Abstract
In a Brenda of Bristol moment, I couldn’t stop myself thinking: “You’re joking. Not another Rupert Murdoch biography.” The title is misleading, however. It isn’t a biography of Rupert at all, but one about his father Keith. Nor is it particularly new because it is little more than an updated version of the book published five years ago in Australia titled Before Rupert: Keith Murdoch and the Birth of a Dynasty.
Nor, I’m afraid, was there much fresh material on Keith to mine. Several Rupert biographies have covered the ground on his father, notably about the myth of Keith’s celebrated “exposure” of the horrors of the ill-fated 1915 Gallipoli campaign in which about 11,000 Australian and New Zealand soldiers were killed. Yet Tom Roberts not only fails to add more to what we already know, he ignores key evidence discovered some 17 years ago.
For those journalists who have not read anything of Rupert’s life – can there be any? – Keith’s journalistic “scoop” has long been regarded as controversial. William Shawcross recorded in his 1992 biography that “Rupert grew up knowing that his father was an authentic Australian hero”. But Shawcross, despite being granted access to Rupert, did not seek to conceal the fact that the authenticity of his father’s heroism was suspect. The “powerful document” presented by Keith to Britain’s prime minister Herbert Asquith about the horrific realities suffered by the troops at Gallipoli was, wrote Shawcross, “bitter, tendentious, poorly sourced, and filled with errors”.
Much more telling was the revelation by Bruce Page in his 2003 biography, The Murdoch Archipelago, that Asquith was informed weeks earlier about the errors committed by the British commanding officer, General Sir Ian Hamilton, in the fight against the Turks in the Dardanelles. One of his officers, Major Guy Dawnay, blew the whistle because of the gravity of the situation in a report that was, unlike Keith’s, factual. Page detailed the slapdash way in which Keith had gone about compiling his letter, which was laced with prejudice. It portrayed a heedless British establishment willingly sacrificing “colonial youth”. This propaganda fitted the narrative Keith wished to convey about brave Australian “boys” being led to their slaughter by incompetent British leaders. It appeared he had been too trusting in the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent, Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, whose own critical views of the conduct of the Gallipoli fighting were coloured by his “obsessive hostility” towards General Hamilton.
Sadly, Page’s fascinating chapter was omitted from the updated and expanded edition of his book, published in 2011, but it can be found online and Roberts must surely have known about it. Yet there is no reference to Dawnay. Given that Roberts’s book purports to be the most detailed analysis of Keith’s life, it is very odd that the episode is not explored. After all, that Gallipoli “exclusive” was the platform from which Keith rose to journalistic and political fame, a legend perpetuated ever since by Rupert.
Another major fault with this book is the way in which the author continually attempts to draw comparisons between the misdeeds of Keith and those of his boychild. There is little point to visiting the sins of the father on the son. That said, there is an undeniably strong correlation between the two when it comes to their understanding about the tripartite relationship between politics, journalism and business. Keith’s career was forged on leveraging political links into journalistic advancement in order to build a newspaper company. The result: power.
It is impossible not to be struck by the similarity of Keith’s dismissive remark about an Australian politician he backed to be prime minister, “I put him there. And I’ll put him out”, and Rupert’s claim that prime ministers seek him out rather than the other way round. Keith viewed the wooing of politicians as a commercial necessity. It was the single lesson Rupert took to heart in the wake of his father’s death in 1952.
Elsewhere, there is compelling material about Keith’s journalistic flaws, notably his willingness to spread one of World War One’s greatest myths, that the Germans built factories where the corpses of their soldiers were boiled to extract fat, which was then used to manufacture candles, lubricants and margarine. Asked to provide proof, Keith said his story was “authenticated”. He also ran a propaganda publication aimed at recruiting Australians to join the army, which was described by a critic as telling “more lies to the square inch than any newspaper I have ever seen”.
There are several references to Keith’s obsession with racial purity as an enthusiastic member of the Eugenics Society of Victoria. In urging Britain to fight for “a white Australia”, he lauded the virtues of his country’s “cleverest breeders of sheep” because they knew the value of cloning “pure stock”. He was appalled at “the horrors of merging a coloured race with white”. This obsession also manifested itself in his extolling the fitness of the white bodies of Australian soldiers and in his promotion of female beauty competitions. Odder still, and rather disturbing, was his promotion of a baby competition in which readers were asked to submit “unclothed and full-length” photographs of their offspring.
Arguably the best section in the book is devoted to showing how Keith created his newspaper business, starting with the influential Melbourne Herald. He was quick to seize on technological developments that improved printing, while branching out into radio, newsreels and even air travel. His major aim was to improve circulation, urging one of his managing editors to publish “crime, love, excitement and sensation”. He never lost sight, however, of the chance to play politics in the belief that he could make and unmake prime ministers.
It did not make Keith popular, as Roberts highlights in quoting the opening stanza to a poem published after his death, Dirge for a press lord:
The Lord of lies has gone to his last rest,
Mourn him with hymns, all who hold falsehood dear;
Silence your rotaries and bid your presses hush,
And let four lies stand guard around his bier.
Would that stand too as an epitaph for Rupert? We know he was outraged that it was necessary for the family to sell the Melbourne paper to pay his father’s death duties. And we know he was determined to win it back. He could have stopped there, but Rupert had the Keith gene. He was not for stopping.
