The Dreadful Burden

The Port Arthur massacre was Australia's worst mass murder, with 35 people killed. I had been covering it all week and, I thought, coping well. But as I stood at that tree I suddenly found myself weeping.

Reporting the Port Arthur Massacre

The first Saturday morning of May 1996, I found myself standing at the base of a burly gum tree at Port Arthur, Tasmania. It was hung with bright, sad mementoes: flowers and poems, a wet, white teddy bear and a child's perfect drawing of an angel in a green checked dress and golden wings.

Round and round this impressive, impassive eucalypt, six days before, Martin Bryant had stalked six-year-old Alannah Mikac before shooting her dead.

Fifteen or 20 feet away was a line of bouquets marking the spot where he'd already murdered her mother Nanette and her three-year-old sister. Down the hill, past the unconsecrated convict church, was the Broad Arrow Cafe, its windows whitewashed to hide the interior where he'd systematically gunned down more than two dozen other innocents.

The Port Arthur massacre was Australia's worst mass murder, with 35 people killed. I had been covering it all week and, I thought, coping well. But as I stood at that tree I suddenly found myself weeping.

The reason, I have since told myself, is that the gum, for all its stature and magnificence, could not protect that little girl. Maybe it was a symbol of our helplessness in the face of such events. Perhaps that single cold murder among so many brought a sense of human scale I could relate to.

But I remember something else from that morning that may provide another answer. Outside the cafe, Salvation Army Major Don Woodland had stationed himself for another long day of consolation. Friends and relatives of the dead would walk up and he’d wrap them in a hug and they would salt his shoulders with their tears. Later it occurred to me that he was soaking into himself just a little of their misery and grief. That was his quietly heroic mission — but also, I suspect, his dreadful burden.

I once spoke to an ambulance paramedic who told me that each terrible thing he saw in his job was stored at the back of his head like a snapshot. ''The trouble is," he said, ''my photo album is overflowing." Something similar can happen to those of us who cover the Port Arthurs, Dunblanes or Virginia Techs, or who see too much death and injury and intrude on too much sorrow.

Those who are covering the terrible events in Virginia have a great responsibility, not only to their readers or viewers and to the community they are reporting on, but to themselves and their colleagues. They will find themselves drained and distressed. Even the most seasoned and professional journalists can be affected and possibly hurt by exposure to such tragedy. Despite the necessary and appropriate wall professional wall we erect between ourselves and the victims and survivors we report on and the horrors we witness, we are just as human as them and can be just as damaged.

In Tasmania in 1996, there quickly grew a distaste for and hostility toward the media, fueled in part by a less-than-ethical minority but also by the immensity of the shock and grief. The community on the Tasman Peninsula is still not completely healed, nor will ever really know that over-worked word closure. So the community at Virginia Tech needs to be treated with scrupulous respect, despite the demands of deadline and competition.

At Port Arthur, Major Woodland told me none of the people who came to him for comfort had cursed God, but many questioned the mystery of Him, that he can allow evil like this to happen. Yet even in the depth of that mystery it is important to remember that what we do is important and worthwhile. The journalism of trauma matters, and we have a responsibility to tell these stories and to tell them well.

But we need to be careful. And caring.