Award-winning Kiwi journalist Charlotte Glennie, 53, was interested in the world from an early age, so an OE was always on the cards. But nearing the end of her travels, she suffered life-threatening injuries after a fall in Croatia. Proving herself both determined and brave, Charlotte not only survived but forged an impressive career as a journalist on the global stage. Charlotte began her career as TVNZ’s first Asia Correspondent before moving on to work for Australia’s ABC network. During her time there, she covered major world events, including the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. She also reported on the 2008 Beijing Olympics, gaining experience across a range of international stories. Today, Charlotte lives in Sydney with her partner Johnny and their two children, Joe, 15, and Matt, 13.
As a child, I was always very curious, but I was also shy.
In the playground, I’d worry about people who were left out or were bullied. The eldest of three, my two brothers are four and six years younger than me, so I was quite protective as a big sister. I was also very bossy as I was never shy at home.
I was probably quite annoying at high school because I asked lots of questions, but I always wanted to know more.
I did become self-conscious in my teenage years but I still spoke up in class. Debating helped push me outside my comfort zone and even though I wasn’t comfortable with public speaking, I studied law and drama at Otago University.
.jpg?resize=380%2C285)
Dunedin was freezing in winter, but uni was great and I made friends who have carried me through life.
Although I was only 17 when I went down, which in hindsight seems very young to leave home, I yearned for something different. It was that same yearning that saw me go overseas for large chunks of my career and Otago was the beginning of that.
I was in a hostel that almost nobody applied for, except one guy from a very small town in Clutha District whose brother had gone there, but most of the rest of us had been rejected from our first choices.
This made for an interesting group. We were also further from campus than the other hostels and up a big hill, so in winter, the black ice could make walking down the hill quite dangerous. But when you’re young, you take more risks and I definitely did some less than sensible things back then.
After graduating, I applied for drama school in Wellington and journalism school in Auckland.
When I didn’t get into drama school and I was accepted for journalism, I took that as a sign.
After working for four or five years as a journalist in New Zealand on radio and television, I went backpacking solo around Asia.
Eleven months into my trip, I stopped off in Eastern Europe in Croatia on my way to London. I was 29 and feeling invincible when I fell eight metres down a rocky cliff in Dubrovnik. The doctors said my injuries were like gunshot wounds. I don’t know how many blood transfusions I had before I went into surgery. It was really frightening, but my friend Quentin held my hand through the pain. I still remember giving him my mum’s number to tell her what had happened. Sometimes I can talk about it and at other times I tense up, but writing about it has been cathartic.
I’ve often wondered, if I could, would I wish that fall away?
But it defined my entire life. Seeing the actions of the first responders, the paramedics and doctors who saved my life. I would not have survived without them – and not just physically. Their words of wisdom and encouragement were invaluable. I often think about them and the surgeon who said I needed to be brave.
I’m also grateful to my parents as I definitely inherited their positivity and Mum’s pragmatism.
Somehow, she remained calm and collected when Quentin called her from the hospital as soon as I was taken away for surgery. It was probably shock, but Mum believed straightaway that this was something we just had to get through, and she did everything she could to make sure that I did.
Over the years, various publishers have asked if I’d write a memoir, but I’d always been very work-focused because daily news is all-consuming.
I was approached again in 2018 when I was working for UNICEF Australia. I’d just made my second visit to the Rohingya refugee camps of Bangladesh – the largest camps in the world. The first time I went there the year before, hundreds of thousands of people were pouring into the country, fleeing what the UN said was genocide in neighbouring Myanmar. Memories of seeing so many people who had witnessed such horror, arriving in a new country with nothing, having barely eaten or slept for days, will stay with me forever.
Which is one of the book’s themes: How journalists continue to think of the people whose stories we tell.
How they continue to inspire us, even though the people will never know. Like the mother I interviewed when I was reporting in China. Her 17-year-old son had been killed in the Tiananmen crackdown of 1989. I still think of her often and how she has spent nearly four decades bravely fighting for justice for her son. But back in 2018, the timing still wasn’t right for a memoir. We’d just moved back to Australia from Singapore and I was working full-time in the not-for-profit sector.
Then Covid happened and partway through 2021, when the trans-Tasman travel bubble opened, it coincided with my father’s 80th and we went to New Zealand to celebrate in the June school holidays.
We were only meant to be there for one week, but the travel bubble closed when we were on the last flight in. Johnny, my partner, and I are both New Zealanders and the boys had never spent more than two weeks here at one stretch, so we put the boys in school and ended up staying till the end of 2022.
I worked part-time while we were in New Zealand and I did a creative writing paper at the University of Auckland.
When we did creative non-fiction, I wrote about working as a correspondent in Hong Kong and other parts of Asia, and the impact of trauma. That great Covid reset gave me time to be more reflective and writing that genre flowed more easily for me, and I produced a lot of words. Not that any writing is easy, but when those memories came to the forefront of my mind, I knew I was ready to honour the stories of the people I’d interviewed over the years.
Which is how the book was born – remembering all these people and what they had lived through.
Like the 2004 tsunami when over 230,000 people were killed when huge walls of water swept across the land. I saw hundreds of dead laid out in temporary morgues set up in temples in southern Thailand and it was hocking. Each one of those people was someone’s daughter or son, a mother or a father. A life that was valued and was now gone, and in its place, there was a trail of grief. It was heart-wrenching to witness, but when you’re a journalist, you can’t stop to analyse how you’re feeling, you just have to keep going, day after day and report the news so people know what’s happening.
There’s a saying in news – if it bleeds, it leads – but I hope I’ve never pushed anyone to do an interview who hasn’t wanted to do it. I’ve still asked people to do interviews in circumstances where
I’ve felt uncomfortable.
As a young journalist, if you’re working in breaking news, you definitely have to do that, but as soon as I hear a hard no, that’s it for me. Of course, some people want to talk and others are wavering, so you help them weigh the pros and cons. If someone has lost a loved one, they might not want that person to be forgotten. Talking about what happened and the kind of person their loved one was can be very important during times of grief. It’s very nuanced.
Writing this book is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
It took me three years to complete, and I even sent the family away for one holiday so I could stay home and focus. I needed peace and quiet, starting my writing at five in the morning and only stopping to eat or take a walk around the block. It made me realise how important story- telling is to me. Whether its journalism, working in the not-for-profit sector or writing this book, telling people’s stories is what I love best.”
Every Second Counts by Charlotte Glennie ($39.99 at PaperPlus) out now.
