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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
“You can’t put it like that Mr Chairman/governor/prime minister, readers will lose interest.” Such were the admonitions that Gwen Robinson would be heard giving over the phone to any number of central bank governors, global business chiefs, politicians and academics. Nobody at the Financial Times, where Gwen was comment editor on the op-ed page for several years, encountered anyone who could tame egos quite so well. The fact that such dousings came in a raspy Australian accent from an intrepid soul who had covered wars and revolutions, carting her luggage in random plastic bags, made such eavesdropping involuntary.
“I’ve read it three times Jean Claude/Alan/Gerhard/Larry and I still don’t get what you’re trying to say,” was her idea of letting a figure down gently. They had professional reasons to stay on good terms with her. Most had personal ones too. Beneath Gwen’s natural bluntness was a gossipy heart of gold. Few significant world figures passed her by. But her networking derived from a far deeper capacity for friendship.
Gwen Robinson, who died last week aged 65 in a hospital in Bangkok, which was her base for the last 15 years, came from one of Australia’s finest journalistic backgrounds. Her father, Peter Robinson, was a distinguished foreign correspondent, editor of the Australian Financial Review, and a columnist for several newspapers. It was in Japan in the 1950s, where Peter was writing essays for an English-language magazine owned by Asahi Shimbun, that he met Gwen’s mother, Haruko Morita. Haruko, also a life-long journalist, most loved writing about dance and culture.
Gwen was born in Tokyo in 1960. Her brother, Mark Robinson, arrived a year later. The family moved to Australia in 1964. “My parents felt we wouldn’t be seen as Japanese in Japan,” said Mark. They were not always regarded as Australians in Australia either. Gwen and Mark were often the sole kids with Asian blood at their various schools in Sydney and Canberra. They got used to racial taunting. Gwen would fight back. “She got into several fistfights with girls in the school bathroom,” Mark recalled. Nobody, including her parents, could control her.
A turbulent adolescence, and the feeling that she belonged neither to Australia nor Japan, though she bore strong hallmarks of both, was prologue for the life Gwen chose. After graduating in Asian history and sociology from the Australian National University, and a spell as a local news reporter, Gwen was sent to Manila by the National Times. Her timing was impeccable. She turned up a few months before the Philippines’ 1986 “People Power” revolution that overthrew Ferdinand Marcos’s brutal kleptocracy. Gwen knew the army’s failed coup plotters, leaders of Cory Aquino’s successful opposition, church leaders and communist rebels. Most could be found at one point or another unburdening themselves in her tiny flat on Manila Bay.
“A dinner invite to Gwen’s place would find you with Marxist activists, coup leaders, intelligence chiefs, ambassadors and generals,” recalls Humphrey Hawksley, the BBC’s correspondent. Gwen was 26 and just over five foot. Stationed variously in Manila, Bangkok, Tokyo but mostly the open road, and with a thickening clutch of newspaper strings, Gwen was never tied down for long. This also applied to her romantic life. “It was hard to imagine anyone being both pliable enough to remain married to Gwen and interesting enough for her to want them to,” says Mark.
Gwen instead created a burgeoning and interlacing galaxy of friends. Many owe their marriages to her. An early evening bilateral drink with Gwen — whether in London’s Groucho Club, the Geronimo bar in Tokyo’s Roppongi district, or the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand where she was president for two years — would end in the small hours and with new acquaintances. She loved to make introductions, exchange gossip, share her passion for food, insights and endless titbits.
She saw through bullshitters like jellyfish. But her kindness to young journalists, friends of friends, those suffering from proverbial broken wings and anyone who sought advice, was borne of a generous nature that dwarfed her occasional acerbity. “It’s never as good as you hope or as bad as you fear,” she would tell protégés. When Gwen left the FT in 2013 having worked there for nearly two decades from Tokyo, London, Washington and Bangkok, her colleagues were instantly struck by how much less they now knew of what was happening inside the paper.
Gwen devoted most of her final years to Myanmar, a country blighted by military rule and ethnic cleansing. She covered it for Nikkei Asia, where she was editor-at-large, and as a senior fellow at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University’s think-tank the Institute of Security and International Studies. Though suffering from cancer, she loathed to dwell on her woes. Her itinerary never flagged. A question about how she was faring was parried by a blitz of inquiries about her questioner’s life. On her deathbed, Gwen’s brother played her 68 video messages from friends. Though she would have dismissed it as nonsense, the universe seemed also to tip its hand. The day before she died her hospital was shaken by the effects of a 7.7 magnitude earthquake that devastated Myanmar. She passed during peak Sakura, Japan’s achingly brief cherry blossom season.
