How Chip Le Grand got his name

(Note: All links to The Age and Sydney Morning Herald articles in this piece are archived in accordance with the Nine newspaper journalists’ strike. Sign the petition to support the strike here.)

In the last few months, The Age chief reporter Chip Le Grand has written a great deal about Israel and Palestine.

I don’t want to explore Le Grand’s writing on Israel and Palestine in this article too deeply. I want to talk about his name.

But because Palestine is this newsletter’s primary focus, here’s a quick recap.

Earlier this month, author, lawyer and academic Randa Abdel-Fattah published an email from Le Grand in which he asked if she considers herself “an October 7 denier”. Abdel-Fattah called Le Grand’s questions “[an] obvious hit job masquerading as journalism” that were “calculated to stitch me up as a ‘Holocaust denier’,” and which were indicative of a “pattern of anti-Palestinian racism” across Australia’s largest media outlets.

Le Grand’s article published in The Age a day later, ‘The denial and disinformation facing October 7 survivors,’ repeated as fact many of the exhaustively discredited Israeli claims about Hamas brutality and mass sexual violence on October 7, while also equating criticism and interrogation of those claims with Holocaust denial. The article’s almost innumerable falsehoods and distortions are detailed well here.

Le Grand also published an exclusive this month revealing that the Zionist Federation of Australia intended to lodge a complaint with the Australian Human Rights Commission against former SBS newsreader Mary Kostakidis. The ZFA claims that Kostakidis’ reposting of a link to a speech by Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah constitutes hate speech.

In an email published by Kostakidis, Le Grand agreed with the ZFA’s characterisation, writing that Kostakidis had “[promoted] hateful speech from the leader of a terrorist organisation”. For her part, Kostakidis noted that Le Grand, who published his exclusive a week before the ZFA filed their complaint, “is very well informed about what the Zionist lobby gets up to on a Sunday”.

In February, Le Grand wrote a front-page piece sympathetically profiling members of now-notorious WhatsApp groupchat ‘J.E.W.I.S.H Australian creatives and Academics’. That piece painted the January leaking of the groupchat’s transcript as “doxxing,” largely burying the fact that many members of that groupchat — including those who Le Grand profiled — were coordinating to have people fired or otherwise professionally censured for expressing support for Palestinians and a ceasefire in Gaza.

In Le Grand’s final story before Nine journalists went on strike this week — a recap of a soccer game between Israel and Mali at the Paris Olympics — he lauded the fact that there was “no attempt, either inside or outside the stadium, to turn this Olympic group match into something else”.

Anyway! Now onto the issue of real importance: Chip’s name.

Earlier this month I found out that Chip's birth name is Homer Eugene Le Grand, V.  I tweeted a dumb joke about it, largely riffing on the fact that Le Grand’s writing has often been sympathetic to transphobic agitators.

But Chip’s unusual name, and the fact that there were apparently four Homer Eugene Le Grands (Les Grand?) before the current one, piqued my interest. Who were they? Where did such a distinctive name come from? And why carry it down through the years?

I’m ashamed to say I spent far too much time finding the answers to these questions — but in fairness, the ancestral Homer Eugene Le Grands for whom Chip is named are a fascinating bunch. The bulk of this research was via ancestry resource FamilySearch, but was corroborated wherever possible with other sources. I sent questions to Le Grand on July 16 asking for confirmation of what I found, but did not hear back.