by Mark Colvin
Visnews, 26, 233–4, 269
Wałęsa, Lech, 243–4
Ward, Stephen, 102
Warner, Russell, 250–1
Warsaw, 242–3
Washington: art galleries, 223; National Air and Space Museum, 223; reunion with father, 219–20, 221–3
Watkins, Peter, 120, 209
Waugh, Evelyn, 13, 51, 242
Webb, Marius, 194, 214
Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 253
Weekend Magazine, 43, 253
Weinstein, Allen, 225, 226
Wenner, Jann, 221
West Indies cricket team, 134
Westminster School, London, 105; alcohol, 124–5; A-Levels, 147; boarding, 145; cadet corps, 122; drama productions, 123, 126–7; English masters, 125–7; free time, 123–4; housemasters, 123; interest in history, 143; Liddell House, 122, 123; nuclear war concerns, 121; Oxford Entrance Exam, 148; school trip to Greece, 143–4; singing in cathedral, 122; smoking, 125; student demonstration, 145–6; uniform, 121; ‘Up School’, 122–3
Whistler, James McNeill, 223
White, Dick (‘C’), 60, 70
Whitlam, Gough, 186–7, 194, 196, 198, 238; Dismissal, 200–201, 202–3, 205, 206, 211–12, 219; ‘Maintain Your Rage’, 203–4
Whitrod, Ray, 211
Wilde, Oscar, 105
Wilkinson, Marian, 272, 280
Williams, Shirley, 247
Winter, Patti, 194, 195
Wintergarden picture palace, 208, 209
Woollett, Richard, 139
Woolley, Charles, 231
World Series Cricket, 217
Wran, Neville, 189, 211
Wren, Christopher and Marciane, 114
Yalta Conference (1945), 277
Yamani, Sheikh, 264
Young, George, 71, 72
Young, Hugo: One of Us, 236
youth culture, 125, 211
Z Special Unit, 83
Zambia: Joyce killed, 4–6; President Kaunda, 5
Zimbabwe, 4, 246
My mother Anne and father John arriving in Australia in early 1949. It was the first time my father had met her parents.
My father’s Panamanian Merchant Navy registration papers, dated September 1949, which describe Lt-Cdr John Colvin, R.N., as a ‘trainee’.
My parents on their wedding day.
With my mother, aged 1.
Dining with my mother in Caorle, Italy, 1954.
Aged about 4, with my beloved dog Bamse.
On my 7th birthday in Kuala Lumpur, with the magician or ‘gully-gully man’.
With my sister Zoe, arm still in plaster, 1959.
On ‘Merah’ at Kuala Lumpur racecourse, having a riding lesson.
My father at the Kuala Lumpur family home, 7 Lorong Kuda. The famed Petronas Towers now stand where the racecourse (and the house) used to be.
At the funeral of the head of SIS, Sir Dick White, in 1993. The man in the three-piece suit with the watch chain, someone whispering in his ear, is my father. Photograph Brian Harris, courtesy The Independent
At Double J, circa 1976.
Photograph courtesy ABC Archives
First week on The World Today.
Photograph courtesy ABC Archives
With my eldest son Nicolas in Brussels, 1985.
In Brussels in 1985 with the ABC’s chief political correspondent Barrie Cassidy, who was travelling with Prime Minister Bob Hawke.
With producer Sally Wiadrowski, camera operator Dave Maguire and sound recordist Eric Briggs, on the edge of the vast Namib Desert, Namibia in 1989.
In 1990 during the run-up to the First Gulf War at the multi-million dollar building in Baghdad promised as a memorial to the hundreds of thousands of dead of the Iran–Iraq war, but in fact a museum of the life of Saddam Hussein.
Already ill but still undiagnosed, with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 1994.
In Charing Cross Hospital, London, 1994. It was to be the beginning of a stay of several months and a chronic illness that affected me for more than two decades.
With my son William.
