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Northern Territory News in 1954 when the right hand side verandah with push out windows and several partitions provided primitive accommodation for the manager and his family .
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The years l955 to l962
were action-packed ones for
Bowditch and Darwin.
Extraordinary story after
extraordinary story broke which
involved him doing things which
no other editor in Australia would
contemplate. During that period
the paper changed ownership twice and he began
working for the rising young media mogul, Rupert Murdoch .
As an example of the exceptional
news stories which kept on surfacing
in Darwin, in l957
Doug Lockwood won the London Evening
News award for the World’s
Strangest Story. This was about a 12 year old orphan
boy who had climbed into the
wheel nacelle of a Dakota aircaft
just before it took off from Koepang ,
Dutch Timor, on a
flight to Darwin.When the plane landed in Darwin the
unconscious, injured boy, Bas
Wie , was found hanging in the struts.
He became known as the Koepang Kid
.
After strong representations by Darwin people, he was allowed to stay in Australia and lived with the
NT Administrator, Mick Driver , and his family . Wie became a
respected Darwin resident, had much
contact with Bowditch over the years
, and in
the year 2001 was helping
alcoholics to dry out . The Indonesian
airline Merpati recently used
Bas Wie in an advertisement on a new Koepang to Darwin service.
By Peter Simon
Always skating on thin
ice financially, the NT News lurched on
, despite the fact that it was a well
read and lively
publication under Bowditch’s
editorship . However, the
southern directors began to
discuss unloading the paper. At one stage, in what can only be
regarded as an act of desperation , they
even suggested offering the paper to
the Catholic Church . Then a secret deal was done with Swan Brewery whereby they bought
the NT News and the Mt Isa Mail . There was a brewery war on at the time and Swan wanted to capture the Territory
market against fierce competition from Carlton United .
Bowditch said he believed Eric White played
the two breweries off against each other
until Swan bought the paper to thwart its competitor . Bob Freeden, who kept a watching brief on the paper from Sydney in
Eric White’s office, and Bowditch went
to Swan headquarters on two
occasions to receive
“riding instructions”.
The brewery was furious when a lighthearted item appeared in the
paper about an Aborigine called Banana
who had been picked up for drunkenness and was
referred to in print as “Pickled
Banana ” . What really upset
the brewery bosses was that Banana’s
condition was linked to a party
held to mark the opening of a new hotel
in Darwin.
In the newly opened air conditioned bar,the Hot and Cold, at the
Hotel Darwin, owned by Mick
Paspalis ,there appeared a Rigby mural
showing a Pommie businessman in bowler hat arriving at
Darwin airport with a slinky blonde
dressed in black on his arm. Subsequent
scenes highlighted the
adventures of the blonde- dressed in a
bikini , waterskiing behind a
stingray , examining a snorting buffalo
and being leered at by blokes in shorts, singlets and
thongs. In the end , the businessman, sans blonde, was shown boarding the plane with a case of beer
on his shoulder bearing the message WING YOUR WAY
WITH SFA which , for the
uninitiated, stands for sweet fuck all. A special feature in the
newspaper marking the opening of
the bar
included pictures of Betty
Bowditch with Ruth Ward , second
wife of the
lawyer.
Rock and Roll caused a
culture shock in Darwin. Doug Lockwood complained
to Darwin Council about the noise which came from the nearby Town Hall. His children
had been unable to sleep
because teenagers rocked and rolled
until 4am , screaming and
stamping in a frenzy of “ half-witted abandon ”.
Councillor D’ Ambrosio responded
by saying Lockwood had forgotten that he had once been young and
that they used to dance the Black Bottom and the Charleston.
Fashion conscious Darwinites were also
given a sneak preview of the chemise look in a function
at the Seabreeze, Nightcliff.
There was an odd theft
in Darwin in l958 when three
hundredweight of uranium was stolen from
the showground. Authorities were quoted as saying it was the first recorded theft in the
world of uranium and that thieves would probably try and
smuggle it out of the country for sale “ in the islands .”The mysterious islands where the uranium might be sold were not named.
It being the Cold War ,
presumably the customers for uranium were
Russians.
Bowditch went to the Supreme Court in Darwin for the Albert Namatjira appeal to Mr Justice Kriewaldt against his sentence for
supplying liquor in Alice Springs
and sat with and spoke to the artist outside the court. An editorial
Bowditch wrote in the NT News on
October 10, l958 , about the
imprisonment of Albert Namatjira , was included in Professor F.K. Crowley’s Modern
Australia in Documents ,Volume 11 , l939-l970 . The series
was designed to illustrate the major events , developments and controversies in the history of Australia
since Federation in l901.
DARWIN TO GO NUCLEAR
During l958 Jock Nelson
made two important announcements . He said that in the event of a federal
Labor government being
elected it would set up
a NT Development Commission similar to the Snowy River Authority and the possibility of
building an atomic energy power plant in
Arnhem Land would also be examined.
As early as l955 the director of the Atomic Energy Division
of the Chase Bank of Manhattan , Dr L. R.
Hafstad, a former director of the US Atomic Energy
Commisssion , had stated Darwin
could be among the first places in Australia to put
atomic power into large scale use for industrial and domestic
electricity.
Lockwood won a Walkley Award for journalism in l958
for his report
about Aboriginal girl Ruth Daylight who had been taken
from the bush humpy in which she
lived at Hall’s Creek, WA, dressed up
in white finery and presented to the Queen Mother at the Governor-General's Canberra residence,Yarralumla, then
sent back to her humble
life. There was an arrangement
between Lockwood and Bowditch
whereby they gave each other a copy of
Press telegrams they sent to the papers they serviced down south.
This meant that on straight news
stories they were not scooped . Ruth Lockwood
said there were times when
Bowditch would “sneak along the side of the house ”
in the early hours of the morning , wake Doug, whose bed was
alongside the louvres, and mutter details
of a story he had just heard , often thrusting a copy
of something he had lodged
at the post office through the
louvres. On such occasions the whole family woke up.
CAPTAIN TOWNSEND AND SABRINA
A surprise arrival in Darwin was
Group Captain Peter Townsend , the dashing RAF
officer who had wanted to marry
Princess Margaret , but had been
prevented from doing so because
he was divorced.
He was travelling with teenage Belgian heiress
Miss Clare-Luce Jamagne and denied he would marry her . Of course, he
did. Onlookers said
Princess Margaret was better looking than the Belgian
and one woman , probably a staunch
monarchist , declared the girl
was suffering from teenage acne .
When news came through that the busty English blonde star Sabrina was
to pass through Darwin by air,
Lockwood and this writer sped to the airport with a tape measure. The idea was that Sabrina
would be told there were rumours
that her bust measurement was highly inflated . To dispel that hurtful
tale, the tape would
be run round her bossom, insured for
100,000 pounds ($200,000). A
cameraman would record the event for posterity .
Alas , the tape measure
remained sheathed because
the tip that Sabrina was
arriving in town was false. Sabrina’s mother stepped out of the plane-not her
famous daughter. Still , mum was a
jovial , staturesque lady who said she
was sorry to have disappointed the panting Press. NEXT :
Darwin's Escape Artist .
