The Murdoch Archipelago

by Bruce Page

  Lady Murdoch, as she then was, became under the will trustee of the Murdoch estate, jointly with H. D. Giddy, finance director of the Herald group. Sir Keith had always regarded Giddy as an ally against Theodore Fink, and a Herald role in settling the estate was necessary: the trust structure would reduce tax liabilities, but some part of the Queensland value would be needed to meet them. (Settlement was not reached until 1961, which takes us into the next chapter.) The trustees could give Rupert control of the newspaper properties only if they found him capable of running them properly and making a ‘useful life’ in command of them. By the standards of the time and place – not arbitrary ones at all – no rational basis existed for such a finding. Responsibility may well be borne young; after all, Rupert was the age of (say) a flight leader in the Battle of Britain. But the pilot would have had valid training and experience. Rupert, on the other hand, did not meet requirements for the bottom grade of editorial responsibility in the company over which his father had presided. The trust had nonetheless to exercise a judgment – otherwise it, and its tax advantages, would be invalid.

  There were some useful points of appearance and practice. A link with the Daily Express then conferred an éclat that now seems impossible to imagine, and that was provided via Ted Pickering. Also the News, the urgent case, was already in the competent hands of Rohan Rivett, a loyal friend to both Rupert and his mother – who much admired Rivett.

  But essentially it was a hereditarian proposition. Elisabeth could say that Sir Keith had at the end thought Rupert a fit successor to himself. Sir Keith on the last day of his life received a letter from Rupert describing the British Labour Party conference – he was present as an Oxford student representative – and turning to Elisabeth said, ‘Thank God, I think he’s got it.’ By no realistic standard could such a judgment rest on a scrap of private correspondence. But who better than Australia’s dominant newspaperman to judge that Rupert had inherited his talents? Obsequies aside, Sir Keith’s colleagues had their doubts about him both as journalist and as man. The widow, however, was universally liked and respected.

  She did, however, make plain to Rupert that there could be no evading the emulation now due from him. According to William Shawcross’ biography, there was a dialogue – shortly after Sir Keith’s death – in which Lady Murdoch demanded Rupert repay her support by accepting his father’s example, and his father’s expectations. This was said by members of the family to have ‘shaken him to his foundations’.

  Ever since, Rupert’s assertions of fidelity to the example have continued, ritualistically – though modified, over the half-century, to cope with Elisabeth’s public distaste for a tabloid empire she clearly never foresaw. His mother took too much notice of his critics, said Murdoch when re-asserting this fidelity in a long interview for the January 2000 edition of the British Journalism Review, and she was wrong, he said, to fear for Sir Keith’s standards, summing up firmly: ‘His ideals are my ideals.’

  Connecting the ideal journalist-statesman Sir Keith with tabloid vigilantism and escapades like the Hitler Diaries is absurd – and the Anzac spirit accommodating itself to the pseudo-Marxist thugs of Beijing is still more disagreeable. But with the real man there is an acceptable fit, truth being ironic, as it is in the early speeches Sophocles gives to Oedipus. Keith was better than Rupert has been at appearances. But the son’s political and organisational techniques resemble those of the hidden father in many substantial ways.

  To become, as he did, a quite unprepared journalist-proprietor Murdoch had to adopt a respectable myth about his father. The validation he needed depended on the validity of the myth itself: his independence began in an act of submission. And this ‘official’ father has remained dynastically intact ever since, though not robust enough, in truth, to withstand any significant amount of the curiosity essential to journalism – a curiosity which must not be deterred by uncertainty about its destination. Investigation, like charity, begins at home.

  None of this applies to Dame Elisabeth. First, the relationship of partners begins (more or less) with the independent capacities which a child is still constructing. Second, there was no professional resonance for her, no obligation of inquiry. If she preserved a deeply mistaken estimate of Sir Keith as a professional icon, it was not her profession. It left untouched her own life’s work of voluntary service to the poor and disadvantaged.

  Research and common sense suggest that everyone carries some authoritarian damage, but that most people grow up sufficiently poised for life’s ordinary inconsistencies, not pursued by a need to dominate or submit. The Adorno team remarked that authoritarian people often function admirably where structure, responsibility and discipline enable them them to minimise the ambiguous – as judges, engineers, senior administrators. But the news business exists only to seek ambiguities. Such discipline as it has rests on expelling anyone suffering the authoritarian need to be certain before being right.

  No sign exists that Murdoch has ever looked straight at Murdoch: biographies and profiles report, in common form, the heroic version. The diarist Woodrow (Lord) Wyatt was Boswell to the Newscorp elite from 1985 to 1997, and his record shows Rupert’s table-talk reinforced still with strands from the Dardanelles jeremiad. It isn’t a son’s office to disparage his father, but in the Wyatt context the Murdoch of 1915 is invoked as Rupert’s exemplary predecessor, scourging contemporary Britain with valiant truths. Here Keith succeeds in continuing himself, as a component of Rupert the synthetic iconoclast.

  It would have been arduous in the 1950s fully to illuminate the mystery of Keith Murdoch (much military history, for instance, such as Serle’s Monash, is the work of subsequent decades). But that there was enough to start on, few people in journalism or politics doubted: many, as Rupert knew, saw in Keith a cynical servant of established authority. It is not so hard now to learn that an English staff officer did most to reduce the Gallipoli debacle; that Australian journalism owed little to Northcliffe’s protégé; that the Herald was not really a Murdoch creation. Specialist histories, documents and old newspaper files link naturally to each other via strands of curiosity.

  Such curiosity is anaesthetised among Murdoch’s employees, to whom Keith remains ‘THE JOURNALIST WHO STOPPED A WAR’ (as The Times put it with sweeping naivety) and a classic voice of conscience. ‘For courtiers to survive at the court of King Rupert,’ wrote Andrew Neil, veteran of a decade’s service at the Sunday Times, ‘they … have to be adept at anticipating their master’s wishes and acting in his interests’ – but their adeptness is barely tested by the case of a dynastic record which is explicitly approved, and can be sustained largely by oversight (of review assignments and so on). In Australia, where the history lies nearest the surface, Newscorp is responsible for about three-quarters of mainstream newspaper employment. The simple discovery that, contrary to his claim, Rupert is not a second-generation iconoclast fails to be made.

  Few people, probably, will doubt that Rupert Murdoch’s personality is authoritarian, if only because his ruthlessness is paraded rather than denied. To explain its impact we must be clear that this is ruthlessness of a particular sort. The authoritarian, says Erich Fromm, has attributes that are commonly found: activity, courage or belief. But their expression is uncommon, because he gains the strength to act through adherence to superior power. The News story records the impact of a courageous, intrinsically insecure man on an intrinsically insecure profession – one he has studied to make more insecure, and which he has learnt to rule by ‘terrorism’ (Andrew Neil’s word).

  Murdoch’s personal inheritance imposed a career on him, but stripped from his character the qualities it implacably demands. And whatever appearances may have suggested, the story set in context shows him blunders aside – concerned in very little consequential journalism during many years’ activity. As George Munster first noted, his papers are combative in style, not in substance: they do not evoke from state or corporate power the authentic backlash which, once felt, is never
forgotten by anyone in newspapers or television. Instead we find a Newscorp doctrine that entertainment is preferable to news. It’s not obvious that this is a useful preference, except insofar as some entertainment can be scripted and controlled, whereas all news is accident-prone. Still less obvious, initially, is how this fits a corporate obsession with politics, which after all is only news, though rarely of the most gripping type.

  Having failed as a sinister farce on the Western Front in 1918 (see note on p39) the Keith Murdoch plot against John Monash recurs time and again as effective melodrama on Rupert’s corporate stage, as ambitions and rivalries manipulated to produce dominance and submission. The son’s improved results need not mean that media people are grubbier than soldiers, only that organisations may be more or less robust against the attack an active authoritarian is qualified to launch. The AIF was a volunteer elite, with a temporary existence; nobody joined it except for honour and nobody (literally) was doing it for a living. Its basis was a military bureaucracy – helpful to residually authoritarian members modified by a democratic and collective ethos. Shielded from much of the ambiguity of civilian life, it presented to Keith an impregnable target.

  Newspapers and television companies we shall find in various ways less robust

  – inevitably so. The question is not whether each outfit investigated was ever invincible, but whether it and its members might have been less fragile, whether the sociology of the media industries allows for an ethic somewhere between Sir Jocelyn Stevens’ cheery definition of ‘the law of Fleet Street [as] every man for himself’ and the selfless companionship of Charlemagne’s paladins Roland and Oliver.

  At this stage, let’s note only that, when Murdoch set out, tests of professional suitability as strong as any a free society might use were in place, having developed in response to the rise of industrial journalism – the media, as we now say – around the start of the twentieth century. Rupert was insulated from them, and it seems clear that his father intended that to be so.

  * Founded in 1900, the ALP was sometimes ‘Labour’ and sometimes ‘Labor’ till the American spelling was formalised in 1912. Australian usage otherwise is ‘labour’.

  * Lady Murdoch became Dame Elisabeth when she was awarded the DBE in 1963.

  4

  BLACK JACK AND THE STUDENT PRINCE, 1900–1971

  La reconnaissance de la plupart des hommes n’est qu’une secreté envie de recevoir de plus grands bienfaits.

  DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD

  Politics is the art of putting people under obligation to you.

  COLONEL JACOB L. ARVEY Rohan Rivett’s removal from the Adelaide News in 1960 has been much recorded, and justified by Rupert Murdoch as a poignant consequence of his friend’s professional instability. More truly, it is poignant as an episode in which Murdoch himself approached real journalistic achievement and chose to retreat. Sir Keith had installed Rivett as a pathfinder for Rupert, and after Keith’s death it was a ‘great comfort’ to Elisabeth to know he was there. Loyalty is a scarce commodity, and had Rivett not supplied it generously the inheritance might well have come to nothing when Rupert arrived and began to describe himself as publisher of the News.

  The paper had come into Murdoch hands as an undistinguished fragment from the Herald empire, overshadowed by the morning Advertiser. The correspondence between Rohan and Sir Keith – now in the Australian National Library – records much concern over replacing group services the News had long relied on, and retaining able staff in an editorial backwater. Plainly the Herald bosses were confident that without Sir Keith a leadership vacuum would develop, making the News ripe for repossession. In spite of energy and legal control, that was not something Rupert could have done much about in his first two or three years. He had too little experience. The memoirs of Sir Norman Young, later chairman of News Ltd, say that old hands called him ‘the boy publisher’: use of the US title – then meaningless in Australia – demonstrated that he had no authentic role.

  But Rivett supported him totally, and amply motivated the staff. David Bowman, editor later of the Sydney Morning Herald, wrote at the time that Rivett was not ‘the easiest man in the world to work for’ but that nonetheless ‘a couple of times … Melbourne … held out attractive bait that I rejected’, because there was no editor of whom he might be as proud. Rivett’s means were simple. The News addressed issues ignored elsewhere, and most notably ethnic ones, domestic and international. This was a time of editorial anaesthesia, when the Sydney Bulletin – fountainhead, once, of the nation’s radical democracy – carried on its masthead the words ‘AUSTRALIA FOR THE WHITE MAN’.

  As Rivett’s News showed no sign of dissolution, Murdoch had time to start learning his trade. In October 1953 the News reported the Murdoch estate’s sale of Sir Keith’s Queensland Press shares to the Herald group, stressing its own independence and the local residence of all its own directors – Rupert and Rohan included. Rupert would have been a Brisbane resident if he could have persuaded his mother to pay off the estate’s taxes by borrowing against the Courier-Mail’s value, and keeping the shares. But he had to attempt a patriotism for Adelaide.

  Lacking both gold and convicts, this was always the most decorous of Australian cities, but not always the oddity it had become by the 1950s. When the British scientist A. P. Rowe arrived to run Adelaide University he knew it as a considerable institution (training-ground of Marcus Oliphant, a pioneer of modern electronics). But Sir David Rivett’s principles had vanished from this segment of Australian intellectual life: university policy-making came under Tom Playford, South Australia’s premier – and very little in the state did not. Normal government, Rowe concluded, had been suspended. This condition can be traced to the Depression’s devastating impact on South Australia. Sir Thomas – as he saw it – had personally rebuilt the state, and he ran it in corporatist style, via a tiny, obedient cabal. Rivett and Murdoch were not members. And in 1959 they became the focus of its loathing.

  Ceduna, 490 miles north-west of Adelaide, is the last halt before the emptiness of the Nullarbor Plain, with Western Australia far away. The name may come from an Aboriginal word for ‘resting-place’: Ceduna four decades ago saw itself existing at civilisation’s rim. On 12 September 1958, the body of nine-year-old Mary Olive Hattam was found in a cave beside the brilliant waters of Murat Bay; she had been raped, and battered to death.

  Rupert Max Stuart, from a people then called Aranda in the northern interior, was arrested. He had travelled to Ceduna as odd-job man with a funfair – a representative young black of his time, living on the white world’s fringe, a frequent drunk and brawler. He was illiterate, and scarcely articulate in English. But having agreed a coherent confession, he was taken to Adelaide and was scheduled to hang. Only the pathos of Mary’s fate seemed to make the case unusual. However, the lawyers assigned to defend Stuart disbelieved his confession. Their appeals, though denied, generated disquiet.

  In July 1959 Rivett met Father Thomas Dixon, a missionary to the Aboriginal peoples, Stuart’s death-cell counsellor. Rivett said he did not think it a case for an anti-hanging campaign. Dixon, however, was suggesting a racist frame-up. Stuart both repudiated his confession and claimed he had been at work when Mary died. The sketchy police inquiry had not contacted Norman and Edna Gieseman, the funfair’s owners, by now in Queensland. Dixon could find them, but had no airfare, and the execution was imminent. Rivett put Dixon on a plane with the News’ chief crime reporter.

  On oath, the Giesemans corroborated Stuart, justifying a simple, explosive headline: ‘PRIEST: STUART HAS PERFECT ALIBI: Murder case bombshell’. Sir Thomas had to put off the hangman and commission an inquiry. Adelaide found itself a national, even international story – one London account invoked the Dreyfus case – and Playford found that not all South Australians shared his outrage.

  Circumstances were ready to amplify the conflicting emotions stirred by race, paedophile savagery and the gallows. First, Australia’s urban middle classes – with i
nternational experience broadened by two world wars – knew their society was a comfortably advanced one, and ignoring the gross exception created by terra nullius was becoming harder. But to outposts like Ceduna the disinherited blacks at their fringes were menacing, not pitiable. Second, capital punishment, having been intrinsic to the penal colonies, affronted progressive nationalists. But frustration had followed the early defeat of its military use. Though Red Ted’s Queensland banned hanging in 1922, conservative state bosses like Playford were tenacious defenders. So execution was a geographic lottery, as it has become again in America. Long-damped journalistic sparks struck this volatile material.

  Many Australian reporters had found exciting work in wartime, and many idealistic ambitions survived into the peace. But with the 1950s a competent blandness infected the editorial offices of Fairfax’s Sydney Morning Herald, those of the one-time ‘Murdoch press’ and those of their chief rivals. Anti-communist stresses having split Labor’s Catholic constituency, Robert Menzies monopolised federal power, and over a land where social dynamics had relied heavily on party contention, a soggy membrane of consensus spread.

  To Jack Williams of the Herald group and Rupert (‘Rags’) Henderson of Fairfax, this was not unwelcome. They were preoccupied with commercial television licences and, being intimates of Menzies, knew his doubts about letting newspaper companies share in the new gold-rush. Even conservative journalists sometimes agitated public opinion deplorably, and Menzies was not sure they could be trusted with a new and potent medium. Discrepancies in the nation’s ethnic arrangements were just the kind of thing Menzies thought better left obscure. The major newspapers and networks had noticed the Stuart trials and appeals, and had even reported Father Dixon’s belief in missing evidence. None dared take the investigative initiative – least of all the Advertiser, essentially the Playford regime in print.