By Peter Mosley
Kate Webb, a top wire service reporter of Vietnam war vintage, has died of cancer in Australia at the age of 64.
In over 30 years covering Asian hot-spots she won a reputation as a tough, hard-drinking chain-smoking but highly professional frontline reporter. During the Vietnam war, she was captured by Viet Cong troops in 1971, aged 28. She was presumed killed, and the New York Times and other newspapers published her obituary. Weeks later, weak and ill, she staggered back into Phnom Penh.
New Zealand born but raised in Australia, she began her career as a foreign correspondent covering the turmoil over President Sukarno's fall from power in Indonesia in the 1960s. As a correspondent for UPI and then AFP, and sometimes as a freelance, she covered such major stories as the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in India, the mujahideen triumph in Afghanistan, the "people power" revolution in the Philippines, the fall of Chun Doo-Hwan in South Korea, Cambodia's "Killing Fields", East Timor's civil war and Hong Kong's handover to China.
Reuters reported that Webb died peacefully in a Sydney hospital on May 13 from bowel cancer. She had retired in 2001 "to grow vegetables."
Former colleague Alan Dawson, who knew her well, wrote in an appreciation of Kate Webb published in the Bangkok Post (reported by AsiaMedia.com) : "When Kate Webb talked she almost whispered, so that one had to focus on her words. She reported the same way - economically, undramatically but so descriptively that readers figuratively leaned forward to catch every word of her story. There wasn't a story that she ever covered poorly."
Dawson wrote that working for UPI during the Vietnam war, Webb became widely known but "never sought to be a role model or a trailblazer, but the duties were thrust upon her. With all due respect to the women who covered the Vietnam War, Kate was the best... there was a simple reason. She was only in it for the news."
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