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A journalist, author and film-maker for 50 years, Jeff McMullen's work includes many decades as a foreign correspondent for Australian Broadcasting Corporation, reporting for Four Corners and Sixty Minutes, as the interviewer and anchor of the 33 part issue series on ABC Television, Difference of Opinion, and host of televised forums on the National Indigenous Television Network.
Throughout his professional life Jeff McMullen has written, filmed and campaigned around the world to improve the health, education and human rights of Indigenous people.
Born in Sydney, Australia, McMullen was a small boy when he accompanied his father, a member of the RAAF, to live in Penang, at the height of the Malay Emergency. With eyes wide open to the beauty and creativity of many different cultures this wanderer has been attracted to far-flung destinations ever since.
McMullen has reported on more than thirty conflicts around the world including the genocide in Rwanda and highest war on earth in the Himalayas. He has camped with Indigenous tribes from the Amazon to the remote parts of Australia, drunk mare’s milk with nomads in Mongolia, travelled to Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Siberia. The extremes of beauty have called often as an antidote to balance the horror and suffering of the war zones. McMullen has swum with sea-lions and iguanas in the Galapagos Islands, dived with whalesharks on Australia’s Ningaloo Reef, climbed several active volcanoes and been stranded in a tent for 17 days in Antarctica after filming six men and their huskies on the longest trek ever made across that frozen continent.
Jeff McMullen was educated at Sydney’s Macquarie University (BA in literature, history and political philosophy), where novelist Thea Astley remembered him for his effusive love of storytelling in prose, poetry and film.
In an age of widespread cynicism over media manipulation of the truth, McMullen has never given in to jaded reporting or world-weariness. While pleased with his major investigations and share of world scoops, honesty and fairness have been the hallmark of his work and reputation. After five decades in top flight journalism, McMullen has never been sued for libel or defamation. He continues to write and speak about fairness and holds Doctorates of Journalism from Central Queensland University and Doctorates of Letters from the University of Newcastle, Australia and Macquarie University, Sydney.
At just eighteen McMullen was the youngest ABC foreign correspondent of his day, reporting from Papua New Guinea, then at twenty from Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and India. His generation of reporters gave Australia the first regular television news coverage of major international events by Australian journalists and cameramen.
In 1972, at the age of 24, McMullen began twelve years in the United States, first as the ABC’s New York correspondent, then Washington correspondent. He covered the coup against Salvador Allende in Chile, the siege by Russell Means and the American Indian Movement at Wounded Knee in South Dakota, the chaos in Argentina after General Juan Peron, the Falklands War, the Iran hostage crisis, the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan and numerous other international events. The major political story of McMullen’s career was the Watergate scandal and the impeachment proceedings against President Richard Nixon.
In Brazil, Ecuador and Guatemala, McMullen extended his work with First Nations people who were fighting for their independence and in some cases survival. In 1973 McMullen was among the first filmmakers to report on the slaughter of Indigenous tribes in the Amazon. An hour-long documentary on the slaughter of some 250,000 indigenous people in Guatemala was screened before an American Congressional Committee and influenced its vote to suspend military aid to that regime.
As a roving reporter for ‘Four Corners’ based in New York, McMullen wrote and produced many one-hour documentaries from the Soviet Union, Western Europe, the United States and South America. After a trilogy of Four Corners films from the war zones of Central America, McMullen was awarded a United Nations Media Peace Prize in 1984.
After eighteen and a half years with the ABC, most of it as a foreign correspondent, in 1984 McMullen joined Australia’s ‘Sixty Minutes’, as part of that program’s most successful line-up; with Jana Wendt, George Negus and Ian Leslie. McMullen went on to become one of the longest serving reporters on Sixty Minutes, spending another sixteen years travelling the world and notching up hundreds of stories shown in about sixty different countries.
In 1988, McMullen won an International Current Affairs Award (Pater) for his story about the effort to save the life of Ian Grey, a young Australian missionary who faced execution in Mozambique after assisting the Renamo guerillas in one of the most violent African conflicts. McMullen has known as friends most of the Australian correspondents and camera operators (and many more international colleagues) killed in the line of duty since the 1960s. While reporting in war zones McMullen and his film crews have had many narrow escapes, from El Salvador and Nicaragua in Central America to Eritrea and Sierra Leone in Africa. McMullen’s Sixty Minutes story about child combatants in Sierra Leone’s dirty civil war later was utilised by UNICEF in a campaign aimed at halting this exploitation of children. Famine, poverty and slavery in several parts of the world took McMullen on a long exploration of the seething violence and exploitation that undermines the unity of the human family.
At a young age he began seeking evidence and a scientific understanding of the connection between species extinction and the widespread struggle for natural resources that was having a dramatic impact on all living systems. This interest in earth science and knowledge gleaned from some of the brightest minds in the world led to investigations of the environmental threats to the Galapagos Islands, Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and Ningaloo Reef in Western Australia.
While Jeff McMullen has been a household name in Australia, his stories also have appeared on CBS Sixty Minutes and the PBS network in America, as well as the BBC, CBC, South African networks and even Russian television.
Among many memorable interview subjects were Chile’s President Salavador Allende, US President Jimmy Carter, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller, Australian Prime Ministers Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Howard, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and Rwanda’s President Paul Kigame. Interviews screened around the world included the anti-war dissident Philip Berrigan; the feminists Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer, Andrea Dworkin and Bella Abzug; singers and musicians including John Lennon; Ray Charles; Sting; Stevie Wonder; Barbra Streisand; Janet Jackson; Neil Diamond; Cher; Eric Clapton; Mark Knopfler; Mariah Carey; Michael Hutchence; Jimmy Barnes; Elton John; George Michael and BB King; film directors including Peter Weir; Martin Scorsese; Steven Spielberg; actors Kevin Costner; Warren Beatty, Lauren Bacall; Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson; comedians Ben Elton and Paul Hogan; athletes and sports stars Ian Thorpe; Cathy Freeman; Dawn Fraser; Steve Waugh; Shane Warne and Brian Lara.
Much of McMullen’s film work over the past two decades has focussed on the human rights of the First Peoples, the impact of the NT Intervention and the chronic illness taking many lives.
He played an inspiring Associate Producer's role in the Indigenous rights documentary 'Our Generation', (directed by Sinem Saban and Damien Curtis), which won best Campaign Film at the London International Documentary Festival.
McMullen’s film, 'East Coast Encounter,' travelled Australia as part of an exhibition by leading artists, poets and historians who explore James Cook’s 1770 contact with Aboriginal people and the impact of terra nullius.
In the book, “Dispossession: Neo-Liberalism and the Struggle for Aboriginal Land and Rights in the 21st Century” (IN BLACK & WHITE published by Connor Court 2013) Jeff McMullen analyses the market forces shaping Indigenous policy.
McMullen's autobiography, “A Life Of Extremes – Journeys and Encounters” (HarperCollins Australia) examines the global pattern of conflict, environmental degradation and species extinction, as well as sharing ideas from some of the world’s bravest individuals on a brighter future for the human family. “Intervention: An Anthology” edited by Rosie Scott and Anita Heiss includes Jeff McMullen’s essay, “Rolling Thunder – Voices Against Oppression”. This covers the resistance to the Northern Territory Emergency Response from 2007.
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