Production of the new paper in Darwin in l952 and certain published statements about Australia's northern neighbours were noticed in Indonesia , resulting in a strange letter arriving addressed to both the editor of the NT News and Doug Lockwood of the Melbourne Herald group of newspapers, who was based in Darwin. The sender was C.A.Rebeira,F.B.S.C., F.C.I., F.I.P.S., a Ceylonese resident in Indonesia for 43 years, who describing himself as a company director and adviser to many business and industrial concerns. He had read in a Jakarta newspaper about the birth of the NT News . While wishing the newspaper success and saying he was not anti-Australian , he warned that Australia was denying God’s will that the “surplus population ” of China,India, Japan and Pakistan should occupy the country . Australians, he said, had tried to wipe out Aborigines, driving them inland and hunting them like wild dogs.
Now Australia and New Zealand, with so much vacant land, feared being invaded by Asia . In the NT alone there was 550,000 square miles of vacant good land , which the Asian races could turn into a bountiful area . Directing remarks to Lockwoood’s “ mistaken idea” , he referred to a newspaper article in the Melbourne Herald in which it was said 70 million Indonesians were “staring ” at the empty land in North Australia .
Rebeira declared there was no need for empty Australian land because the Indonesian Republic was now dispersing its population which had been bottled up under the Dutch . Australia , he said, had sided with the Dutch in the dispute over Dutch New Guinea . Reports about Indonesians wanting to overrun Australia were nonsense and imaginative falsehoods. He had written to the Australian politicians Arthur Calwell and Kent Hughes outlining his views.
World affairs at the time, he continued, were being wrongly handled because Great Britain was no longer able to exercise its influence, which she had done for centuries ,steering the people “ in the right way” . All the evils taking place in the world would “ boomerang ” a hundred times on the heads of those who created them . [This letter was kindly supplied from the extensive files of Kiwi author and journalist ,Ross Annabell.]
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The second edition of the NT News carried some disturbing information : the local brewery was up for auction under instructions from the mortgagee . With 97 1/2 years to run on its lease, the fully equipped brewery came complete with stocks of malt, hops, syrups and cordials. There was also an odd item in the same paper which had the suspicous earmarks of a quick beat up to fill a hole. It reported that a gorilla had been sighted near Auckland, New Zealand. A person who made use of the advertising columns was Jessie Litchfield of Roberta Library , grandmother of former NT Chief Minister , Marshall Perron .
Much was made of the claim that the News was owned by locals. In fact, the shots were called from Sydney through Eric White and Don Whitington. A regular part of the News was a front page column called True North which usually contained bright , short items. It is thought that Whitington might have been responsible for naming the column which ran for decades. Whitington was obviously a man with a sense of humour as he once listed his hobbies in Who’s Who as watching birds , carousing and Australian Rules Football. He had an arrangement with the airline company ,TAA , whereby he would fly up from Sydney to Darwin and write articles for the airline’s magazine and other publications. At times he visited Alice and spoke to Bowditch , the two “ hitting it off.” Whitington advised Bowditch to move on from Alice because the place was too small for a man with his talent. NEXT : Bowditch the talk of the town in Alice Springs and is there truth in the news ? .
