There’s a bear in there
Melbourne Observer proprietor Maxwell Newton recruited award-winning journalist John Sorell (pictured) in the early 1970s to edit the independent Sunday weekly newspaper. I was a teenager working as a ‘casual’ in the Richmond printery.
First working from offices in St Kilda Rd, then briefly above Waverley Offset Printers, then at Newton St in Richmond, Sorell led a tight team that quickly increased the circulation from 45,000 to 210,000 copies. For one VFL Grand Final edition, printer Tom Gardiner churned out 240,000 copies.
John Sorell -nicknamed the ‘Bear’ – was a taciturn bully. There is no other way to put it. And I was just a print factory teenage ‘casual’ … but with a difference. I was an ambitious first-year university student, 18, writing for Farrago, the weekly campus newspaper. I was getting a few stories that scooped the dailies and the weeklies, and that certainly caught Sorell’s eye.
One story was a one-on-one interview with Ernie Sigley, TV’s biggest name at the time. Sigley gave me an exclusive double-page interview at a time when he was talking to no other media. Sorell took me to lunch at Ron Richards’s Prince Alfred Hotel, across the road from the Observer offices. He offered me $300 – $100 in three weekly payments – for reproduction rights.
I did the right thing. I contacted Myke Dyer, Publicity Director at Channel 9. He patched me through to Ernie’s home at Emerald Hill (South Melbourne), and in a three-way call, we agreed that I wouldn’t sell the story to the Observer. It cost me money short-term, but it gave me a lifetime association with the Sigley family. I used to see Ernie regularly when he hosted the afternoon program at Melbourne radio station 3AW.
• Footnote: John Sorell published the interview anyway, without paying the money. He simply added a few ‘Sigley reportedly said’ lines story, and front-paged the story in the Observer.