Exclusive: The founder of Australia’s most prominent media awards visited the apartheid state in 1958 and judged it ‘a grand country with a great future’

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The Ampol founder, Sir William Walkley, derided apartheid South Africa’s failure to attract white migrants as “race suicide” in 1958 and warned the country faced a potential bloodbath if a communist leader emerged who was “perhaps a half-breed with the white man’s intelligence”.

The comments are contained in a report produced by Walkley – whose Walkley Foundation still runs Australia’s most prestigious media awards – on a four-week tour of South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) to assess the prospects for Ampol expanding into those countries.