The closure of The Bulletin magazine on January 24, 2008 after 128 years of publication came as a shock. For much of its early life it was a kind of Aussie larrikin, unabashedly rooting for the workers, sticking it up the gentry , trumpeting strident nationalism which supported the White Australia policy, belittled Chinese and Aborigines. In l915 it came up against The Triad, not a secret Chinese gang, but a sophisticated monthly magazine from New Zealand which covered music, science, literature and art .
By Peter Simon
Its founding editor, the energetic, cigar chomping , Charles Nalder Baeyertz, a music aficionado , launched the magazine in Dunedin in l893 . A review of the first edition said a leader on ancient music showed the editor had an intimate knowledge of everything in the divine art from the time of Jubal to that of Mark Twain. The only omission detected had been mention of “Mercury and his dried up tortoise .” In Dunedin, he adjudicated at what equated to an eisteddfod , and his cutting comments ruffled many feathers.
A newspaper report said that Baeyertz , in the refined seclusion of the Triad, was devoted to the correction of “our sins ” and the “exposure of our faults ” . It went on to say his adjudication of local talent had caused “ many naughty words ” to be uttered around the domestic hearths of Dunedin . His reviews often verged on the brutal and he became the scourge of amateur and professional performers. Over the years the magazine became well known-even feared- on both sides of the Tasman.
The magazine took on a new dimension when the much travelled bon vivant , English–born journalist and author Frank Morton came aboard as assistant editor. Morton had led a colourful and varied life . Brought from Kent to Australia with his parents when he was l6, he was apprenticed to an engineer in Sydney , but caught wanderlust. He went to Hong Kong aboard the sailing ship Conqueror, journeyed to Singapore where he taught at a Methodist mission school and later joined the Straits Times as a journalist .
EXPERIENCES IN INDIA AND AFGHANISTAN
While in Singapore he married a woman born in Calcutta and moved with her to India where he worked on several publications. It being the time of the Raj, he accompanied the British theosophist and author Annie Besant , a supporter of Indian independence , on her travels. Morton also went with the British India Foreign Secretary, Sir Mortimer Durand, on his special mission to Afghanistan . As a result of that trip the Durand Line , the contentious boundary between India and Afghanistan , was drawn up in l893.
Morton returned to Sydney in l894, contributed to the Bulletin magazine, went to Queensland and then Tasmania. New Zealand beckoned and by 1905 he was on the Otago Daily Times in Dunedin, did a stint in Wellington , then was hired by Baeyertz to help produce the 60 page monthly Triad. Under his influence, Triad expanded its literary content and he wrote columns under a variety of pseudonyms. Like Baeyertz, who wore pince-nez, Morton seemed to enjoy making people squirm. In a review attributed to him , the magazine pilloried the soon to die author of a book of verse who hoped the proceeds from its sale would help his family ; it also mercilessly flayed a woman poet who wrote an introduction to the book .
While in NZ , Morton, a prolific writer, produced a book of poetry Laughter and Tears : Verses of a Journalist and two novels ,The Angel of the Earthquake and The Yacht of Dreams. He moved back to Sydney about l914 . Baeyertz came to Sydney the same year intending to start the Australian edition , probably due to the fact that the bulk of its readers -3000- were here .These plans were delayed because of the outbreak of war. The first edition , produced in October l915 , declared : New Zealand volume 23, No.7 , Australian Volume 1, No.1. Morton teamed up with Baeyertz once more and Triad went into competition with the lively, well- established Bulletin.
EDITOR SUES
Baeyertz sued the Theatre Magazine for a paragraph about him which inferred he was German ( he was Belgian ) and referred to him as Herr Baeyertz. The offending item had also called him “ that unconscious comedian of culture .” It was said the more cultured and better written Triad broke down the parochialism of a false Australian sentiment espoused in the Bulletin . It gave the Australian public a greater understanding of what was going on overseas in literary circles , even covering French writers , a field in which Morton was knowledgeable . An array of talent contributed to the Triad including John Galsworthy , Anatole France and many leading Australian writers and artists . As mentioned recently in Little Darwin , poet Kenneth Slessor , helping edit a school magazine in Sydney, submitted items to Triad and the Bulletin , but they did not get a run . In l917, however, he was published in both publications ; he and Morton were said to be alike in many ways, both described by author Geoffrey Dutton as dandys .
A feature of Triad was that it never accepted free tickets to performances , buying tickets for every show it reviewed. Baeyertz formed a close association in Sydney with James Brunton-Gibb , a prominent eisteddfod adjudicator in the areas of speech and drama on both sides of the Tasman . I bought a number of items, eisteddfod programmes, and letters from Baeyert(s) to Brunton-Gibb in a Melbourne bookshop.
By l924 , Baeyertz was still running the magazine as well as a large correspondence course in public speaking, elocution and voice production. Morton had died in December l923 and a fire in the office had added to his workload . The artist Pixie O’Harris, Rolf Harris’s aunt, renowned for her illustration of children’s books and the decoration of children’s hospitals , schools and day nurseries was a Triad caricaturist. Editorship of the Triad passed to L.L. Woolacott , a journalist and playwright well known in Sydney theatrical circles , who once wrote to Townsville accountant , song writer , John Ashe , asking him if he would consider leaving the north to work on a new publication. Baeyertz concentrated on other business interests, but lost control of the magazine , which had a circulation of more than 23,000 , and left after a dispute to edit a new Sydney newspaper .
The magazine changed hands several times , was modernised and renamed the New Triad ; poetry written by Pamela Travers , author of the Mary Poppins books, appeared in Triad before she left Australia to further her writing career. A three act play , Deliverance , written under Woolacott’s pseudonym , Errol Travers , was published in the magazine in two parts in l927. It dealt with family relations, moral degeneration and suicide . The magazine was delivered into oblivion when it folded in l928.
