The Friday night after our arrival in Melbourne, Fabinyi took my wife and me to a rather indifferent production of Patrick White’s play, A Season in Sarsparilla. He was an uncertain driver (a neglected, green Ford Consul) and he drove us quite randomly through strange streets, sounding the horn at deserted cars and crashing the worn gears. Later, with what was to become typical hospitality, he invited us to dinner to meet his wife and family. It was a large rambling house in Hopetoun Road, Toorak, with lots of books, his wife Elizabeth, his children and relations, with Andrew at the head of the table, dispensing drinks haphazardly but generously and politely listening to nobody – except himself. He was a benevolent patriarch.

On my first working day at Cheshire, Fabinyi asked me to read some manuscripts, report on them and draft replies to the hopeful authors. Having had no experience of this sort of thing, I laboured and did my best. Late in the afternoon of the following day, he asked me into his office, sat me down and said: ‘Your reports and letters are a trifle pompous, aren’t they?’

I sweated and said nothing. He then gave me a clutch of Cheshire catalogues and told me to take them home and read them so I could learn what his publishing was all about. As I left his office, I said: ‘Thank you, doctor.’

He said: ‘Would you mind not calling me that.’

The 1963 Cheshire catalogue was amazing. It contained some 250 titles, ranging from: Art, Architecture and Music; Belles Letters; Children’s Books; Commerce and Economics; Current Affairs; Domestic Science and Health; Education and Philosophy; English Language and Literature; Geography, History, Biography, and Sociology; Library Science; Mathematics; Modern Languages; Novels and Short Stories; Poetry; Science; and Travel. Very soon, I was to learn that I had got a job with the Doyen of Australian Publishing – a sobriquet which Andrew always laughed at, but only with his close friends …

Fabinyi was born on 27 December 1908 in Budapest, Hungary, the son of a lawyer. While preparing his thesis on aesthetics, he entered the local booktrade, joined Lauffer’s Bookshop, Budapest, and in 1932, started an agency for the distribution of British books in Hungary. Early in 1939, Fabinyi left Hungary for London and arrived in Australia on his way to New Zealand. He stayed in Melbourne and joined the bookselling firm of F.W. Cheshire to establish there a publishing and general book department. In 1940, Fabinyi joined the Australian Army, became a naturalised British subject on VE Day and rejoined F.W. Cheshire.

During the next twenty-four years, Fabinyi built an impressive and wide ranging list of titles under the Cheshire imprint. While the main thrust of Fabinyi’s publishing concerned high school textbooks, such was the vigorously eclectic nature of the man that hardly any general subject in the arts and sciences was neglected. As the Cheshire publishing list expanded under his very personal (and often idiosyncratic) direction, Fabinyi’s influence and reputation grew. He soon became Publishing Director of F.W. Cheshire, a member of numerous cultural organisations, was elected President of the Australian Book Publishers’ Association in 1965–66 and was awarded an OB.E in 1960. A passionate believer in good books and the ideas they contain, Fabinyi worked tirelessly for the development and expansion of public and school libraries, and devoted much of his time to the affairs of the Library Association of Australia. He served as a member of the Victorian Branch Council and as its President on three occasions between 1959 and 1966. For his work in the Library Association, the prestigious Redmond Barry Award was conferred on him in 1974.

Fabinyi resigned from F. W. Cheshire in 1969 to become Managing Director of Pergamon Press, Sydney. There, under somewhat less sympathetic circumstances, he continued his highly individual style of publishing. In 1977, he became a non-executive director and adviser to Longman Cheshire and he remained closely involved with its publishing until his death in July, 1978. In some forty years of publishing, Fabinyi was responsible for more than one thousand titles, written by Australian authors. Such is the mortality rate in publishing that many of these books have been long since forgotten, but equally many are still in print and being read today. So much of the facts, but what of the man?

As we have seen, Fabinyi arrived in Australia in July 1939, originally intending to go to New Zealand because as he said: ‘It was the furthest place I could go’. Seeing the decay of Europe, he left Hungary the day after Munich for London. While no lover of the communists, Fabinyi had a greater hatred of the fascist leader Admiral Horthy and above all feared being taken into the array to fight for Hitler. In moving from Europe to a completely unknown part of the world, Fabinyi was to display that sense of the movement of history which he retained throughout his life.

Fabinyi’s wife, Elizabeth, who met him in 1940, recalls that he was enthusiastic about Australia right from the start, but ‘somewhat taken aback by lack of culture’. Judging from the Cheshire catalogues of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Fabinyi quickly set about remedying that defect.

Again, it was typical of Fabinyi that he volunteered for the Australian Army in 1940, but because he was an alien, he was not accepted until 1942 when he joined a labour battalion, stationed at Albury. Later, he was transferred to the Army Education Corps, and by the time the war ended, he was a Warrant Officer. In 1949, he travelled to the United Stated in an attempt to place Australian books in that country. The trip was largely unsuccessful, but it is fair to say that by this time, Fabinyi had the publishing bit firmly between his teeth, and already, as they say, he had decided to put Australian publishing on the map.

The publishing catalogues of F.W. Cheshire revealed several things about Fabinyi, and about Australia. The first was his obvious (and at times uncontrolled) enthusiasm for a country which was still not his own. He had tackled what was then a basically provincial and dependent culture head-on; he was to do this all his life in an Australian-country-of-the-mind which, I think, never quite accepted him.

The first two books Fabinyi published in the early 1940s are typical of his naïve enthusiasm: Two Pacific Democracies – Australia and China by Wy Tsao, with an introduction by R.M. Crawford, and Pacific Treasure Island – New Caledonia by Wilfred Burchett. Today, most Australian publishers would reject such projects out of hand. But the names were there: Crawford and Burchett. And in the 1950s and 1960s, there were other names: Clive Turnbull, Robin Boyd, Alan Marshall, Joan Lindsay, Brian Fitzpatrick, Cyril Pearl, Xavier Herbert, C.P. Fitzgerald, Henry Schoenheimer, Bruce Dawe, Judah Waten – all people anyone would be proud to publish. Andrew had the gift of picking them, and some left him after he had taken the risk, for bigger advances and more prestigious publishers. He may not have got the right books all the time, but at least he got a lot of the right names.

Fabinyi was probably the most unsystematic man I ever knew. He flew from idea to idea: his publishing meetings were a guided-democratic joke. I once accused him of being the ‘Soekano of Publishing’ and he was terribly offended. But he was indeed the commissar, his was the idée fixe; if the front door were closed to a project he espoused he would use the back. And to this extent, he was circuitous. Fabinyi’s publishing decisions were a mixture of shrewd commercialisms (eternally successful school books most of which are still in print) and a mixture of wildly improbable successes and failures. But under his direction, the Cheshire list grew in all directions, as did his power and influence in the Australian book trade and the literate society at large. Ironically, Fabinyi (and most Australian publishers) owed his success not only to his own ability, but also to the boom years of Menzies and subsequent Liberal governments. It is also worth recalling that Australia in the 1950s and 1960s was always ‘coming of age’ – the bourgeoning of the nationalist spirit (Australian Civilization and The Australian Tradition are but two examples) which Fabinyi, the Hungarian-born ‘Australian’ vigorously espoused.

Although they are not usually known to the general public, publishers and authors of school textbooks may wield great power in the community. Tens of thousands of Victorian High School students have laboured through Adamson and Turner’s First Year Mathematics, Ridout and McGregor’s English for Australian Schools, Rowney and Lugg’s Pursuit of Science and Coghill et al’s Continents and People. It is fair to say that in terms of formal high school education, Andrew was pragmatic and conservative. His own education and business sense made him so. But exceptions to this immediately come to mind: Hannan et al English Part One is at least one and the Junior Secondary Science Project is another.

However, it was in the field of social ideas that Fabinyi was most radical and innovative. It still amazes me that a Hungarian-born publisher understood immediately what Robin Boyd or Alan Marshall or Vance Palmer was all about. Fabinyi, for example, displayed great national awareness in publishing Encel and Davies’ Australian Society in 1965.

For many years, Fabinyi was a member of the Twenty Club, a group of Melbourne intellectuals with as much interest in good red wine, football, and cricket as in the affairs of the mind. Was he fully accepted as one of themselves? Upon reflection, I think not; I don’t think Andrew ever really became a fully fledged member of the general ‘Australian Club’. He used them for ideas about Australia, and of course they used him to get their work published – in one form or another. And this resulted, at times, in quite disastrous publishing. But Andrew, in his new provincial culture, embraced all. Given his eclectic intellect and his singularity, he had no other alternative.

Politically, Fabinyi belonged to what might be called the ‘independent left’. He understood and generally supported the student revolts of the 1960s and was implacably opposed to the Vietnam War. As far as I know, he always voted Labor; he also fought vigorously against the prevailing censorship of many books which was part of the scene of the day. To my mind, he was far more outspoken about censorship than many of his publishing colleagues who appeared to be inactive on this issue which affected their professional livelihood and intellectual freedom.

Fabinyi was only too aware of the doctrinal and political barbarities of Russian communism; but unlike many of his Eastern-European contemporaries, he never developed that fanatical anti-communist attitude that blinded some of the best European intellects of his generation. In Australia, he viewed the anti-left activities of the DLP and the Liberals with mounting disquiet, recalling his formative years in Hungary under Horthy. He remained forever appalled at the dismissal of the Whitlam government by Sir John Kerr in November 1975.

To my mind, a publisher is remembered, and measured, as much by his authors and their books as by his financial success. For Fabinyi, ultimately the ideas, the discoveries, came first and the money (both corporate and personal) came second. For me, among the many distinguished authors Andrew published, three stand out: Robin Boyd, Alan Marshall and Bruce Dawe. (This is, of course, a highly arguable and personal choice.) Boyd’s The Australian Ugliness is one of the best books on the Australian culture ever written. Alan Marshall’s I Can Jump Puddles is the classic of Australian childhood, while Bruce Dawe is one (to me, the best) of the leading poets of our generation. All three authors’ books are still in print.

One last measurement of Andrew Fabinyi. People still talk about him – some with admiration and some without. But they still discuss him: he stays in the mind. He stays in the mind because, unlike many publishers both here and elsewhere, he had an intellectual view – a vision – of the world. He saw us all as being capable of improvement – and that basically was the raison d’être of his publishing.