How Did Rupert Become ‘Rupert’? An ANZAC Day Reflection

Here for ANZAC Day, I’m republishing my July 14, 2011 reflections on how Gallipoli helped make Rupert ‘Rupert.’

An ‘Australian Prince’

You can’t get a fix on Rupert until you understand the father:

• Keith Murdoch was the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister who had settled in the respectable Eastern suburbs of far away Melbourne.
• Despite a severe stuttering problem, Keith excelled at Camberwell Grammar School and then during his cadetship as a reporter at The Age.
• He earned a series of rapid promotions to a position as a chief Parliamentary reporter where he established close ties with Australia’s political leaders

Gallipoli: Breaking the Cover Up

By 1915, Keith Murdoch was stationed in wartime London running the premiere Australian news wire.

• Australian Prime Minister Andrew Fisher asked him to report on conditions in the Dardanelles, where a British-led Australia & New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) force had been assigned to choke off the Ottoman heartland.
• It was a strategic folly cooked up by Winston Churchill.
• Murdoch defied British wartime censorship: exposing a ‘cover up’ that was disguised as a ‘matter of national security: He reported that the Dardanelles campaign was an incompetently-led disaster

A Myth for a New Nation

• Australia was a newly-formed union of six disparate and distant colonies
• The new federation lacked either a fight for independence or a nation-building narrative
• Murdoch told a story of heroic ANZAC lads who were pinned down on beaches and foothills
• They were trapped in a doomed struggle against two forces: withering Turkish fire from above, and an incompetent British high command that was safely moored off the Turkish coast

• It has been said since that ‘we went to Gallipoli as colonials and came back as Australians’
• In my own home and at school, I learned that Keith Murdoch was an author of the story of how ‘we became Australians’
• The ANZAC story captured a national tragedy of unthinkable scale

Casualties

Consider this:

• U.S. population in 1970: 200 million. Vietnam War dead: 58,000
• Australia’s population in 1915: 5 million. Great War dead: 59,000

ANZAC Day is scheduled on April 25, the anniversary of the Gallipoli landing:

• It is our most solemn national holiday, and in New Zealand, too.
• I don’t know of other nations whose major patriotic holiday celebrates a military defeat.
• And BTW, Rupert Murdoch was a principal funder of Peter Weir’s Gallipoli.

A ‘First Family’

Keith Murdoch was a living national legend who went on to acquire and publish newspapers:

• He was a key political power-broker until his premature death in 1952.
• His wife Dame Elizabeth, who recently passed away at 103, became a warmly-regarded philanthropist.
• The family was at the very center of the Australian political and social establishment.
• Visiting powers and potentates from all fields enjoyed the hospitality of Melbourne’s first family.
• For example, General Douglas MacArthur set up his HQ in Melbourne after the flight from Manila. It was on Collins Street that he began the campaign to roll back the Japanese from the Western Pacific. He was a frequent visitor to the Murdoch home. In our respectable, leafy suburbs, a post-War folk memory persisted that MacArthur took a personal shine to the young Rupert.

Takeaway

• Many who don’t know Australian history see Rupert Murdoch as a harshly-accented ‘outsider’
• But nothing could be further from the truth about the ‘Australian Prince’ who became the ‘Dirty Digger’!!

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COMMENTS …

Regarding Rupert’s Mother, Dame Elizabeth: here is a quite recent (for a 102 year old) report on her discomfort with her son’s appetite for invading the privacy in the pursuit of a story.

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Great piece.   That’s what I call essential reading!

For the record, there are a couple of parallels to your mob’s Anzac Day in terms of the national celebration of defeat:

• The Serbs are famously in awe of their own decimation at the hands of the Ottomans at the Battle of Kosovo (1389).
• And, a tad more recently, there is the Ur event in recent Chinese history: The Long March, which, while it saw the complete defeat of the Red Army and the longest “strategic retreat” in all of human history, yet it also cemented Mao’s iron grip over both power and propaganda in modern China.

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Your post on Keith and Rupert is a fantasy straight from a garden party in one of those “leafy” Melbourne suburbs that you New York-based expats long for.

Sure, the young wives of newly-minted surgeons and law partners practically fainted when they received their first invitation from Dame Elizabeth. They were in! But who was left out of the Murdoch-calibrated ranks of the respectable?

Take the Gallipoli story: Australians were bitterly divided over the Great War. Irish Catholics made up about a third of the population and they loathed their English colonial overlords.  They fiercely resisted moves to introduce conscription. Their leader was the youthful Archbishop Daniel Mannix who had been exiled from British-occupied Ireland (its ‘West Bank’) to Melbourne for advocating Irish independence. The powerful Labor movement resisted the Great War in Marxist terms as an Imperialist massacre of working class lads.

As the casualties piled up and up, the conservative political class needed to reframe their ‘demo-cide’ of Australian Males 20-40. That’s when Keith Murdoch said to his Establishment friends: ‘What can I do for you?’

His Gallipoli story provided an alternative narrative to wasted lives. It became unpatriotic to question or resist the war … ‘disrespectful’ to our heroic mates in the trenches.

Sound familiar? Fast forward to Rupert’s leadership of the media drum corps that banged away, day in and day out, for the attack on Sadaam’s Iraq.

Like father, like son. The Murdoch story is not about your Melbourne garden parties and phone hacking. That’s the froth on the surface. Underneath, it’s an ugly, inter-generational saga of how a ruthless family uses wars to seize and extend dynastic power.

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You fail to note that Keith Murdoch was himself accused of ‘hacking’ the Gallipoli story: he blew through the battle zone, and many say that he plagiarized the detailed field reports of Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett.

… More from the Left

Bruce Page: A Real History of Rupert Murdoch (Counterpunch, July 18, 2011)

… And New York Times

Maureen Dowd on the Gallipoli connection, July 20, 2011. Her article was published days after mine, and bears an unsettling resemblance to my work.