University lecturer and former journalist Richard Murray is telling me about the moments in his life – and there are several of them – which led him from poor Maori tribal lands in New Zealand to a University of Queensland podcast booth talking to one of his journalism students (me) about his life and the craft of news reporting. One of those came when he was just a kid, living with extended family at the bottom of New Zealand’s north island. Life wasn’t idyllic. “My mum had drug and alcohol issues, and she moved around from partner to partner…So I didn’t really grow up with a lot of positive male role models,” Richard explains. The UQ lecturer had four stepsisters and a lot of cousins, growing up in the chaotic environment it produced, until his life changed one day on a local rugby field while throwing a ball around with his cousins. Richard was approached by a rugby talent scout for the prestigious Wellington College, who took an interest in the lanky kid. He was offered a scholarship to play rugby at the school, and soon Richard would get to see how the other side lived. “I still maintain that the biggest culture shock I’ve ever had, anywhere going around the world, was going from rural New Zealand into that,” he says.
It should go without saying then that Richard’s path to journalism lecturer at UQ was far from straightforward. A short stint playing rugby at UQ in 1992 ended with a torn ACL in his first season, and he returned to New Zealand to study economics, history, and politics with the vague dream of becoming a diplomat. “I probably wouldn’t have made the best diplomat,” he laughs, acknowledging that journalists and diplomacy tend not to mix. He went for the exam and got knocked back, and it was during a period of moping around following the rejection that a friend’s father, a desk editor at the former The Dominion newspaper in Wellington, suggested giving journalism a go. He immediately loved it. “I think because I came from a bit of a mongrel background – going into a newsroom, it wasn’t that much different,” he says. Richard tells me he loved being around hungry idealists who really believed in what they were doing and had a purpose. He learnt on the job very quickly. “It was a real school of hard knocks. And I liked that pressure, I’ve always responded well to it.”
Richard Murray is a lecturer in journalism at The University of Queensland
His background helped in other ways. “I very quickly got a reputation for being able to talk to people and tell stories that a lot of my colleagues weren’t comfortable doing,” Richard says. These were stories about the other side of crime, and Richard quickly found himself in a niche that has become a lifelong passion – social justice storytelling and exploring the bigger picture stories behind why people from certain backgrounds engage in criminal activity. “Because that was my family background,” Richard says. “I was able to break quite a few stories about different drug rings and syndicates because I had a family who had lived like that…one of the major industries, or the only major industry on our tribal land was the cultivation of marijuana.” “I think these days, sadly, it’s meth. The drugs have just got harder.” He adds with characteristic humor: “I was comfortable talking to people who had neck and face tattoos before neck and face tattoos were cool. And they were usually friends of friends.”
If the rejection from New Zealand’s esteemed diplomatic ranks stung Richard, then his then girlfriend, who went for the same position, got accepted, and then promptly dumped him, added to his woes. “She had this idea that she’s going to be spending time with these James Bond types,” he says wryly. “What she found was that the ranks of New Zealand diplomacy were inhabited almost exclusively by disgruntled and overweight married men and young gay men.” The split led to Richard moving to Melbourne, a popular spot for Kiwi’s in the 90s and a potential stepping stone to journalism jobs in London. Richard got a casual reporter job at The Age and split his time covering stories for the paper and doing shifts as a labourer at the port of Melbourne loading and unloading containers, where he befriended members of the influential union. Melbourne would be short-lived, however. Before he left New Zealand, Richard had applied for an exchange program in India, where the Indian government would swap journalists with Australian newsrooms, who would work in India but keep their home wages. After about a year in Melbourne, Richard got a call from his mum saying she had a letter stating he’d been accepted.
So “almost on a whim” Richard moved to Mumbai, into a flat paid for by the newspaper, The Times of India, and lived comfortably on a Western salary for the six-month duration of the program. The Times was – and still is – the most distributed English newspaper in the world and the pinnacle of Indian journalism. After the six-month program, and on the offer of his desk editor, Richard chose to stay, even though it meant living on a local salary. “What struck me about that was just the incredibly quality of journalism and the writing. The journalists I worked with at the Times of India were far and away the most talented and intelligent group of journalists I’ve encountered anywhere,” he says. Richard ended up on the business and finance desk before moving to the defence task, which meant travelling extensively through India. The highlights of that period? “I was one of the few foreigners there was allowed into Kashmir” during the period of tensions between India and Pakistan, he says, and he got to cover the early years of Narendra Modi and the BJP’s rise to power. As a result, Richard covered extensive violence against Muslims in Gujarat province by Hindu nationalists. “I remember arriving with an Indian colleague to do a story about a massacre that had happened in a village in Gujarat state and being picked up by the police heading in and locked up for 10 days until any vestige or any evidence of this of this atrocity had been removed.” They let them go afterwards, but “10 days in an Indian prison is no joke,” Richard says.
Murray worked for The Times of India, the most widely distributed English newspaper in the world.
It’s here that our conversation takes a different turn; a characteristic of Richard is his humour as well his willingness to get vulnerable. In India Richard was working hard, doing whatever he could to understand international and domestic developments and tell the story as best as he could. “The first 12 years of my life were tough and hard, but that was what I knew, that was my background,” he tells me. “And ever since then I’ve always been in someone else’s space.” Richard says that going to India wasn’t much different going to Wellington College, or to the university. “And part of that is not being an imposter. You’ve got still got to have your integrity…you’ve got to be authentic”. The flipside of that, he adds, is “just feeling a deep sense of inadequacy,” something which he still carries with him today. “These people still don’t feel like my world, but I just got used, probably before most, to living in a space that wasn’t mine.” The inadequacy also fueled his drive to do more, to get more promotions and accolades. “But I feel just as inadequate now, as I did when I was 12 years old. In a different way. I’ve learned to live with it, to have it work for me.”
After India came Nepal with Associated Press, and a civil war. “People just didn’t know (about it), it was so far away, it was so remote, so removed, it just felt like another world.” The situation was dangerous and unfolding. “I got shot at. It wasn’t the first time that I’d seen dead people. But it was certainly the first time that I’d seen people who had been who had died under those kinds of conditions.” The other challenge was working at altitude. He adds that the soldiers must have been a terrible shot – Richard’s very tall so he’s not exactly inconspicuous in a place like Nepal. Richard’s mind in Nepal was on telling the story as well as possible, a passion that would sometimes leave him “tying myself up in knots”. “I’m a bit of a train spotter,” Richard says. “I’ve got to find out the context: why is this going on?” His stint at university studying international politics also helped. “I learned to read different signals. What kind of weaponry were soldiers carrying? Where did it come from? Was it American? Was it Israeli? Was it Soviet? Was it Chinese? That gives you a pretty good idea of who’s funding these things.”
As for the reality of working in a war zone and witnessing horror, Richard says he was too caught up in reporting to stop and consider how he felt at the time, but it’s come back in later years to affect him. “It’s always been a big problem in journalism, that people are so reluctant to address those kinds of issues in a meaningful way. What I didn’t know at the time is that those things would come back to get me later.” How has he worked through those emotions? “It was a heart attack that really got me thinking about these things more seriously.” Richard ended up with a PTSD diagnosis and the therapeutic process has involved “learning more about myself and being more about who I am.” He tells me of the importance of this work: “Understanding that a lot what I’ve seen and what I’ve experienced has been really formative in who I am now, and learning to live with it, rather than to push it down and forget it. Just to learn to live with it, and accept that.” It’s a badge of honour in the industry to have covered wars – “people are impressed by it”, Richard says – but “the insomnia, the flashbacks, and the anger that bubbles up sometimes” is far more troubling, especially now that he’s a father. I thank Richard for his vulnerability. “That’s humanity, isn’t it? Not letting these animal instincts rule you,” he replies.
Pyongyang, North Korea, where Murray helped establish an Associated Press bureau in the late 2000s.
After Nepal a new relationship brought Richard back Queensland (“I actually met an Australian woman at a bar in Kathmandu, it sounds like a bad country song, doesn’t it?” he says), where he got a job for Queensland Country Life, travelling around the state and reporting on the drought that was devastating farmers in the mid to late 2000s. Then a job came up at the Associated Press bureau in South Korea. Leaving the relationship and Queensland behind, Richard set out on “probably one of the best experiences I’ve ever had” covering news in the Korean peninsula, including in the north. Which brings me to a question I’ve been waiting to ask Richard about an experience he’d casually mentioned to me a few months earlier over coffee: the time he went to prison in South Korea for a story he published as AP bureau chef.
“I don’t always talk about this much,” he admits, citing his former colleague Peter Greste who spent 400 days in an Egyptian prison cell as the reason. “I always felt his prison story was heaps cooler than mine,” he says wryly. Richard explains: “We’d run a story about a certain very well-known industrial who was head of one of the most recognised electronics brands in the world.” That man had been allegedly engaging in an historical South Korean business practise where teenage girls are used as prostitutes in secret basement rooms in the offices of some of the world’s biggest electronics companies. The story had been in the Korean media for ages, and when a journo came to Richard with the story, he wondered if it would even be in the public interest to resurface allegations that done the rounds of the local media. What caught his attention was the business owner’s status as head of the Korean International Olympic Committee, “a rogue’s gallery of some of the most corrupt people on the planet,” which pushed the story over the line in Richard’s eyes. It ended up going around the world.
Then a couple of days later “a whole lot of very well-dressed men” entered the AP office in Seoul and told Richard they were being sued for defamation. Since Associated Press doesn’t publish bylines on stories, it was Richard who copped the punishment. In South Korea, defamation is criminal, and there is no truth defence, meaning if you tell the truth about someone, but you damage their reputation in telling the truth, you can still go to jail. “So yeah, I went off to prison,” he says matter-of-factly. IT was ultimately a symbolic gesture to warn journalists operating in Seoul not to cross the line with particular people, and Richard spent not much longer than a month behind bars, still enough for him to get to know some of the hard Korean-American gangsters in the foreign wing of the prison, as well as coming across “the usual peanut gallery of Western sex pests and paedophiles.” The big issue – and I’m sure Richard is deflecting a little with humour here – was the uniforms. “Because I’m so huge, even the biggest uniform was way, way, way too small on me. And so the shirt looked like a crop top and the pants looked like sort-of Capri pants.” After the month was up he returned to his job “like it never happened.” The lesson from the experience? “It really kind of opened my eyes to sort of some of the arrogance that we have, as far as working these places, sometimes where we really don’t, don’t always appreciate the impact that our work might have.”
Richard is a university lecturer now and he’s the face students see when they show up to their very first journalism lecture. His third-year course on social justice storytelling is one of the most popular in the program. The first thing he tells students on day one is that “they’re already journalists, and if they want to take this seriously, they need to start doing it.” It’s not like being a doctor or an engineer or an accountant, and you don’t need a professional certification. Richard’s teaching style is “let’s get our hands dirty together, let’s get amongst it”. He tries to take the chief of staff role you’d find in a newsroom for student, minus the profanity, and “try and build the energy in such a way that students feel empowered to go out and chase that story.” New technology and ways of storytelling are crucial to the program. “We’re not teaching the history of journalism,” Richard says. “When I started it was a job for life,” and the average age of the newsroom was around 48. Now, Richard says, the average age is more like 28 in many newsrooms. Which means students going through the program need a broad range of skills covering video and audio to thrive long-term in their careers.
Social justice storytelling brings together some of these skills in a third-year course aimed at telling stories in a more nuanced and complex way than traditional news reporting. “It’s really nothing more than the human story,” Richard says. “It’s making sure that we have a diversity of voices and experiences in our media.” That means looking at systems of justice, prevalence of certain types of crime in the community, and asking the bigger questions to get to the structural reasons of why people behave the way they do. It’s not about excusing bad behaviour – “I’ve been around enough scumbags to know that some people are just bad,” he says – but most people aren’t bad. That’s why bringing empathy and curiosity to a story can be so powerful. “I think one of the biggest issues we have in society today is that no one listens to each other,” Richard says. “There’s no compromise.” But he acknowledges it takes time to do these stories well and newsrooms are under pressure. He worries about the future of journalism in Australia. Meta’s recent decision to pull the plug on a funding deal with Australian news publishers will affect regional publications the hardest. “There’s not a lot of wiggle room. And unless the funding model can be solved…then yeah, we’re in trouble.”
Richard misses the newsroom but the switch to teaching has ultimately been a happy one. “I miss the energy. I also miss the camaraderie of working with people,” he says. Journalism is “wonderful, and I miss it every single day.” But teaching has it perks. “I get to spend Christmas with my family,” Richard offers. “It’s added years to my life. I’m probably a much better physical condition than I was when I was doing that work.” He’s grateful for the experiences journalism has given him, particularly the people he’s met who have changed his life. “Journalism has put me in a place to meet those people. And to understand that what separates us is not nearly as important as what brings us together.” Now, he says, “it’s my responsibility to find a way to share that with the people that I’m obligated to. And that’s something I take pretty seriously.”