Australasian Update, Autumn 2007

Important visitor

The US Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma’s research co-ordinator Dr Meg Spratt, top left, will visit Melbourne in mid-June where she will meet with a number of journalism educators.

Dr Spratt is former newspaper reporter and editor who also has more than 12 years’ experience teaching journalism and media studies to university students.

Her particular research interests include journalism history, race and gender, and political communication, with an emphasis on photojournalism.

Recently, Dr Spratt’s PhD dissertation examined the uses and interpretations of photojournalistic icons from the height of the American Civil Rights Movement.

Dr Spratt will then be attending the World Journalism Educators Congress being held in Singapore later in June with three Dart Australasia board members, director Cait McMahon, Professor Kerry Green and Jim Tully.

Trauma reporting award

The Australasian Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ASTSS) is offering a media award to recognise excellence in journalistic reporting of traumatic events for journalists who work in the State of Victoria.

The ASTSS provides a forum for extending the understanding of, prevention and treatment of major stress and trauma within the Australasian region. It is affiliated with the International Society for Traumatic Stress (ISTSS)

A prize of $1000 will be presented at the ASTSS 2007 Annual Conference in Ballarat in late September. Applications close July 31, 2007.

For further information, see ASTSS’s News Board where an application form can be downloaded.

Congratulations

GARY Tippet, centre, an Age journalist, Australasia's inaugural Ochberg Fellow – and a member of Dart Australasia's executive – was recently part of an online reporting team that won a Quill Award.

The Quill award for best online report was for 'Beaconsfield - from tragedy to triumph', the team's multimedia coverage of the Beaconsfield mine tragedy.

Judges wrote of the piece: "This was a concise and exemplary use of the medium on one of the biggest stories of the year - a multidimensional and beautifully crafted page which combined vision, commentary and graphics in a very satisfying package."

Worth a read

WHEN the 2004 tsunami crashed onto the coastlines of countries fronting the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day, one Australian journalist, an experienced foreign correspondent, was having a well-earned getaway with friends on a Thai beach, oblivious to the drama that would unfold around them.

What happened over the coming hours and days as she kicked into automatic reporter mode — and what that meant for her and those around her — is the riveting story contained in Kimina Lyall’s Out of the Blue ($29.95, ABC Books).

How she reacted when friends lost their lives and her partner was washed out to sea, how help eventually reach survivors, working amid death and destruction, how individuals and communities responded, the grief that slowly seeped into her being, and what it was like to be torn between the professional and the personal, Kimina tells it all with candour and the acknowledged clarity of hindsight.

The lessons she acknowledges she learned in the weeks and months after the tsunami — and those there for others to take on board — are borne of first-hand exposure to a natural disaster and its traumatic circumstances.

But they are expressed in the familiar, accessible language of a journalist telling it like it was from her point of view.

The surreal period that followed the initial waves makes fascinating reading for all working in the news media and should underscore how trauma can touch individuals differently.

For your diary

ABC TV’s Compass program is scheduled to air nationally ‘Bearing Witness’, an examination of the interface between journalism and trauma on Sunday, June 17 (check local TV guides for start times).

The program has been recently put together by the corporation’s Religion and Ethics Production Unit and is presented by senior ABC reporter and presenter — and 2005 Dart Ochberg Fellow — Philip Williams.

Program summary supplied by ABC TV:

"The burden of bearing witness is born by newsmen and women around the globe who put themselves on the front line of conflict and tragedy in the course of their work.

But what sustains them? How do they deal with trauma?

Almost three years after the Beslan massacre veteran ABC TV reporter Philip Williams is still dealing with the traumatic aftermath of covering this shocking siege.

Now he wants to meet other journalists “who’ve been through the same thing”.

He takes us on a moving personal journey into the ‘darkness in the soul’ of men and women whose job it is to report on our behalf events that most of us could not bear to experience.

He visits legendary Vietnam War photographer Tim Page who went everywhere, saw too much and coped by drowning himself in drugs and alcohol.

“I don’t think these were criminal acts. It was a method of survival,” he tells Philip. Some 40 years on Tim Page still carries it.

Philip is shaken: “I would hope for young journalists starting out we develop new means so they can ‘download’ and relieve the pressure of horrible images or the horrible stories or what ever it is that blocks up their emotions so it doesn’t become a dominant force 40 or 50 years later.”

Philip also meets Sally Sara who as the ABC’s Africa correspondent filmed horrific civil conflicts involving child soldiers; and, Kimina Lyall, a respected foreign correspondent who at her Island weekender in Thailand when the Boxing Day tsunami crashed into her world.

These distressing experiences have changed their lives.

Philip pleads for more understanding for all of his colleagues: “Why would a journalist going to cover a war or traumatic event be any less affected by that event than the soldiers or the emergency workers? Or perhaps even, to a degree, the victims themselves. We’re in there. We’re seeing it all. We’re recording it. We’re reliving it. We’re editing it. Of course we’re going to feel it!”