Journalist Iain Finlay, best known from This Day Tonight and Beyond 2000, has died at age 89.
Suffering from amyloidosis, he chose voluntary-assisted dying. He died at his home in northern NSW, surrounded by his partner of 60 years, Trish Clark, and children Zara and Sean.
Although born in Canberra, his father’s various postings meant his education was scattered across Australia and overseas. His early career included working at the Australian office of United Press International and then producing and presenting a current affairs program at a Hong Kong radio station. He then went to Canada, working for national broadcaster CBC, then freelanced for BBC and studied television production in New York.
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He returned to Australia in 1968 to join This Day Tonight. He stayed for two years before becoming ABC’s South East Asia correspondent. He later returned to Australia to present PM for ABC radio while also doing freelance work, including reporting for motoring program Torque and producing a documentary, I’m Not A Bird… A Boy With Wings, about Sydney-based hang-gliding champion Bill Moyes. The documentary won a Penguin Award and was sold to the Seven Network.
In February 1975, he was announced as the new host of This Day Tonight for New South Wales and ACT, replacing Bill Peach. He stayed in the role for six months, before he and partner Trish took the family backpacking across Africa, South America, Europe and the Pacific. The couple authored a number of books based on their travels.
In 1976, he took a brief detour into acting, playing the part of resident ‘nasty’ Frank Curtis in early episodes of The Young Doctors, and was even a panellist on game show Blankety Blanks.
In the early 1980s, he was one of the reporters for ABC’s technology series Towards 2000. When ABC dropped the show in 1984, Finlay and his colleagues took it to the Seven Network, where it became Beyond 2000 and was sold to over 80 countries including the United States. He followed the show when it moved across to Network Ten in 1993.
He and Trish went on to pursue humanitarian work, including raising funds to help build a school in rural Laos.
In his later years he had been participating in a treatment trial for amyloidosis, a rare disorder in which amyloid protein builds up in the organs and can lead to their failure. When it became clear the treatment was not working, he “sorted out” his end-of-life plan and opted for voluntary-assisted dying.
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Source: ABC. Sydney Morning Herald, 9 December 1974. The Age, 6 August 1975. TV Times, 8 February 1975, 6 November 1976. TV Week, 24 May 1986.
