CQU academic Professor Denis Cryle has contributed a retrospective on The Australian newspaper to Online Opinion: Australia's e-journal of social and political debate.

Professor Cryle notes that he encountered a significant problem for a newspaper historian, namely how to characterise The Australian:

"Was it a liberal paper, radical, conservative or all three? It was at least two of these, perhaps all three - avidly read and distributed by anti-Vietnam activists, liberal in its early politics then violently anti-Labor and advocate of the New Right, before moving back to the centre of the political spectrum in the early 1990s.

"Whatever could be said of it, The Australian wore its heart on its sleeve and remained an ideologically-driven publication with a long history of campaigning behind it - an inveterate stirrer to use the Australian vernacular."

Professor Cryle suggests it is useful to understand The Australian and its, at times, erratic development as the prolonged outcome of creative tensions, involving Rupert Murdoch, his executives, editors, journalists and production staff, and featuring a variety of these players at any one time.

"Murdoch himself fostered creative tension, at times openly within the organisation, through rival appointments within and across the group. Such tensions were also fostered from below, as the national strikes of 1975-76 and 1979-82 clearly indicate. To understand these complex forces in the history of the paper, one has to look more widely to the experiences of the journalists, editors and executives, at times, united in the desire to get the paper out, at other times, deeply divided over editorial policy as well as workplace change," Dr Cryle says.

You can read the full Online Opinion article at: http://onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7025

The website notes that Professor Cryle is a print media historian based at Central Queensland University. His new book entitled Murdoch's Flagship. Twenty-five years of The Australian, will be published by Melbourne University Press later this year.