Strewth: Ita Buttrose the voice of expertise

Ita Buttrose shared a memory with a Canberra audience a few years back involving Frank Packer and kissing armpits.

Frank Packer absolutely up to his armpits in work back in the day.

Voice of expertise

Part way into yesterday’s official announcement of Ita Buttrose as the new chair of the ABC, a member of the fourth estate inquired, “Ita, you have worked for Kerry Packer as a boss. You know you’ll be working for the Australian public as your boss. Which do you think is the more terrifying prospect?” This was quietly eased away with chuckles and sturdy sentiments (“I don’t have a problem with the Australian public; I believe the main shareholders of the ABC are the Australian public”).

Ita Buttrose in 1983.

Yet we found ourselves thinking: never mind Kerry, what about his father? At which point we come to this memory Buttrose shared with a Canberra audience a few years back about when she was editing the very first issue of Cleo and her boss, Frank Packer, took exception to a spot of content: “He said to me, ‘This article here, What Turns a Man On? Where did you get the information that kissing a man’s armpits turns him on? It doesn’t.’ I said, ‘It doesn’t?’ and he said, ‘No, it doesn’t and I know more about these things than you.’ ” Something to ponder.

From rock to rap

That Canberra talk yielded lots of treasure, not least Buttrose’s thoughts on Cold Chisel’s 1980 song Ita. (A sample lyric: “I’d like to take her out to dinner / But when I think about the places I’ve been / I’d probably hold my fork all wrong.”) Quoth she: “It always amazed me that Don Walker, who was a member of the band and wrote the words, they used to watch me presenting The Women’s Weekly commercials every week. We spent massively, we were on all networks. Every week, I’d be there saying, ‘And in this week’s Weekly …” and rattle off all the things and then I’d say, ‘The Women’s Weekly, on sale now’. And they used to watch it and that was it. I believe, I believe because Ita told me so …” All good, but not a patch on that time Ita rapped about manners. A sample lyric: “You’re standing on the footpath, get out of the way / And put away your iPhone, I don’t care what you say.” You can almost dance to it.

Buttrose the prior

In the meantime, here’s a snippet from Joyce Morgan’s 1999 obituary of Buttrose’s father, Charles Buttrose, in The Sydney Morning Herald: “After a period as chief editorial writer on The Daily Telegraph, he joined the ABC in 1957 as federal supervisor of publicity and the following year became director of publicity and concerts. With his working life spent outside the Public Service, he could be impatient with the bureaucracy he encountered within the ABC and was at times scathing of colleagues he regarded as not up to scratch. … (He was) critical of contemporary journalism and the publication of what he believed were too many ‘windy think pieces, any of which might be improved by the cutting by a third or more’. He was disdainful of the growing number of first-person stories in which the author appeared more important than the subject.” We suspect Gerard Henderson is quietly hoping that it’s genetic.

Send in the clown/s

In our Daily Dose of Christopher Pyne, the Defence Minister says being lectured by Labor on ship jobs is like being lectured by the clown in Stephen King’s It on child protection. A topical simile.

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