Mark Colvin, the man who watched the world for Australia

Updated

He was the familiar voice and fierce intellect behind the radio microphone who explained the world to Australians every day. But Mark Colvin never dreamt of being a journalist.

Journalist, broadcaster, author, presenter, filmmaker, foreign correspondent — despite a long list of stellar achievements, Mark Colvin admitted he fell into the profession which came to define him.

Colvin, a legendary ABC journalist who died today after battling a long illness, was born in London in 1952, the son of a British spy.

He came to Australia as a 21-year-old armed with a degree in English literature from Oxford University and no clear career ambitions.

After failing as a builder's labourer — suffering regular heat stroke in Canberra's December sun — the dole office noted Colvin's academic credentials and pointed him towards journalism.

Colvin said of his attempts to start a career in the media:

"I was a half-English dilettante with an arts degree and a pommy accent."

"I remember going for an interview with the [Sydney Morning] Herald. [The] first mistake: I went to the Hunter Street Sydney office, which was just their corporate office, not the actual newspaper.

"The Herald found my minimal charm and talent easy to resist."

But on February 11, 1974, dressed in a "stylish denim jacket, patch pockets and flared trousers", Colvin took the fateful steps into the William St headquarters of ABC News in Sydney.

"Somehow Aunty, where the BBC voice was still pretty prevalent in those days, saw something in me," he said.

Colvin was at the beginning of a four-decade career with the national broadcaster, which would see him promoted to a posting in London as a correspondent before he turned 30.

In the decades to follow, he would cross the globe as a reporter for many of the ABC's most prestigious TV current affairs programs and become the familiar voice of radio current affairs across the nation.

But in those early years as a cadet, Colvin still was not entirely sure journalism was for him.

"I've been a journalist for more than four decades, yet I had no longstanding vocation to be a reporter before I became one," he said.

"Even halfway through 1974, my first year as a trainee, I had real doubts about whether I would stick with the trade."

In a radio interview on Brunch with Simon Marnie in 2009, he reflected on an extraordinary career and described journalism as both a privilege and a great responsibility.

"Particularly if you work for what's considered one of the flagships of the ABC — and I've worked for all of the current affairs programs and the pressure's enormously high," he said.

"I love daily journalism because at least every day you go home thinking, I've done something, I've achieved something. And you can walk away from it."

"It doesn't mean that you don't put your whole heart and soul into it, but in some extents, it's nice to say: 'Well we did as well as we possibly could'."

'The greenest of green recruits'

Colvin did as well as any ambitious reporter could hope to, right from January 1975 when he joined the fledgling youth radio station Double J as one of its cub reporters.

As a nod to his contribution, he featured in the final news bulletin on Double J in 1979 before it went national as Triple J.

He broke into TV in 1979 as one of the first reporters with the ground-breaking Nationwide program, along with ABC luminaries Andrew Olle and Paul Murphy.

The following year, he was sent to the ABC's London office — a posting he later described as his big break.

"The first time I set off to cross a national border as a foreign correspondent, I forgot my passport," he said.

"It was January 1980 and, at 27 years old, I had just arrived as the greenest of green recruits at the ABC's London bureau."

A few months later, he was in the city of Bristol covering the St Pauls riot.

Then it was off to Tehran to cover the Iranian hostage crisis, where he was directly caught up in the student riots and the subsequent government crackdown.

Throughout the 1980s Colvin had a front-row seat in the theatre of history, as he covered stories including famines in Africa, the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland, and the break-up and ultimate demise of the Soviet Union and its client governments in Eastern Europe.

But amid the constant stream of weighty current affairs reporting, he was also able to show a lighter side to his talents.

Colvin played the role of an unassuming journalist during a 1982 interview with Sir Les Patterson at the unveiling of Dame Edna's waxwork model at Madame Tussauds in London.

He asked Sir Les why Dame Edna was not there in person, to which Sir Les replied: "I think she felt it was perhaps a bit immodest, might have shown an unseemly conceit."

In between stints overseas, Colvin returned to Australia in 1983 to become a reporter for the radio current affairs programs AM and PM.

He was instrumental in the birth of The World Today radio program in 1984, immediately stepping into the presenter's chair.

But Colvin did not leave television behind altogether, and between 1988 and 1992 worked with Four Corners, where he was awarded a gold medal at the New York Film Festival for a special report on the famine in Ethiopia.

In 1994, he was in Rwanda covering the massacre of Tutsis — an assignment which nearly killed him and took its toll on his health for decades to come.

In was during this fateful trip — amid a million refugees living in excrement, and with cholera and dysentery commonplace — that he contracted a rare inflammation of the blood vessels.

The illness led to a series of medical complications that dogged the rest of his career, and life.

"The degree of death and suffering we saw [in Rwanda] was absolutely extraordinary," he later said.

"There were fields of people lying in their own excrement and vomit; people dying of cholera and typhoid and I don't know what else."

'The unstoppable force won'

In September 1997, Colvin made an appearance on a radio show that arguably became his trademark — PM.

What he initially thought would be a short stint for a few months blossomed into a career spanning two decades.

His charm and sharp intellect would become a hallmark of the show.

Complications from his illness continued over the decades behind the radio microphone, with Colvin undergoing a double hip replacement before eventually suffering kidney failure.

In need of a transplant, it was at this point the journalist became the story.

A chance interview on PM introduced him to Mary-Ellen Field, who would become his organ donor.

"We were joking that she was the unstoppable force meeting the immovable object," he said.

"When she was trying to persuade me to take her kidney, the unstoppable force won."

Their subsequent friendship was explored in television programs and became the subject of a play called Mark Colvin's Kidney.

In recent years, Colvin also had treatment for melanomas, and just before Easter, he was admitted to hospital after being diagnosed with lung cancer.

During all this time, he remained relentless and dedicated to his craft — both as a practitioner of old-school journalism and an enthusiastic adopter of its newer forms.

As @Colvinius he became a prolific and influential member of the Twittersphere, attracting more than 100,000 followers who he regularly served with astute insights and a select cultivation of the day's best journalism.

His Twitter bio proclaimed him to be a "Lifetime Lance-Corporal in the Awkward Squad".

'I miss being on the road so much'

Colvin spoke of his passion for PM in his memoir Light and Shadow, published the year before his death, saying he sought to use the program as a "vicarious pair of eyes upon the world".

"I've encouraged all my colleagues — from young trainees to seasoned foreign correspondents — to bring me, and through me, the program's listeners, a picture of the world through their eyes," he said.

"If I sometimes push them harder than they expect for that firsthand view, it's partly because I miss being on the road so much."

"And partly because I know from experience that the view on the ground is never exactly what the pre-digested words of the news agencies or edited pictures off the satellites suggest."

Colvin also wrote about his experiences growing up in an unorthodox family, with his father serving as a Cold War-era spy for MI6 while working as a British diplomat.

He lamented that despite his father's colourful career — during World War II he was infiltrated into Vietnam on board a midget submarine to run a resistance network against the Japanese — "I could never get him to record an interview, even one embargoed till after his death".

Colvin also championed the cause of colleague Peter Greste, who was jailed by Egyptian authorities in December 2013 accused of "falsifying news" and portraying Egypt in a bad light.

He interviewed several Greste family members on PM and was on air as the verdicts were handed down in a Cairo court.

Colvin is survived by his two sons, Nicolas and William.

In his book, he reflected on his life, describing it as "mostly a dream run".

"So, like the legendary lost dog on the poster — three legs, blind in one eye, missing right ear, tail broken, recently castrated, answers to the name of Lucky — I feel that despite near-death experiences and chronic illness, I have had what AB Facey famously called A Fortunate Life," he wrote.

And on behalf of us all, Mark — we, surely, are fortunate you have shared it with us.

Topics: journalism, death, community-and-society, human-interest, abc, australia

First posted