Vale Colin Munro

By Tim Lee, ABC staffer, and Rural Press Club of Victoria member

Colin Munro cut a large figure. Physically he was a large man with gingery hair and a ruddy complexion that sprang from his Scottish ancestry. His vibrant personality matched his large frame and he hailed from the old school of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, modelled on the BBC. In the years following World War II both organisations adopted a model which owed much to the military. Colin Munro thus joined the ABC as a Rural Officer, a title which automatically bestowed a cachet of respect upon the young journalist.

The Rural Officer held the most respected post in most country ABC studios. He hosted the Rural Report in the early morning. Over breakfast the farming community tuned into the latest agricultural news, trends in agriculture and crucial market reports, such as wool prices, cattle markets and river heights. One of Colin’s first postings was to Orange in New South Wales. A local married couple with whom he boarded gave him the nickname ‘Bangers and Mash,’ in homage to his healthy appetite.

Almost thirty years later in 1993, as the recently departed head of ABC Rural Radio, Colin Munro was back in the district to help launch a new ABC studio at Dubbo.  By then he had become one of Australia’s best known broadcasters and radio personalities. In time as head of Rural Radio, he commanded respect and loyalty from a network of reporters in almost thirty locations around the country.  He had made television programs on rural stories in his earlier years and in later years hosted a live broadcast of the annual conference of the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics (ABARE). As one of the nation’s most respected rural commentators, it was a chance to show his extensive agricultural knowledge in his customary debonair and polished style.

He had that rare and enviable gift of the best broadcasters, an ability to make his listeners feel they were engaged in conversation with him. It was helped greatly by his prodigious memory for names and details and a genuine love of people. There wasn’t a district in Australia whose people or features were unknown to him. The depth of his knowledge was readily shown in his hosting stints of “Summer All Over”, the summer time version of the very successful “Australian All Over”.

Like the stud master with an intimate knowledge of his flock Colin Munro could always find someone who was related to someone else, whom Colin knew and could regale stories about. His stories reflected his love of the land, its people and its history. He was especially interested in the lives of the nation’s pioneers, including, notably, the late Fred Mackay of the Royal Flying Doctor Service. Fred, despite his advanced years at the time, was one of Colin’s radio regulars, and having seen firsthand the great work of the RFDS in remote Australia, that charity remained very dear to him.

Colin Munro was often the life of the party. He had a supreme ability to recite the poetry of Henry Lawson, ‘Banjo’ Paterson and, if sufficiently prompted, might perform a party piece of some complex, uproariously funny rhyme. In the mid Nineties he moved into a senior management role in radio, a job which entailed some ambassadorial duties for the ABC across the country. He laughed at my suggestion that he had by then become the ABC’s “chief show opener and baby kisser,” but there was an element of truth to it. He was a bon vivant, a drawcard at agricultural shows and a keynote or after dinner speaker at countless functions. It seems a travesty that illness in the past year robbed him of his extraordinary memory, and that a series of strokes ended his life at 70. Vale Colin.