The paddock outside Canberra that makes Rupert Murdoch ‘feel Australian’

Just outside Canberra, off Wee Jasper Road, is a metal post marked Cavan, where the bitumen ends and a dirt road begins. At the end of that road lies the spiritual home of media’s most famous man: Rupert Murdoch.

The property is Cavan Station, a nearly 200-year-old wool station which the local mayor, Jasmin Jones, calls “a jewel in the crown of the merino industry”. For a time, visits to Cavan were a permanent fixture on the Murdoch calendar; the family descended on the property – just over three hours from Sydney – for Christmas, and it was a power base near the capital where Murdoch would summon important politicians and business figures.

Now, with Rupert approaching 95, his visits to Australia are rare. He has returned just once since 2018. Only two of his six children retain Australian citizenship (Lachlan and his elder, half-sister, Prudence), and so Cavan’s main purpose is returning to its roots as a commercial farm.

But why does this piece of land hold such importance to the Murdochs?

Murdoch bought a much diminished Cavan Station in 1966 for $196,000 while spending much of his time in Canberra. He’d launched The Australian two years before.

It was a chance purchase of a picturesque property on limestone land with a history of near-perfect grazing conditions for sheep and cattle, says agriculturalist and historian Cameron Archer. And so it had quickly become a good place to grow wool.

“It came up and [Murdoch], having knowledge of Australia’s pastoral industries, he was smart enough to say: ‘Well, this place and these really good properties just don’t come onto the market,’ ” Archer says. “He grabbed it, and has continued to expand it. It’s an iconic property in the Yass district and in the Southern Tablelands.”

His mother Elisabeth’s Cruden Farm, located on the way to the Mornington Peninsula, gifted to her by his father Sir Keith Murdoch, was formative for Rupert and remains in the family. Cavan would prove a similar gift for his own children.

Murdoch spent plenty of time on the property with his young family and his second wife Anna dePeyster, mother to Lachlan, James and Elisabeth. One of her novels, In Her Own Image, is set on a sheep station on the Murrumbidgee River, as Cavan is.

But Murdoch gave up his Australian citizenship in 1985 to become a television station owner in the United States. The farm in Yass Valley became a nostalgic tie to Australia.

Matt Crozier, the long-time property manager at Cavan Station has previously said the iconic Australian asset makes the Murdochs “feel Australian”. Having stepped away from the business in October, he declined to speak further when approached by this masthead.

Cavan Station, in its original form as the 19th-century Cavan Run, spanned 52,000 acres (21,000 hectares), according to Archer, who recently published a book detailing the history of the Cavan region. But it was a fraction of that when Murdoch bought the land from its previous owners, the Castle-Roach family in the 1960s. It has only been under the stewardship of three families – the Rileys, Castles and Murdochs – since its inception.

Since then, the Murdochs have come to own almost the entire Cavan region, buying almost any neighbouring land that has come to the market, including the Bogo Stud and, in 1995, a property called Bloomfield from Princess Diana’s mother, Frances Shand Kydd and her husband for $1.65 million. The most recent purchase was the Boambolo property next door for $15.5 million in 2023.

Such is the quiet nature of the region, the Club House Hotel on the main street of Yass sports a plaque commemorating the day in 1981 when Diana allegedly visited its Merino Bar. However, the truth behind this plaque is hotly contested by the town’s population. “It’s an urban myth”, says a local historian, who declined to be named for the purposes of this story. “She didn’t go to the pub.”

But there was another event 18 years later that captivated Yass: the star-studded wedding of Lachlan Murdoch and Sarah O’Hare in 1999.

Locals still refer to the wedding as “the wedding”. The Murdoch clan arrived in a convoy of Holdens, pumping up the Australiana. Some of the locals even got an invitation, while media swarmed every shop in town for comment.

Some locals are fans of the Murdochs. Jones, the Yass mayor, says the clan are a positive presence in the region, and their connection to a small part of rural NSW adds “a beautiful dimension” to their family.

But among locals unfriendly to the Murdochs, the day of Lachlan and Sarah’s wedding is mostly remembered for having bucketed with rain.

“They can do a lot of things and have a lot of money,” the historian says. “But they can’t control the weather.”

Twenty years later, Lachlan and Sarah were back with a party to celebrate their anniversary, after a similar bash at Bondi’s Icebergs.

News Corp-owned HarperCollins published a book in 2019, Cavan Station, written by Nicola Crichton-Brown that is said to have been authorised by Murdoch himself. And when he was a frequent Twitter poster, Murdoch regularly posted images of himself and his family at the farm.

With multimillion-dollar properties in the most expensive real estate markets in the world – New York, Los Angeles, Sydney and London – as well as superyachts and personal drivers, the remote farm, or at least what we see of it, is the antidote to urban luxury.

When Lachlan wanted to emphasise his Australian identity, he took a photographer to Cavan as part of a special interview commemorating The Australian’s 60th anniversary in 2024.

Back to work

When the Murdochs aren’t in residence at Cavan, the station is a different place with a history that goes back far beyond their ownership, says Archer, whose own family worked on the property for three generations.

The property has a history of innovative agricultural methods, such as implementing fencing and structured breeding in the 1800s, as opposed to shepherding, which was previously used. Bogo Stud is still producing top quality merinos, Archer says.

But before then, Archer describes the area where the mountains meet the Murrumbidgee as a “garden of Eden” for the local Ngunnawal Indigenous people.

“It would have just been a beautiful place to be. Big cod in the river, the grasslands and all the wildlife that would have been around that place. You’d have to think, if you were one of the Ngunnawal people, it would have been a prized place to be in droughts or in not-so-good wet times too, when you could get up on the hill.”

After 15 years running the station, manager Matt Crozier left in October, leaving the operation of the property with the Armidale-based Impact Ag Australia, which is ultimately part-owned by Prudence Murdoch and her husband Alasdair MacLeod. Macleod, a former News Corp executive and Citibank banker, has helped operate the property since the droughts of the mid-2000s devastated the area.

Using his stewardship, Cavan Station signed a $500,000 deal to sell carbon credits to Microsoft in 2021 under a US scheme, following on from a similar deal signed earlier that year by the Wilmot Cattle Company, another regenerative farming company owned by MacLeod, based in Northern NSW.

He did not respond to a request for comment.

But while each of the Murdochs continue to visit Cavan occasionally, the recent family fallout, as a result of a multiyear court battle for control of the Murdoch Family Trust assets, is likely to have spelled the end of the Christmas get-togethers. Cavan is held within that trust.

The family have plenty of other options. In 2021, Murdoch bought a similar property closer to his US home, a Montana ranch for $US200 million ($292 million) from the Kochs, a family of major industrialists and Republican donors. It was the largest sale in the state’s history.

Impact Ag also operates that Montana ranch, a 340,000-acre (137,600-hectare) property near Yellowstone National Park, and where the hit TV show Yellowstone is shot.

“We feel privileged to assume ownership of this beautiful land and look forward to continually enhancing both the commercial cattle business and the conservation assets across the ranch,” Murdoch said at the time of the sale.

But, according to News Corp sources, when Murdoch has mused about where he’d like to be buried, it isn’t at Beaverhead. It’s at Cavan.

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