nation 58-9

As you saw I was dabbling with late period Nation (just before it merged with the Sunday Review to become Nation Review, a whole different social upheaval of a publication) and I liked it so much I decided to go for the full epic sweep, so I got the first volume. 

In some ways, plus ça change - it looks the same (except by the early 70s they had almost completely dispensed with illustrations; the late 50s had small fairly generic pen sketches breaking up the text) and I think that though it was a bold venture in the late 50s - potshots at Menzies, Bolte et al - by the early 70s it really had the courage of its convictions. 

The 'Adelaide hanging' coverline above is part of the Nation's tenacious continued reportage on the case of Rupert Max Stuart who you may know was convicted of killing a small child in Ceduna in the late 1950s and almost hanged for it but the case became a national concern largely because it seems fairly apparent that he didn't do it, or at least, the confession the police said he made was written in such a way that it's almost impossible that he confessed, and that was the sum total of the case. You can read about more than you would ever want to read about it, in this badly written wikipedia entry. Do I need to say that, while obviously Stuart should not have been prosecuted for this crime, much less sentenced, no-one ever talks about the poor child who died? Anyway...

Nation in 1958-9 offers me personally less than the seventies volume but I am going to persist through the sixties and, I suspect, learn a massive amount. As it is, I am going to extract quite a bit from these early issues - not least the material on Arthur Warner, who I'm keen to learn more about (this is a good summary but I bet there's dirt). 

Writers in these early issues include Ken Inglis who is always good (and was a major contributor to the Stuart case material) and Bernard Hesling, who wrote the Bee Miles article in the issue above. Hesling is good on detail but his style is a kind of fast-paced light approach which hasn't aged well - he seems too damn flippant for anything. Still, Bee (I always thought it was Bea, what do I know) Miles introduced him to the Griffins at Pakies - that's more than I could ever say about my life.