Tuesday, July 15 marked 60 years of The Australian and boy oh boy did they mark it, and mark it, and mark it (And look, who among us … )
Over the past weeks, we’ve had a recap of the paper’s coverage of women’s issues — taking them “seriously” while also conceding that they had described Dame Leonie Kramer as the”prettiest professor” in the land — a list of the 60 most influential Australians during the paper’s lifetime, a series of “big ideas” essays, a reissue of the first ever edition, a collaboration between Barossa Shiraz and Johannes Leak that so many of us have been begging for, a special wrap of 60 years of coverage, and most movingly, special advertising partnerships: “Congratulations to the thinking person’s paper from the thinking person’s cruise,” says Viking cruises.
“Keep fighting for freedom of the press, freedom of expression for everybody, not just us. And that this will contribute, and be seen to contribute, to a better society,” Rupert Murdoch told Paul Whittaker in a “world exclusive” interview he provided to Sky News Australia to mark the occasion. Meanwhile, Lachlan enjoyed a generous profile in the special edition supplement that accompanied the Weekend Australian just before the anniversary, with lots of folk album cover-ready photos of the heir at the family property.
The excerpt online promises that Murdoch talks passionately about “freedom of the press” but if he did, we didn’t find it. While talking a great deal about his distinctly Australian perspective, the upcoming US election, and artificial intelligence, he does not take the opportunity to assert the general importance of press freedom. We will not speculate as to why.
Accompanying the paper on the date itself was a special 38-page rundown of “60 years of The Australian” capturing each decade through the Oz’s reporting, commentary, culture and lifestyle, photography, sports coverage and cartoons.
It’s enough to swell one’s heart with nostalgia — not so much for the halcyon days when the Oz was a sane conservative voice committed every bit as much to genuinely important journalism as it was to vendettas and ever-narrowing culture war preoccupations, but for when we had the time to do fun things like send them a cake. As James Jeffrey, whose witty and limpid prose was a major reason to read the paper until he scarpered into Anthony Albanese’s office (weird how Peter Dutton never brings that one up?), wrote in the “Strewth” column when the Oz turned 50:
Then there was one from the folks at Crikey, pictured, emblazoned with the portraits of many august organists (including yours truly) and the message: “Happy 50th, The Australian! Much like the climate, we hope you never change.” While we are shocked to discover Crikey may be a hotbed of climate-change scepticism, we can cheer it on the second bit, the gist of the official response being that change here is as likely as a casino on Titan. Against expectations, the cake was not half-baked but sweet with a soft heart — we can only assume it was made by Crikey scribe Bernard Keane. We didn’t eat the bit adorned with our likeness, but Paul Kelly — who suffers no such delicacy — ate his portrait. His verdict? ‘Scrumptious.’
Remember when we used to have fun? Great days.
Perhaps the clearest indication of what The Australian has become is provided by the spread of cartoons — in every decade until the 2000s, the summary displays a spread of art styles and, while broadly conservative, a variety of targets; pointed of-the-era comments on Indigenous land rights, corporate greed, gun control and bigotry, alongside jokes about the union movement dragging the country back to the stone age.
Then we get to the last decade and a bit, and the vision narrows to a slit — former Victorian premier Dan Andrews makes it twice: once as a torturer in Chinese Communist Party garb with a bloody skeleton labelled “Vic” on the dungeon wall behind him, and once getting a series of answers to the question “what has Australia ever done for us?” from a conveniently multicultural crowd (“universal suffrage?” suggests a woman in a hijab).
The only Liberal leader to make the cut from a near decade of chaotic rule is, obviously, Malcolm Turnbull — offering a pub full of real men the chance to talk about marriage equality over daiquiris — while the two years of Anthony Albanese’s leadership get a cartoon each, one featuring his approval of a verdant green landscape destroyed by wind turbines, and another of him altering his pro-Voice t-shirt to remove “treaty” and “truth”.
There is a skeletal demon representing Hamas, with his torso strapped with a shield of infants. And of course, the late Bill Leak’s notorious “what’s his name then?” cartoon which kicked off the 18C farrago that would dominate the last years of the paper’s 2010s coverage, and sadly, of Leak’s life. For whatever reason, the Oz was sufficiently sensitive to identity-based offence to exclude the “Waffen-SSM” cartoon, that depicted a rainbow-clad Nazi horde during the marriage equality debate.
Do you have a favourite moment from The Australian from the last 60 years? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
