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Bridget Griffen Foley

Most people, at least in Sydney, have a story to tell about ‘Singo’. As Gerald Stone comments towards the end of this independent but enthusiastic biography: ‘Anecdotes about John Singleton, even the most affectionate, tend to swing between total admiration and head-wagging disbelief. He leaves no one feeling neutral.’

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After she left journalism, Patricia Clarke turned to researching and writing books, beginning with The Governesses in 1985. Bold Types is her fourteenth book. The Canberra writer was a familiar figure at media history and other conferences, and in the National Library of Australia reading rooms, until Covid-19 at least. Her books, augmented by dozens of articles and conference papers, focus mainly on the lives, careers and letters of Australian women, especially writers and journalists. Clarke also writes about the history of her city, Canberra, an interest reflected in some of the fourteen entries she has produced for the Australian Dictionary of Biography. The ninety-six-year-old has devoted nearly ‘half a lifetime’ (to borrow the title of one of her tomes, about Judith Wright) to historical endeavours.

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Who has not heard of “Yabba”, Sydney’s greatest barracker?’, asked the Listener In in February 1937. The Listener In was not the only radio magazine intrigued by a new Australian cricketing identity. Two identities, in fact: Myra Dempsey, who was covering the 1936–37 Ashes series for 3BO Bendigo; and Dempsey’s discovery, ‘Gabba’, a female counterpart to ‘Yabba’. A fixture at the Sydney Cricket Ground for a generation, ‘Yabba’ (Stephen Gascoigne) scored an entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography and remains a fixture in Australian cricket histories. But Dempsey, a minor celebrity in her day as the first female cricket broadcaster in Australia (and probably the world), remains unknown to broadcasting and cricket historians alike.

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This impressive collection of knowledge ranges from the history of newspapers and the biographies of radio and television stars to the rise of media owners (the first of whom, Andrew Bent, arrived as a convict in 1812). It covers war reporting, food and sports coverage, children’s radio, blogging and podcasting, and even the life of the radio serial Blue Hills, which ran from 1949 to 1976.

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Fairfax Media, which has churned out millions of words since its beginnings in Sydney in the 1830s, has itself inspired hundreds of thousands of words in the last year or so. First came Colleen Ryan’s Fairfax: The Rise and Fall (June 2013), followed by Pamela Williams’ Killing Fairfax (July 2013). Now comes Stop the Presses! by Ben Hills, a veteran investigative journalist who would no doubt self-identify as a ‘Fairfax lifer’, like many characters in his book. Just in case the theme of these tomes isn’t clear, we have Hills’s subtitle: How Greed, Incompetence (and the Internet) Wrecked Fairfax.

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Beginning as a voice on ABC radio, Ray Martin became a face familiar to most Australians. He reported from the United States for Four Corners in the 1960s and 1970s, was one of the original reporters on 60 Minutes from 1978, presented the Midday show from 1984 to 1993, and twice hosted A Current Affair (ACA). As he notes, he was the face of Channel 9 in the 1990s, also hosting Carols by Candlelight, election debates and assorted specials. But just in case anyone is in any doubt as to whom this book is about, Heinemann has plastered the cover with Ray: Stories of My Life: The Autobiography. Martin’s signature is added for good measure.

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Phillip Knightley, Murray Sayle and other authors of the Daily Mirror’s historical feature used to relish their days sitting in the Sydney ‘public library’ researching and writing pieces on rape, pillage, sexual betrayal and murder most foul. Decades later, in the early 1990s, I began spending days sitting in what had become the State Library of New South Wales wading through yellowing copies of Sydney’s tabloid press. On one such day in the late 1990s, I stumbled across a card in a catalogue for an index to the Daily Mirror’s muckraking stablemate, Truth. The discovery or creation of a new newspaper index is always a thrill for media historians. I immediately submitted a call slip for the index, and up came a hefty ledger of alphabetical references to Truth for the late 1920s. Lodging more call slips, I ended up surrounded by ledgers ranging from 1925 to 1947. They were all handwritten, and presumably laboriously compiled by a librarian at Ezra Norton’s company, Truth & Sportsman Ltd. Who knows what went through the librarian’s mind as he or she indexed stories of divorce, rape, incest, prostitution, white slavery and cocaine rackets covered by one of Australia’s most notorious newspapers.

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Margaret Simons is a writer familiar to her readers. There she was in Fit to Print: Inside the Canberra press gallery (1999), first driving with her husband and young children to the national capital, then following Michelle Grattan’s blue dress around Parliament House. Here she is again in The Content Makers: Understanding the media in Australia, telling us about her experiences in daily journalism, her move into freelance journalism, writing for the e-mail news service Crikey, and attending last year’s infamous 2006 Walkley Awards dinner.

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Australian television’s golden anniversary roadshow kicked off in September 2005 with the screening of 50 Years, 50 Shows on Channel Nine. Some twelve months were to elapse before the actual anniversary, on 16 September 2006. In 2005, Channel Nine was entering television’s anniversary year and, as the first station to go to air in Australia, determined to present its own history as synonymous with the history of television.

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Australian historians admire Robert Menzies. Pardon? Aren’t historians, like the rest of the Australian academy, left-wing propagandists? Don’t they all loathe the prime minister’s political role model? Regardless of how historians view Menzies’ attitudes to the monarchy, appeasement, the middle class and the Communist Party, they have reached a consensus on one point: Menzies played a significant role in the consolidation and expansion of Australia’s university sector. When Ben Chifley laid the foundation stone of the Australian National University during the election year of 1949, Menzies refused to politicise the initiative; as prime minister in 1956, he appointed a committee to inquire into the plight of Australian universities and insisted on the provision of life-giving funds by the Commonwealth government under conditions which preserved university autonomy. As his biographer, A.W. Martin, notes, ‘Menzies’ support of universities, and the university life, was never at any time in doubt’.

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