Lyall Grey

Lyall left home at 18 to attend university in Melbourne. After graduating, he got a job working as a photographer for the Gippsland Times before being headhunted by agricultural publication Stock & Land. It was a job that he loved and that kickstarted his photojournalism career:

I spent a heck of a lot of time on the road because I had to go round every event really from Dubbo right across Victoria and across to Murray Bridge in South Australia. So I was doing an average of 150,000 kilometres a year in a car just going round, taking photographs, and very quickly I got into journalism from that as well, just because I was out there and I could capture the story.

After ten years at Stock & Land, Lyall got a job working in public relations for the Melbourne Royal Show. He wasn’t there long, but as he recalls, ‘it was incredibly intensive, particularly as you got closer to the Show’. Working long hours, Lyall’s role involved getting the media onboard with the Show, feeding them stories and other exciting events to help promote the Show.

One stunt was having different animals ride the tram to the Show:

My idea was to take over that tram, put it in the city and then to have it slowly coming out to the Showgrounds with a little bit of a band in there playing some music and then having people hop on at the different stops with an animal.

As well as the animal tram, Lyall recalls organising a weather reporter to attempt woodchopping, and a photoshoot with the premier, as well as other outside-the-box stunts to help bring the Show into the media spotlight. ‘We worked really, really long hours and it was such a buzz though because you’re looking for things all the time.’

One of the biggest educational opportunities for the RASV in the lead up to the Melbourne Royal Show, was the establishment of journalist tours of agricultural industries across Victoria. Beginning in 1957, the RASV Journalist Tours were carefully curated events that took a group of journalists to different agricultural industries across regions of Victoria over a five-day period with the intention of highlighting the lives and work of farmers and their families. These tours were also important opportunities for media exposure and often featured farmers with prize-winning livestock or agricultural innovation.

Lyall went on one of these tours as a young journalist and assisted with them in his role at RASV.

I thought it was really good because a lot of journalists in metropolitan areas are given agriculture as a ‘safe’ entrance into journalism. The editors seem to think, oh well, we can stick you out here. You can do the agricultural stories. When you get any good as a journalist we’ll put you onto some ‘real’ news.

So these young journos had no idea, in a lot of cases, what agriculture was really about, why it was there. And that’s why I was so impressed with what they managed to do on the first tour I went on, because it took them out to a whole selection of different farming activities and it gave these young journalists that had no experience with agriculture at all, a real eye-opening experience.

Sponsored by Shell, the RASV Journalist Tours ran from 1957 until 1989. As Lyall recalls, the tours were ‘really well thought out … a lot of really good tea and scones. The people that welcomed the journalists onto their property were really very good’.