Mike Swinson

Mike Swinson is an Australian who grew up on a 2,500 acre mixed sheep, wheat, wool and cattle station in Central West NSW. That old saying, ‘you can take the boy out of the bush, but you can’t take the bush out of the boy’ applies to Mike. The family went through tough economic times that eventually saw the property sold after nearly 60 years of operation. Mike left the bush life that he loved and moved into radio and television broadcasting, joining first the Australian Broadcasting’s Corporations Rural Department, then moving into Television Current Affairs, TV documentaries, TV Gardening and Television News. His work has been recognised with a number of state and national awards, including winning the ‘Golden Ear’ award at the 12^th annual International Agricultural Film Festival in Berlin in 1982, then with Australian journalisms highest level of recognition, a Walkley Award in 1996 for ‘Best Coverage of a Current Event,’ with ‘Lynn’s Story,’ a harrowing account of the aftermath of the Port Arthur Massacre. Then followed another national award, from the Australian Teachers of Media, in 2011 for a national power industry documentary, ‘Back to Basics.’ Mike still run his own business, Corporate Image Matters that he started in 2002. His work has been lauded as he and his partner’s trialled ground breaking media productions for the National Gallery of Australia and were on the cusp of a new and productive relationship with the British Aerospace Engineering. Mike is currently a magazine editor, a Crisis Management Consultant to the aged care industry, a specialist consultant on transforming basic communication skills, to corporate managers in some of Australia’s large international organisations on honing critical communication skills and still dabbles in an old fashioned way in the art of video production.