Tim Bowden, 1937-2024
Legendary ABC broadcaster, producer and author TIM BOWDEN died on Sunday, aged 87. He was a war correspondent in Vietnam, the maker of ground-breaking radio oral history series, the presenter of Backchat on ABC TV, and the author of 18 books. Tim was awesomely talented. Perhaps even more important, he was greatly loved, by colleagues and by the Australian public.
Tim, who was always a stalwart supporter of the ABC and its staff, was the third person, other than the founding directors, to sign up to ABC Alumni. He was always willing to help. In the run-up to the last election, he recorded a series of spook Backchat videos, which we wittily called Chatback.
We asked one his oldest and earliest colleagues, broadcaster and columnist MIKE CARLTON, to pen this tribute to Tim ‘God’ Bowden.
We first met in Bangkok, October 1966, there for the ABC to cover a visit by Lyndon Baines Johnson. Our mutual friend and his fellow Tasmanian, the cameraman Neil Davis, introduced us.
Bowden was reclining on his hotel bed, chortling as he read from a bit of cheap pornography pressed on him by a hard-sell taxi driver on the way in from the airport.
“Take a seat, dear boy”, he said. “Listen to this: The cardinal watched eagerly as his daughter undressed across the room…”
My, how we laughed. Unforgettable, that. Not that he was into pornography any more than the rest of us, I rush to explain, but he had a lifelong zest for the offbeat and quirky, rejoicing in human foible. He would have been just as intrigued if the driver had sold him a Bible or Jane Austen.
Odd as it sounds, up there on the foreign correspondent circuit we called each other by surnames. Bowden, not Tim. Carlton, not Mike. His initials were T.G, but he always refused to reveal what the G stood for. He frequently signed his ABC memos “T. God Bowden,” or sometimes just plain “God”.
He was then a seasoned broadcaster for what the ABC primly called the Talks Department, officially designated a “Talks Officer,” in the absurd, quasi-military speak of the day. (The Commission, as it was then, was largely run by Chaps Who’d Had A Good War.)
I was a different beastie, not all that long out of school, a wet-behind-the-ears fledgling journalist for the News Department. Back at the ABC’s Sydney HQ the two fiefdoms fought a turf war as bitter as any in sectarian Belfast but on the ground overseas we got on famously. We had to.
Generously, Bowden became a mentor. We would run into each other in Saigon, Singapore, Jakarta, New Delhi. Twelve years older than me, he was the consummate professional and in the beginning I was quite in awe of him. He had the great qualities of the best broadcast journalist: a fierce curiosity, a passion for accuracy, an acute bullshit antenna, and the skill to turn what he found into an informative and listenable story. He wrote his scripts in taut but stylish prose, with a flash of whimsy or humour where it worked. Swiftly, too, and always well before deadline. Like all of us then – sadly not today – he had done voice training, which gave him a mellow clarity but without the toffy, pseudo-BBC pretensions of an earlier generation. There was none of what Clive James memorably called “the plonking manner”.
Radio was his great love. It had been his nursery, where he had begun, and by the time we met he was the supreme technician. The tools of his trade were at first a tiny Stellavox tape recorder, with 5-inch reels that could run only about seven minutes of whatever, later upgraded to a bigger, flashier and very much heavier Nagra machine. On the road he would bash out a script on a portable typewriter and record it in a hotel room or a rice padi or an airport lounge, wherever, his head buried beneath a blanket or a towel to cut out the noises of Asia. Then, with a razor blade and some sort of sticky tape he would deftly edit and splice in the interviews or the actuality sound to go with the piece. Package done. It was marvellous to watch, a skill we mere News journalists never had to master. Talks Department, dear boy, Talks.
Back home, he was the founding executive producer of radio’s PM program in 1969 and after that he switched to television as a producer with the trail blazing 7.30pm current affairs show This Day Tonight, where we hooked up again. In all honesty, I don’t think he enjoyed television all that much. “Radio is the Theatre of the Mind”, he would say. “Theatre of the Mind, dear boy.” You could do so much more with steam radio, as we sardonically called it, engaging the listener’s imagination.
Yet television he did well too. When I put news of his death up on Twitter, or X or whatever it is now, there was a flurry of responses happily recalling his Backchat program on good ol’ Channel 2, where once a week he dealt with the bouquets and brickbats of viewers and listeners. It was a platform tailor-made for his wit and his mastery of the subtly-arched eyebrow and he became, in effect, the face and voice of the ABC and well-loved for it.
In later life he took to the printed word, with the same success. One Crowded Hour, his biography of Neil Davis, killed in a coup in Bangkok in 1985, was written with an admixture of love, a bittersweet sorrow, and ultimate celebration of an extraordinary life. He found another fertile field in the stories and recollections of Australian PoWs from World War 2, which he had encountered first for radio documentaries and later turned into book form.
Socially, Bowden was an unending delight to be with, over lunch or dinner. The parties he threw with his wife Roz were invariably long, loud and riotous. Yet behind the joyful, sometimes even frivolous façade there was a man of serious purpose. He believed profoundly in the virtue of public broadcasting and his career was dedicated to its advancement. He leaves an indelible mark.
They don’t make ‘em like Bowden any more. He was a one-off and I will miss him dearly.
Another old colleague of Tim Bowden’s, cinematographer David Brill, the Alumni’s co-convenor in Tasmania, remembered him in a conversation with Patricia Karvelas on RN Breakfast on Wednesday 4 September.