The Shot

by Gary Ramage

  ‘Waiting for Andrew Chan’s brother,’ I replied.

  Darbs told me to drop it – I had to be at Sydney airport in two hours. I was going to Denpasar to photograph the real Chan.

  To get to the airport via Lane Cove with all my gear in two hours was in the ‘don’t try this at home’ category. So I won’t tell you how I did it. But I made it to the airport with my packed bag that now included a full kit of hard- wearing, quick-dry adventure wear of the Columbia variety, and a pair of Merrell hiking shoes. After the tsunami shoot in Phuket, I’d rejected jeans; they take up too much space in your luggage and they’re a nuisance once they get wet. Now I was travelling with Columbia ripstop adventure pants, which dry quickly and roll into a small ball.

  I flew into Denpasar – all smiles and a silly hat – because I didn’t have time to apply for a working visa for Indonesia. News journo Rhett Watson and I travelled to Denpasar and then it was off to the hotel where the other Aussie photographers and journalists were staying. Rhett and I became lifelong mates after this trip. The cops came around the media hotel twice a week, because few of us had the required visa, but when they did we all scattered like rats and the cops didn’t push it. The News correspondent for Jakarta, Cindy Wockner, came down to see us and gave us the lay of the land. The Indonesian justice system is quirky and she outlined how she expected the Bali Nine arrests to be handled, the likely movement to and from the courtroom, and she warned us about what we could and couldn’t do.

  Also staying in the hotel were two other photographers with a similar sense of adventure to me: Jason South from The Age and Mick Tsikas from AAP. We formed a natural team and went up to the jailhouse, where the prisoners were kept while they went through the courts. It was remand prison, Indonesian style. The gig basically entailed sitting in the forecourt of this single-storey colonial building all day, waiting for family and lawyers to turn up, at which point we aimed the cameras. The cells fronted onto the forecourt area – a concrete quadrangle with gardens around the edges – and the visiting yard was quite public. Unfortunately, you could only see into the visiting yard through one window covered in bars and one concrete box that stuck out of the wall, also covered in bars.

  Think about it: the only time that one of the drug mules was going to come to the visiting area was when a visitor arrived, and then there’d be thirty photographers and TV crew trying to get their shots through these two confined access points. So every time someone entered the administration block, the journos and photographers surrounded them, demanding to know who they were and who they were going to see. If a visitor said, ‘I’m here to see Scott,’ or ‘I’m representing Renee,’ we leaped to the best position at the window or the box, and strained and pushed and shoved for the best angle. I had to really concentrate to stare from the bright sunlight into the dimly lit cell block and identify the nine faces. We all had to get up to speed really quickly or the circus just passed by and you didn’t have your shot. I remember all the press pack asking one another if they’d seen this mule or that mule. We had to assign faces to names. Luckily the Bali prison system had no uniform so we came to identify the Bali Nine by their clothes as much as anything.

  PHOTO BY GARY RAMAGE; COURTESY NEWSPIX

  When the parents came to the cellblock, it was really moving.

  Those early days of the Bali Nine story were quite mad and we had to be well prepared, because it looked like it was going to be a marathon. That meant coming to the jailhouse each day in a sunhat and long sleeves, slathered in sunblock and carrying a good supply of water. I also needed a full photo bag and two cameras, because I used the 70–200mm lens to shoot through the bars and into the visiting yard, but when the authorities did a prisoner transfer I’d need the in- your-face wide angle.

  In these situations, the photographers do a lot of secret deals, which I can’t detail too much. Let’s just say that when you wait all day in the sun for a shot, at some point you have to go to the loo, or one of you gets the lunch for everyone else, and we don’t let one photographer go without. We ensure that the guy who missed the shot at least has something to send back, even if it isn’t the best one. At the Bali Nine stakeout, Jason, Mick and I looked after one another and secured good shooting positions by force of numbers. The lads saved my arse on more than one occasion and we got some really good material. When the brothers and sisters, parents and friends came into the cell block, and everyone was hugging and crying, it was really emotional and moving. Even if the relatives called us vultures and scum.

  ***

  Some of the press pack weren’t happy to simply gather the news, and there was quite a bit of chequebook journalism going on up in Denpasar. Some of the network producers (who shall remain nameless) were allegedly paying the families of the drug mules for access to the Bali Nine, and while that was considered all fair in love and war, I decided to even it up a bit. After all, I was shooting for the whole News Ltd pool and the pressure on me was immense, not just to file but to have a mix of ‘horizontals’ for The Australian and The Courier-Mail (when it was still a broadsheet) and ‘verticals’ for the tabloids. I never stopped and never relaxed in the weeks I was up there, and if other crews were stealing an advantage then I wanted a piece of that too (did I mention that tabloid photographers have to be very, very competitive?).

  One of the Nine was being moved from the cellblock to go to the dentist, or so we thought. Southie and I followed, but Mick was not concerned and did not need the photo. We staked it out and stayed hidden. But the male mule we were following was in there too long and finally I thought, What the fuck? Is this a root canal or something? I crawled up to the window for a peek. The entire dental surgery was filled with an Aussie TV crew, and the male mule was being interviewed in the dentist chair! The window was half open, so I got my camera in there and started shooting. Like I said, it was a free-for-all.

  ***

  We often left the cellblock, especially when visiting times were over and the prisoners were having an afternoon nap. But that didn’t mean downtime for me, Rhett, Mick or Southie. The editors at Holt Street were constantly pushing for more material, so we’d often follow the family visiting one of the Nine. We tried to be respectful, but there’s only so far you can play that part when what you’re doing is following someone to their car and asking them things like, ‘How’s Scott? Is he healthy?’ Sometimes we’d follow family members in a car, but not like a car chase in the movies. It would end in a shot of them having lunch or going into their apartment building. That sort of thing.

  Although this kind of job might sound tame compared to shooting in a conflict zone, it could nevertheless result in injury. We’d rigged up a pole to keep open a window that looked into the cell area. This allowed us to have the cameras set up for when the Bali Nine came to see their families. One morning an Indonesian photographer accidentally bumped the pole, releasing its hold on the window. It came down fast, smashing Southie and a TV cameraman in the head. They luckily escaped unhurt, but Mick was caught in the middle of the other two and as he looked up to see what was happening a large shard of glass smashed into his nose. Blood was pissing everywhere. The TV cameraman freaked, but Mick remained calm and cool, considering. I grabbed a dirty towel from the ground and rammed it into his bleeding face. While he was sitting on the ground, Scott Rush’s father came out, placed his hand on Mick’s head and said a quiet prayer for him. Mick to this day believes he was praying for the media scumbag to get better.

  ***

  I’d been back in Sydney for a month when I got the tap to go back to Denpasar for Schapelle Corby’s sentencing. She’d been arrested on arrival at Denpasar airport in October 2004 with a boogie board bag filled with pot. In the process, she’d become a celebrity back in Australia. The women’s mags loved her; the tabloids, not so much.

  I got up there and things were delayed slightly, but Southie and Mick were at the hotel so we had some time to scheme and plan. The Schapelle Corby story was slightly different to the Bali Nin
e’s. The nine drug mules were clearly smuggling heroin and they did it for the money, so the real Bali Nine story was which ones would die for their crimes, given Indonesia has the death penalty for drug crimes. But Schapelle was different: she protested her innocence, and she was a lone, young, attractive Aussie chick in a sea of nasty Indonesian men. I’ve said that the photographer’s job is to tell the story with the picture, and the Schapelle story was ‘frightened animal’. All the best images of Schapelle highlight those big eyes and the fear of her pursuers. Southie and I had to shoot it this way, and we had to get some action going.

  One morning we got the tip-off that Schapelle’s father Michael and his wife were flying into Denpasar ahead of Schapelle’s sentencing. We confirmed the flight, waited in the terminal and photographed them as they were coming out of the customs area. We papped them all the way to their van, which was parked about four minutes’ walk away. It isn’t savoury, going stride for stride with people calling you every name under the sun, but Southie and I stuck with it. You might recall that when I first started in photography, I couldn’t be coaxed away from the wide-angle lens; I naturally liked being in someone’s personal space, getting right in close. It served me well for the pap work. I had long blond hair in a ponytail in those days and I remember the father was quite disbelieving that there were people paid to do what I was doing. Although he didn’t say it in those words exactly. Finally, when he was in the back seat of the van, he looked out the window at me and called me a ‘fucking German’.

  ***

  The days leading up to the sentencing were filled with mad conspiracy theories that flew around the press pack like a contagious disease. On the day of the sentencing, Southie, Mick and I got to the courthouse early and found a window that looked into the courtroom. We got stepladders and pinned up a sign at this window that said News and Fairfax while other crews did the same at their windows. But we also wanted the shots of the frightened animal being pursued, so Southie arranged for three motor scooters with drivers to be positioned out the front of the courthouse in readiness. We had a plan.

  By the time the court was in session, there were more than a hundred Aussie and Indonesian media at the courtroom, standing on ladders at the high windows and on the forecourt apron of the courthouse. It was quite unhinged. I got some shots of Schapelle with my 70–200mm lens – of her doubling over when she gets twenty years in prison – and then she was dragged from the courtroom, away from her parents and sister Mercedes, and it was time to go to work. The press pack surged like a tide into this side driveway area of the court, where the prison van was waiting. This was the shot we all wanted: Schapelle being dragged away by the Indonesians to rot in a dungeon for the rest of her life. Otherwise sane professionals were screaming at this woman as she was half carried her by her armpits to the vehicle. The idea was to get her to turn and look at you so you could get the full facial shot. So there was lots of screaming at Schapelle. People jostled and pushed and elbowed and the Indonesians were actually very organised in forming a corridor to the van.

  Southie was convinced that Schapelle was going to stick her face up against the glass of the van but it didn’t happen. I got my shots and then Mercedes held an impromptu press conference outside the courthouse. Which was fine by us, because it meant the rest of the pack were looking the wrong way as we barged out of the scrum to our waiting scooters. As the van swerved past us, the sirens and lights going, we gave chase. They were really going fast and it was a bit of shock initially – I mean, I didn’t have a crash helmet or anything. We’d already told our drivers that we wanted a shortcut to Kerobokan Prison, because ideally we wanted to be there when the prison van door opened. When someone shows me a stop sign, all I see is a different way of saying go.

  We tracked the prison van through Denpasar, and then our drivers split off onto the shortcut route out to Kerobokan. When prisoners are processed into the prison, they go through the admin wing, which features a drop-off apron under a large veranda awning. You then walk up twenty wide steps and push through the wooden doors into the administration section. We knew this because we’d cased it. So now we arrived just as the van was coming through the main gate. We dismounted and ran to the admin wing forecourt, but as the guards swarmed around the van’s side door I decided I was too late to get the shot I wanted. I ran to the top of the entrance steps and put my back against the double doors, while the guards had kittens about Southie and Mick. Then they lifted Schapelle out of the van and she scuttled like a beetle, with guards on either side, up the steps and towards the doors.

  And that’s when these other guards came out of the main doors and clubbed me to the ground. No questions or arguments. I hit the deck as Schapelle got to the top of the stairs and ran straight over the top of me. I lay flat on my back, camera to my eye, aiming up, and just kept shooting. And that’s how I got the shot of Schapelle Corby looking straight down at me, hands up against the side of her head. It was the best shot of the day. I remember Mick laughing as I got crunched – he thought I wasn’t going to get a pic. When we were showing each other afterwards what we had captured, he admitted mine was the better picture.

  PHOTO BY GARY RAMAGE; COURTESY NEWSPIX

  Schapelle arrives at Kerobokan Prison after sentencing; I lay flat on my back and kept shooting.

  Just to demonstrate how no good deed goes unpunished, wire pics of Schapelle’s sentencing ran the next day. So all of that work was down the drain.

  15

  Prime Ministers and Yobs

  I was only in Denpasar for seven days on the Schapelle gig, but I slept for two days when I got back. When you do this kind of work, you’ll be remembered for one or two shots – if you’re lucky – but all the tiring stuff comes from what you’re not known for. The police press conferences, the lawyer announcements, the standing around in the sun, the endless phone calls to Sydney, the tip-offs that go nowhere and the long, long days that can start at 6 am and end at midnight. The journalist can do a lot of work by email or over the phone, but photographers can’t phone it in. We have to be there and we can’t miss it.

  The paparazzo side of my career sometimes shocks people – they assume that a ‘serious’ photographer who goes into conflict zones maybe has a poetic or profound side to his nature. But the pap work is really just one of the skills. If you’re required to photograph someone and they run away, you have to chase them to get the picture. And yelling out to a politician or celebrity is not really that rude as long as you do it properly. I remember when George W. Bush came out to Australia to address Parliament and News Ltd photographer Kym Smith yelled out, ‘Hey, Bush,’ to get his attention. She only needed him to look her way for two seconds, and she’s a pro so she bagged that shot and got on with it. People tut-tutted but, actually, that’s the job. You have to interact with your subjects, otherwise there’s no eye contact or human involvement. So it’s about getting attention without being rude. I speak to prime ministers while I’m shooting because when I have their attention I have to show ownership and a certain amount of control. Not everyone wants to do that.

  I went on Julia Gillard’s first tour of the US when she was prime minister. Fairfax’s Andrew Meares and I shared a room on that tour – Fairfax were reluctant to let him go because of the cost, so News and Fairfax split the accommodation costs and Meares was on the plane. When Gillard was invited to address Congress in Washington, it was a big deal for Gillard and for Australia, and because the Capitol Building is so bloody big, Meares and I split up: he took an official spot in their press gallery and I found a place on the other side of the chamber, in the public area. I thought Julie Gillard did a really good job that day – I was proud to be an Aussie. And when the talking was done, I looked down on our prime minister and she was beaming, glowing with a newfound confidence. She was looking away from me, so in the House of Reps of the US Congress, I yelled out from the public gallery, ‘Julia! PM!’

  She heard the lone Aussie accent and looked up with a huge grin a
nd it was a great shot. It’s one of my personal top tens. Was that disrespectful to a prime minister? Perhaps, but I had to go with the moment and trust my instincts. I saw a politician who’d just blossomed into a prime minister, and had done so in one of the cathedrals of modern democracy. I thought she was in a mood to hear a bit of ocker informality, and I got it right.

  So you have to engage and you have to get a reaction. And you have to be adaptable and a good listener. I’ve had to refine my sense of who people are and where their sense of humour might end and their boundaries begin. You have to get it right most of the time because if you’re a dickhead no one will deal with you, and if you’re too respectful you won’t get the shots they want at the picture desk.

  Andrew Darby knew I’d do what I had to do to get a shot, and he knew I had stamina and no kids. He could assign me to these gigs and get a full-bore performance. And I was only just getting started.

  ***

  Before the year was out, I was sent back to Bali to cover the aftermath of the second Bali bombings, which occurred on 1 October. Twenty people died (including four Aussies) in the blasts and about a hundred and thirty were injured, mostly suffering burns. As I arrived, most of the nineteen Australian burns victims were being shifted to Singapore, and we had to follow them since the story was really about the families. It was a tiring gig with little sleep, the hours dictated by police conferences, hospital staff and families, and juggled with constant enquiries and suggestions from Holt Street. It was also a revelation to me about what terrorists are really about. They’re not building anything – it’s all destruction.

  Barely a week after the Bali bombings, I was on my way to record a different kind of destruction. A 7.6 magnitude earthquake had hit the mountainous Kashmir region of Pakistan and Afghanistan and the whole side of a mountain had disappeared into the valley below. An estimated 80,000 people were killed and several million people made homeless. Initially, there wasn’t much there for The Daily Telegraph, but when the government sent troops to help the locals I thought it might be worth a picture or two. At News Ltd my views on the Pakistan earthquake were aired in front of different, sympathetic people and I was put on the plane with Prime Minister John Howard and his entourage. We flew into the military airport at Karachi and headed out to Islamabad and then the village of Dhanni. On the walk up the hill to Dhanni I saw a bunch of boys playing cricket on this brown dirt field, and so did cricket fan John Howard. His adviser said to him, ‘Don’t play cricket with the children.’ Howard looked at him, confused, and the adviser repeated, ‘Don’t play cricket with the children.’ So Howard just walked over there and started talking to them – and of course they wanted him to play. So he stepped up to bowl one of his off spinners and I started shooting. On the first delivery the ball seemed to go straight up in the air and drop at his feet. He tried again, and again, and couldn’t get it right. And in one of the shots he’s making a very silly face – he was confused and frustrated. At least, that’s the story told by the photo I emailed back to the Tele half an hour later. The real story was that the boys made their cricket ball out of sticky tape, and Howard couldn’t get the damned thing to leave his fingers properly.