Malcolm Brown (ON 1964) has had a brief post-retirement flurry in the media with reminiscences on the Azaria Chamberlain case – sparked by the sad demise of Michael Chamberlain in January. He has also been hauled back into the media, briefly, to talk about his coverage of the Granville rail disaster in 1977. At Granville, during his two days of coverage, he was unaware that the train that had preceded the ill-fated 6.09 from Mt Victoria was carrying the woman he was destined to marry, Ingeborg Koch. Ingeborg had caught the earlier train at Blaxland only because the guard had seen her running for it.

Brown, known as “Charlie” Brown in his schooldays, went to Wesley College, Sydney University, and completed an Arts degree. He started his journalism career as a cadet on the Daily Liberal, a newspaper at Dubbo where he had grown up, but was obliged to do National Service. He was selected for officer training and commissioned but did not get to Vietnam. Demobilised, he resumed with the Daily Liberal, then shifted to the Sydney Morning Herald in 1972 and stayed there for the next 40 years. In that time he was a general reporter. He specialised in police operations, royal commissions and other inquiries. Over the years he has been arrested, shot at, sued, threatened and beaten up. He was obliged to get out of Belfast quickly in 1979 when tipped off that the IRA was coming for him.

Brown was a correspondent in Newcastle, Brisbane, and London. He was dispatched to the Middle East in 1991 to cover the Gulf War and did numerous trips to Fiji during the civil strife in 1987, 2000 and 2006. His career story was the disappearance of baby Azaria Chamberlain at Ayers Rock in August 1980. Assigned to the case in September that year, Brown became disturbed when it was reinvestigated in 1981 and Michael and Lindy Chamberlain committed for trial. His feeling that something was going terribly wrong strengthened as the case progressed. He erupted when the couple were convicted and from then was at the vanguard in a long and tortuous struggle to get Lindy freed and the case reinvestigated. He was gratified in 2012, when he retired, to be able to report on the final chapter – the coroner’s finding that a dingo had taken the baby.

Brown has written or co-authored a number of books, including Justice and Nightmares, Case Studies in Forensic Science; Australian Crime; Australia’s Worst Disasters; Rorting, the Great Australian Crime, and You’re Leaving Tomorrow, an account of National Service and the Vietnam War. He married Ingeborg Koch in 1978 and the first 18 months of their marriage was spent in London, where their first child, Stewart, was born. On returning to Australia, they had two more children: Grace, born in 1982, and Douglas, born 1987. Since retirement, Brown has pursued a career as a singer with the Sydney Welsh Choir and with Rotary where he has been made a Paul Harris Fellow. A grandfather of three, he is an Anglican churchgoer and has served as chairman of the Wesley College Foundation.

Appearing in the Sydney Morning Herald on Thursday January 19th 2017, Malcolm relived the horror of the Granville train disaster of 1977 in his article titled, ‘The girl who wasn’t among the 83 dead in horror crash’. Click here to read the article.

Since 2013 Malcolm has generously given of his time to conduct a number of interviews for our ‘Notable Newingtonians’ series, which will be included in our new Archive Insight page later this year.