Word: australian
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Digger" is a slang term first used in the 1850s to describe a miner in the Australian gold fields. It was popular in World War I as a nickname for an Australian soldier, and today is sometimes employed as a generic name for any Australian...
...when aging Publisher Dorothy Schiff, 73, told him she was thinking of selling her New York Post. Murdoch pounced, wrapping up the $30 million sale in three weeks of secret negotiations. Thus it was only a few weeks ago that a significant number of Americans first heard of the Australian and wondered where he had been all this time. Surprise: Murdoch had been living in the U.S. full time for nearly three years...
...Murdoch sold his 120-acre farm outside London and moved his family to Manhattan. There he is shuttled by chauffeured Cadillac from his Star office to Dolly Schiff's old suite at the Post to his twelve-room Fifth Avenue duplex, which is crowded with English antiques and modern Australian art. At a restored colonial farmhouse upstate, Rupert keeps trim by riding, skiing, swimming (40 laps in his pool) and thrashing around on a tennis court. He once challenged a group of his editors to play him, without their tennis shoes. "We have an old-fashioned marriage," says Anna...
Second best is probably the telephone. A reluctant memo writer (though a prolific doodler), Murdoch directs his far-flung empire almost entirely by phone. For an hour most nights, he conducts a long-distance séance (at $3 a minute) with Ken May, his Australian proconsul, from the 18th century desk in his study. Murdoch can be a telephonic terror. Pubs full of sacked editors in London and Sydney curse his quick temper, his reluctance to dispense praise?...
Murdoch's chief bastion of legitimacy is The Australian, his home country's only national newspaper, which he founded in 1964 and refers to as his "flagship." The Australian is a good, solid journal of politics, business and criticism, paying attention to the arts as well as to sports. There is no paper like it in the U.S. Although writing and perceptions are inferior, The Australian is vaguely reminiscent of London's Observer, which Murdoch vainly tried to buy last year as part of his drive for respectability in Britain. Ironically, The Australian has never made money...