By Jill Fraser

Twice voted Australia's Most Admired Woman, Ita Buttrose is a doyenne of Australian publishing.

Ita has overseen some of this country’s most successful magazines - many of which were massive money-spinners. But in her personal universe, wealth creation has never been a priority.

Chuckling she tells FatCat that she inherited strong financial genes. Her late brother, Will was a high profile economist and another brother, Julian, is an accountant. But for Ita, her focus was elsewhere and becoming a good manager of her finances eluded her. "I’ve improved," she laughs confessing that as a youngster she failed to heed the best financial advice she was ever given, to "save something every week".

"I’m a woman from a different time," she says. "Back then we thought that Prince Charming would come along and look after us but that’s not the reality."

Buttrose says she was never driven by money or equated success with mega-loads of cash.

"I suppose it would be nice," she muses. "But it seems to me that extremely rich people always want more.

"I've heard of some very wealthy people who have more than enough yet they go and do something illegal.

"I can understand how people get seduced by power and the promise of easy money. But in my view you work hard for money and become suspicious if something looks too easy."

Intimately acquainted with the vagaries of success she recalls how at the age of 30 she was struck off the A-list virtually overnight when Sir Frank Packer sold the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph to Rupert Murdoch, bringing an end to her job as Women’s Editor and Sunday magazine editor.

"It was like I didn’t exist anymore. The phone stopped ringing and so-called friends suddenly vanished," she says.

"I wish you could have seen their faces when ACP asked me to create Cleo (magazine) and later appointed me editor and then publisher of The Australian Women’s Weekly. It was a terrible shock for them."

Having worked closely with two of Australia’s richest and most powerful men, Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch, Buttrose has been in a rare position to observe and compare the business practices of these renowned media moguls.

"Kerry was different to his old man in that Sir Frank never trusted us with the budget figures. When Sir Frank was around we knew if our magazine wasn’t making a profit but we didn’t know why," she says.