Name Margaret Jones Role Journalist | Died July 30, 2006 | |
Books Thatcher's Kingdom: A View of Britain in the Eighties, The Confucius Enigma, The Smiling Buddha, Pressures on the Press | ||
Margaret Mary Jones (8 October 1923 – 30 July 2006) was an Australian journalist, noted for being one of the first accredited to China after the Cultural Revolution, and first female Foreign Editor on any Australian newspaper. Described as a 'trailblazer for women journalists', she wrote for John Fairfax Limited for a total of thirty-three years.
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Jones was born in Rockhampton, Queensland the youngest of six children of John Jones, an employee of the Rockhampton Harbour Board for around 40 years. After a Catholic education in Rockhampton, she commenced teacher training in Brisbane, but abandoned it for life as a cadet journalist. There is an anecdote about her having a youthful article accepted by The Times (London).
Career
She worked for the Australian Broadcasting Commission as a stringer then regional correspondent from 1948–53 during employment as a journalist on the Mackay Mercury, then moved to Sydney to work for the Daily Mirror.
She joined the Sydney Sun-Herald in 1954. Famously, her job application read in part "As you may see by my signature, I am a woman and I know that, even yet, a certain amount of prejudice still exists against women in journalism". Her first assignments were book and theatre reviews and a column "Dog of the Week".
She resigned in 1956 to work in England and Paris then rejoined the Sun-Herald in 1961.
She was posted to New York in 1965 as foreign correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald, the more serious broadsheet sister of the tabloid Sun-Herald to share offices with the rock music journalist Lillian Roxon. Their relationship, noted Robert Milliken in his autobiography, was "like two sopranos sharing the same stage". Perhaps to keep these two apart, she was posted to Washington in 1966, the SMH's first correspondent there, by editor John Pringle. There she was to experience overt professional sex discrimination from the National Press Club which did not admit woman members, effectively barring her from important presentations. Nevertheless, she made the most of her opportunities, reporting on President Lyndon B. Johnson and the escalation of the Vietnam War and the 1967 Glassboro Summit Conference between Johnson and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin.
She was next posted to London in 1969, reporting on subjects as varied as the IRA and The Beatles. Returning to Australia in 1972 to become Literary Editor, she fought, successfully, to allow women full membership of the Sydney Journalists Club.
With the Whitlam government's normalisation of relations with China, the foreign editor, Stephen Claypole, had her open a bureau for John Fairfax Ltd. in Peking (now Beijing), China in 1973 despite her having no knowledge of Mandarin. Journalists then were prohibited from talking to ordinary Chinese and had to rely on the official newsagency and the Communist Party controlled newspapers Renmin Ribao and Kwangming Ribao. She was the first SMH journalist to be stationed there since WWII. She travelled extensively, to North Korea and from Yunan (now Yunnan Province) to Manchuria and Inner Mongolia. For six months, Western journalists suffered official restrictions in reaction to release of Chung Kuo, Michelangelo Antonioni's documentary on China.
She returned to Australia to take up an appointment as Literary Editor but regretted not being in China to witness the death of Mao Zedong, the rise and fall of the Gang of Four and the end of the Cultural Revolution. In 1976, she was invited by the Sydney Journalists' Club and the New South Wales branch of the Australian Journalists' Association to give the Paton-Wilkie-Deamer Newspaper Address, the first woman journalist to be so honoured.
In 1980, the early days of Margaret Thatcher's rule, she returned to London as European Correspondent. She was later to publish an account of that time, Thatcher's Kingdom. On revisiting China in 1986, she noted the opening up of the country to tourists, and the greater ability to meet ordinary Chinese.
She retired in 1987 and served on the Australian Press Council 1988–98, then was appointed in 1991 to the Independent Complaints Review Panel set up by John Howard to hear complaints about the ABC.
Among her other interests were membership (and a stint as Vice-President) of Sydney PEN, where she was chair of the Writers in Prison Committee. She was an active member of the Australian Republican Movement, the Sydney Institute, the Mitchell Library's Library Society and the D H Lawrence Society, where she was secretary and frequent contributor to their magazine Rananim.
She died in Bondi, New South Wales and was privately cremated, followed a week later by a wake for her friends and colleagues. She had no surviving close relatives apart from one niece.
Legacy
Her professionalism and refusal to be sidelined did much to overcome prejudice against female journalists, and the current improvement in gender balance can in some way be attributed to her. She left a substantial part of her estate to the Mitchell Library and to the Art Gallery of NSW.