Mad case of survival for legendary editor

Bret Christian has trained two generations of reporters in his own style of shoe-leather journalism.

Bret Christian, publisher of Perth’s Post Newspapers

Perth was gripped by the murder mystery that began with a fisherman’s horror discovery of a body in a floating suitcase last July. The victim was wealthy divorcee Annabelle Chen and the story was top priority for the city’s crime reporters.

But the biggest scoop on the story has come from a suburban newspaper unaccustomed to daily dealings with the homicide squad. The Post phoned police with a breakthrough in September last year.

Police had been trying to find the source of distinctive floral tiles in the suitcase with Chen’s remains, believing this may lead them to her killer or at least give clues to where she was murdered. There had been multiple appeals to the public for anyone who recognised the tiles to come forward when the Post’s David Cohen made an exact match to the bathroom of a house Chen had owned. Two arrests soon followed, as did charges.

Cohen works for Australia’s longest-serving editor Bret Christian, who has trained two generations of reporters in his own style of shoe-leather journalism.

The campaigning proprietor started the Post in 1977 with his then wife Bettye in the front room of a Subiaco terrace house. They converted part of the bedroom of their infant son Kim into a photographic darkroom.

At the newspaper’s 40th birthday party last month, Christian’s speech was a warm thank you to readers, advertisers and staff.

“Looking back on those frenetic early days, a saying with worrying implications comes to mind; only the mad survive,” Christian said.

Not much happens in the Post’s patch without its reporters finding out. They don’t just go to monthly meetings of the seven councils in Perth’s western suburbs, they go to every subcommittee meeting too. Christian himself is often at the press desk when arguments over matters such as building heights can finish after midnight.

Residents seem to want to share almost everything with their local paper. After a dinner party turned ugly in the elite seaside suburb of Cottesloe last year, hosts gave the Post photos of themselves bleeding from the head.

The Post’s weekly distribution of 52,000 is in the golden triangle of Perth real estate represented in Canberra by Foreign Affairs minister Julie Bishop, and she gave a speech at the Post’s milestone party. In front of mayors, business leaders and frequent writers of letters to the editor, she acknowledged the newspaper’s relevance and clout.

“I recall very clearly when I first decided to run for the seat of Curtin in 1998 and Sir Charles Court called me to visit and he gave me a list of matters that I must attend to urgently if I were to be considered worthy of the support of the people of the western suburbs of Perth — number one on the list was ‘go and see Bret Christian’,” she said.

Why has the Post endured? Christian thinks it’s the stories.

Recent gems include Cottesloe’s smelly public toilet war, the police officer who “bashed himself up” for compensation and the priest who dug his own grave.

Christian is also committed to investigative journalism and righting injustices. He led reporting on the Claremont serial killings and put his own money into the successful fight to overturn the wrongful murder convictions of John Button and Darryl Beamish.

Christian’s longtime chief-of-staff George Williams, a former news editor of The Australian, describes him as a “courageous, sometimes barefoot, always tie-less editor who clings to his mission statement that if we’re not having fun, we’re doing it the wrong way”.