Mark Colvin, who has died of cancer aged 65, was a broadcaster whose four-decade career combined the best of old-school journalism with a passion for the digital age that delivered his insights and wit to a whole new audience on Twitter. For 20 years, for the Australian public broadcaster ABC, Colvin hosted the daily radio current affairs show PM, a national programme he made his own with his incisive interviewing style and distinctive sonorous voice. He led ABC’s coverage of national and international events including the Arab spring and UK phone hacking, as well as successive budgets and state and federal elections.
Since contracting a rare autoimmune disease, Wegener’s granulomatosis, in 1994 while covering the genocide in Rwanda, Colvin lived with severe pain and disability, kidney failure and two hip replacements. Throughout it all, including three years on dialysis while waiting for a kidney transplant, he continued to host PM, staggering into work at 3pm after spending the day in hospital preparing for work on his iPad.
“As illness and disability have encroached over the last two decades, the virtual world has only become more important to me,” he wrote, and in 2009, while in hospital, he discovered Twitter. As @colvinius he became a leading proponent of the power of social media for journalists, and used it to great effect to cover breaking stories on PM.
In 2011 Colvin made contact via Twitter with Mary-Ellen Field, a British woman caught up in the News of the World phone-hacking case. He did a series of interviews with her and they became friends. When Field discovered that Colvin had a life-threatening illness and was on the transplant waiting list, she offered him her kidney, despite never having met him in person.
He eventually agreed, and the transplant went ahead. The tale of his second chance at life became the subject of a well-received play, Mark Colvin’s Kidney, written by Tommy Murphy and staged by the Belvoir Street theatre, Sydney, earlier this year. Colvin said many times that if the play led to just one donation, it would be worth it.
He was born in London to an Australian-born mother, Anne (nee Manifold), and a British father, the naval officer, diplomat, secret agent and historian John Colvin. His father’s work took him on countless overseas postings so the young Colvin was sent to boarding schools including Summer Fields prep near Oxford, and Westminster school in London. He recalled being subjected to physical abuse and loneliness that he described as barbaric.
His parents divorced when he was 11, leaving Mark and his younger sister living with their mother while their father moved into a nearby flat. While he was suspicious about the true nature of his father’s work, Colvin did not find out his father was a high-ranking member of MI6 until he was an adult. Even then his father refused to disclose much about his work, and died in 2003 without ever agreeing to the interview about his clandestine career that his son so badly wanted.
His father’s life as a spy was the background to Colvin’s acclaimed memoir Light and Shadow: Memoirs of a Spy’s Son (2016) which also chronicles the international events he witnessed as a foreign correspondent.
Colvin travelled to Australia at the age of 21 after graduating from Christ Church, Oxford, with a degree in English literature and no clue about what to do with his life. He stumbled into journalism at the suggestion of a dole officer after he failed as a labourer because he kept getting sunstroke.
He got a cadetship at the ABC in 1974, and after a short stint in the newsroom he joined the new youth music radio station 2JJ (now known as Triple J) in 1975, with a brief to deliver a news service that reflected young people’s interest in Australian music, drugs policy, unemployment and the environment. Colvin’s fierce intellect, charm and wit saw him promoted to foreign correspondent by the age of 28.
He was London correspondent for five years, a documentary film-maker for five years on Four Corners, the flagship investigative current affairs programme, and the founding presenter on a midday radio news show, the World Today. He covered famines in Africa, the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland and the break-up of the Soviet Union. His 1990 Four Corners report on Ethiopia, The Forgotten Famine, won a gold medal at the New York film festival and was nominated for an international Emmy.
After contracting Wegener’s granulomatosis, Colvin was hospitalised in London for six months and his family flew over from Australia to say goodbye. He survived, and although the diagnosis cut short his career as a foreign correspondent, he continued to travel the world through his programme. “I’ve encouraged all my colleagues – from young trainees to seasoned foreign correspondents – to bring me, and through me, the programme’s listeners, a picture of the world through their eyes,” he said.
Colvin is survived by his wife, Michele McKenzie, whom he married in 1987, and their sons, Nicolas and William, and by his mother, Anne, and sister, Zoe.
• Mark Andrew Colvin, journalist, born 13 March 1952; died 11 May 2017
