John Hurst, Nation Review, July 21-27, 1977, p. 11.

Max Newton is living comfortably in his Toorak mansion on an income — mainly from pop magazines — of between $30,000 and $40,000 a month. He says he is struggling. He has a swimming pool and a parttime handyman-gardener to keep his lawns and flower beds in trim. Nevertheless he’s struggling, or as he puts it, “surviving from day to day”. It’s all very sad really. All things being relative 40 thou must seem a pittance when you’ve known better days and Max has known better days. He was making a lot more in his heyday as publisher of assorted comics and the weekly sex and scandal sheet, the Sunday Observer.

About ten weeks ago, he says, his earnings were almost nothing. He had just been relieved of his responsibilities as publisher by E. O. Smith, the Sydney accountants acting as administrators for creditors of his companies, and Max gives the impression he didn’t know where his next quid was coming from.

Under the new ownership of Peter Isaacson Publications, in which the Herald and Weekly Times have an interest, the Observer is tamer although it still displays the tits and bums and columns of titillation Max made famous. Sunday morning without “Mad Max” must be very dull for the thousands who eagerly awaited his violently hysterical column branding politicians as rats, liars, fools, mountebanks or communists. Max is no longer very interested. He seems to want to forget that he had anything to do with it:

It could be argued that I could have done something more interesting or demanding. But too fucking bad. It’s over.

I used to regard papers like Truth and the Mirror as poor. I could never find anything in them worth reading. I didn’t know anything about popular journalism. I couldn’t work out how they did it. But in 1971 when Gordon Barton’s Sunday Observer flopped it seemed to me there was an opportunity to get control of a big selling paper for very little money. It seemed a good business opportunity.

It was a pretty straight family tabloid at first. The Observer only really became violent in the 18 months after John Sorrell (former editor) left. A former sub on the Herald, John Brook, and another bloke, a New Zealander, made it more violent. I didn’t particularly like it, but I’ve always tried to give talented journalists their head. It’s too late to argue the point. I didn’t interfere with what they did and used to encourage them from time to time.

I’ve always written in violent terms about politics. I used to do a column in the Financial Review called “Canberra Observed” by Cato which was the most violent piece of political writing in the 50s or 60s. I’ve always been in trouble because of the violence with which I’ve written. I like stirring people up.

I think it’s the function of political journalists. The only subjects I’ve written about are politics and money. It’s the function of political and economic journalists to attack all the established power sources.

I’ve always taken the view that in this country established power is very settled and happy with itself and there aren’t too many people in a position to criticise or try to bring down people in power. I’ve always detested people having power over me or any other human being, no matter their political colour, and I’ve tried to bring them down and make them fight each other and suspicious of each other and expose them in any way I can. I’ve always worked on a no holds barred basis.

Journalists never need worry about something to do while they have that permanent function of making life uncomfortable for people in power. The idea that journalists can be objective is a self-deception on a grand scale and the sooner we recognise the extent of our own huge bias the better. That’s why I disliked the postures and pretensions of Perkin (Graham Perkin, later editor of the Age). The whole Perkin mystique was vomit making. He was a puffed up pretender who put out a so-called objective newspaper which was nothing more than a mouthpiece for the socialist left.

Be praised, be damned but never be ignored was Max’s philosophy. He expected to be sued for libel and so he was, frequently. ACTU president, Bob Hawke, who went to the same school and university in Western Australia as Max, was among those who got money out of him. He still detests Hawke. He sneers at the bastardised dingo degree of B. Litt. which Hawke, a Rhodes scholar, got at Oxford while Max was getting a first at Cambridge, and at Hawke’s intellectual pretensions.

What Hawke does is to become associated with people who are his intellectual inferiors by a mile, bully them mercilessly, and then allocate to himself from that “no contest” position the prize of being an intellectual.

An old mate of mine, John (now Senator) Wheeldon — a very funny, very talented man though I disagree with him politically, would eat Hawke intellectually. Hawke is a bloody good salesman, always has been. He got his guernsey on the ACTU research staff with the help of Horrie Brown, the Australian statistician who conceived the Australian National Income Accounts. He was then able to do a pioneering job browbeating judges in the Arbitration Commission.

Hawke regarding Newton with equal if not greater disdain. Most of the time he behaves as if Max was not there, which must rankle with a man who hates being ignored.

When Max ran the Observer on the formula of tits, TAB, trots, footy and the private lives of nymphomaniacs and starlets the results made him look like a mini tycoon. Circulation and revenue went up from 95,000 & $25,000 in September 1973, to 160,000 & $60,000 by the end of 1974. The selling price had gone up from 25 cents to 40 cents but it didn’t seem to matter. There were always more people who wanted Max’s frills and vicarious thrills in preference to the rival rag, the bland Sunday Press.

What went wrong, says Max, is that he was too impetuous in the purchase of new printing plant in 1974 and 1975. The fantastic increases in the price of newsprint also hit hard. The creditors moved in.

Max had to enter a scheme of arrangement with creditors of his companies to sort out debts amounting to millions. “After the holocaust over at Richmond there was every possibility I would be ruined and bankrupt,” he says. He has had to give person guarantees on plant purchases in excess of $3 million. He has no idea what the sale of the plant will bring. He says he has not been told.

He puts the losses incurred between 1973 and the scheme of arrangement with creditors in 1976 at between one and a half and two million dollars. Reports that debts of his companies amount to six million dollars have been exaggerated. “A journalist I trained made that mistake because he added up the total debts of the scheme companies forgetting that about two thirds were inter-company debts,” he says.

The tax department is also after him for $204,000 allegedly underpaid over the past seven years. He suggested to them facetiously that they might as well make it a round figure of one million dollars to compound his problems. He still has a lot of cheek.

It’s all very trying but he’s not complaining overmuch. He is bringing out magazines like Teen Beat, Pop Quiz, Super Star 77 and a thing on the Skyhooks, selling for about one dollar to $1.25, and has plans to revert to the serious scoop journalism he wrote or organised as political correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald, as managing editor of the Financial Review and Australian in the 50s and 60s. “I hope to put up a paper which will deal with the serious subjects of money, politics, economic policy, the unions, industry and banks complex — the power setup — on a basis which will make it completely immune from libel.”

He will never run a daily newspaper again, he says, and he couldn’t work again for one of the big groups. He’s too much of a maverick.

I got very sick of the bureaucratic setup at Fairfax and News Ltd. The whole time I was working for Fairfax and Rupert Murdoch I had a running battle against the managers who tried to tell me what I could or could not say. I’ve never been able to stomach it.

I’ve always been very wilful and I’ve paid and paid and paid for that attitude, but I’ve not changed it. Rupert Henderson (managing director of John Fairfax Ltd) was a man of tremendous insight and political and editorial skill and an inspiration to me, but many times he thought I was mad in the way I carried on. He said I could not be controlled. He kept saying to me that I had to stay on at Fairfax and become one of the leaders of the company, if not the leader, but I never had any tact, any self-discipline.

With Henderson and other Sydney Morning Herald executives, Newton supported former Country Party leader Jack McEwen, against Menzies when Ming was backing British entry into the common market. There were, he says, many rows about that.

With the support of Henderson and Warwick Fairfax, he campaigned for Arthur Calwell against Menzies in the 1961 election and Ming scraped home by one seat. He wanted to do it again in 1963, but the economy had improved and Fairfax was against it and Max got out and joined Murdoch.

On all matter of policy I found Rupert to be very superficial. Of course, that does not matter a bugger in my opinion, so far as the success of Rupert’s enterprises is concerned. His great flair is his ability to gamble, his courage and judgment. What I found a fault and a lot of other people did not give a fuck about was his overriding sense of intellectual inferiority, which makes it very uncomfortable for anybody to talk to him about matters of policy.

A more general fault is his capriciousness in his relations with employees. He chews journalists up and spits them out all the time. That does not seem to affect the editorial success of his publications, so who am I to say he is wrong. But I found it impossible to work for him on an ongoing basis because of his contempt for serious journalistic standards. Rupert really has no time for that. He is too busy promoting the growth of his publications. He has shown much greater loyalty to the managerial people — the production people and financial controllers, rather than for editorial people.

Generally Max has no time for politicians.

They have to be rats and liars because they are required to reconcile all the aspirations of conflicting groups into some workable synthesis. The only politician I ever had any time for was Bert Kelly, the Member for Wakefield, SA, who conducted a lone, thankless campaign in favour of low tariffs with no hope of preferment under Menzies. I find it appalling that anybody can regard it as a credible proposition that our national problems will be solved by politicians.

For a while, in 1975, he was director of the Workers Party. “But I did that for a mate, John Singleton (Chairman of the Party), who wanted me to give him a hand. It was a real pain. Journalists should be outside the whole political thing.” (Max fell out with the Workers Party when he referred to Jim Spigelman, secretary of Whitlam’s media department, as “a little Jew boy”.)

Although once a firstclass scholar, he has a lot of contempt for academics. The Australian academic community is characterised, he says, by laziness, bitchiness, derivative thought patterns, frustration and suffers from “a collective dose of the Poor Mes”.

The only people — apart from himself and a few friends — who he seems to think have much intellect are public servants, the source of many of his leaks when he ran the Canberra newsletter Incentive. In those days he scared the shit out of politicians with leaks from treasury and other departments. It caused his former ally against Menzies, Black Jack McEwen, to denounce him as a Japanese spy. The Commonwealth Police raided his office to seize files. “But they made a balls of that,” he says.

The clue to Newton’s erratic, some say paranoid or psychotic behaviour, is the influence of drugs and booze, which he admits got a bad hold over him. “For 25 years of my life I was addicted to drugs and alcohol which had the effect of blotting out reality,” he says.

He’s kicked the habit how and is sceptical of taking aspirin. Feet up, spreadeagled on the settee, he looks calmer — almost placid until he lets his guard down — certainly more congenial than in the hectic days at the Observer when he ranted and raved at journalists he would call mate in his occasionally good moods. In those days, he says, he was in a rage for virtually 24 hours a day and sought refuge in booze, tranquillisers and sleeping pills because he could not cope with the anxiety and tension.

I was on benders with the Observer in 1972 and 1973. I became suicidal. At a time of very great business stress and the breakdown of my first family, I had to be hospitalised suffering from acute alcoholic poisoning. Fortunately, with help, I’ve been able to remain on the path of recovery. There’s no fucking permanent recovery.

Characteristically, people addicted to booze and drugs are emotionally immature. That’s why I could not get on in organisations like Fairfax and News Ltd. It was not that I was some fucking high-minded man of principle. I was a very difficult person to get along with because I was emotionally very immature. By the time I was 44 I was no more emotionally mature than when I was 14. It’s only in recent years that I’ve been able to learn anything about how to acquire a degree of emotional maturity.

To me emotional immaturity is characterised by the following emotions dominating one’s life: unreasoning fear, guilt, hate, anger, envy, self pity and depression.

It sounds a bit like the seven deadly sins muttered by Max from the confessional.

I suffered from guilt when I was a little boy. I came from a very strict Methodist household where guilt was very deeply ingrained in the whole family attitudes. But it would not be fair to explain my feelings of guilt purely be reference to the Methodist Church. The causes of irrational guilt are a lot more subtle than attending the Methodist Church since the age of four. This illness of self pity, guilt and fear is more likely some sort of arrested emotional development which nobody knows anything about.

Hate and envy?

Well, if there was any setback it was due to “THEM”. The person who suffers in this way has a virtually non-existent ability to be honestly self-appraising. If you have a setback, you say: “It’s those bastards — it’s them.”

He laughs at himself:

Fucking THEM.

I think that this attitude showed itself in my writing. It was almost like public vomit.

Newton says he feels calmest when he can regard life as a game, a kind of Swiftian black joke:

I can take things bloody seriously and have taken things obsessively. But I feel happiest and most relaxed when I can stand off from it all and see how trivial most of the things one got worked up about were and are. I suppose I’ve changed my priorities. My priorities and more to do with family life than they were.

My first family was never very satisfactory — nothing to do with my wife or children but to do with me. There are so many people who have not been able to cope with tension and anxiety and have carried it over into their family life and ruined it. I’ve had this opportunity to have another family and enjoy family life in the past few years in a way that was not possible before.

In the past three years I’ve had more “objective” type disasters than in the rest of my life put together. And yet over this period I’ve been able to become calmer in relation to those facts than at any other time. I’m trying to live calmly and free of fear.

With the alcoholic, suicide is just outside the door, never very far away. No matter how well have may became he has to apply himself to a program of self-development.

We need to conduct a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

In his time Max has been a clever, energetic journalist, a reputation no one can deny him however much they hate him. It’s hard to believe his suggestion that his rave period with the Observer was simply a gigantic aberration from the norm. But he’s not making many excuses, he knows the other devils inside his thick hide and he’s trying for something better.