Mike’s modern history
Baby boomer broadcaster charts his life and career alongside Australia’s development
MIKE Carlton might have a reputation for being outspoken, opinionated and controversial, but when we telephoned him for this interview, we found him in his kitchen prepping for dinner before going out on the school run to pick up his nine-year-old son.
At 72, the Sydney broadcaster, journalist, commentator, columnist, television and current affairs reporter has more than 50 years of experience in the cut-throat media industry, but now he’s a mellow fellow, relishing his role as house-husband while his wife, Morag (28 years younger than him), works long hours as a producer of ABC’s Four Corners program.
“I did not believe it was possible when I heard our son was about to be born,” he said.
“I was shocked, thought it would interrupt my serene retirement, but it has been an absolute joy to have him. He keeps me young. I must keep up with life for him, keep up with the world for him. It is an incredible pleasure.”
Mike has just released his memoir, On Air, a mighty 550page tome recording his life – all the good, bad and the ugly – and while he set out to write his personal story, he has written a record of modern Australian history that every baby boomer will relate to.
“I did not consciously write it as (a record of our modern history),” he said.
“But I didn’t want it to be just about me. I wanted it set in the context of the times.”
Those times Mike refers to begin in the 1950s, when, as a suburban schoolboy in Sydney, he lived with his widowed mother, younger brother and bigoted grandmother.
Every penny counted in their household. Mike recalls a time of great financial difficulty as a boy after his father died when Mike was just five and his mother struggled to keep the roof over their heads.
However, it was also a happy time, an enlightening time of modest ambitions and boyhood and teenage rites of passage. Unable to afford a university education he left school at 16 and gained a journalism cadetship with the ABC, a journey that began humbly but eventually propelled him to the very top.
“I would like to think my book speaks to baby boomers,” he said.
“Things were a lot simpler then in terms of everything from schooling to education.”
In insightful and often hilarious prose, Mike has dredged his memory to talk of school days in Australia in the ’50s, when education taught him little of the world and virtually nothing of real life.
It wasn’t until he wandered into journalism that he started to learn about the outside world, especially on assignment as a foreign correspondent in Vietnam in the ’60s.
“The Vietnam horror. I talk a lot about it in the book. I had had a sheltered life in Sydney and going out into that was an eye-opener.”
After stints as a foreign correspondent in Indonesia and Singapore, he returned to Australia, still a young man, but with eyes wide open to the shortcomings of almost all our world leaders of the time.
In the book, Mike writes: “The profound lesson I had learned was that authority has an infinite capacity to distort and lie to protect itself from the consequences of its mistakes.”
Many such harsh criticisms are peppered throughout On Air, and Mike does not hold back in his scathing assessments, whether talking about Gough Whitlam, Indonesia’s Suharto, or Queensland’s Bjelke-Petersen.
And he does not run when it comes to criticism of some of the media industry’s personalities, from radio broadcasters to television presenters, to board members and management.
Is he worried about the backlash to his memoir?
“I am more nervous about what my friends will think, and my brother. I don’t really care what the enemies think. It was fun taking a stick to a few people. It would be dishonest to say it was not enjoyable.”
Mike has two adult children and a 12-year-old grandson to his first wife Kerri, as well as his nine-year-old son with his wife Morag.
Now he has finished writing his memoir, he spends his days looking after the family household in Sydney’s Pittwater, supporting his wife in her career, managing to fit in a swim and surf as often as he can as he believes “regular immersion in salt water is essential to life”.