Mary Kostakidis Biography | Mary Kostakidis | Who is Mary Kostakidis?
Mary Kostakidis (born 1954) is an Australian television presenter. She is the former weeknight SBS World News Australia presenter and was the face of SBS across two decades.
Kostakidis was a member of the management team that set up and developed SBS Television in 1980 and went on to present its flagship World News for 20 years, resigning in 2007. Her board and committee appointments for nearly 3 decades at SBS and subsequently reflect a strong commitment to social justice and the arts.
She has served as a member of the Fred Hollows Foundation Board, the Sydney Theatre Board, the National Library of Australia Council, the ResMed Foundation Board, and is a former Chair of the Sydney Peace Foundation. She is currently on the Advisory Panel of the Sydney Peace Foundation, USYD, the Freilich Foundation, ANU, and The Privacy Foundation.
The Sydney Peace Foundation is a University of Sydney Foundation and its major Partner in Peace is the City of Sydney. Annually it awards Australia’s only international prize for peace, the Sydney Peace Prize.
Past recipients include Muhammad Yunus, Xanana Gusmão, Mary Robinson, Hanan Ashrawi, Arundhati Roy, Hans Blix, Irene Khan, Patrick Dodson, and Noam Chomsky, and in 2011 its third-ever Gold Medal for ‘exceptional courage in pursuit of human rights’ was awarded to her fellow Australian journalist Julian Assange.
In 2009, Kostakidis served on the National Human Rights Consultation Committee chaired by Frank Brennan. The Committee inquired into the adequacy of the protection and promotion of human rights in Australia, holding consultations in metropolitan, rural and remote areas across the country, and receiving over 35,000 written submissions.
They recommended a raft of measures, the most contentious of which was a Human Rights Act. Human rights education was the measure that had the greatest support of those that took part in the consultation, but the overwhelming majority supported human rights legislation. The four-member Committee also included Mick Palmer and Tammy Williams.
From 1997-2003 she served on the Advertising Standards Board; in 1993 she was appointed by then Prime Minister Paul Keating to Republic Advisory Committee chaired by Malcolm Turnbull; in the early nineties she also served on the Council for the Order of Australia and in 1992 was a founding member of the James Joyce Foundation Board along with Ed Campion and Don Anderson. She has also been an active member of the Kazantzakis society. Read also about Mark Beretta
Kostakidis has served as an Ambassador for Beyond Blue and was also a member of the Drug and Alcohol Council, the Breast Cancer Council Advisory Committee and the Constitutional Centenary Foundation.
Mary Kostakidis Age | How old is Mary Kostakidis?
Mary Kostakidis is an Australian television presenter. She is the former weeknight SBS World News Australia presenter and was the face of SBS across two decades. She was born in 1954 (age 65 years old as of 2019), Thessaloniki, Greece
Early life
She was born in Thessaloniki, Greece and migrated to Australia with her family two years later. Kostakidis attended Fort Street Girls’ High School, and the University of Sydney, where she studied Modern Greek, Philosophy, French, German and Italian.
She was also a founding member and first President of the University’s Greek Society. She went on to complete a Diploma of Education. Kostakidis was awarded a post-graduate scholarship to study at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece.
Before joining SBS, Kostakidis worked as a tutor at the University of Sydney, as a research officer for the Departments of Health and Youth and Community Services in New South Wales and as a court interpreter and a translations editor. She once worked for ABC Radio news.
During her assignment as an interpreter on the so-called Greek Conspiracy Case in the late 1970s, she organized a conversion course for Greek interpreters at the NSW Ethnic Affairs Commission in conjunction with Sydney University
Modern Greek lecturer Dr. Alfred Vincent, to facilitate conversion from the formal Katharevousa to demotic or vernacular Greek so that the defendants in the case would be able to understand the language being used. Some years later, Greece also adopted the vernacular as the language of all official documents.
Mary Kostakidis Husband, Married | Who is Mary Kostakidis Married to?
Mary Kostakidis is not afraid of change. In fact, she embraces it. Maybe that’s a side effect of reading the news and living in the present rather than dwelling in the past, but it’s an attitude reflected in the home she shares with her cardiologist husband Ian Wilcox.
When they married 18 months ago, both saw it as an opportunity to let go of the possessions each associated with previous, separate lives. Kostakidis jettisoned without a hint of sentimentality the antiques she had collected in her Double Bay home, embarking on a very different aesthetic of sleek, ocean-liner style minimalism at their Mirvac-designed wharf apartment at Walsh Bay.
“I’ve done this kind of thing before. When I got divorced in 1991, I changed the palette I lived with completely,” she says, laughing at the extreme contrast with her current surroundings that leans towards the dark end of the neutrals tones of grey, mushroom, and black. “But I still love color, only now it’s from books and flowers.”
Standing on her expansive veranda, shielded from the sun by metallic shutters that lift to reveal a glorious view, she points out the ceaseless traffic of ferries and tugs (“like mutant insects”) that made her so keen to live here. “I love the fact that this is a working harbor.
I’m concerned by former premier Bob Carr’s plans which would change all that, reducing the harbor’s authenticity and making it into something much more twee.”
It’s a comment that proves that behind the professional facade of dispassionate objectivity Kostakidis must wear as SBS’s newsreader, is a woman of strong opinions.
Her only complaint about the new residential area at Walsh Bay was that there was nowhere to do grocery shopping but she is relieved to know a supermarket is opening soon. But the biggest bonus of living in the area is “the feeling of being part of an arts precinct, things like hearing the Philharmonia Choir rehearsing as you walk past”.
Kostakidis grew up in Dulwich Hill in the ’50s. She recalls when her family arrived from Greece they had few material possessions. “The sense of home came from outside in the backyard where the barbecue was, together with the chooks and the vegetable patch, the fruit trees and the eel pond.
And that was where the dancing happened.” Inspired by that memory, Kostakidis and her husband spend a lot of time on their deck. “We read the papers out here and mostly eat here, too, especially with friends,” she says.
On the veranda, furniture including a set of Philippe Starck Ghost chairs, emphasizes transparency so that nothing interferes with the view. On summer evenings, sliding doors from the living room create a seamless transition from inside to outside.
Kostakidis is something of a homebody and has created an environment she regards as a sanctuary, spending every spare moment here, preferably reading. “We try and quarantine quiet time,” she says.
All the furniture in the living room has been carefully considered to create an atmosphere of serenity and simplicity. “I am not into clutter,” Kostakidis says. “I’m pretty neat.” The lines of each piece are clean and spare with an almost masculine edge, except for one blond chair that curls in a sensuous curve like a ribbon unfurled in mid-air.
Kostakidis and her husband have become especially keen on the work of Australian Thomas Jacobsen. They are regular gallery-goers and try to get to events like Design Week if they can.
A cherished object hangs on the wall that separates the kitchen from the sitting room. It is a still life of a pumpkin, drawn by her daughter Lara when she was just twelve years old. Although Lara has not gone on to pursue an artistic career, it reveals a bold sense of space and a gestural hand.
Another favorite possession is hidden from view in one of the apartment’s three bedrooms which Kostakidis uses as a small study filled with the couple’s library. It’s a small French desk, pockmarked with scratches and woodworm. “I just could not bear to part with it when I got rid of everything else,” she says.
Mary Kostakidis SBS
Kostakidis joined SBS as part of the original management team in September 1980 and worked to set up the Subtitling Unit. She became Director of Programme Preparation where she was involved in developing policies of censorship and classification.
After being the face of SBS news for many years, in her final year, she only co-hosted the main SBS World News at 6.30 pm weekdays with Stan Grant. She also hosted an interview program, The Talk Show.
Walk-out and legal action
On 21 August 2007, it was reported that Kostakidis had stormed out of the newsroom a week and a half earlier, furious at changes to the news bulletin. Although SBS said she was ill and taking leave, it was reported she had concluded her role as co-host due to differences in opinion over the increasingly commercial direction SBS was taking since the 2003 arrival of former New Zealand TV boss Shaun Brown.
On 5 October 2007 Kostakidis lodged a statement of claim in the Federal Court of Australia, alleging a breach of contract and contravention of the Trade Practices Act 1975 on the part of SBS, citing alleged bullying by fellow presenter Stan Grant.
She secured the services of a prominent Melbourne lawyer, Julian Burnside, and was expected to argue that her contract stated she would be the primary presenter of the program, and that she would be able to exercise some editorial control.
The matter was settled out of court. On 23 November 2007, SBS and Kostakidis were reported to have reached an “amicable settlement”. The financial details of the settlement were not disclosed.
Mary Kostakidis Photo
Personal life
Kostakidis acted in a children’s television series called Five Times Dizzy in 1986 with Rebekah Elmaloglou. She has also appeared in the movies Jindabyne and Look Both Ways as a newsreader.
Kostakidis has a long-standing interest in social justice and continues to engage in public discourse, delivering lectures, chairing public forums and contributing editorial opinion articles in the mainstream press and independent online media.
Her second husband is Ian Wilcox, a cardiologist. They married in Venice.
Mary Kostakidis Net Worth
Mary Kostakidis (born 1954) is an Australian television presenter. She is the former weeknight SBS World News Australia presenter and was the face of SBS across two decades. Kostakidis was a member of the management team that set up and developed SBS Television in 1980 and went on to present its flagship World News for 20 years, resigning in 2007.
Her board and committee appointments for nearly 3 decades at SBS and subsequently reflect a strong commitment to social justice and the arts. Her net worth is unknown but stays ready for the update soon