Douglas Lockwood

Born in Natimuk, 25 kilometres (16 mi) west of Horsham in Victoria's Wimmera district, Lockwood left school at 12 to help run his father's (Alfred Wright Lockwood) newspaper, the weekly West Wimmera Mail, at the height of the Great Depression.

[1] With his father's blessing he left home at 16 and worked as a reporter on rural Victorian papers in Camperdown, Tatura and Mildura before being hired by Sir Keith Murdoch in 1941 as a journalist on The Herald in Melbourne.

[2] At the end of 1941, during World War II, he was sent to Darwin with his new wife, Ruth (née Hay),[3] and was there for the first Japanese attack on Australia on 19 February 1942.

[5] As sole author Lockwood published: He co-wrote Life on the Daly River (Robert Hale, London, 1961) with Nancy Polishuk; The Shady Tree (Rigby, Adelaide, 1963) with Bill Harney; and Alice on the Line (Rigby, Adelaide, 1965) with Doris Blackwell.

His widow, Ruth, completed the work, which was published as A Bushman's Life (Viking O'Neil, Melbourne, 1990).