LEARNING TOLME VIVIDLY

In 2019, Geraldine Brooks' husband, Tony, passed away, suddenly, shockingly. Now, the much-loved and awardwinning author bares her soul in a new memoir, and in this exclusive interview with The Weekly.

- SUSAN CHENERY

But he was. A cardiac arrest. He was 60 years old.

Tony Horwitz was an adventurer as well as a serious historian. He must have seemed indestructible. He was a writer and journalist who, Geraldine writes, had covered "stories from sniper pits in Sarajevo and boats under shelling in Beirut harbour, who ducked rifle fire during the Romanian revolution and reported on two wars in the Persian Gulf, who hitchhiked across the Australian outback and followed the Pacific voyages of Captain James Cook from the Arctic Circle to the edge of the Antarctic ice shelf".

Tony had "chutzpah". During the first Gulf War he noticed that the Saudis sent their army uniforms to the dry cleaners. He bribed a dry cleaner to sell him one and, dressed as a soldier, was the only American reporter with the Kuwaiti troops as they liberated their city.

He was never, she says, operating at less than 100 per cent. It was always "all in". Did he have no fear? "He had a sane person's amount of fear, but he had a possibly insane level of curiosity and ambition that drove him through the fear. And physical courage as well."

They'd met in 1982 at a party on a balcony in Manhattan. She'd won a scholarship to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and he was in the same program. She was struck by his idealism.

They built an epic life together. Based in Cairo and then London, they covered the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans as foreign correspondents. Their duffel bags, she writes, were always halfpacked and ready to go. "Filled with the accoutrements of foreign correspondence - shortwave radios, field dressings, cash for countries that didn't take cards, my chador, a bulletproof vest."