Sex, sealed and delivered
October 22, 1997, The Australian
In mid-1978, three days after I'd contracted a rare, painful and ugly
swelling of the jaw after a wonky wisdom tooth extraction, my publisher
Ita Buttrose rang me at home in a snapping frenzy because, she barked,
the Boss wanted to see me. Now!
At that time, when Kerry Packer's Australian Consolidated Press bulged
importantly with the biggest and most successful magazines of the day,
the smell in the corridors was the panic of small and frightened
journalists hoping not to be noticed by anyone bigger and more brutal.
Spotlit like a rabbit by the building's two biggest examples of the
latter, I fronted up to Kerry and Ita and learned that I was being
promoted from junior writer on Cleo to editor.
Whoosh!
My rise had less to do with talent than the fact that Ita, having been
succeeded as founder editor by two women of around her own age, had now
impatiently decided to go for someone younger.
With lots of ideas, she said.
But also softer.
Scareder.
However, I had one significant deficiency that she had overlooked and
that was I knew almost nothing about sex.
And sex - especially its wilder shores was Cleo's business. In the 1970s,
Ita Buttrose had had high hopes for me and I did my innocent best to fulfil them. Photo: YouTube
it was the first mainstream publication to write openly about orgasms
and penises, masturbation and erotic fancies in among the features on
more everyday topics. I had joined it as a wide-eyed but determined
21-year-old from the West. My parents hadn't wanted me to work for a
magazine whose editor signed everything in bright pink Texta pen and
who, in between accepting my freelance contributions on Lang Hancock and
Western Australia's mining women, urged me to think up racy stories
about intercourse. But when the job offer came, I scarpered for Sydney.
On my first day in the office, one of the worldly senior writers
Cleo’s first issue in 1992. It was a raging and unexpected success.
entertained the others with an account of an interview session with a
sex therapist during which he had produced a vibrator and left her alone
for 15 minutes of private investigation. It was a long way from theatre
reviewing for the Daily News in Perth.
Now having made it into the editor's chair, [one of my first covers, November 1978, is featured at the start of this article] I realised that if I were
going to stay there, sex would have to play its part in my career.
I have always been tenacious, if occasionally clueless, and I became
dogged in my pursuit of sex stories. Within three months we were up
before the Queensland board of censors. On the lurid strength of our
December contents, they wanted to sell Cleo in plastic covers from
behind the newsagent counter, thereby cutting our northern circulation
by about 95 per cent.
I swapped frocks with the conservative junior art designer and flew to
Brisbane with Ita. She, immaculate, mesmerising and waving her nail
varnish in all directions, did the talking while a tableful of serious
men looked at my fresh-facedness and wondered what other depravities lay
behind my sheepishness.
As Ita skilfully blathered her way out of this jam, one of the panel
flicked irritably through the issue, searching for one particular
example of salaciousness to back the case he was arguing. He didn't find
it, but I knew what he had been looking for. It was an extract from
Walter: My Secret Life, one of the more celebrated pieces of Victorian
porn. A publisher had brought out a new edition and I, spotting the word
SEX in the blurb, had immediately bought a chunk for extract and jammed
it into the bumper Christmas issue.
Now, squirming in a hot Queensland committee room, I realised there was
more to editing Cleo than buying in dirty books full of things that
mostly went over my innocent head.
In the late 1970s, Kerry Packer was terrifying.
Photo: InsideStory.com.au
After that, I spent another several months trying to make Cleo work, but
my heart wasn't really in it. Eventually I ran away to London, where I
reinvented myself so successfully that I almost forgot my shameful past,
until five years ago when Lisa Wilkinson, then Cleo's editor, rang me at
The Australian because the magazine was about to have its 20th birthday.
I was horror-struck. I had only just joined this newspaper, and with
impeccably serious credentials. Now I was going to have to ask my then
editor-in-chief, the august and even more serious political journalist
Paul Kelly, for permission to appear in a group photograph that would
only remind everyone of what I had once been.
And I hadn't even been very good at it.
On that occasion, the arrangements fell through and nothing happened,
but now there is another milestone - Cleo's 25th anniversary - and, along
with all the other editors, I've been made-up and dressed up for an
anniversary edition group photograph that, as I write this, I still
haven't seen.
I am hoping that any resemblance to rabbit has long since gone.
More importantly, I'm now more than a little pleased, chuffed as the
English might say, to marvel at the infinite variety of the human
character. From there to here . . . the equivalent of a career
transplant. And Cleo itself has changed over the years. In the 1970s,
when it started, it quickly became indispensable to Australian women.
The old line of a successful magazine being a friend to its readers was
absolutely apt in this case, and often the magazine was a friend to
women who'd never had anyone to lean on before. Now it is younger,
frothier, more fashionable.
A party girl magazine rather than one designed to equip women for
everyday life. Or maybe now that we all know so much more about sex,
life just feels more like a party.
I do owe something to Cleo. It gave me my start in editing and it did
something more. To this day, in the middle of a discussion about almost
anything that is taking far too long - the intricacies of APEC, Cheryl
Kernot or the finer points of Australian publishing - I can still keep my
eyes open and my head nodding, blank out and, without any vestige of
guilt, simply remove myself to far, far wilder shores.
I wrote this when I was The Australian's deputy editor (features) and editor of The Australian's Review of Books. I hadn’t written for many years and this was a turning point. I loved the fact that writing engaged a different part of my brain from editing and best of all, the only person I had to encourage was myself.
