RANCA NSW
JOURNALIST
Frank began his journalistic career in 1938 as a cadet on The Sydney Morning Herald.
His family wanted him to do law and went as far as arranging for him to do his articles with Vickary, a prominent Sydney law firm with close association with Newington and MLC (his sister Marcia had been at school with Vickary’s daughter). Frank went for an interview with Mr Vickary, who said he would be glad to have him articled to him, but he decided that law was too dull for him and he wanted something more exciting, so he turned to journalism.
He got an interview with the news editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, Angus McLaughlan, but he said there was a waiting list of 625 for cadetships with the SMH and advised him to continue with his university studies and look around for something else. Frank asked him would he mind if he kept in touch and he said that would be in order.
Little did he know that Frank would push his nose into his office every Friday night and ask were there any vacancies. Eventually he agreed he could have a six weeks’ trial. That was in 1938.
He was never told that his trial period had ended, even when he resigned in 1951 to join the Melbourne Herald.
The day Frank finished work at the SMH to join the Navy, his fellow cadet; Bill Marr was also leaving to join the army. The chief of staff, Bob Hawkesley, came into the reporters’ room and said:”You two blokes will probably get killed, so you had better write your obituaries before you leave.” Frank had not been alive very long at that stage so there wasn’t much to write and he finished his in a couple of minutes, but Bill seemed to be having difficulties with his. Several other reporters were waiting around to take them out for a farewell drink, but Bill kept typing a few words, then ripping the paper out, screwing it up and throwing it on the floor. After a while they got a bit impatient, so one of the others picked up a piece of paper Bill had thrown away, straightened it out and found Bill had written : ”Not since the death of Jesus Christ…….”
Frank returned to the Herald when he was demobilised after the war and in late 1946 the Herald sent him to New York on loan to Australian Associated Press and the international news service, Reuters, and during his term of four years he covered all major event on the North American continent.
The high point of his term in the United States was the 1948 presidential election and he had the distinction of being the only journalist in any of the major news organisations to forecast that President Truman would win.
He also reported on the rise of McCarthyism and his candid despatches earned him the disfavour of the U.S. government. Instead of deporting him, they used the more subtle method of refusing to renew his wife’s visa, so the Herald sent him to London for a term in its Fleet Street office, after which he returned to Sydney.
He joined the Melbourne Herald a sub-editor in 1951 and in 1956 was appointed to Australia House in London, where he was responsible for immigration publicity in the United Kingdom as well as Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway.
In 1951 he accepted an offer by Sir Keith Murdoch to go to the Melbourne Herald as sub-editor.
On 30 Dec 1985 Frank was made an honorary member of the Australian Journalists Association, Northern NSW District Newcastle
How the Sydney Morning Herald remembered Frank Walker, a revered and respected journalist.
The last pre-World War II Herald journalist has died. He was Frank B. Walker, who began his cadetship at the Herald in 1938, with fellow cadets Harry Kippax, Graham Kingsford-Smith, Lindsay Browne, and Bill Mart. The preceding year's cadets were Guy Harriot, Mungo Mac Callum, Jim Else-Mitchell, Harry Williams, and Dan Speight. All were to have distinguished careers.
Frank Walker was educated at Newington College and at Sydney University, where he was in residence at Wesley College and graduated as Bachelor of Arts.
His military service began in 1938 when he joined the Sydney University Regiment as an infantry foot-slogger and at the outbreak of war he exchanged foot blisters for sea-sickness by enlisting in the Royal Australian Navy, serving as an anti-submarine officer in corvettes.
During the war he married an army nursing sister who served in the hospital ship Wanganella and at the 2/1st Australian General Hospital in the Middle East. After the war, the Sydney Morning Herald sent him to New York, on loan to Reuter-Australian Associated Press for three years He reported the rise of McCarthyism and his trenchant dispatches earned him McCarthy's wrath - and cancellation of his wife's visa as a means of forcing him out of the United States.
To resolve the impasse Reuters transferred him to their Fleet Street office. He joined the Melbourne Herald a sub-editor in 1951. In 1956 he joined the government information service and was appointed to Australia House in London, where he was responsible for immigration publicity in Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway as well as the United Kingdom.
During this posting he managed to open up Scandinavia for migration to Australia. Because of large scale migration to the United States at the turn of the century, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Sweden had passed, laws banning immigration advertisements. Walker approached each government, suggesting that in a democracy it surely could not be illegal for Australia to run advertisements showing only something symbolic of Australia. The four governments had to agree.
Walker returned to London and over a well-irrigated luncheon asked the Punch cartoonist David Langdon to draw something symbolizing Australia. Langdon pulled an envelope from his pocket, scribbled a map of Australia and drew a grinning face in the middle and rays of sunshine beaming out of the coast-line. A picture that was to symbolize Australia throughout Europe for years was born. The Scandinavian governments could not object, because it did not mention migration, but Scandinavian migrants were soon on their way to the happy land of sunshine.
In 1960 he was appointed press attaché at the Australian Embassy in Germany, with responsibility for publicity in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. While in Germany he had a bizarre reunion with King Taufa'ahu of Tonga whom he had known when they were fellow students at Newington and Wesley colleges. He was invited to an official dinner the German government gave in honour of the king and while talking to him, Walker he forgot that he should address him as "your majesty" and called him George, which was the name the king had always used when they were students. The host, Chancellor Karstens, visibly bristled at the breach of protocol, but the two old friends continued calling each other George and Frank throughout the dinner.
Walker was the last Australian to have contact with the Theodor Detmers, captain of the German raider Kormoran which sank HMAS Sydney. The Kormoran crew had invited him to their reunion in Hamburg where he met Captain Detmers, who told him he could not believe his luck that Sydney would come so close. He has reported details of their conversation to the HMAS Sydney inquiry.
Because of Walker's fluency in German and French he alternated between Canberra and Bonn, spending a total of 13 years in Germany. He retired in 1980, settled with his wife at Budgewoi and devoted his retirement to trying to get recognition for unsung heroes of World War II.
On learning that an Australian killed in the midget submarine attack on the German battleship Tirpitz had been treated unfairly, he returned to Germany and London to study the archives. He found that the two Englishmen who commanded midget submarines in the attack and became prisoners of war were awarded the Victoria Cross, but the Australian, Lieutenant Henty-Creer, who also commanded one of the submarines, was only mentioned in despatches.
Walker established that Hentv-Greer had in fact been recommended for a VC, but the Admiralty held it over "until it was known what had happened to his submarine". The Admiralty made no effort to find out, hence no VC for the Australian hero. Walker exposed this in his book "The Mystery of X-5", which was published in London.
His next book, "HMAS Armidale, the Ship that Had to Die" revealed the heroism of Ordinary Seaman Teddy Sheean, who kept his gun firing even after his ship HMAS ARMIDALE had gone down. The book also focussed on the heroism of Lieutenant Commander Robert Ranking, captain of the sloop HMAS YARRA, who tackled three Japanese cruiser and two destroyers in a vain attempt to save his convoy. Both deserved the Victorian Cross, but Sheean was only mentioned in dispatches and Rankin did not even get that.
The book did, however, result in the Navy naming one of its submarines HMAS SHEEAN – the first time in naval history, that a warship was named after a lower deck sailor – and another was named HMAS RANKIN. Also the fleet of 14 new patrol boats was name the ARMIDALE class.
Through the RAN Corvettes Association, Walker worked tirelessly for belated VCs for Sheean and Rankin, appealing first to the Minister for Veterans' Affairs, then the Minister for Defence, the Prime Minister and eventually the Queen, but without success.
The other heroes Walker eulogised were not humans, but ships - corvettes. He pointed out that whereas glamour ships such as cruisers, destroyers, frigates and sloops were quite rightly celebrated, corvettes were ignored, yet they were to the Navy what jeeps were to the army and DC3s to the Air Force. In his book, 'Little Ships for Big Men", he honoured both the ships and the crews.
"They did everything, everywhere", he wrote," and they did it with dash and grit. The only thing they did not do was stay long in harbour. We had to make the most outrageous demands on the ships, but they responded to every call and never let us down. The crews were as heroic as the ships. There was a Teddy Sheean in every ship".
Walker's then wrote "The Dark Betrayal", which was fiction, based on fact. He wove a spy story around facts revealed only in the last few years – that the Allies traded with the Axis throughout the war. His last book, “HMAS Armidale lives on” was launched on hi 86th birthday.
Walker was an inveterate contributor of short, snappy letters to his old newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, such as :"Of course we need phone-tapping, to protect us from people who would bring in a system of government that includes phone-tapping" and "in 1933 the Germans voted for law and order. And they got it".
Shortly before his death he was awarded the Centenary Medal, which was struck to honour Australians who made significant contributions to their country in the twentieth century.
His wife Joyce died of cancer in 1999, and he subsequently married a former German, Erika, who had migrated as result of the publicity about Australia which he had created. He is survived by Erika, two married sons and three grandchildren, a great-grand-daughter and a stepdaughter.
Malcolm Brown, SMH 4 September, 2008