AustLit

Don Whitington grew up in Tasmania and worked in his youth as a jackaroo, woolclasser and freelance journalist. He later worked on the staff of the Sydney Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Mail and the Courier-Mail, and early in the Second World War became head of the Daily Telegraph's Canberra bureau. In 1947 he began an independent national weekly newsletter, Inside Canberra, and later instituted another newsletter, Money Matters, and two newspapers, the Northern Territory News and the Mount Isa Mail. Well known to Australian federal politicians, Whitington wrote a range of guides to and accounts of federal politics as well as In Search of an Australian (1967) and an autobiography, Strive To Be Fair (1978).

Adapted from the entry in the Oxford Companion to Australian Literature.