In 1968 Simon Townsend was sentenced to twenty-eight days in a military detention barracks for refusing to answer questions at an army medical examination. He was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War. He was twenty-two. He had been a newspaper reporter for six years, most recently at The Sun in Sydney. When the case went through the courts and the press it became a widely reported conscientious objector case.
The reason it matters to a site about journalism is not the politics. It is the journalism. Townsend was both the subject of the story and a journalist. The coverage helped put conscientious objection in front of the public. And the experience of being on the other side of the microphone, with reporters shouting questions at him from the steps of a courthouse, changed how Townsend talked about press freedom for the rest of his life.
The case in brief
Simon Townsend was called up under the National Service Act in 1968. He registered his objection as a non-religious conscientious objector, a category the law did not easily accommodate at the time. When he refused to cooperate with the medical examination he was arrested, charged, and sentenced. He served the sentence at the Holsworthy Military Detention Barracks in Sydney's south-west.
His case, along with others such as William White's and John Zarb's, added to a public debate about who the conscription laws were catching, and who they were missing. Those cases pushed the question of conscientious objection on non-religious grounds, a category that had existed in UK law for decades but which Australian law had been slow to formalise, into the courts and the press.
What the press did
The coverage was extensive. The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, the ABC and the commercial TV networks covered the sentencing and the release. Photographers waited outside the Burwood courthouse. Townsend was photographed being led into custody and being released. The family still has the clippings. Some of them are reproduced on this site.
What the press did not do, and what Townsend remained quietly angry about for decades, was investigate what he said happened inside Holsworthy. By his own later account there were beatings, forced head-shaving, and collusion between senior prison officers and the military police. It was not a story the press of 1968 chose to pursue.
Why it mattered to the law
Within a few years of Simon's case the law around conscientious objection in Australia was amended to recognise non-religious objection. The combination of court cases and public coverage added to the pressure for change. Journalism did not win the argument on its own. But journalism put the cases in front of the public in a way that the parliament could not ignore.
That is a fact worth teaching in any journalism course. The press cannot change the law. But the press can refuse to let the law operate out of sight. The combination of a consistent reporter, an engaged editor, and a public hearing is what reshapes legislation.
Why press freedom matters to the craft
Simon would not have made a career out of journalism if he had not experienced, at twenty-two, what it means to be on the other side of a reporter's notebook. He knew how a careless sentence could damage a source's life. He knew what it felt like to read a report of yourself in a paper and not recognise any of it. He also knew what it felt like when a reporter got it right.
Those lessons ran through everything he wrote afterwards about the craft. Check your facts. Check the spelling of the name. Do not make things up. Do not let anyone else make things up and pretend you did not know. Those rules are not invented. They are what press freedom needs to survive.
Where to read more
Records relating to Simon Townsend's 1968 national service case are held at the National Archives of Australia. The National Film and Sound Archive holds Australian news footage from the period. The Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian and The Sun coverage is accessible through Trove, the National Library's digital archive.
The photographs reproduced on this site are reproduced with permission of the Townsend family and, where noted, the State Library of NSW.