Book review: Every Second Counts 

In 2003 while still in her early 30s, Charlotte Glennie made the case to Bill Ralston, her boss at TVNZ, that the broadcaster should open a dedicated Asia bureau. Much to Glennie’s surprise, Ralston said yes. Glennie would spend the next two years living in Hong Kong and traveling throughout the region reporting on everything from the Boxing Day tsunami, Japanese atomic bomb survivors, to the New Zealand grandmother teaching English in rural Mongolia.  

Much of the first half of Glennie’s memoir is spent detailing the stories that marked her two years based out of Hong Kong, as well as the pressure and excitement of setting up a one-woman bureau – with no dedicated camera crew or translator – tasked with making a vast and varied region’s stories accessible and relevant for a New Zealand audience.  

One of the first stories Glennie covers is of a Sri Lankan teenage girl sedated and deported from New Zealand after the government rejected her claim for asylum. The treatment of the girl, who had claimed asylum on the basis that she had been sexually abused back in Sri Lanka after initially claiming political persecution, caused public outcry in New Zealand.  

Glennie tracked down the girl’s mother in Hong Kong, who explained that as a domestic worker she was unable to support her daughter on a visa in Hong Kong. They had initially claimed asylum on political persecution grounds, she explained, because of the social stigma attached to sexual assault in Sri Lanka. “Our interview with Malini’s mother was an angle no other media organisation had, and we only had it because we had been in Hong Kong, where she was,” writes Glennie.  

Glennie in Bulgan, far west Mongolia, where she reported on a Kiwi grandmother teaching English to nomadic children

Another first for a reporter from a New Zealand media outlet was Glennie’s visit to North Korea. There as a guest of the New Zealand-DPRK Friendship Society, Glennie met with one of two New Zealanders living in Pyongyang, Hugh Gollan, and toured the New Zealand-DPRK Friendship Farm. Despite spending much of the trip trying to evade her two DPRK? tour guides, Glennie notes how she also became fond of them: “They were our portal into a world that couldn’t have been more different than the one we were from, and I was grateful.” 

The biggest story of Glennie’s time as TVNZ’s Asia correspondent, however, was the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, which is believed to have resulted in over two hundred thousand deaths across Southeast and South Asia.  

Dispatched to Thailand and Indonesia in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami, Glennie describes harrowing scenes of family and friends searching for their loved ones among rapidly decaying bodies. In a later story, Glennie recounts a New Zealand woman jailed in Thailand for heroin smuggling telling her that sewing body bags for the tsunami victims had been the most meaningful aspect of her time in prison – and the inescapable smell of death that showering was unable to wash away.  

But it is the scenes not included in news footage that underscore the all-consuming nature of the job: Exhausted journalists struggling to process the magnitude of witnessing such devastation. “There were no words for the scale of the suffering we were reporting on,” writes Glennie. “Somehow, we found them for our stories, but they eluded us in conversation.” 

Glennie reporting on the post-tsunami reconstruction in the Indonesian province of Aceh in 2005

Despite winning New Zealand’s top honour for television journalism in May 2005, Glennie would be told less than a year later that TVNZ would be axing the bureau that covered 60 percent of the world’s population in a bid to save money. To rub salt in the wounds, Glennie makes it well known that the bureau only ever operated on a shoestring budget, relying on freelance camera crew and the goodwill of more resourced broadcasters such as Al Jazeera and the BBC to make things work behind the scenes, a far cry from the much better resourced TVNZ offshoots in London and Australia. “The world was changing,” laments Glennie, “couldn’t news resources be shared more evenly to reflect this?” 

The decision prompted pushback from New Zealand’s “old Asia hands”, but the highest profile critic of TVNZ's decision was Helen Clark. “International cable news channels, while they can be highly informative, do not necessarily serve our needs,” Glennie quotes the then-prime minister as publicly stating at the time.    

Any talk of attempting to save the bureau proved futile and while Glennie was offered to retain her Asia correspondent title, covering the region from TVNZ’s Auckland newsroom offered little appeal. “To make the Asia job a success, I had ventured to the continent’s most isolated regions,” writes Glennie, “I had been able to do it to the best of my ability because of my proximity to where the action was, not by being thousands of kilometres away at the bottom of the world.” 

Glennie, ABC cameraman Luke Hill and producer Wan Xu at Lugu Lake, home of matrilineal Mosuo people, 2007

With no other New Zealand outlet present in the region, and determined to stay in Asia, Glennie was forced to jump ship, taking up a role based in Beijing with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 

Aware of what this would mean for New Zealand audiences, Glennie points out, “The few stories that did get covered from the region would, for the most part, be told by correspondents from overseas news organisations, missing the unique nuance relevant to a New Zealand audience.” 

But for Glennie no longer being constrained by the need to find the New Zealand angle in a story was also liberating. Glennie’s next two years in China took? place during what many western China watchers now fondly recall as a comparatively liberal period, allowing her to document the energy leading up to the 2008 Olympic Games, but also the ongoing activism of grassroots organisations such as the Tiananmen Mothers and self-trained legal advocate Chen Guangcheng.  

Glennie also makes it clear that with no dedicated correspondent in the region, New Zealand media often failed to notice the big China stories. Glennie recounts receiving a request from RNZ for an interview. Assuming it will be on a major political story unfolding in China, Glennie was shocked when her RNZ contact asked her to talk about a locust outbreak affecting farmers in Inner Mongolia.  

Charlotte reporting from the grounds of a temple in Khao Lak, Thailand, three days after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami

Well-versed in what makes a compelling story, Glennie intersperses her reporting experiences with details from her personal life, most notably a major plummet off a Croatian cliff in her late twenties that left her bed bound for months, and the cost to one’s personal life that fast-paced journalism so-often necessitates. It is her eventual decision to prioritise the latter that sees her leave China for Sydney at the end of 2008.  

Although China, and the region’s, importance to New Zealand has only increased in the intervening decades, Glennie remains the only New Zealander to ever be employed fulltime in the region for a New Zealand media outlet. While Glennie acknowledges the growing diversity of New Zealand journalists and the increasing number of those with Asian heritage, she concludes there is “no substitute” for New Zealand media having a fulltime reporter permanently based in Asia.  

In fact, according to the Asia New Zealand Foundation’s most recent Perceptions of Asia survey, over a third of New Zealanders think Asia is the most important region for New Zealand to have a foreign correspondent in. 

It is a conclusion that readers of Glennie’s book, despite the changing ways in which news is consumed and shared, will most likely agree with.  

The Foundation's Asia in Focus initiative publishes expert insights and analysis on issues across Asia, as well as New Zealand’s evolving relationship with the region.