Ita Buttrose’s memoir celebrates resilience, leadership and public service, but avoids reckoning with controversies that shaped her later career, writes Denis Muller.

Ita Buttrose is a consequential figure in Australian public life for many reasons, most of all because of her work as a journalist, so it is odd that only one chapter of her memoir  Unapologetically Ita is wholly devoted to this.

The rest is a collection of essays, written in a somewhat hortatory tone, on personal resilience, menopause, ageing, dementia, HIV, motherhood, leadership, and the opportunities and challenges facing Australia.

The book is written, not always coherently, in the language of magazine journalism: a mixture of reportage and opinion. In the middle of a discussion about HIV/AIDS and the subsequent risk that gay people would retreat back into the closet, for example, Buttrose inserts an anecdote about how the Herald Sun and the 60 Minutes television program focused on her revelation that she had become a radical celibate. The connection to gay people’s lives is not obvious.

The exhortations begin with the first chapter, Never Give Up. The message is delivered mainly by reference to the struggle of women to be accepted at the highest levels of Australian corporate life and her experiences working for Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch, the two media moguls for whom she was an editor and editor-in-chief respectively.

Buttrose writes that, at the age of 21, it occurred to her that she could climb further up the corporate ladder than she had supposed. This insight liberated her from the effects of an education system that she says limited women’s ambitions, stultified their self-confidence and fitted them only for jobs considered suitable for females.

It becomes clear that advancement of women was an important driver for her. “All the things I’ve done,” she writes, “have been driven by that goal.” She claims that she let the voices of women be heard through the publications she edited and that  Cleo, the magazine of which she was the founding editor, was a vehicle for challenging repressive attitudes.

Feminine skills

Here and there, glimpses of her editorial work show through. As editor-in-chief of Sydney’s Daily and _Sunday Telegraph_s, she insisted on a page being devoted to women’s sport. And she was adroit in charting a course past the conservatism of the proprietor,  Sir Frank Packer. When she........

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