Australian War Correspondent
p. 90 · Read in the full issue
Australian radio and TV journalist Frank Legg, who last year produced The Eyes of Damien Parer —the story of Australia’s best-known war photo grapher—has now followed with War Correspondent, which tells of the difficulty of that particular task through Legg’s own eyes, for he was himself an Australian Broadcasting Commission correspondent in New Guinea, Borneo and Japan.
L EGG’S problems weren’t shared by all correspondents; as a radio journalist he frequently found him self with special troubles connected with cumbersome recording gear, but his story nevertheless gives a good account of the difficulties of covering a shooting war. Especially when the enemy is not merely over the next hill but also back at base in the form of unsympathetic and inefficient Army Public Relations officers.
A weakness in the lengthy and
readable account of his New Guinea exploits is the number of errors in it. Names, places, initials are too often wrong, when a little checking would have put them right. The facts of some of his stories are garbled— possibly because he has taken the accounts from the original scripts made at the time—but again, check ing of later sources would have
corrected them.
SI.
(War Correspondent. Rigby Ltd.
37/6.)