Fairfax journalist recorded transformation of China against all odds

YVONNE PRESTON: 1937 - 2024

Yvonne Preston arrived in China in 1975 as the Herald’s China correspondent, she had a big challenge. She did not speak the language and did not know much about the country.

Yvonne Preston, a former foreign correspondent in China, in her Sydney home in 2020.Credit: Janie Barrett

China had only just been opened up to the west and what access there was for journalists was so tightly controlled that they were largely confined to compound. Outside travel was strictly controlled.

The Cultural Revolution had raged since 1966, an era she described as “vicious, lethal and cruel”. Mao Zedong was still in office. Constantly spied upon and watched by the People’s Liberation Army and fed copious material by the official news agency about the glories of the proletarian revolution, Preston was in a tight corner.

Daughter Louise said: “Once, Mum was in Tiananmen Square and tried to take a photo of a soldier, who promptly confiscated the film, which upset us children because, as I recall, the film included a photo of [leading Australian China expert] Geremie Barme sleeping on our couch.”

The fact that Preston nevertheless did a fine reporting job over the next two years, in the same vein as her illustrious predecessor Margaret Jones, stamped Preston as someone she had always been: not just a journalist but a genuine literary figure.

Mao Zedong was in his final years in power when Yvonne Preston first arrived in Beijing.Credit: Getty

She told it as it was, braved the scrutiny and caught flak from western visitors to China, at that time mostly of a communist or socialist persuasion. One called her a “lying capitalist bitch”, another that she was at “her venomous best, or worst”.

In 1991, after stints in London and Sydney, Preston was sent back for another two years and again distinguished herself. China rose from the dreadful poverty she first saw in 1975, but she observed the continuation of ugly features, which she despaired of in the years that followed.

Yvonne Preston was born in Ipswich in England on October 30, 1937, daughter of a co-op store employee and mathematical whizz, Stanley Miller, and his wife, Kathleen (nee Lovick). She had a twin brother, Gerald, and was to have another brother, John. All the children were very bright and won scholarships.

Preston went to a Church of England primary school and won a scholarship to a Girls’ Public Day School. She was looked down on to an extent because she was not from the upper classes, but taught by true believers in women’s education. Preston attended the London School of Economics, where she focused on international relations.

Passport picture of Yvonne Preston and her two daughters.Credit: Fairfax

She started her working life by producing a magazine for Sunday school teachers. In 1965, she was working for a co-op doing tests on goods and living in “rainy Manchester”. She saw a sign for “Ten-Pound Poms” along with a picture of Bondi Beach which she found “particularly compelling” and decided to give it a try.

During the voyage to Australia, she met her husband-to-be, a fitter-and-turner and ship’s steward, Albert Edward (Bert) Preston. They married on September 25, 1965. Preston, settling with Bert in Sydney, started her work in Australia as a research economist with the Reserve Bank before joining Fairfax newspapers and writing for The Australian Financial Review, The National Times and The Sydney Morning Herald. She gave birth to two children, Louise and Madeleine.

Taking up the Beijing posting in 1975, with Bert forever on the high seas, she took the children with her, filing for Fairfax newspapers and also for the London Financial Times. Bert did make some visits and found that his identity was noted by officialdom.

Preston said later: “The Cultural Revolution was in its dying days; Mao Zedong was still alive, just; the country was dirt poor and isolated from the rest of the world; there were few cars, only bicycles and donkey carts on the streets; and politics consisted of campaigns such as the ‘criticise Confucius, criticise Lin Biao’ absurdity.”

’On one occasion, my ABC colleague was told, ‘We have no comment and you may not say that we have no comment’.’

Yvonne Preston about working in China

But the world was coming to Beijing. She found herself interviewing an array of leaders, dictators and despots visiting Beijing including Yasser Arafat and the president of Yugoslavia, Marshal Tito. She made a visit to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

And things did not stay still. China was shaken by an earthquake which nearly put paid to Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and wife Margaret, and she met Whitlam afterwards. She and her family had to live in the Australian Embassy for a time. Mao died. Shortly afterwards the “Gang of Four” made a bid for power and failed, followed by Mao’s widow died by suicide.

Deng Xiaoping made positive changes to the economy and things started looking up. But the control of media remained just as stringent and all Preston’s resources were needed to find out what was really happening, including the repercussions for those suspected of backing the Gang of Four and serious disturbances in Tiananmen Square in 1976.

It was a battle. “For a start, there was no phone book,” Preston said. “We had a single number we could ring outside the diplomatic compound for the ill-named Information Department of the Foreign Ministry. Our requests for help, answers, permission to travel, facts, news, confirmations were almost invariably met with a blank, ‘I will take note of your question’, ‘I think you know the answer to that question’. On one occasion, my ABC colleague was told, ‘We have no comment and you may not say that we have no comment’.”

Yvonne Preston in a Herald work portrait, 1981.Credit: Fairfax

Returning to Australia, Preston dealt with social issues, such as joblessness and social disadvantage in Campbelltown. She wrote about the battling family that lived in Paul Keating’s Bankstown childhood home. Preston was always concerned about the status of women and their disadvantages.

In 1985, she was posted to London as European correspondent and in December that year was reporting on how Muscovites enjoyed Christmas. “The snow drifts down in sub-zero temperatures, and the occasional drunk skids across the icy pavement,” she wrote.

She reported from London on clashes between Brixton rioters and police and the siege of the police station, the need to overhaul Britain’s welfare system when 20 million of Britain’s 56 million people were on pensions, the enduring popularity of the royal family and the political machinations surrounding then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

The problems of Ulster and sanctions against South Africa took her attention at that time, and she was perhaps inevitably drawn into the endless cloak-and-dagger business of MI5 and what it got up to, particularly the truth behind enigmatic intelligence figure Sir Roger Hollis.

Behind all her reports was the steely observant eye that overlooked nothing, and so much of what she wrote was prescient. Of Margaret Thatcher, she wrote: “It is not so much a question of Thatcher’s lack of compassion, as her order of political priorities: her unwilting belief in the perfection of the market mechanism, her refusal to offer any amelioration of the unconscionably harsh consequences of the Thatcher revolution because she does not recognise them.”

Preston wrote optimistically but realistically on the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union, saying the liberated country was not without problems, including ethnic strife. She deplored what she saw as the “low-key” western reaction to brutal suppression in Burma and maintained her rage about the shocking treatment of women the Ceausescu regime in Romania. In 1989, she was awarded a United States National Order of Women prize for an article on Benazir Bhutto.

Preston formed a relationship with a Welsh-born man, Myrddin Phillips. She returned to Australia in 1989, but two years later was back in Beijing.

The country had moved ahead in some ways. But memories of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, with the continuing issue over what was happening to those called to account over the incident, was very topical.

The United States and China were in constant discussion and bickering, on such issues as trade and arms proliferation. There were other issues to be dealt with, one being population, which was 800 million when she first went to China, but now well over a billion, and there were serious pollution problems.

Preston reported on the tight security in Beijing leading up to the 1991 anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.Credit: AP

Preston reported on the tight security in Tiananmen Square in 1991 at the second anniversary of the massacre. A senior Chinese official arrested over the incident remained in jail. Preston got wind of pro-independence demonstrations in China’s remote western province of Xinjian.

She also reported about peaceful dissenters in Inner Mongolia continuing to be the targets of a harsh crackdown by Chinese authorities and a shakeup in the People’s Liberation Army.

With her normal prescience, she sensed that the prospective takeover of Hong Kong in 1997 was not going to usher in an era of peace and security for the province. When the Governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, made his first official visit to Beijing, he was snubbed by the Chinese prime minister and a Hong Kong journalist accompanying him was arrested.

In 1993, with her second China stint over and having divorced Bert Preston, she was given a Walkley Award for Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism. She retired that year with her beloved partner Myrddin. She also took up a hobby she had long wished to make her profession: art, in particular watercolours.

Yvonne Preston at her Sydney home in 2020.Credit: Janie Barrett

Journalist Jill Sykes said: “Yvonne kept up with the world and had strong opinions about its directions, but was extraordinarily modest about the role she played in recording a significant part of the 20th century.”

Preston nursed Myrddin until he succumbed to the ravages of Alzheimer’s Disease and died in June 2021. Her daughter Madeleine also died in March 2022, which devastated her mother.

Yvonne Preston died in Sydney on June 17. She is survived by her twin brother, Gerald, and her daughter, Louise. A wake is to be held at a date to be fixed.

Get a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up for our Opinion newsletter.