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I miss you little brother

Journalism loses a rising star

Walkley Magazine Issue 44 April/May 2007

Morgan Mellish
1970-2007
A surfer, a sailor and a tenacious journalist, Morgan Mellish was also a good bloke. Sean Aylmer and Andrew Burrell remember a friend.
Beside the bed in Morgan Mellish’s house in Jakarta was a well-thumbed copy of a favourite novel, Christopher Koch’s Highways To A War, about the life of a photojournalist in Indochina, as well as tomes on Islam and philosophy.
He once told a colleague that he decided to become a journalist after reading that novel and Koch’s other compelling account of foreign newsmen, The Year of Living Dangerously.
As a foreign correspondent for The Australian Financial Review in Indonesia, Morgan was fulfilling that dream, as he told a former colleague, fund manager Matthew Kidman, four weeks ago.
Morgan had rung Kidman asking for some investment tips and in the course of a long chat said his Jakarta-based role for the AFR was the perfect job.
“I can do what I want, there’s lots going on over here and I can write what I want, no-one is telling me what to do and I go surfing when I want,” he joked to Kidman, an old mate from when they both worked in the business section of The Sydney Morning Herald in the late 1990s.
Morgan was one of the five Australians and 16 Indonesians who died in the tragic plane crash in Yogyakarta on the morning of March 7. The others were Australian Embassy spokeswoman Liz O’Neill, AusAID officer Allison Sudradjat and federal police officers Mark Scott and Brice Steele. Badly injured in the accident was Sydney Morning Herald journalist Cynthia Banham.
Morgan was among the most liked reporters at Fairfax.
While people remember his laid-back, relaxed attitude to life, he was also a tenacious reporter who refused to be intimidated.
At one lunchtime meeting in 2000 with Ray Williams, the former boss of HIH who eventually went to jail over accounting irregularities, Morgan decided to find out how the insurer’s accounts worked.
“Your treatment of goodwill just seems wrong,” he told Williams, his lunchtime host. “Explain how you can do that.”
Williams, who at the time was king of the insurance industry, said he could do it under current accounting standards. Morgan wasn’t satisfied and badgered Williams for 30 minutes. Eventually the HIH boss fobbed him off by promising to get one of his management team to explain the accounting standards at a later date.
As Morgan walked back to the Fairfax offices in Sussex Street, Sydney, explaining to a colleague why Williams was wrong, he said: “That guy’s a crook.” He was right.
Interviewing Rodney Adler, the former head of FAI Insurances, by phone from the AFR office, Morgan (feet on the table) told Adler he didn’t understand his explanation about buying HIH shares. On and on he probed. Eventually, Morgan’s notes and taped conversations were used as part of the case against Adler that landed the former FAI boss in prison. It is one of the few instances in Australian corporate history in which a journalist’s work has landed a chief executive in jail.
Morgan’s crowning journalistic achievement came in November 2005, when he wrote a series of articles that forced South Australian businessman Robert Gerard off the board of the Reserve Bank. It won him the 2006 Walkley Award for business journalism.
By combing through five court registries in Brisbane and Adelaide, Morgan discovered that Gerard was fighting the Australian Taxation Office over a Caribbean tax haven deal, labelled “tax evasion” by investigators, which led to a $150million settlement.
Gerard’s difficulties with the ATO were known previously, but no-one in the media or government had investigated properly. Morgan nailed the story but needed to speak to Gerard.
Having left a message with Gerard’s wife, Morgan headed to the beach with his surfboard and mobile. Gerard called back just as Morgan was fresh out of the waves. He didn’t have any paper handy, so he scrawled some notes in the margin of his copy of the SMH, including the killer quote from Gerard acknowledging he had told Peter Costello about his dispute with the ATO.
The Walkley Award judging committee called it the first breaking story that “seriously rocked the Howard government”.
“Mellish’s research was exceptional and continued to set the agenda on one of the biggest stories of the year – an outcome that ultimately resulted in Robert Gerard’s resignation.”
The AFR’s chief political correspondent, Laura Tingle, worked with Morgan during the Gerard story.
“I was repeatedly bowled over by the thoroughness of the work he had already done and the confidence that gave him, in his own very cool and detached way, that what we wrote was utterly accurate and beyond political attack,” she says.
Morgan was highly regarded outside the media community.
Treasurer Peter Costello extended his sympathies to the family, friends and colleagues of Morgan: “Morgan was a well-liked and respected journalist and I extend my sympathies to all those who knew and loved him.”
Westpac chief executive David Morgan, who dealt with Morgan over several years, thought he was a “good guy”. “A tenacious journalist is a fair description. If he was on to a story, he was like a dog with a bone. During interviews he was pretty tough-minded and quite probing. He was unfailingly professional,” Morgan said.
And Simon Mordant, joint chief executive of advisory firm Caliburn Partnership, said Morgan was a “star”.
“What he achieved was pretty impressive in any career,” Mordant says of Morgan, whom he met not long after Morgan joined the business section of The Sydney Morning Herald in September 1997.
On his first day at the Herald, Morgan was shown his desk and told to read the papers. After putting a few belongings in drawers, he decided to ring a few friends and provide them with his new phone number. That morphed into long discussions about his recent surfing trip to Indonesia, and by late afternoon on day one he was firmly ensconced, feet on desk, talking to his mates about surfing.
He wasn’t avoiding work – he just hadn’t been given any guidance on what to do. By Morgan’s reckoning, why waste time looking busy on day one when you could use the time better ringing friends.
It demonstrated a self-confidence that Morgan carried throughout his journalistic career. He knew what he was good at, but also his weaknesses. He was never afraid to ask questions, no matter how they sounded, and was happy to take advice.
Regularly he would ask his editors to read his stories in an effort to improve them. He explained once that he loved working with one AFR editor because “she makes me a better writer”.
Such self-assuredness made him a very good journalist. He had no qualms about approaching chief executives, government ministers, investment bankers or anyone who he needed to speak to.
He also had the knack of gaining people’s trust – another essential ingredient in a journalist’s make-up.
“He was someone you instantly trusted and that’s extremely important,” Mordant says. “Sometimes you would talk to him, and you weren’t quite sure whether he got it, but he always did.”
Morgan grew up on Sydney’s North Shore, attending Shore School and surfing the break off the northern beaches. He did an economics degree at the Australian National University in Canberra before becoming a journalist, working for the trade publication Foodweek.
After his stint at the SMH, Morgan shifted to The Australian Financial Review in early 2000, where he worked as financial services editor before becoming chief economics writer based in Canberra.
In 2004 he moved back to Sydney as a senior writer. His goal was always an overseas posting – preferably somewhere with surf. Twelve months ago he became this paper’s Indonesia correspondent and, as he explained to the newspaper’s editor, Glenn Burge, the surf was only “hours away” from Jakarta.
“Morgan was incredibly popular,” Burge says. “He had a dry sense of humour and a laid-back attitude to most things in life. Jakarta was to be the perfect posting for him – a fascinating country to develop his knowledge of Indonesia and, indeed, Asia as a reporter – but also pretty attractive for someone who loved surfing.”
“I always figured Morgan would go a long way in journalism – perhaps one day a senior political writer in Canberra, or serial foreign correspondent.”
Early in 2005, he somehow managed to convince Burge to give him several months of leave without pay to go surfing in Central and South America. Then the Indonesia correspondent’s position was advertised and he applied from somewhere in South America.
If it wasn’t surfing, it was sailing. Morgan sailed with retired insolvency expert Max Prentice and his son Matthew for 15 years.
“Morgs was emotionally capable in the line of fire,” Prentice says.
Morgan was sailing on Prentice’s boat, She’s Apple II, in the treacherous Sydney to Hobart race in 1998. After battling 40 to 50-knot winds for about 24 hours, they dashed for shelter in Eden. From there Morgan filed a first-person account of the storm for the SMH.
“Even at a time of great emotion Morgs could keep a cool head and do things like work,” says Prentice. “It’s a tragic loss of a true friend and a good sailor.”
Morgan died just a week before his 37th birthday.
He was farewelled in Sydney at a memorial service on March 21 at St Andrews Cathedral by hundreds of his colleagues and friends and his family – his mother Dawn, father Peter and sisters Lucy and Caroline. The service was attended by Fairfax Media chairman Ron Walker, News Limited Chief John Hartigan, federal MPs Joe Hockey, Bruce Baird and Julia Gillard as well as Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Kelty.
On Saturday March 24 at 11am a large group of Morgan’s surfing mates and some of his family paddled out on their boards off the south end of Sydney’s Bronte Beach to remember him.

Morgan was a character, a friend and a very good reporter.

He knew what he was good at, but also his weaknesses. He was never afraid to ask questions, no matter how they sounded, and was happy to take advice.

While people remember his laid-back, relaxed attitude to life, he was also a tenacious reporter who refused to be intimidated.