Allara, the ship that wouldn’t die
WHEN a torpedo-damaged freighter was towed into Newcastle Harbour in July 1942, at the height of Japan's deadly submarine campaign against Australian shipping, a Newcastle Herald photographer was on the spot to capture some extraordinary images of the crippled ship and its wounded crew members. But the superb dramatic photographs weren't published. Tight censorship by the government, preventing the publication of bad news that might harm public morale, saw to that. The negatives were filed and forgotten for decades, before passing out of the newspaper's ownership during a "downsizing" in the 1970s when collector Ken Magor…