Name Don Whitington | Role Journalist | |
Books Inside Canberra, Strive to be fair, The witless men | ||
Bertram Lindon "Don" Whitington (31 January 1911 – 5 May 1977) was an Australian political journalist and author.
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Life
A member of the distinguished Whitington family of South Australia, Don Whitington was born in Ballarat and grew up in Tasmania. He worked as a jackaroo in New South Wales before he moved to Sydney in 1933 and began working as a journalist. In 1941 he was appointed to head the Canberra office of the Sydney Daily Telegraph, and thereafter he remained based in Canberra. In 1947 he founded the newsletter Inside Canberra (http://insidecanberra.com), which has been published ever since, currently by Keating Media Pty Ltd. He and his business partner Eric White began a media company, and in the 1950s they founded two newspapers, the Northern Territory News and the Mount Isa Mail, both of which they later sold to Rupert Murdoch.
He wrote several books on federal politics and two novels. In 1968 he wrote a series of articles for The Age on the political, racial and economic problems faced by the then Australian territory of Papua New Guinea. His unfinished autobiography was published the year after he died of a heart attack.
His first marriage, of 1936, produced three children but ended in divorce. He married again in 1974.