Obituary: 60 Minutes newsman Gerald Stone knew what made TV tick

Gerald Stone always had a theory about why media mogul Kerry Packer chose him to bring 60 Minutes to Australian television.

Gerald Stone in 2000, discussing his memoir. Picture: Bob Barker

Gerald Stone always had a theory about why media mogul Kerry Packer chose him to bring 60 Minutes to Australian television.

The American newsman was not the obvious pick for the job.

It was 1978 and Stone had just presided over a failed bid to combine Packer’s Channel 9 Sydney and Melbourne news programs into a national broadcast. He was in the doghouse. But he and Packer had forged a unique bond, three years earlier.

In August 1975, a civil war was unfolding in East Timor and a humanitarian group wanted to send a boatload of medical supplies from Darwin. A skipper was willing to make the risky voyage — and take a Channel 9 crew along to film the story — for $6000.

Stone agreed — and decided to take the dangerous assignment himself. But he still had to get Packer to approve the $6000.

“Fine,” said Packer. “But only if I come too.”

A few days later Packer arrived at the dock in Darwin — with six cases of Fanta, a suitcase full of cash and an arsenal of pistols and rifles.

On the journey north in a battered old Japanese fishing trawler, Packer amused himself — to Stone’s horror — by shooting at empty Fanta cans thrown over the side. When the unlikely aid team arrived in Dili harbour, Stone begged his boss to keep his guns hidden below deck.

Stone and his cameraman, Brian Peters, set out to capture images of the war-torn city — bodies in the streets, a hospital overwhelmed with wounded and dying and, ominously, an Indonesian warship lying off the coast.

Meanwhile, Packer spent all day under a fierce sun ferrying refugees in an inflatable launch, clearly having the time of his life.

The two men eventually hitched a ride back to Darwin on an RAAF Hercules. Stone had a scoop — the first pictures out of East Timor’s war. And Packer had a defining experience that would stay with him for life.

The pair would never be friends, but a foundation of respect — rare for Packer — had been laid.

Kerry Packer turned to Gerald Stone to helm 60 Minutes in 1978.

In May 1978, Packer summoned Stone to tell him he would be helming Nine’s new flagship program, 60 Minutes.

The pitch for the show had already been neatly spelled out by its American founder, CBS producer Don Hewitt, in a line so often quoted it’s become an industry cliche: No one cares about flood control, but they’ll watch a profile on Noah.

Now Stone had to make it work for an Australian audience.

“I don’t give a f . . k what it takes,” Packer told him, “just do it and get it right.”

First, he had to find a group of reporters who viewers would want to invite into their homes every Sunday night.

Stone didn’t just hire reporters, he cast them: the larrikin George Negus, the tenacious Ian Leslie, the all-round good bloke Ray Martin. And a few years later, to the initial dismay of the other three, the still very young but extraordinarily talented Jana Wendt.

60 Minutes teams set out around the world, cameras and American Express cards in hand.

Few sommeliers in the world have a greater knowledge and appreciation of fine wine than the original 60 Minutes cameramen and sound recordists.

Stone turned a blind eye to the extravagance and hid the bills from his notoriously parsimonious boss. Reporters, producers and crews were working non-stop through multiple time zones for weeks on end without a break. And 60 Minutes was becoming the network’s biggest money-spinner.

But Stone could be a demanding, sometimes intimidating boss, prone to an explosive temper.

“I would never yell at anyone I didn’t have the greatest respect for,” he would claim.

He simply wanted to get the best out of people.

There were heartbreaks, one particularly painful.

Six weeks after his own expedition to East Timor with Kerry Packer, Stone sent cameraman Brian Peters back with reporter Malcolm Rennie.

Both men, along with Channel 7’s Greg Shackleton, Gary Cunningham and Tony Stewart, were killed by Indonesian troops in the village of Balibo.

“The regret I feel over their loss gnaws at me to this day, like an old wound that has never quite healed,” he wrote in his memoir.

Regret, but not guilt. They were, like Stone, newsmen doing their job.

Gerald Stone began his career as a copy boy at the New York Times in 1957 before joining wire service United Press International.

In 1962, concerned about the imminent threat of nuclear war, Stone packed up and brought his wife and two young daughters to Australia, a country he’d never visited.

He got a job on the Sydney afternoon tabloid, the Daily Mirror, and was soon sent to cover the war in Vietnam, an experience that led to appearances on television and eventually a job on the ABC’s This Day Tonight.

The Packers recruited him to star in a political interview program, Federal File, on Channel 9, but his lingering American accent irked some viewers, and he was kicked upstairs to become the network’s news director.

When he eventually left Nine, after a decade as executive producer of 60 Minutes, he returned to the US to work for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox TV. That lasted only three years. On his return to Australia he set up Real Life, a tabloid show on the Seven Network to rival Nine’s A Current Affair, and was later editor-in-chief of The Bulletin magazine.

He wrote several books, including two that charted the ups and downs of the Nine Network, and served for many years on the board of broadcaster SBS.

But 60 Minutes was his pride and joy — the people and the stories; a show that, as veteran cameraman Nick Lee says, shone a light on the worst and the best of humanity.

Stone died on Friday at the age of 87. He leaves behind wife Irene, daughters Klay and Jennifer, and two grandchildren.