by Leigh Sales
Daniel and Zach clung to their branches for six hours, until the water receded enough for them to climb down to safety. Daniel told Amanda that if he’d not been able to hear Zach’s voice, he would have let himself slide into the water too, with the rest of the family.
Amanda also met Peter and Marie Van Straten, a retired couple who had watched from inside their highset Queenslander as roiling water flooded the main street of Grantham. Within seconds, geysers began spurting through the floorboards of their shaking house. A tree smashed through the bedroom wall and suddenly the house was dislodged from its moorings and began to float away. It crashed into a tree and the kitchen was ripped off. Peter and Marie struggled through the rapidly rising water, trying to get to the centre of the house as rooms crumbled around them. Two kilometres down the road, the house came to rest in a paddock, lodged against something. Now that it was no longer moving, it started filling up with water even faster.
Marie had a broken arm and Peter had no medication for his diabetes. Soon the water was up to Peter’s neck and over Marie’s head. He stood on one leg, pulling the other one up for Marie to sit on to get her head above the surface. As it grew dark, they began to lose hope. Peter was grey and hypothermic; Marie started to sob. Miraculously, after they’d said their goodbyes to each other, a helicopter flew over the area and they attracted its attention and were rescued.
Along with Amanda’s reporting for The Australian, she produced a Walkley Award-winning radio documentary called The Day That Changed Grantham and wrote a book called The Torrent, which went into even more detail. In the process of her investigation, she was niggled by a broader question not directly related to the flood or its causes: what makes people decide to talk to journalists at times of immense trauma? The thought was prompted by one particular survivor’s initial refusal to grant an interview.
‘He lost his mother, his mother-in-law and his baby daughter, and he almost lost his wife, his two other children, and he almost died, and he lost his house,’ Amanda tells me. ‘I thought, It’s not surprising that he’s not talking to me but what about these others? They are. Why are they doing this? If I was in that state, I’d be flat out getting breakfast or getting out of bed. But they’re fronting up for interviews and are willing to talk.’
Amanda was stunned to discover that there was very little research into why traumatised people speak to reporters and what that might teach us about the practice of journalism. In recent years, it has been acknowledged that journalists who cover traumatic events are susceptible to the same professional hazards, including post-traumatic stress disorder, as other first responders. There is a growing body of research and training for journalists on how to protect themselves from this, largely led by Columbia University’s excellent Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma. But at the victims’ end of the equation, Amanda realised, there was a gap in the research. She was still writing a proposal for a thesis and figured this was a solid topic for exploration. Alongside her investigation into the flood’s causes and its aftermath, she added one simple question for survivors: Why did you decide to speak to a reporter?
Any experienced journalist would be able to give an anecdotal answer to that question. The University of Melbourne’s report on Black Saturday, discussed earlier, touches on it, although it mostly focuses on the experience of being interviewed by a journalist and satisfaction or otherwise with the published work, not the reasons for talking in the first place. Amanda’s study – from her admittedly small sample of thirty-three – is unique, and interesting because it actually qualifies some of those reasons, identifying six main ones.
The most common was the hope that it might aid personal recovery. That was closely followed by the desire for the public to truly understand what had happened. Many of the victims felt that while media coverage of the disaster had been extensive, it had not captured just how devastating it was and how long-term the impact would be. The next two reasons were closely related: people wanted lessons to be learned from the tragedy, and they felt a sense of duty to ensure that responses to future disasters were improved. The fifth reason, perhaps an obvious one, was timing: the decision to talk was influenced by when the request for an interview was made and whether, at that moment, the person felt up to sharing their story. The final reason was possibly the most surprising, yet it was mentioned by more than one person – it was good to talk to somebody who would listen for free.
Daniel McGuire, the man whose wife and two children died in the rural fire truck, told Amanda, ‘It’s better talking to you than to a psychologist because I can talk to someone without paying them to listen to me.’ Another Lockyer Valley resident, Rod Alford, told her, ‘I find it more relaxing talking to you than the highly educated professionals. They tend to be more financially focused – they are watching their clock and say, “Time’s up – would you like to make another appointment?” And I think, You bastards – you’re caring and sharing for two hours, but only because you’re being paid.’
Of course, journalists are also paid to listen, just not by the victims. And journalists can sometimes profit from hearing the stories of survivors in a way that psychologists don’t. Amanda was talking and listening to the flood victims first and foremost to get a story, one for which she earned income and was given an award by her peers. She had something to gain from the interviews, but obviously she was also caring enough in the way she handled them for the interviewees to feel that they too had benefited.
Both the flood and bushfire studies asked survivors if anything about dealing with journalists had made their situation worse. People reported that they’d sometimes felt used when journalists appeared on the scene soon after the disaster, conducted an interview, left and were never heard from again. It was also hurtful if the journalist seemed rushed or eager to leave as soon as they had the pictures or story they were after. Survivors were upset if images of them appearing extremely distressed were published when permission hadn’t been sought, particularly if the footage was used repeatedly. The bushfire survivors were incensed if they intuited that a journalist was trying to ask questions to force an emotional response and make them cry. For the flood victims, it was very distressing when a report included inaccuracies, no matter how tiny.
‘The family of that person will cut that paper out and keep it forever. It will have my name at the top,’ Amanda says. ‘And if I’ve misspelled the name, if I have the day wrong, or the time wrong, or the colour of the car wrong – some, in a sense, inconsequential thing to the death – it doesn’t matter. It’s a big error in their eyes. And I don’t want anyone who keeps something like that, that is so important to them, to think, Yeah, well, they did die and that stupid journalist couldn’t even get the time right or the colour of the car right. It’s about care. Did she care?’
The Black Saturday researchers asked survivors to imagine they were sitting around with a few young journalists who had no experience in covering disasters. What advice would they give about how to treat victims? Their answers could be summed up in four words: humanity (don’t lose sight of the fact that you’re dealing with people, not characters in a story), empathy (try to understand what the person is going through and act accordingly), autonomy (allow the subject to lead the discussion), and respect (make allowances, give the person time and space, and above all, don’t be exploitative).
In Amanda’s thesis, she formulated guidelines too: be flexible with interview timing and location; empower interviewees to understand that they don’t have to answer every question they are asked; be scrupulously committed to accuracy; and give the interviewee emotional security – for example, by not interrupting them to ask questions.
‘When I did the first few stories, as I listened back to the recordings to transcribe them, I heard them talk and then I heard myself butt in with a question,’ she recalls. ‘I realised that the person I was talking to never came back to that point. They could never find that original thread that they were on. I missed all the rest of the sto
ry or I missed a substantial chunk of what was going on for them. I kicked myself. “You fool. Shut up. Just shut up and listen.”’ Clearly, that is the type of interview James Scott wishes he’d had with 60 Minutes.
Through her research, Amanda also realised that if journalists could listen effectively, they might help lay the groundwork for future counsellors – or at least do no harm. For more experienced journalists, this kind of approach can be second nature, but for junior reporters or for journalists under deadline or competitive pressure, it can slip by the wayside, as my own Hurricane Katrina experience amply illustrates.
Amanda leaves me with a thought-provoking idea.
‘For every journalist who does a death knock,’ she says, ‘I think it should be routine that they go back a week or fortnight or so later, and ask the question, “Why did you agree to talk to me?” I think we need vastly more data than thirty-three answers to that question. Journalists all over the world today will be at scenes of death and disasters and they will be asking the public to talk to them. And none of them will go back and ever ask why.’
After I wrote this chapter, I emailed it to James Scott. I didn’t want him to be taken by surprise on publication of this book, when he read that I would have conducted his 60 Minutes interview almost identically to Richard Carleton, even though James had found it so traumatic.
‘Does that make me a bad person?’ I asked.
‘No, it doesn’t make you a bad person. You’re adhering to the principles that are fundamental to your profession,’ James wrote back, quite generously I felt. ‘The missteps in your career that you’ve shared were no doubt distressing for those involved. But what if that father had never rung you? You would have been none the wiser to the pain and anguish that story caused the family. If journalists never get feedback, then nothing will ever change.’
James doesn’t believe that even with feedback, many journalists would alter how they work. He believes empathetic journalists will act with empathy and that others will continue to act like cowboys. James signs off his email to me with one final thought:
‘It was painful to have unkind and untrue things said about me. It’s easier to read the news about other people, no doubt. But there’s something I want people to understand and it’s really important: life moves on.’
In my second year as a journalist, I was sent to cover a demonstration in Brisbane organised by firefighters and their families. They were protesting about conditions and equipment after the deaths of two men fighting a housefire. I was looking for people to interview and there was a woman who seemed to be at the centre of the rally. She was wearing large sunglasses and holding a baby.
‘What brings you to the march?’ I asked as I sidled up.
‘My husband was one of the firefighters who died,’ she replied flatly.
I squawked, ‘Oh,’ and backed away as fast as I possibly could – even though a good journalist would have kept asking questions. I was so floored and uncomfortable, I could think of absolutely nothing to say. I just wanted to get away from her. It was like the reaction of Walter Mikac’s friend, Doug. I don’t imagine that Doug was a bad person. He was almost certainly a good person, so devastated by what had happened to his dear friend that he couldn’t bear to face him. Almost all of us know that feeling of helplessness, and the fear that we’ll say or do the wrong thing.
When people find their lives turned upside down by unimaginable tragedy, they immediately discover that some friends and professionals seem to know exactly what to do and say while others have no idea. The world will divide into people who are helpful and people who are not.
If you do happen to be the person at the wrong end of the odds, what might get you through the worst days of your life? And for the rest of us, how can we get better at swallowing our own discomfort so that we are a comfort and not a hindrance?
Juliet Darling is the perfect name for the woman who knocks at my door. She is pretty and fine-featured with softly curling hair, just as one would imagine a Juliet, and it is rather darling that she is holding a bunch of daffodils for me. I feel ashamed, because I should be the one giving her something for coming here to face my questions about the most devastating events in her life.
I study Juliet’s face closely, expecting grief to have carved sharp lines of anguish. Like my nightmare about Walter, somewhere in my subconscious I must believe that she will be outwardly marked by her suffering. It’s not the case. She’s one of those women whose face is gently creased in all the right places – crinkles at the corners of her eyes, fine lines on her forehead – so that she merely looks kindly. Juliet is dressed all in black but a thin red watchband peeps out of her sleeve, so subtly stylish that I suddenly form the opinion that red shoes are brazen.
I’ve attempted to make a chocolate and Chinese five-spice cake for us but the wretched thing wouldn’t hold together when I removed it from the oven. I shovel it into the freezer in the hope it will somehow magically set, given I’ve messed up the baking. Juliet is polite enough not to comment when we sit at my dining table for almost two hours and still the promised cake doesn’t appear.
I set down cups of tea and we begin by talking about her late partner, Nick Waterlow. In 1998, a mutual friend arranged for them to meet at a dinner party, and then again soon afterwards, alone in a bookshop café near Nick’s workplace. Juliet was in her late forties and had a son, George, from an earlier relationship. Nick was fifteen years older with three children. Their matchmaking friend clearly had sound instincts, as Juliet and Nick felt an instant connection. Juliet remembers that their chatter was so comfortable and familiar, it felt more like a recollection than a conversation. They shared a love of the ridiculous and sometimes, late at night, they would scream so uncontrollably with laughter that a neighbour would ask the next day what had been so funny.
Nick Waterlow was a well-known figure in Sydney’s art world. He had been the director of three Sydney Biennales and a mentor to countless students at the city’s College of Fine Arts. Born in London, Nick was an only child and had been sent to boarding school at the age of six. He told Juliet that from the moment he was exposed to art, he loved it with a deep passion. Art was his way of connecting with other people, drawing him out of himself. He always had a firm belief that he wasn’t an artist; he knew that his talent lay in identifying interesting works of art and showing them: a curator. Nick was one of those people who made everyone feel they were the most important person in the room, and to him, in the moment he was speaking to them, they were. His warm nature made him loved by many.
There was one matter that was a source of profound stress and anxiety in the Waterlow family and it would come to engulf Juliet as well. Nick’s youngest son, Antony, had been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia years earlier. He suffered from a delusion that his family had orchestrated a worldwide plot, ‘an internet-based campaign of harassment’, to persecute and destroy him. He believed that people could use ‘secret technology’ to control his thoughts and he experienced auditory hallucinations. From around the year 2000, Antony frequently demonstrated violent, aggressive and threatening behaviour, usually directed at his family. He repeatedly threatened to kill his father and siblings; he told Nick that he wanted to stab him.
Juliet was scared of Antony. Once, when he came to visit, she hid all the knives.
‘Nick and I only had a very few arguments and they were always about this issue,’ she says. ‘I felt afraid. I felt, This is a dangerous situation. I couldn’t explain quite why I felt it to that extent. But I think it was that I was an outsider and I could see his son’s deranged thinking very clearly. And I thought, That’s dangerous. I kept saying to Nick, “Don’t walk on the main road with him. Don’t eat anything in his house. Don’t walk near the street with him, he could push you in front of a bus.” ’
‘How did Nick react when you said things like that?’ I ask.
‘He listened.’ Juliet pauses.
‘Was he defensive because it was his son?�
� I probe.
‘Yeah, a little bit,’ she admits.
Antony had seen psychiatrists on and off but had always refused medication. He didn’t meet the criteria to be scheduled (involuntarily admitted to a mental institution). At the time, Juliet was annoyed that Nick wasn’t doing more to force the issue and protect himself, although she later learned that Nick had in fact gone to great lengths to try to help Antony. Nick didn’t discuss the matter with Juliet – she thinks he was trying to protect her from further worry.
Despite Nick’s efforts, by 2009 Juliet was living with a perpetual feeling of dread. She describes the atmosphere as being like the heavy, expectant feeling in the air before it rains, a sense that something is about to break.
‘Every time I saw a police car, a fear would rise in my chest. I spent so many evenings lying awake, waiting for Nick to return, my breath caught in my throat.’
On the night of 9 November 2009, Juliet was doing just that, lying in bed reading. Nick and his daughter, Chloe, had invited Antony to Chloe’s home for dinner. Nobody knows for certain the sequence of events that followed but at some point during the dinner, Antony armed himself with a knife and stabbed his sister and father to death. Chloe’s daughter, a toddler, was also seriously injured. Nick died in the hallway, by the front door.
A neighbour heard the kerfuffle, including Nick’s final words, directed at his son: ‘I love you!’ Later, the coroner who investigated the circumstances leading to their deaths would describe what happened as ‘a love story, that like so many love stories, ends in tragedy’.
Around 10.30 pm, Juliet’s phone rang and it was Nick’s other son, Luke. He told her that two bodies had been found in a house in Randwick, the same suburb in which Chloe lived. Juliet knew in her gut that her worst fears had been realised. Not long afterwards, the police arrived. Juliet was terrified, as Antony had escaped and was nowhere to be found. She went into hiding at a friend’s house and remained there until Antony was discovered in bushland and arrested, almost three weeks later. He pleaded not guilty to murder due to mental illness and was institutionalised indefinitely.