All Change at Holt St ...
I have an essay in the July issue of The Monthly that takes a look at the recent restructure of Rupert Murdoch’s local News Corp branch. Here’s a taste of the opening. The magazine is out Monday.
Rebekah Brooks’ eyes meet the camera cooly. Her bright auburn hair is smoothed straight both sides of a loose just-off-centre part, before dropping into a tangle of looped curls that fall across her shoulders. The high forehead is regal. Elizabethan.
One hand opens the black, tinted-glass car door, the other reaches back to her seat for what appear to be the hoop handles of a Hermès Birkin bag. The rumour will spread in the next few hours that she has a designated Birkin carrying assistant. Not true, apparently, but the bag – they cost anything between $12,000 and $200,000 – is its own statement. The presence of a Birkin recalls the recently viral words of Succession’s Tom Wambsgans, the oleaginous supplicant in TV’s Murdoch family simulacrum. As he observed cattily in the final season, with the sharp eye of one arriviste for another, “she’s brought a ludicrously capacious bag”.
It’s the middle of the second-last week in May. The arrival of Brooks, chief executive of News UK (owned by News Corp), has added to a power infusion charging the executive floor of News Corp’s Australian headquarters at 2 Holt Street, Surry Hills, an unprepossessing, gentrification-resistant corner of inner Sydney that once housed the bustle of the rag trade.
“It’s what we fondly call the arse end of Surry Hills,” says one News employee. “Rats, garbage, junkies, Central Station. It’s a corner that doesn’t have much of the charm and trendiness of the rest of the suburb.”