Colvin is as circumspect as Bernstein in his claims for journalism: ‘the best obtainable version’ is not a claim to absolute truth. Colvin acknowledges that, as a reporter, he is a ‘single pair of eyes recording the precise moment ... a single perspective on what’s known as the first draft of history’. As a broadcaster (so authoritatively presiding over ABC Radio’s PM program since 1997), he hews to a credo that echoes Bernstein’s: ‘Don’t make up your mind before you have gathered the facts. Never start with a conclusion. Test your theories against the evidence. If the facts contradict you, change your thesis ... listen to others’ opinions, cast your net wide. Then – and only then – draw your conclusions.’

Light and Shadow would serve admirably as a textbook for aspiring journalists (or for any professional ethics course), but, as its title indicates, it is a double-headed narrative, a father-son story wound through revelations of Colvin’s own life as a foreign correspondent and broadcaster. I say ‘revelations’ because, for listeners who have known only Colvin’s perfectly modulated voice and dispassionate, intelligent probing of all comers on PM, the boy and man revealed in these ‘memoirs’ (note the plural) of a spy’s son comes as a shock. Could such a calm, assured professional have such a tumultuous back-story? Well he does, and that reminds us, again, that human beings are mysterious, and we should be careful about our assumptions

Mark’s father, John Horace Ragnar Colvin, lived ostensibly as a diplomat. But he was recruited to Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, in 1949 and lived the double life of a spy thereafter. His son was not fully aware of his father’s profession until his mid-twenties. Now in his sixties, Colvin has had to accept (galling for a journalist and even more so for a son) that aspects of his father’s life will forever remain opaque to him, however assiduous his research into public records, diplomatic dispatches, espionage literature (including his father’s own memoir), and the reports of friends and family.

Mark Colvin

Colvin’s mode is one of effective self-effacement (though he is effusive about many of his peers, familiar names like Paul Murphy, Jim Middleton, Andrew Olle, Richard Carleton). He details the serious illnesses that have dogged him since 1994 in a scant page, saying that he has ‘tried hard not to let them define me’. They have not. About his father he is aware of the psychological complexity of their relationship – ‘the possibility that I stepped unconsciously into a field of work that I thought was the opposite of what my father did’ – but never milks it for drama. He concludes: ‘by trying to be as unlike my father as I could, I was perhaps not so different at all: for both of us, information gathering was our trade, and constant doubt and questioning the knives we wielded’.

Their ‘trade’ has given us a journalist who knows the world from Iraq to Mongolia’s Ulaanbaatar Bator (one of his father’s strategic postings), and whose accounts of it are both serious and enthralling – ripping yarns no less. His life has encompassed childhood in Germany, Austria, Malaysia, and Australia. His mother – and bedrock after his parents’ divorce – Anne Colvin, née Manifold, grew up in Victoria’s Western District, country her son came to love. He was educated in England, at the Dickensian Summer Fields, then Westminster School, and finally the Australian National University. He has interesting connections (his mother’s great-aunt Ethel was married to Stanley Bruce – ‘Uncle Stanley’). His English accent helped earn him employment at the ABC but also curled-lip contempt from Bob Hawke whenever Colvin interviewed him (‘He just hates Poms, mate,’ explained one of Hawke’s staffers). He is an obsessive reader and a lover of the absurd. He understands fully the importance and the costs of his ‘trade’: he has seen colleagues die in the pursuit of ‘the best obtainable version of the truth’.

We are lucky to have Mark Colvin. Read his book and take from it the assurance that integrity and honesty are not extinct – even in the media.