The strange decline and death of the Argus.(Media)(The Argus newspaper)

THE MOST SUCCESSFUL company in the world in its field invests a huge amount in an ailing Australian company in the same business. It promises the latest and best world techniques and practices. Its pockets are long and bulging. Surely the business and industry expertise behind it must be so immense it can hardly go wrong. In other words, it must know what it is doing.

No such luck. The world-beater got it wrong and the ailing product and company went down the gurgler after seven years of mostly cascading red ink.

So next time you hear of Australian multi-nationals going abroad with big plans, or of overseas ones doing the same here, remember the sad story of the Melbourne Argus and the London Daily Mirror.

The Daily Mirror is today still a big-selling, cheeky and intrusive tabloid, but toppled from its previous position by one antipodean who did go abroad and succeed, Rupert Murdoch, whereas his rival's trip in the opposite direction ended in ignominy. The Argus ceased publication in January 1957.

This tangled tale goes back a long way. In 1908 Rupert's young future Dad, Keith, went to London, couldn't get a suitable job and came home broke. A few years later he was back in London as war representative of the Sydney Sun and Melbourne Herald combined cable service. He made a name for himself on the way over by visiting the Gallipoli disaster and writing confidentially to the Australian government about it. (Censorship prevented him writing for his papers.)

Not one to fail often, young Keith then used his celebrity from this, rather than his still not especially exalted position, to cultivate major figures of the day, in particular the great popular press magnate, Lord Northcliffe, of the Daily Mail stable, who adopted him as a protege.

In 1920 Keith returned to Melbourne as editor of the Herald and began to liven up, with help from Northcliffe, what had been a fairly undistinguished local evening paper. Before he was forty he was attracting--behind his back--the "Lord Southcliffe" tag. Northcliffe, who died before his time in 1922, had been suspected of megalomania, including for his bellicose, government-bashing wartime journalism, which helped get a "win the war" government in 1917. So this nickname was not entirely flattering. Northcliffe was the "great journalistic Barnum", according to Lloyd George.