Australian Story: Making Lachlan Murdoch, ABC review: a closer look at the chosen one

You might wonder why the opening episode of journalist Paddy Manning’s three-part Australian Story into what drives 53-year-old Lachlan Murdoch spends most of its time focused not on him but squarely on his father, Rupert, and grandfather, Keith.

You might, but probably not if you watched the backstabbing HBO drama, Succession. Just as Brian Cox’s grizzly media baron Logan Roy loomed angrily large over his squabbling scions – played by local hero Sarah Snook alongside Kieran Culkin and Jeremy Strong – so it was in the family that inspired the show.

A clip of Lachlan’s sister Elizabeth insisting that they’re not a living soap opera – ‘We’re a normal family, we just have a spotlight on it’– rings hollow, especially given she, James and Prudence, their sister from another mother, are now engaged in a very real succession battle to wrest back control of the media empire, after Lachlan was named as Rupert’s chosen successor last year.

Who is Lachlan Murdoch?

According to the very few folks willing to come forward for this documentary – including mate and fellow billionaire James Packer – Lachlan’s an intensely private person who guards that self-erected shield zealously, leaving Manning to make do with intriguing archival footage.

That includes a 2001 interview with a blue-suited, fresh-faced and spiky-haired Lachlan, who appears to open a locked door in his head when he says, ‘When you’re brought up in a family business, it’s all around you from a very early age … there’s no sense of turning business on and off. It is my life … I hope it’s healthy, because it’s the only thing I’ve ever known.’

This glimmer of self-doubt is anathema to the manner in which Rupert has gouged out a multi-faceted media dominion of monstrous proportions – a characterisation that saw Time magazine depict him in the late 70s as King Kong aloft the Empire State Building, when he acquired the New York Post.

Episode one lays out the humble beginning of the business through Keith Murdoch’s efforts in Adelaide. Though he died before Lachlan was born, it’s suggested the younger man idealises the origin story. Manning also tackles the conundrum of how a once ‘socialist’ and ‘idealistic’ Rupert turned, realising bad news sells better, taking the business interstate – including founding The Australian in Canberra – then global.

It also suggests that the kids were once tight. That though their father was forthright, they were close to him. A recollection of them assembling around Rupert at the breakfast table each morning as he went through the papers issuing decrees on which stories weren’t subbed properly is amusing. As is another image of a very young Lachlan mimicking his hands-on-press print dad by scribbling in a notepad while Rupert pontificated.

But trouble was already brewing.

A mother’s warning

Several former employees insist Lachlan was always the chosen one, beloved of his father and besotted in return. So much so that his mother, Rupert’s second wife Anna, worried about what would happen if the weren’t held equally tight.

Indeed, long before Armstrong’s show, Glasgow-born Anna – aunt of The Newsreader star Anna Torv – had already predicted a vicious splintering in her 1988 novel Family Business, about the suspiciously similar MacLean media barons and their sibling rivalry.

But like the prophet Cassandra, Anna appears to have been cursed by the gods to discern the future clearly yet endure her warnings being ignored.

Anna worked for the business, interviewing Rupert as a cadet before being swept off her feet. Featuring prominently in this opening ep, she was by his side in London as Murdoch senior assumed control of the ill-fated The News of the World and still-burning The Sun.

Lachlan, meanwhile, was born in London but spent most of his childhood in the US. Yet he insists, in that 2001 interview, that he considers himself Australian and wishes he could ditch his American accent. There’s also footage of a leaner, bleach-blond Lachlan later assuming control of the Brisbane arm of the business after a self-imposed, rock-climbing black sheep exile.

Will the next two chapters give us clearer answers on who this secretive Murdoch truly is? Quite probably. Manning certainly has form, digging in their dirt. He penned an unofficial Lachlan biography – managing not to be sued – produced a podcast on the clan, and is now writing a thesis on them too.

What we’ve seen so far is juicy, even without the current cohort contributing. But why do we care? As the person (for now) in control of the Murdoch empire, his reach is inescapably global and affects us all.

Australian Story: Making Lachlan Murdoch premieres on ABC and ABC iview on 9 September.