Leading journalist contributed to Australia's economic reform
The Age
Tuesday September 1, 2009
FRED Brenchley, one of the most outstanding Australian journalists of his time, and a man renowned for his integrity and decency, has died of cancer in Canberra. He was 67.Besides his many journalistic achievements, he was a significant contributor in the economic reform debates involving the opening up of the Australian economy to international forces and its later exposure to domestic competition and micro-economic reform.In the 1980s, he also made a major contribution as a manager at the Fairfax company when it faced financial disaster.Born at Waverley, Sydney, Brenchley was one of two children of a garage proprietor, Fred, and his wife Jean. He attended the local primary school and Cleveland Street High School.He was one of the last of a prominent group of journalists who rose to the very top of their profession despite €” or perhaps because of €” the fact that they did not go from school to university. Rather, they started on the bottom rung as a copy boy. In Brenchley's case, at age 17, it was at Sir Frank Packer's Daily Telegraph in Sydney in 1959. Later, however, he completed an economics degree part-time at the ANU.His career had a rocky start. As a copy boy, he was returning with beer for a senior police rounds reporter when he was sprung in the lift by an irritable Packer. Interrogated, Brenchley confessed it was forbidden cargo. "You're sacked," Packer said. The copy boy sought counsel from Packer's urbane editor-in-chief, David McNicoll, who told him: "Just carry on, keep quiet and he will forget it."And so it was. He got his cadetship and later moved to the Canberra bureau, where he built contacts that stayed with him throughout his career. Brenchley left the Telegraph for the short-lived Melbourne afternoon paper Newsday and was then recruited by Max Walsh to join The Australian Financial Review's Canberra bureau.In 1972, he was appointed bureau chief of The National Times, and in 1974 when Walsh was appointed editor of the AFR, he asked Brenchley to join him as deputy editor.He and Walsh played a crucial role in reporting and promoting some of the most critical economic policy changes in Australia in the past 100 years, supporting tariff reform and new exposure of the whole Australian economy to international forces.He became AFR editor in 1979, and the following year Fairfax sent him to take over management of the Sungravure magazine group. The stable included valuable titles such as Woman's Day, Cosmopolitan and Dolly, but the printing plant that published them was decrepit. A printers' strike forced Brenchley, with some anguish, to shift printing to a modern facility, which transformed the appearance and sales of the magazines, and underpinned the ultimate financial strength of the group.When the Fairfax newspaper plant in Sydney was crippled by failures in its computerised typesetting system that threatened the company's viability, he assembled a team that defined and then solved the problem with a new computer system.He returned to journalism when young Warwick Fairfax took over Fairfax in 1987 and spent six years in London for the AFR and managing the Fairfax bureau. He was Canberra correspondent for The Bulletin magazine from 1998 to 2004 and then turned much of his time to books. Brenchley was a director of Media Monitors and a member of the Old Parliament House Governing Council.In 1965, he married Elizabeth (nee Lundy), a writer, photographer and artist, and they later collaborated in writing and illustrating several books. In 2001, they wrote Stoker's Submarine, about the fate of the Australian submarine AE2 and its captain in the Dardanelles in 1915. White Flight (2004) and The Myth Maker (2005) followed. He also wrote an award-winning book Allan Fels: A Portrait of Power (2003).Brenchley's journalistic qualities included a vast knowledge of business, economics and government; a deep awareness of the need for modernisation and exposure of the Australian economy to international and domestic competition and micro-economic reform; an eagle eye for news; unequalled writing skills, and an ability to draw upon an extraordinary range of contacts who had found him to be an utterly reliable and trustworthy outlet.As a co-author of newspaper columns with Brenchley, I found him to be remarkably creative, well informed, and with new ideas and a journalistic edge to the last. Our last column in this paper appeared a day after Brenchley was admitted to hospital in Canberra for treatment for cancer, to which he finally succumbed after a totally unsurprising and unremitting struggle for more than 12 months.Brenchley is survived by his wife Elizabeth, their daughter Penny and son Julian, daughter-in-law Rebekah and three grandchildren.FREDERICK RONALD BRENCHLEY,EDITOR, AUTHOR25-9-1942 €” 29-8-2009
© 2009 The Age
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