After 20 years of struggling with a rare autoimmune disease, veteran ABC broadcaster Mark Colvin has died aged just 65.
It was in 1994 while covering the Rwandan genocide that he contracted Wegener’s granulomatosis, a rare illness that affects the bloodstream, that his illness began.
ABC reported that he became ill on his return to London, suffering from severe fluid build-up and kidney failure which led to him spending three years on dialysis and eventually having a kidney transplant in 2013. Side-effects from treatment meant he also had to have both hips replaced.
A story in itself, Colvin’s kidney donor was someone he met on the job during an interview about the News of the World phone-hacking scandal. After becoming friends with Mary-Ellen Field, who had been accused of giving journalists personal information about one of her clients, supermodel Elle McPherson, she donated her kidney.
In fact, it was such a great story that it became the subject of a play, aptly named ‘Mark Colvin’s Kidney.’
Only last November Colvin released his personal memoir titled ‘Light and Shadow’, which tells the story of his coming of age as a journalist during “the tumultuous Whitlam and Fraser years”, and his “risky” work as a foreign correspondent.
Colvin, as well as being a respected broadcaster, has been an active presence on Twitter and leaves a large following of over 103k.
He will be missed.
UPDATE: A Tweet has been sent out from Colvin’s Twitter account, getting in the last word even after death.