The Shot

by Gary Ramage

  The 5th Aviation Regiment was responsible for picking up and delivering special forces units, and responsible for on-call operations such as the QRF. In normal conditions, the SAS’s QRF teams would be lifting off the ground mere minutes after receiving the order. But there’d been some comms breakdown at the airport and the upshot was that there were no Black Hawks available to the SAS. The commanding officer was beyond angry. He’d just watched two truckloads of the worst militias disappear down the road and had no way of giving chase.

  When the first Black Hawk did finally come in he put me on board with two of his snipers. He wanted better intel on what was happening. He said, ‘Get me some video evidence of what these bastards are doing up there.’

  ***

  It was through this work with the special forces that my eyes were opened to what the army is really about, which led to an increasing dilemma on my part. A warrant officer mate in the intel section was based out at Dili airport. When I went there to catch up with him one day, he said to me, ‘Have a look at this.’

  We went down into the basement of the terminal building where he led me into a darkened room. In front of me, squatting on the floor in a stress position, were fifteen Indonesian militia, hands tied behind their backs and blindfolded. They were clearly very scared. They were down there for questioning and it struck me that while this might have been an operation to build trust and security, it was actually a nasty little war. This demonstrated the limits of what I could do as a military employee. As a media photographer, my job was to show readers what was actually happening. But this was not my job in Timor, or Bosnia, Kosovo or Somalia. I was a PR guy, and a senior one at that. This was probably the first time I reacted like a media photographer, only to realise I was a sergeant in the army. This was a hard place to get to; I didn’t know it then, but once you see the world through media eyes, you’re screwed. You can’t see it any other way. I saw those prisoners in that basement, and I saw a story. My first reaction was to frame it and see it on the front page of The Daily Telegraph with a big headline. I wasn’t interested in a PR spin for Defence.

  Before I could become too frustrated by this growing awareness of my changing attitude, I was pulled out of Timor. Lieutenant Colonel Rob Barnes – commanding officer of the media support unit – said I’d done enough for the year and I should go home and have a rest.

  I arrived back in Canberra in early November 1999 and when I returned from leave I was made a warrant officer class two and sent to Townsville to be a photographer for the 3rd Brigade in North Queensland. At first I felt a little like I’d been sidelined, but Townsville was a welcome breather for me and I became very social in that city. I played a lot of golf and met my mates every Friday night in the Heritage Hotel, where you could buy a dozen oysters and a beer for ten dollars. I started spending my time off in Perth, visiting my sisters and parents and my old Perth buddies. One night at my sister’s place, where I was staying, I flopped down on the couch and turned on the TV. The Twin Towers in New York were on fire. Talk about your world changing.

  I was in Townsville for twelve months and then I was assigned back to Timor as a photographer to the Australian HQ in Dili under the United Nations. This time I’d run the show. Townsville had recharged my batteries – I was back.

  ***

  As soon as I hit Dili I wanted to change everything. I first noticed that the old MTV – the darkroom caravan from Somalia – wasn’t being used. So I suggested to Major Dave Munro that it be shifted to Balibo, home to the combat element of the battalion and the Black Hawks from the 5th Aviation Regiment. I wanted to be away from the bosses: get great pics and footage and just lift the whole performance.

  Big Dave – an Army reserve PR officer and a great bloke – said yes, and so I combined my management duties out of Dili with photography assignments accompanying the jungle patrols. I had to pull every available string and call in all favours owed to me in the warrant officer networks. But a lot of army people thought it was important to get working with the patrols, so they found me Land Rovers and got us on Black Hawks, and I got back to doing what I do best.

  The professional’s job is to tell the story with a picture. If that means you control it and tweak it a little, then that’s what you do. This is how one of the best pictures I have ever made came about. I was loving the sunsets they get around Timor, and I’d started thinking about a book that the ADF might publish, which would honour those who served in Timor. So I was on the lookout for something iconic, based on the Timor sunset. I was thinking of a cover shot and I didn’t want to leave it to chance.

  One evening I was watching the ocean when I saw a Black Hawk come in and I decided, That’s it. That’s my shot. I sat down and did some scheming, came up with a lens/ film combo and used my contacts in the aviation wing to get me a Black Hawk that I could control for the picture. I wanted to set up a helicopter against the sun as it turned into a massive orange sitting on the horizon. I had my Nikon F5 with a thirty-six-frame roll of Fuji in it. I screwed on my favourite 600mm Nikkor lens – in those days a $15,000 piece of gear that may have belonged to the army but was sure as hell my prized lens. I had a 5th Aviation guy on the radio who was relaying instructions to the pilot out over the ocean approach, and gave him exactly the channel I wanted him to fly down. Then I dialled in my shutter speeds and aperture. I wanted the lens to crunch all the information and light into a package that would almost overwhelm the film, but not quite. These things can be a very fine balance, but I’d done my homework and, as they say in this business, I’d already framed it in my mind.

  The pilot lined up the sunset and the Black Hawk perfectly. Once I reckoned I had the shot, he came in to land. When the shots were developed, they were better than I’d anticipated. It was the end of an era, in many respects. The Nikon F5 was considered by many professionals to be the best SLR camera ever made, and this Timor gig would be its swan song. The special forces and intelligence people in the army were already moving to digital SLR cameras and the photographers were about to follow. In a few months we wouldn’t need the MTV anymore, because we wouldn’t need to develop and process and print. I’d already used the Kodak 620 in the Balkans, and all I needed was a Mac laptop and a sat-phone. That was the darkroom and printing shop, right there.

  The irony of this photo shoot was the journey of the images themselves. There wouldn’t be a book of record to chronicle the Timor campaign like the one we’d done for Somalia. I argued hard for it; my guys had done some great work recording life on patrol with Aussie diggers in the jungles of Timor as well as daily life on the patrols bases. But I couldn’t get the project off the ground. So many times over the years diggers have asked me why there was no Timor version of the Somalia book. Well, I tried. But the upshot of the sunset shoot was a story in itself. A lot of folks in the media unit saw and liked that shot, and with one thing and another, and with the way defence people leave and join the private sector, about a year after I shot that Black Hawk the ADF had an approach from Sikorsky, the US company that builds the Black Hawk. It was a formal request to use my sunset shot of the Aussie Black Hawk in their new advertising campaign. For many years, Sikorsky used that shot as the backdrop for their magazine advertising. It’s a shame they couldn’t spell my name right on the poster, though!

  The set-up photo is not really dishonest, as you can see from the Black Hawk/sunset example. Photographers regularly use catcalls and say silly things to get a person to turn, or to get them to change their expression. It’s part of the business. There has to be a bit of the manipulator in you or you won’t get the shot you want.

  PHOTO BY GARY RAMAGE; COURTESY DEPARTMENT OF DEFENCE

  In East Timor, I set up a shoot showing a digger with two local boys.

  Sometimes, it’s a little more than manipulation. By the time I was back in Timor, I was focused on providing pics for newspapers in Australia. That was clearly where I was heading. One afternoon I set up a shoot showing a digger walking with two local boys d
own the beach in Dili. It was a beautiful shot and it ran on the front page of The Daily Telegraph in Sydney.

  And then there are times when the subject lands in your lap and there’s nothing to do but shoot. One night in 1999, I was hauled out of the Turismo and ordered to accompany Lieutenant Colonel Rob ‘Barnsey’ Barnes to a regional airport in East Timor. We drove out there and it was all hush-hush. All I knew was I had to take a video camera. We drove across the tarmac, and I climbed up into this RAAF C-130 Hercules. Inside was the reason for all this: Xanana Gusmão. He had been a key leader of the Timorese independence movement, and would later become the president of Timor-Leste. After several years of imprisonment by the Indonesian government, he had been released, and had returned home to help in the rebuilding of his country. As I started rolling the tape, he was very relaxed with the camera. You see, when the Democratic Republic of East Timor was declared in Dili in 1975, Gusmão had been the press secretary for Fretilin, a left-wing independence party, and he had filmed the ceremony. So on one level it was a super-secret midnight dash. But really it was just two cameramen sharing a moment.

  11

  A Career Explodes

  The world was certainly changing as the 2000s got going. East Timor became Timor-Leste under Xanana Gusmão, the United States endured 9/11 and launched its War on Terror, and in Canberra a reorganisation of Defence media and PR was underway. In a post-9/11 world, the challenge we faced was how to fight an idea like jihadism with our own idea. The answer was strong messages and positive images.

  After Timor I returned to Canberra to help create the centralised 1st Joint Public Affairs Unit (1JPAU). It was commanded by Barnesy, and was based at Fairbairn Air Force Base in Canberra. I was the inaugural sergeant major and chief photographer for the corps. Barnesy and I had first met back in Brisbane, when he was a young captain – plucked straight from being a journalist on country newspapers – and I was a young corporal starting a photography career. He was a couple of years older than me but we hit it off from the beginning. He was a family man and I was engaged to be married, but we still liked having a laugh. Now we were in Canberra, with a big task. My role was to get the photographers around the country ready for the JPAU. There had to be a way of commissioning work and managing the flows so that the quality could be controlled from Fairbairn. We had embraced digital by now and so the MTV darkroom van was sent to Puckapunyal, where it was used as a target on the mortar range.

  In hindsight, was the exploding caravan a metaphor for my career? As an astute reader might have worked out, my enjoyment in the army came from doing great work and becoming a better photographer. I was selfish like that. But you stay in the game long enough and suddenly they make you sergeant major, show you a desk, and you inherit all the management responsibilities you were previously too cool for.

  We had about nine photographers in the state-based barracks, and now they had to work to our centralised schedules, standards and protocols. This was confronting enough. Then add the new technology of digital imagery: every image could be sent immediately over the internet. So there were no more excuses like, It must have been lost by the couriers, or, I got a bad batch of chemicals in the lab, and there was no more hiding behind the distance between a state barracks and HQ in Canberra. It took a while for the older photographers to fully grasp this, and I was under time pressure to get them into the new system. So I shifted very quickly from being the guy who could make everyone laugh over a few beers to the unit’s most-hated. This was not a gradual evolution: it happened overnight. I couldn’t be everyone’s friend and deliver for Barnesy. Barnesy was also under pressure to make this work, and what the CO wants, the CO gets!

  Being in management didn’t suit me. I lost all my friends, alienated people who had nothing to do with me and made a whole new class of enemy. In every state-based photography unit they had their own way of doing things, which I had to tear down. Barnesy would have high-level meetings with the brass about the way it could all work, and I’d have to push these ideas on to the actual photographers and make it happen. And they didn’t want to change. I found myself in meetings with these resentful, intractable people (who were me, really), and I’d be saying things like, ‘Either get on the train or fuck off.’ Nice huh?

  As we were trying to reorganise from within, Barnesy was having problems getting support from the broader military. Most people in the star plot (the people of general- level rank) didn’t see the benefits of publicity. Even though some of them liked the Somalia book, they didn’t see how it helped them. A notable exception to this was Angus Campbell, who would later be the Commander Australian Forces in Afghanistan and the Middle East region. He saw the value in communicating the stories to the public and politicians, and even to other parts of the military. And he was a natural at it. In 2011, at Al Minhad Air Base, he’d wake up News Ltd’s senior defence journalist, Ian McPhedran, to brief him on a casualty incident, so the facts got into the news cycle back home. But most weren’t like Campbell in the early 2000s.

  Just to ensure this had all the hallmarks of a Ramage snafu, I added to the complexity by commuting to Canberra. In the late 1990s, Lisa Keen had resigned from the ADF and taken a senior media role at Taronga Park Zoo in Sydney. Lisa arranged some moonlighting work for me taking shots of the animals for a catalogue, and through this gig I met another Taronga Park employee, Mel. She was a very good- looking, smart and vivacious brunette, and I was stunned when she showed an interest in me. We started going out and then bought an apartment in Lane Cove. We decided I’d commute. For two years I spent my weekends with Mel in Sydney and on Monday mornings I’d rise at 4.30 am, drive to my weekday digs at RAAF Fairbairn, and then drive back to Sydney on Friday. I had a double room at Fairbairn, and it was very comfortable, but I really don’t like mess life. And I hated living apart from Mel.

  I became exhausted, and with the ranks above and below me both resisting the new structure, I felt increasingly isolated. And then, in 2003, my granny – Martha Ramage – passed. It was during the Canberra fires in early January and I drove to Sydney to catch a flight to London, motoring around Lake George with this massive plume of smoke seeming to chase me in my rear-vision mirror. I was a bit nervous about the mercy dash because I was formally under a warning order from Barnesy for Iraq. A warning order is a military standby to be deployed. There’s a whole lot of rules attached to it about where you can go and what you can do. In my case, the warning order was for leading a photography team into Iraq, given the invasion was imminent. But I charged on to Sydney, found Dad at the airport and we headed for Scotland. It was a very sad time, and on the way back, Qantas cottoned on to the reason for our trip and they upgraded us to business class. When the hostie came around with drinks, Dad reached for his wallet. Everyone laughed, which really relieved the pressure; we had a few drinks and a laugh and a cry. It was a great trip home, in the circumstances.

  But what was I coming home to? A massive crossroads, as it turned out.

  ***

  This is how a career blows up. I came back from Scotland to find that I wasn’t in trouble about the warning order – but Barnesy was fuming. He’d been dropped as the commanding officer of the 1JPAU in Iraq and replaced by Lieutenant Colonel Mark ‘Pup’ Elliot. The brigadier wanted Barnesy looking after things in Canberra and Pup got the call-up for Iraq. It was a pity, because Pup and Barnesy were mates and there were no hard feelings. But because of the role Barnesy was now expected to play, he needed me with him in Canberra, so Alan Green would go to Iraq in my place while Pup was the CO of the Coalition Media Centre in Kuwait. I was devastated – I was thirty-six, it was my time. Barnesy and I had expected to be team leaders in a combat deployment, in a concept we’d built up against a lot of opposition.

  But I got on with it and even proposed to Mel. She accepted and we were very excited. But in the background I schemed. Pup had a flat in Kingston, which he allowed me to use while he was in Kuwait. Pup looked like an army officer: just over six foot tall, greyi
ng crew cut and in his early fifties. He was basically me, only a bit older and with a lot more charm and polish. He liked to get things done and wasn’t a big fan of red tape. I was in contact with Pup while he was in Iraq, and early on in the piece he was becoming frustrated with Australian policy. The media access was very poor and, rather than being allowed to disseminate information and help the media, the JPAU was being shut out of the ADF loop. After a couple of phone calls with me, Pup said, ‘I need images, but I can’t send anyone out.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  ‘So, what if I could get you accredited, and you take holidays from the army and file images to me as a freelancer?’

  I paused at this. ‘We can do that?’

  ‘If it’s legal, let’s do it.’

  So I did my homework and decided there was nothing within the rules of the army to stop me from going on holidays into a war zone as a serving member and take photographs as a freelancer. So I got a letter of passage from Pup – to speed up my visas and get me across borders – and I went on leave from the army.

  By way of apology for pulling me off the Iraq tour, Barnesy gave me the coverage of the ANZAC dawn service at Gallipoli. So my plan was to go over there, do the dawn service and file my pics over the phone lines, and then go on leave the next day. I travelled to Turkey with Matt Grant, my old golfing buddy from Lavarack Barracks in Townsville, and we covered the ceremony. I took several good frames on that trip – one being the Aussie flag in the sand with a group of World War I medals on it as the water came in. We used Matt’s great-grandad’s memorial plaque in a few frames, with poppies and a slouch hat. Again, some of the best shots are set up.