Book Review

Elizabeth Riddell, writing in The Australian on the death of Sir Frank Packer on 1 May 1974, predicted that	1
(t)en 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.
Packer has found his biographer in Bridget Griffen-Foley whose Sir Frank Packer: the Young Master is the second of her books on the Consolidated Press empire of the Packer family in Sydney.
Riddell’s words give a hint of the legendary qualities of the press baron and Griffen-Foley has tracked down the facts (or lack of them) behind many apocryphal tales. They include one in which a fuming Packer sacked a member of the printers’ union on the spot who had been in a lift which ‘whizzed past’ several times and refused to stop for Packer. Chaos ensued when a strike then broke out and several editions of the Daily Telegraph and one of the Women’s Weekly failed to appear. Packer ultimately and ignominiously reinstated the unionist. ‘One of the most bizarre episodes in the industrial history of Consolidated Press’, she comments. Other legends include the awarding of a prize to Dymphna Cusack’s novel Come In Spinner but later publicly relegating it to ‘the dustbin’ along with the strike over the Telegraph’s 1953 headline ‘Stalin Dead Hooray’.	2
We also get a vivid sense of Packer the (unlovely) human being, who energetically drives his business, who deals personally with his senior journalists, who is open to flattery from his social betters and who humiliates those below. A psychological profile emerges. Shy behind the bluster and sporting a XXL-size inferiority complex, the Young Master, as the printing unions dubbed him in the 1930s had a modus operandi which was that of a tribal chief. His fetish for loyalty, his system of payback and bullying, his use of patronage and his projection of himself and his power through the Daily Telegraph all attest to this. As the author suggests this is the mythical Lord Copper owner of the Daily Beast pace Evelyn Waugh. And at the back of many readers’ minds will be a search for the psychological key to explain Packer the Younger, and even his son James. Part of the key is perhaps contained in the connotations of the phrase ‘new money’.	3
Since the beginning of the Menzies era, Sir Frank Packer was also a Liberal Party powerbroker of an old fashioned kind. Understanding this relationship is important in understanding a major dimension of power in Australia and Griffen Foley covers it meticulously. His relationship with Menzies was not always smooth. One simple example. In 1952 Packer secured an appointment for his personal financial adviser John Ratcliffe with both Menzies and his Treasurer Fadden. The interview cannot have been a success because in the months that followed the Daily Telegraph conducted an hysterical front page campaign against a minor change to the tax laws which would have cost Packer many thousands of pounds. All the while the Telegraph lied that it had ‘no selfish interest’ in the matter.	4
Packer’s connection with Menzies was usually warmer and lasted until Menzies retirement. In the instability which followed, Packer angled to favour Billy MacMahon, a personal friend with whom he often dined at ‘Cairnton’ in Sydney’s Bellevue Hill. So loyal was Packer to MacMahon that he told the then Prime Minister John Gorton that he would ‘turn his press against him if he continued to ‘persecute’ MacMahon’ (p.290). Later, Packer and his journalistic accomplices, including Alan Reid, allied themselves with the young Malcolm Fraser to create a crisis which saw Gorton lose his Prime Ministership. On the other hand, Packer’s long and venomous relationship with Labor can be summed up by recollections of one of his staff of nights when he would enter the newspaper office and kill a story: ‘Why has Calwell got a page three lead? Put him on page thirteen!’ Ahh, such was the stuff of Labor legend, too true, too true!	5
Griffen-Foley’s history is of a traditional narrative kind with loads of empirical detail, based largely on documentary sources combined with interviews of surviving family, friends and employees. It is not encased in a contentious or questionable interpretive framework, allowing the reader to form his or her judgments if they take the trouble to piece together the broader patterns of Packer’s activities. Apart from her meticulous documentary research Griffen-Foley reveals that she had extensive access to Packer’s sister, Lady (Kathleen) Stening who gave her access to family papers and photographs. She also interviewed Packer’s widow, Lady (Florence) Packer. Such sources are the pure gold of the historian’s quest and both enriched the consequent account, not least in the family photos, which add to the lively cartoons, front pages, and other illustrations. In her introduction, Griffen Foley notes Lady Stening may not like aspects of the book. But Griffen-Foley strives to be fair and strains on one occasion to point out that ‘he did not always behave in a totally cavalier and insensitive fashion’ (p.175). She has carefully mined hundreds of archives, manuscripts and personal papers to create a many-faceted appreciation of Packer’s life.	6
Griffen-Foley also has a journalist’s eye for detail, for example, in her opening description of the dinner at the Vanderbilt mansion for the America’s Cup yacht challenge. The food, flowers and Packer’s sweating nervousness in the presence of President Kennedy are vividly portrayed.	7
The final images we have of Packer are; first, of a sick old Canute trying to hold back the political and cultural surge of the 1970s, in a series of squalid arguments with Mike Willesee about the price and content of A Current Affair which Willesee produced for the Nine Network; second, a plan to launch a new daily newspaper, after the expiry of an agreement with Murdoch not to publish for several years. Having ordered new presses for the new paper, Packer died, leaving us guessing what might have happened if Kerry had not cancelled the order.	8
University of Technology, Sydney DAVID McKNIGHT

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