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Robert Keith-Reid - the Pacific's doyen reporter
By Rowan Callick, Sean Dorney and Michael Field
Rotfi’s Number One citizen has filed his last story.
Robert Keith-Reid, the greatest journalist in the islands, the undisputed doyen, died at the weekend in a Brisbane hospital, aged 64, of complications following a heart
by-pass operation.
He’d have loved to know the result of the Fiji elections.
We knew this and after watching Sitiveni Rabuka in the dock on Friday, we tried phoning him at his hospital bed. But there was no answer.
During the Fiji coup of 1987, he was sending a telex to Associated Press when heavily armed soldiers burst into his office.
He swiftly signed off, transmitting: "I've been arrested now. Cheers."
After three days in the Queen Elizabeth Barrack’s guardhouse he was told he could go free but coup leader Sitiveni Rabuka said he would like to have a beer with him in the officers' mess first.
"Look who we've got here," he called out as Robert entered.
"You haven't had a shave for a few days, I see." The colonel told him he had been jailed because "I didn't like your lean and hungry look."
After the 2000 coup Robert, along with the rest of us, was often at the Barracks and he would ruefully recall the mosquitoes of his rough accommodation.
For the small band of journalists who have made the South Pacific their story, Robert was a figure of great admiration and respect. He led the way for us long before it even vaguely fashionable to cover the region; he had the enormous advantage in that he knew everybody who was anybody in the South Pacific.
For instance, Crown Prince Tupouto’a of Tonga was a great friend. But being friends with Robert did not shield you from criticism. One evening, sitting with the “Tippy toes”, as he put it, in his grand villa on Tongatapu after dinner, Robert asked him how long he believed his subjects would put up with such ostentation.
He was born in England during the war, his father a naval officer based in Malta. Robert came to Fiji as a teenager in 1958. He used to talk of his time at Suva Grammar, along with most of the people who became the movers and shakers.
Even today people as different as the Bad Dog barman and a former MP or two, remember “Bing”.
His mother Kathleen, who today lives at Suva Point, was quietly running Fiji in the last of its colonial days. She was the secretary to the governor and Robert, in a clue to his extraordinary insights over Fiji life, used to laugh at the way his mother taught a young army officer to drink tea properly. His name was Sitiveni Rabuka.
Robert joined Radio Fiji and later the Fiji Times. An extravagant, larger than life personality, he was never really the kind of bloke who could work in a corporate environment. He walked out to set up as a freelance journalist.
He said once he was terribly afraid he would find himself penniless and without any work. Instead it signalled an incredible era of work for publications around the world; far more work than one man could ever cope with in fact. His connections included Janes, The Economist, the Associated Press and Flight – the latter reflecting a love for planes.
He brought a magazine called “Hosting and Catering in the South Pacific” in 1985 from the Stinson-Pearce group for one dollar. This grew into Island Business and a network of
aviation magazines.
In recent years Fijians have known Robert through his Sidetracks column in the Sunday Times. It was there that he introduced us to the world of the “Republic of the Fiji Islander” – his celebrated Rotfian.
To those who didn’t know Robert, it sometimes read like a “good old colonial days” read, but that was not Robert at all. He was immensely and quietly proud of being a citizen of Fiji. It was just that he found the pomposity of political life in Suva rather intolerable and poked at it
mercilessly.
In a column he recalled, for example, the days when the Council of Chiefs wasn’t always great.
Radio Fiji ran reverent commentaries in BBC tones from a broadcaster.
Wrote Robert: “He had the irritating habit of saying, in a hushed pommy priest-like tone: ‘I am speaking to you from the GREAT Council of Chiefs’ … Well, it caught on.
Obviously someone liked it. One day there appeared in the Gazette a proclamation declaring that, henceforth the council was a great one.”
Jioji Kotobalavu, secretary of the Fiji Prime Minister's office, in 2002 issued a press release describing Robert's criticism of Fiji's security arrangements for the ACP Summit as "the ravings of a small mind, a cynic, and a relic from the colonial past."
Robert called Mr Kotobalavu to request the original signed release, and had it framed. The latter was disarmed, and they were immediately on speaking terms again. Robert's palpable commitment to the Pacific, his durability, his command of detail, his eccentricity, even his feigned nostalgia for the good old colonial days, and most of all his capacity to generate sparks and fun simultaneously, earned him ultimate respect even from many – not all –of those he nailed in print.
He almost always got it right, though he wasn't necessarily thanked for it. He warned six months before George Speight seized the entire Cabinet in 2000 that the government of
Mahendra Chaudhry risked a coup. In April, shortly before the riots that razed Honiara's Chinatown, Islands Business' cover story was on "Chopstick diplomacy" and the growing
resentment of islanders against China and Taiwan dragging their struggle into the Pacific.
As a journalist, he was brave, hard-working, focused, and extraordinarily – in a region where those in power expect deference – prepared to speak plainly, sometimes plain insultingly, to ratus, police chiefs and high commissioners.
Often, many thought what only Robert would actually say, out loud, in Islands Business, or in Sidetracks.
The ABC's own Pacific doyen, Sean Dorney, was naturally a close friend. Once, when Robert called Sean to commission an article, the latter replied that he'd be pleased to do so
– but under the pseudonym Gerard Doceray, because the ABC had suddenly gone cold on freelancing.
Someone from the ABC in Sydney rang Robert later, seeking Mr Doceray's details, to commission a big piece on PNG. Robert suggested contacting the ABC's own man in Port Moresby, Mr Dorney – "he's on top of it." The caller replied: "Sean's all right for some things, but this Gerard Doceray seems to know what's really going on!"
Sean encouraged Robert for years to visit Papua New Guinea, telling him it wasn’t as dangerous as Port Moresby’s reputation.
Minutes after booking in to his hotel Robert ran Sean to abuse him: “Not dangerous, there has just been an armed holdup in the foyer.”
And now, conveniently for all the crooks, conceited politicians and coup schemers of the Pacific, the biggest thorn in their side is no more.
When the most famous of Pacific politicians, Fiji's long serving Prime Minister Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara, died in 2004, Robert said: "He was not a saint and could be difficult when
he wanted to be, but his death is our loss and he will be greatly missed."
Not a bad epitaph for himself.
Robert is survived by his Rotuman wife Lillian and his daughter Kialika who Robert, a father comparatively late in life, utterly adored.
Michael Field is with Fairfax New Zealand based in Auckland, Sean Dorney with the Radio Australia in Brisbane and Rowan Callick is The Australian’s China correspondent. All three were close friends of Robert Keith-Reid.
News release from PINA (Pacific Islands News Association):
Themembers and Board of Directors of the Pacific Islands News Association(PINA) wish to express their sympathies and condolences to the familyof our long time friend, and respected member Robert Keith Reid.
“Welearned over the weekend of his death in Australia”, said President KenClark “We had been following the progress of his improvement in healthover the past few weeks, and we are saddened to learn of the suddenreversal that led to his death.”
“Robert made a very significantcontribution to PINA and to the media industry in the Pacific over manyyears, sometimes his advice was strident and focused but he alwaysprovided his honest and honourable position on the matters at hand atthe time, we’ll miss his high standard of journalism,” said Mr. Clark.
PINA Secretariat
Suva, Fiji
Radio Transcript from Pacific Beat
The Pacific has lost one of its finest journalists. Robert Keith-Reid, aged 64, the publisher of the region‚s leading news magazine, Islands Business, died in hospital in Brisbane on Saturday of complications following heart surgery. He had suffered a heart attack while visiting the Solomon Islands capital, Honiara, in March. Our Pacific Correspondent, Sean Dorney, reports on a man who left an indelible stamp on Pacific journalism.
DORNEY: I first met Robert Keith-Reid in Kiribati in 1980 when as the chief political reporter for the Fiji Times he was covering the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders meeting. He was far better informed than I and was exceedingly generous with information. The telecommunications then were far more tenuous than today and at one point, in absolute frustration about the telephone line dropping out yet again, Robert threw his hands in the air only to have one of them caught by the ceiling fan. With his hand heavily bandaged, he carried on reporting. Michael Field, the Auckland bureau chief with Fairfax New Zealand, covered numerous Pacific stories with Mr Keith-Reid.
FIELD: He was a fiercely competitive and outstanding journalist but he shared everything he knew. He expected you to share what you knew. And he dressed everything up, everything he ever did, with great humour. And I was just thinking about it today he was one of the most relaxed and casual but disciplined people I‚ve ever come across. Robert, as far as I‚m aware did not own a suit and I never saw him wear a tie. He always wore shorts, no matter where, Hawaiian beach shirt. But that was an intriguing disguise for a man who had a very sharp mind and a knowledge for detail that was just mind blowing for most of us.
DORNEY: Michael Field. Robert Keith-Reid‚s business partner was Godfrey Scoullar, another naturalised citizen of Fiji, who teamed up with him after a beer together in the mid 1980s.
SCOULLAR: Robert had bought into Islands Business magazine from the Stinson-Pearce group at that time and he‚d worked for a couple of years there and came into difficulties and asked me, as an accountant, just to help him out. What was I thought going to be just a bit of help on the side from my regular job turned out to be a job in itself. In the early 1980s we just had Islands Business magazine and from those beginnings we expanded our publishing company and I think we became very much a regional company doing in-flight magazines for Polynesian Airlines, Royal Tongan Airlines, Air Pacific ˆ which we continue to do, Solomon Airlines ˆ we do at the moment, and Air Niugini plus a number of trade publications covering tourism, power, aviation. We‚re involved in doing publications for general practitioners in Fiji and the Fijian Institute of Accountants.
DORNEY: Robert had an extraordinary capacity to work, didn‚t he? He used to just churn out the stories.
SCOULLAR: Yeah, well that was one of the great things about Robert. He was like a lot of journalists. He wouldn‚t do anything until the deadline was looming. And often he‚d have to catch a plane at eight o‚clock in the morning and he‚d still, at three o‚clock in the morning, be banging out his copy. But he always got his copy out in time ˆ always at the last minute but he made it.
FIELD: Robert knew everybody. And people like myself would come back, gleefully rubbing my hands at a scoop or something only to be slightly taken down a peg, usually with the greatest of humour, by Robert who sort of knew about it two days ago and knew a good deal more than even I knew about it.
DORNEY: He had an extraordinarily wide circle of contacts didn‚t he?
FIELD: Well, they were more than contacts. There was a real sense that he was in the Pacific fanau family kind of way with people. He used to be able to write really strong columns for his magazines and then sit down with the self-same people a short time later and have a drink and they‚d be laughing at each other. There was from the people that he criticised quite a respect for him because he always had the unerring ability of mostly being right. I‚ve been in so many Pacific Forums around the region where we‚d be door stopping a summit meeting or a particularly crucial meeting and the leaders would all come out and be pompous and pushing their way through the media and then their eyes would alight on Robert and they would always stop and talk to Robert. They wouldn‚t talk to me or to anybody else. But it was always, „Oh, Robert.‰ That‚s how Robert got everything ˆ before the rest of us too, irritatingly.
DORNEY: Michael Field. Godfrey Scoullar, his business partner, says Robert Keith-Reid had an extraordinarily ability to soak up information.
SCOULLAR: Often he used to write pieces without ever referring to anything except for what he had stored in his own brain. He was excellent in that regard. And he could produce prodigious amounts of high quality copy. We haven‚t actually been successfully sued and we‚ve hardly been sued over the past 20 years which, I think, is a testimony to the sort of quality copy which Robert wrote.
DORNEY: And pulling no punches?
SCOULLAR: And he didn't pull punches. He wrote it as he saw it. And he wasn‚t afraid to do that.
BACKANNOUNCE: Godfrey Scoullar, the business partner of the late Robert Keith-Reid, the publisher of the Fiji based news magazine, Islands Business, who died at the weekend of complications following heart surgery after he suffered a heart attack in Honiara in March. Sean Dorney prepared that report.
I wrote this late Saturday night after hearing about Robert passing away
By Lata Yaqona
It was with profound sadness that I learnt of the passing away Robert Keith Reid who I considered a friend, a mentor and the best of the best of Pacific regional journalists.
As a teenager I had avidly read his column and later as a young journalist in the early 1990s I had the privilege to get to know him. My father knew Robert well and had first met him when he came to Fiji before I was even born. I still have a memento from that time, a black and white picture that I treasure, with my father who was public relations officer with the Fiji Government Information Service at the time, the late George Williams and Robert wearing thick black framed glasses looking straight into the camera.
I showed Robert the picture once, much to his amusement and we laughed and carried on talking about the political scene and stories he was working on.
I like many others throughout the Pacific read Robert often, considering him a good arbiter of the political life and future of Fiji and the Pacific. It was an area that he remained passionate about throughout his life and Fiji of course which he loved. At times I used to say to him that he was more local than most locals. I also knew that his deep love for his adopted land and the political upheavals of the last 20 odd years resulted in him handling it the way he best knew – through the thousands of articles and commentary he worked so hard on, spending hours at the Islands Business office.
His self deprecating humour often had many of us media practitioners in stitches, and even more so when people who did not know him were left shocked standing in the wake of some blunt comment he would make at the most inopportune of moments. Of all the journalists I know he was one who gave the most damn about issues that affected the lives of people and this was reflected so much in the issues that he tackled. He was not only unafraid to ask the questions that needed asking he carried this conviction into the stories he wrote which he tackled with a depth of knowledge uncommon even today amongst media practitioners.
His marriage late in life and soon after the birth of his adored daughter Kialiki we saw another side of Robert emerge. His often amusing column Sidetracks was peppered with anectodal stories of his home life featuring Kialiki and his wife Liliana. These were again were things that mattered most to him and alongside stories of his family life were also hard hitting looks at the political challenges that continued to plague life in Fiji.
Robert approached his work with a passion, thoroughness, knowledge and fairness so sorely lacking in mainstream journalism practice today. Throughout his busy schedule and over the years since I left the mainstream print media we remained in touch.
This would occur mainly through media events that I happened to attend or I would call him just to chat and say hello and to ask him how he was. He would of course be making some caustic remarks about some issue of the day and we would laugh about it.
In recent years it would be at the Royal Suva Yacht Club each Sunday where he would be buying a bottle of red wine for his mum or each time I visited the Pacific Islands News Association (PINA) office on Gordon Street in Suva we would meet on the stairs. He would smile and raise his eyebrow as only Robert could and wander on down to Bad Dog Café for a some lunch before he would continue his slog at his computer late into the night before leaving for Traps further down the road.
Robert has left a huge void in the heart of the media world in Fiji and the Pacific and for my generation of journalists who often had a drink with him he will be greatly missed. I for one can still hear that chuckle and I can see his raised brow as he would lean back against the bar at Bad Dog Cafe or Traps and he would look at me and say “Oh the Lauan - so what’s the latest scandal?”
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