Power, Change and Responsibility

Vale John Martinkus

The Workers’ Monument of Vojvodina (1972) by Boško Petrović, Novi Sad. Photo – SpomenikDatabase

Yesterday my former colleague John Martinkus died. John was a year younger than me.

We worked together quite a few years ago at the University of Tasmania. He’d moved to that end of the earth after an unusually intense early career as a reporter from – and sense-maker about – conflict zones.

He’s best known for his work in Timor Leste (where his reporting helped motivate the international community to send in a UN peacekeeping force in 1999, against the backdrop of the locals’ push for independence from Indonesia), Papua, Aceh, Iraq (where he was briefly kidnapped by Sunni insurgents) and Afghanistan.

Like me, John was born in Australia – his parentage was Lithuanian, mine is partly Balkan. We had good, crisp discussions about the situation of being children of post-WW2 migrants who weren’t Anglo-Celts. Not very many of us in Tasmania, nor in that university.

There are many pointed lessons from John’s legacy – including for the degraded spaces of our contemporary media, politics and the academy.

Here’s an interview I did a few hours ago with ABC Radio in Tasmania, and one of his students.

And here’s another from ABC RN with Sally Sara and Mark Davis.