Vale Tim Bowden AM

Broadcaster, journalist, oral historian and author Tim Bowden – who died on Sunday aged 87 – had a long and storied relationship with the Australian War Memorial.

Bowden grew up in Hobart, Tasmania and after graduating from university headed to the UK where he worked as a producer and radio interviewer for the BBC. After three years, he returned to Tasmania to join the ABC, going on to work for the broadcaster for the majority of his journalistic career. During the 1960s he was a foreign correspondent based in Singapore. He went on to cover the Vietnam War, contributed to well-known ABC radio and television programs including PM, This Day Tonight and Backchat, and established the social history unit at Radio National.  

His fingerprints are present throughout the Memorial’s collection. He conducted over 120 oral histories in the Memorial’s collection – some as an interviewer for the Keith Murdoch Sound Archive, others from his own research, including projects such as of Prisoners of War: Australians under Nippon and Changi Photographer (instrumental in bringing the photographs and images of George Aspinall to light).  He was vital in bringing fellow Tasmanian journalist Neil Davis’s personal objects and collection into the Memorials care after Davis was killed in 1985, and donated the research, recordings and photographs that went into the writing of his biography of Davis’s One Crowded Hour.

Tim Bowden was also a great supporter of the work of the Memorial. He was invited to formally open the exhibition Focus: Photography & War in 2006 and earlier this year was guest speaker in Launceston for Action: Film & War with David Brill. Always ready with a sly one liner or topical anecdote, he was an erudite and compassionate writer, researcher and interviewer. 

Many of the collections he donated and worked on can be found on the Memorials website and you can listen to a selection of the oral histories he recorded.