Sean Dorney
Sean Dorney is one of the ABC’s most experienced and respected correspondents. He’s an acknowledged authority on Papua New Guinea and is the author of two books on PNG affairs.
Sean lived and worked in Papua New Guinea for almost 20 years and is, remarkably, the only foreign correspondent to have been both deported and awarded honours by PNG.
The first of his three postings to Papua New Guinea began in 1974, just before PNG independence. From 1974 to 1976 he was seconded from the ABC to work with the then-newly established National Broadcasting Commission of PNG. During this time, he met and married a fellow broadcaster at the NBC.
It was an exciting time to be in PNG, and Sean remembers the thrill of covering the independence celebrations. ‘There were no mobile phones back in 1975, so I had to chase across the bush there at Wigani to get to the Supreme Court building where the NBC had a phone and I could ring the story through of the raising of the flag on Independence Day in Papua New Guinea.’
During this period Sean was as well known for his rugby skills as he was his journalism. He became captain of the PNG Rugby League national team, the Kumuls and played representative football for two years. Sean also later served on the Port Moresby Rugby League Judiciary Panel.
In 1979 Sean returned to Port Moresby as the ABC correspondent, but was expelled in 1984 by the then Foreign Minister, Rabbie Namaliu, following a dispute between the PNG government and the ABC over the screening of an interview with Irian Jayan rebel leader, James Nyaro, by the Four Corners program.
Sean returned to Port Moresby as ABC correspondent in 1987 and in 1991 the government of Prime Minister Sir Rabbie Namaliu awarded him an MBE for ‘services to broadcasting and sport’. For 18 months in 1991-92 Sean was seconded to the PNG NBC as in-country project manager for an AusAid/ABC assistance project. In 1997 he led the ABC’s radio and television coverage of the Sandline mercenary crisis.
After almost two decades in PNG, Sean returned to Australia in 1999 to take up a position with Radio Australia as Pacific correspondent, based in Brisbane. He recently reflected on working in PNG: ‘It’s an exceptionally difficult country to govern. It’s basically a thousand mini society states speaking 850 languages and you are trying to combine it into one unified country and run it along modern Western lines…And that is what makes it so exciting to be a journalist there. You never know what’s going to happen.’
Sean has written two books – ‘Papua New Guinea: People, Politics and History since 1975′; and ‘The Sandline Affair – Politics and Mercenaries and the Bougainville Crisis’. In 2000 Sean completed a two-part television documentary marking the 25th anniversary of PNG independence and spanning his own quarter of a century involvement with the country.
Sean has received many awards for his work in the Pacific. He won the Walkley Award for radio news reporting for his coverage of the Aitape tsunami that struck PNG in July 1998. In 1999, the Queensland Branch of the Media Arts and Entertainment Alliance (MEAA) honoured Sean with its ‘Most Outstanding Contribution of Journalism Award’. The PNG Government awarded Sean an MBE 1991 and he received an AM in 2000 in recognition for his service to Australia as a foreign correspondent.
In 2006 Sean took on the role of Pacific Correspondent the ABC’s Australia Network. While on assignment in Fiji 2009 for Australia Network, Sean was deported by the military-led government, which objected to his stories on its censoring of local journalists.
