Australian Dictionary of Biography

Journalist Paul Lyneham listens to John Howard during the Federal election campaign, 1996, by Andrew Chapman

National Library of Australia, PIC/11453/86 LOC Drawer PIC/11453

Rodney Paul Lyneham (1945–2000), journalist and broadcaster, was born on 13 August 1945 in Melbourne, elder child of New South Wales-born Noel Lloyde Lyneham, draftsman and town planner, and his Victorian-born wife Phyllis Amy, née Chaplin. Paul attended Balwyn State School, and Camberwell High School. In an unfinished autobiography, he evoked a ‘Ginger Meggs’ childhood of japes, scrapes, and snakes on the urban outskirts. He also recalled a primary school headmaster who once brutally thrashed him for a misdemeanour but was pleased to add that the family dog later seized an opportunity to bite his assailant.

The family moved to Canberra in 1961, where Noel became supervising town planner for the National Capital Development Commission but also left Paul’s mother for another woman. Years before the supporting mothers’ benefit was introduced, Phyllis became sole parent to Paul and his sister. After qualifying for matriculation at Lyneham High School, he enrolled in arts and law at the Australian National University, enjoying English literature and history but never finishing either degree as he was drawn to journalism. He began on the university’s student newspaper, Woroni, followed by stringing for the fledgling national daily the Australian, which in 1965 he parlayed into a cadetship. After a stint with the Canberra Times, he joined the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) in 1969, and was soon posted to its London bureau. His reporting ranged from the Troubles in Northern Ireland to light-hearted pieces for Weekend Magazine that included a man trying to grow square tomatoes for use in sandwiches.

While in England Lyneham on 11 September 1970 married a fellow Canberran, Margaret Valerie Morton, but the marriage did not last. He later formed a relationship with New South Wales-born Dorothy Jane Horsfield, a poet, novelist, and journalist. They returned to Australia on the day of the Whitlam government’s dismissal, 11 November 1975. Lyneham reported for the ABC’s Four Corners, which won a Logie award in 1978 for his exposé of rapacious profits being extracted, along with coking coal, by the Utah Development Company in Queensland’s Bowen Basin. In 1981 he was lured to Channel 7 to be the network’s European correspondent, covering the Falklands War and loathing the conflict’s pursuit by Britain’s Prime Minister Thatcher for what he saw as base domestic political purposes. Returning to Australia in 1983, he began reporting on Federal politics, the focus of his subsequent career.

In 1987 Lyneham rejoined the ABC and became the Canberra-based chief political interviewer for the 7.30 Report. He became a prominent public figure: his short satirical book, Political Speak (1991), enlivened by his trademark informed mockery, sold 34,000 copies. In 1995 he left the ABC and joined Channel 9, furious to have been belatedly told that a new wholly national edition of the 7.30 Report would see all major political interviews conducted from Sydney by Kerry O’Brien. Furthermore, he and his long-time colleague, Andrew Olle, with whom he had shared a popular political commentary segment on radio 2BL, would no longer present a New South Wales edition of the same show. Lyneham never forgave the ABC or O’Brien, who understood Lyneham’s anger but said he had been sworn to secrecy by the managing director, Brian Johns.

Some commentators thought Lyneham’s reputation suffered on commercial television, where his work ranged from political interviews on the current affairs program Nightline, to lighter turns on the breakfast show Today. He was nonetheless a finalist in the 1999 Walkley Awards for his investigation on 60 Minutes concerning investment by the former prime minister Paul Keating in a piggery, that included an allegation of having misled parliament. The story fuelled Keating’s deep animosity toward the owner of Channel 9, Kerry Packer, but the network’s head of news and current affairs, Peter Meakin, recalled that Packer was initially unconvinced that there was sufficient evidence for the story to be broadcast. Lyneham persuaded the famously intimidating proprietor, saying ‘If you don’t want the heat, why don’t you run a shoe factory or bake loaves of bread?’ (Horsfield 2002, 195).

In early 2000, Lyneham, a lifelong smoker, disclosed on national television that he had lung cancer. He died on 24 November 2000 in Canberra, survived by Dorothy and their three children, Chloe, Joel, and Mathew. Dorothy thought his incessant workaholic drive—during the Falklands War he had worked seventy-five days straight from dusk to dawn filing for Australian audiences—contributed to his early death.

Lyneham was tall and well built, and, as his career progressed, greying and receding hair helped impart an aura of mature authority. He had a rare ability to report on politics from the perspective of ordinary Australians rather than as a Canberra insider. Even on the ABC he was happy to use theatrical props to enliven a story, such as placing a crowbar on the interview table to symbolically separate the ABC’s then managing director, David Hill, from the minister for transport and communications, Gareth Evans, as they argued over the organisation’s funding. To Murray Travis, executive producer of the 7.30 Report, Lyneham’s confrontational style brought politics alive: ‘He could bring satire, whimsy and hard information into the same six to twelve minutes any night you asked him. And he could tell a story like no-one else’ (Travis 2000, 3). In 2002 an award in his name was established for excellence in political journalism by members of the Federal parliamentary press gallery.