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Walter Marsh
Walter Marsh is a journalist based in Tarntanya/Adelaide with a…
DiscoverWalter Marsh: Understanding Rupert | Sorrento Writers Festival
‘Yesterday Mr (Robert) Maxwell called me a moth-eaten kangaroo. I haven’t got to that stage,’ media proprietor Rupert Murdoch told a shareholders’ meeting in 1969. And so, more than five decades, billions in turnovers, four wives, and multiple acquisitions later, Rupert Murdoch remains the world’s most powerful media identity.
What makes Rupert tick? Our panel goes right back to the days of young Rupert growing up at nearby Cruden Farm, the Adelaide years, the birth of The Australian in the 1960s, the assault on London and then the US, the evolution of News Corp, succession planning, and family politics.
Walter Marsh (Young Rupert) is a journalist based in Tarntanya/Adelaide with a background in history and culture. A former editor and staff writer at The Adelaide Review and Rip It Up, his writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Monthly, The Saturday Paper, and InDaily.
Young Rupert
For half a century, the Murdoch media empire and its polarising patriarch have swept across the globe, shaking up markets and democracies in their wake. But how did it all start?
In September 1953, 22-year-old Rupert Murdoch landed in Adelaide, South Australia. Fresh from Oxford with a radical reputation, the young and brash son of Sir Keith Murdoch had arrived to fulfill his father’s dying wish: for Rupert to live a ‘useful altruistic and full life’ in the media.
For decades, Sir Keith had been a giant of the Australian press, but his final years were spent bitterly fending off rivals and would-be…
