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Foreign Correspondent remembers Mark Colvin

Jonathan Holmes and ABC colleagues remember the late, great Mark Colvin, who died last week.

ABC has held over this week’s planned report on Foreign Correspondent in order to screen “A Man of the World: Remembering Mark Colvin.”

Jonathan Holmes and ABC colleagues remember the late, great Colvin, who died last week.

To many Australians he was the honeyed voice behind the PM microphone, the agent of reason in a fevered Twittersphere. But Mark Colvin also carved out a singular career as a foreign correspondent roaming the world’s power centres and trouble spots.

In doing so he inspired others.

Hearing Mark Colvin’s radio word pictures from the Iranian Revolution sparked a pup newspaper reporter to aspire to a foreign posting. That was Tony Jones. Colvin cajoled another young Pom to move to Australia. Britain’s loss – that was Jonathan Holmes.

Now it’s Holmes who reports on Colvin’s legacy as a foreign correspondent and, in his later years, as a virtual correspondent, harnessing Twitter as a portal to dive into big, breaking stories like the Arab Spring.

In this Foreign Correspondent tribute colleagues also tell of a little known aspect of Colvin’s career: how he channelled his own ordeal – the illness he contracted while reporting on Rwanda’s genocide – to help other reporters deal with the traumas of covering terrible events.

9.30pm Tuesday May 16 on ABC.

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