Hugh Duncan Lunn is an Australia

Australia

Australia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...

n journalist

Journalist

A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...

 and author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

.

Early journalism

Lunn served his journalism cadetship with The Courier-Mail

The Courier-Mail

The Courier-Mail is a daily newspaper published in Brisbane, Australia. Owned by News Limited, it is published daily from Monday to Saturday in tabloid format. Its editorial offices are located at Bowen Hills, in Brisbane's inner northern suburbs, and it is printed at Murarrie, in Brisbane's...

. Upon completing his cadetship, he worked overseas for seven years. During 1967 and 1968 he covered the Vietnam War

Vietnam War

The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...

 for Reuters

Reuters

Reuters is a news agency headquartered in New York City. Until 2008 the Reuters news agency formed part of a British independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data...

. In 1969 Lunn reported on the Act of Free Choice

Act of Free Choice

Act of Free Choice was an event in July to August 1969 by which Indonesia asserts that the Western New Guinea population decided to relinquish their sovereignty in favor of Indonesian citizenship...

 in West Papua while Reuters

Reuters

Reuters is a news agency headquartered in New York City. Until 2008 the Reuters news agency formed part of a British independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data...

 Correspondent in Indonesia.

On returning to Australia he became Queensland editor of The Australian

The Australian

The Australian is a broadsheet newspaper published in Australia from Monday to Saturday each week since 14 July 1964. The editor in chief is Chris Mitchell, the editor is Clive Mathieson and the 'editor-at-large' is Paul Kelly....

. Over the course of the next two decades Lunn was in turn sacked and re-employed
by Rupert Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch

Keith Rupert Murdoch, AC, KSG is an Australian-American business magnate. He is the founder and Chairman and CEO of , the world's second-largest media conglomerate....

's newspaper a number of times. Finding himself without employment at the age of 47, he began to pen a memoir about his childhood.

Author

Lunn is now famous in Queensland for a number of autobiographical books: in June 2009 he was voted as a Queensland Icon as one of 15 "influential artists" in the state's history in a list of 15 which included the Bee Gees

Bee Gees

The Bee Gees are a musical group that originally comprised three brothers: Barry, Robin, and Maurice Gibb. The trio was successful for most of their 40-plus years of recording music, but they had two distinct periods of exceptional success: as a pop act in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and as a...

, Geoffrey Rush

Geoffrey Rush

Geoffrey Roy Rush is an Australian actor and film producer. He is one of the few people who has won the "Triple Crown of Acting": an Academy Award, a Tony Award and an Emmy Award. He has won one Academy Award for acting , three British Academy Film Awards , two Golden Globe Awards and four Screen...

, Powderfinger

Powderfinger

Powderfinger was an Australian rock band that formed in Brisbane in 1989. From 1992 until their breakup the band lineup consisted of vocalist Bernard Fanning, guitarists Darren Middleton and Ian Haug, bassist John Collins, and drummer Jon Coghill....

 and David Malouf

David Malouf

David George Joseph Malouf is an acclaimed Australian writer. He was awarded the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in 2000, his 1993 novel Remembering Babylon won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 1996, he won the inaugural Australia-Asia Literary Award in 2008, and he was...

. The best known of his memoirs is Over The Top With Jim. Published in 1989, Over The Top... became the biggest-selling non-fiction book in Australia for the calendar year 1991. It tells the story of his Brisbane childhood and his friendship with Jim Egoroff and Ken Fletcher

Ken Fletcher

Kenneth Norman Fletcher was an Australian tennis player who won numerous doubles and mixed doubles Grand Slam titles....

. After reading the book Egoroff is said to have visited Lunn and threatened to "punish you for your sins".

Lunn is also famous for coining the phrase "there is no such thing as an ex-Queenslander", which he first used when in November 1979 he convinced rugby league

Rugby league

Rugby league football, usually called rugby league, is a full contact sport played by two teams of thirteen players on a rectangular grass field. One of the two codes of rugby football, it originated in England in 1895 by a split from Rugby Football Union over paying players...

 Senator Ron McAuliffe, President of the QRL, on a 90-minute plane trip from Brisbane to Canberra, of the viability of a Rugby League State of Origin

Rugby League State of Origin

State of Origin is an annual best of three series of rugby league football matches contested by the Maroons and the Blues, who represent the Australian states of Queensland and New South Wales respectively...

 series.

Awards

• Walkley Award
  Walkley Awards
  The annual Walkley Awards, under the administration of the Walkley Foundation for Journalism, are presented in Australia to recognise and reward excellence in journalism. Finalists are chosen by an independent board of eminent journalists and photographers. The awards cover all media including...
  
  (1974)(for six feature articles dealing with the Brisbane floods)
• Walkley Award (1975)(for feature on Why Queensland is Different.
• Walkley Award (1979) (for a series of articles from Australia, Hong Kong, Cambodian border and Malaysia on Vietnamese boat refugees)
• Special AMA Award for a 1979 Medical Article "The Re-making of Robert Hoge"
• National Press Club Best Sports Feature Award (1979)(for "The Maroon Avengers")
• The Age Book of the Year Award 1985 for VIETNAM A Reporter's War

Publishing Record

• Joh: The Life and Political Adventures of Johannes Bjeke-Petersen 1978
• Behind the Banana Curtain 1980
• Four Stories: About Aboriginal Australians in Queensland 1982
• "Queenslanders" [(1984)]
• VIETNAM A Reporter's War 1985
• Over The Top With Jim 1989
• More Over The Top With Jim Stories 1992
• The Over The Top With Jim Album 1995
• Head Over Heels, University of Queensland Press 1992 ISBN 0-7022-2418-9
• Fred and Olive's Blessed Lino, University of Queensland Press 1993 ISBN 0-7022-2575-4
• Spies Like Us, University of Queensland Press 1995 ISBN 0-7022-2757-9
• Working for Rupert Hodder Headline 2001
• On the Road to Anywhere HH 2003
• Lost for Words, ABC Books 2006 ISBN 0-7333-1759-6
• The Great Fletch, ABC Books 2008
• "Words Fail Me", ABC Books, 2010