MEMOIR
Light and Shadow: Memoirs of a Spy's Son
MARK COLVIN
MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS, $32.99
In his long career as an ABC correspondent and broadcaster, Mark Colvin has covered stories as significant as revolution in Iran and famine in Africa. He learned early to carry a passport and be wary of translators. (An interview with Lech Walesa in 1981 went awry when, instead of being asked if he respected the Polish PM, the question put to Walesa by Colvin's intermediary was whether he fancied him.)
![Author Mark Colvin.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170517054933im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/8/0/g/e/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gt1wvk.png/1494506824423.jpg)
But an equally intriguing story always lay close to home. His father was an English spy. And it was only when Colvin started to apply some of the skills of investigative journalism to his family history that a more complete picture emerged.
He likens the process of discovery to "the realm of detective work, pieced together from scraps, first- and second-hand, including the testimony of my mother (usually careful and reliable); the anecdotes (often unreliable, sometimes positively misleading) that my father sparingly doled out ... the difficult job of making sense of a life that was lived on two levels, the public and the secret."
![Light and Shadow, by Mark Colvin.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170517054933im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/1/w/w/t/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gt1wvk.png/1494506855484.jpg)
John Colvin's profession – he was, ostensibly, a Foreign Office diplomat – explains the peripatetic nature of Mark Colvin's upbringing, which included stints in Austria, Malaya, the UK and also Australia. He writes: "My mother grew up in western Victoria, my father in the English county of Hampshire." His British background might have assisted him getting employment with the ABC in Sydney in 1974. A decade later, however, it didn't help. Sensing that then-PM Bob Hawke "seemed to single me out as an especially loathsome specimen", he sought an explanation from a staffer, who explained: "He just hates Poms, mate." Colvin decided it was pointless to protest that he was half-Australian.
Like many contemporaries, he had drifted into the profession with no formal training. He learned on the job. In January 1977, working for radio station 2JJ, Colvin reported on the Granville train disaster, which killed 83 people. "You go numb, trying to cover a story like that for the first time at the age of 25, or at least I did. Some people freeze up entirely: luckily, for me it was not the numbness of paralysis but a sort of emotional shell. You concentrate on your notebook and your tape recorder."
He is selective with personal stories. Of his parents' divorce, he writes: "My school reports ... showed me suddenly dropping from near the top of the class in most subjects to the lower middle. I just felt the need to endure." His memories of Oxford, where he studied literature, are more golden. The soundtrack includes the usual suspects – Stones, Pink Floyd, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell – and also Terry Riley's A Rainbow in Curved Air ... "I sat on the steps of the Christ Church Library for 45 minutes and soaked it up in the sunshine. No one complained ... Time slid away like mercury skittering across a floor."
Colvin can write as well as he speaks. But he is telling several stories here, and confronts structural problems fitting his personal and professional memories into the jigsaw puzzle of his father's life. He could go several years without seeing him, but their relationship was solid. "For all our political differences we shared a huge amount in terms of artistic and literary interests, among other things, and his enormously wide knowledge of history and foreign affairs was an extraordinary resource." His father wore dark glasses to their farewells: emotions had to be hidden.
Colvin has more to say than space to say it. The focus on his father means his mother remains mostly in the background. And some topics remain private. It comes as a shock when he mentions, almost in passing, a partner and child. And he reveals little about his long illness, resulting in a kidney transplant, or more recent times. "There are a lot of good stories," he writes. "By the time you get to my stage in life, the playlist is always too long for one concert."
Espionage and journalism have much in common, not least information and secrets. Maybe Colvin has another book in mind. Or perhaps, like his father, he prefers to keep some things to himself.
Alan Attwood is a former Fairfax correspondent and editor of The Big Issue.