THROUGH HER EYES

Reporting from war zones and places of trouble across the world consumes our multi media stage. Until recently, however, women were at the back of the queue in the ranks of those who sent back news of global disasters. Not anymore. Today women reporters go anywhere and they have changed the nature of reporting and how viewers see their world. Melissa Roberts is co-editor co-editor of The Beijing Bureau & co-editor of and contributor to Through Her Eyes – Australia’s Women Correspondents From Hiroshima to Ukraine. Trevor Watson is an award winning journalist & co-author of Through Her Eyes – Australia’s Women Correspondents From Hiroshima to Ukraine.  Melissa Roberts and Trevor Watson addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 5 October 2022 to discuss their work and the ways women have radically altered human perception of disasters.

THROUGH HER EYES

TREVOR WATSON

Good evening.

I would like to thank Gerard Henderson for inviting us here to speak to you tonight about our latest book, Through Her Eyes: Australia’s Women Correspondents from Hiroshima to Ukraine.

I got to know Gerard in the mid 1980s when I was with the ABC’s Radio Current Affairs Department which produced those iconic news programs AM, PM and The World Today. In those days, Gerard was our “go to” person on just about anything political. This was largely because he had a valid opinion on most things and was happy to share his opinion at any time of the day or night. And, there was one night in particular, that I will never forget.

I was producing PM and I had Gerard in our Sydney studio to comment on the subject of the day. Whatever that may have been. To liven it up a bit, I also had in our London studio so called journalist, John Pilger to put a counter position to that held by Gerard. That’s what the ABC calls balance.

Of course, the discussion quickly descended into an uncontrolled shouting match between protagonists separated by 17,000 kilometres. As far as I was concerned, this was great radio and I let the fight continue until the two were exhausted. We all then moved on to another story, another day. The debate was forgotten until I received a long handwritten letter from London. It was from Pilger, and it was a deeply felt apology for his outrageous behaviour during the debate with Gerard. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little shocked by Pilger’s rare apology. I still have the document stored in a very safe place.

In 2020, the ABC’s Bill Birtles and the Financial Review’s Michael Smith……the last two Australian journalists based in China for Australian media organisations……left the country under a great deal of duress. Their departure from China ended 50 years of continuous coverage of the Middle Kingdom by Australians for Australians and was, therefore, was a significant milestone in the deterioration in relations between Canberra and Beijing.

For this reason, Melissa and I decided to produce The Beijing Bureau: 25 Australian Correspondents Reporting China’s Rise. The book was a series of essays by former China Correspondents who reflected on life in Beijing and the momentous stories they had covered.

Having watched young Chinese protesters crushed to death under tanks tracks, the chapters written by Melissa and myself focussed on the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. Rarely has a foreign relations concern so occupied the thoughts of those in government, those who sit in the nation’s boardrooms and of ordinary Australian than China. And The Beijing Bureau was a success. We did the bookshop launches, the radio and television interviews and the writers’ festivals. The Australian Embassy in Beijing even had a launch event with copies of the book shipped to China under the cover of the diplomatic bag.

Melissa and I rather like all of this and wanted to do another book. The problem was that we had already covered the biggest story in the world…….China. The answer was a book covering a string of the momentous stories from Hiroshima to Ukraine as seen “through her eyes”. It was Melissa’s idea and it was an outstanding one.

One of my favourite places in the world is the Foreign Correspondents’ Club in Hong Kong. For people like me who are in love with the romance, the adventure, and the comradery of international journalism, the FCC is a place to swap old war stories and rub shoulders with one’s heroes. One of those heroes was a woman named Claire Hollingworth who passed away in 2017 at the age of 105. This might be a big call but – in my view – Hollingworth was responsible for the scoop of the twentieth century.

In 1939, while working as a young reporter for the London Daily Telegraph, she made her own way to Poland. From there, she crossed the German border where she saw Hitler’s forces massing on the frontier. The frontpage splash in The Daily Telegraph the next day read, “A thousand Tanks Massed on Polish Frontier; 10 Divisions Reported Ready For Swift Stroke; From Our Own Correspondent.”

The story was remarkable for two reasons. Firstly, as I mentioned, it broke the news of World War II; secondly, it was filed by a woman.

In the best of all possible worlds, the gender of the journalists shouldn’t have mattered. But, the reality is that until very recently, gender determined all in journalism, particularly opportunity. While it is now common to see women closely questioning world leaders, interviewing disaster victims or lacing up combat boots, that hasn’t long been the case and change hasn’t come easily.

To paraphrase British rabbi Lionel Blue, “Journalists are just like everyone else, only more so, and newsrooms have traditionally been just like many other male-dominated workplaces only more so.” They have been blokey places of clattering typewriters, cigarette smoke, booze and large amounts of adrenaline. The nature of the work attracted big egos, larger than life characters, adventurers and voyeurs.

When I was a young cadet, the few women that were in the news industry were exposed to highly sexualised humour and occasionally to verbal abuse laced with threats of gender specific punishment for minor misdemeanour. Working at the ABC in the 1970s, I heard a lot of abuse directed at young women and young men. Some of the abuse I heard directed at young women I am not prepared to repeat here.

In the early 1980s, I joined the ABC’s parliamentary bureau in Canberra. In those days, the commercial radio networks took news seriously and stations 2UE, 2SM and 2GB all had fulltime Canberra correspondents. In 1980 those correspondents all happened to be young women and they were nicknamed “microphone stands with tits” by a highly respected member of the gallery. You would be shocked to know who it was.

You can imagine that in this blokey environment, the chances of a woman taking up a prestigious and highly sort after foreign posting were very remote. Melissa mentioned Diane Willman who was laughed at by ABC management when she raised the prospect of an overseas posting. She also mentioned trailblazer Margaret Jones who, in 1965, famously defied the rules and crash the men only National Press Club in Washington.

Again, as Melissa said, Jones later became the first Australian journalist to be posted to Beijing following the Whitlam Government’s recognition of the People’s Republic of China. Jones went to her grave believing that Stephen Claypole, the Herald’s Foreign Editor, sent her to China to improve the paper’s gender credentials. Claypole attempted to assure me over lunch very recently that this wasn’t the case. He claimed, that he believed she was simply the best person for the job. I still have my doubts.

The prospects for women in the news industry have now changed, and that change is thanks to Hollingworth, Willman, Jones and others who have challenged the gender-based status quo with single-minded determination and courage. Having said all of that, I wish to assure you that Through Her Eyes does not dwell on the struggle for gender equality in the news media.

Through Her Eyes is a unique collection of eyewitness accounts of the events and issues that have shaped the world over the past 80 years. And for the first time, Australia’s most acclaimed women correspondents, many of them still in the field, tell their own personal stories behind the big stories.

Unfortunately, life for these journalists still on the ground, is getting tougher by the day. New technology has made it possible to file instantly at any time and from anywhere on the planet, and this has imposed enormous pressure. Gone are the days when a reporter could spend a week assessing an issue before filing a well-informed piece.

This may surprise you, but Melissa and I are old enough to have covered not the last war in Afghanistan but the war before that against invading Soviet forces. In those days, we spent a lot of time in the mountainous desert region along the Afghan – Pakistan frontier. Before leaving the city of Peshawar we were required to sign a document absolving the Pakistan government of any responsibility for our fate. We would then be assigned a detachment of frontier militia or Khyber Rifles for our protection.

The region was ruled by opium producing warlords and was alive with Mujahideen fighters who moved freely across the frontier between the two countries just as we did. Many of these mujahideen fighters were to later join the Taliban and wage war against the West, but in the early 1980s they needed our support and were more than happy to accommodation Western news crews.

We produced our stories on film, which we would carry back to Peshawar for shipment to Sydney via Karachi, Colombo and Singapore. Once in Sydney, the film would be processed, edited and finally broadcast up to two weeks after it was shot somewhere in the Hindu Kush Mountain range.

Today, reporters land and glean what they can in the time it takes to setup a satellite dish or tap into the local internet service and go live to air. Those work for the ABC often have reporting responsibilities to multiple TV and radio news and current affairs programs. Today, all media outlets also run 24-hour online services to feed.

Of course, there were countless times when reporters of my generation faced huge demands – Tiananmen Square, the Kobe earthquake, the collapse of the Marcos Regime in the Philippines, the 1987 Fiji coup and so on. In my view, new technology, filing demands and pressure to beat the competition, including so called citizen journalists of the internet, all threaten quality.

A correspondent’s job is to paint a picture for a remote audience, to provide background, context, perspective, and analysis that makes sense of newsworthy events and issues. Correspondents must use their mastery of the language and the tools available to them to ensure that audiences see what they sees, feels what they feels and are moved the way that they are moved. Sadly, the demand for instantaneous and continues coverage impacts on the understanding, the flare, the imagination, and the creativity needed to bring that picture to life.

Another concern is the shrinking number of correspondents posted abroad. Australian news organisations despatch correspondents overseas in the expectation that they will see the world through Australian eyes.

If Australia is to operate effectively, it is essential that our government, our institutions, our corporate sector, and our people’s understanding of the world is shaped by journalists who view the world through an Australian prism.

And yet, the number of ABC bureaus, in particular, that have closed in recent years is striking – Johannesburg, Moscow, Brussels, New York, Singapore, Hong Kong, Auckland and Hanoi have closed. The ABC blames government spending cuts. I say, that with a budget of over a billion dollars a year, it’s more a matter of priorities. By the way, it might interest you to know that throughout COVID, the ABC’s Jakarta correspondent operated out of Melbourne while the ABC’s China correspondent was based in Sydney. The public was left to believe, however, that these journalists were in the field and that their reports carried the credibility of those filed by a reporter on the ground. The ABC’s Bill Birtles, unwelcome in Beijing, is now attempting to cover China from Taipei. Unfortunately, in my view, it’s not enough to cover China or anywhere else from afar.

As for Ukraine, the ABC seems to have almost entirely abrogated its responsibility to the big guys at the BBC and CNN. Despite the barriers erected by management priorities, financial difficulties, security threats and, of course, gender, Australia has and continues to produce world class journalists.

Many of them are women and many of them tell their story in Through Her Eyes: Australia’s Women Correspondents from Hiroshima to Ukraine.