The Shot

by Gary Ramage

  Dhanni was built on a mountainside and the earthquake was so strong that when we arrived there was no more village, just an enormous scar. Everyone was living in tents and being fed and looked after by the Australian Army. The fact that the army had named their base Camp Bradman put a smile on John Howard’s face, but only briefly. There wasn’t much happy news in that annihilated part of the world.

  PHOTO BY GARY RAMAGE; COURTESY NEWSPIX

  John Howard’s advisor warned him against playing cricket with the Pakistani children.

  When it came time for Howard to leave, he flew back to Islamabad and I stayed and documented the reconstruction effort of the soldiers, engineers and medics in Dhanni. It had started as a political gig, but I found I was quite affected by the plight of the Pakistanis and the efforts of the Aussies. There was nothing really sensational about the disaster from a photographic perspective – just a massive scar on a mountain where pastures, schools, rivers and houses used to be. The Australian’s senior political journalist Dennis Shanahan and the Tele’s Malcolm Farr went back to Islamabad with Howard, as did the young ADF photographer Neil Ruskin. I gave Neil the key to my hotel room in Islamabad and I moved into his army tent in Dhanni. I flew back to Sydney a few days later having grabbed a fantastic portfolio of shots.

  ***

  The next big story I covered unfolded much closer to home. In early December this thing started brewing in Cronulla, a beachside suburb in Sydney’s Sutherland Shire, to the south of the city. There was a conflict between predominantly Anglo- Saxon locals and Muslim youths who would come in from the Western Suburbs. Apparently they had harassed the local girls and bashed a couple of lifeguards.

  I’d been casually keeping an eye on this, and during the week a group of Cronulla locals planned a protest for Saturday morning. It might have passed without notice, but talkback radio personality Alan Jones talked it up a bit and so it was on. We discussed it around the Tele and, since I had the enthusiasm for it, I was assigned by Darbs. I set off early on Saturday morning and got down to the public park beside Cronulla beach at around 5 am. Darbs thought this could go either way, so he had Craig Greenhill as the second photographer on standby. I staked out the place and watched as the area beside the beach filled with what were obviously young yobs who’d been drinking all night (and probably the day before in the blistering sun). The police presence seemed to grow as the number of yobs increased, and by the time the sun came up there were thousands of drunks milling around in Aussie flag singlets with cans of beer in their hands.

  Then it started. A boy of around sixteen who, in the crowd’s eyes, looked Middle Eastern was suddenly being chased by the yobs across the street from the beach and into the park, with the cops in pursuit. The yobs got to the kid and were kicking the shit out of him as the cops arrived. That’s when things got out of control. The cops, led by this very brave sergeant, dragged the kid out of harm’s way and into the pub to secure his safety, and the mob surrounded the pub, throwing cans at the building, spitting, chanting racist slogans, that sort of thing.

  I was shocked at what I was seeing and I rang Darbs, telling him I needed help. It was too big for one shooter. He sent reinforcements.

  It was vile. Two Sri Lankan youths drove down a nearby street and were set upon, thugs jumping up and down on their car and smashing beer bottles against the windscreen. Thankfully, the scared-shitless occupants of the car managed to drive away.

  At the surf lifesaving club, a hundred people were standing around the building baying for someone’s blood. I asked what was going on and one of the yobs told me a couple of Muslim women had been given refuge in the building by Anglo- Saxon ‘traitors’.

  A group walked past me and I took a photo that I’m glad the Tele didn’t run: in it, one of the yobs is wearing a T-shirt that says Mohammed is a camel-raping faggot. This was the tone.

  Over the road in the beachfront park, a couple of yobs had climbed to the top of a huge Norfolk pine and were planting the Australian flag, to the rapturous applause of the yobbery. At that point I actually snapped out of my professional role for a couple of seconds and felt anger and revulsion. I’d served my country and been deployed under that flag, and here it was being used as an excuse to abuse police, scare women and bash people. I was ropeable.

  We were under rolling deadlines that day and the picture desk wanted its cover shots for The Sunday Telegraph by 1 pm. I had to file what I had, which meant getting to the car and using the laptop. Craig turned up and I asked him to check out what was happening at Cronulla railway station. Some of the drunks had been yelling about waiting at the station for ‘them’.

  While I sat in the car putting on captions and sending the images, Craig walked onto the station platform. When the train arrived he entered the carriage in front of him. It just happened to be the carriage that a bunch of yobs stormed into looking for non-white people to bash. Craig was in the middle of the melee. Although he was a bit shaken by it, he stood his ground and kept shooting, and his images informed a nation about what was going on that day.

  The Cronulla Riots, as they became known, went all day. I finally got out of there at one in the morning of the next day, making it almost a twenty-hour day for me. It was a disgusting spectacle. Not only when Fairfax photographer Andrew Meares got a bottle in the face, but when the police escorted an ambulance to rescue the Middle Eastern women and children from the surf club, and the yobs saw what was happening and attacked the ambulance with bottles. They chased it up the road, showering it with glass. Can you imagine how scared those women and children must have been?

  When you do this job you can’t really flinch when evil erupts in your face. It’s your job to record it and get it onto newspaper pages. The judgement and thinking can come later, in your own time. But after this display down in Cronulla, I had to really stop myself becoming negative about the bogan elements of our society. I reminded myself that the flag actually represented the good guys who gave refuge to the women and their kids, and the police and ambulance personnel who just kept throwing themselves into the fray and doing what they had to do. In particular, the good guys had a hero that day, Craig Campbell. This was the police sergeant who came running to the aid of the first Middle Eastern victim at the park that morning, and who later waded into that train carriage when the yobbos were getting so carried away they might have killed someone. He threw himself in, baton swinging, and protected those passengers.

  And speaking of good guys, Craig Greenhill stepped up and his images went around the world. They gave him a Walkley Award in 2006 for best spot news photograph. Well deserved.

  ***

  Christmas rolled around and I was now single. So I employed the standard Ramage remedy and threw myself deep into the work; specifically, I wanted to go back to Pakistan to do a pre-Christmas gee-up with the troops, who were living in a tent city in the freezing cold of Kashmir. I thought there had to be a story up there and I pushed to do it. I went down to see Darbs one evening at his home in Cronulla, and I put it to him. And he said, ‘Go for it.’

  It was an uncomfortable, cold, wet way to spend Christmas. The daytime temperature averaged a balmy -2 degrees Celsius and the nights got down to -15, sometimes driven by icy winds and often accompanied by snowstorms or cold rain. I remember one night making a mad dash to the makeshift loo. It was a steel seat with a half-44 gallon drum cut down to fit under the seat. Now, in below-zero temps at two in the morning this is not a comfortable manoeuvre. There was an upside to it though: it had the best views overlooking the massive mountains and the valley below. Which reminds me of another tip for novices: in conflict zones, assume nothing. For instance, don’t assume the military will supply sleeping bags or gloves or a decent jacket. You always go prepared. If you have to scrounge and beg for kit from the soldiers you will never get their confidence. You must attend to your own warmth, especially your hands, head and feet.

  Despite the conditions, we got some great material. When I got back to Sydney the bos
ses at Holt Street wanted a return on their photographic investment, so they did a book called Pakistan Assist: A portfolio of images by Gary Ramage, and they got Rhett to write the foreword and Major General Michael Jeffery to pen an introduction. While a lot of good was done over there by the Aussies, there were some confronting sights, many of which made it into the book. Like the twenty-five-day-old baby who was brought into the field hospital. He was malnourished and I thought he had a chance, but he died twenty-three hours after I took the shots. Was it ethical to publish those pictures? I had to develop a personal code of conduct for these situations, because I was no longer photographing corpses in a mass grave for the investigators. Now I was taking images for newspapers and books, with the intention of entertaining and enlightening. I really had to think this through because it seemed my specialty was conflict zones, and those places involve people who have lost everything; I didn’t want to take their dignity too. In the end, I decided that if one person saw my confronting images and it contributed to them urging a new policy at their organisation, or made them give to an aid charity, then I could take photographs of a little baby who subsequently didn’t make it.

  16

  Mines, Ministers and Palaces

  After the Pakistan shoot was done I was transiting through Dubai’s airport on 10 January 2006 when I took the weight off in one of the lounges. I was a bit preoccupied because, having split up with Mel a few months earlier, this downtime just gave my brain the time and space to start going over how terrible it all was: would I ever get it right with a woman? I decided there was a good chance I’d be single for the rest of my life, and working that out in a transit lounge with the waves of exhaustion washing over me was pretty depressing.

  Before I could really give in to self-pity, though, I ran into a Channel 7 crew who told me about a bus crash in Cairo. There were at least two Australians killed and several more injured – off-duty police officers, mostly. I was really tired, but I thought what the hell, I should at least touch base with Darbs to give him the opportunity to send me there to cover it seeing as I was only three hours away. I called him and he said, ‘Leave it with me.’ Three minutes later he called back and said, ‘Go.’

  I went to the counter and changed my flights. A few hours later, I was flying into Cairo. The Channel 7 crew and I arrived at the hotel I’d booked to find it was also the hotel where DFAT had put the Aussies from the bus crash and their families. So, yes, it was a tragedy, but good pickings for us. We did well not to miss out. We got the stories and the pics and went out to the crash site and harassed the local cops about the investigation and so on. And then I flew back to Sydney with the lesson ringing in my ears: cultivate my contacts at DFAT and always check on where the families are being accommodated before making my own booking.

  I’d been back in Australia for two months when News sent me to Iraq with Paul Kent, to report on Australia’s contribution to the coalition effort. We were under the wing of Security Attachment Baghdad and went on some night patrols with our guys through the streets of that ancient city. But there was no fighting, no bang-bang. The city was being rebuilt and there was little drama while we were there. I took a lot of shots of soldier life, and when I look back on those shots I see now that every soldier’s locker is covered with pin-ups of naked women, something that is no longer allowed. Those shots are now part of history – probably the last deployment where diggers could be themselves.

  It was a short trip, the most enduring evidence of which was the shot taken of me standing in front of the ‘crossed swords’ monument. It apparently commemorates the victory in the Iran–Iraq War, and is made from melted-down Iranian army helmets. The enormous monument is also notorious for the fact that underneath it are the interrogation headquarters of Saddam’s secret police. Who would build a monument to a war and construct torture chambers beneath it?

  ***

  The underground theme continued back home. In April I was having dinner with my old high school friends Karen and Grant one night when I got a call from the night editor.

  ‘A mine’s collapsed in Tasmania,’ he told me. ‘They want you down there, now!’ It turned out there’d been an underground rock fall, triggered by a small earthquake. One man, Larry Knight, was dead, and two others – Brant Webb and Todd Russell – were still trapped down there.

  I dropped everything, grabbed my prepacked bags, tore out to the airport and got on a flight to Launceston, where I hired a Thrifty campervan. I’d already been on the phone to people in Beaconsfield and I knew there was no accommodation.

  Not that I’m complaining or anything – I mean, I’ve worked in Kashmir in the winter and Somalia in the summer – but Christ it was cold in Beaconsfield. I had this campervan, but no plug for power, so no heat. I got sick trying to sleep in that tin can. My morale wasn’t improved when I saw the way some of the media circus was living: big Winnebago camper trucks for the Channel 9 and 7 crews and the motel booked out. Some of the ‘anchor talent’ would later be driven in each evening so they could do their live crosses.

  But the real mission for me was to get the shot. And there was only one shot: Webb and Russell emerging from the mine when they were rescued. I was in luck, because one of the senior Tassie cops at the scene was Phil Pike, a mate of mine, so I was confident I’d be tipped off when they were coming to the surface. But then there was the question of getting the best shot. The mine head was a small area, with all the rescue people standing around, and it was surrounded by a security fence. There was no doubt it was going to be tricky. Recalling the manoeuvre Southie and I had pulled in Denpasar, I bought ladders to put against the security fence, but it turned out they weren’t really high enough for our purposes. We did a trial run and found that getting up high over the security fence gave us a nice angle. But the mine operator took one look at the ladders and had a wall of shade cloth put up in front of our prime position.

  The drama went for two weeks and the Sydney picture desk wanted material, so at one point we were chasing dog stories. It was a media circus on the surface while, one kilometre below, those two guys were alive and interacting with a remote-controlled camera, which had managed to find them.

  The locals resented us breezing into this small town, using the place and just leaving. There was some princess behaviour too. A female Channel 7 journalist refused to use the public loo and instead used the crew’s Winnebago, which had no running water. She took a dump in the camper and immediately blocked the on-board toilet. Beaconsfield was also the unveiling of Bill Shorten, who was then the national secretary of the Australian Workers Union. I can tell you that the exposure he got was at least as much to do with having to fill minutes and pages as it was his innate charisma.

  Sadly, there was a second death at Beaconsfield. Richard Carlton, from 60 Minutes, was standing beside me in the park across the road from the mine one afternoon. We were at a media briefing of the type that we had to cover, but which wasn’t worth much, when Carlton just keeled over. What do you do in these situations? Drop your camera? Try to save him? I can tell you that no one put down their cameras; we all got our shots before we tried to help Richard.

  Having been gazumped on the ladders I went back to old-fashioned wheeling and dealing, managing to negotiate access to the miners when they were brought to the surface. A wire photographer would take the shot, to make pool pictures that we could all use. I ordered a cherry-picker from a hire company and the News Corp photography contingent managed to get it positioned and operating for the miners’ release. Southie still gives me shit about that bloody cherry- picker!

  But my generosity – expected in the photographer community, by the way – wasn’t matched by the TV people. As the ambulance loaded up Brant Webb and Todd Russell to take them to the hospital, Channel 7’s David Koch leaped in the back with them and was promptly thrown out. And because of that, they shut down the media access: no more photographs at Beaconsfield.

  ***

  I’m a very lucky photographer beca
use I get to pursue the parts of my profession that I find the most interesting. But in 2006 the powers that be at Holt Street decided I could take more responsibility.

  The year actually got off to a flier, travelling with News Corp defence writer Ian McPhedran into Tarin Kowt, where we were hosted by 3 RAR. It was only a short trip, but Macca and I hit it off and formed what would be a formidable team in the future for both journalism and books. Macca has become one of my closest and trusted mates and is now writing books, having recently retired from the industry. But when I got back from Afghanistan, the spectre of ‘management’ raised its head and a long discussion started between Andrew Darby and myself. The discussion went through most of 2006 and hinged on whether I was prepared to go to Canberra and head up the News Ltd photographer’s bureau at Australian Parliament House. The chief photographer for News at parliament, John Feder, was moving to Sydney, and they wanted someone to go down there and shake the place up a bit. Darbs wanted me to be his man in Canberra.