Anna Murdoch making her own way

Press, 27 September 1988, Page 7

Anna Murdoch making her own way

By

NIGEL MALTHUS

It is, of course, impolite and unflattering to label an interview subject as “the wife of ...” but this time it seems inevitable. Mrs Anna Murdoch is the wife of Mr Rupert Murdoch, the Australian newspaper baron whose world-wide news media interests include a substantial .stake in the group which owns many New Zealand newspapers, including this one. Mrs Murdoch, though, is forging her own career, as a novelist, and yesterday she paid a flying visit to Christchurch to promote her second work, “Family Business.” She agreed, a little wearily, that the reporters she met usually asked about her husband, but she hoped that they would get over that as she made a name for herself. “I’m quite philosophical about it. I have to expect a certain amount of interest, particularly with this book, because it’s about newspapers,” she said. “Family Business” tells the story of the McLean family, particularly the matriarchal Yarrow McLean, who takes over the small-town paper her grandfather started and builds it into a worldwide publishing empire. It was not a thinly-disguised biography, nor even thickly-disguised, said Mrs Murdoch.

It did, however, draw off some of the experiences of the Murdoch family as they moved from Australia to London and then to New York, building the Murdoch family business. • One of the themes was the changing technology of the printing industry, from type-setting by hand, through “hot metal” to computerised direct input — appropriate, perhaps, for an author whose husband was instrumental in forcing the British newspaper industry to accept computerised methods. Here she let slip the intriguing information that Rupert was the only one of the family (they have three children) who was not “computer literate.” “We tease him about it,” she said. Mrs Murdoch said that a book about the newspaper industry was something she had to do, “because it was the only job I ever had.” She was a cadet reporter in Sydney about 25 years ago. “It’s a business I feel very affectionate towards,” she said. “For all its faults, it’s very interesting, and I wanted to write about it.” Mrs Murdoch’s first novel, “In Her Own Image,” published in 1985, was about an Australian farming family. Whatever the advantages and disadvantages of being married to a. powerful man, she has obviously found in writing something to call her own.