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Talking Heads: Ray Martin

Ray Martin will be an upcoming guest on ABC's fireside chat show, Talking Heads, hosted by Peter Thompson.

Ray Martin will be an upcoming guest on ABC’s fireside chat show, Talking Heads, hosted by Peter Thompson.

He will talk about his career, family, journalism and more.

Peter Thompson’s guest is one of Australia’s most successful journalists. For many years the face of Channel Nine, Ray Martin has travelled the world, covered the big stories and interviewed the rich and famous. He’s won five gold Logies, sparked a couple of Royal Commissions, and has been appointed a Member of the Order of Australia.

“I can’t believe this fortunate life I’ve had,” he says.

Martin’s been happily married to Dianne for more than 40 years and they have two beautiful and talented children. It’s a far cry from the young boy whose family once slept at Sydney’s Central Railway station because they were poor and had nowhere else to go.

With an early life marked by poverty and constant upheaval, by the time Martin was eleven years old, he was on the run with his mother from a drunken, violent father. As part of their cover they changed their surname from ‘Grace’ to ‘Martin’.

Martin’s dream as a teenager was, “to open the bowling for Australia against the poms”, but he thought he’d probably become a history teacher. As luck would have it he landed a job at the ABC that changed everything…

“I love history and I devour it now. I just can’t get enough of it but I also want to see history being made rather than report on the way it used to be 200 years ago…I think journalism allowed me to go to places and see history being made,” he says.

Hear more about Ray Martin’s extraordinary life journey this week on Talking Heads.

It airs Monday August 16th on ABC1.

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