Private relationships conducted in the public domain are, inevitably, difficult for researchers to pin down. Certainty is elusive and memoirs partial. Working in such environment, researchers are not dissimilar from gossips, trading in information that has a kind of truth – but what kind of truth?

In this paper, Dr Nick Richardson confronts a simple but challenging question: how much of the relationship between Prime Minister Joseph Lyons and Melbourne-based media proprietor Sir Keith Murdoch was real friendship? How much of it was the intersection between political power and media influence?

With no easy answer to hand, Dr Richardson uses records from the National Archives to explore some long-held perceptions about Lyons and Murdoch and to come closer to the truth about what really happened between these two influential and powerful men in the turbulent 1930s.