This is taken from BBC News:

Veteran ex-BBC broadcaster dies
By Phil Mercer
BBC News, Sydney

Red Harrison, a former BBC journalist, has died at the age of 75 in a hospital in Sydney after a long illness.

Arthur Leslie Harrison was born in South Shields in north-east England and moved to Australia as teenager.

Known as Red on account of his flame-coloured hair, he worked as a jackaroo on a Queensland cattle station.

This was followed by a stint in Papua New Guinea before he drifted into journalism.

He was a successful newspaper editor in Perth and Sydney and went on to become one of Australia's most recognisable radio personalities.

Red Harrison had one of the most distinctive voices in the business.

Friends have described his deep tones as "well lived in".

He presented the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's flagship radio news programme AM between 1981 and 1986. For years he was the voice of the BBC in the Antipodes.

He was a talented pianist and chess player, who also found time to indulge his passion for flying and military history.

This is also from The Australian:

The world was Red's planet
by Piers Akerman, June 30, 2008

Red Harrison, journalist. Born South Shields, England, August 18, 1932. Died Campbelltown, NSW, June 20, aged 75.

BROADCASTER A.L. "Red" Harrison had been many things in his life but it was in his last guise as a correspondent with the BBC World Service that he achieved global recognition.

Possessing a distinctive voice, which BBC colleague Ian Richardson described as "mahogany", Red conveyed a reassuring authority that resonated with his audience wherever they tuned in.

One of his most ardent listeners tuned in at her home in Buckingham Palace, a fact the Queen told him when they met at a reception at Admiralty House, the Australian Governor-General's residence in Sydney in 2002. Over a drink, she said she began her day with the World Service and paid special attention whenever she heard Red's authoritative tones.

Like his real names - Arthur Leslie - he kept a lot to himself but he was born in South Shields, Tyne and Wear, on August 18, 1932, to William Harrison, a chief steward in the merchant marine, and his wife, Alexandra.

Bill Harrison was in the East Indies when Singapore fell and was posted missing.

Arthur and his brother Walter were sent to boarding school. In his case to the Royal Merchant Navy School, now Bearwood College, in Berkshire and that's where his name change took place.

The US servicemen stationed near the school taught their young neighbours to play baseball and football, and gave them chewing gum. They also named the boy with flame-coloured hair Red.

The family was stunned when Bill Harrison returned at the end of the war having survived as a prisoner of war in Changi. Assuming her husband dead, Alexandra was engaged to another man but resumed her marriage, and the couple decided to begin a new life in Australia.

Red Harrison was then 15. Shortly after arriving, he went with his father to work on oil rigs in New Guinea but when his mother found he had lied about his age to get the job, she contacted their employer and her son was sent home.

He began his media career with a cadetship at the ABC in Sydney, then in Brisbane, where he married his first wife, Mary "Mickey" Wall, in 1952. Their first child, Barbara was born shortly after.

The ABC did not smile upon young cadets with children and he was let go. Still a cadet, he joined the rural Gympie Times, then worked as a jackaroo on a sheep station near Cloncurry before returning to journalism in Townsville.

He received his first grading when he moved to a newspaper in Tasmania and his own family had grown to include Michael, Kathleen and Robert by 1956.

Several years later, he left his family and moved to Sydney and Frank Packer's suburban newspaper group. He also joined the part-time volunteer One Commando Regiment, making more than 100 parachute jumps and earning his green beret.

He was soon poached by Rupert Murdoch's News Limited operation and sent to Perth to his first editorship, the local Sunday newspaper, The Sunday Times.

In 1962, as the first Mercury space capsule passed over Perth, the then lord mayor, Harry Howard, urged the citizens to turn on their lights for the astronauts. A ratepayer was moved by the tribute to present Howard with a pair of racing pigeons, which Red heard were subsequently eaten. He ran the story, to the dismay of the advertising department, and after a number of similar confrontations was transferred to Sydney.

The new challenge fitted Red as comfortably as his stylish trenchcoat.

Whether on the sub-editors' table of the new national newspaper, The Australian, writing leaders on The Daily Mirror, flying to Melbourne at weekends to moonlight on one of Max Newton's sheets, or editing The Sunday Telegraph, he was the consummate newspaperman.

He loved words and enjoyed long sessions of a word game in which each player had to add a letter to those before, with the proviso that it was possible to form a word with the addition of further letters, without changing the order of the earlier letters. In one game, he was challenged when he added a "q" after "l". He won, his word was catafalque.

In the early 1970s, Red was delighted to accommodate two of his passions beyond the smell of ink and the thundering of presses - he met and married in 1971 Pamela Macarthur-Onslow, a direct descendent of John Macarthur, the pastoralist who introduced the merino sheep to Australia, and he completed a private pilot's course.

The couple moved to a house at Camden, on the outskirts of Sydney, and Red spent hours towing gliders into the air from the aerodrome adjacent to their home and part of the original Macarthur estate. Pilots, including professional aircraft ferry pilot, Jim Hazelton, with whom Red brought an aged Beech 18 (familiar to most from its role in the film Casablanca), from the US, via Iceland, Britain, Europe and Asia to Australia, say he was a meticulous aviator.

He made the transition from print to broadcast effortlessly, joining the ABC's flagship current-affairs program in 1981 and the BBC five years later. His reports of the troubled Springbok tours placed him at the top of world news lists, but his coverage of Fiji's first coup in 1987 was superlative.

Coup leader Sitiveni Rabuka, who had closed down the local press, was unimpressed, however, and sent a team of thugs to bring him to heel. After being dragged from his hotel room, he was badly beaten in a cell at a police station but the troops failed to find his transmitting device and he stayed on the air bringing the Fijians their news via the BBC World Service.

When the BBC dispensed with his services without any warning, he was devastated, retreating to a world of book reviews, mainly to do with military history, another of his specialties.

He died at Campbelltown Hospital on June 21 after a long struggle with emphysema. Red and Pamela Harrison had no children together but he is survived by his four children and a grandchild.