Ray Martin

Raymond George Martin AM (né Grace, 20 December 1944) is an Australian television journalist and entertainment personality. Having won the Gold Logie five times, he is the most awarded star of Australian television, along with Graham Kennedy (although Kennedy won the ‘Star of the Year Award’, the forerunner of the Gold Logie in 1959). He is best known for his various on-air roles on Channel Nine from 1978, particularly his stint on A Current Affair and his long tenure as host of the variety/talk show The Midday Show, after original host Mike Walsh left as host of a similar midday format with The Mike Walsh Show. In 2011, he returned to the current affairs show 60 Minutes, in which he had been an original presenter, albeit only in a part-time capacity. Early life and education He was born Raymond George Grace into an Irish-Australian Catholic family in Richmond, New South Wales, Australia. He was the youngest of four children and their only son. His mother changed the family surname to Martin to prevent her abusive, alcoholic husband from finding her and their children after they fled from him in c. 1955. She and the children moved many times, settling in Adelaide and in Tasmania. In the early 1990s, he found out that his great-great-grandmother was an Indigenous Australian woman from the Kamilaroi nation, near Gunnedah. He attended Launceston College and the University of Sydney, where he studied engineering on scholarship at university, but changed his mind and studied to become an English and history teacher. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1967.