In the post-war period, a wave of industrial disputes and the challenge presented by communism had the media proprietors and their business allies in despair at the disorderly state of conservative politics. Readership was two to three times higher than that: copies were shared among family members and co-workers. In the period 1941 to 1946, when Australia’s population was 7.5 million, more than 2.6 million copies were sold each day. Australia’s newspapers are approaching the zenith of their reach: on a per capita basis, they will never sell more printed copies than they do in the mid-1940s.

When the story opens, it is wartime and Robert Menzies’ ill-named United Australia Party has rebelled against him, causing him to resign as prime minister. It covers the long period of conservative political hegemony through the 1950s and 1960s, and ends in 1972, when Australian politics took an historic turn with the election of the Whitlam Labor government. Media Monsters picks up the story in 1941, where Paper Emperors left off. Some survive to this day - notably, the journalistic practices of the Murdoch dynasty. The patterns that emerged in the 19th and early 20th centuries - the dynasties, the allegiances, the political partisanship, the harnessing of journalism to promote proprietorial preferences - were still present into the 1970s. Not only are these forces largely hidden from public view, but they have survived epochal social, political and technological change more or less intact. It builds on the foundations laid in her magisterial first volume, Paper Emperors: The Rise of Australia’s Newspaper Empires, and matches it for breadth, depth and insight, synthesising ownership patterns, political manipulation and vested interests that have helped shape Australian democracy. Media Monsters: The Transformation of Australia’s Newspaper Empires, Sally Young’s second volume on the history of the Australian media, is indispensable for anyone interested in the dynamics that drive Australian politics. Nowhere does this apply with greater force than to the Australian media and its place in the nation’s power structure.

Carl Sagan said that in order to understand the present, it’s necessary to know the past.

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