THE BANDAR LOG – A LABOR STORY OF THE 1950s

Australian Canberra Press Gallery journalist Alan Reid was both a player and an observer of the great Labor split of the 1950s. From his experience, he not only came to a very dark view of political players on all sides but also wrote a novel – The Bandar Log – depicting the machinations of both key and peripheral participants in the drama that rent the ALP. Reid’s novel remained unpublished after a court case against it found the text to be libellous until, more than five decades later, academic and journalist Ross Fitzgerald and Connor Court Publishing have now published an edited version which was launched at The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 24 June 2015. Helen Trinca, Managing editor with The Australian and editor of The Deal magazine, spoke about The Bandar Log as fiction while Ross Fitzgerald gave an account of how the lost text was rediscovered.

THE BANDAR LOG – A LABOR STORY OF THE 1950s

ROSS FITZGERALD

The late Alan Reid (who was born in 1914 and died in 1987) was probably the most influential political journalist in twentieth century Australia.

Working for most of his long career as Canberra correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, Reid not only reported key events in Australian politics, but also from time to time actively participated in them. Apart from his hitherto suppressed novel The Bandar Log: A Labor Story of the 1950s, Alan Reid wrote three major works of non-fiction: The Power Struggle, published in 1969, The Gorton Experiment, published in 1971 and The Whitlam Venture, published in 1976.

As Stephen Holt and I point out in our biography Alan (“The Red Fox”) Reid, which was shortlisted for the 2011 National Biography Award, Reid’s roman á clef, which highlighted the Machiavellian nature of Labor politics in the 1950s, was submitted to Angus & Robertson in 1958. However Dr Colin Roderick, who worked at the time for A&R insisted that Reid’s novel was libellous. As a result, the publisher withdrew its initial support.

In 1960, as Stephen Holt and I explain, another attempt at publishing The Bandar-Log, this time by J.P. Atkins of Cleveland Publishing, also failed. The printer, Halstead Press, a subsidiary of Angus & Robertson, was ordered to halt the print-run by its owner-company.

A celebrated legal case followed the abandonment of the printing. Atkins (who was president of the Democratic Labor Party in NSW) sued Halstead for breach of contract. However, in September 1961, Judge W.B. Perringnon of the Sydney District Court found the novel to be libellous and the claim was dismissed.

Indeed, in a legal first, Reid’s novel had been judged to be defamatory without having been published!

The Bandar Log is a document of considerable historical significance. This is because Reid’s novel is a thinly fictionalised recreation of the great Labor split of the 1950s. This schism in Labor’s ranks began in October 1954 when its erratic federal party leader Dr H. V. (“Doc”) Evatt denounced the perceived influence wielded over the party by the anti-communist Catholic activist B. A. (“Bob”) Santamaria. The resulting donnybrook involved personality clashes as well as ideological conflict. The messy saga featured a diverse array of participants – including Catholic churchmen, trade union bosses, state premiers, state and federal Labor politicians and assorted commentators and journalists.

The characters appearing in The Bandar-Log mirror, with varying degrees of faithfulness, these actual participants in the Labor split. For example, in Reid’s novel the character Kaye Seborjar (i.e. “Cesare Borgia”) is clearly Dr Evatt, while the character Carr Domineco is undoubtedly Bob Santamaria. Moreover in The Bandar-Log, the hard-bitten political insider Macker Kalley (i.e. “Machiavelli”) is none other than Reid himself.

Fortuitously, and thanks to the diligent and helpful staff of the Mitchell Library in Sydney, I was able to access and copy the 1960 galley proofs of Alan Reid’s hitherto unpublished novel. As a rule of thumb, each single galley equaled three pages of the manuscript.

At The Sydney Institute, Anusha Rutnam digitally converted the old, complicated and arcane typeset manuscript into a relatively readable format. But a problem was that some of the 1960 galleys were both quite difficult to read and/or were overwritten in Reid’s own hand. Moreover, the 1960 version of The Bandar-Log literally repeated hundreds of “I said”, “she said”, “he said”, “they said”, etc. So, to make Reid’s novel more accessible and readable, a great many of these repetitions were omitted.

After I completed the first editing process, Paige Hally then meticulously re-typed the manuscript from the original. At this stage Terry Moriarty’s fact checking and proof reading was extremely helpful. Then, after a final edit, Nathan Lentern painstakingly entered all the various corrections into the final manuscript.

In the publication of The Bandar-Log, I am especially indebted to Alan Reid Jr – who is with us here this evening with his sister Susan McLean – and to other members of the family of the late Alan Reid. I would also like to thank the family of the late, great, cartoonist Les Tanner – whose extremely evocative portrait of Alan Reid (which originally appeared on the front of Quadrant magazine) graces the cover of this book. As it happens, it was none other than Peter Coleman, whose memoir we are also celebrating tonight, who as editor of Quadrant at the time arranged for Les Tanner to draw this portrait of Alan Reid.

While Alan Reid’s hitherto unpublished Australian Labor novel of the 1950s is hardly War and Peace or Great Expectations, I hope that when you read The Bandar-Log you will see why historians like myself and Stephen Holt, along with leading political commentator Laurie Oakes, and former journalist now Prime MinisterTony Abbott, thought it important to at last publish The Bandar-Log for all to read.

Thanks indeed for organising this fine function Gerard. And thank you for pressing my publisher, Connor Court, to feature Tanner’s brilliant cartoon portrait of Alan Reid on the book’s front cover.