Person - Bill Brown

WILTON JOHN BROWN (1917 - 1992)

Bill Brown started off at the NTL as a volunteer electrician before trying his hand at acting. He played Lieutenant Grube in 1942 in According To Plan, a NT collaboration with the Army Education Service, tolerated by Security as more anti-fascist than pro-communist.

He then concentrated on writing, mostly propagandist pieces. In his one-act Actions Speak Louder (modelled on Waiting For Lefty ) factory hands at a stop-work meeting wait for provosts to arrive and conscript some of them for National Service, pro and anti American views are debated, a black/white boxers match is discussed, and a family is evicted. Bill Brown's "32 Years of a Fighting Newspaper", written for a Tribune Festival in 1952, covered historical incidents such as the 1938 Dalfram dispute, the 1940 banning of the CPA, and the 1941 attack on the USSR by Germany. He contributed scripts for the 1952 revue The Follies Bourgeois. In 1962 NT performed his The Day Tribune Topped 100 000 at a CPA conference: .

Setting the editor’s room of a big city newspaper The Daily Sin and Smearer. Editor at desk, two male reporters enter. Reporter 1: Randy Moan of the deadbeat – I mean of the night beat – at your service, Chief. Reporter 2: Larry Scent king of the crime dens reporting for duty, boss. Editor: Right boys, we’ve got a busy day ahead of us. Three rapes, two murders, a suicide and a juicy robbery with the nightwatchman still hovering near death with his brain laid bare to the bone, all in one night. Reporter 1: Sensational, boss. Reporter 2: Yeah terrific. That’s real news, boss. All front page stuff eh? Miss Heartright (entering): Here’s a startling cable from our man in Moscow. It says that Soviet doctors can now put patches on the human heart, replace broken knee, shoulder and hip joints with artificial ones that work perfectly, and new steel wire nerves – Editor: Yes yes Miss Heartright, tell them to cut it down to a one inch single column story to help fill page 47.

Bill Brown was born in Chippendale; his father John Frederick Brown died when he was young, and he was reared by his mother Mary. Billy hung around with Chippendale gangs, was into modern music, belonged to a jazz band at Newtown, and joined ALLY (Australian Labor League of Youth). At age 14 he was an apprentice electrician; he started off at NTL as a volunteer electrician before trying his hand at acting and writing. He joined the CPA in 1940 when it was illegal and in 1942 he married Freda Lewis qv whom he’d met at the New. The two loved jitterbugging at the Trocadero. He served in the Second World War in Indonesia – an army colleague was Jim Cairns. In 1945 he was involved in a demonstration at Morotai to get boats to pick up servicemen stranded there at the end of the war. An agit-prop song he wrote, as Demos Cracy, was Boys in the Rear about the army’s double standards. Demobilised, he returned to Garden Island as an electrician, then taught himself shorthand and typing and got a job as a journalist with the Daily Mirror. In 1948 he resigned from the Mirror to work on Tribune, becoming its editor in 1954. He was an effective Domain speaker. As a boy he learned to surf at Bondi, and the family moved from Bronte to that suburb in 1950. He played handball with his brother-in-law Rae Lewis in the Bondi Pavilion, then part gymnasium. He and Jack Mundey were arrested in the first sit-down in opposition to the Vietnam War.

Contact had a sketch by Bill Brown on amendments to Crimes Act.

• Crimes Act 1960 (No. 84) made major amendments re sentencing, treason, defacing coinage, espionage, official secrets, conspiracy.

7 – 9 September

Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s four years before he died, in its early stages Bill Brown spoke openly about the disease. ML MSS 5779 papers 1961-88 one box Brown is Lee Rhiannon’s father. Speaker at event?

BARBARA JOAN BRUNTON GIBB (1927 - 2014)