Dame Elisabeth Murdoch, the 103-year-old mother of the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, the widow of an Australian newspaper baron and one of her nation’s most noted philanthropists, died on Wednesday at her estate near Melbourne.
Mr. Murdoch announced her death.
Elisabeth Joy Greene was just a teenager, a shy, obedient girl of privilege, rail thin and fashionably coiffed (though not long out of pigtails), when she was introduced to Keith Murdoch in 1927. He was 42, already a wealthy, famous and worldly newspaperman destined to become one of Australia’s foremost publishers. He had seen her debutante picture in a society magazine and had come courting.
Months later, in June 1928, they were married. She was 19. As a wedding present he gave her a sprawling estate at Langwarrin, near Australia’s southeast coast. They called it Cruden Farm, after the ancestral parish of his Scottish forebears, and it became the seat of Murdoch family life for generations.
There, while her husband amassed a newspaper and radio empire in Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane and became a political power broker, she gave birth to her four children: Helen in 1929, Rupert in 1931, Anne in 1936 and Janet in 1939.
She reared them with what she called “loving discipline,” to discourage materialism, especially in the headstrong Rupert. She sent him for eight years to Geelong Grammar, a boarding school near Melbourne that imposed a military regimen and canings. He was bullied and teased and became decidedly unhappy, but his mother was firm.
“I was never indulgent with them because my husband was inclined to be a bit indulgent, so I had to swing the other way,” she told Frances Jones last year. “They all grew up to appreciate my attitude about material things.”
She was also alert to her husband’s self-indulgences. During the Depression, when the Murdochs hired men desperate for work to build stables and other outbuildings at the farm, she was aghast when her husband drove up one day in a Rolls-Royce. She ordered him to return it.
And she herself was frugal. For decades, according to The Australian, a national broadsheet, she refused to have heating in the house, resisted hairdressers and one year gave up a trip abroad to pay for a pool in the garden. The newspaper said she preferred to spend money on the garden rather than herself.
Dame Elisabeth, who was styled Lady Elisabeth when her husband was knighted in 1933 and Dame Elisabeth when she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1963, said her philanthropies were inspired by Sir Keith, a trustee of national museums and galleries. He died in 1952.
Although much of her husband’s wealth went for taxes, she inherited shares in his media company, News Limited, and its subsidiaries; a Melbourne magazine, and a newspaper in New South Wales. The Adelaide News and Sunday Mail went to her son, and became the foundations of his international media empire.
Dame Elisabeth gave millions to more than a hundred charities. Her beneficiaries included deaf children, epileptics, victims of mental illness and substance abuse, prison inmates and Melbourne institutions. These included the Royal Children’s Hospital, of which she was president from 1954 to 1965, the Australian Ballet and the Royal Botanic Gardens. Last year she greeted Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, at ceremonies to dedicate new facilities at the hospital.
At Cruden Farm, she developed a magnificent garden, with a lake and vistas of woodlands, lawns and beds of roses, irises and honeysuckles. Rows of lemon-scented eucalyptus lined the long, winding driveway like sentries. The garden became a centerpiece of her life — she worked on it for more than 80 years — and a treasure of landscape architecture, which she opened to the public.
In a life that spanned a century, Dame Elisabeth met and entertained royalty, prime ministers and presidents and many world leaders in business, entertainment and other fields. The house at Cruden Farm was comfortable, if not imposing, with white columns across the portico and an Australian flag flying from the roof. The public rooms were filled with photographs, mementos and old oak furniture.
She was a matriarch from a gentler age, speaking softly, keeping track of appointments in a small red leather diary, writing letters in her own hand, reading biographies voraciously, and each week playing bridge, calling it her secret vice. In 2009, her family and 500 guests attended her 100th birthday, and the Spanish tenor José Carreras performed eight songs.
Even after her centennial, Dame Elisabeth, alert and observant, kept up a busy schedule of meetings, charity functions and gardening chores. She got around with a walker and a wheelchair, and in the garden used an electric buggy driven by her gardener as they discussed what to trim, remove, plant or rearrange.
Elisabeth Joy Greene was born on Feb. 8, 1909, in Melbourne, the third daughter of Rupert and Marie Grace De Lancey Forth Greene. Her father was the wool expert of the New Zealand Loan and Mercantile Agency and the son of a Scottish railway engineer who had emigrated to Australia. Her mother, descended from Scottish and English forebears, was active in society and philanthropic circles.
She attended elite schools in the Melbourne area, St. Catherine’s in Toorak and Clyde in Woodend. While still a schoolgirl, she knitted woolen shirts for babies at the Melbourne Children’s Hospital and was rewarded with a tour. There she saw victims of abuse and neglect, and she was appalled. She volunteered to work one day a week at a free kindergarten for poor children. She said these early experiences were the seeds of her philanthropies after her marriage.
Dame Elisabeth’s oldest child, Helen Handbury, died in 2004. Besides her son Rupert, she is survived by her two other daughters, Anne Kantor and Janet Calvert-Jones, as well as many grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. A News Limited newspaper, The Courier-Mail of Brisbane, said she is survived by 77 direct descendants.
