Keith Dunstan

Keith Dunstan OAM (born 3 February 1925) is an Australian journalist and author born in Melbourne, Australia, the son of William Dunstan VC and Marjorie Dunstan. He attended Geelong Grammar School and was a Flight Lieutenant in 1943-46 with the Royal Australian Air Force, stationed at Labuan in the Pacific. He is among the most prolific of all Australian writers and the author of more than 25 books.

Journalism

In 1946 Dunstan joined The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd, publishers of The Sun News-Pictorial and The Herald (since merged as the Herald Sun). He was Foreign Correspondent for the H&WT with posts in New York (1949–52) and London (1952–54). This period was followed by a position with The Courier-Mail for which he wrote a column Day by Day. He returned to Melbourne and from 1958 to 1978 contributed a daily column, A Place in the Sun for The Sun News-Pictorial, the city’s largest circulating daily newspaper. During these years his popularity grew and he became a Melbourne institution. From 1962 he wrote regularly for the Sydney-based weekly magazine The Bulletin under the pseudonym of Batman (after the city’s controversial founder, John Batman) and for the travel magazine Walkabout. He was United States West Coast Correspondent (1979–82) for the H&WT, afterwards a regular columnist and occasional contributor to The Age.

Books

He has published a quartet on Australian character: Wowsers (1968), Knockers (1972), Sports (1973) and Ratbags (1979) and...
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