essay
LA TROBE UNIVERSITY ESSAY
Writing about The Packer Dynasty
Bridget Griffen-Foley
WHENEVER I GO to a social function -- whether it be a book launch, a conference dinner, or a party hosted by people who have nothing to do with the literary or academic world -- I am invariably introduced as the 'Packer company historian', a 'Packer biographer' or, rather more ambiguously, as 'a Packer expert'. I have been working on the Packer family empire since 1993. What began as a doctoral thesis on the history of Australian Consolidated Press from the launch of Australian Women's Weekly in 1933 to the death of Sir Frank Packer in 1974 evolved into my first book, The House of Packer: The Making of a Media Empire (Allen & Unwin 1999). I am now completing a full-scale biography of Sir Frank, to be published later this year by HarperCollins.
Both projects have been undertaken with the cooperation of some members of the Packer family, but without access to the firm's archives. This lack of access to internal corporate records has preoccupied some of the reviewers of my book. The comments of two reviewers in particular, while initially leaving me somewhat perplexed, have made me ponder the issues entailed in undertaking 'unauthorised' histories and in writing about extremely high-profile individuals and institutions.
If I were given the proverbial dollar for every time a new acquaintance greeted me with the question, 'So have you heard the story about the lift?', I would never need to work again. I had always wondered whether this story was apocryphal but, as I was completing The House of Packer, I came across a report in a printing journal proving that the incident did actually occur. This contemporary account formed the basis of the following paragraph in my book (p.223):
As the headline in the Printer averred, an 'Unusual Dispute' developed at Consolidated Press on Friday, 21 October 1955. At 11.30 pm Packer and [editor-in-chief David] McNicoll found themselves stranded on the third floor as the lift went past them two or three times. When a furious Packer descended the steps and saw N. Slarke at the lift, the unfortunate man was given a fortnight's notice. After Packer refused to unconditionally withdraw the dismissal the following night, the chapel stopped work. Although the chapel was understandably angered by Packer's high-handedness, the PIEUA [Printing Industry Employees' Union of Australia] regarded the decision to stop work as illegal. However, it was unable to persuade its members to resume work. To complicate matters even further, there was a suggestion that Packer had suspended some journalists indefinitely; [the Daily Telegraph editor] King Watson appears to have been as bewildered by the situation as the AJA [Australian Journalists' Association]. On Monday afternoon, after a compulsory conference and further discussions, Slarke was reinstated and work resumed, but Packer refused to pay employees for time lost during the dispute. The story, which still circulates in Sydney publishing and business circles, is seen as emblematic of Packer's capricious and autocratic managerial style; according to one of the myriad versions of events, the person dismissed was not even a Consolidated Press employee, but a postal worker!
And so The House of Packer revealed the 'true' story (if one dares to use such as term in these postmodern times), naming the person who was sacked and establishing the exact date of the incident. In several radio interviews promoting my book, I was asked about the lift episode and given the opportunity to say what 'really' happened. (After one interview, a member of the Slarke family rang in and the producer, clearly delighted, put me in touch with Noel Slarke, who gave me further details about the incident.)
So what did Scott Milson, reviewing my book for the Weekend Australian (September 4-5 1999), make of the tale about the lift? This is how he began his review:
A generation of Australian journalists has relished and retold the story of Frank Packer's encounter with the scruffy young man in the lift at Consolidated Press headquarters in Sydney. There are many versions, all of them along the following lines: 'You're fired, son. Don't come back and here's 10 quid for your trouble!'
There were no surprises here, until Milson declared that the story was probably not true 'in any form'. Failing to mention my account of the lift episode (which is even listed in the index), Milson went on:
Mystified, the youth pockets what was a small fortune and, on his way out the door, says to a passing journalist, 'That's funny, I don't even work here. I', from the PMG.'
It's such a wonderfully emblematic yarn -- the capricious sacking, the bully-boy behaviour, the spontaneous largesse -- that no novelist could improve on it... Herein lies a central problem with the book...The family did not cooperate, the corporate records were withheld and none of the real insiders broke ranks. The resulting limitations of writing a family company history are obvious -- even the anecdotes can't be definitively nailed down.
Not long after the appearance of The House of Packer and the review by Milson, James Packer married Jodie Meares amid much fanfare. On 24 October 1999 I naturally turned with considerable interest to the Sunday Telegraph's potted history of the Packer family. I was hardly surprised that the journalist, Phillip Koch, mentioned the lift episode in his brief sketch of Frank Packer's career. What did astound me, however, was to see Koch regurgitate Milson's version of the story but cite my book as the source!
Scott Milson criticised me for not nailing down one other, crucial detail. I must again quote from The House of Packer (pp.4-5):
After being defeated in municipal elections in December 1918, [Sir James Joynton] Smith decided to launch a weekly newspaper to present his views. [Claude] McKay agreed to edit the newspaper and signed up [R.C.] Packer [Frank's father] as manager. Smith pledged 20,000 pounds to the venture, promising that if it succeeded McKay and Packer would be given a financial interest.
This is one of the best, if not the best, documented episodes in the emergence of the Packer dynasty. Claude McKay detailed the development when he ghost-wrote James Joynton Smith's autobiography in 1927; McKay dealt with it again when he penned his own autobiography in 1961; and the fact that McKay and Packer had each received a one-third share in Smith's Weekly as a gift was frequently referred to in newspaper articles in the 1920s and 1930s, and has been repeated more recently in Australian Dictionary of Biography entries. But according to Milson, the reader of my book is left 'none the wiser' about this transaction. He asked: 'Were the shares sold to Packer? And if so, how did he raise such a huge sum to pay for them?' Gerard Henderson subsequently made a similar point in Australian Book Review (October 1999), observing that 'For all her digging in archives, Bridget Griffen-Foley has been unable to come up with an adequate explanation about how R.C. Packer obtained the money to buy into Smith's Weekly and commence the Packer family media empire.'
In 1921, after Smith had pumped 98,000 pounds into Smith's Weekly, it finally showed a profit. He summoned Packer and McKay to a board meeting and, to their delight, gave them each a one-third share in the company...[T]his event laid the foundation of the Packer empire...
I have been somewhat startled by these criticisms, even if most reviewers have seen fit to castigate Consolidated Press for electing not to actively cooperate with my research endeavours. I find little consolation in the fact that reviewers such as Milson and Henderson have used adjectives like 'exhaustive' and 'meticulous' to describe my scholarship. I suggest that they have exaggerated the limitations of The House of Packer. Yes, it was an extremely difficult book to write, but I think that I have provided unambiguous and, dare I say it, definitive explanations for the two episodes I have referred to above. On the question of where the money came from in 1921, my critics have been unwilling to accept that R.C. Packer was simply given a one-third share in a nascent newspaper company. They seem more inclined to imply some sort of conspiracy theory -- albeit on the basis of no evidence -- than to believe that the founder of the Packer dynasty acquired his first shareholding through a remarkable, but very straightforward, act of generosity.
Perhaps reviewers feel that because I was not helped by internal business archives, I missed out on some sensational episode in the company's formation or subsequent history. It is, of course, possible that I did, but I do not see the point of hinting at subterfuge when there is absolutely no evidence that any occurred. After discussing the Joynton Smith gift to R.C. Packer and Claude McKay in 1921, The House of Packer goes on to unravel, at considerable length, the complex and at times Machiavellian corporate coups that the Packers executed later -- in 1930, 1931, 1932, 1935, 1954 and 1967.
Somewhat ironically, I also maintain that reviewers of my work have made too much of the lack of family and business cooperation. The Packers are so wealthy, the walls around their Bellevue Hill compound (as it is invariably described) are so high, the speculation about their political influence is so rife, and the noises Kerry Packer made before the release of investigative journalist Paul Barry's The Rise and Rise of Kerry Packer (Bantam Books 1993) were so threatening that commentators often seem unwilling to portray the Packer family as anything other than sinister in its secretiveness.
I concede that wading through my book's fifty-three pages of endnotes would have been hard going. However, the preface and acknowledgments clearly indicate that I undertook extensive interviews with Sir Frank's elderly sister and interviewed his widow, had a great deal of contact with the family of E.G. Theodore, who co-founded the empire; tracked down the family of the company's 'silent partner', T.H. Wynne-Lewis; located the papers of the first editor-in-chief, George Warnecke, in Paris; and had dealings with Consolidated Press editors and executives such as Donald Horne, Ita Buttrose and the late Dorothy Drain. My acknowledgments also note that Consolidated Press granted me permission to work on a section of a manuscript collection it holds the copyright to in the Mitchell Library, and allowed me to reproduce some of its front pages.
Of course, I would like to think that my book is about more than just what happened next or who fell out with whom at one company. The House of Packer is about that old cliché, the concentration of media ownership in Australia; a tradition of progressive liberalism in the Sydney press; the distinction that has been drawn between the broadsheet and the tabloid press; responses to modernity; and the construction of femininity by women's magazines.
But what has most concerned reviewers is the 'unauthorised' status of my work. They have intimated, in essence, that the book was not worth writing without the cooperation of Consolidated Press. What this means is that a company headed by the richest man in Australia, a company that is in the news virtually every other day, a company that made a fair part of its money discussing the private dealings of other people, should only be the subject of historical scrutiny if it agrees to be the subject of historical scrutiny. While not wishing to sound portentous, I venture to suggest that having some knowledge and understanding of how a firm that publishes magazines, runs a television network, has interests in pay television and the Internet, lobbies governments and directs the shape of sporting competitions originated and evolved is genuinely in the public interest.
Nevertheless -- and this may be a deeply contradictory qualification given what I have just written -- I personally feel very uneasy about the pursuit of 'unauthorised' histories and biographies. I cannot help thinking of 'unauthorised' books as quickies produced by journalists on the side, usually about members of the royal family and usually about people who are still alive. Although there have been some commendable biographies of living subjects, I do not believe that I would ever feel comfortable embarking on such a project. I would think it unethical to write an 'unauthorised' biography of someone who was still alive; I would feel as though my independence was being compromised if I was hired by the subject (particularly a 'Great Man') to write an official biography; and I could not regard a biography written part-way through the subject's life as in any way definitive. I also maintain, somewhat unsurprisingly, that archival material must be available for someone wishing to study a particular institution or individual. I would not have been prepared to rely solely on newspaper clippings and the seemingly endless stream of anecdotes about Consolidated Press and the Packer family. And if I could not answer that most fundamental of questions -- where did the Packers get their money -- I would not have had the audacity to embark on writing The House of Packer.
As various members of the Packer and Theodore families assisted me with my research, I prefer to think of the book as 'independent' rather than 'unauthorised'. If I had set out to write a highly commercial account of this most controversial of institutions, I would have followed Gerard Henderson's advice and cut the manuscript by a third and scrapped all the endnotes, and I would have heeded Vic Carroll's directive (Age, September 18, 1999) and taken the company's history up to the present day. I began this project because I was genuinely concerned about the neglect of media history in this country, and because I wanted to engage with, and raise, scholarly concerns about the role of the media in a Western democracy.
The most challenging part of my work on a biography of Sir Frank is dealing with public perceptions of the Packer family. As I have already intimated, I do think it is important that academics address subjects and issues of interest to the general public. However, that fact that the name 'Packer' is familiar to virtually every Australian, and most people have a favourite story about Kerry and/or Frank Packer, is at times exasperating. When Sir Frank died in 1974, Elizabeth Riddell observed in The Australian:
Nobody would be foolish enough at this stage to try and assess either the man or the myth. Ten years, twenty years from now there will be an account of his life and works, the writer having first sieved the truth, or as near as anyone can get to the truth, from the massive slagheap of third hand report and wishful anecdotage.
But someone had already attempted to assess Packer's life. In 1971, with Packer very much in the limelight following his bid for the America's Cup and his role in the demise of Prime Minister John Gorton, Cassell Australia had published Sir Frank: The Frank Packer Story. The author was R.S. Whitington, who had worked at Consolidated Press for many years as a sports journalist. The result was a poorly written, badly structured and factually inaccurate hagiography and, as Riddell forecast, it has taken another quarter of a century for anyone to attempt a serious biography of Sir Frank.
In an effort to get close to 'the truth', I have undertaken research in Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Singapore, England, New York, Paris and Dublin. Like most biographers, I am seeking to uncover the layers of my subject's lived experiences. I want to look at how Packer conducted business and familial life on a daily basis; I want to consider his relationships with his employees, trade unions, his fellow proprietors, Liberal politicians, his wives, his sons, his mother and, I think most crucially, his father; and I want to explore his motivations, ambitions and insecurities.
At the same time, it has never been my intention to simply discard the apocryphal element in the stories about Sir Frank that had currency even before his death. I find the way in which the legend of Frank Packer -- the bully, the tyrant, the serial sacker, the womaniser, the practical joker, the political 'king-maker' -- developed in his lifetime fascinating, if somewhat puzzling. My biography actually begins counterfactually.