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Farewell Greg Bright, a journalist
“Every newspaper story ever written was 100 per cent accurate, except to the handful of people who knew what actually happened.”
– Greg Bright
When I heard that Greg Bright had passed away my first instinct was to call him, because he would probably have something to say about it. He was a journalist, and so a hopeless gossip, and he saw gossip as a foundation stone of news, or possibly the entire foundation. The practice of seating journalists next to boring executives at boring events frustrated him. He wanted to be in the back of the room with the rank and file, the foot soldiers, the people who actually knew what was going on and would tell you about it. This was where news came from; everything else was stenography.
Greg Bright, for those who are somehow unaware, was the previous editor of this publication, as well as the founder of innumerable other financial publications, including InvestorDaily, Money Management, Super Review and Investment Magazine. There likely would not be as diverse a financial news landscape in Australia today without his efforts.
It’s at this point that most obituaries launch into biographical facts: he was born in 1954, he died in 2024, his father owned five papers, he had six stents in his heart and two titanium knees and liked to ride motorbikes. Some of these things are interesting, some of them are not, and none of them tell us as much about the man as we should know.
So here’s a story about Greg Bright: when he hired me in 2021 I’d barely started tramping into the Elizabeth Street office we shared with Shed Enterprises before Sydney’s second Covid lockdown forced us all back home. For three months my interaction with Greg was entirely through the phone. Each morning we would talk for a half hour or so about what was happening in the news and what we were going to write about and Greg would more or less mentor me in this manner.
As the months went by it became less and less necessary for us to talk every morning – having nothing to do but write financial news every day means you get pretty good at it, pretty quickly – but I continued to call him. In hindsight, this was largely because I was locked up in my house and my girlfriend was an on-call midwife and I only had a miniature dachshund to talk to for days at a time, and while they’re talkative animals the conversation is not mutually intelligible. Greg, at some point, must have recognised that I mostly needed somebody to talk to and was not seeking journalistic advice or history lessons, but continued to take my calls and chat about whatever it was that desperately lonely rookie journalists wanted to chat about with enormous patience. This sounds like a small thing, something anybody would do, but it was, for some reason, the thing I kept returning to when I heard he’d died. I continued to call him once a week, for pretty much the same reason, for the rest of the time I knew him.
Of course, I didn’t know Greg as long as a lot of other people. He pissed a lot of those people off. Not everybody had as high an opinion of him as I do.
But here is another story about Greg: two decades ago, when a large, boring European asset manager was fretting about whether one of their executives, who was a dark-skinned woman, should appear on the cover of one of his publications (it wasn’t in keeping with their image as a historically European organisation, or some idiotic reason like that), he took the decision out of their hands and did it anyway. He had no time for that sort of thing, and he wasn’t going to let somebody like that tell him what to do.
For a lot of people, Greg was the first person that really believed them. The industry is littered with his proteges. He had a keen sense for what a person could do and, without them even really noticing, he made them capable of doing it.
Greg was, at his core, a journalist, which meant knowing some things that were hard to explain to people without sounding callous, even cruel. Among those things is that obituaries are very well read. They were one of his favourite things to write, and I’m shocked that I have no draft of his own to work with. Writing this one is difficult, not only because Greg was my friend but because Greg was my editor and I have no doubt that he would disapprove of some of the technical and narrative choices made here. We have not even gotten into his storied career at Fairfax, his first magazine, Encore, launched in bi-weekly format as Australian Film Review, or his short, doomed stint as John Howard’s press secretary.
Here are some other things Greg knew: the headline is sacred, and it’s alright to paraphrase a little more loosely in it. The use of the word “exclusive” is masturbatory, something journalists care about but their readers do not. Readers usually have no idea where they read something. If you aren’t willing to take a punt, you shouldn’t be in the game (this little saying was passed on to him by somebody who was successfully sued for defamation a number of times, calling into question its usefulness, but it is comforting to repeat to yourself as you publish something you aren’t really certain of).
And he knew that a story never really ends – you keep finding bits of it in other stories, and just when you think you’ve seen the last of something it’ll turn up again and surprise you.
Greg was not supposed to pass away just yet. He was the healthiest he’d been in his entire life, having shed what looked like my bodyweight and given up the booze, and was unrecognisable to his friends. He was activating oats and taking long walks on Culburra Beach. But if you linger on all that you’ll go mad.
Greg leaves behind a wife, Christine, four children from a previous marriage, a vast number of friends, and a book on the history of superannuation, asset management and custody and administration that might now never be finished. As far as I know, Greg didn’t believe in life after death. But I choose to believe that he is continuing to work on that book given he now has access to a vast number of interview subjects that he previously couldn’t get any time with. It is also possible that those subjects are deeply distressed at the prospect of his imminent arrival in the afterlife, where they probably thought themselves safe from his inquiries. They should have known better. A story never really ends.
