In 1964, when I was working as an inexperienced D-grade reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald, I made the acquaintance of a newcomer named John McFlinn, who had just been appointed a courts reporter. He was a lonely and sad-looking middle-aged man for whom I soon felt sympathy, after hearing his personal story. Originally a New Zealand journalist, he had recently spent ten years, he told me, on the staff of a Southern Rhodesian newspaper, but had resigned and returned to his native land because his wife, suffering from terminal cancer, had wished to die among her relatives. After her death, he had come to Sydney to try to start a new life. It was thanks to John that I first became interested in Southern Rhodesia, which was already, a year and a half before the Unilateral Declaration of Independence that created Rhodesia, a ‘hot’ topic in our newspapers.
I remember well having a drink somewhere with him and asking him about the emerging Rhodesia Front party and its espousal of full independence from Britain. Speaking of its then leader (I can’t recall whether this was Winston Field or Ian Smith), John told me that he had met him personally as well as watching him in his public activities. ‘He is as trustworthy a man as I have ever met,’ he said. From that time on, partly because of my Anglophile perspective, I became a supporter of the Rhodesian independence project, and began to read widely on the subject.
