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Canberra was home to not much more than 50,000 people when David Bowman arrived in 1960 as the new political correspondent for the Adelaide News. Just four years later he was editing The Canberra Times and the paper was fighting for its life against Rupert Murdoch’s boldly conceived daily, the Australian. Murdoch’s plan was to base his new paper in the national capital and drive The Canberra Times out of business or into his own hands. Despite the city’s size, it seemed the perfect place for a new, less hidebound daily: newspaper readership was high and accelerating population growth was generating plenty of news. But Murdoch had rashly hinted at his strategy during a chance conversation with The Canberra Times’s managing editor, Arthur Shakespeare, a few months earlier. By the time the Australian appeared in July 1964, Shakespeare had sold his paper to Fairfax, owners of the Sydney Morning Herald, turning Bowman and his team into a much more formidable opponent for the newcomer. David Bowman had come to journalism almost by accident. He had begun training as an engineer in his home town of Adelaide, but found himself distracted by his passion for chess. His reports on matches caught the eye of an editor at the News, and he was offered a job there. In his early twenties he headed for London, where he worked for a Daily Mirror offshoot, the Junior Mirror, before seizing the chance to join an expedition to find gold in the wreckage of the General Grant, a cargo and passenger ship that had sunk off the New Zealand coast in 1866. As his former colleague Alan Dobbyn wrote this week, the expedition encountered its own turbulence and hit a reef 150 miles north of Port Sudan. Reaching land in the ship’s lifeboat, he and his fellow crew members were taken by a Sudanese herdsman to a nearby village, where they were housed and fed while they waited to be rescued. Back at the News and posted to Canberra, Bowman was offered the editorship of the famously under-resourced Canberra Times, which Shakespeare had been running since 1926. The paper had no reporter in the Press Gallery and scarcely any anywhere else; one journalist later described it as a “sweatshop.” That was to change dramatically under the new owners – not least because Fairfax appointed John Douglas Pringle, a Scottish-born former editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, as managing editor. “As journalists go, I am a Pringle man,” Bowman wrote years later. “One had to be exceptional to work with that sensitive, engaging, brave personality and not fall under the spell.” The admiration was mutual: Bowman, recalled Pringle, was “a very, very able journalist” and “enormously technically competent: he could do anything on a newspaper.” With a vastly expanded staff, the two editors joined battle with Murdoch in what Pringle later called “the hardest struggle of my life.” Murdoch had announced that the Australian would be edited, assembled and printed in the national capital, with copies sent interstate by truck and plane. But it would also serve Canberra readers “on a scale and at a level of quality never previously attempted in this country.” The difficulty of appealing to both audiences – national and local – would help drive the new paper to near-extinction the following year. Compounding the Australian’s problems were difficulties with national distribution and clashes between Murdoch and his editor, Maxwell Newton. The paper’s circulation, which had averaged nearly 74,000 in the first fortnight of publication, fell to below 52,000 once Canberra households stopped receiving free copies. Money was being lost at an alarming rate. The Canberra Times was clocking up losses too, but nowhere near as damagingly, and its editors were enjoying themselves much more than their counterparts. “I thought there was no better place in heaven or earth than at The Canberra Times,” Bowman told me a few years ago. “Canberra really was a fascinating place in which to edit, or even work for, a newspaper. There was such variety. If you’re going to do it properly you’ve got to work bloody hard, of course, but the variety – parliament, the public service, a big university, the ACT Advisory Council … and all that was going on the Canberra ‘village,’ of course.” Murdoch eventually gave up the battle to crush The Canberra Times, shifting his paper’s headquarters to Sydney in early 1967. Pringle had long departed for his second stint as editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, and early in 1968 Bowman joined him there as executive assistant. Two years later, he was appointed news editor, a job he performed with characteristic energy. Then, in 1973, he became executive editor of all Fairfax’s Sydney papers, an unsought position that brought him into conflict with the tenacious editors of the Australian Financial Review and the National Times. Amid great social and cultural change, resistance was growing within the company to the conservative views of Sir Warwick Fairfax in particular. Bowman had the near-impossible task of trying steer a smooth course through the shoals. Four years later, with the Sydney Morning Herald’s circulation again becalmed, Bowman was given the editorship of the flagship paper. “He lost no time,” recalled Alan Dobbyn. “Widespread changes gave new prominence to finance and the arts, more than doubled the space for readers’ letters and enlarged the Saturday magazine. With authority over editorials for the first time, he turned back the rigid conservatism that often marked the traditional Herald and sought to revive even-handedness, reflecting liberal political and social attitudes.” But the turnaround was not enough to protect him. When one of his sparring partners, Max Suich, was appointed to the more senior position of chief editorial executive in 1980, Bowman’s days at Fairfax were numbered. Forced out of the job, he went freelance, most notably as the highly regarded media critic for Australian Society magazine from 1985 to 1992. There he wrote stylish, persuasive critiques of the press’s coverage of major issues and its increasingly concentrated ownership, themes he developed further in his 1988 book, The Captive Press. He also wrote the Australian obituaries for the London Telegraph, and later contributed to the Adelaide Review, the Sydney Review, and 24 Hours, the forerunner of the ABC’s Limelight magazine. As the man who tried to bring factual accuracy to the memoirs of former prime minister Billy McMahon, he plays an important role in Patrick Mullins’s award-winning book, Tiberious With a Telephone: The Life and Stories of William McMahon. Friends will remember him as a superb conversationalist, wittily self-deprecating and well-informed. “His hatred of injustice and bigotry was often in evidence,” wrote Dobbyn. “He championed political dissidence and those whose voices he felt were not being heard, such as the Palestinians.” Before his final illness he relaxed by singing in a choir, continued to play chess and became a fixture at French film festivals with his wife, Margaret.
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David Bowman at the end of his career. Picture: Warren Duncan
Canberra was home to not much more than 50,000 people when David Bowman arrived in 1960 as the new political correspondent for the Adelaide News. Just four years later he was editing The Canberra Times and the paper was fighting for its life against Rupert Murdoch’s boldly conceived daily, the Australian.
Murdoch’s plan was to base his new paper in the national capital and drive The Canberra Times out of business or into his own hands. Despite the city’s size, it seemed the perfect place for a new, less hidebound daily: newspaper readership was high and accelerating population growth was generating plenty of news.
But Murdoch had rashly hinted at his strategy during a chance conversation with The Canberra Times‘s managing editor, Arthur Shakespeare, a few months earlier. By the time the Australian appeared in July 1964, Shakespeare had sold his paper to Fairfax, owners of the Sydney Morning Herald, turning Bowman and his team into a much more formidable opponent for the newcomer.
David Bowman had come to journalism almost by accident. He had begun training as an engineer in his home town of Adelaide, but found himself distracted by his passion for chess. His reports on matches caught the eye of an editor at the News, and he was offered a job there.
In his early twenties he headed for London, where he worked for a Daily Mirror offshoot, the Junior Mirror, before seizing the chance to join an expedition to find gold in the wreckage of the General Grant, a cargo and passenger ship that had sunk off the New Zealand coast in 1866. As his former colleague Alan Dobbyn wrote this week, the expedition encountered its own turbulence and hit a reef 150 miles north of Port Sudan. Reaching land in the ship’s lifeboat, he and his fellow crew members were taken by a Sudanese herdsman to a nearby village, where they were housed and fed while they waited to be rescued.
Junior Mirror Man in Red Sea Drama: David Bowmans account of his ill-fated quest for gold in 1955.
Back at the News and posted to Canberra, Bowman was offered the editorship of the famously under-resourced Canberra Times, which Shakespeare had been running since 1926. The paper had no reporter in the Press Gallery and scarcely any anywhere else; one journalist later described it as a “sweatshop.”
That was to change dramatically under the new owners – not least because Fairfax appointed John Douglas Pringle, a Scottish-born former editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, as managing editor. “As journalists go, I am a Pringle man,” Bowman wrote years later. “One had to be exceptional to work with that sensitive, engaging, brave personality and not fall under the spell.” The admiration was mutual: Bowman, recalled Pringle, was “a very, very able journalist” and “enormously technically competent: he could do anything on a newspaper.” With a vastly expanded staff, the two editors joined battle with Murdoch in what Pringle later called “the hardest struggle of my life.”
Murdoch had announced that the Australian would be edited, assembled and printed in the national capital, with copies sent interstate by truck and plane. But it would also serve Canberra readers “on a scale and at a level of quality never previously attempted in this country.” The difficulty of appealing to both audiences – national and local – would help drive the new paper to near-extinction the following year.
Compounding the Australian‘s problems were difficulties with national distribution and clashes between Murdoch and his editor, Maxwell Newton. The paper’s circulation, which had averaged nearly 74,000 in the first fortnight of publication, fell to below 52,000 once Canberra households stopped receiving free copies. Money was being lost at an alarming rate.
The Canberra Times was clocking up losses too, but nowhere near as damagingly, and its editors were enjoying themselves much more than their counterparts. “I thought there was no better place in heaven or earth than at The Canberra Times,” Bowman told me a few years ago. “Canberra really was a fascinating place in which to edit, or even work for, a newspaper. There was such variety. If you’re going to do it properly you’ve got to work bloody hard, of course, but the variety – parliament, the public service, a big university, the ACT Advisory Council … and all that was going on the Canberra ‘village,’ of course.”
Murdoch eventually gave up the battle to crush The Canberra Times, shifting his paper’s headquarters to Sydney in early 1967. Pringle had long departed for his second stint as editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, and early in 1968 Bowman joined him there as executive assistant. Two years later, he was appointed news editor, a job he performed with characteristic energy.
David Bowman in the early days of his reporting career. Picture: The Canberra Times
Then, in 1973, he became executive editor of all Fairfax’s Sydney papers, an unsought position that brought him into conflict with the tenacious editors of the Australian Financial Review and the National Times. Amid great social and cultural change, resistance was growing within the company to the conservative views of Sir Warwick Fairfax in particular. Bowman had the near-impossible task of trying steer a smooth course through the shoals.
Four years later, with the Sydney Morning Herald‘s circulation again becalmed, Bowman was given the editorship of the flagship paper. “He lost no time,” recalled Alan Dobbyn. “Widespread changes gave new prominence to finance and the arts, more than doubled the space for readers’ letters and enlarged the Saturday magazine. With authority over editorials for the first time, he turned back the rigid conservatism that often marked the traditional Herald and sought to revive even-handedness, reflecting liberal political and social attitudes.”
But the turnaround was not enough to protect him. When one of his sparring partners, Max Suich, was appointed to the more senior position of chief editorial executive in 1980, Bowman’s days at Fairfax were numbered.
Forced out of the job, he went freelance, most notably as the highly regarded media critic for Australian Society magazine from 1985 to 1992. There he wrote stylish, persuasive critiques of the press’s coverage of major issues and its increasingly concentrated ownership, themes he developed further in his 1988 book, The Captive Press.
He also wrote the Australian obituaries for the London Telegraph, and later contributed to the Adelaide Review, the Sydney Review, and 24 Hours, the forerunner of the ABC’s Limelight magazine. As the man who tried to bring factual accuracy to the memoirs of former prime minister Billy McMahon, he plays an important role in Patrick Mullins’s award-winning book, Tiberious With a Telephone: The Life and Stories of William McMahon.
Friends will remember him as a superb conversationalist, wittily self-deprecating and well-informed. “His hatred of injustice and bigotry was often in evidence,” wrote Dobbyn. “He championed political dissidence and those whose voices he felt were not being heard, such as the Palestinians.” Before his final illness he relaxed by singing in a choir, continued to play chess and became a fixture at French film festivals with his wife, Margaret.
- Peter Browne is editor of Inside Story, and edited Australian Society from 1985 to 1992.
