Bunyip’s last word

Greg Newall, the bloke who for almost 10 years wrote the Bunyip column in the now defunct newspaper The Glebe, puts the record straight about the birth of the beast, and how it became the poor creature that was put down in June 2009.

Fresh from a year-long travel in Europe in the mid-70s, and needing income to support pregnant wife, child and landlord, I knocked on the door of 36 Talfourd Street, Glebe, clutching a minuscule classified ad for a journo.

Bingo! Len and Colleen Campbell, the owners, publishers, distributors and writers of what was one of the few privately-owned newspapers in Australia, hired me, probably on the grounds that as the ad had no address I must’ve known my way around the inner west to have knocked on their door on a Sunday.

Suddenly The Glebe (as it was originally before expanding into The Glebe and Western Weekly, and then being gobbled up by News Ltd in the late 1980s to be further split and renamed) had a reporting staff of one.

Together the Campbells were the original Bunyip (the logo was a pic of their son) and the full-page shit-stirring column (page 3 against all usual paper layout criteria) gradually devolved to me.

She had been an NZ nurse, he an Aussie journo, so they aired the men’s home problems through a carefully nursed political pamphlet which eventually morphed into The Glebe. The aim was to expose the rorting of the then Leichhardt Council welfare operation, The Old men’s Home in Hereford Street, Glebe, where she worked.

The first paper, an 8-pager, was produced from their Talfourd Street home (whether with or without council approval I know not); it grew and the men’s home management rogues were exposed and the council was voted out.

Businesses eventually clamoured to advertise and by the late ’70s the Campbells were able to tell big boys, such as the Grace Bros Broadway department store, to get stuffed if they couldn’t get their ads in on time: the ads wouldn’t run because they weren’t desperate for the advertising dollar.

The paper was so successful that it paid reporters better than metropolitan daily journo rates, gave equivalent 6-week leave plus public holidays,  and within years the one-man reporting staff had grown to five (although the snapper was still part-time).

The money kept rolling in: the company could buy a Glebe Point Road business frontage for a proper office, although the Campbells preferred to administer from the comfort of their Talfourd Street dwelling which had reverted to a home.

The paper’s opponents sneered that it was too cosy with the inner-west Labor Party machine (the then Balmain state MP’s dad did drive one of the delivery vans) but it got up many a nose and the writs did come in, but not to the extent of the urban myth that the walls were papered with writs.

Sydney’s legal fraternity decided the paper would suit a test case for the old ”criminal libel” law (prison rather than penury) over a report that Burwood Council in opposing the Croatian Club setting up a new premises had defamed the club’s directors (some tosh about the populace being afeared of knifings in the street). It didn’t proceed but The Glebe did lose a standard defamation law case and was fined $1 plus the club’s costs of about $15,000.

The Glebe got action on various fronts for the public in all manner of things — from halting a waterside roadway through Leichhardt Park to exposing crook landlords and getting government departments to do the right thing by members of the public.

One peculiar case involved an eccentric living in a rooming house in Darlinghurst (way out of the paper’s distribution area) who had been dismissed as a crank for pressing the state government to abide by its laws and keep open to the public a foreshore at Vaucluse (way further from its distribution area).

With The Glebe’s help he succeeded in embarrassing householders and church bodies to remove fences and structures from public land, and the government to re-dedicate the foreshore for public use. Today it is the Hermitage Foreshore Reserve leading to Neilsen Park.

The Campbells sold The Glebe to the Melbourne-based Herald and Weekly Times newspaper group in the late 1980s for $1million-plus and bought a horse property in Toowoomba, Queensland.

Then in a flash the H&WT was taken over by Rupert Murdoch’s News Ltd.

The nation’s biggest and most successful privately-owned paper was now one of the Cumberland Newspapers’ vast suburban stable, and the staff jumped ship one by one (Jean Kennedy headed to radio and won fame as a radio and TV reporter, Tony Park went to Sydney’s largest suburban paper, The St George and Sutherland Shire Leader, and is now an author of African adventure books and PR consultant, Elaine Reeves headed off to grow blueberries in Tasmania, Georgia Blain became a successful author, the photographer remains anonymous as he was moonlighting, and I went to the Fairfax Community Newspapers group as an editor).

In the style of today’s newspaper game run by smarties, marketers, lawyers and bean counters, The Glebe in its latest branding was quietly snuffed out for it was competing with another in the Cumberland stable.

Sighs of sympathy all round please readers.