Laconic, a beach lover, surfer, rock climber and adventurer, Morgan Mellish also had a rare gift for pursuing a story.
Jakarta correspondent. There, he revelled in the life of a foreign correspondent. On the bedside table in Mellish’s Jakarta house was a copy of Christopher Koch’sThe special investigation into Gerard’s tax affairs.. The latter is about a love affair set in Indonesia during the overthrow of President Sukarno in the mid ’60s, and was later made into a film starring Mel Gibson and Sigourney Weaver.
“Morgan had reached his dream: to be a foreign correspondent,” his Indonesian partner, Nila Tanzil, later recalled. “He tried to go away from the city in the weekend, to surf, to climb mountains, or anything. He definitely knew how to live a life and embrace every moment of it.”According to onetime colleague Nick Chesterfield, Mellish was “a man who was unafraid to put himself on the line to tell the truth.
“To his eternal credit, Morgan did not stop reporting even when he was stopped by the Indonesian intelligence service, and it was his enthusiasm at giving them a big finger that most impressed me.” Mellish was a passenger on a Garuda Airlines Boeing 737-400 carrying 133 passengers and seven crew on a regular Jakarta-Yogyakarta shuttle on March 7, 2007. The plane
and burst into flames on landing, killing 21 people, including five Australians. Mellish, Australian Federal Police agents Brice Steele and Mark Scott, Australia’s Indonesia embassy spokeswoman Liz O’Neill and AusAID’s Indonesia chief Allison Sudradjat lost their lives.journalist Cynthia Banham was badly burnt and broke her back but made a remarkable recovery.
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