Veteran campaigners, innovative publishers and activists in Australia and overseas, Pete Steedman and Phillip Frazer, who have taken on powerful interests throughout much of their lives , recently reunited over a drop of red at Pete’s hideaway in the soggy hills outside Melbourne.
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Steedman is back in town ! News of Pete Steedman’s return in late 1972 reverberated throughout Melbourne , Canberra and beyond , in academic , media , political, police and national security circles , no doubt resulting in a variety of reactions- surprise, twitching, muttering and delight. When he had left Melbourne for swinging London as a freelance journalist in 1969 he was almost a household name because of his strong stand against involvement in the Vietnam War and conscription when he was editor of the university papers, Lot’s Wife and Farrago , at the time supposedly studying economics and politics.
He had been railed against by the Right in parliament, received death threats , and the Federal government had even explored the possibility of bringing in special legislation to charge him with sedition . His editorship of a new national political weekly BROADSIDE had been too boisterous for its conservative backers, the Melbourne Age, which pulled and pulped two editions. Broadside’s stirring adventures in comic form of a whip wielding shapely damsel called FABULA in thinly disguised Canberra and other corridors of power had caused uproar, also intense reader interest.
Leaving the pyrotechnics and flak behind , Steedman took the overland route to the British capital , meeting up with his partner, Julie Reiter , in India ,their adventures and misadventures covered in earlier Little Darwin posts . Also covered was the hilarious and dangerous trip Pete and Julie made in a dodgy Bedford van from London to Morocco with architect Peter Burleigh whose Bulldust Diary , complete with his distinctive illustrations, is currently running in Little Darwin . After packing about five lifetimes of incredible adventures into a few years in London, Pete and Julie decided to return to Melbourne.
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With Julie expecting and Gough Whitlam about to be elected, giving birth to a new feeling of jubilation in the nation , Steedman began work as Publishing Manager for Stockland Press , a conservative company whose shareholders were members of the farming community. With his extensive experience in publishing here and London , abreast of the new web offset printing system , he was brimming with ideas . In town was his co-editor from the university newspaper days , former medical / arts student majoring in politics , Phillip Frazer. Frazer had founded the weekly teen pop magazine , Go-Set ,which had a circulation of 70,000 , and a permanent staff of 25 in four capital cities . Other publications Frazer brought out were Revolution, High Times ,The Digger.
A major coup for Frazer was the Australian edition of Rolling Stone , first run as a supplement in Revolution in 1970, then as a separate magazine in 1972. (Frazer went to New York in 1976 and became an editor of Seven Days, a U.S. alternative newsmagazine, then worked on other U.S. political magazines including The Nation, the anti-nuclear power organization No-Nukes, and in 1981-82 edited Ralph Nader’s Multinational Monitor. In the 1990s he published the liberal Washington Spectator newsletter, and published, edited and wrote the environment newsletter News on Earth. In 1999 he founded, and has since published and co-edited the newsletter The Hightower Lowdown with Texan Jim Hightower. The Lowdown, with more than 100,000 paying subscribers, is one of the biggest circulation political publications in the US, notable for its criticism of the Bill Clinton , George W.Bush and Barack Obama administrations for being beholden to corporations and a corporatist ideology. Little Darwin has carried a Hightower profile and intends to post further interesting comments by him , many of which appear on Nation of Change - Progressive Journalism for Positive Change - that are relevant to growing issues of importance to Australia , ranging from Afghanistan to banks and Monsanto . )
Frazer had recommended Steedman to the Stockland Managing Director , Mike Woods, a farmer ,who was wanting to expand the business and needed new ideas and someone to implement them. He had grown to like Frazer and was infatuated with the characters Frazer introduced. Woods and Steedman drew up loose plans for changes in the company and how to move Stockland on to bigger and better things. Frazer and Steedman considered they had “captured” a company that gave a chance for the expansion of Frazers operations.
When Steedman started at Stockland he did an audit of all their operations and found it was a good company, but too small to survive the consolidations that were about to happen. They didn't believe him, within a couple of years of him leaving they were taken over. The printery basically consisted of two businesses-one using the old style hot metal letterpress production, the other the versatile new web offset technique. There was no way he could rationalise this situation as it would mean the end for the half dozen employees working with metal. To keep them in work , he devised a scheme of getting out of print and copyright Australiana , regional histories ,that would appeal to the 20,000 subscribers in the rural paper, Stock and Land, that was the major publishing task of the company.
At the same time, he made increasing use of offset, a process that Stockland were only just learning about. Steedman got rid of small run print jobs and some religious publications that the company had carried for years and brought in university papers, ethnic publications , Frazer's The Digger. The political and satirical weekly , Nation Review, called The Ferret (lean and nosey), was also printed at Stocklands , launched in 1970 by independent publisher Gordon Barton who opposed the Vietnam War along with Steedman. Contributors included cartoonist Michael Leunig, Germaine Greer, Phillip Adams, Mungo MacCallum , Sam Orr. A separate company- Peelprint – managed by Steedman, was set up to print all the “radical publications.”
Monopolistic distribution companies made it difficult for new publishing ventures to establish themselves in Australia , greatly reducing their circulation and profitability.
Steedman put a lot of thought and effort into trying to create a new distribution network. His grand plan was to have publications come off the Stockland presses , pass through a hole in the wall to an adjoining property where they would be bundled up and picked up by trucks using a rear lane , eventually delivered to outlets other than newsagents –milk bars and other shops. He bought the terrace house next to the printery but the plan did not come to fruition.
Steedman put a lot of thought and effort into trying to create a new distribution network. His grand plan was to have publications come off the Stockland presses , pass through a hole in the wall to an adjoining property where they would be bundled up and picked up by trucks using a rear lane , eventually delivered to outlets other than newsagents –milk bars and other shops. He bought the terrace house next to the printery but the plan did not come to fruition.
Gregarious, he mixed with people from all walks of life- journalists, DJs , actors , politicians ,musos , unionists , even Anglican minister Peter Hollingworth , later a bishop and a Governor –General of Australia . Hollingworth , in the Brotherhood of St Lawrence , consulted Steedman when he approached Stockland to print a book he had written about the poor and underprivileged in Melbourne. It was to be called Always With Us, reflecting the saying that the poor are always with us. Steedman strongly stated the title meant nothing and would not sell. It was renamed The Powerless Poor , went into two editions and then paperback. Forthright, with a kind of crash through or crash attitude similar to PM Gough Whitlam, Steedman was larger than life, interested in fast cars , motorbikes and black leather jackets.
ENTER CYCLONE TRACY . On December 26, 1974 , Steedman received a call from a friend who had been seconded to the Social Security Department to set up systems to cope with a disaster which at that stage nobody knew much about. Steedman was specifically contacted because of his expertise in communications and was asked to design a system to service the thousands of people that were expected to be evacuated from the cyclone destroyed city of Darwin. As a result, he was made a welfare officer and brought out a paper called the Darwin Newsletter , at first printed at Stockland Press , for refugees scattered throughout the nation, with an eventual circulation of 20,000.[See THE CYCLONIC NEWSPAPER PAPER in Little Darwin , December 10, 2010.] The Darwin Disaster Welfare Council also asked him to write a report on the social , economic and political effects of the cyclone and the response of administration to the disaster.
After spending nine months in Darwin , during which he said he went a bit “troppo”, he returned to Melbourne and enrolled at Latrobe University to take a post-graduate degree in media and communications . While in Darwin, Steedman’s wife, Julie, had enrolled as a mature age student in Ceramics at the Caulfield Institute of Technology (CIT). Steedman planned how, on his return to Melbourne, he could fit in with Julie’s new involvement . As all jobs at academic institutions had as a prerequisite- a degree- and since he had spent many years at two universities without picking up a piece of paper, he figured that he may have to upgrade.
The newly opened LaTrobe University had a special entrance into the post graduate B.Ed that took into account subjects passed as well as industry experience. On this basis he was accepted at the university . Since the course was basically what he’d been doing for over 10 years, he was able to do the two year course in one with high distinctions. He commented at the time that he had either suddenly gotten a lot smarter, or the education system had deteriorated significantly. He opted for the latter.
When the opportunity arose , he applied for the position of Promotions Officer for CIT and was soon made the head of a new Department of Information and Promotions, with a brief to increase student enrolments and develop a corporate image . In the first year, the intake increased by 43 percent and subsequent increases made CIT one of the most preferred places in the Victorian tertiary system. Steedman segmented his market and aimed literature at potential students, parents and the business community. He had an intense fight with many academics, especially those from Science and Engineering who felt they were being “cheapened” as academics and were being “sold like cornflakes”. Bluntly, he told them it was his way or they would have no jobs in the new year as enrolment numbers in those disciplines were minimal and decreasing. His three year campaign consolidated CIT as one of the major educational institutions in Victoria and it later merged with Monash University. He had saved jobs, revitalized an institution and created a new method of “selling’ education.”His approach was not to just "get bums on seats " but to educate kids and line up job prospects . His drive and forthright manner of expression perturbed some, but he achieved remarkable results.
At last month's launch of University Unlimited, the history of Monash University , thinly thatched Professor John Sinclair and Steedman were photographed with a page open showing them working on the university magazine, Lot’s Wife, back in 1966. Young Steedman , the editor, in black T-shirt, is described as a mixture of James Dean and Elvis. Sinclair , assistant editor, looks studious and more kempt. During the launch , playwright David Williamson recalled having once tried in a pub to “save” a girl upon whom Steedman was putting the hard word –but she did not want to be saved . NEXT : Steedman’s new baby – the Labor newspaper.
At last month's launch of University Unlimited, the history of Monash University , thinly thatched Professor John Sinclair and Steedman were photographed with a page open showing them working on the university magazine, Lot’s Wife, back in 1966. Young Steedman , the editor, in black T-shirt, is described as a mixture of James Dean and Elvis. Sinclair , assistant editor, looks studious and more kempt. During the launch , playwright David Williamson recalled having once tried in a pub to “save” a girl upon whom Steedman was putting the hard word –but she did not want to be saved . NEXT : Steedman’s new baby – the Labor newspaper.
