An ABC report that an archive of two million Fairfax newspaper photographs, taken between 1920-2000 in Australia , ended up in America grabbed my attention because I like to think I may have actually handled some of those black and white prints and been involved in some of the news events covered . One such photograph is the above shot of a swagman in rural New South Wales taken in the late l960s. He was encountered when I was being driven to an assignment with a photographer from the Fairfax building in Broadway, Sydney .
By Peter Simon
Tramping along the side of the road was an unexpected figure from a bygone era, a swaggie. We screeched to a halt , reversed and I interviewed him while the photographer took a series of snaps. An obvious battler , all his possessions are on display - a spare left foot boot , a blackened billycan , food including vegetables slung over his shoulder in a bag , a Sunshine powdered milk tin . We gave him a lift . The story appeared in the Sun-Herald and the photographer gave me a souvenir copy of the swaggie , which has been carted about for nearly 50 years , surviving Cyclone Tracy .
The Fairfax archive may well contain coverage of the great moment in Australian history -which I covered -raids by Sydney university students in a campaign to open the tiled front bars of hotels to women . On one occasion , police present , girls dressed as men with painted on moustaches , one carrying a masonic bag , another a paper RSL badge pinned to her lapel , noisally invaded a bar watched by stunned mullet looking , bemused guzzlers, a male student dressed as a woman, with a floppy hat. The photographs may have been filed under the flippant heading: REVOLTING LADIES LOUNGE LIZARDS .
My involvement with newspaper photographs began in the l950s when I became a copyboy in Sydney , working in The Sun building in the city . There I perused and handled many photographs in the Pix magazine library , opposite Sporting Life . I had another stint in the paper's Feature Services which syndicated photographs and stories , one being extracts from Dr Michael Bialoguski 's book, The Petrov Story . A Polish-Russian medical practitioner, violinist and ASIO spy, goatee bearded Bialoguski , encouraged Vladimir Petrov , Third Secretary at the Soviet Embassy, Canberra, to defect .
Armed Russians dragged Mrs Evdokia Petrov aboard a plane in Sydney, midst wild scenes, and she was granted asylum at Darwin airport after police manhandled the escorts and removed a gat .
My duties as a copyboy in Feature Services included going to the Yaffa Syndicate office to pick up packets of overseas syndicated cartoons and illustrated articles for distribution . The Radio and Hobbies magazine office in the Sun building was one of my drop off points.
The Sun later moved into the new Fairfax building in Broadway and it is presumed its invaluable photographic archive also went along to the block which included the Sydney Morning Herald. The building had large darkrooms for photographers to process films to produce silver bromide prints , with what seemed perpetual running water in troughs , sounding like the River Caves at Luna Park . Pictorial editors, like their photographers, were colourful guys, one had run a plantation in Papua New Guinea , if I remember correctly.
Murders and Guts
One of the many colourful and experienced photographers was Steve Dunleavy , who had a nasty experience with a zipper which required the embarrassing and painful attention of the staff ex-Army nursing sister . It is possible that some photographs he took were included in the archive now in America . If so , America would be interested to know that his son, of the same name , a Sydney police rounds reporter , went on to become a legend in Hong Kong and New York Post's ace crime reporter , a national celebrity for his coverage of the Son of Sam serial murders in 1976-77.
The murderer , David Berwitz, who terrified New York, killing women at random with a .45 , wrote rambling letters to Dunleavy, who later had his own hard hitting television show , billed as Mr Blood and Guts.
In 2016, 40 years after the Son of Sam murders, Dunleavy, retired, down Miami way , getting about in a gopher , was quoted for a documentary, Son of Sam : The Hunt for a Killer , as saying the police could have arrested Berkowitz earlier on had they acted on clues . Berkowitz was sentenced to six consecutive life sentences for six murders and seven woundings . In 2017 he was said to be a born again Christian and had a website headed, Son of Hope .
Trips to the Morgue
When I worked in the Fairfax building in Broadway , I had cause to consult "the girls in the morgue ", the name given to the area which contained a huge collection of photographs , newspaper files , cuttings, reference books. It was a place where you went to get background , inspiration , look at pix . Being nosey, I would often just drop in and browse about to see what was hidden in dark corners, nooks . From memory, there were dusty displays in one section .
The entire Fairfax photographic archive is said to have contained as many as 8million prints, valued by one source at $89million. It seems part was sent to America to be digitalised by Rogers Photo Archives , for a fee of $300,000, the negatives and copyright to be retained by Fairfax. However, the head of the company was convicted of fraud , the business collapsed, assets were taken over by a bank which had no interest in the vast collection , stored in a Little Rock Arkansas warehouse .
Eventually the director of a Californian art gallery , Daniel Miller, took possession of some two million photographs . He sold some to Australian institutions , including 25,000 cricket photos to the Bradman Museum at Bowral . The archive covered whaling, maritime , aviation, royalty, theatre, Olympics,horse racing , AFL , crime and law , regional towns . Many of the photos were taken taken by prominent photograhers of the day , like Max Dupain. The archive is said to have included photographs from other newspapers taken over by the company, some in New Zealand .
In an ABC radio interview , Miller said the collection included many photographs by outback writer Jeff Carter .
Northern Territory Photographs Dumped
I was shocked to learn that the photographic collection at the Northern Territory News, Darwin , had been dumped when the newspaper moved into new offices in Mitchell Street in 1967 . Darwin photographer Joe Karlhuber, who had worked at the News , informed me of this situation , shaking his head in despair and disbelief .
In its early days , the News , in the old tin bank building, ran metal bloc photographs sent north from the Sydney Daily Telegraph ,where they had been used , with no real relevance to the north.
When Rupert Murdoch bought the newspaper in 1960 new equipment provided included a block making machine ,a Scanagraver , and I was given the task of helping make this new fangled gadget perform, a plastic image cut from a rotating photograph on a drum , because I had some photographic experience dating from schooldays when I had a camera.
A Yashika Mat 120 reflex camera turned up in the office , which I and fellow journalist Keith Willey used . Willey made forays down the track and turned up great feature articles , one being about a family of dingo baiters and trappers , one minus a forearm.
I was carrying the camera when thrown into the sea while going ashore in a small boat on the south coast of Portuguese Timor to cover an oil strike by an American company,Tradewinds, on an Australian exploration lease ; though damaged, the roll of film produced some shots .
During my time as press officer for the Department of the Northern Territory, I hired its first photographer, veteran Sydney photographer , Ray Sharp , and we went on story gathering trips to Alice Springs , gradually building up an interesting file on Territorians , towns , events. Years later , I was told that much of this had also been culled, thrown out .
The Australian News and Information Service had an office in Darwin which produced illustrated stories promoting the Territory and Australia overseas . One of its photographers, Mike Jensen , a Dane, had very high standards , culling prints that he thought were not worth keeping . As a result , I called on him regularly , went through his reject bin , and retrieved works of art . Jensen worked with the veteran Sydney journalist, lanky Colin Mann .
Indignant over the treatment of a reporter, Mann once poured a glass of beer over the head of vociferous Sydney Bulletin editor and author , Donald Horne, who was holding court in a pub. Later on , Colin got a posting to an Australian government office in America and was given a tough time by a pompous and bullying high official , who was lucky not to be christened with a jug of Budheimer .
North Queensland photographs
in light of the Fairfax archive, and what happened to the NT News files , I wonder what happened at the Cairns Post after it eventually was swallowed up by the Murdoch empire . When I passed through the Cairns Post in l962, from Darwin , it had a keen photographer , John Ellison , frustrated by the conservative management . Later he took up a position with East-West Airlines in Tamworth , New South Wales , which eventually ended up being taken over by Sir Peter Abeles and Rupert Murdoch of Ansett Airlines in a deal with a West Australian airline company.
