26/08/2025
Introducing Douglas Brass, War correspondent, journalist, newspaper executive and Waitaki Boys Old Boy.
Tunis is Mad Tonight: The Life and Times of New Zealand Journalist Douglas Brass, (Author: Peter Cox).
Henry Douglas Brass in Invercargill in 1910 and died in Melbourne in 1994. He went to Southland Boys’ High School and then Waitaki Boys’ High School. While at Waitaki Boys’ High School, Brass became friends with James Bertram, Ian Milner, who was the son of the school’s rector, and Charles Brasch. Bertram and Milner were both Rhodes Scholars at Oxford in the 1930s, along with another ex-Southland boy, Geoffrey Cox. (Brasch, a poet, founded Landfall magazine and helped invent New Zealand literature). Amongst other subjects Douglas studied Latin, French, Chemistry and Physics while at Waitaki Boys between 1923 and 1926.
Brass was reporting from Parliament for The Press when he was just 24. He moved to Melbourne and worked for legendary journalist and media boss Keith Murdoch. Wartime found him back in New Zealand as the Melbourne Herald’s correspondent before he enlisted and went to North Africa, appointed as a war correspondent. It is for his outstanding and widely published reporting from the battlefields that he became known. The tile of the book comes from his description of entering Tunis as the Germans surrendered.
After the war, Brass stayed on in London and covered the reconstruction of Europe. He was in Germany for war crimes trials and wrote about what he saw. Peter Cox, author of Tunis is Mad Tonight, wrote that Brass was a very perceptive man, “A very human guy with a lot of his writing about the impact of these events on ordinary people. Particularly the ones in Germany. I found that really moving.”
Cox adds Brass to this celebrated cohort of bright young New Zealanders and sees the culture of Waitaki Boys’ High School as central to it. Bertram called the school an “imperial nursery, a Rugby of the South Seas”.
He stayed in Australia but there was another New Zealand link to come. As a Murdoch man, he helped to launch the Dominion Sunday Times, the ancestor of the Sunday Star-Times, after News Ltd invested in the Dominion.
