If he were still alive, Eric Dark would be as alarmed by the health of the Australian media today as he was in the 1940s. And the great Blue Mountains figure would be just as alarmed by the way the state was using digital technology to place journalists and his fellow citizens under increased surveillance.
The 2016 Dr Eric Dark Memorial Lecture at the Carrington Hotel in Katoomba was a lament for the way the internet has both savaged the Fourth Estate and enabled government agencies to be more powerful and less scrutinised Big Brothers than ever before.
The annual lecture - part of the Varuna & Sydney Writers' Festival - was delivered by award-winning journalist Andrew Fowler, whose latest book is The War on Journalism.
Fowler said the way the internet had smashed the revenue streams of newspapers in particular meant mainstream media was in crisis, increasingly reduced to offering "thin" journalism instead of meaty investigative material that held wrongdoers to account and formed a vital foundation of democratic society.
He mourned the way journalists at companies like Fairfax Media (owner of The Blue Mountains Gazette) were constantly having to file for various platforms instead of having the time to properly develop stories. "The deadline is always now," Fowler said, likening reporters to workers in a factory where the machinery of the production line is constantly being sped up
Fowler's lecture - titled Good News, Bad News - had echoes of the 1949 article Dr Dark wrote, The Press Against the People, in which Dr Dark warned about the dangers of a media driven by commercial and political imperatives.
Dr Dark (1889-1987) was a Katoomba GP, a lover of outdoor adventure, a man highly decorated for his service on the Western Front during WWI.
He was also the husband of the great Australian author Eleanor Dark (The Timeless Land) and a man who, having witnessed the suffering of the poor during the Great Depression, became passionate about left-wing politics. For those political views he was monitored by ASIO and persecuted.
His concern for freedom of speech led to his becoming a vice-president of the Australian Council for Civil Liberties
Fowler also wrote a book about Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, The Most Dangerous Man in the World, and predicted to the big crowd at the Carrington that one day statues would be erected around the world to Assange and whistleblowers like Edward Snowden because of what they had done to expose lies and champion freedom.
"It's us who are being terrorised," he said of the increased surveillance and curbs on civil liberties governments use terrorism to justify.
The Darks' Katoomba home is now the Varuna writers' centre.
