Five Years On

Today it is five years since my brother died. At the time, my younger daughter wrote a short memoir of him for Louise Adler at Melbourne University Press. Since then the management at the press has changed and it seems that the memoir has been taken down from the MUP site. Here it is, for anyone who would like to read it:

Memories of My Uncle

Lucinda Higgie

There’s a W.H. Auden poem about grief that my uncle, Mark Colvin, loved. It isn’t ‘Stop All the Clocks’, the one in Four Weddings and a Funeral. He liked that one, but because Auden wrote the poem about the death of a dictator, it annoyed him when it was played straight.

No, the poem that my uncle liked was ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, in which Auden seems to be meditating on Bruegel’s ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’. Icarus only takes up a few centimetres of this painting. In fact, all we can see is Icarus’s foot, which is about to sink into the water. No extravagant displays of grief are demanded. Nobody even seems to have noticed that anything is amiss. The world goes on, oblivious and indifferent to the death that means everything to those who mourn it. Auden interprets Brueghel’s artwork as an accurate portrayal of the nature of grief.

Perhaps the poem was particularly memorable for Marko because he had been stationed for several years in Brussels, the city where the painting hangs. Perhaps, as the years went by and his ailments increased, he came to recognise the truth in Auden’s contention. And perhaps, in the work that he did as a journalist, he found a way of redressing the balance, of ensuring that at least a few of the Icarus-like falls that happen all over the world on a daily basis might get the attention they deserve from those who are ‘just walking dully along’.

What I’m sure he never imagined was that his own death would be met by anything other than the public apathy that Auden describes in ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’. Yet, within an hour of his passing, my uncle’s name was being flashed across television screens all across Australia and reports of his demise were being included in news bulletins on the radio and online as well. As a result, neither my sister nor I—we both live in England—learnt of our uncle’s death from family. Instead, we woke up to texts from friends who’d never met him but who had learned of his death from the rolling coverage. Instead of absorbing the information and digesting it from an individual perspective, by the time I left for work that day I had already read half a dozen articles about my uncle’s life, including an obituary. I had seen dozens of tweets from people who had never met him but already missed him like a friend. I had watched a beautifully edited montage of my uncle’s work put together by the ABC and saw that my uncle had not just been a member of our family but also a national treasure.

How wonderful it was to know how loved he was. Although press coverage is often construed as an invasion of privacy, the aftermath of his death has had a surreal element of camaraderie to it. It is in this spirit—my sneaking suspicion that there are people beyond my close family who might get comfort from hearing more about Mark Colvin—that I am recording some memories, which I hope will help to fill in a bit more of the picture of the kind and loveable person we have all lost.

One

There is a little film that Marko made of us children—his sons Nicolas and William and my sister Anna and me—when we visited some English cousins in Devon in the summer of 1992 or 1993. I was about three at the time, and in the film Marko interviews me about the plane flight we have just taken over from Australia, on which I’d drunk what I called ‘Coco Cola’. While he is asking me about this, I suddenly break off the interview to try to go into a tent with the older cousins, am promptly kicked out and then spend a lot of time running around a field completely in my own world. Looking back at that footage, I am struck by the way Marko always managed to make me feel as though my thoughts and ideas were worth listening to, even when I was tiny and not particularly articulate. One of the things I most appreciated about him, then and later, was that when you were with him, there was never a sense that he was looking over your shoulder, wishing for someone more interesting to come along.

Marko would never belittle or patronise me. During my school years, he would eagerly read stories I had submitted for English, completely engaging with my writing and with what I was trying to achieve. One year, I chose to go in a particularly grisly direction for a crime fiction assignment and had the character of the young child, murder her mother at the behest of a vengeful father. As part of the evidence, I wrote a diary from the child’s perspective, dropping hints to the reader about what had actually happened. When Marko let out a gasp at the end and told me that the twist had caught him by surprise, I was thrilled. He never talked down to me when I was a kid. I remember in 2003 sitting in a pub in The Rocks with him when he fixed me with that intense gaze he got when he particularly cared about something and told me the story of the Battle of Trafalgar. Being taken seriously by him, being engaged with as an equal, meant such a lot in those gawky adolescent years when I didn’t like myself very much.

And it wasn’t only a question of your ideas making you worth your salt with Uncle Marko. Just as importantly, he took your feelings seriously as well. Gaslighting is a term that has been in the media a lot over the last couple of years and it describes the act of writing off the validity of a person’s observations, emotions and overall perspective, so that they themselves begin to doubt their own worth. It is a tactic that manipulators and abusers use. I wish there was an easy antonym (fire extinguishing?) for this phenomenon; certainly a conversation with my uncle Marko when you were upset always had the opposite effect of gaslighting.

A phone call between him and me one afternoon in early 2013 illustrates what I mean. I was in that unsettled, in-between phase where university is over and the path ahead is still indistinct. I had made an ill-fated move to Sydney to study post-grad law. I “was moping aimlessly down a street in Newtown on my second evening there when Marko called to see how I was getting on. You could never fool Marko for long and after trying to put a brave face on things, I started to cry and blurted out how lonely and lost I truly was. I felt like such a twit; I had just moved to a beautiful, exciting city, yet I was utterly miserable. His response could not have been more kind-hearted. Without platitudes or bossiness, he helped me to see that it would all be all right and to picture the good future of which I had completely lost sight. He was such an excellent listener. That is one reason he was such a brilliant interviewer, I suspect. It was also part of what made him a wonderful friend. It never felt like he was just waiting for you to finish speaking so that he could say something, or half-listening to you while thinking about what his next comment would be.

Two

In 1998, a decade before the advent of Twitter, I sent my uncle Marko an email. I had just turned nine and my parents, my sister and I were six months into a posting in Budapest. I told him about our recent trip to Poland and then admonished him for forgetting my birthday, typing out about fifteen lines of ‘snap snap grrr.’ I mean that quite literally, it took me another four years to learn how to copy and paste.

That email didn’t reach Marko at first. Instead, I received a reply from an American Mark Colvin about a week later. ‘I’m very sorry I missed your birthday,’ he wrote, ‘but I didn’t know it was happening because I don’t know who you are.’ I remember Mum and her brother laughing like drains as she read this down the telephone to him in Australia.

“That first failed attempt to communicate electronically was redressed eventually. Not only did we successfully exchange emails, we became Facebook friends. Later, Marko withdrew from Facebook, incensed by their policies on privacy and various other things, but in 2007, when my dad was working in London and our family had been living there for about a year, he sent me a long message, having learned that I was hoping to study—‘read’ as some people in England like to put it—English literature and had been visiting university campuses, trying to decide where I should apply.

The message he sent me was long and thoughtful and, most importantly for me, never suggested for a moment that I shouldn’t set my sights as high as he had done:

Dear Lucy 

Thank you for being my friend on Facebook. As you can see, my page is rather dominated by literary bits and pieces. This is because, like you at exactly the same age, I loved reading novels and poetry. I’ve never lost that love, and have always been incredibly grateful for the chance to go to Oxford to study English. The thing about the Oxford course is that, in my time—and I don’t believe it’s changed that radically—it chose to treat English in a historical fashion, so that the student follows the story of both the language and the literature from their origins. So you start with learning some Anglo-Saxon—don’t worry about it; for someone like you who has studied German, it’s a doddle. In the process, you gain access to some extraordinary pieces of work: Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Pearl and The Dream of the Rood. These are not properly accessible at all in modern English because the form, alliterative verse, just doesn’t work in translation. The other reason, and it’s a good one, for learning Anglo-Saxon is that it is the basic building block of present-day English. Once you have got through the Anglo-Saxon, Chaucer, who wrote in Middle English, is easy. Again, Chaucer is available in translation, and Coghill’s Penguin translation is really very good, but it doesn’t compare to reading the original.

In every way, of course, the course lets you understand how each development in English, the language and the literature, is a building on the past—or sometimes a demolition of it and starting again. You will come to understand, for instance, how we came to have standardised spelling because of the English Civil War, and the printers’ abandonment of the old rules whereby each line on the page had to be exactly the same length. This had meant almost random spelling to shorten and lengthen words to make the lines fit. In the Civil War, with vast numbers of new pamphlets being printed every day, they just chucked away that rule and started using the same spelling for a word every time.

And so it goes on, through the centuries, with the result that an Oxford English degree is almost a history degree as well.

When I wrote to him to tell him I’d decided to apply to Cambridge rather than Oxford, he might initially have been a bit disappointed. ‘Cambridge is BLOODY cold,’ he had written in a previous email, ‘and it’s only a university town with no other industry, whereas Oxford has always had lots of other industry, so Cambridge is, in a way, more like, say, Canberra.

All the same, on the grey January morning in 2008 when I learnt that I had received a place on the English course at Jesus College, Cambridge, after my mum and dad, Marko was the first person I wanted to tell.

More recently, reading Marko’s book Light and Shadow, I found a passage where he pinpoints the moment he realises he wants to study English Literature at university and I felt a shock of recognition. His experience came after a lesson on a short poem “called ‘The Sick Rose’, one of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience. The discussion, Marko writes, ‘opened the poem out, appropriately enough, like a flower’ as well as having ‘opened up every great poem [he] read from then on.’ For me the epiphany came through the poems of Tony Harrison, who wrote sonnets about his working-class parents in Leeds, his classical education at Leeds Grammar and his attempt to reconcile the two worlds he had come to straddle. Reading Harrison—most particularly ‘V’, his long poem about returning home to tend his parents’ graves, which have been vandalised by disaffected youths who, he realises, so easily could have been him—my eyes were opened to how form and subject matter could balance and counterbalance one another. Sitting in a classroom in London, as my uncle had decades earlier, I suddenly got the point of poetry. I ended up writing both my university dissertations on poets. One was on Gerard Manley Hopkins, whom Marko was a bit sceptical about—‘What is all that accented stuff about, Lucy?’  The second was on Les Murray. A few years ago, when Marko travelled to Bunyah to interview Murray, he brought me back a present—it was a copy of Murray’s latest book, On Bunyah, which had been autographed and inscribed, ‘To Lucy and the grace of Cambridge.’

While I remember many discussions about Murray—conversations about his poems ‘Animal Nativity’ and ‘Dog Fox Field’ one Christmas spring to mind particularly—and about other literary topics, the very first conversation about books that I can remember having with Marko was about Harry Potter. When I heard that my uncle had been visiting William’s primary school to read Harry Potter to the class, I wanted to know how he’d done all the voices. I particularly remember his Professor Flitwick, which was eager, staccato and very, very high pitched, but all the ones he did were so good that it’s hard to choose between them.

“Marko didn’t go quite as far as my friend who, towards the end of our degree, said, ‘I’ve read lots of Shakespeare and Milton and medieval literature now, and it was pretty good, but nothing has given me as much enjoyment as Harry Potter.’ Still, I was delighted that my clever uncle was not a snob and admired the books too. It was an enthusiasm I loved sharing with him and each time I finished a book in the series, I would ring him so that we could talk together about what I’d just read. One conversation comes to mind as an elucidation of his ability to gently suggest a new perspective. I was about nine and we were talking about Prisoner of Azkaban. I told him how annoyed I was that Harry had been distracted from pursuing the Golden Snitch during a Quidditch match because he’d taken a shine to the Ravenclaw Seeker Cho Chang. Why did the series have to introduce boring lovey-dovey stuff when adventure was so much more fun? I remember Uncle Marko replying with a gentle question about whether it didn’t perhaps make sense for characters to become interested in romance as they grew up?

Like most good children’s books, the Harry Potter stories deepen as you grow up, and it is oddly comforting, now that my uncle is no longer here, to realise that the series for which we shared an affection is, at its centre, all about death and grief. In the very first book, Harry comes across the Mirror of Erised, an enchanted mirror that shows the beholder their deepest desire; he looks into it and sees the family he has never had the opportunity to meet. J.K. Rowling explained in an interview, ‘The Mirror of Erised is absolutely entirely drawn from my own experience of losing a parent. “Five minutes, just please God give me five more minutes.” But it would never be long enough, that was the point of Chapter 10, you know.’

When I read that with no significant experience of loss, I thought it was an interesting idea. Now it speaks to me with new force. What I wouldn’t do for more “time with Marko. Five more minutes to drive to the Balmain lookout in that car full of detritus with Chops, the gentle boxer dog, on the backseat. Five more minutes to laugh at a Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch or David Attenborough’s footage of a sneaky, thieving penguin.

When I feel like that, there is a moment in the third instalment of the series that has helped me to begin to make peace with the loss of my uncle. In that volume, Harry thinks that he has seen his father again, despite knowing that this is impossible. He is ashamed of his wishful thinking. ‘It was stupid, thinking it was him,’ he mutters, ‘I mean, I knew he was dead.’ Here’s how Rowling has Dumbledore respond:

‘You think the dead we loved ever truly leave us? You think that we don’t recall them more clearly than ever in times of great trouble? Your father is alive in you, Harry, and shows himself plainly when you have need of him.’

Three

When my uncle died, mum got an email from our cousin Jasper in England. He hadn’t seen much of Marko but he’d always remembered him because of a visit he made to their house when Jasper was fourteen. ‘I remember very clearly … being surprised how much interest he had in us even though we were young,’ Jasper wrote. That was one of the things I also valued about my uncle—he valued young people. When we were just kids, he was happy to lark about with us at the drop of a hat. He threw himself into the spirit of things and joined in the fun, as if he were still ten himself. One example is the trip we made to the now defunct Fox Studios in Sydney, back in 1999 or 2000. We boarded an enormous fibre-glass boat for a ride called The Titanic Experience. At the point when we all had to make a dash for the life rafts, Marko lifted me clean into the air and shouted ‘I’m all she’s got!’ at the top of his lungs.

A decade or more later, when I went up to Sydney with my friend Teresa for a concert, Uncle Marko kindly let us both stay. Despite the age difference between them, my uncle went out of his way to make my friend feel at home—and soon found that they had a point of connection, as her family came from a village he had been to while filming a story on the ‘Ndrangheta mafia. He later kindly dug out his footage from the archive and sent it to Teresa so that her mother could watch it and see shots from her childhood home. Teresa was not used to being around big dogs and, difficult as this is to imagine if you have met Chops, she was nervous of him. Marko picked up on this without it even being stated and, rather than being impatient as some people would be at what they might regard as a silly fear, he showed Teresa how to put out her hand to Chops’ muzzle so that they got used to each other.

It was times like these that I often found myself thinking that, had Uncle Marko not become a journalist, he would have made a wonderful teacher. He was so patient and enjoyed explaining things that fascinated him and discussing them with you. I don’t know why, but it also seemed to me that he always retained something of his younger self into adulthood, a trace of the small boy he had once been. As a result, I regularly recall—even see—my uncle in my work as a school teacher now. The boys I teach are bright, as he was, and they are kind and funny, as he was too. The school at which I teach is less than a kilometre from Westminster School, where Marko was a pupil between the ages of thirteen and eighteen. He was happy there. Unfortunately the school that my uncle attended before that was not a nurturing place at all. He describes his experience there in detail in his book, Light and Shadow, and summarised it in an interview with Richard Fidler quite simply: ‘I went to prison for five years.’

Now that I have read my uncle’s account of his time at prep school, I find that I think of him as I watch the sweet, enthusiastic little boys that I teach—boys who rush up in the playground to tell me about the book they are enjoying or to show me a magic trick they have learnt or to ask whether I’ve finished marking their homework. When he was exactly the same age as the boys in my care, my uncle was physically, emotionally and, in my view—because Marko learnt about God from the same people who tormented him—spiritually abused by the adults who were meant to look after him. It horrifies me. While I cannot undo what happened to my uncle, I can do my utmost to make sure that the children I teach feel safe, happy and valued. I can ensure that they are never made to feel the way my uncle was made to feel.

Four

Mary-Ellen Field’s gift of a kidney to my uncle freed him from dialysis and gave him four more years of life. It was, as my uncle said in the Four Corners documentary about the process, ‘the most gracious gift you could have’. I could not be more grateful to her, especially as it was during those years that, for the first time since I was sixteen, my uncle and I were living in the same country, giving me the chance to see him more regularly than I ever had before.

Some of the best memories—and how miserable that they are just memories now, not part of a tradition that will include future events as well—are the most ordinary ones. When I came to stay, we would often drive around Rozelle to pick up various things he needed. He would park the car in a disabled spot and I would dash out to get kangaroo mince for Chops, or chocolate éclairs for the two of us, or a prescription from the chemist, or, if we were driving to granny’s that day, a lemon tart for her. Many of the businesses recognised Uncle Marko as a regular. A couple of greengrocers gave us both cups of freshly squeezed blood orange juice when they saw Marko. ‘This is for Mark, isn’t it?’ the pharmacist would ask when I said I was picking up a prescription for my uncle. She gave a fond smile when I said it was.

I felt completely relaxed with my uncle Marko. There was absolutely no need at all to put on a performance, to sing for your supper. I have a wonderful picture of one of the many moments when Chops decided to try to be my lapdog, despite the fact that he is the size of a foal. In it, Marko is laughing in the chair by the TV. Another lovely memory is another simple one—having come back from “a trip to Byron Bay, I stayed over with Marko. Lying on the sofa in Rozelle, I watched the first few episodes of Rita with him on Netflix. He cooked a delicious roast, with duck fat potatoes, and together we drank goblets of wine while laughing at the ridiculous scenarios thrown together in the Danish show about a teacher.

Whenever I stayed with Uncle Marko, I would wake up before him, find Chops’ leash—or dear old Jumbles’ before she departed this life—and we’d jog together towards Callan Park. My usual excuses about exercise evaporated, replaced by a memory of his comment to me once as he was making his slow and painful way from one room to another: ‘Never take your health for granted, Lucy.’

Of course, one of the reasons that that made such an impression is that it was very unusual for my uncle to refer to the state of his health. The phrase ‘he never complained’ is a tenacious cliché when it comes to talking about people who suffer from chronic illness, as if mentioning that you are suffering even once completely eradicates your claim to sympathy. Nevertheless, it was extraordinary how much he had to bear and how little he mentioned it. Mum used to say that she had come to realise that on his best days Marko probably felt the way we do when we have the flu. However, he didn’t dwell on it and rarely even called attention to it. I wonder now whether he just thought—perhaps correctly—that most of us simply wouldn’t be able to properly understand. Or that it was just too boring to talk about.

As far as I know, Marko was only starstruck to the point of speechlessness once. It was when he met Adam Buxton, the English comedian whose show with his friend Joe Cornish was a favourite with him and with my family. One of its many catch cries was the phrase ‘Love you, bye’, with which Buxton would sign off at the end of each show, the words spoken very quickly, as if he were already rushing away from the person he was farewelling. Marko and I would always end our telephone conversations with that same phrase—or at least I would forget and sign off automatically with ‘love you lots, bye’, and then my uncle would reply in the silly voice of the podcast, ‘Love you, bye!’ We would laugh and talk for another ten minutes after that before going through the ritual again.

I miss those telephone calls. I wish we could ring each other one last time.

Goodbye, Uncle Marko. I loved you and I miss you so much already.

‘Love you, bye.’

Hairy Legs and True Romance

I was living in London when the engagement of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer was announced. I was very young, but I suspect that even if I hadn't been I would have been swept up in the fairytale that the Palace sold to the British public in the following days and weeks.

Sadly, it emerged later that what the public had been led to believe was an exquisite example of true romance actually wasn't any kind of love story. The beautiful princess was not the object of her prince's undying - or quite possibly any other kind of - love.

So it is cheering to discover that there really can be fairytale princesses:

And, even though, as you can read here, (a free ebook that also contains a lovely piece of writing by my younger daughter), I have been brought up in the belief (feeble, laughable and ridiculous) that my family should in fact be occupying the royal palaces of Denmark, given how delightful the current occupants of the royal roles are, I am especially happy that we are not.

In fact, given the wife of Denmark's crown prince was Australian when they married, could Australia please not become a republic but simply swap royal families after the current British queen's death, taking the Danish Queen or King as our head of state in future? Wouldn't that be rather nice?

Nigel's Trousers

A year ago today my beloved brother died. My sadness was initially made a little easier because it was mixed, if only to a very small extent, by relief that he was finally free from the misery he had endured for a very long time.

As time has gone on though, I have grown to miss him more and more, as the pile of things I've wanted to share with him - mostly funny things that I knew would amuse him as much as they did me - has mounted up. A lot of those things I would have shared via this blog, which he encouraged me to write in the first place and which became for me another way of talking to him. That is why, since he hasn't been here to talk to any more, I haven't really posted all that much.

But today it occurs to me that I can continue talking to him here. All I have to do is to pretend that he is listening. If I can create for myself the illusion that our conversation continues, if rather one-sidedly, that will be a small comfort, (and will also help me get rid of that ever increasing pile of things I mentioned).

And instead of being sad today, I'm going to listen to a song that I know my brother would have laughed and laughed at. It is by John Finnemore, who my brother loved, and its choice is, I suppose, influenced by nostalgia, (as, one could argue, this whole post is): when my brother and I were children we used to make up imaginary characters and conduct increasingly complicated conversations between these fictional people on long car journeys; our favourites were Nigel and Daphne, and this sketch makes affectionate fun of the kind of person Nigel, my brother's alter ego in our game, would have grown up to become, (with acknowledgments to Country Life magazine, from whose article about red trousers the illustration comes):

Words and Music

There was a session devoted to my brother at the Sydney Writers' Festival the other day. The organisers asked if I'd be part of it; I couldn't but I sent this along:

"A few details you might like, to round the picture people have of Marko:

1. he noticed clothes (there are a couple of outfits I'm particularly fond of because he admired them - "I do like that jacket, sis"; "Oh that dress is lovely" - quite unusual in a man) but he also had some sweetly old-fashioned ideas about them. A senior ABC person gave an address to staff the other day & Marko told me he was very shocked she was only wearing a cardigan: "She should have worn a good suit"; he was staying with us in Vienna and on the day he was leaving he came downstairs in a smart jacket and tie. When my husband asked him what had made him dress so smartly, he explained that he would be crossing a border and he thought you should always dress smartly when crossing borders. He is probably right, but it seemed somehow endearing.

The other thing to note is that he was interested in all things cultural, not just so-called "high culture". While he might not go so far as my daughter's friend who, at the end of an English literature degree at Cambridge, said "Well that was all very interesting but I still haven't read anything I've enjoyed as much as the Harry Potter series", he did like Harry Potter and much else besides. An illustration of this was a rather ludicrous scene not long before he died where he insisted I look up the Wikipedia synopsis of the final episode of the current series of a BBC thriller series called Line of Duty and read it to him, as he wouldn't have time to watch the episode now. As nurses and doctors milled around checking drip lines and blood pressure and asking him to scale his pain etc, I read this complicated thing out to him, with my mother beside me, the pair of us interrupting the flow with questions - "What, so Roz is a baddy?", "Oh yes, a real baddy"; "So she tampered with the jumper?", "Yes, she smeared DNA on it".

Another illustration came from a young cousin writing to say how sorry he was to hear of Marko's death - "I remember very clearly Marko coming to the Old Rectory when I was 14 or 15 and being surprised how much interest he had in us and in the music we were into; he had an eclectic taste, which we shared and 20 years later I still have some of his music on my hard drive."

I have so many stories I could tell you. He was so loveable

Interestingly, I've just been talking to the mother of that young cousin and she tells me that he had given the bowdlerised version of his experience of Marko, who actually had a more profound influence on him than he had described. While talking to our young cousin about a piece of music they both enjoyed listening to, my brother said, "Those lyrics - have you listened closely to them? They are so brilliant", and with that small comment Mark made his younger relative realise that he had always been too stoned to even notice that there were any lyrics. Since that day, that whole extra dimension of the songs he listens to has been opened up for him.

A win for my bro and his love of language. He would have been very pleased to hear that extra bit of the story.

My Brother, My Friend

On 11 May, my brother died. Although I do not normally make speeches, I felt I owed it to him - and to my mother - to pay tribute to him at his funeral a couple of days ago. Since then, some people have asked for a copy of what I said, and so I am putting the text here for those who want it. If you don't feel like reading such a long thing, the gist is that I loved my brother enormously and will always miss him. He was a wonderfully generous brother and human being and, by great good fortune, he met a woman called Mary Ellen Field who matched his generosity with an abundance of her own.

"I'd like to start by apologising. This will not be a very good eulogy, when compared to our family's usual standards. The problem is that up until now Mark Colvin has been our eulogiser-in-chief, and he set a very high bar. For both our father and our stepfather, he did the job brilliantly, evoking each of them with a vividness that almost made you believe they were still among us. How nice it would be if I could do the same for him.

For those who don't know, by the way, I am Mark Colvin's sister. This does mean that, on the subject of Mark Colvin, I can at least claim to be that much derided thing, an expert. My mother would be the greatest expert on him here today - or indeed anywhere on the planet. My cousins, Jamie and Belinda, who, to our great joy, have flown out from England to be with us to farewell Mark, were both born before me, so they might be able to argue that they also have the edge. However, despite missing out on his first four years, as the next sister in line to him, I reckon I did have quite a lot of experience of Mark Colvin - although possibly not the Mark Colvin who has been celebrated in the media since his death.

Yes, I am his sister. And apparently there is a thing called sibling rivalry. Well I wouldn't know. It is said, I admit, that Marko expressed initial disappointment that I wasn't a boy – the story goes that while being read a Christmas story the evening after my birth, (I was born near Christmas) he piped up each time the male pronoun was used, saying, “Him, not her - they laid him in a manger”, “He, not she – he was wrapped in swaddling clothes” etc (I mentioned this to someone in Marko's hospital room the other day and Marko smiled gently, commenting, “Ah, family stories, aren't they always the best')?  In any case, if there was any truth to the story, the whole thing took place before I was aware of anything much, and by the time I was noticing stuff, Marko seems to have decided that we were going to be friends forever. We have been ever since.

Our relationship consisted almost exclusively of laughing together, sharing stupid jokes, a love of Molesworth, EL Wisty, Shelley Berman, New Yorker cartoons, deriving amusement from the tormenting of parents and grandparents – in this regard, there was one recurrent idiocy that we shared with our cousins Jamie and Belinda, with whom we spent such a lot of time as children. It involved insisting to our grandmother that the man who took the parking fees in the car park at Winchester - a sensationally unattractive person who always wore a very grubby raincoat and was therefore known to us as “the mackintosh man” - was desperately in love with her; this for some reason was something that totally maddened granny, which of course gave us all great joy. 

However, our absolute all time favourite torment routine, something we never really abandoned even in adulthood, was teasing our mother with a rendition of a Fairy Liquid advertisement ubiquitous in our childhoods; “Mummy”, one of us would say, in a sickly voice, “Mummy”, the other would chime in, repeating this tag team repetition, until finally our mother could stand it no more and would reply, reluctantly, often impatiently, presumably having resigned herself to the fact that we were never going to give up. “Yes?” she would say, and after a lot of giggling, we would ask her, “Mummy why are your hands so soft”, breaking immediately afterwards into a saccharine rendition of one of the most saccharine jingles ever penned, which I will spare you. 

We also made up routines for long car journeys, dialogues between characters we invented randomly. For some reason, the pair we reverted to most frequently were Nigel and Daphne, a couple of what would now be called Sloanes who loved nothing better than discussing their social calendars. I have no idea why we found this so amusing but it passed the time extremely well. “Nigel, are you going to Lady Northumberland's ball next week?” “Daphne, I'd love to, but I'm going to the Hambledon Hunt Hunt Ball that evening and I simply can't get out of it.” 

I realise as I remember these things that one of the worst aspects of losing my brother is not being able to have the opportunity to make him laugh again. How I would love to tell him about Mary Ellen Field having received not one but two letters of condolence following his death - charming, kind, beautifully written letters, both of them from convicted phone hackers serving time in one or other of Her Majesty's jails. He would have laughed and laughed at that, as he would if he'd heard about how one of his closest friends told herself she must pull herself together and get out of the house the day after his death. She had barely gone through the gate when the local real estate agent greeted her, unleashing a downpour of tears, most of which landed on the unsuspecting woman's shoulder.  “A real estate agent, of all people,” his friend said afterwards. Yes, Mark would have found the idea of blubbing on a real estate agent wonderfully absurd. 

But actually there was more to our relationship than laughter – there was also huge generosity, although I'm ashamed to say it was always from him to me. After a brief hiccup when he was so battered by his experience at prep school that his affection for me was replaced almost exclusively by the response “Stick a beetroot in your cakehole” if I ever attempted to speak to him, I was amazed one morning as we were walking down Victoria Street in London, near Westminster School, the place that restored him after his five horrible years at Summerfields. All of a sudden, Mark vanished, and before I could work out where he'd gone he reappeared, emerging from a sweet-shop doorway. He handed me a small white paper bag containing a quarter of sherbet lemons. He'd decided he'd give me a present, just out of the blue, for no reason, simply because he felt like doing it. 

There were many other similar occasions, but another that especially stays with me was an afternoon when he returned to our house at 68 Limerston Street and handed me a brand new book. It was the first ever Paddington Bear novel, when Peggy Fortnum was his illustrator. “I thought this looked as if it might be something you'd like", he told me. It was astonishingly thoughtful and perfectly chosen. I am still grateful for the hours of pleasure he gave me with that unprovoked gesture, as I went on to read and enjoy every one of those early Paddington books. 

Marko's generosity continued beyond our childhood - and so did my disgraceful bludging. It is astonishing to remember but there was a time when Sydney had not yet become a place full of hipster cafes, and if you wanted brunch on Saturday you had the choice of a milk bar or fending for yourself. This was the early seventies. I was 17 or 18, working as a motorbike courier, Marko was living in Coogee and I think possibly already at Double Jay or possibly still a cadet. Anyway, on the first morning of each weekend he used to buy a steak and a tin of mushrooms and cook the steak and then add the mushrooms to the pan. By some coincidence, I would usually drop in at around the same time and rather wearily he would share what he had intended to be a meal for one. 

Three or four years later, in London, when he was working at the ABC bureau there and I was being paid almost nothing to work for various now defunct magazines, I would sometimes go up to see him at the office they had in Portland Place.  He and I and basically everyone else in the rest of the office would head out to a restaurant run by a young Greek Cypriot. Lunch would go on for hours and usually end with complementary Metaxas all round. Much food was eaten, much rubbish was spoken and there was a nice sense of Australian good cheer. 

On those occasions, as I remember it – and admittedly the Metaxas were not brilliant for one's memory - Mark always shouted me, and always refused to accept repayment. In the same period, I let slip that I needed carpet but couldn't afford it. To my astonishment – when you don't have much money, it is always astounding to learn that anyone else has any to spare -  Marko immediately told me not to be ridiculous and gave me 250 quid.

If I wanted to self justify of course I could point out that money was not something my brother cared about. In fact I have rarely met anyone so little interested in material wealth as Mark. If you want proof of how little stuff mattered to him, you only have to look at his arrival to live permanently in Australia. Somehow- and even this I cannot quite credit, but perhaps my stepmother or some other relative did it for him – he managed to organise himself enough to get his belongings, including a rather lovely desk that had belonged to his grandfather,  packed up professionally and shipped over to Sydney. After that, however, his attention drifted. Despite nagging from his parents and various other members of the family – or perhaps because of the nagging: after all I do remember my mother having a conversation with him after he'd had a motorbike accident wherein she said, 'Well I hope you will give up riding the motorbike now”, to which he replied, 'Well I was going to until you said that” -  he never, ever managed to pick the things up from the wharf; really and truly never; in the end they were seized and used toward payment of the wharf fees he'd accrued.  I genuinely don't think he cared at all about that happening. 

But it wasn't only with money that Marko was generous; he was equally generous with those more precious commodities, his time and his knowledge. My cousin Belinda often tells the story of how, just before his finals at Oxford, she was bemoaning to him her lack of education. Despite the fact that he had so much else on his mind, Marko still found time to draw up a reading list for Belinda – she has said ever since that what he did for her that day was actually supply her with the education school never had. My daughter Lucy talks about his patience with young people. When you were with him, she says, there was never a sense that he was looking over his shoulder wishing for someone more interesting. Many people at the ABC have told me that he was extremely unusual in his openness, helpfulness, generosity and lack of any guarded competitiveness. I think actually that had he not been a journalist, he would have made a great teacher and certainly he told Mary Ellen Field that one of the things he loved best about her gift of an extra four years of life was the opportunity it gave him to mentor younger colleagues. And, since we are mentioning her, I would just like to highlight her gift and point out that she was the one and only person who matched my brother's generosity with an abundance of her own.

Marko's generosity, his total lack of hesitation about sharing what he had, was something I still admire greatly, not just because I benefited from it. It is a quality encountered very rarely and it was just a small part of a larger element in Marko's character – a trait that never left him and would be unexpected in anyone but particularly in a man of Marko's profession. It was innocence, or at least a kind of innocence - an unshakeable expectation of decency, of fair play, of loyalty in others, a tendency not to suspect low motives. As I say, this quality never completely left him and it was a great part of his charm and loveableness. However, it did make him very vulnerable to hurt.

Perhaps the best illustration of this gentle unworldliness is the story my mother tells about the first children's party she took Marko to. Marko was not a shy child. He went into the party perfectly happily, and before long my mother saw a small girl approach him. They seemed to get on, although the girl, to mum's way of thinking, looked like she was coming on a bit strong. All the same they appeared happy. Mum took her eye off proceedings. The next thing she knew, Marko was hurtling towards her, an expression of complete shock on his face. He looked at mum and then back at the girl, who had remained where he'd left her on the other side of the room. 

“That girl bit me,” he told my mother. He was clearly horrified. Before she could think what she was saying, my mother added to his horror by saying “Well, darling, go and bite her back”. 

Needless to say, Mark didn't. He was never aggressive or violent. However, he could be disappointed – and woe betide the person who disappointed him and thought they could still retain his friendship. If Marko put his trust in you or gave you his friendship and you betrayed it, perhaps because he himself was so loyal and such a good friend, he found it well nigh impossible to forgive the hurt he felt as a result. Mind you when that happened, when he did give up on someone, he didn't resort to histrionics. He didn't shout or scream or throw things. In fact, the only sign that he could no longer stand the sight of you was a dawning sense of being locked out from his affection, an intimidating withdrawal of his attention and interest. 

But even then, I was so glad to discover last week, things weren't completely irredeemable, provided you were truly sorry for the hurt you'd caused. After years of wounded silence from Marko, one of our closest relatives apologised unreservedly for something that Marko thought he'd said to him. "I love you" was Marko's immediate reply. Our relative flew over from London and they were together when Marko died.

But enough of this cloying stuff. It is also important to remember that Marko was hugely interesting company. That is why, as well as the laughs and the steak and tinned mushrooms, I will miss so much the endlessly varied conversations we had. During one of our very last, he said to me, “You and I always had so much in common” and that is true. However, once again I was the beneficiary, as Marko's brain was so enormous and so stocked with knowledge, whereas, except on very rare occasions, I was merely the interested looker on.  On any topic worth discussing he had such a rich reserve of information and reference stored away inside his head. In the last two or three days of his life alone, despite his being very, very ill, we managed to have some great discussions about among other things Taming of the Shrew and whether it is actually a sexist work - we agreed that it isn't, that it is actually all about love; Les Murray's poetry, most particularly Dog Fox Field; the rich language of observed nature that emerges again and again in Shakespeare's writing, (complete with quotations straight from memory – by Marko, naturally, not me); Memling, Van Eyk and the so-called Northern Primitives and how the only reason we tend to hear more of Michelangelo and da Vinci is that Vasari's writings pushed them to the fore; and Thomas Hardy, who my brother to the very end refused to agree contains traces of humour. 

And speaking of humour, I did manage to get one last chuckle out of him. It was very late in the piece, when he was well aware that death was not far away. If I had any doubt about that I would not have mentioned the plans being made to mark his passing. However, he knew and I knew, and so I told him I'd heard that the ABC had a strategy in place for the day of his death that was equal to that devised by the British government in the event of the death of the Queen Mother. He looked - unsurprisingly, given his utter modesty about his own significance - astonished and also gratified, in a I-must-stifle-any-tiny-scrap-of-incipient-vanity kind of way. To help in this regard, I told him that I was going to nip out immediately and look for a suitably flowery hat for him to wear from now on. He laughed, relieved that he had been rescued from the dangers of a plunge into full blown self-importance.

That was so typical. My brother was never a seeker of limelight, never a big noter. When filming, he abhorred noddies and appeared as little as humanly possible in the footage he shot. He must have known at some level that he was much loved by many, but it never made him self-important. While, like anyone he would have been gratified by the tributes that have been paid to him since his death, he would have been amazed as well. I doubt that he would have thought he deserved them. 

Speaking of tributes, I was looking through Mark's papers the other day and found something he'd written for the family of  Bahram William Dehqani-Tafti, his interpreter in Iran. Bahram was assassinated on 6 May, 1980. His death horrified Marko. His tribute to Bahram reads as follows:

"You get to know people faster in a war zone: during the three days he spent with us in Kurdistan, Bahram revealed many of his qualities: he was courageous, extremely level-headed, and at the same time sensitive to the people surrounding him. He had an enquiring mind without being inquisitive; but one of the things which struck me most forcibly was his ability to look at a problem from all directions.”

Mum felt that those words could just as well have been written about Marko himself. 

In the instant after my brother died. out of nowhere a memory from our childhood leapt into my head. It was from the very early 1960s, we were in Victoria, in a car driving along a remote and empty road. Marko and I were in the back, playing up as usual. Eventually my parents ran out of patience. They stopped the car. "If you don't behave" they told us, "we will put you out on the side of the road and leave you". 

My brother immediately grabbed the door handle, opened the door and leapt out. He began walking. I didn't see my parents' faces because I was so shocked myself. What would happen to him? Would we ever see him again? He was striding away ahead of us. He had called our parents' bluff.

My father started the car again and drove after Marko. Then ensued a ridiculous reversal of roles whereby my parents were reduced to creeping along in first gear beside their son's walking figure, begging him to get back into the car.

It was an odd thing to think of at that moment but I like to believe it was a metaphor. Marko has leapt out of the car we're all travelling in, he has shown us that what we think we are afraid of is not actually anything to be frightened of. He is striding off down the road."