Please join us on Monday 20th February at 10.30am in our Port Macquarie Library for an author chat with Michael Cavanagh. Our Leanne will be talking to journalist, foreign correspondent, author and local Michael about two of his writing collaborations.
After a short-lived teaching career Michael realised the best thing he could do for the future Australian leaders was to leave the classroom and pursue a journalism career.
For nearly four decades he had a wonderful ride, including reporting federal politics arriving in Canberra at the zenith of the Hawke/Keating double act, and then to chronicle its unravelling.
He also was responsible for the ABC’s News/Current Affairs coverage of the biggest show in town, the Sydney Olympics.
In all of this from 1997 through to 1998 he was the ABC’s China Radio Correspondent based in Beijing at that time often using the term the “emerging power” as a prelude to where it is now the dominant world power.
The Beijing Bureau
“The Beijing Bureau (https://booktopia.kh4ffx.net/JrbAJ2) a book by Australians who have been foreign correspondents in China.
‘Twenty five of us, some who reported for Australian outlets such as the ABC, SMH, and The Australian, and overseas organisations including the BBC, CNN and Financial Times. We each contributed an essay on our period spent in the Middle Kingdom.”The Beijing Bureau” looks at our experiences reporting China, from the 1970s to present day: the lives of its people, its government, culture, and the meaning of China’s rise to Australia and the world community.’ Michael Cavanagh
China is flexing its muscles internationally, through the Belt and Road Initiative and coercive trade bans, through Wolf Warrior diplomacy, the diaspora and military adventures. At home in China, the government is tightening its grip on its people. At the same time, the Chinese people are enjoying prosperity unrivalled in their history.
“The Beijing Bureau” provides readers a thoughtful perspective on this powerful nation.
A cut above
It is an era fast disappearing as Australia’s connection with the bush become more tenuous and industry more high tech. Erwin Leslie Mobbs, better known as Jim or Pops grew up in the shadow of the depression. Leaving school in his early teens with his twin brother, the two toiled away with their Seventh Day Adventist missionary father turned orchardist. The two then struck out growing vegetables supply markets and the military. Soon like many of his generation the call to arms in World War 2 was answered.
Prior to peace breaking out they left the military. Jim took to the bush establishing a business pulling massive felled trees out of the forest for milling in the once booming timber industry around the Wauchope region. As attitudes towards the timber industry changed he returned to his younger days of agriculture. Then, when many would have been content to put up their feet, his early rejection of his family’s religion which embraced abstinence resulted in him actively encouraging his son to take up grape growing and wine making. Certainly a cut above!
