by Bruce Page
Rivett’s ‘bombshell’ broke this dubious calm. Every editorial and legal eye in the country focused on Adelaide and its Royal Commission where, to the bench’s fury, Jack Shand QC, Sydney’s deadliest cross-examiner, came representing Stuart. Meanwhile other cultural detonators were taking effect. In England, the idea of the ‘establishment’ had just been unmasked by the columnist Henry Fairlie, and to many reporters it seemed that a powerful chapter must be operating in Adelaide. The potent – but still undocumented – legend of Keith at Gallipoli came to life, establishing Rupert suddenly as a second-generation exponent of emotionally committed journalism.
Alan Reid of Packer’s Telegraph found himself unique in not caring whether Stuart was hanged or not (it was ‘a good story either way’). Writing privately, he reckoned he could hardly remember anything able to ‘divide newspapermen the way this one did’. There was a ‘wonderful study’ in the:
complex motives that animated the various individuals who surged and fought over the body of the incoherent Stuart [including] Rohan, firmly astride a white horse with a Crusader’s glint in his eye, and Rupert, the young proprietor, delighted at the trouble he had stirred up and yet intermittently fearful as to what might be the outcome …
The three Commissioners told Shand they would not test the verdict – he had to shake their confidence in it. One having been Stuart’s judge at first instance, and another – Chief Justice Sir Mellis Napier, Playford’s senior disciple – on appeal, this was no surprise: just a manifestation of the Commission’s scandalous composition. But here the News stumbled into hazard.
Sir Mellis – who clearly disapproved of newspapers offering evidence, however significant to justice – blocked Shand’s cross-examination of the first police witness. Declaring that ‘this Commission is unable properly to consider the problems before it’, Shand walked out. Swiftly, the News had a poster on the street:
‘SHAND QUITS: “YOU WON’T GIVE STUART FAIR GO’”.
Murdoch devised a punchier replacement, which Rivett agreed:
‘COMMISSION BREAKS UP: SHAND BLASTS NAPIER’. And this went fractionally too far: the Commission, though disrupted, was still in business, and Shand had subtly avoided a personal focus on Napier. To Playford’s men such tiny errors invited prosecution of a newspaper which was promoting ‘mob rule’.
Nine counts of defamation were eventually aimed at Rivett and News Ltd, among them seditious libel, the blunderbuss which John Peter Zenger had faced in New York in 1735. As a judge in present-day Australia may be called a ‘wanker’ with impunity, Playford’s repressive aspirations now seem absurd, but they were not quite so in his own time. That said, the News – with Murdoch taking control – backed off further than Zenger and his counsel Andrew Hamilton ever did.
Anticipating prosecution, the News ran an editorial by Murdoch, ‘LET’S GET THE RECORD STRAIGHT’. It apologised for quote-marks on headline and poster paraphrases, and said ‘SHAND BLASTS NAPIER’ should have been ‘SHAND ATTACKS NAPIER’. Defamation being a matter of content, not punctuation, and the gap between blasting and attacking being insignificant, none of this mattered. Murdoch’s poster had been inaccurate – something not admitted
– but no sane court would drive charges through so slight a factual crevice.
Unhappily, Adelaide’s bosses just then were not quite sane, which was why Sir Tom saw criminality when Napier & Co. were criticised as judges of their own decisions. The News had an invincible right to report that, as interstate and international experts swiftly confirmed. But powers irrational enough to think otherwise were not to be appeased by apologetic trivia, and when that became clear, Murdoch decided that the News must abandon the principle. It denied editorially any intention to convey criticism of judicial actions.
Though journalists rail tribally against lawyers, experience tells them that a legitimate judicial system will recover from its excesses, and that the process is never accelerated by conceding on essentials. A decent respect for authority rests on a belief that it will come back to respecting its own rules.
But it seems likely Murdoch was concerned more to appease the powers of Adelaide than to maintain editorial credibility and legal principle. Once new lawyers had been found for Stuart, the Commissioners resumed work. And while they deliberated, Murdoch proposed a merger between News Ltd and the Advertiser group. News would give three new units of its own stock and some cash for four existing Advertiser shares. No votes would attach to the new equity – Murdoch began, and remains, resistant to modern capitalism’s ideas about democratic equity – so that financial control of the Advertiser and its Herald shares would fall to him. This, along with the deal’s price-tag – A£14 million when News Ltd had issued capital of only A£565,000 – made its acceptance implausible.
But non-financial aspects of the plan showed his determination to accommodate Playford’s Adelaide, notably provisions for a trust to secure the Advertiser’s editorial character. Suitable persons to conduct it were identified as the Chancellor of Adelaide University, or the Chief Justice of South Australia. Just then, both offices were held by Sir Mellis Napier, who was revealing at the Commission a strong desire to suppress journalistic activism no matter how well justified. This scheme was rejected with a paragraph in the Advertiser suggesting that the paper was best run by local patriots and that Rupert was not one of those.
Anti-climax supervened at the Commission. The revised official case portrayed Stuart as a courtroom veteran and linguistic counterfeiter. But this made his frank confession still less plausible – unless gained by torture or other inadmissible means – and lack of forensic data was irreparable. The evidence would never have hanged a white Australian, and the Telegraph, pointing out from Sydney that discounting a black life might appear racist to Asians, probably chimed with the views of an embarrassed federal government. Stuart’s sentence was commuted to life before the Commission’s report. Months later his guilt was reaffirmed in that diffuse document, tabled with elaborate obscurity and barely reported.
The prosecution of Rivett and News Ltd in January 1960 was anti-climactic also. By this time even Sir Tom could appreciate the lethal recoil of seditious libel. It has to allege things so lurid as to capsize civil authority – indefensible even if true. But governments subject to election cannot admit that truth acts on them like holy water on the devil. (Essentially, Hamilton had used Zenger’s case to launch the principle that allegations must be legally disproved in order to be legally suppressed.) And South Australia’s social fabric visibly had not disintegrated over the notion that a Royal Commission could be packed: a judge free of previous involvement directed the jurors to ignore the sedition charge. They rejected seven other charges too, disagreeing on just one – which in June was quietly dropped. But by then Murdoch had shifted territory, geographic and editorial.
In Sydney – where News Ltd already ran a group of suburban papers – there had long been speculation about the Daily Mirror, weaker of the city’s two evenings. On 21 May 1960 News bought Mirror Newspapers for A£1.9 million. Among the first people Murdoch told were the handful of radical journalists producing a small, influential journal, Nation – he is recalled charging up the stairs of their shabby office to shout: ‘I’ve got it.’ That they were his audience indicates how much the Stuart case had done to anoint him as the new bright hope of Australian journalism. But acquisition of John Norton’s decayed legacy did not really point that way.
Richard Twopeny wrote that the Australian press was honest and unsensational ‘almost without exception’. Ironically, those words were penned when Norton arrived in 1883, just as Norton was on his way to instigate a monstrous exception. Norton’s Truth did – outdid – for the southern hemisphere the work of British organs like the News of the World and New York’s True Story or (later) Daily Graphic. His journalism was as scabrous as anything of theirs, and his personal excesses overshadowed Hearst’s. Norton, says Cyril Pearl in Wild Men of Sydney, was ‘denounced many times as a thief, a bla
ckmailer, a wife-beater and an obscene drunkard … [and was] accused of killing his oldest friend in a drunken quarrel’.
Truth became a weekly with editions in each major city. When Norton died in 1916, with Napoleonic statues clustered about him, it still had a certain livid vivacity, as he did have political ideas (identified by Pearl as proto-fascist). But by mid-century it offered little beyond routine courthouse pornography. The Mirror, added in 1941 by Norton’s son Ezra, widened the group’s base, but was outgunned in the 1950s by the Sun – once Denison’s paper, now Fairfax-controlled. Fairfax then ran Mirror Newspapers for several years – desiring to block abler competitors, and hoping to use newspaper companies as vehicles for televisionlicence applications. But the losses starved Fairfax’s existing TV projects, and News Ltd’s assumption of the burden was welcome in 1960. Rivett and Murdoch saw this investment dissimilarly.
Rivett’s papers include an account of his sacking. On 7 July, just after the last defamation charge was dropped, he was typing an article when his secretary brought in two letters. ‘I looked up to see she was in tears … I finished the sentence on my typewriter and picked up the letters.’ Both came from Murdoch in Sydney. One said in 180 typescript words that Rivett was dismissed – for ‘many’ reasons it would be ‘unwise’ to cite and an acting managing editor, Ron Boland, was en route. Rivett could become a ‘star writer’, or leave with eighteen months’ salary. This letter, Murdoch said, had taken much painful time to compose. The other, handwritten, dwelt further on Rupert’s distress:
I have never loathed writing a letter more. In coming to this decision to ‘close your innings’ as editor of The News I have not lost sight of your achievements – and our long personal friendship makes the whole thing impossibly hard. But there it is!
I thought about getting you up here to tell you verbally first, but we can discuss it much better after you have had time to think it over.
Sincerely, as ever, Rupert The promise of reasons was unredeemed at Rivett’s death in 1977. However, Murdoch has subsequently been more forthcoming. Interviewed for Channel 4’s The Real Rupert Murdoch (1999) he said Rivett had grown ‘headstrong’, and thus unreliable. William Shawcross, also assisted by Murdoch, suggests rather similarly that Rivett was striking leftish attitudes unsuited to the News. An ‘impassioned’ obituary of the British socialist Aneurin Bevan crystallised matters, and Murdoch ordered him out of the office that day.
This looks specious, because Bevan’s news value among working people worldwide could then be likened, not intolerably, to Roosevelt’s: Adelaide has a large Labor population (to which Playford’s Liberal and Country League liked to offer a rural socialist face) and News readers would not automatically have recoiled from the subject. In detail it’s false, because the obituary – a response to breaking news – was the piece on Rivett’s typewriter when Murdoch’s costive paperwork arrived.
Murdoch suggests his friend’s professional marbles were adrift. But, while the News never had an Express polish, its files display no gross discontinuities under Rivett (nor evidence of another Murdoch suggestion: renewed taunting of Playford over Stuart). The Bevan coverage was not smoothly presented, but completing it at all must have required steady professionalism.
Negatives are tricky. But Rivett’s letters from readers and colleagues, stacking two inches thick, display none of the ambiguity usually seen if a departing editor has lost the plot. Their chief note is amazement that anyone able so to recreate an obscure publication should leave (by his own choice, a few assume, thinking no rational proprietor could desire it). David Bowman simply asked to be considered for Rivett’s next paper.
Why offer, long after, an account discrediting Rivett as scatty and incompetent? It is a smokescreen over the real dispute: dispersal of the smoke reveals Murdoch’s character in action, and a pattern not much varied since.
Among the papers is a letter to Murdoch on 28 May 1960, when the Mirror purchase was ‘last week’. Clearly it is written after a hot personal exchange, one which Rivett says would have been intolerable ‘except that I know you better’. He then deals calmly with the issues involved. A modest pay hike for the journalists’ union (the AJA) had been awarded under the national arbitration system. The News, with record profits and buoyant sales, could easily afford it, but Murdoch – unlike the industry generally – was refusing to pay.
Rivett wanted to avoid confrontation at the News. Good staff now thought it an exciting paper, and the lure of bigger cities was resistible; denying a legitimate arbitration would imperil that. Rivett saw the Mirror purchase as a financial strain
– which it plainly was – and warned against letting it erode the value of the News, potentially the kernel of a high-quality newspaper business. Much could be lost if staff felt they were going unrewarded to prop up Mirror Newspapers. (He did not say serious journalists thought the Mirror as toxic as it was unprofitable: that was notorious.)
Rivett’s vision of News Ltd’s future is best evaluated after penetrating further into Murdoch’s. The contingent point is that it was neither eccentric nor reckless. Rupert’s admirers might call it cautious or orthodox. But it was a fair business view, coolly put by a fellow director, concerning a shared responsibility. The evidence suggests that Murdoch tried to shout down Rivett’s doubts. When they were pursued with reasons, Murdoch didn’t engage the criticism, but obliterated its source. ‘Headstrong’, the epithet projected on to Rivett, properly matched himself.
Murdoch’s mother was more explicit, and more graceful, about the cost to Rivett of his own fidelity. ‘My dear Rohan,’ she wrote, ‘I have always been so glad that you and Rupert were together in Adelaide. The connection she saw as having originated in loyalty to Keith, and it had been a great comfort to the family: the letter’s implication was that she realised how much Rupert had depended on Rohan’s friendship and support, and she ‘could not bear to think that your close association with our own interests should hurt you.’ But she thought it rather remarkable that the association had endured so long and Rivett perhaps smiled wryly at that. Rivett disappointed some colleagues by making no open protest. It seemed to concede justice to Murdoch, and to discredit the Stuart investigation.
The papers show he was concerned to improve his payoff (small even by the standards of the day). Murdoch’s executive authority ran in practice to arbitrary sacking of an editor, but removing a director of a quoted company might require reasons. These he did not have, and Rivett avoided providing any by making statements likely to harm News at a delicate moment. He stayed punctiliously on the board till he was offered A£25,000 (about A£300,000 today). Maybe it was not heroic. Maybe Rivett, after the war, felt he had done enough in that line.
Altering editorial course usually takes time. Rivett’s editorial soul remained in command on till 15 July, when the News tackled a Menzies description of White Australia as ‘unaltered and unalterable’. The Prime Minister and his Migration Minister Alexander Downer insulted Asia, and imperilled Australia, said the News. ‘In his … championing of a policy which is regarded by Asians as founded on racial prejudice, Mr. Menzies is … building up a reservoir of ill will which may one day be let loose on our children.’
Fourteen days later, the News decided the same Downer had made a ‘statesmanlike analysis of Australia’s migration problems’. There had been shocking words, but well-said ones. The Minister knew how to ‘reorient his thinking to meet changing conditions’ – was this a salute of equals? – and made the Menzies case on immigration with logic and common sense. ‘As he said, to permit an admixture of Asian and European races to develop within Australia would probably result in tensions that would defeat all our efforts to retain the friendship of our northern neighbours.’ His words ought to be noted in Asia. And to emphasise respect for orthodoxies in the new Murdoch press, the Daily Mirror ran the same editorial – simultaneously – under a masthead declaring itself ‘THE INDEPENDENT NEWSPAPER’. When he removed Rivett, Murdoch still had no political connecti
on like his father’s. But he was developing the appropriate newspaper system: a man ready swiftly to accommodate external authority must allow no internal challenge to his own.
Murdoch’s retreat and the demolition of Rivett’s editorship reduced but did not cancel the value of the challenge to Playford’s Adelaide oligarchy. In his 1962 account, The Stuart Case, K. S. Inglis said that the abuses of power were trivial in comparison with contemporary despotisms, but demonstrated that enough Australians understood the need to keep them trivial. Professor Inglis today would probably not modify his judgment that the line to a police state from a regime like Playford’s, though long, ‘is nonetheless continuous’. When Murdoch made his political breakthrough three years later, it was with a somewhat similar adept of conservative coalition-tactics. ‘Black jack’ McEwen was a bigger man than Tom Playford, but no more particular about abuses of power.
Rivett remained active as a writer and broadcaster, but never edited again. Through work for the International Press Institute in Zurich he became a good friend of Harry Evans, who five years after Rivett’s death agreed to edit The Times for Murdoch in London.
The Stuart case badly damaged the death penalty. Just a few more blows rendered it terminally unserviceable, and every state has now abolished it. The ethnic context of these events seems now implausible. Australia today includes much Asian ‘admixture’, and admits that the land had owners before Europeans arrived. For many people under thirty, the ‘unalterable’ thoughts of Menzies and Downer must sound like gibberish. Remedy for the wrongs done to the original inhabitants remains incomplete, but the attention focused on Rupert Max Stuart’s case was one of the things which began the process.