Vale: Bill Peach

Former ABC current affairs host Bill Peach O.A.M, best known as the original presenter of This Day Tonight, has died.

He lost a battle with cancer early this morning.

Mike Carlton tweeted:
“Bill Peach, star of ABC-TV’s This Day Tonight, great bloke and great Australian, died of cancer this morning at 3.30am. A good mate gone.”

Peach was born in Lockhart, NSW in 1935. His father was a stock and station agent to whom he attributes his taste for travel and humour and his mother’s family were graziers.

He was a former school teacher before he joined Four Corners and then hosted TDT, the forerunner to The 7:30 Report, for eight years from 1967. He later presented the travel series Peach’s Australia for ABC.

“There were several things that were different about ‘TDT‘. Firstly, that it was live every night. I think that gave it some excitement, especially when we crashed and burnt, which we very often did. Secondly, it introduced the idea of debate, controversy, especially about politics, but also about all sorts of other things. There was no formula when we began. It was a magazine, and we could more or less put in anything we liked. I did eight years of ‘TDT‘, and doing a program like that live every night, I think there’s a wear-out factor,” he told ABC’s Talking Heads show.

The ground-breaking show covered plenty of national controversies, airing during Australia’s conflict in the Vietnam War.

“There were a lot of things happening in Australia, and part of what made ‘TDT’ exciting, but also made us friends and enemies, was because we took on big issues, we had furious debates, we had people attacking each other in the studio, and I mean physically as well as verbally. And we had riots going on inside and outside the studio, and of course they were happening in the country. And I thought it was great that we could see and show Australians getting excited about politics, instead of saying, “I don’t care about politics. Who’s going to win the football on Sunday,” you know? It was important, and we tried to show the importance of it,” he said.

With Peach’s Australia in 1975, Peach criss-crossed the country for documentaries that brought the Australian landscape into the nation’s living rooms. He made 27 programs in 2 years, filming in every part of Australia. In later years he switched from 4 wheel drive vehicles to the F27 Fokker Friendship plane, taking travellers on trips across Australia and overseas.

He authored ten books on Australian history and received a special Logie for Outstanding Personal Contribution to Australian Television and has been awarded the Order of Australia (AM) for his services to Australian media and tourism.

“You have to have a different eye to see what is beautiful about dry country, arid country,” he once said. “And of course it’s not all like that. We’ve got nine different climates, we’ve got tropical wetlands, we’ve got everything. But I think I can appreciate the Australian landscape and the Australian people and their sort of laconic take on all that.”

Photo: smh.com.au