Australian Dictionary of Biography

Sir Theodor Bray, 1977

Griffith Archive. All rights reserved.

Sir Theodor Charles Bray (1905–2000), journalist, editor, and university founder, was born on 11 February 1905 at Campbelltown, Adelaide, son of South Australian-born parents Horace Turner Bray, market gardener, and his wife Elsie Maud, née James. After attending Norwood District and Adelaide high schools, Ted was indentured, aged sixteen, as an apprentice printer on the Adelaide Register for a year. He then worked successively as a telephonist and a cadet journalist on the newspaper. His duties included a variety of reporting assignments and a term as secretary to the editor, which entailed some leader writing. In 1929 he moved to the Argus in Melbourne.

On 4 April 1931 Bray married Rosalie Irene Trengove, MA, a teacher at the Methodist Ladies’ College, Adelaide, with whom he had studied economics (part time in his case) at the University of Adelaide. Rosalie was an outstanding student and a talented sportswoman who played representative tennis and hockey. The wedding was celebrated by the bride’s father, Rev. Arthur Trengove, in the Pirie Street Methodist Church, Adelaide.

At the Argus, Bray worked as a sub-editor, assistant chief of staff, and finally chief sub-editor. In 1936 he resigned following a quarrel with Staniforth Ricketson, chairman of Argus & Australasian Ltd, over a ‘pledge of loyalty’ (Bray 1971) requirement—an early display of an aggressive independence evident throughout his career. He relocated to Brisbane, taking up the position of chief sub-editor of the Courier-Mail at the invitation of the editor, Reg Foster, his former boss at the Register. Subsequently, he became news editor, and then in 1942, editor, a position he would hold for twenty-six years—a record for a metropolitan editor in Australia; from 1954 his title was editor-in-chief of the Courier-Mail and the Sunday Mail. In 1968 he ascended to joint managing director, with Reg Leonard, of Queensland Press Ltd and its subsidiary, Queensland Newspapers Pty Ltd. Also in that year, he was elected as chairman of Australian Associated Press Pty Ltd. He retired on 30 June 1970 but remained on all three boards.

Bray’s elevation to the editorship in 1942 had coincided with Australia’s darkest year of World War II. The new demands of the job included an increased workload due to staff shortages, and the strict information security requirements imposed by both State and Commonwealth governments. Operating in the same city as General Douglas MacArthur’s headquarters, the paper was obliged to reconcile the sometimes-exaggerated optimism of American briefings on the progress of the Pacific War with the more measured and accurate reporting from the Australian officials of the Commonwealth Department of Information–a challenge Bray and his senior staff handled with the requisite delicacy.

In April 1944 the Sydney newspaper proprietors, protesting against perceived politically motivated censorship, defied the Commonwealth censor; the authorities responded by suppressing and confiscating offending editions of the city’s four daily papers. In Brisbane, Bray flouted a prohibition against reporting the incident, and in a forceful editorial declared ‘That the right of people to speak and write their opinions … is a right that must be safeguarded with all the forces that we can muster in our democracy … Suppression is too close to the Nazi way of life’ (Courier-Mail 1944, 1).

The forthright stance Bray took evidently did him no harm in the eyes of John Curtin because, in April 1945, he was one of five newspaper editors the Federal government sent to San Francisco, United States of America, to report on the epoch-making United Nations Conference on International Organization. Bray was awed by the scale and ambition of the event, and in particular by the intellectual power and tireless energy of H. V. Evatt, one of Australia’s two delegates. In 1951–52 Bray was included in another select party of newspaper editors sent by the Federal government to provide their direct and uncensored impressions to the Australian public on the progress of the Korean War.

Throughout his editorship, Bray would be a tireless advocate for freedom of the press. In a 1963 public lecture he argued that newspapers needed liberty to probe behind the news and perform their roles ‘of interpreting and explaining and sometimes of exposing’ (Bray 1965, 14), and of acting as a public forum in which important social and political issues could be debated. Australian chairman (1961–70) of the International Press Institute, he also had a long and close association with other international organisations, including the Empire (Commonwealth) Press Union. In 1950, at a conference of the CPU in Canada, he and Claude Hill, a former Adelaide colleague, had pushed a brash and irritating young Rupert Murdoch into the icy water of Lake Muskoka. At a much later CPU conference, in 1988, at which both Murdoch and Bray would again be present, Murdoch publicly expressed a good-humoured hope for more respectful treatment from Bray, whose relations with Rupert’s father, Sir Keith Murdoch, his former employer, were more conventionally friendly.

Notwithstanding Bray’s admiration for Curtin and Ben Chifley, his Courier-Mail always supported the conservative coalition parties in elections. The Liberal Party of Australia urged him to stand for the new seat of Ryan in the 1949 Federal election: he considered this ‘an attractive offer’ (Bray 1992, 6), but declined for family and financial reasons. Some of his newspaper’s longest-running investigative campaigns were waged against the Queensland Labor government over electoral fraud in the Bulimba by-election in 1950, and later against the Australian Workers’ Union for rigging union elections well into the 1960s (though he was by no means opposed to unionism, having been a member of the Australian Journalists’ Association from the age of nineteen, and its senior vice-president before moving to Brisbane).

Bray was also an unapologetic royalist, admittedly being influenced in this by cordial contacts with visiting members of the royal family. These loyalties did not, however, prevent him from imposing a three-month ban on publicity for the newly installed Queensland governor, Sir Henry Abel-Smith, in 1958, after Courier-Mail photographers were refused access to a social event in Parliament House. The resolution of this conflict was followed, as often with Bray and his antagonists, by many years of close friendship.

Appointed CBE (1964) for services to journalism, Bray believed on his retirement that one of his most significant achievements had been to increase the daily circulation of the Courier-Mail from 90,000 to 250,000. He was a hardworking, hands-on editor who insisted on reading the galley proofs of every issue himself before it went to press, and consequently seldom arrived home before 1 a.m. This punishing regimen, together with frequent overseas trips (sometimes with Rosalie), made for slightly distant relations with some of their five children, though in general they regarded him as a generous, affectionate, and encouraging parent. Members of his staff remembered him as charming, clever, and ruthlessly ambitious. Des Houghton recalled that ‘Bray’s Courier was a macho place. He thought a robust newsroom an unsuitable place for women and was reluctant to hire them’ (2000, 16). Short and stocky, gimlet-eyed and gravel-voiced, with an air of self-possessed authority, he was not a boss to be trifled with; but in the relaxed atmosphere of his favourite club, the Johnsonian, he could evince a suitably bearish conviviality.

The first years of Bray’s retirement were busy ones. Having trained himself to excel in public speaking with Australian Rostrum (1937–57), he spoke eloquently on several public occasions, as did Rosalie, a foundation member, in 1941, of the Brisbane Forum Club. As a couple they also had a keen interest in classical music, ballet, theatre, and literature. In 1970 Prime Minister (Sir) John Gorton invited Bray to join the Australian Council for the Arts. The incoming Whitlam government dropped him from the new Australia Council in 1973, but he continued on its theatre board (1973–74). He strongly supported the creation of two new professional theatre companies in Brisbane and of an expanded program of regional cultural development in Queensland.

By this time, however, Bray had already embarked on his ‘second career’ (Bray 1992, 38). In June 1970 he had been approached by (Sir) Alan Fletcher, minister for education in the Bjelke-Petersen government, to chair a committee to plan and design a second Brisbane university. At first declining the invitation as outside his expertise, he finally accepted on the condition that he could choose his own committee, which was agreed. The Interim Planning Council (from October 1971, Griffith University Council) comprised thirteen members, including academics, business leaders, senior public servants, a trade union leader, and just one woman. Bray embarked on a crash course of reading about new universities, guided by John Topley, the council’s secretary, and advised by, especially, two vice-chancellors, Peter Karmel of Flinders University and Sir John Crawford of the Australian National University. Accompanied by Topley, Bray travelled extensively both within Australia and overseas to inspect existing models.

What emerged from the process was an institution that defined itself by its differences from the traditional Australian university, as instantiated by the University of Queensland. Like other new universities, Griffith would be organised in schools rather than departments. Each school, however, would be defined not by subordinate academic disciplines but by a socially significant theme or set of problems to which several disciplines would contribute their perspectives and methods. Professions-based establishments, beginning with a law school, would follow later. The vision was one of enhanced interdisciplinarity, a distinctive tenet of the Griffith model, and perhaps its most radical in the Australian context.

It is not difficult to see why the idea of a university so programmatically independent of its traditional counterparts would have appealed to a journalist like Bray with his irreverence for outmoded assumptions and admiration for the practical application of new knowledge. He was particularly proud of Griffith’s two notable initiatives in undergraduate education: the school of Australian environmental studies, an Australian first, and the school of modern Asian studies. The second of these (on which he had personally insisted) answered to his conviction that Australia needed to acknowledge and exploit its unique position on the Pacific Rim, an argument he had advanced as early as 1963, writing in the Courier-Mail about ‘Australians as White Asians’ (Bray 1992, 44). At his urging, the council chose a native bushland site in the outer Brisbane suburb of Nathan, and a style of architecture (low-set buildings almost embedded in the encroaching vegetation) that reflected the new university’s environmental and egalitarian ethos. It then appointed, in 1972, a suitable vice-chancellor, John Willett, fully in tune with this vision.

With Bray as its founding chancellor, Griffith University opened its doors to its first cohort of undergraduates in 1975. In that year he was knighted for services to journalism and tertiary education, an honour he valued as much for Rosalie as for himself; she accompanied him to London for the investiture. Her death in 1988 was to be a great blow to the close-knit family.

For over ten years, Bray and Willett worked together with energy and dedication to establish Griffith’s reputation as a successfully innovative new university in a higher education environment that was changing and expanding with unprecedented speed. In 1984 Willett retired from the vice-chancellorship, and Bray’s retirement came the following year. His memory is honoured in the name of the Bray Centre, the administrative hub of Griffith’s Nathan campus.

In the twilight years after his second retirement, in addition to a serious devotion to lawn bowls, Bray maintained contact with his lifelong profession, offering unsolicited, but not unwelcome, advice to his successors, chairing the judging panel for the Graham Perkin award for the Australian journalist of the year throughout the 1980s, and speaking on many public occasions of themes and events that had been important to him professionally. In 1995 he was named Senior Australian of the Year, and in that same year he flew unaccompanied to a conference on World War II in Townsville where he spoke with immense authority about his newspaper’s wartime reporting.

Sir Theodor died on 10 August 2000 in Wesley Private Hospital, Auchenflower, Brisbane, and was cremated after a Uniting Church funeral. Of his and Rosalie’s seven children, three sons–David, Richard, and Robert–and two daughters–Felicity and Helen–survived him; their daughter Rosalie and son Geoffrey had predeceased him.