Basia Bonkowski obituary: Accidental TV presenter became a pop music muse

Popular SBS presenter Basia Bonkowski fell into her first TV role but soon becoming a household name while presenting the music show Rock Around the World.

TV personality Basia Bonkowski at Rose Bay wearing hemp jacket and navy striped pants by designer Katie Pye. P/ Fashion

What we now know simply as SBS but was born on New Year’s Day 1978 as the Special Broadcasting Service was obviously always in need of translators. One of its busiest offices was the subtitling unit and Basia Bonkowski (who spoke Polish) and Mary Kostakidis (who spoke Greek) both worked there.

Bruce Gyngell, in 1956 the first man to appear on Australian television – famously with the words “Good evening, and welcome to television” – was the first chief executive of SBS and was on the hunt for on-air talent.

“Initially, it was just a part-time job,” Bonkowski explained to the ABC’s Richard Fidler in 2009. “I noticed all these people were going down to the studio to try out for on-air presenting. Bruce Gyngell came past the subtitling booths, I guess interviewing prospective people, and he said: ‘What do you normally do?’

“I said oh, normally I am an out-of-work actress and writer and he said ‘Oh, OK.’ ” But Bonkowski had impressed the boss in those fleeting seconds. Gyngell asked her to an audition and “I was on air a couple of weeks later”.

Bonkowski’s career suddenly took flight, but it had been hard work to that point. She was born in Adelaide to post-war Polish migrants Maria and Jerzy Bonkowski and had three brothers.

The family ran a suburban corner shop in Adelaide, where they were some of the few migrants: “My mum introduced all those things that no one ate in those days – the exotic sausages and rye bread.” Her father helped out at the shop and worked night shifts. Bonkowski once complained that her overworked mother never appeared at school events. She showed up at the next: “In a pair of leopard-print Capri pants, high black mules with diamante heels, a black polo neck jumper, Jackie O sunglasses and teased hair – I was so embarrassed. I said, ‘Please Mum, don’t come again.’ ”

Rock Around the World presenter Basia Bonkowski

In 2009, Bonkowski wrote a book of her mother’s remarkable, drama-filled life and final days.

Bonkowski was drawn to writing and acting but began a degree in law at the University of Adelaide where, still just 17, she was struck down by Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a dangerous cancer affecting the lymphatic system. The encounter led her to change plans and she switched to Flinders University, where she studied drama and literature. She began teaching drama at a high school and appeared in Sophia Turkiewicz’s graduation film Letters From Poland. (Turkiewicz would later produce the film Silver City, which The Australian’s critic David Stratton praised as one of the best of the 1980s.)

Moving to Sydney soon after, Bonkowski passed through the SBS subtitling job before falling into the TV role where she was at first considered a curiosity, but soon found a formidable following presenting the music show Rock Around the World. Always colourfully dressed, sometimes in eccentric knitted tops, she presented music from across the globe when such shows focused on the popular output from Britain and the US. It was an instant hit and grew from a single Friday night timeslot to four 30-minutes episodes Monday to Thursday.

One of those struck by Bonkowski’s unlikely TV fame was my friend Paul Stewart whose band, Painters & Dockers, wrote and recorded an ode to her in 1985, titled simply Basia.

“She’s sitting there with her multi-coloured hair,

“She’s giving me a multi-cultured stare

“She’s the best thing on my TV

“Better looking than Donnie, Ian or Lee.”

(That last line is a reference to the other rock show hosts of the era: Donnie Sutherland, Ian “Molly” Meldrum and Lee Simon.)

She then hosted a similar rock music show called Continental Drift.

In the 1980s she married Kimble Rendall, a guitarist and singer with indie-punk band XL Capris who later was a founding member of the Hoodoo Gurus and went on to become a noted TV and film producer. They adopted two children from overseas, an experience she wrote about in a second book called Jesse’s World.

In 2006, Bonkowsi completed a master of letters degree at the University of Sydney. She worked behind the scenes for the TV production companies Endemol Shine and Screentime, including on the Nine Network’s long-running factual series RBT.

In 2019 she was among a group of former students of Flinders University elevated to distinguished alumni, “for her significant contribution to the creative arts as a television producer and presenter, author and movie reviewer”.

She was diagnosed again with lymphoma last year.

Basia Bonkowski Rendall, Television presenter and producer. Born Adelaide; died Sydney, September 3.