The Ultimate Insider
Stephen Holt reflects on the career of influential political journalist Alan Reid The journalist Alan Reid served in the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery from 1937 to 1985. Over this extensive period he accumulated a distinctive persona. His colleagues in Parliament House came to regard him as the ultimate old-style working journalist, subsisting on hand-rolled cigarettes and leaks from his sources. And yet his hard-bitten exterior was not the whole story. Reid was never just a lowly hack. Far from merely reporting events, he was an insider who helped to shape them. Reid’s journalistic career is well documented in the National Library’s collections which include copies of the newspapers and magazines for which he wrote. After his death in 1987 the Library acquired his remaining (if culled) research files. Starting in 1972, the Library also conducted a series of interviews with Reid for its Oral History Collection. In addition, the Library holds the private papers of politicians who interacted with Reid, including those of Sir Robert Menzies.
Reid’s Oral History interviews shed valuable light on his formative years.
His father was a New Zealand-born sea captain who settled in Sydney when an accident finished his career. Reid’s interest
in politics began when he was roused by
the speeches of the state Labor leader
Jack Lang. A period of unemployment during the Great Depression ended at the same time that he became a newspaper copy boy. After covering the shipping news and serving At first Reid was unimpressed with Labor leader John Curtin, dismissing him privately as ‘a namby-pamby’. But things changed forever in 1941. After some dizzying manoeuvres Curtin became prime minister on the eve of the war with Japan. Reid was impressed by Curtin’s decisiveness following Pearl Harbour and said so in The Sun. Curtin included him in the select group of a dozen or so journalists who received regular briefings on secret wartime developments. Every fortnight or so, whenever they were together in Canberra, Curtin would ask Reid to have a cup of tea in his office. Reid was privy to Curtin’s thoughts on a range of matters including books, past political personalities and favourite performances by film stars such as Greer Garson in Mrs Miniver. Reid had a wide range of contacts in the Labor party. His prime source of information in the party organisation was the legendary numbers man, Pat Kennelly. He was also close to Ben Chifley. Reid later told a Library interviewer that Chifley once suggested to him that he should stand as a Labor parliamentary candidate. Though a paid-up member of the party, he declined Chifley’s offer. Reid’s closeness to Labor party figures made his articles in The Sun compulsory reading for anyone who needed to keep up with the thinking of the Chifley government.
Labor lost the federal election of 1949. The new prime minister, Robert Menzies, was determined to limit press access to sensitive information. Once a staple in Parliament House, off-the-record briefings became a thing of the past. Reid resented Menzies’ efforts at news management. When Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov defected in 1954, Reid clashed with Menzies because he wrote a news story in which he claimed that the defection was stage-managed to ensure that Labor’s federal leader, Dr H.V. Evatt, was away from Canberra when it was announced. 1954 was a hectic year for Reid. In the wake of the Petrovs’ defection, he began to hear rumours about the secretive figure B.A. Santamaria, who was said to wield a lot of influence in the Victorian branch of the Labor party. In September, Reid published an exposé which made much of Santamaria’s clandestine tendencies. He wrote: ‘In the tense melodrama of politics there are mysterious figures who stand virtually unnoticed in the wings, invisible to all but a few of the audience, as they cue, Svengali-like, among the actors out on the stage.’ The lurid tabloid prose triggered a panicky reaction on the part of Dr Evatt. The great Labor split of the 1950s was the result and it took the party almost 20 years to recover.
In 1955, Reid moved to the Daily Telegraph. Its owner, Frank Packer, was by far the most pro-Menzies of Australia’s press proprietors, but Reid insisted on retaining his membership of the Labor party. He continued to go to local branch meetings in Canberra as indicated by an attendance book, now held in the National Library’s Manuscript Collection, which he signed with a clear bold hand. Within a year or so, however, his membership lapsed. In 1960, the Packer empire acquired the Bulletin magazine. This move gave Reid an opportunity to write lengthier pieces on favourite topics such as allegations of criminal activity on the waterfront. He was now, because of his Packer credentials, in Menzies’ good books. On the eve of the 1961 election he advised the prime minister, whose credibility had been dented by a recent recession, to regain the initiative by making a public pledge to restore full employment. Menzies took the advice and after he was re-elected Reid set out, in articles in the Daily Telegraph, to switch attention from the economy to questions of defence and national security. Labor, because of internal divisions, was vulnerable on these issues. Reid’s persistence, while it led to his getting involved in a defamation case launched by the left-winger Tom Uren, paid off in the end. In March 1963, Labor held a special federal conference—at which its parliamentary leaders Arthur Calwell and Gough Whitlam did not have a vote—to clarify its defence policy. As the conference neared its end Reid arranged for a photographer to take pictures of Calwell and Whitlam as they huddled with conference delegates. Later on in that year, Menzies was returned to office partly on the basis of the claim, supported by Reid’s midnight photographs, that Labor was controlled by ‘faceless men’. Reid’s political role did not lessen after Menzies retired. When then prime minister Harold Holt drowned in 1967, the Packer camp wanted Bill McMahon to succeed him. When the Country Party vetoed McMahon, the Daily Telegraph opted for John Gorton. Reid chronicled these events in a bestselling book, The Power Struggle. Even before it was published, critics were carping at Gorton’s policies and style. Strange alliances formed. The diary of the disgruntled Liberal MP Peter Howson details private meetings at which he discussed tactics with Reid. In March 1971, Gorton stepped down as prime minister but remained in cabinet as deputy party leader. Reid’s account of this period in his second book, The Gorton Experiment, elicited an angry response from the former prime minister which led to his being banished to the backbenches. By the early 1970s Reid was the longest serving member of the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery. Many a young journalist new to Canberra was impressed on first seeing him in action in the lobby of Parliament House where he loved to exchange information with an endless parade of federal politicians.
Reid was immune to the euphoria that affected some of his younger colleagues during the Whitlam government of 1972–75. In columns in the Bulletin he insisted that the Australian Labor Party was in the thrall of ‘trendies’, led by the government adviser Dr H.C. Coombs. Reid’s surviving files include a post-Dismissal letter in which he aligned himself with the discarded minister Lance Barnard and ‘a few others of the old-fashioned ALP types who believe that jobs, housing and such matters are more important than homosexuality, etc’. An unflattering portrait of these years in Reid’s final book, The Whitlam Venture, earned the approval of Labor veteran Clyde Cameron but generated a defamation suit from Whitlam. Reid continued to work during the prime ministership of Malcolm Fraser (1975–83). His oral history testimony details how he counselled a minister, Eric Robinson, when he felt the need to publicly protest against Fraser’s hands-on management style. Reid’s files indicate that, up until the end of his career, political aspirants of all kinds were drawn to him. Queensland’s Peter Beattie supplied him with information on the campaign to reform the Labor party in that state, and a Liberal parliamentary candidate wrote to express his gratitude when Reid wrote an alarming story about the left-wing activist Joan Coxsedge. Ill health finally forced Reid to retire in 1985 and he died two years later. He was clearly an important figure in modern Australian politics, both as observer and participant. If a full biography of him is ever written, it would light up much of Australian politics’ inner darkness. STEPHEN HOLT is an author and historian based in Canberra |
| Back to NLA News Index | Back to July Issue | Back to NLA Home Page |
To order a particular
issue of the NLA News e-mail nlasales@nla.gov.au
or join the Friends of the
National Library of Australia and receive a copy each month by mail.