I met George when I was working on This Day Tonight. I’d been there a couple of years when George joined the Sydney office and he was new to television. He, the late Paul Murphy and I went to Canberra in mid-1975 for the extraordinary sitting of the parliament around the loans affair in the Whitlam government.
We sent George to the ABC studio in Canberra to interview an academic about the constitutional issues around the loans affair. It was rough around the edges, but Paul and I just looked at each other and said, “This guy’s a natural, we’re not going to have to teach him much.”
It all just came to him so naturally. Not long after that he became the Canberra correspondent for This Day Tonight, and it wasn’t surprising commercial television came calling. Gerry [Gerald] Stone was chasing George as one of his three reporters when he embarked on setting up 60 Minutes.
Before that, he’d had years as a print journalist for the Australian, he worked for the Australian Financial Review on the industrial round, and he’d worked for Lionel Murphy, who became attorney general in the Whitlam government. He went on the Asio raid with Lionel as his press secretary.
For a school teacher from Brisbane, it’s incredible.
George was so many things, but first and foremost for me, he was an extraordinarily generous human being who had great warmth for people. It was people who drove him and that he responded to. One of his great strengths as a journalist was having no fear about who he was sitting across from and the questions he was prepared to ask. It wasn’t just about stirring people up, it was mostly about trying to get to the essence of what that person was – not just what they had to say, but what made them tick.
He was as comfortable talking with Mother Teresa in Old Calcutta as he was in the back of a Jeep in a north African desert, interviewing a film star in Hollywood or an Australian prime minister. That was part of his great charm, but it was his essential generosity that was so much a part of his strength. He was real and he was genuine.
He was the first anchor of Foreign Correspondent. He and Jonathan Holmes, as the executive producer, laid the foundation of that show in the early 1990s, which is still going today. At the same time we started Lateline.
He was a force on ABC and already well known for current affairs. George loved the ABC and it gave him his start in television – it was a great introduction through This Day Tonight. But he was always about reaching the biggest audience he could, to bring the important stories to the broadest mass of people. That’s probably the thing that drove him the most.
George was not discriminatory about where the audience came from, and he always believed he could bring colour to something without losing the seriousness or importance of the story.
Sometimes people bring different values to different parts of television. But George was happy to work through any medium to reach the maximum audience – the stories that would make sense to people. He never spoke down to anybody, but never compromised on the important core of any story.
He could have ridden that very successful commercial wave for a long time – longer than he did. He could have stayed at 60 Minutes. He could have stayed doing the breakfast show. He could have ended up fronting A Current Affair and living a comfortable life with a very high profile. But George always wanted to expand his horizons.
He left Channel Nine at the top to go off and make documentaries. He did a documentary series Across the Red Unknown through the former Soviet Union. It’s not that long ago that he and I and Sue [Javes] were looking through the book he and [his partner] Kirsty [Cockburn] produced out of that series. This is 12 months ago now, but he was actually responding to those photos, and he was still remembering bits and pieces of it.
One of George’s great strengths for television was that the person you saw in the frame was an exact replica of the man. So many people on television seem to present a slightly different persona, or the essence of the person is not necessarily captured.
But George was George, wherever he was, whatever he stood on, whatever desk he sat behind. And it was the same George you’d be having a beer with or a good meal and sucking on a good red. He was the same guy when he was home with his kids or interviewing presidents and prime ministers and film stars. That was him.
