Veteran Fairfax journalist Michael Gordon has died at the age of 62.

Key points: Gordon won a Walkley Award in 2017 for Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism

Gordon won a Walkley Award in 2017 for Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism He suffered from a heart attack while taking part in an ocean swim

He suffered from a heart attack while taking part in an ocean swim Gordon left The Age after 37 years at the paper

Gordon was taking part in an ocean swim on Phillip Island on Saturday morning when it is believed he suffered a heart attack.

He joined The Age as a cadet at age 17, and spent 37 years at the paper.

At various times he was sports editor and industrial relations correspondent. He spent time as the New York correspondent for The Melbourne Herald in the late 1980s, and was the national political editor of The Australian from 1994 and 1998.

Michael Gordon's press pass from when he worked at The Age in 1973. ( Supplied )

He was national political editor of The Age from 2013 until his departure in 2017.

Last year he won the Walkley Award for Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism.

He also won the Graham Perkin Award for Australia's most outstanding journalist at the Quill Awards in 2005.

Tony Wright, associate editor of The Age and a close friend of Gordon's, said his death was cruel and hard to understand as Gordon was a fit and active man who was already planning a busy working life after he left Fairfax Media last year.

"I was talking to him yesterday and he had his surfboards on the roof and was looking forward to a very pleasant weekend out there around the beaches and he was as happy as I've heard him for a very long time," Wright said.

"Michael had just taken a new step in life, really, in his post-career after The Age and he was a happy man.

"He was a mentor to many, many, many journalists and he was very generous with his time. And I guess the essence of the man could be summed up in two words: generosity and decency.

"Somebody whose instincts were to stand up for those who couldn't stand up for themselves, the sort of work he's done professionally as a journalist, on those who are on Manus Island and Nauru; he was the first journalist to make his way to Nauru and to interview refugees who were detained there, and it actually changed Australian policy at the time, it was under John Howard at the time.

"It's absolutely cruel, a 62-year-old man doing what he loved on a weekend, swimming in the ocean, near the house that he had built for his family out in the hills ... it's very hard to imagine a worse day really for those who knew and loved Michael."

Michael Gordon won a Walkley Award last year for Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism. ( Supplied: The Age/Fairfax )

Fairfax Media chief executive Greg Hywood said Gordon was respected in the industry.

"Michael Gordon was not merely one of the great journalists of his generation he was one of the most loved," he said in a statement.

"His passing is a tragedy for all who knew him and respected his enormous contribution to the national debate.

"His 40-plus year body of work on politics, Indigenous affairs and refugees reflected his basic values of care, fairness and scrupulous honesty.

"But beyond that ... he was a wonderful man."

Gordon was known for his love of the Hawthorn Football Club, of which he wrote a revised history, One for All, with his father Harry — also a high-profile journalist, author and Australian Olympic historian.

He is survived by his wife Robyn and their children, Scott and Sarah.

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