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Journalist David Dale, whose innovative daily column Stay In Touch helped lift the Herald into a golden age of rising circulation and influence, has died. He was 77.
His column pricked the pomposity of politicians in Macquarie Street or Canberra, ran snippets of bizarre reports from around the world that usually ended up ignored in the wastebaskets of teleprinter rooms, and mixed fact, fiction, satire, gossip and humour with Dale’s distaste for sycophancy that bustled the then broadsheet Herald into the 1980s.
The column was a springboard that took Dale to New York as the Herald’s correspondent and then the editorship of Kerry Packer’s Bulletin magazine. He also worked as a broadcaster for ABC radio and 2GB Sydney and, when redundancy decimated the newspaper industry, he became a journalism lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney and the University of NSW.
Former Herald columnist David Dale, pictured in 2014.Credit: Fairfax Media
Dale did not relish working for Packer and often told the story of only accepting the offer from his right-hand man, Australian Consolidated Press director and publisher, Richard Walsh, while sitting in the smallest room in his New York hotel.
The loathing was mutual. Unimpressed that his new editor had driven up the circulation of the magazine, the mogul sacked Dale for defying his directive not to publish a second version of his Bulletin cover story “Australia’s 100 most appalling people”, not least because many were Packer’s friends.
For Dale, the best thing about his time at the Bulletin was that he recruited News Limited journalist Susan Williams. They married in Paris in 1991. Their daughter Millie was born in 1993.
Former premier Neville Wran launches a Stay in Touch collection at Pulcinella’s Restaurant in November 1984. Dale is in the background. Credit: Paul Matthews/Fairfax Media
The son of psychologist Keith Dale and university secretary Leigh, David was born in 1948 and grew up in the eastern suburbs, attending Coogee Primary School and Randwick Boys High School before taking honours in psychology at the University of Sydney.
On graduation, he travelled extensively in Europe but returned to Australia to take up a Herald cadetship. He did a stint as a political reporter on The Australian but returned to Fairfax where he worked on the National Times and The Sun-Herald before rejoining his old masthead in 1981 to write Stay in Touch for the next four years.
Along the way, his dedication to luncheon contacts helped him win the 1983 Walkley Award for best feature story – The Italian Waiters Conspiracy, tracing the roots of families who established Italian dining in Sydney. Just days before he died at Chris O’Brien’s Lifehouse, Dale was trying to publicise the death of Doreen Orsatti, of Chianti Restaurant in Elizabeth Street, a woman he considered the brains behind Sydney’s reputed first Italian restaurant.
Dale again returned to Fairfax after the Bulletin as a “heritage byline”, writing Stay In Touch and then a new column, The Tribal Mind, as well as nearly 20 books on travel and food.
He ended his academic career after the COVID-19 pandemic, disenchanted that the universities’ recruitment of overseas students was disadvantaging both them and local undergraduates in the quest for money.
Dale, who had been ill for several weeks, is survived by his wife and daughter.
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