From My Notebooks In 1976: Lunch with the Dame in Melbourne

First, thank you all so very much for your many birthday wishes. I truly appreciate them.

I made a bad mistake in last week’s pages. I said that Melbourne’s famous newspaper, “The Age,” belonged to Murdoch. Untrue. It is and always has been quite independent of Murdoch, and my error is possibly due to my own mild obsession with him. Not everything belongs to Rupert Murdoch. Although we have never met, and he has certainly forgotten the one time we spoke 55 years ago, he has been a fairly constant presence in my life.

In 1969 I was editing an issue of the Observer colour magazine in London and I chose to make “influence” the theme. I made a list of people I thought most influential, and planned to ask them whom they thought were most influential. Rupert Murdoch had just landed in England from Australia. He was making a lot of noise, having acquired two newspapers, The Sun and The News of the World, and he was stretching his wings. I phoned him to say we thought of him as having growing influence, and all I remember him saying, quite pleasantly, was “Don’t be silly.” He wanted nothing to do with it.

In 1975, when I was riding through Ecuador, I met and spent some time with Matt Handbury, a young man on a BMW, who happened to be Rupert’s nephew. He was on a long, unfocused journey trying to decide whether to shelter under his uncle’s umbrella or live an independent life. His mother Helen was Rupert’s sister. He told me that when I got to Australia I should visit their sheep station, The Rises, and – he added – I should also go to see his grandmother, Dame Elisabeth Murdoch in Melbourne. He gave me addresses and telephone numbers and so here I was, in Melbourne.

The political scene in Australia had just gone through unprecedented turmoil, and the Murdochs were nothing if not political, so it could be interesting to meet the Dame now. I phoned, and she invited us to come and have lunch at Cruden Farm. We went on the bike, of course. This is what I wrote:

The road from Melbourne to Frankston was along the East side of the bay. At first it comes inland a bit from St Kilda, where the massage parlours earn constant shy allusions – small villas, painted in rather bright distemper colours, windows painted over and the street numbers in large figures a foot or more high as their principal recognition points; where the smart movie houses (Palais and National) were showing classic movies every night (Borsalino & Co, Delon: Day of the Locusts: Death in Venice), and Leo’s Spaghetti Bar did a generous bowl of Spag Carbonara for 60 cents, on Fitzroy Street, among cheaper hotels (Nightly: Miss Sammi Davis) and cafés and Luna Park on the beach.

So the Nepean Highway, which is a continuation of St Kilda’s road goes out to Moorabin through “Autoland” and then past the Lucas factory on the right, to the more leisurely resorts along the coast where nautical sports keep their dinghies and yachts.

Downtown Melbourne in 1976

Cruden Farm is about three miles inland, not a lot of land but sufficient for the house to be well back from the road on a long drive. Stone house, old English, early 19th century perhaps, the Dame appearing at upstairs window saying “I’m just changing. Go in please, make yourselves comfortable.”

Polished wood, piano, delicious aroma of baking, When she comes down she’s a slighter figure than one expects of a Dame, wearing a simple calico dress (frock?), spectacles, easy light-limbed walk (she is presumably in her middle or late sixties.) We talk at first about the election – her son’s change of heart, her criticism of “The Age” for changing its attitude to Liberal in the last days before the election.

[“The Age” was Australia’s greatest newspaper, and Graham Perkin it’s famous editor. He favored the Labor Party but died suddenly before the election. “The Age” changed allegiance, to the Liberal Party, which was distinctly conservative.]

She (the Dame) felt that Perkin would have stuck to his guns. She is herself a convinced Liberal. It’s difficult though, on reflection, to believe that she would have been able to sustain a different opinion from the men. Keith Murdoch was her husband. Geoffrey – Matt’s father – is a son-in-law, daughters Helen and Rachel (married to John Calvert-Jones). She really believes that Labor was ruining Australia, and that Rupert was reluctantly convinced of it.

Rupert I didn’t meet but saw on TV – a broad-faced, cuddly person with a legend of ruthlessness about him. She pooh-poohs the ruthlessness, says talk of his power mania is foolish, that he’s just not like that to meet. Like so many people, she can’t distinguish, at least in her own son, the difference between a personal affectation of ruthlessness, and the ruthless consequences of rational business decisions taken in boardroom vacuo.

We sip white wine with cheese biscuits – the proper kind that are soft and crumbly and taste of cheese and salt, and the Dame talks easily, beginning each sentence by opening her mouth wider than usual and aspirating the first vowel, a curious mannerism that seems appropriate to her generation and reveals the schoolgirl in her.

We are both flattered by her attention – she is perfectly courteous and seems to pay real attention to what we say. At first she tends to address her general questions to me (about Australia, Australians, etc.) but I turn them over to Carol and the Dame picks that cue up very easily. Calvert-Jones arrives with the coffee – he has a rather obsequious attitude to her – I was surprised to hear later that he was a general’s son. Much later, at The Rises, we heard that he had been surprised by the amount of time she had lavished on us.

He showed us around the grounds, a fine old stable with horses’ heads carved on the post heads, and an ornamental garden.

She came out at the end to see us off, and clambered onto the pillion seat to see what it was like, showing suspenders and stocking tops and knickers, and was very sprightly about it, though when she caught my glance at her deshabille she seemed, for a moment, frozen in anger, as though afraid she’d gone too far.

We’re on a circular drive, in front of the house. Big tree has fragments of honeycomb fallen at its base, and Calvert-Jones seems unnecessarily nervous of them.

House has some leaded windows, and colonial white pillars of wood which always seem so unsatisfactory to me where they meet the joists they support.

Perhaps the essential point about Cruden is that the life it describes is so divorced from the Australia we have got to know – as different as upper-class used to be in England.

A few years after my journey had ended Rupert Murdoch acquired both The Times and The Sunday Times newspapers and he offered Harry Evans the editorship of The Times, an offer he couldn’t refuse.

I was in something of crisis at home so I took an assignment from Harry as a roving correspondent of The Times. I was halfway down South America, in Argentina, just as Margaret Thatcher sent her naval armada to the Falklands. I was in a great position to report the story, as Argentinians went into conniptions about the “pirate fleet” they thought was coming to shell Buenos Aires. But Murdoch chose that moment to sack Harry for not doing as he was told, and I didn’t have the stomach to continue. So I went home to the ranch.

Since then, Rupert, together with his gang at Fox News, has become a monster. I am as likely to blame him as I am to blame Trump or President Pudding for all the ills of the world. He’s the same age as me. We’ll see which of us outlasts the other.

PS: I have a new character in my rogue’s gallery. Along with Vladimir Pudding, Porky and Percy K.Pistachio, I welcome Benny Notonyernellie. (Brits might make more sense of this one).