###Man of the World: Remembering Mark Colvin
A Foreign Correspondent special airing Tuesday May 16 at 9.30pm on ABC & ABC iview
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 life-changing illness he contracted while reporting on Rwanda’s genocide - to help other reporters deal with the traumas of covering terrible events.
A Man of the World: Remembering Mark Colvin airs on Foreign Correspondent at 9.30pm Tuesday May 16 and 10.30am Thursday May 18 on ABC & ABC iview and 6.30pm Sunday May 21 on the ABC NEWS channel. Stream it LIVE or watch it later on iview.
Please note that the previously scheduled Foreign Correspondent two-part story, Hunting the KGB Killers, will now air on May 23 & 30