Following his schooling at Marlbrough College in New Zealand, Frank Devine joined the Marlborough Express newspaper. He travelled to Perth, Western Australia in his early twenties where he joined the West Australian newspaper. For a decade, from 1960, he was a foreign correspondent in New York, London and Tokyo. He moved to Sydney in the 1970s to edit the Australasian edition of Reader's Digest.
In 1980 Devine became a senior staff editor for the Digest in Pleasantville, New York. In 1984 Rupert Murdoch (q.v.) appointed Devine as editor of the Chicago Sun-Times. In 1986 he was appointed editor of the New York Post and then, with a return to Australia in 1988, as editor in chief of The Australian. Devine's refusal to oppose the pilots during the 1989 Australian pilots' strike caused Murdoch to sack him as editor in December of that year. Devine became a columnist and after retirement in 2003 continued to write for Quadrant and also produced a weekly column for the Australian. His last column was published in the Australian on 24 April 2009.
Sources: Bernard Lane, 'Louder than Life' Frank Devine Dies' The Australian (3 July 2009): 26 and Damien Murphy, 'Genial Journalist's Witty, Worldly Ways' The Sydney Morning Herald (4-5 July, 2009): 10.
