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Right now this blog is in danger of sinking beneath a tidal wave of interesting newspaper cuttings , files , books , ephemera , old photos , mixed inserts and articles in American art magazines, emails from far- flung correspondents .
One 1960s clipping, above, from the Northern Territory News, brought back memories of Darwin character Donald Charles Duncan , shown here in hospital after surviving a night drifting about in shark and crocodile infested waters .
The girls in the photo were responsible for saving him because they saw him early in the morning floating by the wharf , naked , except for one sock, croaking, "Help! "
An English remittance man , he was a cleaner in the newspaper office in the old Tin Bank and was well known as Dapper Donald and Drunken Duncan , because of his drinking. His escapades and death in Western Australia were covered in the recently launched biography , Big Jim, about the crusading NT News editor, James Frederick Bowditch .
Donald fell into the harbour while looking for Bert Cummins, skipper of the former Hayles Barrier Reef tourist vessel Malita, launched in 1929, which was running supplies from Darwin to Portuguese Timor for an American oil drilling company . Dapper Don , hoping to get a job aboard the boat, toppled in when he went searching for Cummins, who went on to run the Lion's Den Hotel ,named after a tin mine, at Helenvale , near Cooktown, in North Queensland .
