John Pilger - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Pilger was born and raised in Bondi, a suburb of Sydney. Irish Australian on his mother's side, two of his great great grandparents were Irish convicts transported to Australia. His mother was a teacher of French. He attended Sydney Boys High School, where he started a student newspaper, The Messenger, and later joined a four-year journalist trainee scheme with the Australian Consolidated Press. Beginning his career in 1958 as a copy boy with the Sydney Sun, he later moved to the city's Daily Telegraph where he was a reporter, sports writer and sub-editor. He also freelanced and worked for the Sydney Sunday Telegraph, the daily paper's sister title. After moving to Europe, he was for a year a freelance correspondent in Italy.

Settling in the UK in 1962, working as a sub-editor, Pilger joined British United Press and then Reuters in London on their middle-east desk, and was recruited by the English Daily Mirror in 1963, again as a sub-editor at first. Later, he was a reporter, a feature writer and Chief Foreign Correspondent for the title. Working in the United States, on 5 June 1968 he witnessed the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. During the next twenty years, Pilger became the Daily Mirror's star reporter, particularly on social issues. He was a war correspondent in Vietnam, Cambodia, Egypt, India, Bangladesh and Biafra. Nearly eighteen months after Robert Maxwell bought the Mirror (on 12 July 1984), Pilger was sacked by Richard Stott, the newspaper's editor, on 31 December 1985.