Stewart must have been reading his colleagues' minds. This morning, he leaves his rented home in Kuala Lumpur for a few days' rest in Singapore and then to retirement in Sydney, where he will work on books - and hopefully that first volume of his autobiography.

He's already got four internationally published works of fiction under his belt - one of them, Peking Payoff, a best-seller in Hong Kong in the mid-1970s - so he knows the form. But one suspects his life story in words might be a huge undertaking. Stewart is typically modest about it all, preferring to think of himself as being in the right place at the right time rather than being able to predict the future.

He was born in Whangarei, New Zealand, but his family moved to Auckland, where he went to Auckland Grammar School. He took a diploma in journalism at Auckland University and joined The New Zealand Herald in 1946. He later reported for The Sydney Morning Herald in Sydney and Canberra and then worked for The Herald in Melbourne.

From there, he was recruited through the Australian Associated Press-Reuters system and, in 1953, was sent to cover the Korean War.

It was while he reported on the prisoner swaps in the Demilitarised Zone that he met infamous Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett at Panmunjom. Burchett had witnessed the United States' dropping of a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima and had vowed from then on to cover stories from 'the other side'.

Details of Stewart's encounter appeared in The Herald and Burchett sued the paper, claiming the incident never occurred. The claim was eventually dropped and Stewart never again met Burchett, who later wrote from the Viet Cong side.

Stewart was sent from Tokyo to Hong Kong in September 1954 and, in the following year, was posted to Indonesia to open the first regular Reuters bureau. There he covered Indonesia's first democratic elections and the resulting euphoria of President Sukarno's tenure. He had a memorable encounter with the leader in 1957. 'I and another correspondent were picked up by military police and put under house arrest,' Stewart says. 'Young and brash, I stormed to the palace one day and yelled at Sukarno's senior aides and came back a few hours later and said there was no need for interrogation.'

A few weeks later, Stewart was invited on a trip to Borneo with the president. 'Sukarno greeted me at the plane and said he'd heard I'd been in a little trouble and he hoped it would never happen again,' he recalls. 'I was never sure whether he meant the arrest or if he had something to do with the stories I was writing.'

A decade later, he reported Sukarno's downfall in a coup led by strongman Suharto. But he thinks Sukarno did an incredible job in bringing together such a diverse nation.

Stewart was also in East Timor just before Indonesia invaded in 1975. In one of his last major stories for The New York Times, he flew into Dili with independence leader Jose Ramos-Horta and met Fretelin leaders.

'Indonesians at that stage were making incursions across the border,' he says. 'I was sure I wasn't going to stay too long as I knew the Indonesian army didn't want witnesses to whatever it was going to do.'

He left for Jakarta, but heard shortly afterwards that five journalists had been killed.

'They stumbled into an Indonesian army group,' he says. 'I heard they had been executed, but the Indonesians said they'd stumbled into crossfire, which seemed unlikely.'

Stewart returned to Hong Kong from Indonesia in November 1957, where he married Truus The Tiang Nio, an Indonesian Chinese from Surabaya. He returned to Indonesia to freelance and then back to Hong Kong. In 1960, he joined The New York Times, began China-watching and travelled through the region several months a year, writing year-end economic reports.

Stewart's wife made it clear that with two sons, Ian and Andrew, he was not going to cover the fighting in Vietnam. He lost a number of close friends in the war, however, many of whom he had met at the Foreign Correspondents' Club, of which he served terms as president in 1963-64 and 1971-72. 'I never offered myself,' he says. 'I had no desire to. It was a dreadful war because there was no line.'

It was during this time that Stewart made his second newsworthy trip to the border with China, which was now immersed in the Cultural Revolution. He was accompanying British Gurkha soldiers to secure the border after an attack on a police post by Red Guard militia.

'It was paddy fields all up to the border,' he says. 'The Government would take us to a hill to look out over into China and you could see the occasional military post. It was very difficult to get in. I had a permanent application and I didn't get in until 1972 in the wake of [US president Richard] Nixon.'

The Cultural Revolution as experienced in Hong Kong made for frightening times in the mid-1960s. 'The analysts were saying, 'No, China is not going to take over Hong Kong', but you were also getting signs of an alternate idea from the pro-Peking people in Hong Kong and also from the Red Guards across the border,' he says. 'There were bombs in the streets and you were worried about things like sending your kids to school.'

Stewart believes the future of Hong Kong is firmly in the hands of China. 'If China becomes more liberal, then Hong Kong can go on quite happily,' he says. 'But then the problem with that is there will be more economic development in places like Shanghai, and Hong Kong's importance will fade.'

Those Hong Kong and China experiences prompted Peking Payoff, about the relationship between Hong Kong and China, as seen through the eyes of taipans and officialdom. The taipans got together and ensured that China was getting even more money out of Hong Kong than it was already through Hong Kong becoming a money-making operation. Stewart had China's then-premier, Zhou Enlai, agreeing that China would leave Hong Kong alone - precursing by more than a decade Deng Xiaoping's 'one country, two systems' model.

Stewart's other fiction was not so prophetic. He calls an equally popular book, The Seizing Of Singapore an 'adventure story' based around a gang taking over the island nation. His other novels were Deadline In Jakarta and An H-bomb For Alice, based around the US military installation at Pine Gap in Australia's Northern Territory.

In 1974, Stewart and his family moved to Sydney, where he became The New York Times' South Pacific correspondent. Through the 1980s, he was involved in publishing ventures, his wife started an antiques business near their home in Davidson and she became renowned for her knowledge of Chinese arts.

But what seemed like a happy retirement ended tragically in 1987, when Truus was killed by a car as she was crossing the street near the shop and Stewart, then immersed in a book called Reunion about Indonesia and East Timor, had his world blown away. He finished the book - he calls it his therapy to cope with the tragedy - and published it himself.

In 1991, at 62, he embarked on what he calls his 'second coming' - a return to Southeast Asia and daily journalism. He moved to Singapore, where he worked for the Post, The Australian and London's Daily Telegraph.

He immersed himself in Singapore life until 1995, when the government withdrew his work permit to write for the Post, and he moved to Kuala Lumpur.

Robert Keatley, who retired as the Post's editor a fortnight ago, met Stewart in the mid-1960s and is effusive about his attributes, reliability and respectability among journalists. 'Ian goes back to an era when Asia was full of uncertainty,' he says. 'Nowadays the story is economic and much more predictable.'

The Post's Washington correspondent, Greg Torode - a fellow New Zealander - praises his dealings with people and ability to get a story.

'I am always struck by his gentle, unassuming nature and I'm sure this must have been an asset to his work in a prickly region,' he says.

Torode recalls covering with Stewart a quiet meeting of the Association of South-east Asian Nations in Kuala Lumpur.

At one press conference things suddenly brightened, however. Leaders such as Malaysia's Mahathir Mohamad and China's then-premier Qian Qichen used the unexpected absence of US secretary of state Madeleine Albright to take a swipe at Washington's policies. The regional implications were wide and it was a major story. Torode noted his counterpart writing shorthand furiously - far quicker than anyone else in the room. Stewart leaned over and said: 'This one's mine!'

Stewart already has his future planned. He has found a publisher, Allen and Unwin in Australia, for a book on Malaysia, his first published non-fiction work. Stewart is undecided about Malay-sia's future, but can readily pinpoint the problems ahead for its prime minister. 'Mahathir is so focused on the Malays and them not doing what he wants them to - such as working hard - that he's annoyed his devotees of the coalition's dominant partner, the United Malays National Organisation, and is pushing them over to the opposition Parti Islam se-Malaysia,' he says. 'He's very one-eyed on all these questions and it's a problem for Malaysia and his successor.'

You sense he's already written the book in his head - but then that's Stewart, the last of a breed of journalist in Asia that has long gone.

But it's not the end of his name in print. There's certainly analysis and comment on the region he has called home for so long.

The end of an era, yes, but the heralding of Stewart's next coming.