The Hero Maker Read online

  But, as the AJA’s official history would record, ‘Brickhill was brilliant. He developed the forensic style of a trained lawyer; he was respectful, imperturbable, candid and logical. He quickly won the respect of the court.’ Most importantly, ‘He made his plans well.’21 Brickhill had spent the past six months reading every letter, document and minute book from every AJA branch across the country. He’d interviewed scores of potential witnesses in six states, preparing a list of eighty who could be called to give evidence. In the end, he called fifteen. As was to be proved, the press barons didn’t come to court anywhere near as well prepared, and George humiliated several of their more arrogant witnesses during cross-examination.

  Justice Isaacs brought down his decision in the case on 11 May. To the chagrin of the nation’s newspaper owners, Isaacs ruled substantially in the journalists’ favour, making their new awards retrospective to the beginning of the year. The only area where he didn’t agree with Brickhill’s case was in the length of a journalist’s working week, which he set at forty-six hours. Nonetheless, George continued to fight, speaking for a day and a half attempting to convince Justice Isaacs to award journalists a forty-four-hour week, until he physically collapsed in court. The judge failed to relent. Still, the journalists’ award resulting from this case was the most advanced in the world at that time, and as a consequence of the case George Brickhill became one of the best-known figures in Australian journalism.

  The press barons didn’t take the AJA’s success with good grace. Although they agreed to meet the award’s conditions, Sydney’s four daily newspapers promptly sacked more than eighty journalists, and papers in Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth and Hobart also laid off staff. Collecting money for sacked colleagues, the AJA settled in for a long, hard war against proprietors. The court case sapped George’s energy, and that Christmas he was glad to get away to Tasmania for a break. The Brickhill clan, including one-year-old Paul, made the storm-tossed steamer crossing of Bass Strait to spend the holidays with George’s mother, Rebecca, in Launceston.

  In early 1918, Dot again fell pregnant. In October, she would give birth to another son, Lloyd. George continued to labour for the AJA that year, but as 1919 arrived, and with his fortieth birthday approaching, George felt it time to get back into harness as a pressman. One newspaper owner who didn’t despise him was James E. Davidson, known as Jed among his peers. He offered George a job. Davidson actually supported the AJA, and admired Brickhill for what he had achieved for journalists.

  Keith Murdoch considered Davidson ‘one of the most noble characters in Australian journalism’.22 A former editor of the Melbourne Herald, Davidson had acquired several regional newspapers in South Australia. In 1919, his latest acquisition was the Recorder, in Port Pirie. When Jed offered Brickhill the job of editor of the Recorder, George accepted. He left the AJA with the Association’s gold medal for meritorious service, and in March 1919 the Brickhills moved to Port Pirie. George would continue to be an active member of the Association, and thirty years later would be made a life member.

  The Brickhills moved into a house in Port Pirie’s Stenness area, and George returned to the newspaper business with enthusiasm. Reporter Cecil Murn was given his full-time job at the Recorder by George. Murn would fondly remember ‘the Boss’ with pipe perpetually jutting from the corner of his mouth and running an ongoing feud with a night subeditor. George never raised his voice. Instead, he would conduct ‘a wordy war’, leaving notes.

  ‘The politeness of some of these epistles was beautiful,’ said Murn. ‘And therein lay their sting.’ For, said he, ‘Mr Brickhill was the quiet, unostentatious type of editor. But his pen would be loaded to the nib with dynamite, and when he had some genuine grouse on behalf of the people, he poured it out.’23 Murn would recall a young Paul Brickhill as a frequent visitor to the Recorder office, ‘running around the place’. With workaholic George putting in long working days, Paul would also be sent by his mother, Dot, to fetch his father home for dinner with the family.24

  In 1922, Jed Davidson acquired an Adelaide Sunday newspaper, the Mail, and the following year he offered George Brickhill the post of editor. George eagerly accepted this opportunity to edit a capital city newspaper. After publishing his last issue of the Recorder on 30 June 1923, and with Dot again pregnant, he moved the family to Adelaide and took over the editor’s desk at the Mail. That same year, Davidson established Adelaide daily the News, creating the umbrella company News Limited to manage all his newspapers. This was the company which Sir Keith Murdoch would take over in 1949, and which, under Sir Keith’s son Rupert, would become News Corporation, the international media giant.

  Before George Brickhill took charge at the Mail it had been a sporting rag. From its new premises at North Terrace, he turned it into a quality publication with a news and entertainment focus. As a result, the paper’s circulation rose, as did the Mail’s reputation. George was in his element. He employed Hal Gye, famous as illustrator of poet C. J. Dennis’ bestselling Sentimental Bloke books, as the paper’s cartoonist. And George initiated a comics page, starting with May Gibbs’ gumnut babies Bib and Bub as regulars. Circulation continued to grow. Meanwhile, the Mail’s burgeoning real-estate pages were generating healthy advertising revenue for News Limited. Jed was a happy man. And George was a happy man.

  The Brickhills’ fifth and last son, Clive, arrived in October 1923. The following year, when George was at the height of his success as a newspaper editor in Adelaide, he heard that Launceston’s Daily Telegraph, the paper that had flourished under his father, and where George himself had launched his journalistic career, had gone under. As circulation haemorrhaged, the paper’s proprietors had brought in a new editor from Melbourne to turn its fortunes around. Tom Prichard had previously edited Melbourne’s weekly Sun, but not even he could save the Daily Telegraph. Prichard’s daughter Katharine, who went to school in Launceston, would later gain fame as novelist and playwright Katharine Susannah Prichard. On the paper’s closure, the Prichards returned to Melbourne, where Tom took the editor’s chair at the Mining Standard.

  By the second half of 1927, and with his fiftieth birthday just two years away, George Brickhill accepted the offer of a senior editorial position with the Evening News, considered Sydney’s least serious daily paper. There were several factors in George’s decision to move to Sydney. Louisa Bradshaw, Dot’s mother, had been a widow since the death of Dot’s beloved ‘papa’, John Bradshaw, at Lindfield in 1919. Louisa herself was in declining health, and Dot wanted to care for her. And George once again had itchy feet. Besides, if he was going to prove himself on a paper in the ‘big smoke’, it was now or never.

  George was quite emotional when News Limited hosted his farewell function and Jed presented him with a travelling case and rug, plus a silver tea service for Dot. In a farewell editorial, George’s successor at the Mail described him as ‘versatile’ and ‘one of the best known of Australian journalists’.25

  The relocation to Sydney was a move that would shape a spectacular writing career for one particular member of the Brickhill family. But it wasn’t George.

  3.

  Peter and Paul, the Apostles of Individualism

  IN THE SECOND half of November 1927, just weeks before Paul Brickhill’s eleventh birthday, he and his family arrived in Sydney. They moved into a house rented from Mrs Mary Colyer at 8 Mitchell Street on the Lower North Shore’s picturesque Greenwich Point. For young Paul, this was the start of dual love affairs with residences by the water and Sydney’s North Shore that would last the rest of his life. Already home to seven Brickhills – mother, father, and sons Russell, Geoff, Paul, Lloyd and Clive – the house would also accommodate Paul’s widowed grandmother, Louisa, who would live with the family until her death. Dot’s brother-in-law and sister, Mr and Mrs Fred Amos, lived nearby in the neighbouring suburb of Wollstonecraft, and the Brickhills had a close relationship with them.

  Completion of the Sydney Harbour Bridge was then still five
years away, and hordes of workers daily commuted across the harbour from the North Shore on fleets of ferries. George Peter and Paul, the Apostles of Individualism took the ferry from Greenwich Point each workday to get to the five-storeyed Evening News building in Elizabeth Street. Opened a year before, the premises had been purpose-built for the paper. It had frontages to both Elizabeth and Castlereagh streets, and huge new presses rolled six days a week in a massive print room thirty metres below the pavement. The editorial offices occupied the airy third floor. There was even a roof garden and cafeteria for staff. It looked like George had struck employment gold.

  On the southern tip of Greenwich Point, foreshore swimming baths lay close to the ferry wharf, just a few minutes’ walk from the Brickhill home. Young Paul was soon a member of the local swimming association, becoming a strong competitive swimmer. Before long, Paul noticed a boy who lived just a block away on the corner of Lawrence and George streets.26 This boy was smallish, tawny-haired, grubby and solitary. Unlike other local kids, he never played in the local park. Every day, the boy could be seen walking a terrier dog around the district without ever exchanging a word or a glance with anyone.

  Paul felt sorry for him. For young Paul was also different. Left-handed, he had stubbornly resisted attempts by teachers to make him write with the right hand. And, like the other boy, he lived in an isolated world. In young Brickhill’s case, this was the result of a debilitating stutter. Paul was a sensitive child, and as an adult would retain painful memories of wetting his pants in childhood. Although he grew out of wetting himself, he would never entirely lose the stutter. At its worst, it made conversation difficult, and made him the butt of jokes of the insensitive. One device used by people who stutter is to avoid speaking unless absolutely necessary, limiting their interaction with others. Yet Paul was prepared to speak to the new boy, and risk being laughed at because of his impediment.

  Throughout his life, Brickhill would display a generosity of spirit, reaching out to and for others, which showed itself most markedly for the first time when he saw that lonely boy in Greenwich Point. Feeling the other boy’s isolation, Paul, as he would later recall, became determined to get him playing with the other children.27 Approaching the new boy, Paul introduced himself, and learned that the stranger’s name was Peter Finch. The new boy didn’t laugh at him. He was grateful for the approach. And so was born a novel friendship.

  Peter Finch was just three months older than Paul. Although a fifth-generation Australian, he’d been born in London and only arrived at Greenwich Point a few months before the Brickhills, landing in Australia the year prior to that. In an English accent that he before long smothered with the accent used by Brickhill and other Australians around him, Peter told Paul that he’d been born in England, lived in France, and been a boy priest in a Buddhist temple in India for two years before being sent to Sydney by his eccentric Australian-born grandmother. What was more, his physicist father George Ingle Finch had climbed Mount Everest almost as far as its summit in 1922. Paul, a boy with a fertile imagination, was immediately seduced by his new acquaintance’s colourful background.

  Peter, it turned out, hadn’t even been able to read or write English prior to being despatched to Sydney in 1926 and consigned to a Mosman theosophical school as a boarder. Peter was unaware that his itinerant life to that point was dictated by the fact that his father was not his father; Peter was the product of his mother’s infidelity with an unidentified lover, although this was a closely held secret in the family. Subsequently taken out of the theosophical school by his New South Wales-born grandfather, Charles Finch, the retired chairman of the NSW Lands Board and a Greenwich Point resident, Peter had been placed with his great-uncle Edward Finch, also in Greenwich Point. To raise the boy, Edward, elderly and ailing, handed Peter over to his forty-year-old unmarried daughter Kate, who also lived under his roof.

  Kate Finch was Peter’s second cousin, but she made him call her Aunt Kate, and made his life a misery. Every day before school, Peter told Paul, he had to perform a range of household chores from washing up to making beds, which invariably made him late for school. Every day, too, Peter had to take Aunt Kate’s terrier for a walk. Most days, Aunt Kate gave Peter a belting. Brickhill saw at firsthand how Kate Finch used young Peter as a personal slave. One afternoon, he was talking to his mate in the Finch garden, where Peter was at work, when Aunt Kate suddenly called out through an open window.

  ‘Peter, go find my teeth.’28

  Without comment, Peter turned into a denture-seeking robot. When he found the false teeth, in the garden, he silently handed them in through the open window, receiving not a word of thanks. Brickhill would say, years later, that, learning how hard done by Peter was by his uncaring Aunt Kate, he became all the more determined to help him, to rescue him from the friendless world into which he had fallen.29

  Peter and Paul soon became best mates, yet they were the oddest match. Apart from small stature, blue eyes, fathers called George, and the ability to swim like fish, they had little in common. Paul loved competitive sports; Peter hated sport of any kind. Paul enjoyed reading; Peter could then barely read English. Paul was always neatly dressed; Peter was invariably dishevelled. But Paul would later rate himself an individualist. And Peter Finch was the exemplar of individualism. There were other attractions. Peter would prove increasingly daring, up for anything, heedless of risk. While Paul didn’t lack courage, his new friend had more than enough bravado for the pair of them. Paul once watched Peter get into a fight with a much larger boy. Covered in blood, Peter fought bravely on until a draw was declared. And Peter had the gift of the gab. To spare Paul the trial of stuttering, he would do the talking for the pair of them.

  In 1928, Peter was sent to North Sydney Intermediate High, an institution for the also-rans. Paul’s grades were much better, and he was invited to sit the entrance examination for North Sydney Boys High School in Crows Nest. Then, as it is today, NSBHS was one of New South Wales’ selective high schools, catering for the best and brightest students in the government school system. Paul passed the entrance exam and followed elder brother Geoff, who was a year ahead of him, in through the school’s portals. North Sydney Boys High’s creed was ‘Vincit qui se vincit’, meaning, ‘He conquers who conquers himself’. It was an uncanny prediction of Paul Brickhill’s future struggles in life.

  Decades after leaving school, Brickhill would remark that it took him fifteen years to get over his education.30 He didn’t enjoy high school, or embrace it. His brothers did much better, Geoff becoming a school prefect and captain of the seconds cricket team, while younger brother Lloyd would pass his Intermediate Certificate exam at the same school with much better marks than Paul.

  Not even English literature interested the future bestselling author. In his last year at North Sydney Boys High, Paul punched himself in the nose to make it bleed, just to get out of an English Lit class.31 Ironically, it wasn’t Paul who penned articles for The Falcon, the school magazine, it was Geoff. Paul lived for extracurricular activities, keeping up competitive swimming and diving and joining the Boy Scouts’ 2nd Greenwich Patrol. He suggested to Peter Finch that he also join the Patrol, and, to Finch’s amazement, Aunt Kate allowed him to sign up.

  Young Finch was able to convince their patrol leader, Charles Butler, to put on a series of dramatic shows as fund-raisers, and this was where Paul saw Peter’s acting abilities on show for the first time. Peter wrote, directed and starred in these productions, staged at Chatswood Town Hall. In one play, The Tragedy of the Romanoffs, Peter played Tsar Nicholas of Russia, wearing his school army cadet uniform for the role. To add to the effect, Paul loaned him a recently won swimming medal, which Finch wore around his neck.

  Peter cast Paul in the play, blessedly, as far as Paul was concerned, in a non-speaking role. As the Tsar’s butler, Paul shuffled back and forth in the background as Peter embarked on a long discourse with another child actor. Paul would later judge the script a little over the heads of
their audience. But two hundred people a night enjoyed Peter’s performances, and the Patrol’s new hall was built substantially from the proceeds from Peter Finch productions.32

  As would become obvious in later life, Paul possessed an addictive personality. It showed itself early; he described himself as ‘obsessional’ in his younger years.33 After a visit to Palm Beach on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, he became obsessed with one day owning a grand home there where Sydney’s doctors, lawyers and business elite spent their weekends. He loved fast cars, too. Sleek racing cars thrilled him, but he especially loved big, powerful British makes, and prestigious Jaguars and Bentleys above all.

  While still at school, he fell in love with flying as well. His interest would be driven by the exploits of pioneer Australian aviators Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, Charles Ulm and Harold Gatty which filled the newspapers in the 1930s. Gatty, less well known than the others today, made the first around-the-world flight with American Wiley Post in 1931. Called the prince of navigators by Charles Lindbergh, then the most famous aviator on the planet, Gatty had been born in Tasmania, at Campbell Town, forty-five minutes south of Launceston, birthplace of Brickhill’s parents. Both Kingsford Smith and Ulm perished separately while flying in the Pacific in the 1930s, but Gatty would live on to become an airline pioneer. Little did young Paul Brickhill know that he would one day number Gatty among his friends, and work with Charles Ulm’s son.