Places of danger and world-changing events: Lex Bartlem was hands-on in the middle of many during his career as a diplomat.
In 2000, amid war between Eritrea and Ethiopia, he joined an urgent charter flight to Asmara to collect stranded Australians. He was sent to Bali immediately after the bombings, in 2003 receiving an OAM for his assistance to victims and their families. That same year found Lex Bartlem in Baghdad, tasked with establishing an Australian Representative Office when Saddam Hussein was on the run. In Beirut, early in the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, he was part of a team managing the evacuation of Australian citizens.
In 2010, Lex Bartlem OAM was appointed Ambassador to Lebanon, a country close to his heart, serving in that formidable role until he retired in 2014.
'The work our consular service does overseas is largely unknown to most people', Lex Bartlem writes. A Diplomatic Odyssey gives us rare insight into DFAT's important work, while telling the sometimes deeply personal story of a high-achieving diplomat whose extraordinary professional journey was shaped as much by resilience and adaptability as by formal training.
Praise for A Diplomatic Odyssey
'Lex Bartlem is exactly the kind of departmental officer Foreign Ministers value most highly - enormously administratively competent, unflappable and sharply practically focused in crises, and very human in his reactions and relationships.' - Gareth Evans, Australian Foreign Minister 1988-1996
'The insights that Lex Bartlem, an outstanding diplomat of 35 years, can provide into his career at the highest level of Australian diplomacy, will shine a light on this often underappreciated vocation.' - Julie Bishop, Australian Foreign Minister 2013-2018
'The story Lex Bartlem tells will be read with interest not only by former colleagues, but by anyone with an interest in an unvarnished account of the variety and vagaries of consular and diplomatic life and in the world around us.' - The Honourable Frances Adamson AC, Secretary Foreign Affairs and Trade 2016-2021, and 36th Governor of South Australia
