Australian correspondent Lindsay Murdoch has been awarded an Order of Australia Medal (OAM) on this year’s Queen’s Birthday Honours List for services to journalism after spending most of his five decades in journalism covering upheavals across Southeast Asia.

Murdoch began his career working on the Warragul Guardian in southeast Australia in 1968 and joined The Age in Melbourne in 1977 as a police reporter. Starting from the mid-1980s, spent he spent 25 years as a foreign correspondent throughout Asia for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

Murdoch is also a veteran of the wars in Iraq, was among the first journalists to reach Banda Aceh, Indonesia after the Boxing Day tsunami of 2004, and covered the carnage in East Timor in the late 1990s.

He spoke with Luke Hunt. Listen here.