Australian Dictionary of Biography

John Irvine Moorhead, Grafton, 1996

Courtesy of Rod Kirkpatrick

John Irvine Moorhead (1922–2000), newspaper editor and mayor, was born on 21 October 1922 at Grafton, New South Wales, eldest of four children of New South Wales-born parents John Joseph Thomas Moorhead, grazier, and his wife, Sybyl Una, née Scott. Educated at Grafton Public School, Grafton High School, and Barker College, Sydney, John gained the Leaving certificate in 1941. After leaving school, he and a friend, Ron Appleton, rode bicycles from Grafton to Brisbane and back. It took about a fortnight and Moorhead wrote an account of the 633-mile (1,019 km) trip for the Daily Examiner. As a result, the editor, Cecil Bush Bailey, offered him a temporary position.

Having enlisted in the Citizen Military Forces for service in World War II, Moorhead began full-time duty on 10 February 1942 and transferred to the Australian Imperial Force in July. He served in Papua and New Guinea with the 36th Battalion (June to November 1942) and the 7th Machine Gun Battalion (November 1942 to August 1943), before returning to Australia, where he was discharged on 24 June 1946. On 18 December 1946 he married Pauline Evelyn Taylor, a schoolteacher and formerly a next-door neighbour at Grafton, at Wesley Chapel, Sydney.

Following the war, Moorhead was offered a reporting job at the Daily Examiner by its new editor, W. Bailey-Tart. In December 1947 he was elected an alderman of Grafton City Council. He became president of the local branch of the Country Party in 1949 and served as deputy mayor of the town in 1950. At the age of thirty, he became the then-youngest mayor of Grafton in 1953 and 1954. He was the Country Party candidate for the State seat of Clarence at the 1955 by-election, losing to an Independent who attracted Labor votes when that party did not field a candidate.

Moorhead decided that if he did not become the editor of the Daily Examiner by the age of thirty-seven, he would leave Grafton. In 1960 he put feelers out for editorships with dailies at Bundaberg, Maryborough, and Maitland. Suddenly, Bailey-Tart resigned, and the board appointed Moorhead editor, a few days before the Bundaberg News-Mail rang to offer him the editorship there. Moorhead felt he had the freedom to put his imprint on the Daily Examiner. Bailey-Tart had published his editorials on the front page; Moorhead put his on page two and inserted letters to the editor and columns on that page, too. He also introduced a broadsheet page of reviews, and personally worked through several books a week, never taking notes but producing a review of several hundred words on each. His sons John and Andrew later recalled that once he became editor, he was much more focused on work: ‘He often stayed at the office till after midnight, putting the paper to bed, and slept in in the morning, sometimes waking with a migraine’ (Moorhead, pers. comm.). On family holidays he would invariably call at the newspaper office to spend time there before departing, and he always took a typewriter. Despite this, his sons would remember him as ‘a loving and generous father with a broad smile who encouraged them along their different paths with a sense of humour and an acceptance of the fact that they would leave the town to which he devoted his life’ (Moorhead, pers. comm.).

Politically to the right, Moorhead was prone to publish what he termed ‘fighting leaders’ (Moorhead 2001, 31), accusing the New South Wales government, usually Labor, of using country people as a ‘milch cow’ (Moorhead, pers. comm.). He later said that his key issues as editor were the New England New State movement (in which he participated), the deep-sea port proposal at Iluka, and rehabilitation for Grafton jail prisoners. When it came to exploring the major issues, he favoured interpretive rather than investigative reporting. Local news was never covered on the front page of the broadsheet, which was ‘unbelievably serious’ (Moorhead, pers. comm.) by the standards of newspapers at the end of the twentieth century.

In May 1977 Moorhead resigned as editor when the paper was taken over by the expanding Lismore-based Northern Star Holdings, which planned to introduce computerised typesetting and offset printing, as well as a managing editor over him. ‘These takeovers are always difficult,’ he recalled, observing of the technological change: ‘I had just about mastered the ability to change a typewriter ribbon. I did not look forward to fiddling around with all this new wizardry’ (Moorhead 1996). He and his wife, both booklovers, then started an Angus & Robertson bookshop franchise at Grafton, operating it for three years.

A committed member of the Anglican cathedral parish, Moorhead wrote a centenary history, Cathedral on the Clarence (1984). He participated in many aspects of Grafton life, from cricket to sailing to being a member of the theatre group the Pelican Players. In 1985 he was awarded the OAM for service to the community and to local government. This conservative man, who wore red jumpers at times, had come to vote Green at the end of his life. He died on 31 December 2000 at Grafton, survived by his wife and their three sons, John, Andrew, and Stephen. After a civic funeral at the Christ Church Cathedral, Grafton, he was cremated.