Ronald Grayson Campbell (1896–1970) was born on 3 April 1896 in Sydney. His uncle, Norman Campbell, was a freelance journalist who wrote under a number of pseudonyms in Sydney and Melbourne, and the actress and writer Jean Campbell was a cousin. Little is known of his early life, but Campbell was working as a teacher in the early 1920s when he began to submit short stories to newspapers such as the Bulletin, Aussie, the Australasian and Smith’s Weekly. In the winter of 1922 he submitted a clutch of stories to the popular monthly magazine the Australian Journal, initiating an association that would last for more than thirty years. The management was impressed with Campbell’s writing, and, after making good on a request to deliver a competent detective story he was hired to write the ‘Detective Album’ section, a feature of the Australian Journal since 1865. Campbell produced his monthly quota of detective fiction for the next four years, and in 1926 he was offered the editorship of the magazine, a role he enthusiastically accepted.
Campbell oversaw a period of increased interest in Australian writing in the pages of the Australian Journal. In the decades before he was appointed editor, the magazine relied heavily on syndicated fiction from overseas, rather than encouraging home-grown authorship. Campbell developed strong relationships with many of Australia’s most active freelance story-writers of the 1930s, including Myra Morris, Georgia Rivers, Vance Palmer, Xavier Herbert, Roy Bridges, J. H. M Abbot, J. P. McKinney, and Arthur Upfield. By the 1940s the Australian Journal was one of few Australian periodicals that paid its contributors a competitive rate for their fiction, and Campbell continued to encourage younger story-writers such as Jon Cleary and Robert Close. Campbell’s mixture of popular fiction with a variety of departments for men, women and children in the format of a popular family magazine maintained a circulation of 100,000 throughout the depression and into the war-years of the 1940s. At the same time he wrote hundreds of stories under various pseudonyms. As ‘Rex Grayson’ he was the most prolific author of detective fiction in the journal’s history, churning out hundreds of stories and serials during his thirty-year association with the Australian Journal. As Ron Campbell, he wrote two novels, Mudflat Million (1955 with S. H. Courtier), and Marked for Murder (1958); and, as W. Imgram Morgan, he wrote the short-lived ‘Colossal Corcoran’ series of children’s books, an attempt at an Australian version of the popular ‘Biggles’ books.
In the 1950s, with Australian-sourced stories and serials difficult to acquire, the Australian Journal returned to a stronger reliance on syndicated fiction from overseas. Nevertheless, Campbell remained devoted to the promotion of Australian writing. An anthology of stories, ‘The Australian Journal Story Book,’ most selected from issues under Campbell’s editorship, was prepared in 1954, but was never published. Campbell’s career with the Australian Journal came to an abrupt end in March 1955 when A. H. Massina sold the magazine to Keith Murdoch’s Southdown Press. The Australian Journal lasted only three more years under its new management, subsequently appearing, in name only, as a one-sheet newsletter until December 1961.
Noting the demise of the Australian Journal in the Bulletin on 3 September 1958 under the heading ‘Exit Another Magazine’, a correspondent saw this as a sign that the market for freelance writers would become more restricted:
Unfortunately it seems that today there isn’t a big enough demand by readers for magazines devoted to short-stories, serial-stories and similar stuff of a fairly high standard. One by one such publications have gone; their places on the bookstalls taken by productions emphasising pictures, sex and sensationalism. . . . The freelance, anxious to market his work, may, in a few years’ time, wonder whether it’s worth while freelancing, but he can hardly blame publishers for preferring not to back losing propositions. The new writer, including the adaptable freelance, may find outlets for his talent in writing for radio and TV.
This matched trends overseas, with formerly prominent magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post heading towards similar fates in the 1960s. Campbell’s departure marked the end of an era in more ways than one.
After parting ways with the Australian Journal, Campbell followed his partner, Louise Bateson, to England. Not burning any bridges, he wrote a series of travel stories for the new proprietor’s of the Australian Journal. The couple made a living in England as writers and magazine editors. Campbell was a regular contributor to boys’ magazines through the Edinburgh media company, D. C. Thompson, and with the experience of ‘Rex Grayson’ behind him, he was soon writing up to six stories every week for a number of periodicals.
The couple returned to Australia in 1960, and their first child, Catherine, was born the same year. Campbell continued to make a living as a freelance writer, writing for a number of publications, including a regular historical feature for the Sydney Daily Mirror from 1961–1967. Many of these features drew on his love of the opera and the theatre, building a reputation that attracted the attention of American academic Barbara Mackenzie, who commissioned Campbell to help her complete Singers of Australia: From Melba to Sutherland. This volume was published in 1967.
Over the following years, Campbell continued to undertake freelance journalism, and had begun work on a memoir of his life in magazines and writing when he died suddenly on 18 April 1970. While his passing received little public attention, those his life had touched expressed their sadness privately. Upon hearing of Campbell’s death, S. H. Courtier wrote to Louise Campbell,
. . . if I have gained some success in the writing game, the responsibility and the incentive was largely his. He guided and coached me, and he did the same thing with many other writers who got their start in The Australian Journal, some of them great names in Australian Literature.
The Australian Journal Story Book 