Interview with Ian Mathews – newspaper editor and community activist

Interview conducted September 2011 at Emeritus Faculty, ANU
Producer, Interviewer and Editor - Peter Stewart
Engineer - Nik Fominas

Biographical introduction: Ian Mathews is not strictly a past member of ANU staff, though he is happily embraced within the collegial fellowship ofANU’s Emeritus Faculty; he is the editor of the Faculty’s regular newsletter, Emeritus.  Ian was previously Editor and Editor-in-Chief of the Canberra Times, serving with the newspaper from 1963 to 1988.  He had previously worked with the Adelaide News, and with several provincial newspapers in the UK.  For his contributions to journalism he was awarded an Order of Australia in 1988.

Since leaving the Canberra Times in 1988, Ian has edited Stand To, for the Returned Services League of Australia, UNity, the journal of the United Nations’ Association of Australia, and The Order, for the Order of Australia Association. He has also served on national and local organisations supporting education, health, literature, foreign affairs, peace and disarmament, and the arts.

Ian co-authored with Russell Fox (previously Chief Justice of the ACT Supreme Court) the book Drug Policy – Fact, Fiction and the Future, a proposal for alternative approaches to national and community drugs policy.

Apart from his editorial and community activities, Ian is currently studying English literature at ANU.

Interview synopsis:Ian Mathews was born in 1933 in Mitcham, England.  His father was a marine engineer, spending long periods of time at sea.  Ian’s mother was in poor health, so Ian and his older brother were farmed out to family care. Later, after his father’s second marriage, the family expanded by another brother and sister.   Ian was schooled at St Joseph Williamson’s Mathematical School, a grammar (state) school in Rochester, Kent.  His interests were not mathematical though, and the young scholar quickly turned to wordsmithing rather than number crunching.

As a teenager watching a movie about an intrepid investigative newspaper reporter, Ian decided that journalism was for him.  After leaving school, Ian took temporary clerical jobs in local government and hospital administration.  At age 19, combining his interests in literature with his father’s proclivities, Ian signed up as a merchant seaman (writer/clerk) with the Royal Fleet Auxiliary.  During one of his voyages, Ian’s tanker spent a few weeks under repair in Sydney.  There, he and a few shipmates explored some of the bush and farm country around that city, and was impressed.  He resolved one day to see more of Australia.

Returning to England, Ian launched into his formal career, first as a cadet journalist with the Kent & Sussex Courier, then as a reporter with the Express & Echo, in Exeter.  During this period, Ian met and married Joyce Morris.  Joyce had left school at age 14, then worked her way to State Registered Nurse, State Certified Midwife and then to Queen’s Nurse, specialising in community nursing.

In 1960, Ian and Joyce decided to act on Ian’s intention to see Australia.  They emigrated as “ten pound Poms”, sailing to Adelaide for Ian to take a job with The News, Rupert Murdoch’s fledgling newspaper.  Coinciding with their time in Adelaide, Ian watched sedition and criminal libel cases against his Editor, Rohan Rivett, unfold there.   These proceedings related to the Stuart Royal Commission, which eventually acquitted Rivett.  The Royal Commission followed a criminal case against Stuart, an Aboriginal itinerant, who had been found guilty of the rape and murder of a girl in South Australia.  Ian and Joyce wondered, as this notorious libel case and its later Royal Commission wound its way through courts and decisions, what Ian might have let himself in for as a journalist in the Australian landscape.  As he recalls, it was an informative introduction to a new and less restrained style of journalism. 

 Three years later Ian was offered employment with the Canberra Times, the Canberra daily newspaper then privately and locally owned by the Shakespeare family.  He soon found himself in an environment with fascinating journalistic prospects,covering events central to the political life and culture of Australia generally.  

Though uncertain at first about what they might find socially and physically in Canberra, Ian and Joyce (and by then a baby daughter too) were soon delighted at what Canberra offered, even though at that time (1963) Canberra was little more the proverbial sheep-run, and planted within that a large country town with a population of a few tens of thousands.  Soon though, Canberra moved into an expansionary phase (as did Ian and Joyce’s family with the arrival of a son), soon to begin maturing as the political, cultural and educational centre it has become today.  The lively debates and arguments which characterised the city and its newspaper provided an excellent environment for a young journalist to practice and develop his craft.

Ian had a special interest in the development of the Australian National University from these early years, if only because they roughly paralleled his own professional development in Canberra.  ANU had taken a major step in its evolution just three years before Ian arrived at the Canberra Times. Canberra University College, for more than thirty years a remote undergraduate outpost of Melbourne University, merged in 1960 with the ANU (established as a research-only university in 1946), the Collegethen being renamed the School of General Studies.  Together, the two newly merged entities gave ANU the traditional duality of an Australian university, though the warehousing of the research-only Institute of Advanced Studies within the larger ANU has often seemed problematic to a tidy minded observer.

For the Canberra Times, and Ian, ANU and its academic talents represented an important resource  for the Canberra Times and its readers: scholarly articles, reviews, commentary, advice.  A symbiotic relationship evolved naturally between university and newspaper, though the interaction was not always uncomplicated.

Ian worked his way through the ranks of Canberra Times journalism, learning the business as well as the craft from mentors such as JD Pringle.   A couple of editors along, in 1972, Ian became Editor himself.  Thirteen years later he was appointed Editor-in- Chief, a position he held for three years, until 1988.  At this point, Kerry Packer decided the Canberra Times was worth having as part of his media empire, buying the newspaper for Consolidated Press.  As a consequence, some journalists found themselves out of jobs, including Ian. 

Ian decided this would be an opportune time for him to try a different style of journalism, one angled more at exploring community values and life.  Accordingly, over the next several years he set to editing and publishing a number of newsletters (Stand To for the Returned & Services League, UNity for the United Nations Association of Australia (to which he remains Contributing Editor), then later editor of The Order, the national publication of the Order of Australia Association (he was appointed a Member of the Order (AM) in 1988, for services to journalism).  In 2005, Ian became honorary editor of Emeritus, newsletter of the ANU Emeritus Faculty.

In 1992, Ian co-authored with Russell Fox (previously Chief Justice of the ACT Supreme Court) Drug Policy – Fact, Fiction and the Future, a proposal for alternative strategies in national and community drugs policy.

Ian’s enthusiasm for community and international development is reflected too in his past membership of and contribution to a number of organisations and causes: Commonwealth Accreditation Committee for Advanced Education, National Consultative Committee on Peace and Disarmament , NHMRC Education and Publicity Committee, Social Issues Committee of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, Island and Territories Council of the Australian Bicentennial Authority,  and Executive Committee of the National Word Festival.

Ian has a clear and abiding commitment to Canberra and its life.  He believes that ANU has a special responsibility within the metropolis, in particular to showcase more broadly its civic virtues and the merits of its national institutions.  Ian believes that ANU’s alumni, and its staff past and present, have a special part to play in this.

In addition to his continuing community activitism, Ian is currently a part-time student in English literature at ANU, with a particular interest in the literature of family relationships.

Ian’s daughter, Deborah, lives with her family in Mudgee, working for an accountant there, and his son Paul is South Australian manager for Tyrrell’s Wines, living with his family in McLaren Vale, south of Adelaide.  Ian continues to live in the house in Garran which he and Joyce bought in 1964 as they moved to Canberra from Adelaide.  Tragically, Joyce died of cancer in 2008.