June 1961: The Morning Sun Touched The Hull Ripples of HMAS QUICKMATCH With Gold - Photo Alan Zammit.

1383. We're very sorry about the heading. There's a story behind it.

 

In the United States in 1969 Kookaburra was on a reporting assignment competing against a very elegant British feature writer from the New York Daily News, Anthony Stewart.

 

We'd attended an inquest out in the Pennsylvania coal country into the death of Mary Jo Kopechne in Senator Edward Kennedy's car at Chappaquiddick. When it was over we [along Derryn Hinch, then working in the Sydney Morning Herald's New York bureau] went up to the cemetery at Larksville where she was buried, and purely by accident met Mary Jo's parents, Gwen and Joseph Kopechne. We were invited into the gatekeeper's cottage [the gatekeeper happened to be an uncle of the dead girl].

 

The Kopechne's had been terribly hurt about the imputations against their daughter's purity, and KookaburraI began his story with something very tremulous and somnehow quaint that Mrs Kopechne had said to him: 'The doctors told me that my daughter was a maiden lady..."

 

Tony Stewart began his story: "The wintering sun touched the Appalachins with gold ..."

 

I've always wanted to use it.

 

Here's HMAS QUICKMATCH, whose reconstruction at Williamstown Naval Dockyard took place in 1954-55. This photograph was taken in June 1961, and it is very possibly therefore taken during the RAN's ceremonial fleet entry into Sydney Harbour to mark its 50th Anniversary.

 

Photo: Alan Zammit. It appears in John Bastock's book 'Australia's Ships of War'

[Angus and Robertson, Sydney 1975] p319.

Done