Sean Dorney is the Pacific Correspondent for Australia Network. One of the ABC’s most experienced and respected correspondents, he is an acknowledged authority on Papua New Guinea and is the author of two books on PNG affairs. Sean lived and worked in Papua New Guinea for almost 20 years and is, remarkably, the only foreign correspondent to have been both deported and awarded honours by PNG. The first of his three postings to Papua New Guinea began in 1974, just before PNG independence. From 1974 to 1976 he was seconded from the ABC to work with the then-newly established National Broadcasting Commission of PNG. During this time, he met and married a fellow broadcaster at the NBC. Sean became captain of the PNG Rugby League national team, the Kumuls. He played representative football for two years and later served on the Port Moresby Rugby League Judiciary Panel. In 1979 he returned to Port Moresby as the ABC correspondent, but was expelled in 1984 by the then Foreign Minister, Rabbie Namaliu, following a dispute between the PNG government and the ABC over the screening of an interview with Irian Jayan rebel leader, James Nyaro, by the Four Corners program. Sean returned to Port Moresby as ABC correspondent in 1987 and in 1991 the government of Prime Minister Sir Rabbie Namaliu awarded him an MBE for “services to broadcasting and sport”. For 18 months in 1991/92 Sean was seconded to the PNG NBC as in-country project manager for an AusAid/ABC assistance project. In 1997 he led the ABC’s radio and television coverage of the Sandline mercenary crisis. He returned to Australia in 1999 to take up the job of Pacific Correspondent based in Brisbane and has since covered the political crises in the Solomon Islands and Fiji. In 2000 Sean completed a two-part television documentary marking the 25th anniversary of PNG independence and spanning his own quarter of a century involvement with the country. Sean won the Walkley Award for radio news reporting for his coverage of the tsunami that struck PNG in July 1998.