Ownership dynasties have been common in Australian newspapers, from the Fairfaxes, Symes, Packers and Murdochs at a metropolitan level, to the Motts, Harrises, McPhersons, Wilkie Watsons, Dunns, Taylors, Hockings and many more at a regional level.
Much rarer have been dynasties of editors – outside the ownership families. Two such dynasties stand out: The Cherrys, of Burnie, Tasmania; and the Hinchliffes, of Toowoomba, Queensland. Both editorial dynasties emerged in the shadow of a significant ownership dynasty – that of the Harris family at Burnie, 1890-2003; and the Dunn family at Toowoomba, 1922-1989. Both can boast four generations of editors, but the differences are as great as the similarities.
All four Cherry editors served the Advocate, a paper which was established on the north-west coast of Tasmania in 1890 as the Wellington Times and which evolved into the Advocate by 1918. The Advocate had a Cherry as editor for all but seven years of the 20th century.
Two of the Hinchliffe editors served at the Toowoomba Chronicle for a total of 50 years, and the other two have served elsewhere, one in Ipswich, Queensland, and the other in Santiago, Chile. More of that in our next issue.
At Burnie, Philip James Cherry was the editor, 1902-42, and a director from 1934-42; his son, Jack Reid, was editor, 1942-68, and a director from 1963-68; and Jack’s eldest son, David John, editor, 1968-89, general manager, 1989-94, and a director from 1979-2003; and David’s son, Michael David, editor, 1995-2000.
As a child, David Cherry (born 1934) noticed that his grandfather, Philip, worked day and night and spent little time with his wife. Philip Cherry was born in Melbourne but grew up in Launceston where, as a boy, he joined the ‘literary staff’ of the town’s Daily Telegraph.
In 1897 he joined the Burnie paper and became the editor in 1902. Under his editorial leadership, the Advocate became one of the leading provincial dailies in Australia. His obituary in the Advocate confirmed David’s assessment of his grandfather’s workaholic tendencies: “Work was his hobby… It was excessive work that undermined his health. Few holidays did he take, and most of his time away from his guiding post was time snatched to serve the interests of his paper.”
He played a significant part in securing for Burnie the Associated Pulp and Paper Mills plant which employed about 3000 people at its peak. When illness kept him away from the paper during the final few months of his life, son Jack acted as editor and officially assumed the position within weeks of his father’s death.
Jack emulated his father’s workaholic tendencies. This was aggravated during the war years when most male staff of the Advocate joined the services. David Cherry recalls: “I didn’t see much of my father during those years and it was the years when we were young children – three of us – and we were brought up virtually by my mother.”
David’s sense that he belonged to a newspaper family developed slowly. By the age of 13 he was ferreting through the newspaper files for stories about shipping and ships. He used to watch over the teleprinter on Sundays, and he became aware that he wanted to be a newspaperman. He left high school after four years and served two years in advertising. At night he worked casually in the reading room, learning much about newspaper content and how it should be displayed. He still marks up newspapers. Advertising was not for him, he told his parents, but journalism was, and so he joined the editorial department as a copy boy when he was 18.
Jack Reid Cherry died in harness on June 26, 1968, and David, 34, stepped up – earning the job by merit, he emphasises – as the third generation of Cherry editors at the Advocate. He had an advantage over his father and grandfather: His wife, Pat (née Alomes), knew the Advocate from the inside – she had been his father’s secretary. She helped David maintain a better work/family balance.
David Cherry saw his challenge as being to ensure the Advocate was accepted and respected as the newspaper for the entire north-west coast, largely because Devonport was competing so strongly with Burnie and also because the Melbourne Sun sold so well in the region.
Michael Cherry said the three main regions in Tasmania, the South, the North and the North-West were fiercely parochial and there was even parochialism between towns within those regions. These were the barriers that David and Michael, as editors, used the Advocate to try to break down.
Michael described his father, who had worked only at the Advocate, as having been a “gentleman editor” in an era of little change for the newspaper. Michael, however, had worked on the Daily News/Goldcoaster, the Melbourne Sun and, on secondment, at the Port Moresby Post-Courier before he eventually became the editor in Burnie. He saw himself as being a much more outspoken editor in an era when less freedom was being allowed the editor to get on with editing the paper.
He said his forthright style probably developed most at the Melbourne Sun, where, “if you didn’t perform, you were out”. He believes he demonstrated his style clearly in the early days of Burnie’s long-running 1991-92 Associated Pulp and Paper Mills dispute, which he convinced editor Henry Catchpole was much more than a local story.
Michael said he had persuaded Catchpole that the best way for the Advocate to cover the strike was for him (Michael), as chief of staff, to work outside the office along with reporters and to do some reporting himself. “For three or four weeks there I worked 20-hour days, spent time with the picketers, and we got a sense of both sides of the story. That combined effort from the newspaper earned us a Walkley Award (1992) which was the first time the Advocate had won one. That’s where I showed my style and what I was about.”
When he became the editor, the normal pressures of editing a daily newspaper soon mounted for him because he had to turn the newspaper into a standard tabloid shortly after becoming editor; the company was struggling financially and it cut staff in the editorial department; he was a hands-on editor who liked to spend up to an hour-and-a-half a day in the newsroom; he was expected to be seen regularly in the various communities along the north-west coast; and he was a member of a shareholding family in Harris & Co, with “certain expectations placed on me that I would support changes and visions that the Harris family presented, but that I didn’t necessarily agree with.”
In addition, he was prepared to tackle issues editorially, such as the community’s intolerance of homosexuality. In an editorial, he urged tolerance in a community where people suspected of being homosexuals were being bashed and those who showed any effeminate tendencies were being ostracised. About 50 per cent of the 15 youth suicides on the north-west coast that year had been attributed to doubts over sexuality. After Michael’s editorial, letters poured into the paper, demanding his resignation, but many parents called on him at his office, in tears, to thank him for urging tolerance.
Michael suffered a relationship breakdown with higher management and his editorship concluded after only four-and-a-half years. Four years later, the Harris family lost control of the Advocate after 113 years when Rural Press Ltd, a partner with Harris & Co in the ownership of the Launceston Examiner since 1990, took over the Advocate in December 2003.
David Cherry was devastated. A week after resigning as a director, he said: “To me it has been one of the most gruelling, upsetting and disappointing times in my 50 years in the newspaper industry. I was totally opposed to it from the outset and I am still opposed to it. It’s very sad to see the loss of independence.” In May 2007, Rural Press Ltd became part of Fairfax Media Ltd.
• Rod Kirkpatrick is editor of the Australian Newspaper History Group newsletter. Contact him at rkhistory3@bigpond.com
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