Patricia PENN [????- ]

Excerpt from an interview about her work as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's first reporter in Hong Kong:

• I: Now, that's your journalism beginnings.  Now, the next interesting question is Asia.  What made you go to Hong Kong in the first place?  What attracted you to Asia and what did you know about it and how did you first learn about it?
• R: I was brought up there.  My father worked there.
• I: I see.  You were brought up in Hong Kong?
• R: Largely.  I went to Hong Kong, it just happened I was born in England and my father was in Hong Kong and my mother was in England and I was born there and I went out when I was very small and I went to school there and I left in 1939 on a routine leave, four month leave, five months leave of my father and while we were in England war broke out and I didn't actually go back until after the War when I'd worked for two years in London for the BBC.  My father was in Hong Kong through the War, as a prisoner of war, and my mother and my brother and I made an abortive attempt to get back to Hong Kong before the Pacific war broke out and got stuck in Canada because of the - there was an evacuation in 1940 of all non Chinese women and children from Hong Kong because of the Japanese threat.  That was two years before Pearl Harbour and the fall of Hong Kong to the Japanese.