The Hero Maker Read online

  As he was carried along, feet trailing in the sand, he dazedly fumbled with the chute’s quick-release box with his good right hand. Attached to the front of the parachute harness, this box featured a button that had to be turned, after which it was necessary to give the box a solid thump. The harness would then drop away, freeing him from the parachute. But after being hauled across the desert, the box had filled with sand. The button refused to turn. Continuing to struggle with the release mechanism, Brickhill was dragged at least two hundred metres.

  Looking over his shoulder, he saw that he was being taken in the direction of a narrow waterway rippling towards the sea. Just beyond it, a line of entangled barbed wire marked the enemy’s front line. As he reached the waterway, he finally succeeded in getting the release catch to work. The harness sprang open, and he fell free, landing on his back on the sand. Beside him, the chute emptied of air and gently collapsed into the stream.

  He tried to stand, but, weak from exertions and wounds, he only fell back down on his rump. Sitting there, shaken and disconsolate, he became aware of the business end of a rifle pointing at him, no more than four metres away. Looking up, he saw the rifle’s owner, an Italian soldier, splashing through the stream towards him. Ten metres beyond the stream stretched the barbed-wire entanglement, and standing in front of it, with a bunch of scruffy soldiers around him, was an immaculate Italian colonel with rows of decorations on his tunic and perfectly pressed riding breeches with a broad gold stripe down the sides. The soldier who crossed the stream took Brickhill’s arm and hauled him to his feet, then helped him stumble across the water to the colonel, who made a courteous little bow to him.

  ‘For you, the war is over,’ the colonel declared in heavily accented English. This phrase, heard by tens of thousands of captured Allied servicemen during the war, was apparently the only English the officer knew.12

  Brickhill would later say: ‘The first few minutes after being shot down sometimes seem pretty unreal while the grey matter is trying to adjust itself to violently changed conditions.’13 In his now wet socks, he was escorted through an opening in the barbed wire and along a series of low trenches to a dressing station. There, he stripped off his shirt and trousers and an Italian medic tended to the splinter wounds on his back and head, and contusions to his left leg. Handed a large ‘dixie’ mess tin half-filled with a brown liquid, he was urged to drink. Taking a wary sip, he found the tin contained cognac, fiery and warming. As he sat with the dixie in hand, an Italian corporal came to him.

  ‘You are most lucky,’ said the corporal in good English.

  Brickhill didn’t feel all that lucky, having just been shot down and become an unwilling guest of the Italian First Army.

  ‘That was our minefield your parachute just dragged you across,’ the corporal continued.14

  That explained, Brickhill cogitated, why his plane had gone up with such a bang. It had landed smack dab on top of a mine! It had been a miracle that the parachute had dragged him all the way through the minefield without setting off another mine, a million to one chance that, like his plane, he hadn’t been blown sky high. Even though he was now a prisoner of war, Brickhill had to agree with the corporal; he was a bit lucky after all. Raising the dixie to his lips once more, he downed the remaining contents in one go.

  Brickhill hadn’t been destined to die that day. Years later, he would be grateful to the anonymous pilot who shot him down and changed the course of his life. Now, the former Sydney journalist was about to be sent to a place he would make world famous, and which would make him world famous.

  2.

  Ink in the Blood

  THE NEWSPAPER BUSINESS was in Paul Brickhill’s blood, with his father, several uncles and grandfather involved with papers in five Australian states. Brickhill’s Australian roots went back to the early 1840s. With the East End’s silk-weaving industry in decline, London silk-dyer John Brickhill sailed as a free settler to the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land – renamed Tasmania in 1856 following the cessation of convict transportation from Britain. John Brickhill set up home at Launceston in the north of the island, working initially as a gardener. Within several years he was employed as a law clerk, before joining the Launceston post office and rising to a senior position. In 1844, John married Susannah Hutley.

  John and Susannah Brickhill’s third son, James, born in September 1846, would eventually do his father proud. As a boy of sixteen, James took up an apprenticeship at Launceston’s daily newspaper, the Examiner. At nineteen, James made twenty-one-year-old local girl Rebecca Emms pregnant, and they were hurriedly married in May 1865. Their first child was born that September. James would father ten children in all, several of whom died young.

  During nineteen years with the Examiner, James rose from office boy to journalist before ultimately becoming the paper’s accountant. In December 1881, James left the Examiner, and the following January, at the age of thirty-five, entered into a partnership with a printer named Bell to take over the printery and masthead of the Telegraph. This then bi-weekly Launceston newspaper had been set up just a year before by three local businessmen with little newspaper acumen. James soon began churning out his paper three days a week, and within three months had bought out his partner. James built circulation so rapidly, and brought in so much additional business for his printery, including winning the Launceston Council’s printing contract, that on 18 June 1883 he launched his paper as a daily, renaming it the Daily Telegraph.

  Located in premises at 56 Paterson Street, just down the street from his old employer and around the corner from his parents’ St John Street home, James now gave the Examiner a run for its money. Contemporaries admired the young newspaperman. ‘Widely respected and honoured’, said one, his ‘disposition was unobtrusive and retiring, yet he possessed a great deal of enterprise, backed up by much perseverance’.15

  ‘Very few people outside the precincts of a newspaper office have any conception of the care, toil, anxiety and expense that are involved in the management of a morning daily newspaper,’ James declared.16 Because of his care and toil, and despite the anxiety and expense, business thrived. Most of his sons joined him at the paper. The eldest, Walter, became a sports reporter. Another, Lewis, went into the printery as a compositor. Second youngest George also learned the business, as a junior reporter, joining the Daily Telegraph in 1894.

  Then, to the surprise of many, at the end of 1894 James threw it all in. Selling the Telegraph to his general manager and a local consortium, Brickhill became a commission and mining agent. By the end of 1900, he was ready for yet another new adventure. His boys and one of two daughters were by then off his hands, so he took wife Rebecca and youngest daughter Daisy to the mining town of Zeehan, a cold, wet and miserable place in winter, deep in the wilderness on Tasmania’s west coast. There, he became council clerk, and a justice of the peace. During his newspaper days, James had been urged to become involved in politics. His answer had always been that he was too busy. In 1903, his changed circumstances helped him change his mind, and he stood in Australia’s second Federal Election in the newly-created seat of Darwin – renamed Braddon in 1955 – a sprawling electorate taking in Tasmania’s west and northwest coasts.

  In the seat of Darwin, James Brickhill had two opponents, chiefly the colourful King O’Malley, who was destined to become one of the most legendary figures in Australian politics. An American, an insurance salesman and an evangelist, auburn-haired, red-bearded O’Malley would during his career influence the policy direction of the Labor Party, play a hand in the foundation of the Commonwealth Bank, oversee the choice of the site for the new federal capital, Canberra, and hand that city’s design competition prize to fellow American Walter Burley Griffin.

  O’Malley had the advantage of having been one of four members sent to the first Federal Parliament representing Tasmania in 1901. Yet he was considered an outsider by many, not only for a murky North American background but because he’d previously served in South Australia
’s parliament. Brickhill, meanwhile, had the advantage of Tasmanian roots and an impeccable reputation in business and local government. The election campaign in the far-flung electorate proved tough, with the white-haired, white-moustached, fifty-six-year-old James Brickhill speaking to packed halls.

  Opponent O’Malley was especially popular with the ladies, wowing them with his distinctive appearance, golden tongue and frequent biblical references. In a bid to counter this popularity with the fairer sex, an Ulverstone-based Brickhill supporter sent a lengthy poem to Burnie’s North Western Advocate & Emu Bay Times, declaring O’Malley a ‘mountebank and charlatan who insults the Book of Books’, and urging women in the electorate, who would be exercising their newly won right to vote in a federal election for the first time:

  Mother, wife and daughter, by our side, come take your stand,

  Never let him beat us, and o’er his victory gloat,

  Help send this man O’Malley back to his native land,

  Give your support to Brickhill, and Vote, Vote, VOTE.17

  The election result was close. While third candidate James Gaffney could only muster fifty-three votes, James Brickhill came in with 4354. Unfortunately for James’ political aspirations, King O’Malley received 4483, and by the margin of just 129 votes the American was sent to Federal Parliament and a subsequent glittering career in the ministries of prime ministers Andrew Fisher and Billy Hughes. James Brickhill didn’t venture into politics again, returning instead to the quieter life as Zeehan’s town clerk.

  Five years on, in the winter of 1908, he contracted pneumonia. A week later, on 10 July, James Brickhill passed away, at the age of sixty-one. After he was buried in Launceston, his wife, Rebecca, returned to that city. Cared for by unmarried daughter Daisy, Rebecca would live well into her nineties.

  Most of James’ sons had meanwhile scattered to the four winds. Only Lewis remained in Launceston, working now as a compositor with the Examiner. Frank was with the post office in Burnie. Walter and Hector had moved to Perth, Western Australia, where Walter wrote for the local press. Both Walter and Hector served in South Africa during the Boer War, settling there after the conflict. Running an ostrich farm in the Transvaal, Walter returned to journalism occasionally, writing articles about South Africa for Tasmania’s Weekly Times.

  Son number four, George Russell Brickhill, born on 26 January 1879, ninety-first anniversary of the arrival of Britain’s First Fleet in New South Wales, had gone to Victoria when his parents moved to Zeehan and in 1901 joined Bendigo’s Advertiser as a journalist. As early as 1899, in Launceston, George had attended a meeting of local journalists which discussed setting up a reporters’ association. In Bendigo, he was often called out to work on his one day off each week at the Advertiser. There was no overtime pay, no set annual leave. Sick leave, if granted at all, was the prerogative of management. And the pay was abysmal. This was typical of the working conditions for journalists in newspapers across the country, and George was determined to correct the situation. That same year of 1901, he helped found the Bendigo Press Association, a social society for journalists which agitated for better pay and conditions for its members. George became the Association’s inaugural secretary.

  Perhaps influenced by his father’s recent tilt at politics, a lust for adventure got the better of George in 1905. He ran away to join the circus, figuratively speaking, signing up with Wirth’s Circus to travel the world in search of exhibits for them. His brief was to acquire elephants in particular; Wirth’s then possessed just a single pachyderm. George’s adventure took him to the Indian subcontinent, and, in April, Wirth’s received a letter in which George advised he was having difficulties driving four wild elephants to the coast, but hoped to have them loaded aboard the Sydney-bound steamer SS Ashbridge at Calcutta.

  George not only succeeded in getting the quartet of elephants to Wirth’s, he also sent them several tapirs and a ten-metre python. In December, he despatched two more Indian elephants to Sydney aboard the SS Gracchus. Wirth’s Circus elephant troupe increased to eight shortly after when one of their new elephants gave birth in Sydney.18 So it was that the children of Australia in years to come had George Brickhill to thank for the sight of elephants in their home towns as Wirth’s Circus toured the nation.

  Elephant-catching did not a long-term career make. Back in Launceston to visit his mother on 5 March 1906, George spoke to the Examiner. ‘Mr Brickhill has lately been travelling the world in search of circus novelties,’ noted the paper the following day, ‘but has completed his mission and purposes resuming his association with the newspaper world in Melbourne.’19 Sure enough, in Melbourne, then Australia’s federal capital, George joined the staff of the Age, the city’s second-ranking morning daily after the Argus. Before long, George helped establish the Melbourne Press Bond, another pressman’s social club with ambitions for improved conditions for journalists.

  Over the next three years, George slaved away at the Age, making friends including Age parliamentary reporter Keith Murdoch, the future Sir Keith, father of eventual international media magnate Rupert Murdoch. With secure employment and good prospects, George’s attention turned to affairs of the heart. The love of his life was Izitella Victoria Bradshaw, or Dot as she was known in the family. One of six children of Launceston accountant John Walbourn Bradshaw, a one-time associate of George’s father, and Louisa Adelaide Bradshaw, Dot was six years younger than George. On his annual return visits to Launceston to see his mother, George would catch up with Dot. But by 1908 the Bradshaw family had moved to Sydney, where Dot’s father worked as a travelling salesman and part-time accountant.

  The added distance between George and Dot only made the heart grow fonder, and that year George popped the question. On 15 February 1909, the couple was married at the Methodist Church in Kensington, a pocket suburb of inner Sydney. The church was just a stone’s throw from the Bradshaw family home in Elsmere Street. Following the wedding, George took his bride to Melbourne, where the couple’s first marital home was a rented house at Auburn in inner Melbourne. Over the next several years, they moved around a number of rented addresses in the area.

  A year after George’s marriage, leading members of the Melbourne Press Bond agreed it was time to form a national organisation that would collectively bargain on behalf of journalists in the Commonwealth Conciliation and Arbitration Court. A trade union. At 8.00 pm on Saturday 10 December, Melbourne reporters gathered in a basement cafe in Flinders Street, usual meeting place of the Press Bond, to discuss the formation of the Australian Journalists Association. Newspaper proprietors were firmly against the creation of such an organisation, and had warned employees not to attend this meeting. The chief of staff of one paper even positioned himself in a basement billiard parlour next door to the cafe, trying to listen through the wall to what was said at the meeting.

  Proprietors’ warnings failed to prevent more than one hundred journalists, including George Brickhill, from attending, and George was one of eight elected to a steering committee. Two more December meetings followed, after which 147 journalists signed up as foundation members of the Australian Journalists Association. George was one of them, as was colleague Keith Murdoch. The Association was registered with the Arbitration Court, and, within months, George was elected the AJA’s General Vice-President. In addition to keeping down his job with the Age, George worked long unpaid hours on behalf of the Association.

  With the majority of newspaper proprietors across Australia opposed to the AJA and its objectives, a long and bitter fight was waged against the Association. Many press barons signed an agreement negotiated in 1911 with the AJA which initially put an extra £15,000 a year collectively into the pockets of journalists, but a number soon began to ignore the agreement. That same year, George and Dot’s first child, Russell, was born. In 1913, another two-year agreement was negotiated with proprietors by the AJA. The following year, a second Brickhill son, Ayde Geoffrey, or Geoff as he became known, was born.

  Wi
th a growing family and a pacifist outlook, George resisted the patriotic propaganda his paper and others peddled and declined to volunteer to fight in the Great War. This took courage, as relatives of the hundreds of thousands of Australians who did enlist frequently branded stay-at-homes like George cowards. From something his son Paul was to later say, it is likely George received a white feather in the mail. This was traditionally an anonymous – and as such cowardly – way of accusing someone of cowardice.20 Some of George’s newspaper colleagues, Keith Murdoch among them, went to the front as war correspondents. Feeling he had more important work to do at home, George didn’t join war correspondent ranks either. Instead, he was to lead an important fight at home.

  By 1916, with Australia’s newspaper owners proving increasingly difficult to deal with, the AJA decided to take their wages and conditions campaign to a new level. George Brickhill was so passionate about the cause that he now left the Age to become the AJA’s full-time general secretary. On 20 December, with the Brickhills renting at ‘Elsmere’, 133 Burke Road in Camberwell, Dot gave birth to their third son, Paul Chester Jerome Brickhill. George was a Methodist, Dot an Anglican, and, although married in the Methodist Church, Dot was insistent that their children be raised in the Church of England. Baby Paul was accordingly baptised by an Anglican minister.

  By early 1917, after six months of detailed preparation, George led the AJA’s bid in the Arbitration Court for the introduction of an award scheme for journalists’ pay and conditions. Two lawyers engaged by the Association would advise George, but, as the AJA’s rules prevented the use of lawyers as advocates, he would put the case in court on the Association’s behalf.

  Just as the hearing, which was being contested by the collective newspaper owners of Australia, opened in Melbourne on 5 February 1917 before Justice Isaac Isaacs, a future knight of the realm and governor-general of Australia, the AJA’s principal legal adviser was called away to urgent business in London. Without the legal eagle at his side, George went up against a team supported by senior barristers paid for by the press barons. The odds seemed stacked against the thirty-eight-year-old journalist as he put a case for set pay scales for each grade of journalist, for a forty-six-hour week, for three weeks annual leave and paid sick leave, and for equal pay and conditions for female journalists.