5★ - Straight to the favourites shelf!

What a delight to be allowed into Mark Colvin’s unique and fascinating life. He has a memory from when he was two years old – TWO! – peering out the back window of a car as they left their home in Austria. And he has many other memories of his very early childhood, moving around with his British “diplomat” father, his Australian mother, and later his little sister. (I, on the other hand, have an embarrassing lack of recall.)

Young Mark developed a very early love of books, and as an adult, spent a lot of money shipping books back home from the US, where there was so much more available. (The postal service did well before Amazon, eh?)

“Reading, I could somehow see immediately, offered you freedom and adventure without the accompanying danger. You could travel to volcanoes and treasure islands, under the sea or into space, laughing or crying, all while sitting on the sofa or lying on the carpet with your chin propped in your hands.”

((Which is exactly what makes this book so much fun for me!)

I’m not going to attempt to discuss his life and extraordinary friends and relatives, other than to say many of us would be happy to name-drop, as he does “my mother’s great-aunt Ethel and her husband, the former Australian prime minister Stanley Bruce. ‘Uncle S. . . ’” THAT sort of name. But ‘Uncle S’ is hardly a far-fetched claim-to-fame that some might think. He stood in for Mark’s grandfather (Bruce and his wife had no children), took Mark’s mum around Europe and gave her away at the altar. THAT kind of relationship.

Colvin grew up with telephones, tape recorders and, sometimes, diplomatic bags. When he was amongst the first on the scene at the 1977 Granville train disaster (a horrific bridge collapse onto a passenger train in Sydney), there were no public phones free in the area.

“I was just a guy with a tape machine. You knocked on doors and begged people to let you use their phone, promising to pay for the call. Then they watched aghast as you took their phone apart and connected it with alligator clips to your tape recorder . . . . It was a dark and terrible day, but I learned from it for the first time that I could, single-handedly, cover a really big and difficult story without falling to pieces.”

He could easily have fallen to pieces during his hair-raising travels around the world, including Mongolia, countless war zones, and Russia. His stories are even more special because he’s such an intelligent, well-read man who knows and appreciates the history and the culture of where he goes. He’s also a knowledgeable music lover, so music features often.

Of course it’s the spy stories that have probably piqued the public's curiosity the most.

Born in 1952, Mark grew up during the Cold War era, so like many Western children, he was made aware of the threat of Russian spies. Of course, what he tells us now has been learned or gleaned later from research or after his father opened up a bit when things became declassified or when he trusted Mark’s discretion.

Mark certainly hasn’t been indiscreet, but the stories are terrific! This is from 1955 when Kim Philby, the famous double agent was technically “cleared” (although everyone knew he was guilty). But he had very strong defenders still in the service who said Philby simply couldn’t be guilty because he’s “one of us”.

I enjoyed this entertaining bit about the questioning of one of Philby’s closest friends (presumably by another equally friendly interrogator).

“You can get the flavour of this way of thinking from the transcript of a vetting session with Nicholas Elliott which has appeared in more than one intelligence history of the time:

‘Security Officer: Sit down, I’d like to have a frank talk with you.
Nicholas Elliott: As you wish, Colonel.
Officer: Does your wife know what you do?
Elliott: Yes.
Officer: How did that come about?
Elliott: She was my secretary for two years and I think the penny must have dropped.
Officer: Quite so. What about your mother?
Elliott: She thinks I’m in something called SIS, which she believes stands for the Secret Intelligence Service.
Officer: Good God! How did she come to know that?
Elliott: A member of the War Cabinet told her at a cocktail party.
Officer: Who was he?
Elliott: I’d prefer not to say.
Officer: Then what about your father?
Elliott: He thinks I’m a spy.
Officer: So why should he think you’re a spy?
Elliott: Because the chief told him in the bar at White’s [exclusive gentlemen’s club in London’s St James’ Street].’”

He goes on to say

“Espionage is a form of licensed villainy: burglary, blackmail and bribery are tools of the trade, and with a few exceptions almost everybody is greedy for money.

My father told me one story of his time in Vienna, about an assignment on which he was a third-party observer of an exchange between a CIA agent and an Eastern Bloc informant, at an outdoor restaurant by a lake. The informant had brought a briefcase full of documents. The CIA man had brought a case full of greenbacks. My father was looking down from a table on a slightly higher terrace when, as the men opened their respective cases, a sudden, violent gust of wind blew up. Documents and dollars fluttered into the air, towards the lake. ‘And you know what?’ grinned my father. ‘Both of them grabbed for the dollars.’ ”

He’s had enough involvement covering historic events and politics to fill another book, and then there’s the changes to journalism, radio, and television during his time working on papers, ABC’s iconoclastic 2JJ (Double J), and Four Corners. There seems little of any importance in this area he hasn’t been a part of, and uppermost has been fact-checking right up to the last moment before broadcast!

No longer able to gallivant about the globe, Mark Colvin’s voice and Twitter feed are well-known to Aussies, and thank goodness for that. He reckons he’s pretty good at triangulating stories to check veracity. I was taught to find three sources for information, and they must not reference each other. Colvin is a reliable source.

Thanks to NetGalley and Melbourne University Press for the copy for review from which I’ve quoted. Thanks especially to Mark Colvin for writing this.

Some links:
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/mark_colvin.htm

@colvinius "Presenter of PM, ABC Radio. Lifetime Lance-Corporal in the Awkward Squad"

Mark Colvin has a great voice and makes the entire book very entertaining and enjoyable to read and at the same time manages to make you feel as if everything he talks about is something that is happening -kind of like watching a movie! which is something not many authors manage to do!
So kudos to Colvin for really bringing a lively story into book format!


i really enjoyed the views into his journalistic history and learning more on how he became a journalist and how that career evolved. I loved getting to know big world events from his point of view, how he remembered things happening and even how in many big historical moments that was covered hugely by media, he actually was a part of and there to witness it as the journalist reporting!

All that? That was great in this book!


What i honestly did not really get and found a bit.... strange is not the best word for it but it is the best i can do -i am not as articulate a writer as Colvin is!- where his family moments and when he talks about his father.

For me those moments -the moments that clearly where supposed to be a big and important part of the book since the subtitle is "Memoirs of a Spy's son"- felt very interrupting and choppy and a bit unfinished overall.
I don't know if it felt that way to me because i really enjoyed the other parts of the book more -his story of how he grew up and the career parts i already talked about- interesting and the mentioned and pointers that his father was a spy where just kind of moments to me that i just wanted to get through to get back to the interesting things of the book.

Especially since Colvin never really talked about what his father did, how he did it and where he did it. There were small mentioned, and Colvin tells the story how he really found out his father was a spy and that was fine, but all the moments where he kind of starts to get a bit more into his father and the life he had and then he just stops and points to the books his father wrote with the mention of how the government made sure that his father didn't talk about things they didn't want the public to know.

So after those moments everything kind of stopped and we didn't know anything new, and in a way it felt to me like where were walked directly in front of a wall without any real purpose of being there or that Colvin knows how he got there and he needed a few pages to actually get back into the story.


To wrap this all up, i really enjoyed the nicely done mixture of politics, history, journalism both in personal view and overall history as well as his personal childhood memories but i think that he should have just focused on that and not try and build in his fathers life and career into the book as well.

Still it is a great read, and if you either enjoy Colvin's works and want to know more about him because of that, want to read a fantastically written book about being a journalist or simply want to read a nicely done memoir? This is defiantly a good book to try!