[10] Whitton's father had been among the earliest volunteers to sign up to serve in World War 1, fighting at Gallipoli and at Pozieres on the Western Front where he was badly wounded, eventually requiring the amputation of both legs.
She saw much pain and suffering among the wounded soldiers and dealt with much hardship with the other nurses while on duty in the various war sites.She met Thomas while he was in recuperation in Sydney before marrying him in 1925.
[12] In 1936 Whitton's father moved the family to Murgon, a small town 270 kilometres (170 mi) north-west of Brisbane where he ran a newsagency and stationery store.
For instance, he wrote of new players recruited for the Rangers thus: "Some are a little vague as to how to comport themselves in the rucks, but this is no reason for despair – not too many of the club’s senior team have a profound grasp of the technique either".
[18] Mark Day, a columnist for The Australian and former part-owner of Truth, said Whitton regarded the tabloid as a place where he could do "something noble in the art of muckraking and shedding light".
[19] Whitton wrote about the corrupt underbelly of Victoria during the Liberal premiership of Henry Bolte and his deputy Sir Arthur Rylah, winning two Walkley awards for his work.
Whitton won his first Walkley for Best Newspaper Feature story in 1967[9] for a report on living as a pensioner in Melbourne[20] and his second, in 1970, for his 1969 coverage of Bertram Wainer's allegations of police extortion from abortion clinics which led to the 1970 Board of Inquiry into Allegations of Corruption in the Police Force in Connection with Illegal Abortion headed by William Kaye AO QC.
[18][9] Whitton also wrote on the disappearance of the, then, Liberal Prime Minister, Harold Holt in 1967 and on the hanging of Ronald Ryan, Australia's last execution.
While the story of police corruption and abortion for Truth made Whitton's name, he also, when not busy with more significant matters, wrote what he called soft porn for the paper that thrived on both substance and sex.
[19] While there he and his second wife, Noela, combined to produce an expose of the political dealings behind the case of Rupert Maxwell Stuart, an indigenous man who was wrongly convicted of the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl in South Australia and, at one stage, sentenced to death.
[18] Unable to interest his editors in the story, he travelled to South Australia with his wife at his own expense where, with some difficulty, he managed to secure an interview for them both with Stuart.
[18] At the National Times, a weekly paper focussing on politics, social mores, and corruption, Whitton produced acclaimed post-mortems on the Petrov Affair, the HMAS Voyager disaster and the Vietnam war.
[10] The latter, his most significant work during this time, was "a three part, 25,000 word dissection of the disastrous decision-making and rhetorical casuistry that led to Australia’s military involvement in the Vietnam War".
[9] While there he covered what was referred to as the Wran Royal Commission which inquired into corruption allegations surrounding the then NSW Chief Stipendiary Magistrate, Murray Farquhar.
[18] In 1983 Whitton won the Melbourne Press Club's Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year Award for "courage and innovation" in his reporting on the commission.
[14] Whitton's initial experience writing for newspapers was with The Toowoomba Chronicle to which he first contributed as a stringer with pieces on rugby union and then as a full-time reporter in 1964.
[23] "My old master, Sol Chandler, observed that the first task of the reporter is to interest the customer" said Whitton in 1987 at the launch his book, Amazing Scenes.
[11] In this regard Whitton came to epitomise "old school" gumshoe reporting and eye-witness observation; "he worked the cafes, pubs, clubs, watch-houses and courthouses chatting, listening and taking notes".
The technique was, in Whitton's view, most simply summed up in the dictum of investigative reporter James B Steele of The Philadelphia Inquirer: "The challenge is to gather, marshal, and organise vast amounts of data already in the public domain, and see what it adds up to".
Whitton left Murgon shortly after to board at Downlands College in Toowoomba but as teenagers he and Noela exchanged letters and went out in the holidays.
Instead Noela compiled a report on the background to the case and the interview and got it printed in The Digger thus setting in train the events that led to Stuart's eventual release.