Australian journalist Ray Martin says it was legendary 99-year-old broadcaster David Attenborough who taught him the secret to a long and satisfying career.<\/p>\n
“He was about 87 when I interviewed him first up,” Martin told a group of aspiring journalists on ABC’s The Assembly.<\/p>\n
“I said ‘what’s the secret?’<\/p>\n
“He said, ‘Don’t do anything you don’t like. Don’t do anything you like. Only do things you love.”<\/p>\n
After six decades as a journalist, 80-year-old Martin has received five gold Logies, and recently saw one named in his honour. But what he really loves is digging into the stories of people.<\/p>\n
“If you’re going to be in the television game, it’s good to win a Logie, or good to win a Walkley award, or whatever it might be, but that’s not what drives you,” he says.<\/p>\n
“What drives you is telling stories and interviewing people and being a journalist.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ray Martin says the truth is at the core of good journalism. (ABC)<\/p>\n
The line journalists shouldn’t cross<\/p>\n
Martin’s drive to tell those human stories has stayed with him in an evolving journalism landscape, where trust is in decline.<\/p>\n
“I think there are too many journalists who tell us what they think rather than what the person they’re interviewing thinks,” he says.<\/p>\n
“I think that’s a line we shouldn’t cross.<\/p>\n
“To get respect back, you’ve got to get back to telling the truth.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ray Martin spent much of his career at the helm of 60 Minutes.\u00a0 (AAP: Channel Nine)<\/p>\n
For Martin, the trick is balance.<\/p>\n
“If I were doing anything with the prime minister at the time, people would ring up saying, ‘It’s quite clear that you’re a card-carrying Liberal’, and the other half would say, ‘It’s quite clear that you’re a card-carrying communist’ \u2026 That was fantastic.<\/p>\n
“I knew they didn’t know what I was thinking, and I think that’s probably been forgotten today.”<\/p>\n
But it’s not just the reporting that’s changed from Martin’s early days in the industry.<\/p>\n
He recalls a time working before the internet, where foreign correspondents needed a “pocket-full of coins” to feed stories back to Australia.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Ray Martin facilitated several political debates. (Archive pool: Reuters)<\/p>\n
This was the case when he was sent to New York to report on Rod Laver’s results at a major tennis tournament.<\/p>\n
“I had to get to a phone and ring it through to Sydney for a radio program,” Martin says.<\/p>\n
“I had a friend who worked for the telephone company in America, and he gave me an out-of-order sign. I went to a telephone booth, and I put this out-of-order sign up so I could get the phone.”<\/p>\n
Martin says he had to tamper with the phone so he could play his tape recorder.<\/p>\n
“I got back and rang AM and gave the results because I had this phone to myself,” he says.<\/p>\n “In those days, you had to really find a phone and enough coins and that sort of stuff.”<\/p>\n Finding balance<\/p>\n As his career grew, Martin relocated to the US with his wife Dianne.<\/p>\n It was here that she fell pregnant with their daughter, Jenna.<\/p>\n “We’d been married for 17 years before we had Jenna, and then Luke a couple of years afterwards \u2014 I honestly thought we weren’t going to have children.”<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n