Former ABC journalist Tim Bowden – who died on Sunday aged 87 – discovered journalism as a teenager, sneaking into the back row of theaters in Hobart in the 1950s to watch Cinesound news, before television was common in Australian homes.
“Before television, it was still possible to get your visual fix. This news was very popular,” Bowden told the Film and Sound archive in 2005.
“Some of us were sitting there a little longer than we should have because [spending time with your girlfriend] in those days it was very difficult with any kind of privacy,” he joked.
From that unlikely beginning, Bowden also fell in love with journalism.
“Tim has been part of the ABC fabric for decades and has made a huge contribution to the national public broadcaster and the nation,” said ABC managing director David Anderson.
“He was generous to his colleagues and was known for both his sense of humor and his passion for journalism and the ABC.”
Journalist and cinematographer David Brill, who was writing a book with Bowden before his death, said the broadcaster always kept his sense of humour.
“He always told me when we talked about journalism to keep the English simple and have a sense of humour,” he told ABC Hobart.
Tim Bowden spent his career at ABC.
From Hobart to the world
Bowden grew up in Tasmania and, after graduating from the University of Tasmania in 1960 with a Bachelor of Arts degree, headed to the UK where he worked as a producer and radio interviewer for the BBC’s Pacific Service.
Three years later he returned to Tasmania and joined the ABC, where he remained for the rest of his long career in journalism.
“Journalists are generally valued in the public mind on a par with used car salesmen, lawyers, politicians or other professionals of dubious reputation,” Bowden wrote.
“But I’ve always been a happy traveler in journalism, which … takes you into all sorts of situations that you might otherwise have had a snowflake’s chance to experience.”
For Bowden, journalism led him to a posting as a foreign correspondent at the ABC in Singapore in the mid-1960s, where he covered the conflict between Malaysia and Indonesia, before working as a war correspondent in Vietnam.
Tim Bowden with US Marine Corporal Jim Keith, Vietnam near Da Nang, July 1966.
“No military was going to give the press the freedom they had in the Vietnam War,” Bowden said in the aftermath of Vietnam.
“You can be embedded, but of course you’re totally a creature of the army and the unit you’re with and you have to report what they’re doing in a positive way – otherwise they won’t let you do it. it.”
Next was a stint in the US, where Bowden covered the biggest stories of the era, including violent demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago.
He returned to Australia the following year and settled in Sydney, working as executive producer of the ABC’s current affairs radio programme, PM.
PM’s first presenters John Highfield and Lawrence Bryant with producer Tim Bowden in 1969. (ABC)
Over the next three decades, Bowden moved back and forth between radio and television. In the 1970s he joined the ABC’s award-winning current affairs program This Day Tonight, before returning to his love of radio in the 1980s – setting up the social history unit at Radio National. After that, Bowden returned to TV, where he produced historical series about Australian POWs, Australia’s involvement in PNG and Antarctica.
More recently, ABC audiences came to know Bowden as the host of the TV program Backchat which ran until 1994. He was awarded the Order of Australia for services to public broadcasting in the same year.
Bowden’s love of a good story made him the prolific author of 18 books.
His biography of Australian combat cameraman Neil Davis, whom Bowden met in Vietnam, became a classic.
“As a young aspiring journalist who only dreams of being a foreign correspondent, the book One Crowded Hour was like a bible to my peer group,” says Matthew Carney, executive producer of Four Corners.
“It proved so viscerally that our dreams could be achieved. His power, never to be underestimated, showed how it could be done. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Tim Bowden for putting the definitive Neil Davis story in front of us all. make a difference.”
In his later years, Bowden continued to blog, write and travel as a “full-fledged” gray nomad in his 4WD Penelope.
“He was a very special man and contributed so much to journalism and publishing in Australia,” Brill said.
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