George Ivan Smith

George Ivan Smith AO (1915–1995) career spanned radio, war correspondent, movie director, diplomat, poet and author. He was born 11 July 1915 George Charles Ivan Smith in Sydney, New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The first son of George Franklin Smith, a NSW prison governor and May Sullivan.

"As a people we are now called Australians because a vast & lonely land has touched us with her differences" George Ivan Smith, 1953'

In 1935 he married Madeleine LaBarte Oakes (1909-1966) of Maryborough, Queensland: children George Ivan Smith 1937 deceased, Antony Ivan Smith (Ivansmith) (1939-2008) and Sharon Morreale 1940. In 1944 he married Mary Stephanie Douglass; stepchildren Penelope Gilliatt writer (1932-1993), Angela Conner (1935), sculptor and an adopted daughter Edda Mwakeselo Ivan-Smith 1960, author and Social Development Consultant. He died in 1995 in Stroud, Gloucestershire.

Ivan Smith is his full last name and not hyphenated, though often he is categorized under the last name Smith.

After education at Bathurst, New South Wales and then Goulburn High School where his father George Franklin Smith was prison governor at the Goulburn Gaol. After graduation Ivan Smith began work as a cub newspaper journalist for the Sydney Truth.

In 1937 he joined the Australian Broadcasting Commission and managed 2WL a radio station in Wollongong. Later Michael Pate who began his famous career in 1938, when he joined Ivan Smith writing and broadcasting a program called 'Youth Speaks' for ABC Radio.

In 1939 became he talk’s editor and a founding member of the new overseas short wave broadcasting service, "Australia Calling" (1939-1941) later named Radio Australia. In 1941 Ivan Smith was seconded to the BBC Overseas Service in London, England where he became Director of the Pacific Service and organised overseas coverage of the Second Front. In 1945 he joined the J. Arthur Rank Organisation where he worked as Producer, Editor and Director of This Modern Age with Sergei Nolbano, a documentary series of films for J. Arthur Rank (1945-1947).

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