The first foreign editor for ABC News, John Tulloh, was a much-loved legendary figure who fostered generations of journalists, encouraging them to go out in the world and tell compelling stories.
Former ABC North-East Asia correspondent Wally Hamilton, who worked alongside Tulloh, has paid tribute to him for ABC Backstory.
How are international news stories covered?
These days, a story can be filmed on a mobile phone, edited on a laptop and distributed via email. It wasn't always the case.
News cameras used to be wind-up Bell and Howells or Sony CP16s holding 400 feet, or 10 minutes, of film that needed to be chemically processed and manually cut into a story.
The script was often recorded on a cassette tape and sent along to be matched up later.
Customs red tape, an airline strike, censorship or bad weather easily prevented an item from reaching its destination.
Over a 40-year television career, John Tulloh witnessed the transition from film to digital file, telex to email, shipment to satellite feed.
He started at the Visnews news agency in London and later became ABC TV's first foreign editor, based in Sydney, before his retirement as Head of International Operations in 2004.
His recent death, at the age of 82, revived memories of a golden age of news.
Born in 1940 as one of four siblings including a twin sister, Tulloh grew up in beachside Adelaide.
His father worked at The News, an afternoon daily, before starting a public relations company.
After serving a cadetship at The News, Tulloh sailed for the UK in 1961 in search of adventure and career opportunities.
He was eventually hired by Visnews as a scriptwriter at its London headquarters.
Assignments took him to Mexico, Calcutta, Cairo, Hong Kong, New York… the list goes on.
Successful "analogue" journalism depended more on nous and people skills than technology, and Tulloh had both.
David Brill, a distinguished cameraman who knew him well, said: "The great thing about Tulloh was the consistency and loyalty of his friendships."
It enabled him to make and keep friendships with key people in media organisations around the world.
These contacts often allowed ABC correspondents to link into a wider and richer network of resources.
When president Marcos of the Philippines was ousted in a coup in 1986, Ian Macintosh led the corporation's coverage team in Manila.
The ABC linked up with the BBC and NBC, thereby out-competing the Australian commercial stations scrambling to cover the story.
"I wouldn't have been able to get the ABC accepted as a junior partner in the consortium — this was John's work," Macintosh recalls.
It was the same when Macintosh reopened the ABC's Jakarta office in 1991, after years kept out in the cold by the Suharto regime.
Trying to book a satellite to send a news story was often a nightmare.
"Where I couldn't get permission through official lines in Indonesia, he could get it done through his contacts at TVRI [the national broadcaster]," Macintosh said.
Jill Colgan found herself "in the desert in Afghanistan with no means of communication and no backup," and trouble looming.
Using a satellite phone scavenged from another reporter, she called "JT", as he was affectionately known.
"We were brought into the BBC's fold, safer, supported, and able to file on the coming war without missing a deadline," she said.
"He was a lifeline."
Greg Wilesmith, who reported from war-torn Belgrade in 1998, said Tulloh was a "master organiser".
"After NATO bombed the main television station, communications became rather more difficult, and we had to arrange to have the videotapes driven across the border to Romania," he said.
"These kinds of logistics were meat and drink to him."
In 1991, following the Gulf War, Trevor Bormann was tasked with setting up a new bureau in Amman, Jordan.
Tulloh handled the "almost daily" requests for more expenditure with good humour, as this extract from a note to Trevor shows:
"We are so concerned about your aversion to strolling up and down the seven jebels [hills' of Amman that we have concluded your 4W-drive proposal is a good one."
Driver: "No problem, go ahead. What's your next request, a butler?"
During the Cambodian civil war in the 1970s, a freelance Korean cameraman working for Visnews went missing for weeks and was feared dead.
Tulloh "inflated" the story fee and flew to Seoul with a large bundle of cash for his family.
Fortunately, the man escaped his captors and turned up safe in Phnom Penh.
His biggest problem then was explaining to his wife how it was he was earning so much money yet sending little of it home.
Tulloh knew only too well about the dangers of the job.
His friend Neil Davis died in 1985 when hit by shrapnel while filming during a coup in Thailand.
Tulloh described Davis as "always calm, unflappable and ever so modest about his experiences".
He shared the same personal qualities, which helped to earn him a place among the finest foreign editors in the world.
In 2003, ABC contract cameraman Paul Moran was killed in northern Iraq by a suicide bomber.
Tulloh handled the terrible aftermath with his usual tact and delicacy.
Moran's widow would receive a call from JT each anniversary thereafter.
The first Gulf war, the toppling of the Twin Towers, the invasion of Iraq and the scourge of terrorism made the protection of staff serving in hostile areas a greater challenge.
Pre-deployment"survival training", the wearing of NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) suits, even armour-plated vehicles became requirements.
While reporting from Bosnia in 1993, Max Uechtritz heard "the ping of a sniper's bullet" hitting the fortified Range Rover they called "The Hog".
"It had different-sized tyres on each of the four wheels and the heating system had been purloined," he said.
"We had a very cold winter down there in Sarajevo."
Uechtritz had covered the Tiananmen Square protests and military crackdown in Beijing in 1989, where Singapore-based cameraman Willie Phua captured famous images of the "tank man" carrying his shopping bags and holding back the PLA.
Tulloh's ability to anticipate developing stories, resource the coverage and keep lines of communication open proved crucial once more.
Former Washington correspondent, now ABC editorial director, Craig McMurtrie has described Tulloh as calm in a crisis and unfailingly supportive.
"JT seemed to watch, read and listen to everything you filed and didn't duck tough feedback when it was needed," McMurtrie said.
Tulloh once wrote: "News is a serious commodity."
He hated if it strayed into gossip or rumour, and he would swoop like a hawk on sloppy language, jargon or slang in scripts.
John Cameron, a foreign correspondent who went on to become director of news and current affairs, has commented: 'You knew what was expected of you.
"His feedback was carefully couched as encouragement rather than criticism," he said.
"And yes — he was a stickler on standards, but never in a superior way."
Tulloh wanted value-added stories from his correspondents, not pieces rehashed from briefings or handouts.
He wanted stories that captured the mood and attitudes of ordinary people in middle America or downtown Tokyo, not merely the contesting elites.
He deeply regretted the homogenisation of news.
"So much international coverage is due to the ripple effect of what is happening in the most powerful country of the world," he said.
"So many US-based reporters, especially inside the Washington beltway, are influenced by what they read on the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post and to some extent the network evening newscasts.
"It is like an infection."
How are international news stories covered?
Tulloh's own simple description of himself as a boy offers an answer: "I was not a nosy kid, but learned to be observant."
