Photos and stories: Aussie Whiting, the stowaway drifter who became Montreal's most colourful news photographer

Aussie Whiting (1925-1989) came to Montreal as a stowaway drifter and after many struggles, became a newspaper photographer and the stuff of legend. 

Aussie Whiting, along with Pulse News TV cameraman Charlie McQuaide (d. 2018),  and newspaper photographer Ted Church decided to play sleuth on their time off on the evening of Oct 17, 1970 to figure out who might have kidnapped Quebec Cabinet Minister Pierre Laporte. They found themselves on the South Shore parked on some random street and sat there for a long time. They returned home to find out the next day that Laporte had been killed within feet of where they had camped out the night before.


On 2 March 1971 legendary poet W.H. Auden came to McGill to read to a 200-person packed house (with TV screens to accommodate overflow). The Gazette assigned  Aussie to snap some shots. As the crowd hushed to hear the great poet, Whiting noisily dragged a chair, banging down the stairway of Leacock 312. He stood on the chair and shot Auden from close up with his automatic winder zooming away noisily. The crowd lustily booed Aussie's magnificently disruptive intrusion. Auden, played along, interrupting his reading to briefly vogue for the lens. A young Harold Rosenberg was there and decided to become a photographer at that very moment. The Gazette did not run Whiting's photos of the event. Whiting is seen above posting with Rosenberg, who became a police photographer.


 Whiting was born in the Australian outback and raised by an aunt who was really his mom, or something complicated along those lines.


Everybody had an Aussie Whiting story. Here's mine. Whiting, a friend of my father's, once brought me to a Montreal Expos baseball practice in 1972, when I was about 9. He came to our house beforehand and sat in front of the TV entranced by the Lawrence Welk show. He was deeply irritated when my brother made a negative comment about the music. I went alone to the Expos practice with Whiting who drove a car with a rusted hole on the passenger side of the floor, with the ubiquitous baseball bat stowed nearby. I got to watch Expos practice and was then invited into the team clubhouse. It was one of my favourite days ever.


Aussie went to say with his friend, Alouettes football player Junior Ah You in Samoa where he converted to Mormonism. He was such a cricket fan that in 1963 he penned a book Cricket in Eastern Canada under his real name Colin Francis Whiting. It was said that the book sold over 10,000 hardcover copies but it's hard to find now, so that total might have been exaggerated.




Aussie was assigned the job of photographing the arrival at court of Roland Leblanc, 28, a Halifax accountant who was accused of strangling two Montreal women dead in a two day span in August 1966. Dead were Ginette Martineau and Charlotte Doucet, both 20. Martineau had agreed to spend the night with Leblanc for $20 and he just strangled her in a room at the Bell Tourist Lodge at 1170 Mountain after they had sex. He later said he was drunk. Leblanc then checked into room 226 of Motel Pierre in St. Laurent and called Doucet, another woman he had met a year earlier. Two days later she dropped by to see him and he raped and strangled her too. Whiting knew Doucet well, as she worked as a photographers secretary at the Gazette. So when Whiting saw Leblanc coming, instead of snapping his photo, he punched the killer repeatedly until police intervened. The Gazette did not mention that Doucet had worked for their paper in their article about her death. The paper ran photos Whiting took of Leblanc's arrival, shot presumably before Whiting started punching.

 In March 1969 The Gazette sent Whiting out with some instructions to return with "signs of spring." He returned with a photo of an abandoned bed spring.