Murray Sayle
Encyclopedia
Murray William Sayle OAM
(1 January 1926 19 September 2010) was an Australia
n journalist, novelist and adventurer.
A native of Sydney
, Sayle moved to London
in 1952. He was a foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times
in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During his long career he covered wars in Vietnam, Pakistan and the Middle East, accompanied an expedition on its climb of Mount Everest
, sailed solo across the Atlantic Ocean
, was the first reporter to interview double agent Kim Philby
after his defection to Russia, and trekked through the Bolivia
n jungle in search for Che Guevara
. He resigned from The Sunday Times in 1972 after the newspaper refused to publish an investigative piece he wrote about the Bloody Sunday
shootings of 26 unarmed protesters in Northern Ireland
.
Sayle moved to Hong Kong in 1972 and to Japan in 1975. Altogether he remained in Japan for nearly 30 years, writing about that country for various publications, principally The Independent Magazine
, The New Yorker
and the New York Review of Books.
, a Sydney
suburb, in 1926, Sayle was the son of a railway executive. He attended the Canterbury Boys' High School
before enrolling at the University of Sydney
. At university, Sayle studied psychology and worked for the student magazine, Honi Soit
. After leaving without taking a degree, Sayle worked as a newspaper reporter for The Sydney Daily Telegraph
, the Cairns Post, and The Daily Mirror
. He also worked for six years as a radio reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
.
, who had decided to move to Britain. Sayle became a reporter for the tabloid, The People
. Working as an assistant to crime reporter Duncan Webb, Sayle was credited with the phrase, "I made my excuses and left." Sayle left journalism in 1956 and supported himself by selling encyclopaedias in Germany while writing a novel about his experiences on Fleet Street
titled A Crooked Sixpence. The novel was pulled from publication after threats of litigation by an individual upon whom one of the characters was based. The novel was finally published more than 50 years later.
. There, he developed a reputation as "the most forceful of Fleet Street
's finest." British reporter Godfrey Hodgson described Sayle as follows: "Large, shrewd and with many of the characteristics of an armoured vehicle, Murray had plenty of the 'rat-like cunning' advocated by his colleague Nick Tomalin
when it came to that basic reportorial talent of getting oneself in the right place at the right time."
exposing the financial fraud of insurance businessman Emil Savundra
. Sayle reported that the "reserves" of Savundra's insurance company included securities that were forgeries. Savundra's company collapsed in 1966, and he fled to his native Ceylon
(now known as Sri Lanka). Also in 1966, Sayle gained attention when he chartered a plane to find the noted sailor Sir Francis Chichester
, who had gone missing in a storm off Cape Horn
during an attempt to become the first person to sail non-stop solo around the world.
, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971
, He received the Journalist of the Year award in the Grenada Press Awards for his reports from Vietnam. In 1968, he opened an eye-witness account of an all night Viet Cong attack as follows:
in the South American jungle with the Bolivian army. Although they did not meet up with Che, they found what Sayle described as "a strongly fortified base of Castro-type Communist guerrillas." Sayle searched through the rubbish left behind at the base and found documentary evidence, including a photograph and asthma prescriptions, that enabled Sayle to report that Che had left Cuba and was fomenting Communist insurrection in South America. Forty years later Sayle wrote for the first time about his Bolivian journey and the circumstances leading to Che's execution by the Bolivian army.
He made headlines again in late 1967 when he tracked down British double agent
, Kim Philby
, in Moscow. After several days of staking out Moscow's foreign post office, he spotted Philby. Sayle recalled, "After a few days, I forget how many exactly, I saw a man looking like an intellectual of the 1930s, all leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket. I walked up to him and said, 'Mr Philby?'." He then secured the first and only interview of Philby after his 1963 defection. Sayle reported that he found Philby to be "a charming, entertaining man with a great sense of humor." Sayle also described Philby to be man with an "iron head" for drink who appeared to be enjoying his new life and who denied being a traitor. Philby told Sayle, "To betray, you must first belong. I never belonged."
to cover the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia
. Fellow journalist Harold Jackson
has written of Sayle's ingenuity in getting their stories out of the country. International telephone calls were blocked, and the Russians had seized the Prague telex
exchange. Sayle and Jackson discovered that not all of the telex connections were blocked and spent 13 hours dialling "the 10,000 possibilities" to find a working telex code. After discovering several working exchanges, Jackson recalled that the enterprising Sayle sold the numbers to other journalists at "$100 a pop." Another obstacle facing the foreign press in Prague was a shortage of Czech crowns. Sayle took Jackson with him to the office of the Czech firm responsible for distribution of The Times
in Czechoslovakia. Sayle claimed to be the publisher's personal representative and demanded that the man turn over funds that had not been remitted due to exchange restrictions. Jackson recalled, "We left the building with huge packs of Czech crowns stashed in a linen bag rustled up from some cupboard. They kept the foreign press corps functioning for weeks, no doubt at a suitable rate of exchange."
television. According to a published account in The New Yorker
, Sayle learned of the Everest assignment while covering the war in Vietnam: "Murray was in a foxhole in Vietnam when a runner comes sprinting up through the incoming fire with a cable from The Sunday Times. 'Report to Kathmandu,' it said. 'You're going to climb Everest.'" Photographer John Cleare, who also participated in the expedition, recalled that Sayle brought "almost a complete porter load of literature" with him and added:
The expedition came within 1,800 feet of the summit, and Sayle wrote: "The very small number of people who actually know something about Himalayan mountaineering do not consider that our expedition was a failure at all."
In 1972, Murray sailed solo across the Atlantic Ocean
as a participant in the Single-Handed Trans-Atlantic Race.
, a January 1972 incident in Derry
, Northern Ireland
, in which 26 unarmed civil rights
protesters and bystanders were shot, and 13 killed, by a regiment of paratroopers from the British Army
. Sayle and his reporting partner, Derek Humphry
, were sent to Derry to investigate the shooting and concluded that the paratroopers had not been fired upon, as they claimed, and that the shooting was the result of a planned special operation to eliminate the IRA
leadership in Derry. Four days after the shooting, Sayle and Humphry turned in a 10-page story, but The Sunday Times refused to publish it. Sayle resigned in protest, and the unpublished story "vanished for a quarter-century." In 1998, The Village Voice
obtained a copy of the report and published an article titled "Sunday Bloody Times," accusing the newspaper's editor of helping to "bury compelling evidence that the British military planned in advance the infamous 1972 Londonderry attack." At that time, Sayle reiterated his belief that British soldiers planned the attack on civilians.
as a correspondent for Newsweek
magazine. In 1975, he moved to Japan
. He remained in Japan for 33 years, living with his second wife and their children (Matthew, Alexander, and Maindi) in a traditional wooden house in the village of Aikawa
in Kanagawa Prefecture
. He reported on Asia for The Independent Magazine
, The New Yorker
and the New York Review of Books. His most noted work during this time includes his reporting on the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the 1983 disappearance of Korean Air Lines Flight 007.
In August 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
,The New Yorker published a lengthy investigative piece by Sayle entitled "Did the Bomb End the War?" Sayle contended that the bombing was not motivated by a desire to persuade the Japanese to surrender, and was instead motivated by the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and concerns that Soviet forces would then invade Hokkaido
and force a division of Japan.
In The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg
remembered Sayle as follows:
. In May 2007, the University of Sydney awarded him an honorary doctorate of letters for his work as a foreign correspondent. In the same year, he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the Queen's Birthday Honours
, for service to media and communications, particularly as a foreign and war correspondent. Sayle died in September 2010 at the age of 84.
Order of Australia
The Order of Australia is an order of chivalry established on 14 February 1975 by Elizabeth II, Queen of Australia, "for the purpose of according recognition to Australian citizens and other persons for achievement or for meritorious service"...
(1 January 1926 19 September 2010) was 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, novelist and adventurer.
A native of Sydney
Sydney
Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...
, Sayle moved to London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
in 1952. He was a foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times
The Sunday Times is a British Sunday newspaper.The Sunday Times may also refer to:*The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times...
in the late 1960s and early 1970s. During his long career he covered wars in Vietnam, Pakistan and the Middle East, accompanied an expedition on its climb of Mount Everest
Mount Everest
Mount Everest is the world's highest mountain, with a peak at above sea level. It is located in the Mahalangur section of the Himalayas. The international boundary runs across the precise summit point...
, sailed solo across the Atlantic Ocean
Atlantic Ocean
The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's oceanic divisions. With a total area of about , it covers approximately 20% of the Earth's surface and about 26% of its water surface area...
, was the first reporter to interview double agent Kim Philby
Kim Philby
Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby was a high-ranking member of British intelligence who worked as a spy for and later defected to the Soviet Union...
after his defection to Russia, and trekked through the Bolivia
Bolivia
Bolivia officially known as Plurinational State of Bolivia , is a landlocked country in central South America. It is the poorest country in South America...
n jungle in search for Che Guevara
Che Guevara
Ernesto "Che" Guevara , commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat and military theorist...
. He resigned from The Sunday Times in 1972 after the newspaper refused to publish an investigative piece he wrote about the Bloody Sunday
Bloody Sunday (1972)
Bloody Sunday —sometimes called the Bogside Massacre—was an incident on 30 January 1972 in the Bogside area of Derry, Northern Ireland, in which twenty-six unarmed civil rights protesters and bystanders were shot by soldiers of the British Army...
shootings of 26 unarmed protesters in Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland is one of the four countries of the United Kingdom. Situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, it shares a border with the Republic of Ireland to the south and west...
.
Sayle moved to Hong Kong in 1972 and to Japan in 1975. Altogether he remained in Japan for nearly 30 years, writing about that country for various publications, principally The Independent Magazine
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
, The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
and the New York Review of Books.
Early years
Born in EarlwoodEarlwood, New South Wales
Earlwood is a suburb in the inner-west of Sydney, in the state of New South Wales, Australia. Earlwood is located 12 kilometres south of the Sydney central business district, in the local government area of the City of Canterbury...
, a Sydney
Sydney
Sydney is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people...
suburb, in 1926, Sayle was the son of a railway executive. He attended the Canterbury Boys' High School
Canterbury Boys' High School
Canterbury Boys' High School is a public, secondary, day school for boys, located in Canterbury, a south-western suburb of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. It is located near the Canterbury Park Racecourse and next to Canterbury Girl's High School.Established in January 1918 as the Canterbury...
before enrolling at the University of Sydney
University of Sydney
The University of Sydney is a public university located in Sydney, New South Wales. The main campus spreads across the suburbs of Camperdown and Darlington on the southwestern outskirts of the Sydney CBD. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in Australia and Oceania...
. At university, Sayle studied psychology and worked for the student magazine, Honi Soit
Honi Soit
Honi Soit is the student newspaper of the University of Sydney, first published in 1929 and produced by an elected editorial team as part of the activities of the Students' Representative Council...
. After leaving without taking a degree, Sayle worked as a newspaper reporter for The Sydney Daily Telegraph
The Daily Telegraph (Australia)
The Daily Telegraph is an Australian tabloid newspaper published in Sydney, New South Wales, by Nationwide News, part of News Corporation.The Tele, as it is also known, was founded in 1879. From 1936 to 1972, it was owned by Frank Packer's Australian Consolidated Press. That year it was sold to...
, the Cairns Post, and The Daily Mirror
The Daily Mirror (Australia)
The Daily Mirror was an afternoon paper established by Ezra Norton in Sydney, Australia in 1941, gaining a licence from the Minister for Trade and Customs, Eric Harrison, despite wartime paper rationing. In October 1958, Norton and his partners sold his newspapers to the Fairfax group, which...
. He also worked for six years as a radio reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
Australian Broadcasting Corporation
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation, commonly referred to as "the ABC" , is Australia's national public broadcaster...
.
The People and A Crooked Sixpence
In 1952, Sayle sailed for London in an attempt to save his relationship with singer Shirley AbicairShirley Abicair
Shirley Abicair is an Australian-born singer, musician, TV personality, actress and author.-Early life:Shirley Abicair was born in Melbourne, Australia. Some sources show her year of birth as 1935, but a contemporary account shows she was 23 or 24 on arrival in England and, as she had completed...
, who had decided to move to Britain. Sayle became a reporter for the tabloid, The People
The People
The People, previously known as the Sunday People, is a British tabloid Sunday-only newspaper. The paper was founded on 16 October 1881.It is published by the Trinity Mirror Group.In July 2011 it had an average daily circulation of 806,544....
. Working as an assistant to crime reporter Duncan Webb, Sayle was credited with the phrase, "I made my excuses and left." Sayle left journalism in 1956 and supported himself by selling encyclopaedias in Germany while writing a novel about his experiences on Fleet Street
Fleet Street
Fleet Street is a street in central London, United Kingdom, named after the River Fleet, a stream that now flows underground. It was the home of the British press until the 1980s...
titled A Crooked Sixpence. The novel was pulled from publication after threats of litigation by an individual upon whom one of the characters was based. The novel was finally published more than 50 years later.
The Sunday Times
Sayle worked in the early 1960s for Agence France Presse and returned to London in 1964 to work for The Sunday TimesThe Sunday Times
The Sunday Times is a British Sunday newspaper.The Sunday Times may also refer to:*The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times *The Sunday Times...
. There, he developed a reputation as "the most forceful of Fleet Street
Fleet Street
Fleet Street is a street in central London, United Kingdom, named after the River Fleet, a stream that now flows underground. It was the home of the British press until the 1980s...
's finest." British reporter Godfrey Hodgson described Sayle as follows: "Large, shrewd and with many of the characteristics of an armoured vehicle, Murray had plenty of the 'rat-like cunning' advocated by his colleague Nick Tomalin
Nicholas Tomalin
Nicholas Osborne Tomalin was an English journalist and writer.Tomalin was the son of Miles Tomalin, a Communist poet and veteran of the Spanish Civil War. He studied English literature at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. As a student he was President of the Cambridge Union and editor of the prestigious...
when it came to that basic reportorial talent of getting oneself in the right place at the right time."
Emil Savundra and Francis Chichester
Sayle first made a name for himself working with The Sunday Times "Insight" teamInsight (Sunday Times)
Insight is an investigative team for the British newspaper The Sunday Times which is well-known for exposing stories such as discovering Soviet defect Kim Philby's role in MI6, investigating the thalidomide controversy,,revealing the secret manufacture of nuclear weapons by Israel. and more...
exposing the financial fraud of insurance businessman Emil Savundra
Emil Savundra
Emil Savundra, born Michael Marion Emil Anacletus Pierre Savundranayagam was an indigenous Tamil businessman from Ceylon who later took British citizenship. He is known for having perpetrated financial frauds in several countries, culminating in the scandal of the Fire, Auto and Marine Insurance...
. Sayle reported that the "reserves" of Savundra's insurance company included securities that were forgeries. Savundra's company collapsed in 1966, and he fled to his native Ceylon
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka, officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka is a country off the southern coast of the Indian subcontinent. Known until 1972 as Ceylon , Sri Lanka is an island surrounded by the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Mannar and the Palk Strait, and lies in the vicinity of India and the...
(now known as Sri Lanka). Also in 1966, Sayle gained attention when he chartered a plane to find the noted sailor Sir Francis Chichester
Francis Chichester
Sir Francis Charles Chichester KBE , aviator and sailor, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for becoming the first person to sail single-handed around the world by the clipper route, and the fastest circumnavigator, in nine months and one day overall.-Early life:Chichester was born in Barnstaple,...
, who had gone missing in a storm off Cape Horn
Cape Horn
Cape Horn is the southernmost headland of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago of southern Chile, and is located on the small Hornos Island...
during an attempt to become the first person to sail non-stop solo around the world.
War correspondent
Sayle became the newspaper's chief foreign correspondent, reporting on the Vietnam WarVietnam 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...
, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971
Indo-Pakistani War of 1971
The Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 was a military conflict between India and Pakistan. Indian, Bangladeshi and international sources consider the beginning of the war to be Operation Chengiz Khan, Pakistan's December 3, 1971 pre-emptive strike on 11 Indian airbases...
, He received the Journalist of the Year award in the Grenada Press Awards for his reports from Vietnam. In 1968, he opened an eye-witness account of an all night Viet Cong attack as follows:
"I was sound asleep in the guest hut of the province chief's compound when I was awakened by an exchange of automatic small arms fire. I picked out the pop-pop-pop of a Browning automatic rifle followed by the steady bang of American 30 calibre machine guns and then the unmistakable three second-bursts like silk being loudly torn of Chinese AK 47AK-47The AK-47 is a selective-fire, gas-operated 7.62×39mm assault rifle, first developed in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Kalashnikov. It is officially known as Avtomat Kalashnikova . It is also known as a Kalashnikov, an "AK", or in Russian slang, Kalash.Design work on the AK-47 began in the last year...
s. Fumbling out of a mosquito net I dragged my boots on. Then the plop and whistle of outgoing mortars started. A glance at my watch showed it was exactly 1 a m. There was an earsplitting crack and roar and a ram of debris—a 122 rocket going off. ..."
Che Guevara and Kim Philby
In 1967, Sayle tracked down Che GuevaraChe Guevara
Ernesto "Che" Guevara , commonly known as el Che or simply Che, was an Argentine Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, intellectual, guerrilla leader, diplomat and military theorist...
in the South American jungle with the Bolivian army. Although they did not meet up with Che, they found what Sayle described as "a strongly fortified base of Castro-type Communist guerrillas." Sayle searched through the rubbish left behind at the base and found documentary evidence, including a photograph and asthma prescriptions, that enabled Sayle to report that Che had left Cuba and was fomenting Communist insurrection in South America. Forty years later Sayle wrote for the first time about his Bolivian journey and the circumstances leading to Che's execution by the Bolivian army.
He made headlines again in late 1967 when he tracked down British double agent
Double agent
A double agent, commonly abbreviated referral of double secret agent, is a counterintelligence term used to designate an employee of a secret service or organization, whose primary aim is to spy on the target organization, but who in fact is a member of that same target organization oneself. They...
, Kim Philby
Kim Philby
Harold Adrian Russell "Kim" Philby was a high-ranking member of British intelligence who worked as a spy for and later defected to the Soviet Union...
, in Moscow. After several days of staking out Moscow's foreign post office, he spotted Philby. Sayle recalled, "After a few days, I forget how many exactly, I saw a man looking like an intellectual of the 1930s, all leather patches on the elbows of his tweed jacket. I walked up to him and said, 'Mr Philby?'." He then secured the first and only interview of Philby after his 1963 defection. Sayle reported that he found Philby to be "a charming, entertaining man with a great sense of humor." Sayle also described Philby to be man with an "iron head" for drink who appeared to be enjoying his new life and who denied being a traitor. Philby told Sayle, "To betray, you must first belong. I never belonged."
Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia
In August 1968, Sayle was sent to PraguePrague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
to cover the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia
Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia
On the night of 20–21 August 1968, the Soviet Union and her main satellite states in the Warsaw Pact – Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic , Hungary and Poland – invaded the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic in order to halt Alexander Dubček's Prague Spring political liberalization...
. Fellow journalist Harold Jackson
Harold Jackson
Harold Jackson may refer to:*Harold Jackson , received the Victoria Cross in World War I*Harold Jackson , professional ice hockey player in the National Hockey League...
has written of Sayle's ingenuity in getting their stories out of the country. International telephone calls were blocked, and the Russians had seized the Prague telex
Telex
Telex may refer to:* Telex , , a communications network** Teleprinter, the device used on the above network* Telex , a Belgian pop group...
exchange. Sayle and Jackson discovered that not all of the telex connections were blocked and spent 13 hours dialling "the 10,000 possibilities" to find a working telex code. After discovering several working exchanges, Jackson recalled that the enterprising Sayle sold the numbers to other journalists at "$100 a pop." Another obstacle facing the foreign press in Prague was a shortage of Czech crowns. Sayle took Jackson with him to the office of the Czech firm responsible for distribution of The Times
The Times
The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...
in Czechoslovakia. Sayle claimed to be the publisher's personal representative and demanded that the man turn over funds that had not been remitted due to exchange restrictions. Jackson recalled, "We left the building with huge packs of Czech crowns stashed in a linen bag rustled up from some cupboard. They kept the foreign press corps functioning for weeks, no doubt at a suitable rate of exchange."
Mt. Everest and sailing solo across the Atlantic
In 1970, Sayle participated in the International Mount Everest Expedition and reporting on the expedition for BBCBBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
television. According to a published account in The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
, Sayle learned of the Everest assignment while covering the war in Vietnam: "Murray was in a foxhole in Vietnam when a runner comes sprinting up through the incoming fire with a cable from The Sunday Times. 'Report to Kathmandu,' it said. 'You're going to climb Everest.'" Photographer John Cleare, who also participated in the expedition, recalled that Sayle brought "almost a complete porter load of literature" with him and added:
"[Sayle] was no stranger to hardship—some of us 'enjoyed' a ten day storm at 21,500 feet, cut off and unable to go more than a few feet from our tents, eventually running out of food and fuel, but he didn't grumble. I don't think he ever left that tent for ten days except to crawl a few feet through the drifts into the mess tent twice a day. He did his bodily functions into poly bags which he stacked, frozen solid, in the back of the tent until we were relieved and could move about again. We found this very amusing. He was one of us. He was very determined. He kept our morale up when things got very tough on the mountain, as they eventually did when one of our most popular climbers was killed."
The expedition came within 1,800 feet of the summit, and Sayle wrote: "The very small number of people who actually know something about Himalayan mountaineering do not consider that our expedition was a failure at all."
In 1972, Murray sailed solo across the Atlantic Ocean
Atlantic Ocean
The Atlantic Ocean is the second-largest of the world's oceanic divisions. With a total area of about , it covers approximately 20% of the Earth's surface and about 26% of its water surface area...
as a participant in the Single-Handed Trans-Atlantic Race.
Bloody Sunday
Sayle became embroiled in controversy over his investigative reporting into Bloody SundayBloody Sunday (1972)
Bloody Sunday —sometimes called the Bogside Massacre—was an incident on 30 January 1972 in the Bogside area of Derry, Northern Ireland, in which twenty-six unarmed civil rights protesters and bystanders were shot by soldiers of the British Army...
, a January 1972 incident in Derry
Derry
Derry or Londonderry is the second-biggest city in Northern Ireland and the fourth-biggest city on the island of Ireland. The name Derry is an anglicisation of the Irish name Doire or Doire Cholmcille meaning "oak-wood of Colmcille"...
, Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland is one of the four countries of the United Kingdom. Situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, it shares a border with the Republic of Ireland to the south and west...
, in which 26 unarmed civil rights
Civil rights movement
The civil rights movement was a worldwide political movement for equality before the law occurring between approximately 1950 and 1980. In many situations it took the form of campaigns of civil resistance aimed at achieving change by nonviolent forms of resistance. In some situations it was...
protesters and bystanders were shot, and 13 killed, by a regiment of paratroopers from the British Army
British Army
The British Army is the land warfare branch of Her Majesty's Armed Forces in the United Kingdom. It came into being with the unification of the Kingdom of England and Scotland into the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707. The new British Army incorporated Regiments that had already existed in England...
. Sayle and his reporting partner, Derek Humphry
Derek Humphry
Derek Humphry is a British-born American journalist, author and principal founder in 1980 of the Hemlock Society USA and past president of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies, both of which support the notion of decriminalisation of voluntary euthanasia...
, were sent to Derry to investigate the shooting and concluded that the paratroopers had not been fired upon, as they claimed, and that the shooting was the result of a planned special operation to eliminate the IRA
Provisional Irish Republican Army
The Provisional Irish Republican Army is an Irish republican paramilitary organisation whose aim was to remove Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom and bring about a socialist republic within a united Ireland by force of arms and political persuasion...
leadership in Derry. Four days after the shooting, Sayle and Humphry turned in a 10-page story, but The Sunday Times refused to publish it. Sayle resigned in protest, and the unpublished story "vanished for a quarter-century." In 1998, The Village Voice
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...
obtained a copy of the report and published an article titled "Sunday Bloody Times," accusing the newspaper's editor of helping to "bury compelling evidence that the British military planned in advance the infamous 1972 Londonderry attack." At that time, Sayle reiterated his belief that British soldiers planned the attack on civilians.
Asia
After quitting his position with The Sunday Times, Murray moved to Hong KongHong Kong
Hong Kong is one of two Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China , the other being Macau. A city-state situated on China's south coast and enclosed by the Pearl River Delta and South China Sea, it is renowned for its expansive skyline and deep natural harbour...
as a correspondent for Newsweek
Newsweek
Newsweek is an American weekly news magazine published in New York City. It is distributed throughout the United States and internationally. It is the second-largest news weekly magazine in the U.S., having trailed Time in circulation and advertising revenue for most of its existence...
magazine. In 1975, he moved to Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
. He remained in Japan for 33 years, living with his second wife and their children (Matthew, Alexander, and Maindi) in a traditional wooden house in the village of Aikawa
Aikawa, Kanagawa
is a town located in Aikō District, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan. As of February 1, 2010, the town had an estimated population of 41,513 and a density of 1,210 persons per km². The total area was 34.29 km².-Geography:...
in Kanagawa Prefecture
Kanagawa Prefecture
is a prefecture located in the southern Kantō region of Japan. The capital is Yokohama. Kanagawa is part of the Greater Tokyo Area.-History:The prefecture has some archaeological sites going back to the Jōmon period...
. He reported on Asia for The Independent Magazine
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
, The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
and the New York Review of Books. His most noted work during this time includes his reporting on the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the 1983 disappearance of Korean Air Lines Flight 007.
In August 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
During the final stages of World War II in 1945, the United States conducted two atomic bombings against the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, the first on August 6, 1945, and the second on August 9, 1945. These two events are the only use of nuclear weapons in war to date.For six months...
,The New Yorker published a lengthy investigative piece by Sayle entitled "Did the Bomb End the War?" Sayle contended that the bombing was not motivated by a desire to persuade the Japanese to surrender, and was instead motivated by the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and concerns that Soviet forces would then invade Hokkaido
Hokkaido
, formerly known as Ezo, Yezo, Yeso, or Yesso, is Japan's second largest island; it is also the largest and northernmost of Japan's 47 prefectural-level subdivisions. The Tsugaru Strait separates Hokkaido from Honshu, although the two islands are connected by the underwater railway Seikan Tunnel...
and force a division of Japan.
In The New Yorker, Hendrik Hertzberg
Hendrik Hertzberg
Hendrik Hertzberg is an American journalist, best known as the principal political commentator for The New Yorker magazine. He has also been a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter and editor of The New Republic, and is the author of ¡Obámanos! The Rise of a New Political Era and Politics:...
remembered Sayle as follows:
"Murray Sayle ... was a wonder—a journalist of Promethean gifts and BrobdingnagBrobdingnagBrobdingnag is a fictional land in Jonathan Swift's satirical novel Gulliver's Travels occupied by giants. Lemuel Gulliver visits the land after the ship on which he is travelling is blown off course and he is separated from a party exploring the unknown land.The adjective Brobdingnagian has come...
ian accomplishment, a lightning-fast writer whose witty, energetic prose was flavored with a tasty mixture of brash informality and autodidactic erudition, a fearless adventurer in war zones and on the high seas, an instinctive (but sweet-natured!) adversary of every kind of authority, not excepting the authority of the newspaper and magazine editors lucky enough to secure his services. He was a nonstop talker whose verbal stream of consciousness was festooned with unexpected detours, impromptu theories, hilarious asides, and astounding anecdotes, some of them true."
Later years
Sayle returned to Australia in 2004, prior to be diagnosed with Parkinson's diseaseParkinson's disease
Parkinson's disease is a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system...
. In May 2007, the University of Sydney awarded him an honorary doctorate of letters for his work as a foreign correspondent. In the same year, he was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in the Queen's Birthday Honours
Queen's Birthday Honours
The Queen's Birthday Honours is a part of the British honours system, being a civic occasion on the celebration of the Queen's Official Birthday in which new members of most Commonwealth Realms honours are named. The awards are presented by the reigning monarch or head of state, currently Queen...
, for service to media and communications, particularly as a foreign and war correspondent. Sayle died in September 2010 at the age of 84.
External links
- Castroism dies - Che lives - an Essay by Murray Sayle
- Overloading Emoh Ruo: the rise and rise of hydrocarbon civilisation - an Essay by Murray Sayle
- Even further north - an Essay by Murray Sayle
- God wills it! The bitter fruits of fundamentalism - an Essay by Murray Sayle
- AUDIO Muray Sayle and Robyn Williams talk at the Sydney Writers Festival