Axed

Who Killed Australian Magazines?

Phil Barker, Barker Philip

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781761103285
• eBook ISBN: 9781761103308
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Biographies
• Index: Business

Axed charts the dramatic decline of the magazine industry in Australia from the million-selling highs of the 1990s to the recent round of mergers, closures and mass-redundancies. What went wrong?

Australian magazines once boasted the highest circulation per capita in the world. Former magazine editor Phil Barker follows the story from this golden age to today, showing how mismanagement, unchecked spending and the challenge presented by the rise of the internet all combined to undermine the previously unassailable position magazines held in the Australian consciousness.

Prominent magazine executives and editors who witnessed the industry’s decline and failure to capitalise on digital opportunities have gone on the record for the first time. Featuring in-depth analysis of archival reporting and brand-new interviews with key players, Axed lifts the lid on the scandals behind the industry’s swan dive.

But Phil also talks to the people who have managed to pivot in a fast-moving media landscape and believe magazines are a part of Australia’s future. Are magazines really dead, or is there still some hope for survival?

1 IT WAS ON FOR YOUNG AND OLD

‘You’re nothing better than a tampon string!’

Phil Ramey, paparazzi photographer, 1997

Competition is said to bring out the best in us, or perhaps it brings out the worst in us, but it most certainly helps us make the best products.

There is no doubt competition, more hardcore than healthy, was the engine that drove the most extraordinary growth period in Australian magazines during the 1980s and 1990s.

It was a competition so intense and famous it inspired an excellent two-part ABC miniseries in 2013, Paper Giants: Magazine Wars, and a comprehensive catalogue of written commentary.

The key competitors were Dulcie Boling and Nene King. As people, they couldn’t be more different, which is what makes their story so fascinating.

King was a tall redhead. Boling was diminutive, with a neat blonde bob. At her ferocious peak, King was incredibly loud. Boling was icy quiet. King proudly shopped at Target and Katies for madly colourful outfits, just like her readers. Boling was always immaculate in designer suits. Boling was a businesswoman with an eye for numbers. King didn’t care what it cost, as long as she got the readers.

King started work at New Idea in 1979, rising to become deputy editor. But the glass ceiling she ran into was her editor, Boling. There could only be one boss.

King’s powerful sense of what readers wanted always served her well and she was brilliant at coming up with angles no-one else could see. With good reason, she felt she had made a significant contribution to the success of New Idea, and staffers like Prue MacSween, Bunty Avieson and Lorrae Willox could feel the pressure rising to an inevitable boil over.

I remember Willox, who was my deputy on Woman’s Day in the early 2000s, telling stories of King doing a lot of huffing and eye rolling and shouting that she ‘wasn’t going to take it anymore’ when Boling was not in the room, but appearing eviscerated by Boling’s iron will and chilling Julie Bishop stare when she was on the editorial floor.

Boling edited New Idea from 1977 to 1993 and was also chairperson and chief executive of Southdown Press, then owned by the Murdoch family, which later became Pacific Magazines, owned by the Stokes family. She was also on the board at News Ltd and the Seven Network.

King, too, had a stellar corporate career, becoming the first woman on the board of Kerry Packer’s Publishing and Broadcasting Limited (PBL), owner of ACP and the Nine Network.

When the editorship of Southdown Press’s TV Week came up, King no doubt saw the chance to finally run her own show. But Boling may well have thought King would be better suited to staying on at New Idea and blocked the move. She may have been worried King wasn’t ready for the move or even that she did not have all the character traits needed for the job.

King had one of her more explosive eruptions and walked out on the spot. She kept on walking, straight to the deputy editor’s chair of rival magazine Woman’s Day. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall.

She became Woman’s Day editor on 18 January 1988, and from that moment on, it was, as they say, on for young and old.

At the time, Woman’s Day was dull – all knitting patterns and recipes. It was ready for a makeover and King was armed with a bag of potent make-up, her skills honed on the magazine she now wished to crush. Publisher Richard Walsh said the magazine needed a revolution and that revolutionary was Nene King.

The dragon lady, as King happily referred to herself, finally found her wings.

As terrifying as she could be, King was also bizarrely generous at times, sending staff off on luxury holidays or leaving envelopes stuffed with $100 notes on their desks. Next day, for some tiny infraction, you could be screamed at or sacked.

‘We each had our niche – calling it a “war” makes it sound like handbags at 10 paces and that’s just ridiculous. For the record, Nene worked at New Idea for six years, not the nine she now claims,’ Boling tartly told The Sydney Morning Herald in a 2013 piece entitled ‘Lunch with Dulcie Boling’.

King also made some public comment at the time, in a manner more befitting Nene. Semi-retired, she was keeping her hand in as an agony aunt – somewhat bizarrely, back at New Idea. (That’s the way it worked in mags. You could give your soul to one title for five years, get headhunted to the opposition, and be filled with hate for your former home in a week.)

New Idea ran a headline that said ‘Mag Wars! Nene’s only interview “Why I’ll never forgive Dulcie”,’ with a pic of a glaring King.

‘The ever-flamboyant Nene is particularly upset by recent reported comments by Dulcie, who allegedly claimed of her old rival, “She’s brain damaged”,’ said New Idea’s promotion of the issue.

Everyone who worked with King has a story to tell. Kerry Packer loved King, his ‘cash cow’. Staff would sometimes be startled to see that the man who had his feet up on King’s desk for a friendly morning chat was Kerry.

She had extraordinary power and it set her free.

Perhaps the most perfect Nene King story took place in the boardroom at Park Street.

Advertising agency Clemenger’s was in the boardroom re-pitching for the Australian Women’s Weekly account. With print, TV, outdoor and radio, and the lucrative media buy that went with it, Clemenger’s were doing their best to hold on to the multimillion-dollar gig.

There were maybe six people from Clemenger’s and an array of marketing and editorial people from ACP. As the agency people, with their architectural glasses and cool sneakers, began to talk through their ‘insights’, King’s capacity for bullshit ran out.

First, she rocked back in her chair and groaned, looking pointedly away from the increasingly desperate ad guy trying to hold the room. Then she just got up while he was still talking and wandered the length of the boardroom table to the door.

She opened it and stood still, looking back into the room. There was a long silence, then she let a loud, long and quite spectacular fart. She really put some effort into it.

‘Best thing I’ve heard all day,’ she shouted triumphantly, and walked out, slamming the door.

Advertisers loved to get senior editorial people into the room to tell them how amazing their product was, in the hope of some editorial coverage and orders of a magnitude more valuable than the ads they purchased.

Blackmores must have been a big advertiser at ACP because they hosted a lunch in the ACP boardroom that King had agreed to attend.

Blackmores had a ‘doctor’ in a white coat and spectacles to give a presentation after a sumptuous lunch with delicate wine pairings, prepared by the permanent in-house boardroom chef.

The couple of NW staffers who attended couldn’t wait to tell their King story. According to them, King (who always loved a big entrance), finally burst in just as they were serving the fish. Then she reportedly shouted ‘Is this a suck-up lunch or a thank-you lunch? If it’s a suck-up lunch, who the fuck do I suck up to?’

To her the credit, the Blackmores marketing manager put up her hand and, bursting yet another long, stunned silence, said, ‘Well, I’m paying, so I guess it’s me.’

Michael Sheather was the longest-serving writer at ACP, with an extraordinary 22 years under his belt on The Australian Women’s Weekly and Woman’s Day, much of it under King.

Sheather finally hung up his pen in 2020 when he was rewarded with redundancy for his years of effort. These days, he enjoys a quiet life with his family, working in his own content business from the cruisy New South Wales Central Coast.

‘Look, she behaved [at times] very badly, no doubt, but she did have a heart of gold and you knew she just had to get the rage out, then we could all move on. Once you got to know her you could see there was a vulnerability – almost fear – deep down. She was a mass-market editor who was a mass of contradictions,’ he says.

He illustrates this by recounting a pretty normal day in the office when he was a young journalist on Woman’s Day.

‘She screamed “Michael, get the fuck in here now!” When Nene made an offer like that, you didn’t refuse. I’d written a story about a rugby league referee who had a sex change and there was a legal injunction filed that might have taken the mag off the newsstands. That would have cost millions. “What the fuck are you doing to me?” she screamed, waving a mag in my face. She was purple and I thought she might punch me. “Look at this. He’s got a five-day growth and he’s in a Laura Ashley dress. For fuck’s sake, Michael, he’s a cock in a frock!”

‘Then she just dissolved in laughter. “Oh what the fuck!” she said. “Screw the lawyers. What do they know? The readers will fucking love it.”’

It was Friday 24 May 1996 when King’s life unravelled forever. Her beloved husband, Pat Bowring, a keen diver, disappeared at a popular spot 8 kilometres off the coast of Bondi. He went down and never came up. He was just 45.

There is a photograph of King, side-on, snapped the next day as she braved the trip out to sea to the spot he disappeared, that’s like a punch to the gut. Her grief is so obvious, so powerful, an image of a person forever dipped in a vat of agony. Nene and Pat had been together for 23 years and married for five.

‘I had a nervous breakdown and ended up in a psychiatric hospital, and turned to drugs and became a pathetic person,’ she told Mia Freedman, founder and owner of ‘Australia’s largest women’s media group’, Mamamia, on the platform’s podcast, No Filter, in early 2021.

I was as surprised as anyone else when I was made editor-in-chief of Woman’s Day in 1999. It was a weird job for a young man, a view shared by an unsettling number of the incumbent and highly experienced senior staff.

Nene invited me to the ACP ‘canteen’, Elizabeth Street restaurant Bambini Trust, for lunch and a chat. It must have been very close to her retirement. I was deeply uncomfortable, not because she was scary anymore, but because her ongoing torment was just so plain in her face and voice.

She didn’t want to tell me about the front part of the magazine, the newsy bit, but she was concerned about the middle bit, the lifestyle part with the health, food and fashion. One of Nene’s many genius editorial brainwaves was pioneering a feng shui column in Woman’s Day, before anyone knew what it was or how to pronounce it, which became – inexplicably to me – incredibly popular.

Nene wanted to know what ‘the next feng shui’ was going to be and that was, indeed, a very good question. She said it had to be all about the reader, so I brilliantly named the new middle bit ‘All About You’.

It was common knowledge she would smoke weed in the private bathroom in her office in Park Street, but when she retired, her drug use increased to up to ten joints a day. She would spend days in bed with crippling panic attacks, alone in her house in Victoria’s Caulfield South.

‘I was a disgrace but I was not strong enough to end it,’ she told No Filter.

King must have retired with plenty in the bank after years on an extraordinary salary.

But then she met Larry Sutcliffe, a therapeutic masseur who worked on cruise ships, and her dramatic downfall became a landslide. It was a story King would have loved to run in Woman’s Day. It had everything: fame, love, lies, and fascinating tragedy.

King and Sutcliffe would get through the day on a cloud of smoke and, for a couple of years, it seems they genuinely enjoyed each other’s friendship.

Sutcliffe found a new boyfriend, Colin Hahne, online and seemed happy. He introduced Hahne to King in April 2007 and it was in her backyard that day she first tried ice, supplied, she told Melbourne Magistrate’s Court in 2013, by Hahne. (This is a recounted memory from a difficult period in King’s life. Hahne was never charged in relation to supplying drugs.)

Hahne allegedly told her a story about his failed businesses and how broke he was and King took pity on him. Soon, she told the court, both men had moved into her Melbourne home and were living rent free.

‘I had these two people who really cared for me and looked after me,’ she said, and even had both men’s names tattooed on the inside of her arm.

Over that period, King was a regular visitor to the Melbourne Clinic, a psychiatric hospital, for treatment for depression and substance abuse.

It wasn’t until 2009, when her credit cards bounced during a trip to America with a friend that King realised her fortune had disappeared. She went to the police and only then discovered more than $500,000 was gone.

She mortgaged, then eventually sold, the Caulfield South house, and moved to Ballarat.

But in the 2013 case to recover her losses from Hahne, he successfully argued her spending was out of control and they had an arrangement where he had her permission to use her credit cards.

At one stage, Hahne was gifted with a $6000 watch and Sutcliffe got a car. ‘I guess I was sick,’ King told the court.

Hahne was found not guilty of 37 charges of obtaining property by deception in a judgement in February 2016, reported The Sydney Morning Herald on 12 February 2016.

Sutcliffe had already pleaded to one count of obtaining property from King by deception and was placed on a community corrections order.

The love of King’s life was long gone and now the bulk of her...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Preface
• Chapter 1: It was on for Young and Old
• Chapter 2: The Cult of Celebrity
• Chapter 3: In Excess
• Chapter 4: Joint Misadventures
• Chapter 5: How Do You Internet?
• Chapter 6: Ad Breaks
• Chapter 7: The Problem with Men
• Chapter 8: A Nightmare on Park Street
• Chapter 9: Bauer Beware
• Chapter 10: Cleo & Co
• Chapter 11: Stormy Pacific
• Chapter 12: Zoom Doom
• Chapter 13: Last Mags Standing
• Chapter 14: From Green Soup to Green Shoots
• Epilogue: The Way Forward
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Copyright