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Sir Walter Logie Forbes Murdoch, (17 September 187430 July 1970) was a prominent Australian academic and essayist famous for his intelligence and wit. He was a founding professor of English studies and former Chancellor of the University of Western Australia (UWA) in Perth, Western Australia.
A member of the prominent Australian Murdoch family, he was the father of Catherine, later prominent as Dr Catherine King (1904–2000), a radio broadcaster in Western Australia; the uncle of both Sir Keith, a journalist and newspaper executive, and Ivon Murdoch, a soldier in the Australian Army; and the great-uncle of international media proprietor Rupert Murdoch.
Murdoch University is named in Sir Walter's honour; as is Murdoch, the suburb surrounding its main campus, located in Perth, Western Australia.
After teaching in country and suburban schools to the end of 1903, Murdoch's academic career began with appointment as a Melbourne University assistant lecturer in English. This was in what had virtually become a combined department under the classics professor Tucker. Murdoch published his first essay, "The new school of Australian poets", in 1899, and he continued writing for the Argus, under the pen-name of "Elzevir", in a column which appeared weekly from 1905 titled "Books and Men". On 22 December 1897 at Hawthorn, Melbourne, Murdoch married Violet Catherine Hughston, also a teacher.
Sympathy for underdogs and a willingness to champion lost causes extended beyond Murdoch's academic environment. It coloured his second major contribution to Western Australian life: his association with several other members of the foundation professoriate in building closer links between the university and the community. His most effective medium was the column he contributed to the "Life and Letters" page of the West Australian on alternate Saturday mornings.
Combined from 1933 with occasional day and evening talks on radio—he was to prove a very effective broadcaster—and appearances on public platforms, frequently in the chair, it brought Murdoch a wide and varied local following. His writing attracted, in his biographer's words, varying types of people "who read him, all with interest, most with pleasure, some with disapproval, over many years". "No other writer in the history of Australian letters has built so wide a reputation on the basis of the essay as a form of communication."
These essays were directed at the widespread literate, but by no means academic, population of the still very isolated state. But Murdoch's audience did not stop there. Indeed, the "Elzevir" articles had begun to reappear in the Argus in 1919, and the essays in varying forms found an all-Australian market when Murdoch's writings were eventually syndicated on the Melbourne Herald network, then chaired by his nephew Keith Murdoch. (1991). 9780356203393, Fulcrum Productions. ISBN 9780356203393 Walter Murdoch's essays came to be read by others, then and much later, through collection and book form, from Speaking Personally (1930) onward. Moreover, for nearly twenty years from 1945, he conducted a weekly "Answers" column consisting of "little essays" on various questions, which was syndicated throughout New Zealand and most states and which was read by a huge public.
What Murdoch described as his one "real book", Alfred Deakin: A Sketch (1923), was the result of work done in a year's leave in and around Melbourne. It was not successful financially, nor as an introduction either to a larger joint biography (later abandoned) or to La Nauze's definitive two-volume Alfred Deakin: a Biography (1965).
Murdoch's limited interest, in his middle and later years, in Australian writing has often been criticised. However, in 1918 he published the Oxford Book of Australasian Verse (revised, 1923, 1945) and in 1951, after many years' delay, with Henrietta Drake-Brockman, Australian Short Stories, which was much better received than the verse anthology.
A depression at the time did not stop his actively opposing the idea of secession from the Commonwealth as a solution to Western Australia's economic ills. Much later, in 1950–51, he vehemently and stalwartly opposed the attempt to outlaw the Communist Party of Australia (CPA). His prominent essay, "I am going to vote No", rebuked Robert Menzies' attempt to eliminate the CPA in the 1951 referendum on that issue. Murdoch wrote that his opposition rested on one principle: (2025). 9780170346924, Cengage Learning. ISBN 9780170346924
In addition to Murdoch University and the suburb of Murdoch, there is a walk dedicated to Sir Walter on South Wing Level 2 of the South Street Campus library of the university.
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