The real Australia

by Alfred Buchanan

Of the third class, the order of journalists proper, a great deal might be said. This class includes all those who get their living by furnishing copy to the newspapers of the country. They are a motley crowd; they number in their ranks representatives of all the professions, and of no profession at all. They embrace men and women of good social position, and men and women who are distinctly outside the pale. They have no definite organisation, no professional status, no formal rules of etiquette, no exclusive caste, no artificial barriers against membership. They have one standard of living, unorthodoxy; one bond of fellowship, Bohemianism; one passport to success, ability; one aversion, dulness; one insidious enemy, human nature; one unreliable friend—the world.

For these workers of the community there should be, in the aggregate, a feeling of considerable respect and of no little sympathy. Of respect, because in the mass they accomplish great things. The really first-class journalist showers a wealth of good phrasing, clever word-painting, wise discrimination, light fancy, brilliant humour, and saving common-sense on the breakfast-tables of a quarter of a million people each morning. He does all this and more. The result has come to be looked upon as necessary, obvious, mechanical, in a sense inevitable. It represents to the average reader the outpourings of a great machine. And a machine it certainly is, but one that is intricately fashioned, piece by piece, out of the minds and bodies, and hopes and fears, and personal gifts and graces of tens of hundreds of unrecognised writers. Unrecognised—the word that expresses always the salvation of the bad journalist, and always the detriment, or the ultimate ruin, of the good one.

These men are entitled to sympathy, or would be if they did not include in their ranks so many specimens of moral obloquy, so many hopeless outcasts from all the paths of reasonably sane and tolerable behaviour. Journalism makes a man acquainted with strange bed-fellows. Yet, taking it right through it contains probably more ability than all the rest of the professions put together, though possibly less knowledge than is to be found in any one of them. The newspaper writer, considered as a type, is always overworked, and always underpaid. Australia in this respect is no exception to other parts of the world. The men who labour behind the veil of anonymous journalism are rewarded for the most part with a living wage, and are swept out of sight as the new generation comes along. When their initiative goes, they go. Time is their deadliest enemy. Instead of fighting for them as it fights for the barrister and the medical man, it is constantly threatening them with loss of initiative, with loss of energy, with loss of brilliance. Honey is proverbially sweet for a season; but no one knows better than the journalist that the laurel which he wins this morning cannot last till to-morrow.

As to the products of this handiwork—what is to be said of them? The Australian newspaper has already developed a character of its own. Its place is somewhere between the startling sensationalism of New York and San Francisco, and the solemn impressiveness of the older London school. The representative editor balances himself between these two modes of journalism. He is seldom quite free from the English traditions, but he knows his readers; he knows that they, too, are somewhat under the influence of the older and more respectable associations; he knows that, while they have no taste for solid reading, and are always ready to be excited or amused, they have yet a contempt for machine-made sensationalism, for foolish and frothy elaboration, for staring capital letters, for shriekful epithets, for the flimsier kind of composition that rears itself on a basis of sand. Hence it may be that the press of the Commonwealth has followed, for the most part, a middle course, and has endeavoured to be neither too dull nor too picturesque. The effort has often resulted in insignificance; but it has now and again achieved great success.

For purposes of illustration it is not necessary to go beyond Melbourne and Sydney. The smaller capital cities, Adelaide, Brisbane, and Perth, are content as a rule to follow their leaders. Whatever is good or bad, or in any way distinctive at the centre, you will find reflected, though in a slighter and paler fashion, in the towns further north and further west. The same lines of demarcation hold good throughout the continent. In each city one morning paper calls itself “liberal” or “national,” while its rival goes one better, and styles itself “radical” or “democratic.” The word “conservative” has become a taunt, and is never an acknowledged title. The predominant tendency is for the younger and more democratic organ to go beyond its older and more serious competitor. The only important exception seems to be that in Perth, where the West Australian occupies a unique position. It is the accented mouthpiece of “groperism”; that is to say, of those privileged few who came to the State in early days, and monopolised as much of the earth as seemed worthy of their attention. Needless to add, these people are more conservative than they care to admit. The newspaper of their choice is singularly popular considering the circumstances. Under the guidance of an extraordinarily far-seeing and subtle-minded editor who has a rare faculty for flattering a democratic audience, while really ruling and guiding it—who knows also how to bend to the storm when to beat against it is no longer possible—the West Australian is more widely read, and more influential, to-day than it ever was, and that in the midst of a people containing a stronger socialistic infusion than is to be met with elsewhere in Australia.

It is in Melbourne and Sydney, however, that we get the most useful and instructive illustrations of the working of the journalistic machine. The Age and Argus in the former city; the Morning Herald and Daily Telegraph in Sydney, represent the best that Australia has yet been able to accomplish in this field of enterprise. The Age is referred to first because it claims, and with an emphasis that frightens contradiction, to have the largest circulation of any daily south of the line. Its political influence, though perhaps hardly what it was, has also to be reckoned with. The Age has been in existence just fifty-two years; it has been consistently fortunate in the men behind it. More especially it has been fortunate in its proprietor. It owes its power, its prestige, its circulation, its character, its very existence to David Syme, who is still, at a venerable age, an active, working journalist, and who has the distinction of being the most respected and the most disliked man in Australia—perhaps also one of the very best liked by the few who know him really well. That he has used his immense power fearlessly, and on the whole for good, is unquestionable. The present editor of the Age acts up to the policy of the proprietor. Never laying claim to pyrotechnical skill as a writer, and not giving too much rein to his imagination, he is yet pre-eminently shrewd, far seeing, clear-sighted, well informed, capable, and where business interests are concerned, inflexible as death itself. In private life no man could be more popular or more deferentially urbane.

The Argus suffers now, and has always suffered, from want of definite and decisive leadership. On its general staff it has had during the past ten or fifteen years more brilliant men—considered as reporters, at any rate—than any other daily paper in the English language. But instead of advancing to meet the times it has stood still, and talked impressively of many things. More particularly it has talked about the dangers of empiricism, and the responsibilities of the press. People read it, and will continue to read it, not so much for its opinions, as for the graceful manner in which most of its writers contrive to deal with the English language. For the rest its views on Imperialism and Free-trade fall on unwilling ears.

The Morning Herald is the oldest paper in the Commonwealth, and is built on the same lines as the Argus. It has done great things for the tone and temper of Australian journalism. Latterly, it has been showing signs of democratic restlessness that have caused its older admirers a certain amount of alarm.

The Daily Telegraph is the Mary Jane of Australian journalism. It is the most active, the most aggressive, the most tireless, the most sensation-loving, the most hysterical, the most shrill-voiced, the most daring, and the most inventive paper published on the continent. It is a slab of San Francisco tumbled down in the vicinity of Botany Bay.

This reference to certain leading journals brings up a large question—the question of the power of the newspaper press in Australia. Is it an excessive power? And how does it compare with the power of the press in other countries? So far as their political creeds are concerned, the Australians have been called a newspaper-ridden community. They are often too tired to think, and they let the paper think for them. The writer recollects calling upon a prominent official who had just returned to Melbourne after a visit for political purposes to England. The first, and almost the only observation this gentleman made, was that “They are not afraid of the newspapers in the old country.” It was this circumstance that had impressed him more than anything else, although during his absence he had been everywhere, and had seen a great deal. If you are a public man you must read and despise the papers. If you do not read them, you will miss something. If you do not despise them, they will worry the life out of you. The Age is the stock instance of a paper from which tens of thousands of adult, and supposedly intelligent voters have been content to take their opinions. This journal has made and unmade many Ministries. The Sydney Daily Telegraph is aspiring to fill the same rôle, but so far with not the same success. It is quite certain, however, that Australian newspapers of the larger class possess more influence in certain directions than is good either for themselves or for the community.