Ink, sweat and tears: The story of the North West Star

IN the mid 1960s I recognised that Mount Isa was a city of great opportunity and decided it should be the location of my first media venture. Mount Isa became an extension of my life to the stage where it became a second home with all of my family becoming involved.

There already was a newspaper in the city, the Rupert Murdoch owned Mount Isa Mail, a bi-weekly evening publication that had a fairly chequered career.

I realised I would strike opposition in taking on the Mail, however the editorial quality of this newspaper was so poor I felt that if I could get a foothold I could swamp the opposition.

The Mail was produced on a clapped-out press in a ramshackle building in the heart of town and the employees sweated in un-airconditioned premises made of concrete blocks which had to be propped up to stop them falling over.

There were great gaps between the galvanised iron roof and the wall where the gritty dust would blow in. It was manned by a staff whose reputation for toughness and even looseness was the talk of the town.

I knew Mount Isa was a rough union town yet I felt I could meet this challenge.

I set about disposing of such assets as I had accumulated, borrowing, mortgaging and, with the assistance of friends long practiced in the newspaper industry such as Tom Mead of the Consolidated Press group and others, I laid the foundation for a new paper in Mount Isa.

It was to be my first venture into editorial proprietorship and marked a new challenge, although in some respects a natural progression from my beginnings as a newspaper copy boy at the age of 14.

I set about employing staff and went into consultations with unions who drove a hard bargain. Bert Milner,  secretary of the printers’ union the PKIU, really ground me down to get the deal he wanted because of conditions in Mount Isa, which did not apply to any other area in Australia.

At every turn I seemed to experience frustration. I began to suspect this was part of an organised campaign to defeat me before I had even got to the production stage.

The Mail changed from a bi-weekly evening paper to a morning daily. The fight was on. I appointed Kelvin Fairbairn, who had been looking after my accounts in our Sydney office, as manager of the new operation based in Mount Isa. I knew in Fairbairn I had a dogged, loyal worker.

I managed to purchase a fairly recently constructed building of concrete blocks and iron roof on the outskirts of the city centre to house the printing press and editorial and advertising staff. With a few additions it was far more impressive than the Mail's office.

I chose the name North West Star because Mount Isa is generally recognised as the capital of the north west of Queensland and there was a significance about the word "star".

The original mining lode had been called the Black Star and so a black star was well known as a symbol identifying Mount Isa and had been stamped on the consignments of copper which were sent to the coast in the early days of the mine's history.

Competition between the Mail's and our journalists was fierce as we approached publication day. I had to counter all sorts of obstacles which were used against me, such as with the provision of paper and services.

I was eating with Fairbairn in the main dining room of the Barclay Hotel one evening when I heard a voice raised in exaltation speaking to a group of people sitting in a semi-private part of the dining area.

It was Rupert Murdoch. He had flown in with some of his top executives. His words were clear and his message was delivered in vivid terms. Basically it was a promise to drive me out of town, to close me down.

The pattern of opposition began to fall into place. I realised that Murdoch, whose capacity I had always admired but whom I had never actually met, was not going to be an easy man to knock over.

Our workers threw themselves into production of the first edition. But there were major teething problems. On the day of publication we seemed to be as far off as ever. We were scheduled to come out in the morning but it was quite obvious we would not meet the deadline. Members of our staff laboured tirelessly without sleep.

In my own case, I had less than four hours sleep in 72 hours. Barry Pringle and Alan Schumacher and two leading hands on the compositing staff worked day and night sweating in the humid atmosphere. It was traumatic.

Dogged and weary, exhausted and mentally fatigued, I could see the people around me suffering intensely but still carrying on. I have never seen workers so determined to win against the odds, and the odds were tough.

Murdoch had done everything he could to improve his paper and frustrate us. Hard cells within the town had been organised against us and yet those I had employed showed the utmost loyalty and devotion and were backed up by the tremendous assistance of Bill Moloney, the editor, and Douglas Macdonald, the top sub-editor who had worked on the Daily Telegraph.

We struggled on, yet somehow the organisation defied co-ordination. Problem after problem arose. Finally, looking at the exhausted staff, I gulped out to Pringle and Schumacher, the key men on the machine staff: "I'm going to cancel it all and make an announcement over the radio that we are deferring publication for a week".

"Like bloody hell you will," said Schumacher. "We have worked this hard to get the bloody thing where we have and we are going to get it out today if it's the last thing we do."

Pringle supported him wholeheartedly. 

Pringle had been carrying around bundles of metal and doing a multitude of jobs and had suffered terribly through being on his feet for so long. The veins in his legs had started to stand out and he had them bandaged. He refused to sit down. With a team like this I felt we just had to go on.

The reaction among the residents in Mount Isa was now one of tremendous interest. In a small, very integrated and concentrated community there is not much that goes unnoticed. Our struggles to get the North West Star out suddenly became a topic of great interest. It had been reported around Australia there was a fight going on between Murdoch and myself. 

It was quite obvious that we weren't going to get the paper out in the morning, so it was a question of which hour we would get it out. Late in the afternoon on May 12, 1966, we managed to hit the streets and the first issue of the North West Star was published. 

As I hit the button to start the presses I experienced a great sense of pleasure and pride - the pulsating sound of the presses stirs the heart of any newspaperman. We had arranged to have a staff party and my wife and children came to Mount Isa for the occasion. 

Dead beat though they were, the staff turned up. Not a face was absent. 

Although Mount Isa is a great drinking town, on this occasion they were too tired to even drink. Schumacher made a speech in reply to my thanks to the staff. "I had a terrible dream," he said. 

"I dreamt that I was in hell and then I woke up and found that I was only working for the North West Star."

The competition and rivalry between the two newspapers was intense. The break I was hoping for came on June 2, less than three weeks after our first issue. The Mail's front-page headline, alongside its cheesecake picture of a pretty girl in a skimpy bikini, trumpeted "Shock report: teenage vice rampant in Mount Isa". 

Across four columns the story began with a question: "Just how high are the morals of teenagers in Mount Isa, or how low?" The story went on to talk of schoolgirls soliciting in the school grounds during the lunch hour. Girls as young as 12 and 13 waiting in gangs at a midtown hotel for men in cars to pick them up, and roaming the caravan parks and camping grounds offering themselves for hire. It was certainly sensational.

I was now ready to strike. I was sure the Mail's story would have tremendous repercussions. Immediately we set in train the counter attack, which I felt would bring the opposition to its knees. We published a massive editorial defending the honour of the young women of the town. 

Angry parents who complained to us were encouraged to hold protest meetings. The issue was taken up by the churches, led by the Catholic priest Father Tom Gard. The management and editorial controllers of the Mail adopted a recalcitrant attitude. 

They would not recant. On the contrary they exacerbated the position with a follow-up story devoting a page to letters, most of them over nom de plumes, dealing with what they described as a "revealing story". 

Students were forthright in stating their views, voicing with their parents anger at the allegation that they had added to their pocket money in the creek bed, which was close to the schools. Support came from an unexpected source. The wife of a prominent townsman, a devout church-woman, was so incensed by the stories she raised several hundred dollars from neighbours and friends and brought it into the office. 

"I want to buy copies of your paper with this and have them distributed to every house in Mount Isa rebutting this shocking story," she said. "Throw them over the fence, do anything you can, but I want the story told to defend our girls' honour." 

It marked the beginning of the end of support for the Mail.

Finally two months after our first edition the Mail succumbed, with Rupert Murdoch selling it to my company, Carpentaria Newspapers, publisher of the Star. The Mail was soon closed down and a few members of their staff were absorbed by us. The North West Star became Mount Isa's only daily newspaper. 

Within a matter of weeks such loyalties as had existed towards the old Mail were easily transferred to the Star. 

Being the only newspaper in the field and publishing the type of journal we did, we soon attracted support and despite the dire predictions which had greeted its birth, the Star shone more brightly than ever.

Journalist, businessman, politician and publisher, Sir Asher Joel (1912 - 1998) began in 1927 as a copy boy on Sydney’s Daily Telegraph. He became a reporter on The Labor Daily, until, before he was 20, he became its parliamentary correspondent. In World War II, he served with the Royal Australian Navy and was posted to General Douglas MacArthur’s staff as a public relations officer. After the war he began a public relations business and earned a formidable reputation for organising royal tours, papal and presidential visits and the opening of the Sydney Opera House. He was elected an Independent member of the NSW Legislative Council in 1958. He joined the Country Party in 1959 and remained an MLC until retiring from politics in 1978. Knighted twice by the Queen for business and community work, Sir Asher was a public relations consultant for Mount Isa Mines before he established Carpentaria Newspapers Pty Ltd and launched the North West Star. He went on to be chairman of Mount Isa Television Pty Ltd.