Ita Buttrose reflects on her life in media – well, some of it

Ita Buttrose is a consequential figure in Australian public life for many reasons, most of all because of her work as a journalist, so it is odd that only one chapter of her memoir Unapologetically Ita is wholly devoted to this.

The rest is a collection of essays, written in a somewhat hortatory tone, on personal resilience, menopause, ageing, dementia, HIV, motherhood, leadership, and the opportunities and challenges facing Australia.

The book is written, not always coherently, in the language of magazine journalism: a mixture of reportage and opinion. In the middle of a discussion about HIV/AIDS and the subsequent risk that gay people would retreat back into the closet, for example, Buttrose inserts an anecdote about how the Herald Sun and the 60 Minutes television program focused on her revelation that she had become a radical celibate. The connection to gay people’s lives is not obvious.

Review: Unapologetically Ita – Ita Buttrose (Simon & Schuster)

The exhortations begin with the first chapter, Never Give Up. The message is delivered mainly by reference to the struggle of women to be accepted at the highest levels of Australian corporate life and her experiences working for Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch, the two media moguls for whom she was an editor and editor-in-chief respectively.

Buttrose writes that, at the age of 21, it occurred to her that she could climb further up the corporate ladder than she had supposed. This insight liberated her from the effects of an education system that she says limited women’s ambitions, stultified their self-confidence and fitted them only for jobs considered suitable for females. It becomes clear that advancement of women was an important driver for her. “All the things I’ve done,” she writes, “have been driven by that goal.” She claims that she let the voices of women be heard through the publications she edited and that Cleo, the magazine of which she was the founding editor, was a vehicle for challenging repressive attitudes. Feminine skills Here and there, glimpses of her editorial work show through. As editor-in-chief of Sydney’s Daily and Sunday Telegraphs, she insisted on a page being devoted to women’s sport. And she was adroit in charting a course past the conservatism of the proprietor, Sir Frank Packer. When she published a story about female masturbation, for instance, she framed it, for his benefit, as a health issue. The influence Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch may have had on her is a matter swiftly dispatched. Buttrose writes of them in generalities: Packer “was a terrific team leader”; Murdoch “always stressed the need to understand our marketplace”. That’s about it. Really? More revealing is her account of the conservative and sexist culture with which the Packer organisation, Australian Consolidated Press, was imbued. The introduction of Cleo into this culture was a shock to the blokes who ran the place. It certainly seemed to bamboozle Sir Frank. He had delegated responsibility for Cleo to his son Kerry, but when it succeeded so spectacularly he thought to encourage it further by bringing back from the United States the rights to the memoir of a New York madam, including accounts of bestiality. The rights were not exercised.

Inevitably in this culture, there was resentment among senior male editorial figures at the rise of this ambitious young woman. These attitudes did not improve when, in 1972, the Packers sold the Telegraphs to Murdoch’s News Limited. Buttrose writes that, in later years, she was told by a News Limited director that her time as editor-in-chief would have been easier if she’d been a lesbian and worn trousers, rather than skirts and dresses.

Buttrose cemented her position at News Limited by successfully adapting the very blokey Sunday Telegraph to a more family-oriented newspaper like its rival the Sun-Herald, which made a virtue of features such as children’s competitions and a column called Dog of the Week for homeless canines.

She urges women to understand that perseverance is essential to corporate success, and that it is not necessary to emulate men in order to succeed. Here we get a brief glimpse of the inner Buttrose. She says it is not that she doesn’t admire the way men work, “but my skills are feminine ones. I cherish them.”

What are these essentially feminine skills? That’s not to question the truthfulness of her proposition, but the reader would benefit from learning what she means.

Captain’s pick

The second chapter of Unapologetically Ita deals exclusively with Buttrose’s chairing of the ABC. Her appointment was announced as a so-called “captain’s pick” in February 2019 by Scott Morrison, then prime minister. As she correctly says, the ABC was in turmoil.

In the space of a couple of weeks in 2018, it had lost its chair, Justin Milne, and managing director, Michelle Guthrie. These departures had followed the publication in the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age of a dossier, compiled by Guthrie, in which she alleged that Milne had told her to “get rid of” two journalists, Emma Alberici and Andrew Probyn, because the government “hated” them. Milne has always denied there was any interference by the government.

Buttrose robustly defended the ABC from the ideological onslaughts of the Morrison government. It becomes clear that when Paul Fletcher replaced Mitch Fifield as communications minister in 2019, the relationship with the government went from bad to worse.

Buttrose challenged the Australian Federal Police raid on the ABC’s Sydney headquarters in June 2019, saying “it was clearly designed to intimidate” the ABC. When she rang Fletcher seeking assurance that there would be no repeats, she was rebuffed.

She strongly defended the ABC’s Four Corners program Inside the Canberra Bubble, which dealt with the toxic sexualised workplace culture in Parliament House and led directly or indirectly to the sacking, resignation or demotion of three Morrison government ministers. Buttrose received a point-by-point attack on the program from Fletcher and replied with a point-by-point rebuttal, which shut him up.

This was the high point of Buttrose’s term as chair. It will always stand to her credit.

Less creditable was her role in the crisis surrounding the sacking of Antoinette Lattouf in December 2023. Less creditable still is the omission from this book of any reference to the matter.

Lattouf’s appointment for a five-day relief stint presenting a light entertainment program on Sydney radio generated an intense campaign of protest from the pro-Israel lobby, delivered via email and turbocharged through The Australian newspaper.

The campaign to have her removed began when Lattouf published, on her private Instagram account, a report by Human Rights Watch alleging that the Israeli Defence Force was using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. She was taken off air before her stint was over.

Having established through the Fair Work Commission that she had been sacked, Lattouf successfully sued the ABC for unlawful dismissal. She was awarded a total of $220,000 in compensatory and punitive damages.

In the course of these proceedings, emails from Buttrose to the ABC’s managing director David Anderson emerged, in which Buttrose was clearly putting pressure on ABC management to get Lattouf off air. She told them she was sick of getting complaints about Lattouf and asked whether she couldn’t just come down with a stomach upset or Covid or the flu.

The Federal Court found that Buttrose was not materially involved in the sacking of Lattouf, but the fact that she was putting pressure on others to do so is incontrovertible. Buttrose has airbrushed this out of her history.

An opinionated pragmatist

At this point the book takes an abrupt turn.

An essay called The Menopause Revolution is the first of a series of chapters on the substantial contributions Buttrose has made to Australian public life, particularly in the fields of health and ageing. She comes across as neither an ideologue nor even as an idealist, but as an opinionated pragmatist willing to harness her high public profile to a good cause.

The description of her work as chair of the National Advisory Committee on AIDS is distinguished by compassion, tolerance, courage, and the rendering of practical humanitarian help, shorn of ideology.

After caring for her father through his vascular dementia, Buttrose became an ambassador for NSW Alzheimer’s Australia and went on to join the NSW Alzheimer’s Australia Advisory Council. At the time of writing, she was patron of Dementia Australia.

In other chapters, she advises her readers to plan for old age, laments what she calls the diminishment of motherhood, asserts that not enough people today are prepared to take up the challenges of leadership, and has a passing crack at political correctness.

In recent years, Buttrose has undergone extensive back surgery and now uses a wheelchair. Her account of this – the pain, the loss of confidence, the initial embarrassment – is unflinching and will resonate with many people in similar circumstances.

Overall, Unapologetically Ita is a sketch of the public life and worldview of a person who gets things done. An analytical account of her career as a journalist, however, is a job for another day and another author.