Over the next few weeks China’s main broadcaster will screen almost four hours of a documentary about the great Australian journalist George Ernest (“Chinese”) Morrison.

From 1897 to 1912 Morrison was China correspondent for The Times when the newspaper was effectively an arm of the British foreign office. Because of his position and a series of major political events Morrison became the most recognised Australian in the world.

China Central Television claims an audience of about 1,000 million souls, more than the combined audiences for the United States and Europe. Despite the high regard in China, Morrison is almost forgotten in his country of birth.

A small brass plaque marks his years at Geelong College, where his father was the founding headmaster. In 1932 Chinese people in Australia funded a series of lectures “to honour the great Australian who rendered valuable service to China”. The Australian National University took responsibility for the lectures in 1948 and the most recent Morrison memorial lecture was 6 September 2007.

But little else honours a truly remarkable life.

It would take thousands of words to detail his achievements so this article will only mention some of the highlights. In 1880, aged 18, Morrison walked almost 1,000 kilometres from Victoria to Adelaide.

Two years later Morrison exposed the practice of “blackbirding” in an eight-part series in The Age, after working on one of the ships that lured Pacific islanders aboard and then took them to Australia to work almost as slaves.

That same year Morrison traced the route Burke and Wills had pioneered 22 years earlier, walking 3,254 kilometres in 123 days from north Queensland to Melbourne. Travelling alone and living off the land, Morrison averaged 26.5 kilometres a day. In London, The Times described the journey as “one of the most remarkable of pedestrian achievements”.

At age 23 Morrison led an expedition to walk north across New Guinea, but returned early after being speared twice. No surgeon in Australia would operate and a finger-length spear tip remained in Morrison’s body for a year before an Edinburgh surgeon removed it. Morrison continued his medical studies in Scotland and worked as a doctor from 1888 to 1894 in Spain, Morocco, the West Indies and Australia.

But journalism was his passion. The year of the Adelaide walk, Morrison wrote to his mother that journalism was “the noblest of all the professions”.

In 1894 Morrison’s career moved to a larger canvas.

In February that year, dressed in Chinese garb, Morrison travelled overland from Shanghai to Rangoon in Burma. His diary reports he sometimes walked 48 kilometres a day. The next year his book An Australian in China (subtitled “Being the narrative of a quiet journey across China to Burma”) received critical acclaim in England and Moberly Bell, manager of The Times, offered him a trial as the paper’s China correspondent.

Dr Xuan Doe-Kun has translated Morrison’s book into Chinese and it was launched to coincide with the television program. Dr Xuan is an editor at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences and wrote her PhD about Morrison. “He was a great man,” she told me in Beijing, “and the Chinese people still respect him highly.”

In his 1967 biography of Morrison, newspaper editor Cyril Pearl noted that one of Beijing’s major streets was named after Morrison. People continued to call it “Former Morrison Street” after it was renamed WangFuJing Street.

Dr Xuan and Li Yan showed me where Morrison owned a house on WangFuJing Street, now one of Beijing’s ritziest shopping malls. Li Yan wrote the script for the documentary and Dr Xuan acted as historical adviser.

Li Yan travelled extensively in Australia in 2007 filming for the program, and is astonished that Australians appear to have forgotten Morrison. “When he was alive he was the most famous Australian in the world, along with Dame Nellie Melba,” she said.

Opera singer Melba was born a year earlier than Morrison, in 1861. She continues to be remembered in her own country. Restaurants have named desserts after her. The first thing people see when they arrive at Avalon airport in Victoria is a sculpture of Melba. Where are the Morrison memorials?

Li Yan interviewed Sydney writer Linda Jaivin for the documentary. Jaivin, fluent in Mandarin, is working on a novel based around an affair Morrison had with an American traveller, “Maysie” Perkins, in 1903-04. Morrison called Perkins “the most immoral woman” he had ever met, and Jaivin has based the title for her book on the phrase. Jaivin described Morrison as “a very complex character”.

Jaivin said Times journalist Lionel James’s description of Morrison resonated with her – he was a man of “many-sided greatness”. James covered the 1904 war between Japan and Russia with Morrison.

A huge department store occupies the site where Morrison’s home stood in Beijing. Such is the pace of progress and the value of land in Beijing that new, large buildings soon replace smaller ones. Nearby is the area where thousands of Boxers besieged a few hundred troops and diplomats for 55 days during the Boxer Revolution of 1900.

Li Yan showed me the place where Morrison was shot in the right thigh while inspecting the defences on July 16 that year. Despite the wound he dragged a severely wounded British officer, Captain BM Strouts, to safety as snipers continued to shoot at them.

Morrison later wrote in his diary that Strouts’ body was soaked in blood but the captain remained conscious. Strouts, who died soon after, asked about Morrison’s wound. “I said mine was unimportant,” Morrison wrote. “Then I fainted.”

That same day Morrison’s paper reported that every foreign defender in the diplomatic area had been massacred. The Times report was based on a telegram from the Shanghai correspondent of the Daily Mail, sent the day before and also published in the Daily Mail. The story was a hoax, filed by an American conman named FW Sutterlee.

The Daily Mail had passed the telegram to The Times in good faith. On July 17 The Times published obituaries of Morrison and senior diplomats, noting that no newspaper had ever had “a more able servant than Morrison”. The obituary described Morrison’s judgment as “extraordinary, amounting almost to intuition”.

This event explains the title of the biography Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin published in 2004, The Man Who Died Twice: The life and adventures of Morrison of Peking. That book has been translated into Chinese and launched in China this year [2008] under the title Morrison of China. Allen & Unwin, publishers of The Man Who Died Twice, will re-issue the English version of the book at the end of this year [2008] under that title.

As a young journalist Macklin became intrigued by Morrison after reading the ground-breaking biography by Cyril Pearl. “Morrison was one of the great journalists, and he deserves to be better recognised. He used shoe leather to get a story, unlike too many current journalists who only use the telephone and email. And he defined what it was to be a great foreign correspondent.”

Morrison served as a cultural bridge between Australia and China, Macklin said. “As China moves more into the Australian consciousness, hopefully Morrison will become more appreciated. It’s sad he’s not appreciated in his own country.”

Macklin suggested the time was ripe for Australian journalism to devote an award to recognise Morrison’s achievements. “Many Australian journalists know little about the history of their profession.”

China’s main broadcaster and a major publisher consider Morrison worthy of major projects. It’s time the man was more appreciated in his own country.

* Published in the Walkley magazine edition on China in June 2008.

The world’s oldest blogger, Australian Olive Riley, continues to attract huge international attention almost two weeks after her death.

In the days after her death on July 12, aged 108, her blog crashed because of the huge volume of traffic.

More than 200 messages of condolence had to be placed on a proxy blog by her friend Eric Shackle, 90, who still works as a freelance journalist. The proxy blog is here.

A woman from Iran says she found out about Olive from an Iranian newspaper. From Portugal came this note: “All bloggers from Portugal and Brazil already know her history.” Barbara in Paris said: “I salute this incredible lady”. Shaan Jadhav offered condolences from Pune in India. CNN ran an online obituary, as did countless international newspapers.

Olive’s writing has always attracted attention. On one day in January this year the blog had 350,000 visitors. To put that into context, that is more traffic than some newspaper sites.

Mike Rubbo said Olive had become a “media sensation” in the past year. She appeared in 93 YouTube videos, reminiscing about living through two world wars and raising three children alone while working as a cook and barmaid. In the days after her death the number of visits to the videos doubled to 20,000 a day.

In 2005 Rubbo was researching a documentary on why so many people lived to be 100. Rubbo, 69, is a former head of ABC documentaries who has won scores of awards.

He said he had met 30 other centenarians before he encountered Olive. None “came close to Olive” in terms of their enthusiasm for life, he said. Olive was born in Broken Hill in 1899.

Rubbo’s documentary, The Life of Riley, screened on ABC TV in 2006 and was repeated a year later. His moving eulogy to Olive can be read on her blog. “She was such a standout talent, so touching and funny and such a great story teller,” he said.

“If a woman who left school in 1914 can embrace the Internet in her 106th year, what is there you can’t do,” Rubbo asked rhetorically. “She made you think you could do anything, and I’m grateful for knowing her.”

Eric Shackle met Olive at her Woy Woy nursing home on the NSW central coast while visiting his wife. He said Olive had a fine memory and “an amazing zest for life”.

“Just two weeks ago, she recalled the words of a song that was popular before World War II, and sang the chorus with me.”

Olive Riley averaged about one post a week to her blog since early last year. In her final post, dated June 26, Olive wrote how she felt weak and “can’t shake off that bad cough”.

But she wrote of singing a “happy song, as I do every day” with a visitor to the nursing home. Before long, she said, several nurses sang along too. “It was quite a concert!

“Eric read a whole swag of email messages and comments from my Internet friends today, and I was so pleased to hear from you. Thank you, one and all.”

* Published in The Age July 2008 to mark the death of the world’s oldest blogger, July 2008.

Harold Pinter had two great loves: writing and cricket. I came to understand both those passions while working as a journalist in London and playing cricket with the Gaieties cricket club in the late 1980s. (This article was written soon after Pinter died.)

The actor Lupino Lane, whose company was based at the Gaiety theatre in London, formed the Gaieties cricket club in 1937 and was the first chairman and captain. Harold Pinter captained the Gaieties from 1972.

By the time I knew him in the late 1980s Pinter played only occasionally, but had become club chairman. The team consisted mostly of actors, with occasional guests from the worlds of literature and journalism. We were an itinerant team who never had a home ground and played on Sundays because actors performed on Saturdays.

To many, Harold Pinter appeared a man of contradictions and extremes. When I knew him he always dressed in black, drove a black Mercedes and carried a black briefcase. His then thick black hair glistened darkly. He always wore dark glasses. His voice-mail message said, simply: “I’m not here.”

To people who did not know him Pinter had an air of menace. Certainly that menace was a theme in his plays. The national newspapers often reported his abruptness.

Yet on a personal level Harold was charming and kind. The note he wrote, inviting me to dinner at the London literary club Groucho’s, was full of charm, and included an autographed copy of a monograph Harold wrote about the great England all-rounder Arthur Welland. I treasure that monograph. At Groucho’s Pinter proposed I play for the Gaieties, and so I gradually got to know a complex man.

Early in our conversations I confessed being over-awed by his greatness as a writer, and feeling tongue-tied. He smiled and told me about his early years in Hackney, the suburb I then lived in, fighting off the skinheads.

Beers after each game at a series of west London pubs gave me the chance to talk about writing and cricket. Cricket and writing became a theme and a bond. Harold always preferred to talk about cricket.

A huge portrait of a young cricketer driving through the covers, looking not unlike a young Harold, dominates Pinter’s study in west London. It was there he wrote most of his more than 30 plays and about 20 screenplays. Two of those screenplays received Oscar nominations.

Something Harold wrote about writing in 1958 summarised his contradictions to me: “There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.”

Years later he said he believed these apparent contradictions still made sense and still applied “to the exploration of reality through art”. This exploration continued throughout Harold’s life.

My last season with the Gaieties was 1989-90 before I left London to return to this part of the world. One of the last games of the season was against the Heartaches, led by Tim Rice, the lyricist who worked with Andrew Lloyd Weber. Rice was a rich man because of the success of their many musicals, and he owned the cricket ground in west London where the Heartaches were based.

Pinter played that day because of his friendship and rivalry with Rice, opening the batting. Harold was a fierce competitor, and a dogged batsman. The Age reported earlier this week that Harold’s top score in all forms of cricket was 39. A Gaieties’ veteran, producer Steve Marians, said this cannot be true because Harold was too correct and too determined not to get out.

The Heartaches game was washed out about 4pm, and we retired to Rice’s private bar at the ground. Around midnight a small group of us were still drinking. Emboldened with booze, I asked Pinter: Given the option of a Nobel Prize for literature (remember, this was 15 years before he got the award in 2005) and a century at Lords, which would he choose. He smiled. “The century of course.”

My last game with the Gaieties was against Sidcup. After the match I tossed my boots into a bid in the dressing room, believing I no longer needed them. At a farewell dinner the team gave me back the boots, suitably framed on a plaque, with a quote from one of Harold’s plays about a man who lost his boots in Sidcup. Every time I look at that plaque I remember Harold and his twin passions, cricket and writing.

You can read more about Harold Pinter and the Gaieties cricket club here.

* Published in the Geelong Advertiser December 2008.