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Osmar E. White Osmar E. White i(A20274 works by) (birth name: Osmar Egmont Dorkin White) (a.k.a. Osmar White)
Also writes as: Robert Dentry ; E. M. Dorkin ; Maros Gray
Born: Established: 2 Apr 1909 Feilding, Manawatu, North Island,
c
New Zealand,
c
Pacific Region,
; Died: Ceased: 1991
Gender: Male
Arrived in Australia: 1914
Heritage: New Zealander
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BiographyHistory

Osmar E. White was a journalist, war correspondent and radio and television scriptwriter; he also wrote novels for children and adults. White moved with his parents to Australia when he was five and his teenage years were spent in Katoomba. White's journalistic career began as a 'stringer' for the Wagga Wagga Advertiser and a contributor to the Sydney Daily Telegraph while he studied at Sydney University. From 1928 to 1933, he worked as a freelance writer in South East Asia, New Guinea, the South Pacific and tropical Australia . By 1934 he was working as chief reporter for the Taranaki Daily News and in 1937 became editor of New Zealand's Radio Record where he wrote copiously under several noms-de-plume including Maros Gray, E. M. Dorkin, O. E. W. and Edison Watt. In 1938 he returned to Sydney with his New Zealand-born wife, Mollie Allan, and joined the Daily Telegraph but soon moved to the Herald & Weekly Times in Melbourne.

One of the first journalists accredited as a war correspondent by the Australian government in 1941, White covered the New Guinea campaigns, including Kokoda. While accredited to the United States fleet, he reported various naval battles before being wounded at Rendova Island. He wrote Green Armour while convalescing and before being posted to Europe where he was attached to the U.S. Third Army. He covered the liberation of Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen concentration camps and the first Nuremberg Trials. He was the only Australian correspondent present at the signing of the German surrender at Rheims. Back in Australia, he worked for the Melbourne Herald as a feature writer and roving correspondent in the Pacific and South East Asia although he specialised in Papua New Guinea. He was the Australian press representative with the Australian Antarctic summer expedition during the International Geophysical Year in 1956-1957 and in 1960 was seconded to the Department of External Affairs as an independent assessor of Australian aid under the Colombo Plan. In 1963, he retired from newspaper journalism to concentrate on his other writing.

After publishing his first short story when he was seventeen, White went on to publish several hundred short stories and feature articles in Australian, British and American magazines - including the Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, The Strand Magazine, the Bulletin and the Australian Journal. Many stories drew on his travel experience and on his hobby of mountaineering. He climbed extensively in the Blue Mountains with Eleanor Dark (q.v.), her husband Eric - who was the Whites' family doctor - and writers Frank Walford and Eric Lowe (qq.v.).

His first novel, Beyond Ceram, published in England in 1931 [untraced], was set in South East Asia, a region he was to report widely during the 1940s and 1950s. He wrote numerous radio and television scripts for Crawford Productions, including Awake the Murdered, D24, Kiap O'Kane, Homicide and Consider Your Verdict. His one-off television drama, Manhaul, was set in Antarctica. His novels include Encounter at Kharmel (writing as Robert Dentry) and Silent Reach as well as three children's books. His non-fiction works ranged from guide books to pictorial books on Australia, memoirs, history and political commentary. (Compiled from information supplied by the author's daughter Sally White.)

Most Referenced Works

Awards for Works

form y separately published work icon Consider Your Verdict ( dir. John Dixon ) Melbourne : Crawford Productions , 1961 Z1813000 1961 series - publisher film/TV crime

Consider Your Verdict was a television adaptation of Crawford Productions' radio programme of the same name, which (according to Storey at Classic Australian Television) ran from 18 August 1958 to 1960, for a total of 312 episodes. Soon after the radio program ceased, Crawfords began developing Consider Your Verdict as a television program.

As they had with the radio version, Crawfords made a number of production decisions aimed at increasing the apparent authenticity of the program. According to Storey, these included consulting legal professionals (including the Crown Law Department, Victoria Police, and Melbourne University's Department of Law), limiting the actors playing witnesses to a brief overview of the script and requiring them to ad-lib their lines (resulting in an authentically hesitant delivery style), and occasionally casting actual legal professionals in roles (notably homicide detective Gordon Timmins and Eugene Gorman QC). The intention was to suggest that audiences were watching a broadcast of an actual trial; in keeping with this illusion, as Moran notes in his Guide to Australian TV Series, the program carried no production credits.

The majority of the cases were criminal cases (primarily murder), though the program did present some civil cases. Inexpensive to produce, the program occasionally suffered from the suggestion that it adhered rather too closely to legal process, rendering episodes slower and less dramatic than they might otherwise have been.

1962 winner Logie Awards Best Australian TV Drama Series
Last amended 6 Dec 2010 15:37:27
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