Elliot Hannay is an author and veteran journalist.
His latest book is a memoir, The Colt with No Regrets, and will be released April 2020 by Wilkinson Publishers.
His previous commission, Conversations with Katter … Politics, Life and What Matters, was published by New Holland in 2018. It was co-written with controversial Federal MP, Bob Katter, the second longest serving politician in Australia’s history.
His journalistic career started in 1958 at the age of sixteen and he worked in newspapers, ABC radio and television, media consultancy and the public service, for almost sixty years.
In 1980, soon after being appointed Editor of the Townsville Daily Bulletin, he was selected by The Australia China Council and the Department of Foreign Affairs as one of six Australian journalists to tour the People’s Republic of China. It was China’s first exchange of journalists with a western nation.
His most uplifting experience as a newspaper editor was when underworld figures Abe Saffron and Eddie Kornhauser served him with a writ for $3million dollars in damages. More worrying was the threat to send his severed ears to his wife in a matchbox and a confrontation with a dangerously crooked copper who threatened to “pop” him between the eyes with a snub-nosed pistol.
He worked on committees with Indigenous leaders, Eddie Mabo, Charles Perkins and Chicka Dixon and was probably the only editor in Australia to receive a delegation from a local branch of the Ku Klux Klan complaining about his editorials that promoted the interests of Indigenous people. He also broke the first national story about Queensland’s infamous Indigenous Stolen Wages almost forty years ago and supported moves for redress from the State Government.
Elliot is married to Barbara, one of Australia’s leading authors of women’s fiction. More than 12 million of her books have been published world-wide. The Hannays live in Townsville and have four children and seven grandchildren scattered across the state.