Meandering To Manila follows the story of Keith Dalton, who at just ten years old declared he would one day become a foreign correspondent… and then actually did it.
Long before GPS, smartphones or cheap flights, Keith was a young journalist working in Melbourne newsrooms, learning his craft at The Herald and Weekly Times and producing radio for Radio Australia.
But instead of waiting for opportunity to come to him, he made a decision that would change his life: Without a return ticket, he packed a typewriter into a backpack and set off alone on a journey through Southeast Asia to make his childhood dream real.
What followed is almost unimaginable today, malaria in Indonesia, dysentery in Malaysia, travelling by rust-bucket cargo ships, jungle canoes and pre-war trains, witnessing a killing on the Thai–Malay border, and becoming the first white person ever seen by children of ex-headhunters in Borneo.
It was his journalistic baptism and it shaped him into the correspondent who would later report for the BBC, ABC, The Sydney Morning Herald, NPR and others, covering revolutions, coups and one of the most turbulent eras in Philippine history.
Biography/Memoir, Journalism, Foreign correspondent, Travel in the Seventies, SE Asus, Adventure, 1970s, History
About The Author
Keith Dalton was a journalist and a foreign correspondent for 20 years. Then, for another 20 years he was a speechwriter, a press secretary, and a communications manager.
His grounding in journalism began in Melbourne where he worked at the Herald and Weekly Times, obtained a Diploma in Journalism at RMIT, and soon after joined Radio Australia, the overseas shortwave service of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. His three years producing Radio Australia’s leading current affairs program sparked his interest in international broadcasting, particularly into Asia.
He was 25 when he left Australia and spent the next 12 years in Southeast Asia, principally in the Philippines where he reported on the 1986 People Power revolution that overthrew former president Ferdinand Marcos. He broadcast for 10 radio stations and wrote for three newspapers. On returning to Australia in 1987, Keith remained a self-employed foreign correspondent for the BBC, Radio New Zealand, Radio Netherlands and Radio Television Hong Kong. He covered Australian and Pacific affairs for the next three years until he became a speechwriter for the New South Wales Premier and a press secretary.
For three years, Keith was the employee communications manager for Westpac. And for 11 years, he was the corporate communications manager for the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS).
Keith has also written his second book Reinventing Marcos about the decade leading up to the overthrow of the Philippines long-standing dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. It’s a book he never intended to write, until he had to. He needed to set the record straight; to refute the scurrilous lies that have replaced irrefutable facts about the Marcos regime. Dalton remembers Marcos ‘the autocrat’ who politically gutted and economically plundered the Philippines. Social media disinformation has deliberately upturned history.
Keith and his wife, Bet (who he met in Manila) live in Sydney.
