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William Robert Olson

1922-1975

BiographyWilliam Robert Olson (1922-1975), journalist and author, was born in Paddington, N.S.W., came from a seafaring family and grew up in Newcastle. He was a cadet journalist on the Daily Telegraph when he joined the Army and served with 11 Small Ship Company, Royal Australian Engineers, mainly in New Guinea, 1942-1946. After the war he worked on the Daily Mirror and Sun Herald, and in 1957 published a suburban newspaper, The Leader (West Ryde, N.S.W.). He was Sydney bureau chief of The Australian when it started in 1964. In 1966 he became Director of Information with the P & O Group in Australia. In 1970 he resigned to work as a freelance journalist and publisher. In the same year he established Newswire, a business information service specialising in shipping and transport. He also wrote and broadcast his scripts for Radio Australia.

He married Ruth Olive Baylis in 1944. They had three children: William George, Irene Marie and Lynette Mary Ruth.

Olson wrote several books, including Baume: Man and Beast (1967), the biography of journalist and editor Eric Baume. In 1976 he wrote a company history, Lion of the China Sea : A History of the Eastern and Australian Steamship Limited. His novel, North from Scarlet, published under the pen name Charles Gibson in 1961, draws on his wartime experiences. Another novel, Down the Breakie, was published posthumously in 1988, incorporating material added by his son, William George Olson. In 1993 William George Olson published The Years Away, a selection of the 329 wartime letters that his father wrote to his mother. The original letters were donated to the Australian War Memorial (PR90/094).

J. H. Adams was a colleague of Olson's and a shipping reporter on the Sydney Sun during World War II. He covered the incoming and outgoing traffic of merchant and naval vessels on Sydney Harbour. He kept diaries chronicling the growing threat and toll of Japanese submarine attacks on Allied shipping in Australian coastal waters and the Pacific. These contemporary accounts include personal stories of survival and disaster, and provide insights into wartime newsgathering and censorship. Adams most likely used these diaries as source material for his book, Ships in Battledress, published in 1944. Olson used the diaries to write an account of the Japanese submarine campaign off the east coast of Australia for an unpublished book about people, the sea and ships.

Reference: Compiled from the collection, State Library of NSW, William Olson papers, ca. 1905, 1915, ca. 1930-1975, with associated papers, 1939-1998. http://acms.sl.nsw.gov.au/item/itemdetailpaged.aspx?itemid=411747

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