Interview: Peter Cox talks about Tunis is Mad Tonight
- NZ Booklovers
- 5 hours ago
- 5 min read
Peter Cox is the author of two previous books, Good Luck to All the Lads: The Wartime Story of Brian Cox 1939–43 and Desert War: The Battle of Sidi Rezegh. In 2019, he was awarded a Queen’s Service Medal for services to sport, particularly hockey. He and his wife Robin live in Christchurch, where Peter previously worked as a chartered accountant and company director. He now acts as an adviser to some family businesses and as a trustee for several sports organisations while continuing to be interested in military history. Peter talks to NZ Booklovers.
Tell us a little about Tunis is Mad Tonight.
Denis Glover, Charles Brasch, Ian Milner – these names have long been familiar to New Zealanders. Less well known is their contemporary and friend, journalist Douglas Brass, whose remarkable four-decade career gave him a unique view of a turbulent period in world history.
Born in Invercargill in 1910, Brass was educated at Southland Boys’ High School, Waitaki Boys’ High School and Canterbury University College. After graduating, he joined the Christchurch Press, becoming a parliamentary reporter in Wellington in 1934, at the age of 24. The following year he moved to Melbourne, where he worked for Sir Keith Murdoch at the Herald, before becoming an acclaimed and internationally published war correspondent. He reported extensively and intelligently on post-war Europe and also established himself as an admired royal correspondent. Brass went on to become a senior executive in Rupert Murdoch’s burgeoning newspaper empire, was editorial director of News Limited and played a major role in the establishment of The Australian. His powerful columns opposing Australia’s participation in the Vietnam War were extremely influential.
Brass was a man who loved his family and his homeland yet often fiercely criticised New Zealand, a man who was at the forefront of great events yet remained private and reserved, a man who could be serious yet also funny and kind. He was as fine a writer in his field as his more famous contemporaries. Although once described as ‘one of Australia’s great newspaper men’, he has remained virtually unknown in his own country. This book aims to give him the moment in the sun that he richly deserves.
What inspired you to write this book?
Douglas Brass was my wife’s great-uncle and I had always been aware of his impressive career in the newspaper world My interest in writing about him, however, was ignited when, while researching another book, I was given a cache of family material that included a number of his fascinating and brilliantly written wartime newspaper dispatches, several of which had featured on the front pages of British newspapers. When further information, including personal papers, photographs and correspondence, also came to hand, his extremely full, varied and distinguished career began to emerge. His role as a trusted royal reporter also became apparent: he accompanied the new Queen Elizabeth II on her 1953–54 Commonwealth tour. Although Brass had died in 1994, I felt that enough material had been unearthed for a fascinating story to be told.
Thanks to my long interest in New Zealand writing and publishing, I was aware, too, of other threads to Brass’s story. To put some context around his life and work, I wanted to include his friends and his interactions with them. These included his ‘Waitaki friends of a lifetime’, James Bertram, Charles Brasch, Ian Milner and Angus Ross, as well as Denis Glover from his university days. They all, of course, had distinguished careers, but there’s a strong argument to suggest that, in his time, Brass would have been the best known of any of them, with a daily readership at times in the hundreds of thousands.
What research was involved?
Because of the nature of Brass’s career, because he had died a quarter of a century earlier and because the family records were limited in a number of areas, extensive research was required to fill in the many gaps. This included newspaper archives in New Zealand (Papers Past), Australia (Trove) and other countries. National archives in Australia and New Zealand yielded other records. I also had to obtain a number of documents and publications, mainly through second-hand bookshops and AbeBooks searches. Because many of these publications were quite old, some of them took a lot of tracking down. I did, however, uncover some absolute gems, including Brass’s press pack and Order of Service for the 1953 coronation.
What was your routine or process when writing this book?
Other commitments sometimes made it a challenge to find time for writing, but I kept at it steadily whenever I could because this amazing opportunity to reveal Douglas Brass’s life was always in my mind . Although I approached the biography chronologically, the amount of research material and information coming in meant I constantly had to go back and add new material or change the structure. I also needed to ensure that the tone and pace of the book remained consistent. Fortunately Anna Rogers, my invaluable editor, helped to refine the structure until we were happy with it.
What did you enjoy the most about writing this biography?
Without doubt, the research – following up every possible lead to create as comprehensive picture as possible. It was especially rewarding to be able to uncover so much previously unknown information for the wider family.
What did you do to celebrate finishing Tunis is Mad Tonight?
Because this project had taken far longer than I’d initially thought, and so much new information had been uncovered, the true feeling of celebration, and a real sense of satisfaction, came when the first copies arrived from the printer. There was also an element of relief! But I’m thrilled with the finished book, and I genuinely believe that the life of this previously neglected New Zealander deserves to be recorded. There’s no doubt that Anna Rogers and the Quentin Wilson Publishing team played a very big part in making that happen.
What is one of the surprising things people might learn about Douglas Brass in the book?
Because Brass is little known in his homeland, readers might be surprised to learn of his career's sheer depth and breadth and just how influential and highly regarded he was overseas. As one of his obituaries in The Australian recorded, he was not only ‘an outstanding war and foreign correspondent’ but made what was ‘probably his greatest contribution to Australian journalism … when he became the eminence grise behind the young Rupert Murdoch as he began to carve the modest foundations of his global media foundations’.
What is the favourite book you have read so far this year and why?
The Year of Living Dangerously by Christopher Koch. This highly praised, tense novel, set in Djakarta in 1965, tells the story of Western news correspondents and a local cameraman reporting on the volatile and explosive events unfolding towards the end of the Sukarno regime. Coincidentally, and as described in Tunis is Mad Tonight, Brass had visited the city in similar circumstances in 1963 and had met Sukarno, who he recalled as a highly skilled orator who could captivate an audience. Much of the novel’s attraction for me is that I worked in Djakarta myself in 1971 – the book is set in the area I knew – and the vivid descriptions of the city and its people evoked strong memories.
What’s next on the agenda for you?
Before I became sidetracked by Douglas Brass, I was working on another book related to the Desert War. In fact, I initially tried to incorporate Brass into that book, but he didn’t really fit, and so I decided to keep him separate. That original piece of work still seems worth persevering with. So that’s always an option. Another, having read The Year of Living Dangerously, is to revisit my own time working in Asia in the early 1970s, as there are plenty of interesting tales to tell about that time!
