The first time our most influential Australians made our pages
Who influences the influencers? We ask some of the most influential Australians when they first realised they were impactful, and who they think should have made our list | WATCH
In the beginning they were not household names. They were students and business people, a budding athlete, even a hip hop artist.
Years later they would make regular front-page appearances. But long before then, each of the 60 people on The Australian’s list of the most influential people of the past six decades found their voice in a different way.
“I was 15 years old, and I was part of a hip hop crew,” opposition Indigenous Australians spokeswoman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price says of her media debut.
“We wanted to represent a positive image of young Indigenous people in our community … but also to, I guess, influence our peers, our friends in a positive way to suggest that some of us, yes, we have challenges, but there are really great ways that we can express ourselves and contribute to our community and participate in our community in a positive way.”
She may not have attracted national attention then, but for Senator Nampijinpa Price, being interviewed in the 1990s as a teenage member of Flava 4 was a formative experience. “I think that was one of the first times we were recognised as a group of influential young people in our community.”
Kylie Minogue, multi-Grammy winner for pop rather than hip hop, has been in the media for so long it’s hard to remember the first time.
“Oh, I’m not entirely sure. I think it might have been the local paper in Colac, where I was filming The Henderson Kids,” Minogue told The Australian. “It was so wildly exciting, seeing our picture in the ‘actual paper’ and reading the article about our show.”
Well before she was appointed Australia’s 27th prime minister, Julia Gillard was a student at Adelaide University and talking about student campaigns. “I remember a newspaper article – I’m pretty sure it was the Adelaide Advertiser – I was the student speaker at Adelaide University’s graduation ceremony,” she says of the article which appears not to have been as memorable as its accompanying image. “I remember the photo because I’m between the chancellor and the vice-chancellor, both men in their robes, and I really look like I’m being carted off to jail.”
Ita Buttrose, on the other hand, recalls a more favourable image as the catalyst to her decades-long public profile. “The first time I can really remember being in a newspaper as a story was 1967 – when I won the Sydney Morning Herald and Sun-Herald’s fashion contest to find the best-dressed woman at the races at Randwick,” says the former publishing executive and recently retired chair of the ABC.
What made the timing of her win so auspicious was that she was then women’s editor of rival publication The Daily Telegraph, and of the Sunday Telegraph: “I thought the executives at Fairfax (then SMH publisher) were going to have a heart attack. Frank Packer, the boss of the two Telegraphs, was overjoyed.”
The race-day fashion contest had previously been run by the two Telegraph papers, where Ms Buttrose worked. “But at the last minute the Millinery Manufacturers Association, who was a sponsor, gave us the flick and they told us they were going to the Sun-Herald and the Sydney Morning Herald, and we weren’t very happy about that.”
On this race day, Ms Buttrose was approached by a woman from the Millinery Manufacturers Association asking if she would like to enter the Sydney Morning Herald fashion contest. “I wasn’t as well known as I am now. And I thought, well, how nice of them. And I said, ‘I’d love to’ and I gave her my married name,” she says.
“And lo and behold, I won it. I really can’t believe I did it, but I did do it. And the prize was a trip for two to Expo 67 in Montreal. It was a return trip, but my husband and I turned it into a one-way trip. We went to Expo. Then we went to New York. Then we went to London, and we lived and worked in London for three years, all because of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sun-Herald. Lovely.”
From his horse racing vantage point, Peter V’landys, CEO of Racing NSW and chairman of the NRL, no longer has a clear memory of his newspaper debut. “I think it was when I first was appointed as the youngest chief executive officer of Racing NSW,” he says, adding: “I’m just glad it wasn’t the obituaries.”
But as a nominee on the national broadsheet’s list of the 60 most influential people of the past six decades, he has a clearer view of who he would place atop his own list. “Without a doubt, the most influential person is Rupert Murdoch. Daylight second,” he says of the chairman emeritus of News Corp, publisher of The Australian.
Actor Cate Blanchett nominates filmmaker Rachel Perkins. Mining magnate Gina Rinehart names former hip hop wizz Senator Nampijinpa Price as an influential Australian, particularly “her endeavours to speak up for truth about marginalised Indigenous Australians, in particular women and children, and brave endeavours to drive change to help them”.
Senator Nampijinpa Price, meanwhile, considers that “some of the most important, influential Australians are those who can create a turning point in a young person’s life or a child’s life, whether that’s an educator, whether that’s a sporting coach, whether that’s a community member or a family member or a family friend”.
In sports-mad Australia, it’s hardly surprising that many of those who made the list nominate athletes as those they consider to be the most influential Australians of the past 60 years.
For tennis champion Ash Barty, it’s Wimbledon great Evonne Goolagong Cawley and Olympic gold medal runner Cathy Freeman, “for not only what they achieved as athletes, but how they have contributed to communities all around Australia”.
For former Liberal prime minister John Howard, it’s a sporting trifecta of cricket hero Don Bradman, Wimbledon champion Margaret Court and Olympic swimmer Dawn Fraser, as well as former Liberal prime minister Robert Menzies.
National leaders also figure prominently among those that our nominees name as influential Australians. For Ms Buttrose it’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese “because at the moment he controls the fate of all Australians”. For Ms Gillard its Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam, “the first prime minister that really made it on to my radar, my understanding of politics in the world. But I think his legacy was to take Australia into the era of modernity that we’re still living in now … We can see in Gough Whitlam, a man who influenced so much of what has come to pass.”
Andrew Forrest, chairman and founder of the Minderoo Foundation and Fortescue, picks former Labor prime minister Paul Keating, “floating the Australian dollar and making a number of other economic and social moves, which were deeply unpopular at the time. But he went ahead and did them.”
Mr Keating, meanwhile, says that “for managing a crisis, (World War II-era prime minister) John Curtin picks himself out” – an impassioned nomination, but one that falls slightly beyond the 60-year mark.
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