One of the few Australian reporters to have been the subject of a play during their lifetime, Mark Colvin, was an outstanding survivor of an era when journalism eschewed personality for fact.
Perhaps the last "BBC voice" to remain on air at the ABC, his face was certainly well-known to television viewers but it was his voice that continued to echo down the years.
Mark Colvin with actor John Howard who plays him in the play Mark Colvin's Kidney at the Belvoir, February 2017.Credit: Steven Siewert
Effortlessly combining integrity, nuance, authority and familiarity, in some ways it was to become the defining sound of the ABC radio in an era of change.
A household voice to the last, Colvin has died in Sydney after suffering for years from the consequences of a rare and continuing debilitating illness acquired while covering the 1994 Tutsis massacre in Africa where a million refugees lived in squalor, excrement, and amid cholera and dysentery.
A young Mark Colvin at work.
Twenty-one years earlier he arrived in Australia with an Oxford University degree in English literature and blank ambition.
Years later and famous, he once said he tried for a job at the Herald but went to the wrong office. In early 1974 he obtained a talks traineeship with the ABC and the following January was one of the young men with manes and moustaches to get a start with the ABC's pitch for the youth listener, 2JJ.
At the height of the Whitlam era, a sort of conscious new nationalism had taken hold, not least at the ABC where Australian accents suddenly ran rife.
But Colvin stood out as the last London calling.
Colvin grew up in England but travelled extensively with his parents in the dying days of the empire.
His family had a distinguished record serving the British Empire in India. His father, John Colvin, was a Royal Navy officer, intelligence officer and banker. His mother, Anne Manifold, was a great-niece of former Australian prime minister Stanley Bruce. They divorced when Colvin was 11. She later married Admiral Sir Anthony Synnot, a senior officer in the Royal Australian Navy, and became Lady Synnot.
The link to derring-do and empire never quite left him, even when Colvin turned his hand to a summing up.
In his memoir, Light and Shadow: Memoirs of a Spy's Son, published last October, he traced his career but his father's shadow cast a long lasting spell.
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 until after his death".
But before becoming a household presence on radio, Colvin put in years as a foreign correspondent with the ABC.
He landed back home in London in January 1980 to cover the Bristol race riot at St Pauls before heading to Tehran to cover the Iranian hostage crisis, student riots and subsequent government crackdown.
He also forgot to take his passport the first time he tried to cross an international border.
That decade, as part of the old world unravelled, Colvin covered the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland, the break-up of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the ongoing famines in Africa.
Between 1988 and 1992, Colvin worked on Four Corners, reporting on the Kanak rebellion in New Caledonia, the Cambodian peace process and famine in Ethiopia.
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.
Thirteen years later, after being sidelined by a rare blood disease – granulomatosis with polyangiitis – while reporting the massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda, he started the radio program that many think he made his own – PM.
The assignment nearly killed him but complications set in over the years behind the microphone and he had a double hip replacement before suffering kidney failure.
In February, playwright Tommy Murphy's Mark Colvin's Kidney premiered at the Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney.
Colvin was not keen on the title.
"The idea of having a play with my name on it is quite excruciating for me," he said in an interview in the Herald in March. "I find it very difficult looking at the poster on the wall out there."
The correct title, Colvin thought, should have been Mary-Ellen Field's Kidney. She, after all, is the organ donor. "I'm just a very fortunate recipient."
Mary-Ellen Field donated her kidney to Colvin after three years of dialysis before the transplant.
Colvin contacted Field by Twitter requesting an interview after she had become involved in the News Ltd hacking of celebrity phones. Field had been a business adviser to supermodel Elle Macpherson and was blamed for leaking details of her phone conversations to the (now defunct) News of the World.
A pen friendship followed and when he told her that he was down to about 10 per cent kidney function and they were running out of blood, they discovered their blood types were the same, the rare A negative.
"It is a story of redemption," Colvin said of their relationship, as depicted in the play. "My physical redemption to some extent but really it's about Mary-Ellen, someone who had her life nearly completely destroyed by journalism – so-called journalism, I should say – but somewhere finds the ability to be altruistic enough to give a kidney to a journalist. It's quite incredible."
(Colvin and Field had considered naming the donated kidney "Rupert" – to honour News Ltd's Rupert Murdoch.)
Journalist Elissa Blake recalled watching Colvin attend a rehearsal at Belvoir this year.
"He was like a rock star," she said. "The actors wanted to take selfies with him. He had just come from his mother's property outside Canberra, he was caring for her when she was ill. He had been ill himself. He cancelled the Perth Writer's Festival in February. But nothing was going to stop him getting up to the Belvoir rehearsal room, even if he had to take the disabled chair lift elevator up the stairs. He wouldn't have the actors walk down the stairs to meet him."
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 – as a practitioner of old-school journalism and an enthusiastic adopter of its newer forms. As @Colvinius he was a prolific and early influential member of the Twittersphere, regularly providing his huge band of followers with astute insights and a Colvin-curated selection of the day's best journalism.
Colvin is survived by his wife Michele McKenzie and their two sons, Nicolas and William.
He married twice. In his book, Colvin 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.
Damien Murphy