Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma

Three veteran news professionals from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation are missing and presumed dead in a helicopter crash in the South Australia desert. Videographer and photographer John Bean, reporter Paul Lockyer and pilot Gary Ticehurst were on assignment in a region some 800 kilometers north of Adelaide on the evening of August 18 when their copter went down.

Bean — a friend of Dart Centre Asia Pacific and participant in a 2010 DCAP journalists' seminar — shot award-winning video for a wide range of ABC programs, ranging from hard news to gardening, over a 20-year career. Lockyer was one of the ABC’s most distinguished correspondents, reporting international and domestic stories ranging from Singapore to last year’s Queensland floods. Ticehurst was the ABC’s chief pilot, flying news crews for 25 years.

The three were returning to Australia’s Lake Eyre region, where they had reported last year on the transformation of a desert inundated with floodwater from Queensland. "I was completely amazed at what we found,” Bean wrote afterward. “Where was the red, the dust, the caked barren earth, the sand? Instead there was water everywhere, and green, and blue, and yes, there was red.”

In a note to ABC staff, Managing Director Mark Scott called the three “passionate practitioners of their craft of journalism: committed to getting out to find and the tell great Australian stories to our audiences here and around the world.”