BUILDING UP TO A BIOGRAPHY


While I haven't embarked on a full-scale biography of Lawlor, such a job would be well paved by the trail of paper he left behind, including his lifelong bibliographic interests from book collecting to collection disposal, and his well-documented involvement in initiating support structures for writers in New Zealand (the New Zealand P.E.N. centre, founded in Wellington in 1934, and now known as the New Zealand Society of Authors, and the State Literary Fund, successfully lobbied for in the 1940s) and for institutions such as the Turnbull Library.

I have in my research to date, assembled a clear picture of Lawlor’s life from 1893 to 1979, and have taken extra steps such as making personal contact with two of his surviving children: Ruth and Margaret.

Lawlor was a young teen when he commenced his press career as a copy holder at his hometown newspaper, Wellington's “Evening Post”.

While he never received any university education, his outlook on life was strongly shaped and directed by his Catholic upbringing as a first-generation Irish ‘Marist boy' from St Pats in Wellington and his lifelong Catholicism.

In common with the notion of the “Inky Wayfarer” that Alison Oosterman has written about in the Australian Journalism Review, Lawlor was firmly attached to a host of journalists who moved peripatetically from paper to paper, and to & fro between Australia and New Zealand, operating within the context of what Denis Cryle terms the Tasman mediasphere.

In reconstructing the period of his life I am talking about today - what I will call the “Aussie” years - the motivation for Lawlor seeking work in Australia in 1922 was obvious and was corroborated by his family : he had just lost a job on the New Zealand Truth (in what turned out to be his last full time position on a newspaper) and was, at a time of a marked economic recession, desperate to continue his career in journalism and to secure both an income and sound prospects for the future.

His diary entry for 10 May 1922 reads as follows: “A week ago I made up my mind. I am going to Sydney once more... After some months I may, after remitting enough money to keep my home in the interim, put by an additional sum to return to N.Z. as a representative of some Australian paper. It's a gamble but what else can I do?”

Later that month he was passing comment about how remarkable it was to run across so many New Zealanders in the streets of Sydney, “yet not so remarkable when you know that there are 22,000 Maorilanders here at the present time”.

At first Lawlor secured a job at The Telegraph, while pursuing a position as New Zealand representative for the Sydney-based New Century Press, publishers of Aussie magazine and Humour magazine. His diary transcript for 6 July 1922 reads:“Wild with joy. All signed up with New Century Press, 10 pounds a week and commission".

Lawlor's instincts as an entrepreneur surface many times, and a profile of him by Patricia Burns in the Catholic newspaper Zealandia in 1963 makes an interesting comment that Lawlor was,"like every successful journalist, an eloquent and persistent salesman".

Even so, as mentioned in the abstract I supplied for this talk, Lawlor was assured by some – including advertising businessman Charles Haines – that he was a fool to attempt to establish an Australian magazine in New Zealand, let alone one called Aussie.