Murray Sayle, 1926–2010

last updated 8 January 2015

Murray Sayle traveled the world in search of stories, tramping through the Bolivian jungle in pursuit of Che Guevara, chartering a light aircraft to follow yachtsman Francis Chichester on the first solo nonstop circumnavigation of the globe; staking out a Moscow post office to interview British double agent Kim Philby after his defection to the Soviet Union; and popping up in murderous hot spots from Vietnam to Pakistan and the Middle East.

The son of a railway executive, Sayle was born in a suburb of Sydney. He attended the University of Sydney, said the London Independent, but spent so much time on the student magazine “that he missed 90 percent of his lectures and was excluded from taking finals.” In 1952, he followed a girlfriend to London, where he published a tabloid exposé of a sex trafficking ring for The People. “All you needed to be a journalist, he liked to quip, was a little literary ability and rat-like cunning.”

“Large, shrewd, and with many of the characteristics of an armored vehicle,” Sayle displayed a talent for “getting oneself in the right place at the right time,” said the London Guardian. “Later he developed a graceful writing style and an instinct for seeing the larger, less obvious truth.” He moved with his wife to Japan in 1975 and stayed for three decades before moving back to Australia. Among his most significant work is “his contrarian account of the role of the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima in hastening Japan’s surrender” in World War II, which appeared in The New Yorker in 1995. Sayle argued that the threat of Soviet invasion, not the atomic bomb, had convinced Japan to surrender.