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Legendary Australian broadcaster Mark Colvin is known for the timbre of his voice, his broad knowledge of international affairs, his erudite interviewing and his content-rich Twitter-feed.

But the presenter of the ABC’s PM program - a three-time foreign correspondent for the Australian national broadcaster - this week made a mark on my University of Canberra Advanced Broadcast Journalism class with his candor and resilience as he talked about his experiences of reporting war, famine and upheaval across the globe.

These experiences include losing two of his colleagues to violence in Africa and the Middle East in the early 1980s. But the greatest price he paid for bearing witness was his own health. He contracted a deadly auto-immune disease after being exposed to a virus amidst rotting corpses while reporting on the Rwandan genocide in 1994 - a story he described as a "never-ending cycle of death". He is now awaiting a kidney transplant

Nevertheless, he presents the flagship ABC Radio current affairs programme PM five nights a week to which he brings the benefits of an Oxford education and an incredible appetite for international news told from global perspectives. He is also a highly engaged practitioner of social media journalism, interacting with his audience via his iPad – even when he’s hooked up to a dialysis machine in hospital.

These characteristics of resilience, perseverance and tenacity were on ample display when he beamed into our Canberra lecture theatre via Skype on Wednesday morning from his Sydney kitchen.



His presentation took the form of an interactive interview – with questions from me, students in the Canberra University lecture theatre, and remotely via Twitter.

With characteristic self-deprecation, he told us he was ill-prepared for his first posting to London, at the age of 27, and brought "naivety and stupidity" to the job. But he was forced to mature quickly, being terribly traumatised by exposure to significant risk, inhumanity and loss. In fact, he told us he felt like he suffered from a severe but undiagnosed case of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after covering the Iranian Revolution. And, later, when reporting on the terrible famine in Ethiopia after having a family, he said exposure to the suffering of children affected him "...so far deep down in the gut it was almost like having a nervous breakdown."

But this trauma, and the illness that now prevents him from travelling the globe, have not dented his desire to work as a foreign correspondent. He says he has no regrets and answered a Twitter question from a student asking if he wished he could be in the field reporting the current upheaval in the Middle East and North Africa, emphatically, "Yes".

You can watch the video of the lecture here or listen to the audio only version.

Unfortunately, the lecture recording was cut short, but Mark Colvin left us with two key messages: foreign reporting has been transformed by technology, with Twitter being identified by the self-described "dinosaur" as one of the best tools available to journalists, with its capacity to facilitate audience engagement, the crowdsourcing of research and access to global views. And in response to the last student question "What keeps you motivated as a journalist?", he answered with one word: "Curiosity".

Afterwards, Mark Colvin tweeted to me his concern that he'd painted too frightening a picture of being a foreign correspondent and noted that he had also spent significant time in Rome, Paris and Madrid during his foreign postings. But he needn't have worried. While he talked in detail, with great candor, about his reporting assignments and the trauma he experienced in the field, the impact on students was inspirational, rather than depressing. And many of them tweeted about the way in which they had been moved and motivated by Mark Colvin’s story once the lecture was over.
















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