Veteran TV newsman renowned for his fearless and intelligent interviewing style
There was a story about Mike Willesee that he heard in full only after the publication of his autobiography in 2017. That when he lay dying as a newborn with a blocked stomach, unable to hold down any milk, his father had prayed in the hospital chapel.
‘‘I give my son to you,’’ the soon-to-be senator Don Willesee said to God. ‘‘Michael is yours. But first, give him back to me.’’
The days-old baby was rapidly starving when a new doctor arrived on the ward and suggested he could save the boy with a new type of operation. The father, fresh from his prayer, agreed. The operation was a success and, soon after, the doctor sailed back to England like some providential angel. Willesee would not remember being told that he’d been promised to God or that he was destined for the priesthood; he just knew it was so. That it was what his life was for.
As a result of the Labor Party split of the mid-50s, his family would move sharply away from the church, coinciding with puberty for young Michael. ‘‘Lying in bed one night I had a moment of clarity,’’ he would later write. ‘‘I was attracted to girls. Which led to the next moment of clarity – if I’m attracted to girls, I can’t be a priest.’’
And so his future took a lurching turn, but he never lost that innate sense of destiny. That he was here for a purpose.
The veteran Australian journalist has died aged 76, from throat cancer, after 50 years as one of the pre-eminent newsmen of his time, known for his fearless and intelligent interviewing style and willingness to push the envelope.
Throughout his time at the ABC, then the Nine and Seven networks, Willesee produced an array of award-winning programmes and documentaries.
When Willesee joined the ABC as a novice television reporter in 1967, he signed on as a company whose name he plucked from the air, Trans Media. The ABC pay office had never seen anything like it. But he insisted and prevailed.
And when Clyde Packer asked him to discuss coming to work at Channel Nine in 1971, without forethought, Willesee decided he didn’t just want a job, he wanted to sell Packer an entire show. It would be like This Day Tonight, but without such nonsense as the books and wine that his former colleagues were indulging in. It would be for the people. And thus A Current Affair was born, with the 29-year-old as owner, producer and star.
It gave him the leverage to stand up to the aging Sir Frank Packer when he tried to influence what went to air, like the time Packer declared that that vulgar ocker (Paul Hogan) must never appear on his station again. Willesee ignored him. But such tensions would eventually cause him to leave Nine. He joined Seven and proceeded to sink the show he had created.
And if he was going to be a rich guy, he was going to do that properly, too. He got the RollsRoyce, the helicopter and a harbourside mansion. He decided he wanted to breed horses, so along with his second wife, Carol, he turned a run-of-the-mill stud into the sort of joint that produced a string of Group One winners and which the ruler of Dubai might want to own. (Which he now does.)
When he got involved with the Sydney Swans AFL team, he ended up buying it with a consortium in order to save it. When others left in the face of mounting losses, he stuck it out with one other – Peter Weinert – only to end up giving the club back to the people as it was starting to become the sort of club the people might want to own.
His personal assistant, Susan Kane, who worked for him from 1980 till the day he died, remembers a shy man who needed time alone. ‘‘He was so humble and quietly spoken, everybody loved him.’’
She remembers a time when she had cancer. ‘‘He rang me every day to see how I was . . . he organised for someone to come and do the cleaning and the washing so the kids didn’t have to worry about it. When he had the money, he was very generous with it.’’
As Willesee’s financial situation deteriorated in recent years, he didn’t change. ‘‘He was never fussed about it,’’ Kane recalls. ‘‘He made a few discreet investments to keep him going and to continue to employ me, but he never seemed concerned. Money wasn’t important to him. All that was truly important to him was his family.’’
He loved having his children nearby. For their part, the children remember a loving father who was endearingly inept around the house. Like the time he tried to juice some fruit in the coffee percolator – paying $50 to his youngest, Jo, to keep it a secret. Or the time he watered an indoor plant for six weeks before realising it was plastic, perhaps a mistake anyone could make, except that he’d repotted it himself.
Willesee had a premonition of a plane crash in Africa in 1997, and when the Cessna’s stall alarms were blaring, he prayed for deliverance. He survived unscathed and it got him thinking about God for the first time since puberty. And when you’re Mike Willesee you don’t just think about God, you build a consecrated chapel in your house, you hang out with cardinals, meet the Pope, and you set out to prove His existence. That was the project which consumed much of the last two decades of his life and which was the subject of a book delivered on his deathbed.
He is survived by his first and third wives, Joan and Gordana, and his children Katie, Michael, Amy, Josh, Jo and Rok, and 11 grandchildren. – By Mark Whittaker/Nine
journalist/broadcaster b June 29, 1942 d March 1, 2019
‘‘Lying in bed one night I had a moment of clarity. I was attracted to girls. Which led to the next moment of clarity – if I’m attracted to girls, I can’t be a priest.’’
Mark Willesee in his autobiography