Watched Talking Heads from London. Peter Thompson made you feel like you were in the room with someone remarkable. That gift, that stillness. Gone too soon.
Their story
Peter Thompson was an Australian broadcast journalist, educator and environmental campaigner whose calm, probing style became a fixture of ABC radio and television for more than three decades. Born in Sydney in 1952, he moved from country sports radio to national current affairs, led a landmark wilderness campaign in Tasmania,…
Peter Thompson was an Australian broadcast journalist, educator and environmental campaigner whose calm, probing style became a fixture of ABC radio and television for more than three decades. Born in Sydney in 1952, he moved from country sports radio to national current affairs, led a landmark wilderness campaign in Tasmania, and later hosted Talking Heads, a long-running ABC television series of biographical interviews with prominent Australians.
Thompson started in radio in 1970 as a sports broadcaster at 2LF in Young, New South Wales. In 1972 he moved to Tasmania, presenting on commercial stations including 7EX, 7LA and TNT9, and in 1978 he fronted the ABC television current affairs programme This Day Tonight. The island state's hydro-electric politics then pulled him out of the studio. From 1979 to 1982, as a project officer for the Australian Conservation Foundation, he was a leading public advocate for protecting the Franklin and Gordon Rivers from damming. He wrote Power in Tasmania and a biography of Bob Brown tied to that campaign, and in 1985 received a University of New South Wales Alumni Award for his conservation work. Former Greens leader Bob Brown later credited him with a pivotal media role in saving the Franklin wilderness.
Returning to national broadcasting, Thompson presented ABC Radio Sydney's Drivetime in 1987, then the flagship morning programme AM from 1988 to 1993. He hosted Radio National Breakfast from 1994 to 1999 and again from 2003 to 2004, and recorded 35 Wisdom Interviews for Radio National between 2002 and 2004. From 2005 to 2010 he presented Talking Heads on ABC television, a fireside biographical series produced in Brisbane and Adelaide that ran for 238 episodes and yielded companion interview books.
Alongside on-air work he built a second career as a teacher of public communication. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from the Australian National University in 1977, an MBA from the Australian Graduate School of Management in 1984, and a Master of Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School in 1987. He became an adjunct professor at Macquarie University in 2006 and a fellow of the Australia and New Zealand School of Government in 2007, teaching executives about political and social change, risk communication and behavioural change. As director of the Centre for Leadership he ran workshops on ethics and communicating with integrity, drawing on Aristotle's ethos, pathos and logos, themes he developed in books including The Secrets of the Great Communicators and Persuading Aristotle.
Thompson died in a Sydney hospital on 11 September 2026, aged 73, after living with Parkinson's disease and contracting pneumonia. His family confirmed the death to the ABC; he is survived by his partner Jane Rowe and daughter Alexa. Colleagues remembered the distinctive voice that carried AM and Talking Heads into Australian living rooms, and conservationists recalled the campaigner who helped keep the Franklin free.
Across more than forty years he moved between journalism, activism and teaching without treating them as separate callings. Listeners who woke to AM in the late 1980s and early 1990s heard a careful interrogator of politics and public life; viewers of Talking Heads later watched him draw out childhoods, failures and second acts from artists, athletes, activists and public servants. Students in ANZSOG and Macquarie classrooms encountered the same concern for clear argument and ethical persuasion that he had practised on air and in the Franklin campaign. That through-line - curiosity married to civic purpose - is what friends and colleagues named when news of his death spread in mid-September 2026.
Biography adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), TV Tonight, ABC family statements via news reports, and the sources cited on this page. Wikipedia ↗
In their own words
“Peter made his mark as the Australian Conservation Foundation's campaigner to stop the Franklin River dam in the early 1980s. He was an early advocate and media star who had a pivotal role in saving the Franklin River wilderness.”
Bob Brown, tribute after Thompson's death in September 2026, quoted by the Mirror and other outlets.
“A generous spirit who was widely admired.”
Family statement shared via ABC Sydney after his death.
“Vale Peter Thompson. Talented broadcaster. We met during the production on my episode of the ABC's Talking Heads.”
Phillip Adams on X, September 2026.
“That voice. Peter Thompson, well known broadcaster, best known perhaps as host of Talking Heads on ABC TV and of AM on ABC Radio National has died.”
Miriam Cosic on X, September 2026.
“Simplicity, simplicity, and of course, simplicity.”
Glenn Murcutt's three rules of life, as drawn out by Thompson in a Talking Heads interview later cited by ArchDaily.
Photos
1Peter Thompson, self-portrait photograph, 2010
Feb 2010 · by People Forever
Exactly. Style and substance. Rare combination.