The Gallipoli Letter (2 page)

Keith Murdoch, journalist

Keith Murdoch was born in Melbourne in 1885, less than twelve months after his parents had migrated to Victoria from Scotland.

Keith's father was a minister in the Presbyterian church, as had been his grandfather. The influence of the church on Keith, along with the influence of his Scottish heritage, was deep, profound and lasting. But Keith Murdoch would not follow the path of his father and grandfather into the ministry. He would dedicate his life to journalism.

•

For most of their lives the Reverend James Murdoch and his wife Helen, Keith's grandparents, had lived in the fishing village of Rosehearty in the north of Scotland. They had fourteen children, nine boys and five girls, but tuberculosis haunted the family, being ultimately responsible for the deaths of six of these offspring. In 1881, then 63 years of age and fearing further deaths, James Murdoch told his congregation that he must resign his ministry and leave Scotland. Two sons had already migrated to Victoria; it seemed logical that, if they must move, to Victoria it would be.

James Murdoch's first born, Patrick John—also a minister of the Presbyterian church in Scotland and married with one child—had accepted a call to a church in Melbourne and had already booked passage on S.S.
Potosi
. James Murdoch obtained passage on the same ship for himself, his wife, three daughters and his youngest son Walter, who would celebrate his tenth birthday on the voyage— these were all of James Murdoch's remaining family in Scotland. On 20 August 1884 S.S.
Potosi
sailed from London to Melbourne, docking there on 3 October 1884 after a journey of 44 days. The Murdochs were all travelling first class. Young Walter remembered the terrible passage through the Red Sea: ‘No first class passenger went down to it [the heat]; the trouble was all in the 2nd class and the steerage. In the steerage, they died.'

James Murdoch survived less than a month in Melbourne, dying on 29 October 1884. Responsibility for the family fell to Patrick John, minister of the West Melbourne Presbyterian church in the centre of the city. He had already found a terrace house in William Street, West Melbourne, for his own growing family. There was a son, George, born in Scotland but soon to die, then a daughter, Helen, then in August 1885 a second son, Keith Arthur; there would be four more children. In 1887 Patrick John moved to Trinity Presbyterian Church in Camberwell, a rapidly growing and prosperous Melbourne suburb. The manse attached to the church became home to Patrick's children. Described as ‘broad-shouldered, straight-backed and full of Christian fun', Patrick was a demanding father with high expectations of his children.

There should have been enough money in the extended family for all their needs but the collapse of the land boom in ‘Marvellous Melbourne', the bank crash and the subsequent economic depression, meant that Patrick's stipend was reduced and his mother was without income from her investments for some years. Keith Murdoch recalled it as the ‘patched pants' period of his life. He was sent to the Camberwell Common School, a free government school, but was apparently bullied as a child of the manse and developed a disabling stammer. He was painfully shy and without close friends. It is a sad picture of childhood. Such was his stammer that on occasions when buying a railway ticket he would push a handwritten note through the ticket window rather than facing the ordeal of trying to say the name of his destination. Yet his home life was happy, his parents somehow recreating the atmosphere of the Scottish villages they had known in their own childhoods. Golf was Patrick John's main recreation and he and Keith often played together, the son becoming a very good golfer.

Keith finished his schooling at Camberwell Grammar in 1903, graduating dux of the school. Aware that it would disappoint his

PLATE 2 On 25 April 1915, a party of Australian soldiers disembark their transport ship, about to land at Anzac Cove.
AWM Neg. No. J05589

father, Keith nevertheless declined to move on to university studies and announced, instead, that he wished to be a journalist. His uncle, Walter Murdoch, just eleven years his senior, had probably planted the seeds of that aspiration. After graduating from university Walter had set up a small school for a couple of years, which his nephews attended, but during this time he was also building a reputation as a literary journalist with the Melbourne
Argus
, writing longer pieces under his own name, and anonymously contributing editorials and book reviews. Walter Murdoch clearly enjoyed journalism. His nephew Keith was fascinated and aspired to see his own name in print.

Patrick Murdoch was now a prominent minister in a prosperous suburb, with impressive and extensive connections. He introduced Keith to David Syme, the legendary owner of Melbourne's
Age
. Syme commissioned Murdoch as a ‘stringer' in the Melbourne suburb of Malvern, paying him a penny ha'penny a line for published material. The commission was valuable for the
Age
, which had a limited readership in Malvern. Circulation would grow, Syme calculated, as locals read area news. The work would also prove valuable for Murdoch: on-the-job training in finding inventive ways of getting ‘parish pump' material into print. Murdoch succeeded, working long hours to uncover local news stories, and he was offered a position on the
Age
's reporting staff. The stammer persisted, however, and one can only imagine the agony Murdoch must have endured as he set about interviewing local Malvern identities. By 1908 Keith had saved enough money to be able to set off for London. In part his trip was to further his education as a journalist; in part it was to work with British experts who may be able to cure or perhaps reduce his terrible stammer.

Keith Murdoch travelled to London with impressive references, including one from Alfred Deakin, Australia's second prime minister. But Murdoch struggled in London. A young man with parochial experience, shy to the point of inhibition and with a frightful stammer that he was reluctant to expose, he can hardly have been an attractive proposition to those hiring on London newspapers. Though he won an interview for a position on the
Pall Mall Gazette
the opportunity disappeared, Murdoch wrote, when at the final interview his ‘speaking collapsed'. Lonely, with no friends and little or no work, Murdoch read widely and attended lectures at the London School of Economics. He travelled to relatives in Scotland and played some golf. Murdoch also enjoyed observing the mighty men of Empire going about their business in London. But as to work, there was none. The young man did receive treatment for his stammer and there was some improvement. It was both a physiological and psychological problem, he reported to his parents.

Writing home in late 1909 Keith asked his father to confirm a position at the
Age
with David Syme's widow, for his mentor had died in February 1908. There was no alternative for Keith Murdoch: he must again turn his face to Melbourne to try to start his career at home. Told that a place had indeed been held open for him, he returned in 1910.

It was hardly a triumphant homecoming. Keith Murdoch was now twenty-four years of age. He had never held a permanent job and he was largely unknown in the city of his birth. What advantages he had secured came largely as a result of his father's good work and prominence. Murdoch was ambitious and determined to make a name for himself and it was said that he had a high degree of selfconfidence. But, as even he must have been aware, he had much ground to make up if he was to succeed in Melbourne as a journalist.

Finally Murdoch's luck began to change. Melbourne was then the home of the federal parliament, created by Federation in 1901, and the centre of the federal administration. Federal parliamentarians spent months at a time in Melbourne and many members spent long hours in the parliament building, where there was a club-like atmosphere and close association between members and journalists. When Geoffrey Syme, David's son, appointed Murdoch to the
Age
's federal parliamentary press gallery the inexperienced journalist joined this pleasant club.

Shaken by his observation of the plight of London's poor, Murdoch's political views, supported by his studies at the London School of Economics, inclined him to the left of politics just as the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party was coming into prominence. In the first decade of federation governments had been formed by coalitions of interest with no single party able to gain a majority. Alfred Deakin had described the federal scene as ‘three elevens in the field'—a useless way to play cricket, and a situation unable to produce a stable government for Australia.

But at the election in April 1910 Labor became the first federal party to win government in its own right, with a majority of 43 of 75 seats in the lower house and 23 of 36 Senate seats. Labor could govern without the deals and coalitions of earlier years and Andrew Fisher, the fifth Australian prime minister in his second term in the office, became the first prime minister to exercise real power.

Murdoch and Fisher were already close. With his brother, Andrew Fisher had migrated from Scotland in 1885, the year of Keith Murdoch's birth; Fisher was then twenty-three years of age. He was a staunch adherent of the Presbyterian church and superintendent for many years of the Presbyterian Sunday school at Gympie, his hometown in Queensland. Fisher had married in 1899, and when he became prime minister for the second time in 1910 he had six children under the age of twelve. Even so he had time for the younger Keith Murdoch and there was a natural sympathy between the two men. They shared a common Scottish heritage, the values of Presbyterianism and a mutual concern to improve the plight of the poor and disadvantaged. They also enjoyed yarning together and Murdoch even introduced golf into the life of the busy prime minister, taking Fisher to the Riversdale course in Melbourne, where Murdoch was captain for a time. Murdoch also had good relations with other Labor ministers, particularly the attorney-general W.M. (‘Billy') Hughes and the defence minister, George Pearce.

In a short space of time a transformation had come over Keith Murdoch. Perhaps it was the confidence he gained from being a man with London experience, perhaps it was the sense of being at the centre of things, on close terms with senior government ministers and the prime minister himself. Or perhaps it was that Keith Murdoch had finally grown into his own body: tall, handsome and energetic, like his friend the prime minister, Keith Murdoch was suddenly a man to be reckoned with.

Somewhat surprisingly the Labor government was narrowly defeated at the 1913 election, losing the lower house by one seat to Joseph Cook's Liberals. However Labor retained an overwhelming majority in the Senate and—almost at the time of its own choosing— provoked a double-dissolution election, the first such election to be held in the short history of Australian federal politics. Australians went to the polls again on 5 September 1914, voting for a new federal government just a month after the Empire had declared war with Germany. During the election campaign Fisher had pledged his party's full support to the war effort, to ‘the last man and the last shilling'. Labor won back the Treasury benches with another solid majority in the house, and maintained its compelling majority in the Senate. Coming into office as prime minister for the third time, Fisher was now less concerned with social and economic reform than with organising Australia's response to the war. The first task was to recruit and despatch an Australian expeditionary force, acting on an offer of 20,000 men from Australia to fight for the Empire in its hour of need.

The war to end all wars

Australia had been at war at the beginning of the century, supporting the Empire in South Africa. Before that various of the Australian colonies had also despatched troops overseas, to South Africa primarily but also to remote places like the Sudan. In every case Australian or colonial governments had raised, equipped and transported the troops but had left the ultimate control of their troops to British ministers in London and British generals on the spot at the battlefield. But this was not Andrew Fisher's preference. At an Imperial Conference in London in 1910 Fisher had pushed hard for the right of those at the periphery of Empire to have some sort of voice in the oversight of imperial affairs. He wanted a permanent voice at the table for the Canadians, the South Africans, the New Zealanders and the Australians. With little support from the others and none at all in London, Fisher's initiative went nowhere but he was no doubt anxious about handing over the complete mastery of an Australian expeditionary force to the men of Empire in London. The troops were Australian and he was Australia's prime minister. Might he not have some say in their use at war and in their fate, or at least be consulted? The answer was firmly ‘no'.

Despatched from Australia in October 1914, various contingents of the First Division of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) landed in Egypt in December and began training. The Australian High Commissioner in London, Sir George Reid, was largely responsible for this last-minute diversion to Egypt, pointing out, with force, that to expect the Australians to train on the bleak Salisbury plain in winter was reckless. Surely, Reid argued, they would suffer extreme hardship and, most likely, a severe rate of sickness.