Read All About Them

“Never trust a Sydney newspaper proprietor,” Sir Keith Murdoch told his son Rupert, who was in time to become one himself. The Sydney press lords were once a famously weird mob—and whether they remain so is an open question.

The Packer dynasty; the odd couple of stately, unworldly Warwick Fairfax and his polar opposite R.A.G. (“Rags”) Henderson; and further back the neurotic and bullying Ezra Norton, son of Napoleon admirer John Norton, founder of the “awful” Truth, Australia’s most memorable scandal sheet. Their doings and frailties and those of the senior Murdoch dominate Sally Young’s lively and often fascinating Paper Emperors. Young is a Professor of Political Science at Melbourne University.

This review appears in the latest Quadrant.
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The Melbourne proprietors in times past were outwardly nearer the average Australian, but part of interlocking business groups who kept each other comfortable in a way that would horrify modern…