The Estimable Symes of Melbourne

Elizabeth Morrison’s large and handsome book tells the life-story of the Melbourne Age newspaper, and the story of the vigorous and versatile Lowland Scots family of Sime (or Syme) who were the newspaper’s presiding power for over a century, from Victorian colonial times on and into Federation.

Today, those equipped to indulge in gloomy high-level media speculation are freely predicting that (merely by coincidence with the appearance of Elizabeth Morrison’s book) the Age, no longer under the charmed tutelage of the Symes, will shortly cease publication for ever. I do not myself know the likelihood of this happening, but I plainly state my opinion that the Age is today a feeble and foolish newspaper and would be small loss.

And I state that view as one who worked regularly and rewardingly for the Age for years—writing a weekly or fortnightly column, book reviews or general articles. I once in my column asked questions about a pig farm in which the then prime minister Paul Keating was privately investing. Keating was offended, and peremptorily demanded the editor sack me, which the editor promptly did.

I was seized with a vast (however futile) longing to recall the immense David Syme, the family’s most outstanding leader, from the huge and imposing Egyptian tomb where he has lain long years with his wife Annabella in the Melbourne suburb of Kew. Personal success of these dimensions may have a flip side. As a supremely wealthy man it was his habit to purchase his cigars in lots of 1000. His death, partly due to oesophageal cancer, may be a grim irony.

How wonderful to be able to hear that man’s insights on the really curly questions of newspaper life! Alas! But the scrupulous detailed recording of Elizabeth Morrison’s researches is the nearest I am ever to reach to the word with the actual warmth of blood in it, and I count myself lucky indeed for her gift.

Those seven children of George Alexander Sime and his wife Jean who might sensibly if figuratively be called “alumni of the Melbourne Age” were born in a quiet part of the Scots Lowlands, about forty miles from Glasgow. The first bairn was Ebenezer, in 1825; David, eventually the most potent and celebrated nabob of the Age, was born in 1827. The Sime household might have appeared to follow an almost comical pattern of Scots—all rigid Calvin and John Knox; the Scots Established Church did not seem actually to bubble over with levity. In his writings of later life, David claimed to have found Father pretty heavy going. George Alexander held a distinguished degree in Classics, and presumably was qualified to be an ordained minister, but he was only a humble local schoolmaster.

From the other interesting detail in this book, we see mentions of alternative and truly enlargening and enlightening aspects of education: James Morison’s theological broadening and revisionary establishment at Kilmarnock; attendance at wide-open, swinging Heidelberg University in Germany; the possibility of lectures from—even acquaintance with—Hegel and Feuerbach.

Few of the Symes made their various separate moves to the colonies wholly empty-handed of skills useful in their new environment, much though they still had to learn. David’s term as a proofreader on a Glasgow newspaper was almost uncannily serviceable for him at the Age. With Ebenezer, the first Sime/Syme to join the Age, earlier relevant experience went much further; he had served as an assistant to the prominent London bookseller John Chapman, who was also editor of the respected Westminster Review. Here, Ebenezer in turn assisted Marian Evans, better known as George Eliot the novelist, and perhaps celebrated equally for her disdain for the ordinary conventions of Victorian-age matrimony.

So utterly multifarious and so far-reaching were the activities of David Syme and his family, and so generous has Professor Morrison been in her provision of new, fascinating and authoritative details, that this thick biography (almost 450 pages) has taken on also something of the category of a concordance; though it hardly adds to ready light readability, there’s nothing wrong with that, as I said recently myself in reviewing Oxford University Press’s classy new biography of George Orwell by Professor Robert Colls.

As a result of this “dual function”, the book is already my own most thumbed acquisition in years, likely to fall apart long before many others decades old. I shall use my space this month to offer a general tour of it to intelligent general readers—people far more numerous than is generally recognised, and never to be patronised by “intellectuals”. I hope they will discern my estimate of its value, and that some of them may share it. Unhappily I shall need to pass by a great many fascinating, authenticated new facts.

First, a word about the illustrations: an unusual place to start. There are only sixteen, each one full page; there is no shiny art paper; there is no colour. Yet they fit the book’s design and tone perfectly, with the excellent and “eye-easy” typography; the subjects chosen (whether persons, buildings or machines) give the maximum information. In all, the design of this book pays its reader a mature compliment.

The name of David Syme today usually calls up some association with the Age, and inevitably so, and most often in a role broadly practical. He was either its editor, or carried the ultimate editorial can; he led the paper’s (indeed Australia’s) technological production revolution: from flat individual sheets of paper to printing from webs of newsprint of stupendous length fed from reels, and folding as they ran, into individual newspapers separated at the “cut-off” and rushed out literally warm to be sold on the street, commonly for between a penny and sixpence.

Under Syme, the laborious hand-setting and painful composition of type, character-by-individual-character, was succeeded by column-wide shining solid slugs of metal, cast “from the pot” of Mr Mergenthaler’s newly-invented linotype machine.

Connection of the world’s chief international centres by submarine cable abolished the frustrating wait of months for despatches from abroad. But at what a price! From Elizabeth Morrison I learn that each single word could cost over ten shillings in a Federation-time pound. The need to enforce economy on communicating pressmen explains the invention of the grotesque language “cablese”. I recall a famous journo of the 1930s, a mentor (and idol), in happy expectation of a winter assignment in Fiji, showing me the message in which his chief had cancelled the trip: “UN-GO FIJI” it simply said.

Syme was foremost among the leaders of the Australian capital-city newspapers in organising our local press associations to withstand the “rapacious Reuters”.

Quite early in this systematic look at Syme’s whole life, a pitfall beset me (if not a gin too) set by Elizabeth Morrison herself in the form of her single page 407, titled “Appendix B”, “David Syme’s Personal Publications”. There are but nine listed, roughly half books and half contributions to learned or cultural journals. I was astonished to find that clearly we had here a high-powered intellectual at the helm of the Age.

One item, On the Modification of Organisms, published by George Robertson in Sydney in 1890, was about an alternative theory of evolution which, at least for a few weeks, seemed likely to displace Charles Darwin himself from the evolutionary ladder. Syme published Landlordism: In its Moral, Social and Economic Relations and Representative Government in England: Its Faults and Failures. There was also “On the Increment in the Value of Land in Melbourne”—how apt with the Land Boom about to bust. Regarded as a sophisticated, refined and subtle piece of moral reasoning was his careful book of 234 pages The Soul: A Study and an Argument, published by Macmillan in 1903. This surely would be an unusually delicate sort of undertaking for a newspaper proprietor; I have not heard of any current Australian one similarly engaged.

There is nothing like the Syme families for versatility. Commander Hugh Syme’s extraordinary bravery in defusing explosives and saving the lives of thousands is one example—outstandingly the most decorated officer in our Australian Navy.

I said this book resembled a concordance, but many a general reader will find it the handiest of references to have on their own shelves. I shall be referring to it constantly for the rest of my life.