Ezra Norton

In the heyday of tabloid newspapers in Australia, Ezra Norton was a key player. He owned the Sunday scandal sheet, Truth - notorious for its salacious coverage of the divorce courts - and his launch of Sydney's Daily Mirror in 1941 sparked a circulation war which would last for 20 years.

Australia's most powerful newspaper families, the Fairfaxes and the Packers, regarded him as a fierce rival and in 1939, his simmering feud with Sir Frank Packer spilled over into a fist fight in the members' enclosure at Sydney's Randwick Racecourse.

Yet he did not court controversy. For someone who made money out of exposing other peoples' scandals, he was unusually scrupulous in keeping himself out of the limelight. He avoided making public speeches and when he died, he left no letters or diaries.

This obsession with privacy becomes more comprehensible once you learn more about his early life. His father was the infamous John Norton, who helped establish Truth in the 1890s, using it to turn himself into the hero - and villain - of a mythology which kept Truth's tens of thousands of readers enthralled for 20 years. Between 1896 and 1916, the paper was the instrument with which he advanced his New South Wales parliamentary career, championed his favourite causes, castigated his enemies and indulged his biases, which enthusiastically embraced racism and anti-Semitism. He claimed to have invented the word "wowser", and he chronicled his daily routine in his Open Letters, many of which dealt with his rocky marriage to Ezra's mother, Ada. When drunk, as he often was, he was foul-mouthed and violent and Ada left him several times during Ezra's childhood. Yet the marriage endured for 18 years. In 1915, when Ezra was 18, Ada at last sued for divorce, and in typical style, Norton had the ensuing court proceedings splashed all over the pages of his own newspaper.

When he died a year later, Ada and Ezra found that they had been disinherited. Most of the Norton wealth had been left to Ezra's nine year-old sister, Joan.

But Ada's lawyers had influential connections. Thanks to their intervention, the NSW Parliament hurried through its new Testator's Family Maintenance and Education of Infants Bill, designed to assist spouses and children in precisely Ada's and Ezra's predicament, and Norton's will was overturned.

By 1922, 25-year-old Ezra was ready to take over his father's empire, and he proved a remarkably quick learner. He was not a writer. There were no more Open Letters. Nor were the papers' editorials written by him, but they reflected his views which, in many respects, were not so different from his father's. Truth had always been seen as a working man's paper and it remained so, offering a gamey mix of crime, divorce, sex, sport and a slightly more measured and pragmatic form of populism than the old John Norton brand. A few traditional themes persisted, such as the paper's unabashed racism. It also persisted in exposing medical quackery. But Ezra had other passions as well. He abhorred cruelty to animals, was obsessed with cleanliness - he mounted a series of public health campaigns - and he fervently supported a ban on the export of merino sheep to protect the Australian wool market.

It was a mix which certainly suited the temper of the times. In Australia's highly-competitive newspaper scene, Truth thrived and in the late 30s, Ezra turned his thoughts to the afternoon newspaper market.

At first he was frustrated. The outbreak of war brought newsprint rationing and his fellow press tycoons lobbied the government to block his plans. Frank Packer became a particular enemy. The two men had made a practice of sniping at one another and Packer's bigness and loudness - his unavoidably bullish presence - would have made him an irresistible target in the eyes of Ezra, who was famously irascible. And the culmination of their mutually antagonistic relationship was the punch-up at Randwick. Nonetheless, by 1941, Ezra, the corporate maverick, had outmanoeuvred his rivals. The necessary newsprint allocation was granted and the Daily Mirror was launched as a vibrant competitor to the existing Sydney daily, The Sun.

For the next two decades, the newsboys' cry, "The Sun or the Mirror?", would sound as familiar to Sydneysiders as the foghorns on the harbour or the clatter of trams through the city streets. And the papers' competing crime reporters would often behave as outrageously as the confidence men they wrote about.

Photographers put on white coats to gain entry to hospital wards. Reporters snatched family photographs from crime scenes, and Ezra himself gained a reputation for toughness among those editors and reporters unfortunate enough to be subjected to his "boning-and-gutting sessions", when the air was coloured blue by his invective.

His career as a press baron ended in 1958 when he sold out and retired. Television had arrived, he was worried about his health and he wanted to ensure a secure future for his young daughter, Mary, and his wife, Peggy. There was, too, his passion for horse-racing. His horse, Straight Draw, had won the Melbourne Cup the year before.

Yet his influence was to live on. A year after his retirement, Rupert Murdoch, then a fledgling newspaper tycoon based in Adelaide, made his entry into the Sydney and Melbourne markets by buying up the Norton papers. And 50 years later, echoes of the Nortons' stridently populist style can be discerned in the papers, tabloid television shows and mass market magazines that help shape the current media scene.

Tabloid Man by Sandra Hall (Harper Collins $35) is out now. 

Lifeline

1897 Born in Watsons Bay, Sydney
1922 Takes over Truth aged 25
1941 Launches Daily Mirror, rivalling The Sun
1958 Sells his newspapers and retires
1967 Dies aged 69. Buried at South Head Cemetery 

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