Len Anthonisz in 2009. © P.J. Croft 2009, 2015

I just heard the news this morning: there’s a Death notice in yesterday’s West Australian for Len Anthonisz (above).

It’s a bit of a shock. Len worked at TVW7 for many years on a contract basis and we got to know each other well. He was a charming, gregarious bloke, full of interesting stories and was an encyclopaedia of TV engineering knowledge. We used to yarn for, ahem, far too long, out in the satellite earth station, often about the beginnings of digital video and digital editing. This was the 1990s, after all. The PC was only 10 years old at that stage. We thought paying $4,000 for a 486 was a good deal.

He was a do anything, go-getter, can-do sort of bloke. At one stage around the mid 1990s he negotiated a deal to buy three or four surplus Bosch BCN VTRs from TVW to on-sell to a TV station in Vladivostok, Russia! He arranged the shipment and went up there to install them. He got me to check them over and write a condition report on them before buying them. It wasn’t hard: I’d looked after them for many years and they were in pretty good reliable condition. He was talking of taking me up there with him to help at one stage, but that didn’t happen. I wasn’t sorry about that. Vladivostok didn’t sound like a holiday destination to me, but he went.

After the work at 7 dried up, he moved into mobile phone equipment installs, including a major country wide installation for Fiji, I think. He also worked in Jakarta for a few years, and lived in Bali for a couple of years, doing mobile phone work. This was major infrastructure, not just the small stuff. He had the ability to pick things up very quickly and was in managerial roles.

He also worked in Saudi Arabia and Dubai, same deal. Lately he’d been working for mining companies in the north west of WA (Karratha, Port Hedland) setting up their comms and data links. Big stuff.

He was a workaholic, I’m afraid, with not much time for play. I know he was diabetic but I don’t know what caused his death. He was a fair bit younger than me, perhaps 62 or 63. Unfortunately I hadn’t heard from him in the past four years or so. Very busy man. I’m sad about that.

RIP Len, you old bugger.