him in the 1970s, Win was an old man and seemed an unlikely person to have been in charge of a paper with an explicitly political agenda, still less a left-wing one. He was a frequent visitor to the public bar of the Britannia Hotel in Willis St, where Wellington’s newspaper journalists drank, but I don’t recall him ever showing any interest in talk about politics. Win was dapper, charming and a lifelong bachelor, a combination which in those days was assumed to mean only one thing. He was also one of the few regulars at “the Brit” who could fraternise with equal ease among journalists from both the Evening Post and the Dominion – rival papers in those days, with distinct cultures that weren’t always entirely compatible.

Elsewhere on the Christmas card I see Alex Fry. Alex was chief reporter and nominally assistant editor at the Listener when I worked there in the late 70s and early 80s. Not only was he a former flatmate of Noel Hilliard, but both had spent time in a hilltop sanatorium at Pukeora, near Waipukurau, after contracting tuberculosis – a life-threatening illness blamed on living conditions in their unheated Wellington flat.

Alex was that rare creature, a journalist with a university degree. He had a BA at a time when virtually all his peers joined newspapers straight from school and worked their way up from menial jobs as messengers and reading room copyholders. A West Coaster by birth, he had served in the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm, though not during the war, and worked for the Manchester Evening News. Like MacLeod, Alex wasn’t popular with all the Listener staff and had a reputation for being irascible, but I liked him. He was a graceful and erudite writer who should have spent more time doing what he did well rather than pointlessly shuffling bits of paper and largely being ignored in his glass-fronted enclosure.

Talking of erudite writers brings us to another of the rising stars (excuse the pun) on the Southern Cross Christmas card: W P (Bill) Reeves. In the 1960s, Reeves became editor of The Dominion and forged an unlikely friendship with an ambitious young Australian newspaper entrepreneur named Rupert Murdoch. It was the time of Murdoch’s successful bid for a controlling interest in The Dominion – his first acquisition outside Australia – and the two bonded over their shared passion for newspapers and journalism. When in Wellington, Murdoch would stay with the Reeves family and the two men would spend hours sprawled on the floor planning the layout of the soon-to-be-launched Sunday Times (now the Sunday Star-Times).

As Dominion editor, Reeves – a natural-born liberal – had gently eased the paper away from its traditional conservative stance. He later recalled that Murdoch made no attempt to interfere with the Dom’s editorial line; in fact was something of a left-winger himself back then. But when the young tycoon decided in 1968 that the paper should go tabloid – a grievous mistake, reversed four years later – Reeves was replaced as editor by Jack Kelleher, whom Murdoch thought better-suited to tabloid-style journalism. Reeves stayed on as an editorial writer and columnist and continued contributing his weekly Standoff: A Radical View – always authoritative and impeccably crafted – long after his retirement.

It almost goes without saying that there were few women on the editorial staff of the Southern Cross; to be precise, two out of the 32 people on that Christmas card. It wasn’t until the 60s and 70s that women started to infiltrate newsrooms in numbers. But one of those two on the Labour daily, women’s editor Christine Cole, would become Dame Christine Cole Catley, an influential figure in journalism and book publishing.

Again, I had a personal connection with her because she was one of the tutors on the Wellington Polytechnic part-time journalism course that I attended two nights a week – my course fees paid by my employer, the Evening Post – in 1968. Something of a trail-blazer for women journalists, Chris had been the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s correspondent in Indonesia during the turbulent years of the autocratic Sukarno regime. She wrote a popular daily TV review in the Dominion under the nom-de-plume Sam Cree, the choice of a male name indicating that even in the 60s, editors weren’t sure their readers were ready for women columnists. (Chris told me years later that she deliberately adopted a “tough-sounding” name because she didn’t want to sound effeminate.) Later again, while living in the Marlborough Sounds, she and her husband founded Cape Catley Press. She became an important mentor to New Zealand writers and was made a Dame in 2006, five years before her death, for services to literature.

Moving along, we come to the force of nature that was Gordon Dryden, then a young and very left-wing sub-editor. How left-wing? A small clue: he later edited the NZ Communist Party paper The People’s Voice. The son of a sawmiller, Dryden lost count of the number of schools he attended and got his first newspaper job at the scandal-sheet New Zealand Truth when he was 15.

He would go on to become a PR consultant to Labour Party leaders, a pioneer of talkback radio (he founded Radio Pacific) and the promoter of an unsuccessful bid – squashed by prime minister Norman Kirk – to run the country’s first private TV network.  He also, in later life, became a formidable current affairs interviewer. Robert Muldoon reputedly called him the most dangerous man in New Zealand and refused to be interviewed by him again after they clashed on the TV show Friday Conference. An irrepressible communicator of ideas, Dryden also became a passionate promoter of child welfare and educational reform, but never forgot his roots in newspaper journalism. On trips to Wellington from his base in Auckland he would make a point of calling in at the Brit for a beer – or several – with old colleagues. (If my research is correct, he was the last of that 1949 cohort to pass on. He died in 2022, aged 91.)

One of Dryden’s drinking mates, and another face on that Christmas card, was Tom Walsh, whom I knew during his long tenure as the Evening Post’s chief sub-editor. Tom was old-school to the core, with a voice like the bark of a seal. The uncle of Dame Fran Walsh, of Lord of the Rings fame, he was the only man I ever knew who would light each cigarette with the butt of the previous one, which is where the term chain-smoking came from. Tom would be in the public bar of the Brit every afternoon as soon as the day’s work was done and wouldn’t leave until it was time to go home for dinner. Like most journalists of that era he drank too much, at least by today’s standards, and smoked to excess. I doubt that he ate a healthy diet – certainly not at work, because deadline pressures didn’t permit it – and I can’t imagine that he was a stickler for regular exercise. He lived into his 90s.

(As an aside, pubs were central to the culture of journalism. A journalist visiting an unfamiliar city always knew where to find local journos because every issue of the Journalists’ Union’s monthly paper carried ads showing which pubs they frequented.)

Several other familiar names leapt out from that Christmas card. One is Ben O’Connor, who came from a big Irish Catholic family from Nelson and the West Coast – the same family that produced present-day Labour MPs Damian and Greg. Ben became the Evening Post’s business editor and later, the spokesman for the Bankers’ Association. A trenchant and acerbic conservative despite his family’s left-wing leanings, he once stood up at an Independent Newspapers Ltd annual shareholders’ meeting and called for my sacking as editor of the Dominion because he disapproved of the paper’s editorial line, which (among other things) supported the Labour government’s right to defy the US over nuclear-armed ships and the Anzus Treaty.

Louis Johnson, who became a much-admired poet, is on the card too. So is Noel Harrison, who established the aforementioned Wellington Polytechnic journalism course (New Zealand’s first, and long since absorbed by Massey University) and critiqued the press on the weekly TV programme Column Comment, as did Ian Cross.  Harrison’s career ended under an undeserved cloud when he was implicated in allegations of fraud at Northland Polytech, where he was chief executive. A judge threw the case out for lack of evidence and an investigation by North & South reporter David McLoughlin concluded that Harrison had unfairly been targeted by disaffected staff. Harrison later won a $124,000 Employment Court payout and successfully sued National MP John Banks, who had levelled the accusations against him, for defamation.

Lastly there’s Merlin Muir, who understandably preferred to be known as Lin (although his caricaturist misspelled his name as Lyn). Lin covered Parliament for the Southern Cross and would later spend more than 20 years as a desk man at the NZ Press Association. I remember him well from my time as a young and hopelessly inadequate industrial reporter at the Dominion, because Lin would sometimes phone me to query some aspect of a story I had written about the constant industrial disputes which in those days (the early 70s) caused enormous disruption in the life of the country. (All daily papers supplied copies of  important stories to the NZPA so they could be distributed nationally.) I came to dread those calls from Lin because while his questions were always polite and reasonable, which wasn’t always the case when sub-editors pulled up mistake-prone reporters, I was often embarrassed because I couldn’t answer them. He exposed flaws in my stories that the Dom’s own subs never picked up.  

The same Merlin Muir had a celebrated feud with his Khandallah neighbour, the architect Ian Athfield. Muir complained that Athfield’s hillside house kept expanding with scant regard for council planning laws or the rights of those living next door. The bitter dispute culminated with Muir bringing a defamation action against the Institute of Architects, whose magazine took Athfield’s side but ended up publishing an apology to the retired journo.

There were other notable journalists who worked for the Southern Cross but didn’t feature in the Christmas card, presumably because they weren’t on the staff in that particular year. One was my uncle Dick Scott, the paper’s farming editor. Dick, another communist (though he too would quit the party), was married to my father’s younger sister. He subsequently edited the union paper Transport Worker and wrote the book 151 Days, a partisan but immensely lively and readable account of the 1951 waterfront dispute. He also founded and edited New Zealand’s first wine magazine, but left his most indelible mark as the author of Ask That Mountain, the 1975 book that lifted the veil on the Parihaka affair – a stain on the country’s history that had previously been ignored.

The aforementioned Jack Kelleher also once worked for the Southern Cross, as did Russell Bond, a quiet little man who would later occupy a back room at the Dominion, where he wrote editorials and classical music reviews.

That so many former Southern Cross journalists went on to work for the Dominion (Cross was another – he became the Dom’s chief reporter in the mid-50s) was ironic, to say the least. Politically the papers were poles apart, the Dominion having been founded in 1907 by wealthy farmers and professional men with the express object of bringing down the Liberal Party government that laid the groundwork for the welfare state and broke up the estates of the landed gentry.

Another long-serving Dominion journalist was the dignified and gentlemanly Read Mason, a Second World War conscientious objector whose brother Rex had been the influential Minister of Justice in the first Labour government. Kelleher, on the other hand, was a Catholic and a conservative, albeit a liberally minded one. Despite the paper’s Tory roots, the Dom welcomed journalists of all political shades and its newsroom always had a slightly wild, anarchic spirit.

In any case, while many of the Southern Cross journalists may have been left-wing in their personal beliefs, I don’t think they necessarily saw it as their mission to promote a particular political creed. It’s more likely that some simply thought the field was unfairly tilted in favour of the Tory press and that the other side deserved a fair shake.

While it’s a mere side track to the main narrative in Ian Grant’s newspaper history, the 1949 Christmas card is an important journalism artefact.  It recalls a time when newspapers were staffed mostly by egalitarian, personable, highly literate and idealistic lefties, some of whom had a very limited formal education. They observed the rules of editorial balance, had a broad general knowledge, were well-read, could spell properly and were sticklers for correct grammar. Today’s journalists, despite being the most highly educated in history – at least in terms of academic credentials – could learn a lot from them.

Pressing On: The story of New Zealand’s newspapers, 1921-2000, by Ian F Grant, is published by Fraser Books in association with the Alexander Turnbull Library. Recommended retail price: $69.50.