Don Whitington

A member of the Whitington family of South Australia, whose family arrived in Australia in 1840, 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.[1] In 1947 he founded the newsletter Inside Canberra (http://insidecanberra.com), which has been published ever since, currently by Keating Media Pty Ltd.[2] 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.[1]

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.[3] 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.[1]

• The House Will Divide: A Review of Australian Federal Politics (1954, 1969)
• Ring the Bells: A Dictionary of Australian Federal Politics (1956)
• Treasure Upon the Earth (1957) (novel)
• Mile Pegs (1963) republished in 1978 under the title King Hit (novel)
• The Rulers: Fifteen Years of the Liberals (1964)
• In Search of an Australian (1967)
• The Effluent Society: Pollution in Australia (1970)
• Inside Canberra: A Guide to Australian Federal Politics (1971) (written with Rob Chalmers)
• The Menzies Era and After, 1949–1970 (1972)
• Twelfth Man? (1972)
• The Witless Men (1975)
• Strive to Be Fair: An Unfinished Autobiography (1978)

• John Farquharson, "Whitington, Bertram Lindon (Don) (1911–1977)", Australian Dictionary of Biography
• Don Whitington resources at the National Library of Australia