In Young Rupert, ‘Comrade Murdoch’ takes on the ‘Adelaide mafia’ — and wins

With dozens of Rupert Murdoch biographies in and out of circulation, it might seem as if there’s nothing new to be written about the early life of the Australian-born media mogul, who turned 92 this year.  

Not true. In his new biography Young Rupert: The Making of the Murdoch Empire,, journalist Walter Marsh takes us back to the 1950s when the “boy publisher” was fresh out of Oxford University, politically left-of-centre and determined to shake up the Adelaide establishment. Marsh has a deft touch, with a knack for explaining the historical context, bringing postwar Adelaide to life without losing the narrative thread, all the while drawing out the contemporary relevance of the events he describes.

At the age of 22, Murdoch took on the role of publisher and, forced to sink or swim, began his insatiable expansion of News Ltd, the company which he would turn into the first truly global news media empire.  

Murdoch’s early years in Adelaide are often reduced to a fleeting footnote, Marsh writes, but it was here that he asserted absolute control over News Ltd: “It belonged to him, not to his mother, the board, or the other shareholders, and certainly not to any editor who mistook a long leash for free rein.”  

Murdoch had inherited a controlling interest in News Ltd, established in 1922, which his father Sir Keith had patiently accumulated in the years before his death. When Sir Keith died of a stroke in his sleep aged 67, he was the powerful chairman of The Herald and Weekly Times (HWT) — the country’s first national newspaper chain — but owned comparatively few media interests.

As Melbourne University Professor Sally Young revealed in her masterful 2019 study of the formation of Australia’s media empires, Paper Emperors, News Ltd had been set up by the Melbourne-based Collins House, a powerful conglomerate of mining and other industrial interests. News Ltd published The Barrier Miner in Broken Hill, a pro-mining alternative to the union-aligned Barrier Daily Truth. Young wrote: “Unpalatable though it may be for the company to acknowledge, News Ltd was started by a mining and metals giant to put forward what it called ‘propaganda’.”

Using his family company Cruden Investments, named after the Murdoch family property outside Melbourne, Sir Keith accumulated his share of News Ltd in controversial circumstances. Marsh writes that while chairman of HWT he had been “cannibalising the empire from within”, building up controlling stakes in News, Queensland Newspapers, the publisher of Brisbane’s Courier-Mail, and Southdown Press, publisher of New Idea magazine. Keith’s internal rival and successor as managing editor of the Melbourne Herald, John ‘Jack’ Williams, accused Keith of nothing less than “skulduggery, absolute unblushing theft”.

When Sir Keith died in 1952 he’d borrowed heavily to accumulate the media assets he hoped his son would run, but his wife Elisabeth was determined to pay off his debts out of the estate. Then-chairman of HWT, Lloyd Dumas, persuaded Dame Elisabeth Murdoch and Harry Giddy, executor of the estate, to relinquish control of Queensland Newspapers.

Feeling he’d been effectively disinherited by the “cunning old bastards” at his father’s former company, Rupert Murdoch moved to Adelaide to make a go of News Ltd, becoming a director. Besides The Barrier Miner, News Ltd also published the Adelaide afternoon tabloid The News and the weekly Sunday Mail. Murdoch had inherited a bit more than one newspaper, as is often forgotten, but it was certainly a modest foundation for what would later become the first global news media empire, News Corporation, which by the end of the century spanned five continents, reached 75% of the world’s population — and had swallowed up the Herald and Weekly Times to boot.

Twenty-five years ago, Murdoch’s eldest son Lachlan told the Financial Times that while he used to think News Corp’s culture was simply Australian, “now I think our culture, believe it or not, comes from the Adelaide News in the 1950s, when my father came back from Oxford and started running the place. It was a paper going broke, in an incredibly competitive environment, that had to fight its guts out to survive.”

The young Murdoch who emerges from Marsh’s biography is a fearless dynamo, hanging around South Australian Labor luminaries such as Clyde Cameron and Don Dunstan, spending the next decade building up The News and, working closely with his mentor Rohan Rivett, turning the paper into a crusading, profitable, powerhouse that could help fund News Ltd’s interstate expansion.

One of his first bold moves was to splash the front page of The News with the headline “Bid for press monopoly”, with details of a private approach to his mother by the HWT’s Dumas, pressuring her to sell The Sunday Mail to make way for a new Sunday Advertiser. News Ltd’s Mail saw off the challenge from Melbourne. Next Murdoch and Rivett took up the cause of Arrernte man Rupert Maxwell Stuart, accused of raping and murdering a nine-year-old girl at Ceduna in 1958, convicted on the basis of a suspect police confession and facing the death penalty. The case sparked global outrage, and ultimately state premier Thomas Playford commuted Stuart’s sentence to life in prison.

A full-page story in London’s News Chronicle congratulated the Adelaide News, declaring that “Rupert Max Stuart would be dead today … but for a newspaper that did its job”. Rivett and News Ltd wound up facing nine counts of libel — Murdoch was even forced to testify — and the twists and turns of the Stuart case occupy a good part of the book. By the end of the Stuart case, there is damage on all sides, especially when Murdoch turns on Rivett, finally taking the tough decision to fire him.

Towards the end, Marsh ponders the influence of the Adelaide years on Murdoch: “If he hadn’t been forced to start with the second-best paper in Australia’s fourth-best city, would he have become that incendiary blend of outsider and insider — unafraid of challenging orthodoxies and good taste, but still equipped with the tools and privileges of a press lord’s heir?” It’s a fascinating, if ultimately unanswerable question. 

Young Rupert is a great read, and it’s hard not to sympathise with the boy publisher — once nicknamed “Comrade Murdoch” — who took on the “Adelaide mafia” and won.