From the Managing Editor

By Henry Muller

This week TIME AUSTRALIA, the South Pacific edition we established with a Melbourne-based editorial staff in 1986, comes under the stewardship of a new editor, Michael Gawenda. Michael has been on a working visit to New York City for the past three weeks, helping edit articles for our other international editions and discussing South Pacific coverage plans with me and with Karsten Prager, the managing editor of TIME International. "Specifically, we want to widen coverage of the region by devoting more space to New Zealand and the emerging island nations in our area," Michael explains. "That will also allow us to place news about Australia in a more international context, which is one of TIME's great strengths."

During the past five years, TIME AUSTRALIA has gone from strength to strength, collecting a swag (as they say Down Under) of national journalism awards and increasing its circulation to 105,000. Michael, 44, is well equipped to continue this progress. A 1968 graduate in economics and politics from Melbourne's Monash University, he had a distinguished newspaper career in Australia and London before he joined TIME as a senior writer in February 1988. Eight months later, he won the Walkley Award, Australia's most prestigious journalism prize, with his first TIME cover story, an analysis of the debate over proposed Nazi war crimes trials in Australia. He became assistant editor of the edition in November 1989, while continuing to write articles and an occasional column called "Reflections."

Michael takes over from Jeff Penberthy, TIME AUSTRALIA's founding editor, who is stepping back at his own request to become Gawenda's principal deputy. Although Jeff will remain closely involved with TIME AUSTRALIA, helping conceive and edit stories, he intends to devote more time to a young family; his third and fourth children were born during his years at the editor's helm. Eventually, as Jeff told me a few months ago, the clasping and yelling at his knee every morning seemed to be drowning out all the other squeals for attention. "Michael has produced much of the edition's best work himself and shown the capacity to get the best out of others," Jeff says. "He will care brilliantly for an edition that I regard as another of my babies."

We are fortunate to have journalists of the quality of Jeff -- and now Michael -- in charge of our South Pacific edition.