I met George when I was working on This Day Tonight. I’d been there a couple of years when George joined the Sydney office and he was new to television. He, the late Paul Murphy and I went to Canberra in mid-1975 for the extraordinary sitting of the parliament around the loans affair in the Whitlam government.

We sent George to the ABC studio in Canberra to interview an academic about the constitutional issues around the loans affair. It was rough around the edges, but Paul and I just looked at each other and said, “This guy’s a natural, we’re not going to have to teach him much.”

It all just came to him so naturally. Not long after that he became the Canberra correspondent for This Day Tonight, and it wasn’t surprising commercial television came calling. Gerry [Gerald] Stone was chasing George as one of his three reporters when he embarked on setting up 60 Minutes.

Before that, he’d had years as a print journalist for the Australian, he worked for the Australian Financial Review on the industrial round, and he’d worked for Lionel Murphy, who became attorney general in the Whitlam........

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