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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Boy from the bush
Kevin Perkins grew up in
the picturesque town of Bowral in the southern highlands
of New South Wales. His father, who owned a sheep property,
died suddenly and his two brothers went off to war, leaving
him the only “male” at home with his mother
and two sisters. As a result, he had to look out for himself
from childhood.
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Blowing own trumpet
He challenged the town’s
suffocatingly quiet environment by creating his own fun and mischief.
But although a tearaway larrikin, he also developed a serious
side, proving to be an outstanding teenage sportsman in district
cricket and Rugby League. He also excelled as a bandsman and a
talented dance band trumpet player.
Tutored by a CIB legend
On leaving Bowral High, where he was school captain, he wanted
to be a newspaper reporter. But ironically, vocational guidance
“experts” steered him away from journalism, saying
it was too precarious. What else for a lively youth with inquiring
mind and a sense of justice born out of fending for himself?
Ah yes, a detective. So he became a police cadet in Sydney attached
to the old Criminal Investigation Branch, working closely with
such famous tough cops as Ray “The Gunner” Kelly, a legendary fearless detective sergeant who took Perkins under his wing and showed him the ropes of detective work.
He would always value his days as a trainee sleuth but realised
the police culture, which regarded you as a number and stifled
independence and individualism, was not for him.
War of the presses
So he joined the afternoon Daily Mirror as a cadet reporter in
1950. The frenetic Sydney tabloid scene was as competitive then
as anything Chicago ever dished up, even in the vicious circulation war between the Chicago Tribune and Hearst Newspapers at the turn of the 20th century (only the gangsters were missing from Sydney's battle of the afternoon dailies). But he thrived on it, saying
later: “We couldn’t wait to get to work each morning,
yet you never knew from one day to the next if you were going
to be fired.” (He was once).
Smell of newsprint
That began a long and successful tabloid career, lasting almost
40 years in which Perkins was a gun investigative reporter for
newspaper tycoons Ezra Norton, Frank Packer, Rupert Murdoch and
the Fairfaxes, working on the Daily Mirror, Truth, Daily Telegraph and Sunday
Telegraph, Sun-Herald and The Sun. He covered everything thrown
at him, was also a hard-hitting front and back-page columnist
and for 20 years, a news executive. Colleagues and rivals alike
respected his tough professionalism, at one stage dubbing him
P1 Perkins for his flow of page one stories.
From crime to ballet
Now as an author, with the organised chaos of newsrooms left behind,
he still remains Australia’s most experienced all-round
reporter. So far he has written nine major biographies taking
in sport, gambling, horse racing, crime, history, politics and,
for a bit of culture, ballet.
Without that background and all those years of first-hand insights
into life and people, he could not write so realistically on such
a diverse range of subjects – especially for his most famous
book, The Gambling Man.
Litigants "tort" a lesson
And without all those hard days and nights in the newspaper trenches, how else could he have had the gall to personally take on the host of lawyers who sued him in the NSW Supreme Court for allegedly defaming their clients in The Gambling Man?
What's more, most of those litigants, instead of simply rolling over him quickly in the courts as they had expected to do, eventually just folded up in the face of a strong and determined defence from the author. But that's another story. |
