1977 – a journalist's perspective

The following paper has been prepared by Peter Manning, Adjunct Professor of Journalism in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney. It is also available in audio format, below.

At the beginning of 1977, the dismissal of the Whitlam government by John Kerr still felt like a festering wound. To my crowd, the legitimacy of the Fraser government was still in question. It was only a year or so on from the day when the Governor-General had struck down a democratically elected government.

One of the many losses in the December election landslide to Malcolm Fraser in 1975 was Labor’s Fred Daly – a stalwart of the Catholic Right of the Party and one of the popular wits of the parliament. At the beginning of '77 I was editor of a little local paper in Sydney’s inner-city suburb of Glebe and I had met Fred several times. He was always laughing. For most of ‘77, though, I was editor of the satirical weekly, Nation Review, and on one occasion I was flying back from Canberra and I heard Fred’s booming voice two seats ahead of me. ‘Excuse me miss,’ he enquired of the hostess, ‘you wouldn’t by any chance have a copy of Penthouse magazine, would you?’ The somewhat shocked hostess replied in a sharp negative, ‘No sir, we don’t carry that paper.’ ‘Well,’ said Fred, ‘what about the Catholic Weekly?’ She went off to a roar of laughter from the plane.

Fred Daly slipped out of the limelight in the Fraser era and the bonhomie which he brought to the halls of Parliament went with it. Jim Killen was still there and Gough was hanging on but the humour had gone out of politics.

My memory of the year is one of unease – at a whole lot of levels. A Menzies generation that had gone to university and largely studied Arts subjects were being overtaken by the economists. The oil shocks, deficits and inflation figures of the Whitlam years were slowly making everyone aware of their own deficits of understanding. Unease, too, in popular music. Punk bands like The Clash, David Bowie’s Heroes and Talking Heads’ first album all arrived with an edgy, brittle sound that expressed the feeling of the time. On her Hejira album, Joni Mitchell sang not about love but about the lack of it:

Maybe I’ve never really loved,
I guess that is the truth,
I‘ve spent my whole life in clouds at icy altitudes.

The science fiction of Star Wars first hit the screens and broke all box office records as the world’s then highest-grossing film. Fantasy ruled.

Within a few months of the start of the year I was asked by Richard Walsh to edit Nation Review. It was a slightly uneasy mix of both the old ‘Nation’ of Tom Fitzgerald and George Munster, and the ‘Review’ of Mungo MacCallum, Michael Leunig and John Hepworth fame. Owned by the slightly left-wing transport king (there’s a type you don’t see much of these days), Gordon Barton, Nation Review, popularly known as ‘the ferret’, like many other publications was out of sorts with the times. It didn’t like Malcolm and he didn’t like us. It was irreverent, lewd, scurrilous and if it were a fish, it would have been a bottom-feeder.

I had the job of running this combined bag of Kilkenny cats. I remember being seduced by Mungo one late night to turn up to Peter Carey’s place in Birchgrove to get a late feed. Carey seemed non-plussed in the middle of his dinner party. It got heated. Carey decided to jump up onto the middle of his dinner table and abuse Mungo – I think, essentially, in retrospect, for being a journalist. Mungo, standing in the middle of the table, responded with remarks about jumped-up advertising writers. I tried to do a Bob Hawke and seek consensus but failed. It ended badly.