My talk today is in part a life-line to the life story and reputation of New Zealand journalist Pat Lawlor, and in part, a recuperation of the social and literary record left by some of his journalistic endeavours for a magazine called Aussie.
I hope by the end of this talk to have introduced a particular perception of that life and of the journalism of the time I am focused on most in my current research, being that long lost decade, the 1920s.
So here is Pat Lawlor, as photographed in a suitably literary fashion when he was about about 42 years old by the studio of S. P. Andrew Ltd, of 10 Willis Street, Wellington (courtesy of the Turnbull library).
It's the photo that appears in the flyleaf of the first of several books of reminiscence produced by Lawlor, Confessions of a Journalist, published by Whitcombe and Tombs Limited in 1935.
The inside of the dustjacket promised a book of irresistible appeal, containing an entertaining picture of a most interesting period in journalism and making mention of hundreds of interesting people.
The book was also talked up by stating that readers “will be fascinated by the first intimate picture given of life and letters in Australia and New Zealand by one who has played a prominent part in the press world for nearly a quarter of a century", and that "Mr Lawlor's book will be a source of reference for many years to come".
It is a book that regularly surfaces in the footnotes of scholarly biographies, and that can occasionally still be found in a second hand bookshop or on websites like Trademe.
For journalists today it would appear as little more than a curiosity, although both Jim Tully and David Cohen did it the honour last year of including it in lists of books they deemed to be essential reading for post-modern journalists. Perhaps it was just the allure of the title!
The thing that most piqued my interest, some years ago, was Chapter 12 of the book, simply titled '"Aussie” magazine’and a nagging desire it created in me to place and locate this piece of media history in a wider, less neglected, and perhaps, a less easily dismissed, context.
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