The rapid growth of the Melbourne Observer newspaper was reported upon by Norman Thompson of The Review on July 22, 1972:

The enigmatic Max Newton has set Melbourne newspaper circles abuzz with plans to upgrade his Sunday paper, the Melbourne Observer.

Newton has signed up one of Australia’s most highly-paid journalists, Walkley winner John Sorell of the Melbourne Herald, to edit the Observer. Sorell won wide acclaim for his startling revelations of water torture by Australian servicemen in Vietnam some years ago and won a Walkley last year for his exclusive interview with the then newly deposed Prime Minister, John Gorton.

Sorell will make the sercond top staffer from the Herald to join Netwon. Observer news editor, Peter Fitzgerald, was formerlya senior eporter in Flinders St before joining the Newton stable. The Observer is also reported to be seekingthe services of a top reporter from Murdoch’s Melbourne Truth.

Newton is after new premises closer to the city to house his expanding Observer operations. While holding a steady chunk of the Melbourne Sabbath market, Newton’s Observer has been forced into stepping up its reader chasing to combat the tabloid Telestrine.

The offset-printed Observer has gone ahead in leaps and bounds in recent months, going very strong on magazine and features. Ads have been a bit light but the features are winning a loyal readership.

First move in the popularity stakes came with the Observer’s printing of large extracts from the Little Red Schoolbook, and sales soared to an all-time high that day. Further planned extracts from the book were withdrawn on legal advice. As yet, the Observer has no foreign service, but I understand plans are afoot to take a UPI wire in the very near future.

Newton’s Sunday venture was born last year out of the sudden closure of the Review’s lamented sister paper, the Sunday Observer. When the Barton-owned Sunday Observer was launched, late in 1969, plans were publicly mooted to eventually step up operations with the eventual aim of coming out as an evening daily. The big question now is whether Newton himself is pursuing this course.

Another Newton move in Melbourne causing much talk and speculation is the sudden interest he has shown in the national teenage pop weekly, Go-Set. Newton men have been looking closely at the publication and certain exploratory moves towards acquisition are expected within weeks.

Newton’s renewed activity in Melbourne corresponds with a winding down of interstate operations. The organisation’s sole remaining printery, Shipping Newsppapers (Qld) Ltd in Brisbane, has been sold. The latest issue of Graphic Arts sees the sale as “another link in a chain of events where has refelcted a sharp decline in the fortunes of one of the most rapidly expanding publishing groups in recent years”.

At the height of the Newton expansion, the group acquired the Perth-based Fenton Publications, a shipping journal in San Francisco, the Brisbane printery of the old Shipping Newspapers Group along withg its own local building journal, the Sydney trade journal publisher ABC Publishing Co Pty Ltd and culminated in the launching of the Observer.

However, in the period of just over a year Newton has disposed of a number of NSW country newspapers at a fraction of their purchase cost and abandoned several others, curtailed operations in Perth, disposed of and merged a number of business journals and closed in March this year the group’s head printery at Fyshwick.

Under the reoganisation Sydney will now become the base for production operations, housing typesetting and composing facilities and relying on outside printers.

Max wows ’em at the club

A Review Special Correspondent continued in the same July 22 edition in 1972:

When Supermax socks it to ’em, he really goes. Max newton, that is, and on Thursday he had the newly formed Melbourne Press Club roaring at his outrageous speechmaking.

Max got a record attendance of about 60 upstairs in the carpeted seediness of Hosies pub at the cornerof Elizabeth and Flinders Sts. Except for some young spies it seemed an audience of the weary and the dreary.

Not so Max, who won his audience immediately by saying that friendless journos were treated “like shit on the carpet”. Then he described his Melbourne Observer colleague Frank Browne as “a great freedom fighyert and one of Australia’s leading drunk journalists”.

After a bit of detail about battling with lawyers (“They tell you to write nothing except the weather,”) over a story on Sir Reg Ansett, Max told of the day when his libel writs added up to $42.17 million and his assets $165,000. What will you do if they succeed, he was asked. “I’ll be left a bit short,” was the laconic reply. “And the Bank of New South Wales will be left a bit short too.”

Some suitably scurrilous remarks about Labor and Liberal leaders followed and then a heavy serve for the proprietors: “Warwick Fairfax is a very interesting proprietor … he used to call me up all the time and talk about world affaird because he had heard I went to the university of Cambridsge.”

Newton said he’d put his leather-soled shoes up oto scratch Warwick’s desk – and always ask for an ashtay which he never had.

Rupert Henderson once said to him, “That Fairfax, that Fairfax … he goes out at night with that Jew bitch and comes in in the morning thinking he’s fuckin’ Tarzan.”

Rupert Murdoch wants to be a respectable publisher but keeps publishing millions of pictures of tits. It was Murdoch who put “a mate of mine called Walter Kommer” in his office to listen to Max’s phone calls”.

Passing quickly over the proprietors’ propensity for getting involved with women, he mentioned how Rupert came to him and suggested that a blue-eyed blonde on The Australian be promoted from second-year cadet to B-grade. Rupert later married her.

He advised the journos: “Keep all letters from ministers, destory all the documents from officials … only documents will tell you really what is going on in the government … you have to infiltrate.”

He said mini9sters were very vain and very frightened and hated their colleagues. “You can get under their guard very quickly.”

To the giggles of the women (full members), Max said he reached his zenith in journalism in 1967 at the International Monetary Fund conference at6 Rio de Janeiro when Biddy McMahon’s speech wasshown to him BEFORE he had made it, in case Max had any advice to offer: “Sonia kept coming out and showing me the new hair rollers she’d bought. They were very avant garde in those days. Billy had a look at them and said how marvellous they were.”

A few swipes at PR men led Max to Flinders St: “The PR operation by the ruling clique of Collins St – Bolte and a few of his mates at the Melbourne Herald – is the most consummate, skilful job done for a long time.

“You have to take your hats off to the Melbourne Herald for the way for the way they have been able to wash brains white for about a decade and a half. It was done with tremendous skill. It kept people’s minds off the important and on the irrelavnt and trivial. It served to consolidate the financial and politicxal power of a group of people in this state as in no other way in Australia.”

He told of going into a premier’s office with $15000 in $10s and leaving it on the desk. “The line between bribery and political contributions in this country is extremely narrow. The main thing is to do it on the Wednesday week before the Saturday before the elections. With ten grand they’ll bloody near sign anything.”

He saw H&WT chief, Sir Phil Jones, as an accountant: “You can’t tell me that any bloke who counts money can be a mad life-force in the community.”

After a pathetic defence of his attack on Bob Hawjke at question time, Max pedicted that Murdoch could possibly raise $200 million internationally to take over the Melbourne Herald Group. “That’s one way he can do it. The other way is by having some sort of merger, by making life sufficiently unpleasant in the provinces, in the WA, Queensland, perhaps South Australia … Rupert’s already reneged on an agreement with the Tiser. The Melbourne Herald people who are a bit tired, will perhaps merge and create a sort of IPC of Australia.”

One journo asked Max: “You have become a suck-hole of the McxMahon Government. Is that a tragedy or not?” Max didn’t even stand. He said, “Billy’s not a good fuck.”