27 Facts About Murray Sayle

Murray William Sayle was an Australian journalist, novelist and adventurer.

Murray Sayle was a foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Murray Sayle resigned from The Sunday Times in 1972 after the newspaper refused to publish an investigative piece he wrote about the Bloody Sunday shootings of 26 unarmed protesters in Northern Ireland.

Murray Sayle attended the Canterbury Boys' High School before enrolling at the University of Sydney.

At university, Murray Sayle studied psychology and worked for the student magazine, Honi Soit.

Murray Sayle worked for six years as a radio reporter for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

In 1952, Murray Sayle sailed for London in an attempt to save his relationship with singer Shirley Abicair, who had decided to move to Britain.

Murray Sayle worked in the early 1960s for Agence France Presse and returned to London in 1964 to work for The Sunday Times.

Murray Sayle first made a name for himself working with The Sunday Times "Insight" team exposing the financial fraud of insurance businessman Emil Savundra.

Murray Sayle reported that the "reserves" of Savundra's insurance company included securities that were forgeries.

Also in 1966, Murray Sayle gained attention when he chartered a plane to find the noted sailor Sir Francis Chichester, who had gone missing in a storm off Cape Horn during an attempt to become the first person to sail non-stop solo around the world.

Murray Sayle became the newspaper's chief foreign correspondent, reporting on the Vietnam War, the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, He received the Journalist of the Year award in the Granada Press Awards for his reports from Vietnam.

In 1967, Murray Sayle accompanied the Bolivian army as it tracked down Che Guevara in the South American jungle.

Forty years later Murray Sayle wrote for the first time about his Bolivian journey and the circumstances leading to Che's execution by the Bolivian army.

Murray Sayle made headlines again in late 1967 when he tracked down British double agent, Kim Philby, in Moscow.

Murray Sayle took Jackson with him to the office of the Czech firm responsible for distribution of The Times in Czechoslovakia.

Murray Sayle claimed to be the publisher's personal representative and demanded that the man turn over funds that had not been remitted due to exchange restrictions.

In 1971, Murray Sayle participated in the International Mount Everest Expedition and reporting on the expedition for BBC television.

Murray Sayle did his bodily functions into poly bags which he stacked, frozen solid, in the back of the tent until we were relieved and could move about again.

Murray Sayle kept our morale up when things got very tough on the mountain, as they eventually did when one of our most popular climbers was killed.

In 1972, Murray Sayle sailed solo across the Atlantic Ocean as a participant in the Single-Handed Trans-Atlantic Race.

Murray Sayle became embroiled in controversy over his investigative reporting into Bloody Sunday, a January 1972 incident in Derry, Northern Ireland, in which 26 unarmed civil rights protesters and bystanders were shot, and 13 killed, by a regiment of paratroopers from the British Army.

Murray Sayle remained in Japan for 33 years, living with his second wife and their children in a traditional wooden house in the village of Aikawa in Kanagawa Prefecture.

Murray Sayle reported on Asia for The Independent Magazine, The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.

Murray Sayle's most noted work during this time includes his reporting on the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the 1983 disappearance of Korean Air Lines Flight 007.

Murray Sayle was a nonstop talker whose verbal stream of consciousness was festooned with unexpected detours, impromptu theories, hilarious asides, and astounding anecdotes, some of them true.

In 2004, Murray Sayle returned to Australia, where he was later diagnosed with Parkinson's disease.