Mununjali (Beaudesert) and Wangerriburra (Mount Tamborine) man, Wayne Coolwell was never sure how he ended up working in media, but there is no doubt that he left his mark on the Australia media landscape.
Born in Brisbane, Wayne lived in a tin shack out in the bush at Victoria Point where he would go crabbing with his grandfather regularly who was a big influence on his life. He then moved to Aspley.
His love of photography started in the late 1960s after he found his mother’s stash of National Geographic magazines. What Wayne saw in those pages, inspired him to get his own box brownie camera a number of years later. His love of photography saw him go on to study it at the Seven Hills College of Art (now the Queensland College of Art and Design) in the mid 1970s. While Wayne didn’t enjoy the theory side of the art form, he very much enjoyed the practical. While he never regarded himself as a great photographer, he felt like it was a part of him, and enjoyed the magic of developing the image, not knowing what might appear.
In 1979, Wayne moved to London where he worked for a marketing magazine and took the opportunity to visit Europe where he continued photographing his experiences. When he returned to Brisbane, he eventually found his way into the media. First working for Queensland newspapers, then moving to the ABC as a trainee in 1984. While he started his training in news and current affairs, he would later move to ABC Sports where he would become well known for his sports broadcasting.
During his time in ABC Sport, Wayne helped set up the Darwin office and became the first Aboriginal sports commentator at the 1986 Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh. In 1990, Wayne became the inaugural presenter of ABC Radio’s national Indigenous programme, Speaking Out, which continues to broadcast weekly and will celebrate its 35th year on air later this year.
“I never saw myself as somebody who was special or anything like that. I just loved my job. Loved communicating. Loved telling a story and I hope that reached a lot of people”.
Wayne Coolwell, State Library of Queensland oral history, 2023
During his time at Speaking Out, Wayne took the programme on the road for two weeks to the U.S and Canada during the International Year of the World’s Indigenous People, to report on how other indigenous groups were marking the year.
The 1990s were an incredibly busy time for Wayne between his ABC Radio and Television commitments, MC work for community and corporate events and writing his first book, My Kind of People: Achievement, Identity and Aboriginality.
Published through UQP, the writing of the book took Wayne across the world. Originally he’d been asked to write about Aboriginal sporting greats but Wayne wanted to go beyond that and focus on Aboriginal people making a contribution to the country in various ways that wasn’t just limited to sport. The book ended up including Mark Ella who was in Italy playing rugby union at the time, emerging musician Archie Roach, budding journalist Stan Grant, and young artist Gordon Bennett who’d won the Moët & Chandon Australian Art Fellowship which had taken him to France.
In the preface of the book, Wayne tells a story of falling out of a coconut tree and injuring his leg in Fiji. He was then picked up by a driver who’d come direct from a nightclub who promptly fell asleep at the wheel while taking Wayne to the airport so he could catch his flight back to Australia.
After 15 years with the national broadcaster, Wayne left the ABC in 1999 with one of his last work commitments co-anchoring the ABC coverage of the State Funeral for former Senator, Neville Bonner. In his post ABC life, Wayne went on to set up a restaurant and catering company, the Brisbane AFL team, Murri Mavericks, Indigenous Sports Queensland, the John Newfong Media Prize, The Centre For Aboriginal Independence And Enterprise (CAIE), and Chair the National Indigenous Sports Foundation.
Wayne was still taking photographs up until quite recently, and his photographic archive has been acquired by the State Library of Queensland.
