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Mr Hugh Lunn

Fellow

  • Club/association Details
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  • Role(s): Fellow
    Level: Full
    Status: Active
  • Bio/Profile
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    • In 2020 Hugh Lunn was appointed a Patron of “Silver Memories”, a national broadcasting service for the aged.
    • In 2019 Hugh Lunn and comic actor and composer Gerry Connolly staged three condensed performances of their musical “State of Origin: The Musical”  off-Broadway at the historic Princess Theatre in Brisbane
    • In 2017 the Wendy Turnbull Sports Tourism Award was presented jointly to Hugh Lunn and fellow Brisbane sport enthusiast Peter Rasey
    • In 2015 Hugh was made a Fellow of the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences.
    • “Hugh Lunn’s books of memoir re-defined the genre and proved that best-sellers, such as his Vietnam: A Reporter’s War, could also be award-winning books of literature. Which makes him a rarity among authors.” Dr Craig Munro 2018 [Macquarie University; UQP Publisher 1983-2009]
    • Hugh was named a Queensland Icon for Queensland’s 150th anniversary celebrations in 2009. He was in good company, including Wally Lewis, Geoffrey Rush, Powderfinger and the Great Barrier Reef.
    • He has written two books on Australia’s lost language — Words Fail Me and Lost for Words.
    • As a journalist in the 1970s, he won three national Walkley Awards for feature writing.
    • Hugh wrote about Australia’s most famous export — media mogul Rupert Murdoch — in a book titled Working for Rupert.
    • Hugh’s memoir about 13 months in Vietnam as a Reuters war correspondent is called Vietnam: A Reporter’s War. It won the Melbourne Age Book of the Year literary prize in 1985, was published in New York, and is still in print there and in Australia.
    • Hugh returned to writing biography with a book called The Great Fletch — it’s about his late friend Kenny Fletcher of Annerley Junction, who was a Wimbledon and Davis Cup champion. In January 2012, Fletch was at long last inducted into the Australian Tennis Hall of Fame.
    • Hugh coined the phrase “There is no such thing as an ex-Queenslander; there are only lapsed Queenslanders” in November 1979 when he convinced Senator Ron McAuliffe that a rugby league State of Origin match between New South Wales and Queensland was viable. In 2011 Hugh wrote a musical radio play for the Rockwiz crew and the Queensland Music Festival. The show was simultaneously performed on stage and broadcast on 612 ABC Radio. The theme of the musical was The Rugby League State of Origin.
    • Hugh’s Over the Top with Jim — about growing up in the 1950s — became the biggest-selling Australian childhood memoir ever published.