Voices from the Air Read Online Free PDF Page B

bloodline and the determined streak had covered some of the hardest campaigns of the New Guinea theatre for the ABC, and his reporting had touched a chord in the listeners to ABC radio.

    Dear Sir, Kindly accept my thanks for forwarding me a copy of the script of the field unit recording ‘The Australian Soldier.’ I have made two copies of it which I am forwarding to my two sons in New Guinea & who will enjoy it just as much as we did.
    â€“ Listener letter to the ABC, 13 December 1943,
John Hinde
    Many years after the war, John Hinde reflected about the effect of the war on correspondents and just how desperately he had needed a break when he returned from the Philippines.

    One of the problems of being a correspondent was that you didn’t get rest. If you were an active soldier you’d be in a landing, you’d be trained for six months beforehand and you’d be stuck there for months afterwards, whereas ancillary people tended to skip from one hot area to another and I think a lot of us got a bit fed up with this. I saw less action than many of them, and some of them stood up to it remarkably well and some were slowly broken down by it. Some of them became quite obsessed with action or with their work. 15
    To complete his coverage of the Philippines, Hinde spent some time in Melbourne, home to Navy Headquarters, preparing a documentary on the naval battle for Leyte Gulf. When he returned to Sydney he was so ill, he went into hospital. He did not go overseas again for the remainder of the war and was back in hospital for VP Day, the day of the news of the Japanese surrender.
    Some correspondents did not stay with the ABC after they finished their time in the field covering the war. ‘There were no particular honours going, not for newsmen who’d been there,’ said Hinde, but he stuck with the broadcaster. ‘It wasn’t easy to accept for a while. There was a time when I thought I might move back to a newspaper but I had a very deep affection for the ABC.’ 16
    Hinde was with ABC News when it finally launched its independent news service in 1947 and recalls writing the script for the News announcement on the first morning. In 1956, with the introduction of the television news service, he worked on the link between television and the existing radio news service, and also reported for some of the early broadcasts of the ABC’s radio current affairs programs. Hinde thoughthe probably remained working in news as long as he did, in part simply because of a sense of inertia after the war, but he loved the fun of handling a major running news story. ‘There’s nothing more exciting . . . than really handling it, and knowing your medium and getting it on air as it goes.’ 17
    After a stint freelancing, he replaced Frank Legg as the ABC’s film reviewer, when Legg was killed in a car crash, and he found a new calling, as a film reviewer on radio and television. His skills as a story teller honed during his time as a war correspondent were evident in the engaging narrative and gentle raconteur persona of his film reviews. Much later in life, Hinde developed almost cult popularity as a guest on comedy sketch programs such as Libby Gore’s Elle McFeast . In 2004, John Hinde was the guest of honour at the launch of an exhibition on the history of the ABC’s foreign correspondents and war correspondents. Hinde’s wife Barbara Jefferis died that year. John Hinde died two years later in 2006.
Raymond Paull
    Ray Paull was ill with malaria when he came home from New Guinea in March 1945, and he also had later relapses. ‘I remember him being unbelievably ill,’ recalls his daughter Vivienne. ‘I remember the lights being on all through the night while Mum rushed in and out, and he’d throw all the blankets off and then he’d pull them back on.’ Once he recovered from the initial bouts of malaria Paull returned to work as a news journalist in