Adam Gifford
Truth: The Rise and Fall of the People’s Paper, by Redmer Yska (Craig Potton Publishing, 2010), 200 pp., $50.00.
Truth: The Rise and Fall of the People’s Paper, by Redmer Yska (Craig Potton Publishing, 2010), 200 pp., $50.00.
Every Thursday the presses would start at Garrett Street a stone’s throw from Wellington’s Cuba Mall, first hesitatingly, then faster, until a torrent of inky tabloids would roll down the rickety conveyer belt. During the frequent breaks when the roll of newsprint tore or a cog jammed, a crew of casuals would play gin or stare disinterestedly at the headlines screaming smut and scandal in 124-point type. Redmer Yska walked into Garrett St in 1977 as a proofreader, until punk rock – a shock/horror/probe-style story about the Suburban Reptiles’ abortive gig at Victoria University – won him a reporting job.
Redmer Yska and I both worked at the NZ Truth building in Garrett Street, central Wellington, in 1977. While I was one of the casuals, hired to unload Truth from the presses each Thursday, grabbing the streams of inky tabloids as they rolled off the rickety conveyor belts, he was employed up in the proofreading room, checking copy and learning first-hand how to sniff out scoop and scandal. It gave him an educated appreciation of yellow journalism, and a respect for sources and verification – it’s a comfort to have all the paperwork done when the writs come flying. It also gave him an ear for the sort of story New Zealanders want to read, but that the ‘respectable’ media were too sniffy to run, and an eye for the larger-than-life characters whose written-up exploits could brighten (or darken) the country’s provincial grey.
These days, though, when metropolitan broadsheets daily fill their front pages with murder and marital discord, solicit gossip, and frequently feature the latest semi-clad celeb, there is little call for a paper which filled its pages with the doings from the divorce courts. Even when Yska was pounding the capital’s pavements earning his odium money (the 10 per cent margin over award rates which Truth journos enjoyed), the paper’s glory days were behind it. Working there, Yska quickly became aware of the paper’s history as ‘the people’s paper’, which seemed at odds with its descent into titillation and tattle-tale combined with union bashing and consumer advocacy.
In trying to find out why, he has uncovered a narrative of change and evolution out of which multiple versions of Truth emerge. The weekly was an Australian import, the creation of John Norton, whose Sydney Truth mixed sport, sex, crime, divorce and general muckraking into a sulphurous, irreverent brew that appealed to its working-class readers, eager for escapism and the sensational. The 1.5-metre tycoon (referred to by the Australian Bulletin as ‘Freak, big man, small man, philanthropist, scoundrel’) crossed the Tasman in 1904 to lecture on workers’ rights, the threat of Asian migration, and the even greater threat of ‘prating parsons’, ‘putrid politicians’ and other wowsers who would deny a working man his simple pleasures.
He was a bona fide republican hero, having conducted his own defence to beat a sedition charge for calling Queen Victoria ‘flabby, fat and flatulent’, and her son the Prince of Wales a ‘turf-swindling, card-sharping, wife-debauching rascal’. That kind of alliterative language flowered in the New Zealand edition when the presses started rolling in 1905. Most of its reporters and subs came over from the Sydney Truth, but its legal counsel was Wellington solicitor Alexander Dunn, the start of a seven-decade association between the Dunn family and the paper.
Yska was unable to unearth any copies from Truth’s first year – libraries may not have wanted to file papers ‘that soiled the breakfast cloth’, but from stories reprinted in the Australian editions he detected a crusading spark, with social wrongs like sweatshops and corrupt prison guards exposed. In those early years, Truth did indeed try to become the ‘people’s paper’, poaching Socialist Party branch president Robert Hogg from rival weekly The Worker – and eventually making him editor – siding with striking Waihi mine workers, and attacking the Massey government’s brutal suppression of the Great Strike of 1913.
It made a stand against militarism at the start of World War I, which morphed into support and advocacy for the rights of ordinary soldiers and their families. One of the clippings reproduced in this generously illustrated book is the letter Archibald Baxter, father of poet James K. Baxter, sent to his family about the punishments he had endured at the front for his conscientious objection.
In the 1920s, Truth moved towards the centre, with more sports, consumer advocacy and pages for women (these latter produced briefly by Iris Wilkinson, also known as novelist Robin Hyde, whose unpublished autobiography Yska mines for Truth lore).While the paper didn’t back the emerging Labour Party, once it won power in 1935 Truth reached out, first by serialising John A. Lee’s The Hunted (after its favourable review had alerted many New Zealanders to the existence of his earlier Children of the Poor), and then by offering Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage a regular platform.
Yska makes the case for Truth’s coverage being responsible for laying the foundations for the posthumous beatification of Savage. In 1950 the Norton family sold Truth to a group which included its chairman, lawyer J.H. (James Hamilton) Dunn, as well as businessman Cliff Plimmer – who became a senior figure in the National Party. Dunn took increasing charge of both newsroom and boardroom, creating a paradoxical mix of fierce anti-Communism, opposition to state control and the championing of the downtrodden.
It’s here that Yska’s research becomes truly illuminating, uncovering a paper that on one hand was willing to take on abuses of police power and expose the true horror of capital punishment, yet on the other was used by the security services and right-wing politicians to undermine and attack perceived enemies. The hectoring and reactionary tone of the paper in subsequent decades, especially under editor Russell Gault, won the paper more enemies than friends. (LET’S HIT RATBAG STUDENTS HARD blared the headline in May 1970.)
By the end, there were few tears as the paper slid towards becoming, as one of its later editors described it to me, ‘the trade paper for the sex industry’. Yska has mined Truth’s archives for his previous social histories, but now he has made the paper itself the story. And a fascinating read it is too.
ADAM GIFFORD also worked at Garrett Street in 1977, taking Truth off the presses, before finding his own circuitous route into journalism. He is an Auckland-based freelance journalist and writer who contributes regularly to the New Zealand Herald‘s arts pages.
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