In these days of smart phones and digitised newspapers, you don't hear the expression today's front page news is tomorrow's fish and chips wrapper . Anyway , it is probably against modern health regulations and undoubtedly unhygienic to wrap a serving or two in manhandled papers.
Recently , on a trip to a Queensland dump shop , the book section provided an unexpected battered serving of Australian and New Zealand reporting in the shape of the spotty - covered , well- worn , Wake of the Invercauld , about men shipwrecked in 1864 on the Auckland Islands,300 miles south of NZ .
Instantly, on seeing the above title on the spine in a jumble of volumes , I was reminded of a NZ reporter friend , the late Ross Annabell , who deserves to be inducted into the Australian Hall of Journalism Fame , the Kiwi equivalent as well , if not already ensconced there .
By Peter Simon
In numerous conversations with Ross , covering a wide range of subjects , once over a jugged hare sandwich , he mentioned that he had gone to the Auckland Islands while looking for the gold of the General Grant , wrecked in the same area as the Invercauld , two years later .
While on that assignment , he had also scanned the area for possible signs of uranium bearing rocks , he having written The Uranium Hunters , about the Northern Territory uranium boom of the l950s. This blog explained how he had been caught up in the search for uranium there , and at one stage thought he was going to make a fortune with a strike he made with a geiger counter ,even smuggled some yellowcake into NZ .
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| Ross, with camera, inside steaming Mount Tarawera crater. |
I first met Ross on the Rotorua Daily Post , in the North Island of New Zealand, in the early 1960s , where he was a feature writer and a good one at that . Starting off as a cub reporter in Christchurch , he flew to Australia in 1950 aboard a Sunderland flying boat . He worked for the Sydney Morning Herald, the ABC, the Mackay Mercury , in Queensland . He was an early photo-journalist along the way , writing illustrated articles for many publications .
He was the first editor of the Mount Isa Mail and an early editor of the Northern Territory News , Darwin, where he covered the airport rescue of Mrs Petrov from Russian guards trying to force her out of Australia . Because I had worked on the NT News under the great editor , Jim Bowditch ,with whom Ross had dealings , we had some common interests in Rotorua. Sharing a gold prospecting dish was another , with which we never struck it rich.
He lived with his English wife, Meg, above Rotorua , at Mamaku , a kind of ghost town , which had been an early thriving timber milling community . There he was restoring a rundown , stripped - house , surrounded by blackberries , which had been the mill manager's fancy abode, one room so big it was dubbed the ballroom.
A great do it yourself Kiwi , he was a keen hunter , made his own home brew , had a cut down Boer war rifle and a strange van , the shaky timber body built on an old chassis ,which caught fire while driving to work from Mamaku . It looked very much like the following vehicle in the British television show, The Keeper , I saw recently , about a German prisoner of war who was a skilled soccer goalie. In it I went on enjoyable bush walking and mountain climbing trips with Ross.
He won NZ awards for investigative reporting and taught journalism. Ross was 91 when he died on September 7, 2018.
