Phillip Schuler Read online

  Punctual to the minute each day, a neat little man would saunter round Damman’s corner, and shyly approach. He was a Dickensian figure in grey cutaway coat (a fashion even then remote from reality), stiff cuffs and shirt-front, lay-down collar and string tie. This tidy, precise figure was . . . G.F.H. Schuler. We did not know that for quite a while after we joined the paper; and until the day he died there was no more self-effacing man in the office.8

  David Syme was said to have ‘sought no public popularity, and shunned social life’ during his career. The same was true of Frederick Schuler. While he dabbled in the arts and literary criticism, he avoided public events and rarely mixed with the politicians and business leaders in whose careers and activities The Age took a forensic and often proprietorial interest. While his reclusive personality might have endeared him to Syme, there is no evidence that it impeded his success as a journalist. Soon after his appointment as chief of staff, The Age became embroiled in one of the biggest and most controversial stories in the paper’s history and Frederick would be a pivotal player.

  In the early 1890s The Age began to campaign against extravagance and alleged corruption in the Victorian bureaucracy and, particularly, in the Victorian Railways. The railways was driving a massive works program that would bequeath cities and towns across the state a legacy of grand public architecture and infrastructure—and debts to match. A series of articles savaged legislation that would have committed 41 million pounds to construct almost 5000 miles of new railway lines. It was asserted that much of the spending was at the behest of land speculators and their cronies in parliament, who looked to make a killing from a spike in land prices once remote areas were connected by rail. The newspaper warned that unchecked public works spending threatened to ruin the state’s finances. At the heart of the alleged profligacy stood a stocky, genial Englishman, Richard Speight, the chief commissioner of Victorian Railways.

  The Age campaign provoked a storm of protest inside and outside parliament. Syme stuck to his guns, eventually forcing the government to set aside the railway bills, suspend Speight and his two fellow railway commissioners, and appoint a standing committee to investigate the finances and administration of the department. As was the journalistic convention of the times, the Age articles appeared without bylines. According to Syme’s biographer and loyal editorial lieutenant Ambrose Pratt, all were written by Frederick Schuler. While Syme drove and directed the campaign, Schuler’s words made it a reality for readers. Victoria’s most senior lawyer and The Age’s advocate, King’s Counsel James Purves, described the articles as ‘among the most powerful ever written’. He lauded the paper for alerting Victorians to massive unauthorised expenditures the result of which, he said, would be ‘perfectly ruinous’ for the country.9 Alfred Deakin, Age contributor and prime-minister-to-be, said many MPs and senior bureaucrats were ignorant of the perilous financial situation before The Age exposed it.

  Richard Speight begged to differ. With the support of his allies in parliament, not least the free traders angered by The Age’s successful lobbying to maintain rigid tariff protection, he sued Syme for 25,000 pounds in damages on eleven counts of libel. The case triggered two marathon trials that involved 200 days of sittings across fifteen months. It would ruin Speight and came close to ruining Syme. The Age publisher fought with typical tenacity, with James Purves at the head of his legal team and Alfred Deakin assisting. Another key member of the defence team was Frederick Schuler. He helped marshal many of the 1000-plus exhibits, round up the scores of witnesses and assemble the mountains of paperwork.

  The first trial ran from June 1893 to February 1894 and ended with a hung jury. The retrial took a further 105 days. It ended in September 1894 with a Pyrrhic victory for Syme. He was found to have acted within his rights in commenting on the conduct of the railways and all of his charges of mismanagement and extravagance were, with one exception, sustained. But while Speight was not awarded damages, Syme had to pay his own legal costs of about 50,000 pounds—the equivalent of a year’s income for the publisher at the turn of the century. The case was disastrous for Speight whose counsel described his client as ‘utterly broken in fortune’. He was rescued from bankruptcy by the patronage of a clutch of powerful friends led by MP Ephrain Cox. Although Syme had fought hard against Speight in the courts, he would be privately magnanimous to his adversary. When he heard that Speight was being pressed by his creditors, Syme summoned Cox to his office where he wrote out a cheque for 100 pounds. The next day an emotional Speight came himself to the office. ‘Mr Syme, how could you do this?’ he said, as the two shook hands. ‘It was a great fight,’ Syme replied.10

  A great fight it might have been but, in the end, almost everyone in the colony was to lose. In the midst of Speight v. Syme the great land bubble burst, driving Victoria into the worst financial crisis in its history. The waste, mismanagement and speculative investment exemplified in the railways scandal triggered a crash that saw the closure of twelve substantial banks in early 1893, a plunge in rental values across Melbourne and a surge in unemployment. The Victorian budget was driven down to a million pound deficit from which it did not recover for several years. Among the many to lose their fortunes in the crash were Alfred Deakin and his father. But the crisis—and The Age’s role in exposing its underlying causes—would cement David Syme’s power and reputation, and assure Frederick Schuler’s place at his side.

  In the final decade of the 19th century, The Age grew to a position of unprecedented influence that was reflected in the ease with which it manipulated governments, dictated legislative reform and shaped the debate during the march towards Federation. The free traders, furious at his burgeoning influence, dubbed Syme ‘King David’, but the sobriquet intended as a slur would be embraced by many of his supporters as a measure of the relentless publisher’s strength and courage. After Syme slashed the paper’s price, circulation doubled to 110,000—one copy for every ten people living in the colony, probably the greatest market penetration of any metropolitan newspaper in the world. When Federation arrived in 1901 and Melbourne became the capital of both the State of Victoria and the nation of Australia, that influence multiplied, as Ambrose Pratt would boast:

  Throughout Victoria and over a great portion of the Commonwealth, The Age is now the ruling power. It influences the policies of both the Victorian State and the Federal Governments. It makes and unmakes ministries. No Cabinet is strong enough to be independent of its support, to resist its counsels, or to defy its directions. It simultaneously creates and expresses public opinion. In a word, it governs the country.11

  According to Pratt, Syme’s control of the Victorian government and the parliament was absolute:

  For more than a quarter of a century he selected every Victorian Premier and almost every Cabinet minister. But that was not all. Before each general election was held, the ministry of the day invariably submitted for his examination the list of Liberal candidates, and only gave the party support to the men he approved. Nobody knew of this except the persons interested and The Age staff. Syme ruled the country as absolutely as a Tsar, but so quietly and secretly was his domination exercised that the people hardly realised their yoke.12

  While outwardly modest and self-effacing, Syme relished the grip he held over the affairs of the nation. Great-grandson Ranald Macdonald, who would run The Age for twenty years before its takeover by the Fairfax family of Sydney in 1983, described him as vituperative and vindictive and his style of publishing as ‘autocratic and disturbingly powerful’. Syme himself had arrogantly acknowledged the reach of his power:

  Of course The Age was continually consulted as to the formation of ministries. Necessarily, of course, because it made and unmade them. I was always consulted, and I knew the ins and outs of everything. Had I kept a diary . . . it would have been a complete secret political history of Victoria.13

  On 1 January 1900 Frederick Schuler was made editor of The Age, an appointment that would place him firmly at the right hand of th
e kingmaker. Ambrose Pratt would rate Schuler and his predecessor, Arthur Windsor, as the paper’s two most distinguished editors, ‘men of Liberal spirit, political judgement and literary ability’. Schuler would edit The Age for 26 years, two short of Windsor—an endurance record that none of their successors would come near in the century that followed. Some, however, were less than flattering in their assessment of Schuler’s tenure as editor. C.E. Sayers was curtly dismissive, claiming Schuler lived in the shadow of David Syme: ‘His journalism was amiable, dedicated but outmoded. He made no public appearances and did his editing from an office desk—a remote, retiring figure.’14

  The Bulletin would be more generous in its assessment of Schuler’s leadership: ‘He wasn’t the erudite scholar that his predecessor A.L. Windsor was, and his writing was never so “literary”, but he knew far more about news and journalism—especially of the older sort—and he had an exceptional gift for getting to the heart of the matter. His mind was very penetrating.’15

  There’s no doubt that Schuler was as retiring and reticent a public figure as David Syme but, as with Syme, that should not have been grounds to dismiss the influence he wielded beyond the public gaze. While Syme pulled the levers of power through The Age, Schuler manned the engine room that gave life to it. He was a driven manager, directing the work of the staff, overseeing the daily production of the paper and fine-tuning its words. The one surviving image of Frederick Schuler in the photographic archives of The Age shows him poring over page proofs, seated at a desk he built himself in a secluded corner of the office. He would not go home until the paper was done and the presses were running in the early hours of each morning. While Schuler lived in David Syme’s professional shadow, that shadow was lifted with Syme’s death in 1908. Schuler would edit the paper for a further eighteen years under the less demanding directorship of Syme’s son Geoffrey. Schuler’s editorship would also coincide with a new era in which the editors of the biggest newspapers tended to be chosen on journalistic merit rather than their social connections. Like Edward Cunningham, his great rival on The Argus, Schuler had risen through the ranks to the top editorial post.

  Cunningham, who would edit The Argus from 1906 until his retirement in 1928, was eventually knighted for his services to journalism. It was an honour that would elude Frederick Schuler despite his equally meritorious career as a reporter and editor. While David Syme had rejected the offer of an imperial title, none was offered to his German-born protégé.

  2

  Phillip

  One afternoon in the late 1880s, Deborah Strahan visited an art studio in the Melbourne suburb of Richmond. ‘I met such a nice little man today,’ she casually remarked to her mother, after returning to her nearby home. Frederick Schuler might have been short of stature—well short indeed of the handsome woman he had met that day—but he made up for it in determination and persistence. Despite Deborah later telling one of her nieces that it was ‘always my idea that I would never marry a little man’, she and Frederick soon were engaged. They married at the bride’s home in Richmond Terrace in October 1888. The certificate signed by the Reverend Andrew Hardie of the Cairns Memorial Presbyterian Church in East Melbourne, where Deborah sang in the choir, noted that she was 25 and Frederick 34. The staff of The Age presented them with an elegant silver tea service. The couple took their honeymoon at Phillip Island. Nine months later, on 9 July 1889, their first child was born. In honour of the place of his conception, according to family folklore, they named him Phillip Frederick Edward Schuler.

  Deborah was the eldest of the eight surviving children of Edward Strahan and Sarah Anne Campbell, Irish Protestants who had arrived in Victoria in 1853. Another four of the Strahan children had died in infancy. A bright and outgoing girl, Deborah attended Presbyterian Ladies College and would become one of the first women in Victoria to matriculate, although she did not proceed to university. Instead, she followed her father into teaching.

  Shortly before her marriage, Deborah fell down the stairs at her parents’ home, sustaining head injuries that left her unconscious for several days. She appeared to make a full recovery, despite suffering periodic severe headaches from that time on. A decade later, her eyesight began to fail. Doctors discovered a bone pressing on her optic nerve. The Collins Street specialists in Melbourne could do nothing. Two of Deborah’s brothers, Ted and Sep Strahan, both doctors, sought opinions from leading physicians in Germany. They too said the condition was irreversible given the advanced state of Deborah’s injury. By the age of 45 she was blind in both eyes.

  Phillip Schuler and his two younger sisters grew up in the privileged cocoon of a wealthy and well-connected family. Dorothy Sarah Katrina arrived two years after Phillip and Wilhelmina Henrietta—known always as Minna—two years after that. In early 1891, soon after Frederick was appointed chief of staff of The Age and his pay jumped from 7 to 10 pounds a week, the family moved from Jolimont, beside the Melbourne Cricket Ground, to Denham Street in the popular new suburb of Hawthorn. After Minna’s birth, they moved again—to ‘Malford’, a grand residence at 10 Lisson Grove, Hawthorn. It would be the family home for the next half century.

  The house was located just east of the Yarra River beside an area known earlier as German Paddock, the original settlers being German orchardists and vignerons. The area retained a semi-rural flavour; graziers still drove their sheep down Lisson Grove to the abattoir. Set on a large block with lawns and trees at the front and the back, the house had bluestone foundations and a wide return verandah with mosaic tiles and lacework eaves. The dining room had a bay alcove with tall windows and there were marble fireplaces in most of the rooms, including the five bedrooms. A steep timber staircase led to the rooftop with its panoramic views of the surrounding neighbourhood. To the rear of the house was a double-storey timber stable and coach-house decked in wisteria and bougainvillea. Here, in the early years, were kept the horses and the phaeton, the light carriage that would fetch Frederick Schuler from the Bridge Road terminus after he caught the last tram back from the Age offices in the city each night. A groom slept in the loft where there was also a space that Frederick would often retreat to and paint watercolours. As well as the groom, the family was attended by a cook, a maid and a gardener.

  Frederick Schuler had difficult relationships with all of his children. At times he was playful and affectionate, joining family readings of Shakespeare and musical soirees. He would play the flute and Phillip the violin with Dorothy and Minna taking turns on the Beckstein grand piano while Phillip and Deborah sang. More often Frederick was distracted and remote, preferring solitude to family life. He dabbled in painting and gardening, but when not at the office he was frequently away alone on bushwalks or holed up in his study at Lisson Grove, writing or reading. When the siege of Mafeking ended in May 1900, at the height of the Boer War, the exuberance that swept the British Empire in support of Major General Robert Baden-Powell and his men reached Lisson Grove. Phillip and Dorothy were reprimanded for hammering the laundry washtubs so enthusiastically that they were ruined. In January the following year Dorothy and Minna were admonished for creeping along the side of the house and succumbing to a fit of giggles under the study window. Frederick had been engrossed with writing a solemn tribute to the newly dead Queen Victoria and was furious at the distraction. Dorothy, the more reserved and amenable of the children, would recall in her 90s how hurtful her father’s tongue could be:

  Father had a frightful temper. He was very quick tempered and it was all over in a minute. And he’d say the most awful things to us. He once told me I was too stupid to live and then it’d be all over and he’d expect you to forget about it too. But it went pretty deep with me, when he was angry.1

  The family would often go on holidays to the hills or the seaside—but rarely if ever with Frederick. Deborah and the children would travel to Point Lonsdale or Flinders on the Mornington Peninsula, to Olinda in the Dandenong Ranges or to Lindt’s Hermitage at Narbethong, in central Victoria. The Hermita
ge was a guest house set in elaborate gardens surrounded by stands of towering mountain ash and fern gullies. The resort had been developed by John William Lindt, a German-born photographer who had recorded the capture of the Kelly Gang at Glenrowan in 1880. Lindt won international acclaim for his anthropological studies of Aboriginal and Pacific Islands communities. He joined Sir Peter Scratchley’s expedition to New Guinea in 1885, presenting an album of his photographs from the mission a year later at the Colonial Exhibition in London. It may well have been Lindt’s lantern slide shows and enthusiastic accounts of his adventures in the outback and around the South Seas that inspired Phillip Schuler to later take a camera to war, with spectacular results. Lindt would become one of a small circle of close friends of Frederick Schuler, who visited the Hermitage alone to indulge his passion for bushwalking. Frederick also travelled alone to the remote mountain town of Omeo in eastern Victoria and to Rotorua in New Zealand where he saw the fabled ‘pink terraces’ of marble before they disappeared during a volcanic eruption in 1886.

  Frederick would indulge his children with occasional visits to the opera and the theatre. Dorothy would see all of Wagner’s Ring cycle with her father. They were also occasional guests at Government House after the Earl of Dudley became Governor-General in 1908. Lady Dudley took a shine to both the newspaper editor and his daughter. ‘She would often send for father to tell her about what was going on,’ Dorothy recalled. Her ladyship also proposed that Dorothy visit regularly to socialise with the Dudley children, a proposal her parents politely declined: ‘Mother and father wouldn’t let me because they thought I would get above myself.’