‘It depends what you call monopoly’: young Rupert Murdoch’s first big television play

After taking over from his father, the young Rupert Murdoch had found himself ‘in a sink-or-swim fight to retain his family’s place in Australia’s media set’. Photograph: Aubrey Hart/Getty Images

In the first week of May 1958, a 27-year-old Rupert Murdoch walked into a boardroom secreted within Adelaide’s grand lodge of the Freemasons. He had arrived at the lodge hoping to join the ranks of another exclusive new order – television mogul – but so far it hadn’t been going well.

Commercial television’s arrival in Melbourne and Sydney in 1956 had confirmed its gamechanging potential and as Australian regulators turned to other capitals, all the major players jostled for a piece of spectrum. Pitted against the Packer family’s Consolidated Press, the Herald and Weekly Times in Melbourne (and its Adelaide-based affiliate Advertiser Newspapers), Murdoch and his own company News Ltd were placed in the familiar position of a young and hungry outsider.