another excerpt from
#ThingsYouLearnAlongTheWay
#JohnMenadue (1999)

“Working for Murdoch, I learned about business and networks. Most starkly I saw power and the way it is exercised. It left an indelible impression on me. The need for decentralisation of power, not just politically but in the economic and social fields has stayed with me ever since. Today there is not a significant politician who will raise his or her hand against Rupert Murdoch. That says a lot about politicians. Secure people with strong core values would not want to ingratiate themselves in this way.
After I left I could see more clearly his power at work and I was confident that I knew what made him tick. In the early days it was recognition by the person on the throne. Later, as he became bolder, it was to be influential or even instrumental in deciding who sat on the throne.”

continuing #Reading #ThingsYouLearnAlongTheWay
(edited to correct typos, add hashtags)

[[John Menadue commenced working with Murdoch in Sydney in October 1967, after working with Whitlam… I found this part interesting, because Rupert Murdoch has always seemed to me to have loathsome values — consider e.g. his role in the warburton ranges disgrace — but I’d read elsewhere he was considered a bit of a lefty when young.
also, still struggling to reconcile my impression that [murdoch’s mum] dame elisabeth really was as sweet as her public persona suggested, and reports [rupert’s dad/ elisabeth’s husband] keith murdoch was virulently anti-semitic.

the cognitive dissonance of being progressive while inhabiting privileged space would surely do one’s head in?]]

————
“As time went by, however, I became increasingly concerned about the way he [murdoch] used power. That concern increased after I left him when I saw his role in the Whitlam dismissal and his influence with ministers in aviation and pay television.
Working with him for seven years I saw what drove him. It was not making money, as useful as that was, but gaining acceptance by and then influence with people in positions of power. When he inherited the shareholding in News Limited Adelaide from his father, he felt very keenly that the Melbourne establishment, which his father was very much a part of, had denied him his rightful inheritance in the Melbourne Herald Group”

“Shy and reserved, he felt slighted by the establishment. He was dismissed as the ‘boy publisher’, the young bloke who had returned from Oxford in 1953, ‘Rupert the chick’, young and fresh-faced. At Geelong Grammar, which he had attended in the late 1940s, he was ‘Red Rupert’. He wanted recognition and acceptance by senior business and political leaders in the way his father had enjoyed. Menzies and Holt had no time for him. Menzies was part of the Melbourne establishment and had been very close to his father. Menzies ignored Rupert Murdoch in favour of John Williams of the Melbourne Herald, Frank Packer at Consolidated Press and Warwick Fairfax at the Sydney Morning Herald.
The first politician who took him seriously was Jack McEwen, the Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the Country Party. In the 1963 election campaign Murdoch was the only publisher to cover McEwen’s campaign.”
…
“John Gorton was the first Liberal Party leader to take Murdoch seriously. He benefited accordingly. The Liberal Party establishment never took Gorton to its heart”

…

#auspol #AustralianHistory

#Reading #ThingsYouLearnAlongTheWay #JohnMenadue
#ToiletTalk #Straya

“Long-drop toilets away from the house were common, with their cut newspaper and lime bucket. A new pit was dug before each summer. Usually it was quite a walk and, at Ardrossan, we were swooped by magpies in the season. Laurie got out his rifle and shot them. The toilet was often near the woodheap and under a pepper tree or a dollacus creeper, with a blue-mauve flower growing over it. Back lanes for toilet bucket removal were more common in the newer country towns. We enjoyed the fun of the night-soil truck running out of control at Naracoorte, down the hill from the Presbyterian church and into the Lutheran minister’s house at the bottom of the hill. We always thought that Presbyterians believed they were better than the rest of us—even their night-soil. Years later, when Gough Whitlam spoke about the ‘effluent society’ and the need to sewer the outer suburbs in the big cities, I knew exactly what he meant.”