Part Two of a Special Report on the arcane art of China Watching, through a three-part feature written by my father Jack Spackman on the mysterious disappearance of Francis James, who was imprisoned in China […]
In November 1969 an Australian named Francis James disappeared without trace. He was travelling by train from the southern China city of Canton, now called Guangzhou, to Hong Kong. He was last seen by his […]
Like many children I had no real idea of what my parents did for a living so the last thing I expected on a visit to Sydney in 1973 was to hear my dad Jack […]
The first thing the China Mail’s journalists did after deciding to stage their sit-in over the closure of the newspaper was to get the news out. The job fell to Linda Siddall and Debra Jopson […]
On Saturday 17 August 1974 a newspaper died but she did not go quietly. The China Mail was in her 130th year and was Hong Kong’s oldest English-language newspaper. The Mail was not a great […]
Why shouldn’t Hong Kong people decide what happens to Hong Kong? It’s a simple question with a straightforward and, I fear, unchanging answer – China won’t tolerate it. The received wisdom was that Hong Kong people […]
It’s 1973 at the start of another long, hot summer in Hong Kong and already it stinks. The jokes about Hong Kong and its Fragrant Harbour have long been stale but visitors still crack them. […]
Trade unions get a bad press but at their heart they’re about decent pay and working conditions. When I asked my father Jack Spackman why he started the Hong Kong Journalists Association his answer was […]
There’s a moment in an exceptional 1998 documentary on Hugh van Es when he tells photojournalist Kadir van Lohuizen that he never joined a union. It’s a great exchange between two generations of war photographers […]
I was 17 years old and filling time on my father Jack Spackman’s monthly computer magazine while I decided what to do with my life. I wasn’t expecting it to be hard work. I certainly […]
Copyright: Maria Spackman
