Patricia Rolfe 1920-2008
It was my great privilege and pleasure to work with Pat Rolfe for ten years at The Bulletin where she was a revered institution for close to four decades.
She was a regal figure and I called her “Dame Patricia” because that’s how she was and, after an initial snort or two, that’s how it remained. In her small, twinkly way, she was much larger than life.
Rolfe was an unlikely “identity” because she was by nature modest and reticent. She was, nevertheless, one of the most famous personalities and professionals in Sydney journalistic life during times when big personalities and bylines abounded.
Under her beady and unsentimental eye The Bulletin flourished and with it a generation or two of the brightest and/or best, including Lenore Nicklin, Elizabeth Riddell, Rob Drewe, Ed Campion, Sandra Hall, Malcolm Turnbull, Bob Carr and David Marr.
Rolfe graduated from the University of Sydney in 1943 and went to work for Frank Packer at Consolidated Press in the 1950s. She started on Australian Women’s Weekly but soon packed her trunk for London as one of the early female foreign correspondents. Acknowledging the need for smart and warm clothes, her boss gave her a small pay rise. She was not put in the same position as David McNicholl however, who bought an extravagant camel coat on expenses and was ordered to leave it in London for the next correspondent when he returned to Australia.
Rolfe was deputy editor of The Bulletin to Donald Horne and the two combined to revive the magazine from one of its periodic slumps. In effect Dame Patricia was the first woman editor of The Bulletin and certainly its most distinguished female presence in a line of writers that contains Australia’s best from every generation.
As a mentor Rolfe was second to none, although she didn’t see herself in the role. She was wise, calm, unmoved by fads and fancies and disdainful of show ponies. Her wit was sharp and her tongue deceptively acidic. She could deliver a criticism with the gentleness of a maiden aunt’s pat on the head and the victim only realised they had been stabbed with a stiletto when they dropped dead a few minutes later.
As a very green and nervous editor in the early 90s I was weirdly reassured by Dame Patricia one morning when she rolled her eyes at a sudden failure of copy for a late page. “Diana,” she trilled. “Come out for coffee.” No! Surely not! I had a gaping hole to fill. She fixed me with a beady eye and intoned, “Open the window, the ravens will provide.”
And she was right: open the window (make yourself open to opportunity and ideas) and the ravens will provide (something will happen and problems will be solved). It’s advice I’ve taken much pleasure in passing on to students ever since.
Of one editor who remained at her desk from dawn to dusk with a packed lunch for company, Rolfe observed sadly, “No one ever got a good idea by communing with a salad sandwich.” And she was right. Each morning we would leave the building for coffee in a ritual exchange of gossip, ideas and fun that never faltered no matter which bean-counter was nominally in charge.
In the later years at The Bulletin it was our great frustration to watch successive editors and managements misunderstand and stuff up the magazine. One of the schemes we always intended to implement was a compendium of those charlatans and fools we watched troop in and out of the editor’s office over the years. It was to be titled The Scum Also Rises. It was a half-joke we never tired of adding to, there were many candidates.
As a literary editor she was second to none and the books section of the magazine was wide-ranging and fad-free. The black-clad chicks that briefly took over Australian publishing could not sway her. She sniffed out good writing like a truffle hound. She gave me the first of Colleen McCulloch’s Roman histories to review and when I protested at the 700+ pages she said, “Just think, you will be the only person ever able to claim, honestly, to have read it all.”
It was my great good fortune to work alongside Patricia Rolfe and my even greater good fortune to learn from her. It was my great privilege and pride that she liked me and called me a friend. We who were are a lucky lot.
