The birth story of Australia’s first national daily newspaper
Rupert Murdoch published the first edition of The Australian on July 15, 1964, realising an almost 50-year ambition of his father, Keith.
The date atop the front page when The Australian launched reads Wednesday, July 15, 1964. But the idea of a national daily newspaper for Australia had taken shape long before – probably late in 1915.
Back then, Rupert Murdoch’s father, Keith, was living in London and that year wrote the legendary Gallipoli letter, a compellingly bitter 8000-word assessment of the hopeless Dardanelles campaign that both forced the end of it while helping to create the Anzac legend. He wrote of those first men: “It is stirring to see them, magnificent manhood, swinging their fine limbs as they walk about Anzac. They have the noble faces of men who have endured.”
The letter was sent to Australia’s prime minister, Andrew Fisher, and was soon seen by British leader Herbert Asquith and his senior ministers. It was also read by Alfred Harmsworth, later to be Viscount Northcliffe, the world’s first newspaper baron. Northcliffe began publishing parts of Murdoch’s letter in his newspapers. And he had a few: he had launched the Daily Mail in 1896, the Daily Mirror in 1903, rescued The Observer in 1905 and then The Times in 1908.
Keith Murdoch and Northcliffe would become warm friends; Northcliffe admired the swashbuckling young Australian and saw their relationship as like that of a father and son.
Keith even spent time with Northcliffe at his holiday home on the Riviera as the older man sought to recruit him to a senior role in his newspaper empire. But there were two problems: Murdoch wanted to return to Australia and put into practice all he had learned observing Fleet Street and its unique newspaper distribution system, that saw newspapers printed in London available throughout England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and even Paris the next morning; and Northcliffe’s sometimes unsettling wish for power and control.
Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, whom Keith would marry in 1928, wrote in her 1994 biography, Two Lives, that Northcliffe had “delusions of grandeur”. Apparently he adopted the title Northcliffe so he could sign off letters using “N” – like his hero Napoleon. On a trip to France, Northcliffe once tried on one of Napoleon’s two-cornered hats and was very pleased to discover it was too small.
But he was a publishing genius and Keith learned much from him. Keith returned to Melbourne and took over evening daily The Herald, where, reportedly still taking advice from Northcliffe, he improved the coverage of political news and exploited the quickly evolving and increasingly economical technology that allowed stories to be sent as cables that could be published just hours after events in the northern hemisphere. By the 1930s photographs could be sent using the same technology.
This was a revolution and Keith began to think big. His son, Rupert, said in an interview in 2014 with this newspaper’s Paul Kelly that it had been his father’s ambition to publish a national newspaper in Australia.
It was logistically impossible to distribute newspapers by air in the run-up to World War II, and difficult after – during the war the Qantas aeroplane fleet was commandeered by the federal government, with half being lost to accidents and enemy attack.
In any case, Keith was busy running Australia’s biggest publishing group, The Herald & Weekly Times. It took over The Sun News-Pictorial, which faltered after being sent in to challenge the dominance of Melbourne’s The Herald, with Keith increasing the circulation of both. The group then took over Adelaide’s The Advertiser and, in 1933, merged two titles to establish Brisbane’s Courier-Mail, and bought stakes in newspapers in other capitals along with new radio licences. Keith also founded the Australian Associated Press wire reporting service in 1935.
But Rupert said of a national daily newspaper that “it was my father’s dream”. His father had talked to his only son about it when Rupert was a teenager. “It was a family aspiration.” By the time the younger Murdoch began work on launching The Australian in 1964, most things in this country were changing rapidly, but not so much the country’s leadership. Prime minister Robert Menzies had been in The Lodge – his second stint – since 1949.
Menzies had been born in the 1890s, before Henry Ford had built a car, as had the premiers of NSW, South Australia and Queensland. Our governor-general was 1st Viscount De L’Isle – a British army veteran who had served as a Conservative member in the House of Commons.
The year before, Menzies had scrapped all the suggested names for the new decimal currency that was to arrive in February 1966. The public had suggested denominations such as Austral, Boomer, Roo and even Digger. Menzies decreed the currency would be known as the Royal (his treasurer and successor, Harold Holt, quietly overruled him and it became the dollar). By then the fervent monarchist had declared that he wished to “retire to a book-lined cottage in Kent” and was “British to the bootstraps”. Not all Australians remembered what bootstraps were.
Rupert saw the need for change and wished to help drive that through an adventurous, independent newspaper not beholden to any political party or doctrine.
It would help lead Australia away from racism, and comprehensively report on the arts as we moved on from the cultural cringe. It would also encourage the nation to stand on its own two feet, socially, politically and economically, not least because the UK was already courting Europe in the hope of securing membership of the then European Economic Community. Australia and Britain might have some of the strongest ties between nations, but that counted for little when Britain joined Europe and shunned Australasian agricultural commodities.
The Australian also pushed ahead of national sentiment to oppose the Vietnam War to which Menzies would commit his country within months.
But the greatest hurdle to the Murdochs’ plans for a national daily remained technical. George Calvi, a 1960s recruit to the production floor of The Australian, and who would later oversee it, said last month it “was a newspaper ahead of its time”. He did not mean editorially; by 1964 the time for a dissentient national daily newspaper had surely come. But almost insurmountable production hurdles remained.
The national daily newspapers owned by Northcliffe and that Keith had seen up close from 1915 and until he returned to head up HWT in 1921 were delivered by trains crossing Britain – but it was a nation not 1000km from tip to toe. Australians could live more than 5000km apart. Forty years ago, on my first day at The Australian, having transferred from The Times, I was in editor Alan Farrelly’s office looking at a large map on his wall. It was of Australia but superimposed on to a map of Europe. Perth was aligned to London; Melbourne was 70km to the east of Turkey’s capital, Ankara. “And The Australian is available every morning in every bit of it,” Farrelly proudly explained.
What Rupert took on in the Canberra winter of 1964 was akin to scaling Everest with antique equipment. Keith, who died in 1952, would have been familiar with the hot-metal composition of The Australian in 1964, as would Johann Gutenberg who invented movable type 400 years earlier.
To anyone else but Keith’s son, it would have seemed preposterous to publish a newspaper in Canberra and then, depending on how foggy was the national capital, fly printing plates to Sydney, while driving plates destined for Melbourne to Yass railway station (and if that connection was missed, as it often was, race the train to Junee, 157km away); then print newspapers in those capitals to be distributed in Victoria and NSW. From those cities, copies were driven to Brisbane and Adelaide. From Adelaide, copies would be flown to Perth for sale mid-afternoon. All for sixpence.
Another obvious challenge was that The Australian had to develop a national advertising market, which until then was not a category for newspapers.
Months before The Australian was born, The Australian Financial Review had moved to publishing daily, another challenge for the new masthead in an area where it needed to draw readers. The large, raucous managing editor of the Financial Review since 1960 had been Maxwell Newton, a big-thinking, big-drinking Cambridge graduate originally from Perth. He worked wonders with it, more than doubling circulation in a year and turning it into a bi-weekly, against Sir Warwick Fairfax’s wishes. Poached to be launch editor of The Australian, he charmed a varied and talented staff to jump ship from other newspapers. And he recruited young finance writers while editing the Financial Review and The Australian, hiring an opinionated phalanx of eager journalists whose words he made front-page news. They included Jules Zanetti, Des Keegan, Alan Wood and a Dutch adventurer, Walter Kommer, who had emigrated to the Dutch East Indies to become a soldier, and ended up making tennis shoes in Sydney while studying economics at night. Newton heard Kommer giving a speech in 1960 and employed him, first to the Financial Review.
The mercurial, aggressive and provocative Newton and his team of young writers would overturn the convention that economics and politics were separate disciplines. And they went to work challenging a government that, with its sometimes overbearing Country Party coalition colleagues, protected uncompetitive manufacturers and farmers. They also attacked the overcautious, comatose banking system. Throughout the decade, they would nudge the economic agenda towards more competition and less protection.
But Newton would not be there with them. He fell out with Rupert Murdoch within a year and was replaced. By Kommer. Those first days, weeks and months were tumultuous as the new newspaper and its disparate staff operated in uncompleted, cold quarters and adapted to the unbending regimen of a national daily. Rupert kept a close eye on every aspect of it, from the morning news conference to the production floor with its Linotype hot-metal typesetting machines and the infamous Ludlow, which would make metal slugs of larger type – headlines for news and display pages – prepared by hand, and which would sometimes send spurts of molten lead into its surrounds. Ludlow men bore the scars of their profession.
“Please note we are not a left-wing Labor paper nor are we tied to any particular political party or philosophy. We are simply in the business of reporting, interpreting and sometimes commenting on the facts – IN THAT ORDER – and generally doing the best professional job” - Rupert Murdoch
Film shot on the first night shows the boss on the production floor looking at page proofs and early copies off the press. Not captured is the deafening noise.
And back at work early next morning, Rupert would survey the capital city newspapers and then compose a memo to staff observing and evaluating that day’s edition, its news, features and sports pages – and how he thought it compared to the opposition, particularly The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. These daily epistles, like those Northcliffe had sent his staff, became legendary.
After some months of publishing, Rupert writes of one edition: “I am well aware that our finance pages are outstanding, but I have a sneaking feeling that we are overplaying the special articles on economic subjects at the expense of news about companies – in which, incidentally, most of our readers have shares.”
On that same day he also wrote: “Finally, is anyone hearing any comment about the Wizard of Id? I strongly suspect we have fluked a real winner.” We had indeed. The strip, originally by Brant Parker and Johnny Hart, had only just been launched. Six decades on, it appears in more than 1000 newspapers around the world.
A few days later he writes: “Congratulations! Today’s paper is by far the best we have produced for a long time. The whole paper is an excellent professional job and in such contrast to the last couple of days that I hesitate to mention the occasional blemishes.”
But he found some rightly annoying shortcomings. “On p.1 we misquoted Menzies, got into trouble with the use of capitals again in two stories and had a literal in the second headline.”
He also issued a durable warning to all staff: “Please note we are not a left-wing Labor paper nor are we tied to any particular political party or philosophy. We are simply in the business of reporting, interpreting and sometimes commenting on the facts – IN THAT ORDER – and generally doing the best professional job.”
A few days later he showed that no part of The Australian missed his attention. “The sporting pages continue to take shape well and before long I feel they will be an outstanding feature of the paper.” Nonetheless, he adds: “But for all that, we are still far from being as good as we could or should be.”
Days later the headings on the front page were again irritating him, and he explained in detail why: “I must complain about the main headlines of p. 1 and the intro paragraph to the lead story. Slang is sometimes permissible on posters and occasionally in stories when it occurs as a direct quote. But then and then only.”
Rupert was also unhappy about a comment in a report about proceedings in the United Nations: “I notice that the Russians in the UN yesterday were ‘smiling nastily’ through the afternoon. Really!”
It was probably a poor choice of words by the reporter, who was referring to Nikolai Fedorenko, the Permanent Representative of the USSR to the UN from 1963 to 1968. The brilliant Fedorenko spoke English, Japanese and Mandarin, and translated for Stalin during Mao Zedong’s famous trip to Moscow in 1949. Fedorenko could smirk in any language.
In one of the final notes in those early months, the boss is happier as The Australian gains editorial momentum: “Let’s make every edition as good as this one and we will soon have a good base on which to build and improve until every page shines as a first class professional production with good, authoritative, objective writing, interesting headlines etc.”
The Australian did improve – editorially, and with production techniques that made its publishing and distribution simpler, safer and more reliable. Its proprietor went on to build, buy and sometimes save newspapers in which no one else was prepared to show faith, or could be trusted to. One important circle was completed when in 1981, 73 years after Northcliffe had done so, Rupert saved The Times, which had been crippled throughout the 1970s by losses and unceasing industrial action.
His father had walked The Times’s corridors in 1915 and also those of Northcliffe’s other mastheads. And it gave him an idea – a newspaper for a nation.
