FULL BIOGRAPHY 
Hugh Lunn has never had a problem finding his way into trouble.
In 1964, aged 23, he talked his way into ‘Red China’ before the Cultural Revolution —a story he tells in Spies Like Us.
On arrival in London, Hugh worked for the Daily Mirror before snaring a job at Reuters, 85 Fleet Street. They sent him to Vietnam where, with three days of his year to go, he witnessed the 1968 Tet Offensive. Three of his Australian journalist friends — including his roommate Bruce Pigott — were killed there. Vietnam: A Reporter’s War won an Age Book of the Year award in 1985 and has twice been published in New York.
In 1969 Hugh was Reuters correspondent in Jakarta when Indonesia took over the western half of New Guinea and its 800,000 Papuan inhabitants. Only Hugh and Dutch journalist Otto Kuyk were there to tell the world—by morse code—that the UN ‘Act of Free Choice’ was a rort.
Returning home in 1971, Hugh joined The Australian, the newspaper Rupert Murdoch started. As Rupert’s ‘foreign correspondent in Queensland’, Hugh won three national Walkley Awards for feature writing between 1974 and 1979. He also wrote books on politics, Queensland, and even a tell-all book about his seventeen years Working for Rupert, which was praised in America as ‘without a doubt the most instructive, emotional, enlightening and ironic book on Rupert Murdoch’.
In 1984 the Aboriginal Treaty Committee published Hugh’s Four Stories with the chairman, Dr Nugget Coombs, describing them as ‘these historic articles’.
Hugh misses the inventive way Australians used to speak before American TV took over our lives. So he wrote Lost for Words and Words Fail Me to recapture in context our rich, direct Aussie lingo.
His childhood memoir Over the Top with Jim became Australia’s all-time bestselling childhood memoir. Over the Top with Jim and Lost for Words were named in the ‘50 Books You Can’t Put Down’ national project.
In 2006, “Australian Story” on ABC TV broadcast a programme on the life of Hugh’s friend, Wimbledon and Davis Cup tennis champion Ken Fletcher. Following this, ABC Books asked Hughie to write Fletch’s biography, and The Great Fletch was published in 2008.
Over the Top with Jim has been set as a prescribed text for Higher School Certificate English in NSW; while Vietnam: A Reporter’s War has been set as a core text for English students in Year 12 in Victoria and for Years 11 and 12 in Tasmania.

In 2009 Hugh was named a Queensland icon, on the state’s 150th anniversary. He was in good company, along with David Malouf, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Cathy Freeman, Geoffrey Rush, the Bee Gees, Powderfinger … and the Great Barrier Reef.

When the SBS TV Rockwiz team rolled north on tour in 2011, they invited Hugh to write a five episode musical radio serial. The serial was performed live on stage each night by Julia Zemiro, Andrew Buchanan and Bruce Spence, and broadcast around the state on Steve Austin’s ABC Local Radio show as part of the Queensland Music Festival. Hugh then collaborated with Gerry Connolly, the international comic actor, musician and composer, to create State of Origin: The Musical! which premiered in 2019.
Hugh turned Over the Top with Jim into a play for the inaugural Brisbane Festival in 1996 with Bille Brown directing, and he has adapted Over the Top with Jim, More Over the Top with Jim and Spies Like Us for serialisation on Ian McNamara’s Australia All Over ABC Radio show.

In 2015, along with a small group of scientists and academics, Hugh was made a Fellow of the Queensland Academy of Arts and Scientists at a ceremony hosted by Queensland Governor Paul de Jersey at Government House, Brisbane.

At a graduation ceremony in December 2021, the University of Queensland awarded Hugh an Honorary Doctorate of Letters.

In 2022, two of Hughie’s out-of-print books — Behind the Banana Curtain and Joh: The Life and Political Adventures of Johannes Bjelke-Petersen — found new life as eBooks. They are published by Ligature Publishing. They are part of UNTAPPED  The Australian Literary Heritage Project, a collaboration between libraries, authors and researchers. The UNTAPPED project has digitised almost 161 out-of-print books which were selected for their cultural importance by a panel of expert librarians from around the country. The eBooks are also available to borrow from most Australian public libraries.

The eBooks are available from Ligature Publishing

You can buy the eBook of Joh here.

You can buy the eBook of Behind the Banana Curtain here.