Thirty years after reporting from Rwanda, one image still haunts Helen Vatsikopoulos

For Helen Vatsikopoulos, working on Dateline was a dream job — even when the stories she covered for the SBS current affairs flagship required bearing witness to humanity’s worst nightmares.

In four decades on air — the program celebrates its 40th anniversary this year — Dateline’s reporters have covered trauma and tragedy (and sometimes triumph) in every corner of the globe. But few stories stand out with the epochal ferocity of the Rwandan genocide in mid-1994.

Helen Vatsikopoulos reporting for SBS’s Dateline on the Rwandan genocide in mid-1994.

It was, as Vatsikopoulos remembers 30 years later, an episode in human history and a journalistic challenge like no other she had faced before or since.

“I don’t think it ever leaves you,” Vatsikopoulos says of the period in which an estimated 500,000-800,000 people were killed, most of them members of the country’s Tutsi minority.

“You can’t cover a story like that without it impacting every aspect of your life. Now, while I’m talking to you, I have this image in my head which I can never get rid of. And it’s this guy we called the Angel of Death … he was like the collector of the bodies.

“I remember going to the Goma camp early one morning to get pictures and alongside the tents were little packages. And these were children who died overnight, the bodies of people who had died overnight. This guy was like the garbage truck coming along, picking up the bodies and throwing them in the back and then they would take them to a huge pit and cover them in lime. I’ve still got this image of him. He’s got a mask, lowered down onto his chin, he’s holding a body, and he’s got this big grin on his face. That’s an image that stays with me forever.”

The Rwanda story was one of many in Vatsikopoulos’s storied career, which began at the ABC.

She was working on The 7.30 Report when she first saw the new SBS weekly current affairs program. It had started in 1984 as a studio-based program, and by the latter part of the decade was sending teams to cover stories around the world. That broad template has lasted to this day, with adjustments along the way as technology and audience expectations have changed — and when world events, such as the COVID pandemic, have challenged its basic modus operandi.

“I remember thinking, I want to work on that program,” Vatsikopoulos remembers of seeing legendary, groundbreaking correspondent Diane Willman reporting from a conflict zone.

Helen Vatsikopoulos with her Dateline crew, cameraman Simon Toben and sound recordist Spiros Mavrangelos.

“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, here is an Australian woman and she’s on the other side of the world. And she is relaying to us what is happening, history-changing events. And it’s coming to me in my lounge room. That is what I want to do’.”

Vatsikopoulos’s time at the program included momentous events — from the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 to democracy coming to South Africa and much else besides.

But none affected her as deeply as that Rwandan experience in 1994. Its impact is such that later this year she will be part of a public event and exhibition at the University of Technology Sydney commemorating the 30th anniversary of the tragedy, summoning memories that touched the depths of the soul.

There were no hotels. Or banks. Or safe drinking water. The only plentiful thing: guns.

As reporters like Vatsikopoulos and her team navigated the sensory and emotional horrors, they were also dealing with logistical nightmares. This was before mobile phones were in wide use, and communications from a country such as Rwanda involved using a satellite phone kit that was expensive and rare. SBS, needless to say, did not have one. And there were no hotels. Or banks. Or safe drinking water. The only plentiful thing: guns. This was reporting from a country that had effectively ceased to function.

“There were no credit cards, so I actually had $US12,000 [cash] on me,” she recalls. “I was very conscious of the fact, wandering through the streets with child soldiers everywhere pointing guns, and I’ve got a camera operator next to me holding something that I hope they don’t think is a weapon. And I’ve got this bum-bag around my hip with $12,000 in it.”

Gathering the material for their story was one challenge; producing it and getting the material back to Australia was another.

“We did the story and then we raced next door to Zimbabwe. I sat up all night, wrote a half-hour script, recorded the voice, and then it got couriered to Australia.”

SBS publicity photo of Helen Vatsikopoulos.

The raw material — the hours of footage of dead bodies — had to be edited, a traumatic experience for editors who had never set foot near the war zone. Years later, Vatsikopoulos spoke to the cameraman, Simon Toben.

“Simon was Jewish,” she says. “And he said, ‘I had to record absolutely everything. It didn’t matter if they were too horrific to put to air. This is something that I wanted to have out there as a historical record’.

“Part of the job that we do when we go to these history-changing events is not just to do the story. It’s to actually have an archive. And you can say [these pictures] exist, like the Holocaust pictures exist.”

This has been part of Dateline’s mission from the start – through hosts (including luminaries such as Jana Wendt and George Negus); through a period when the program required video journalists to film, produce and report stories on their own; to the format that has been in place since 2015, a half-hour documentary style program covering a single subject each episode.

Georgina Davies, the current executive producer who joined the program in 2015, says it is a privilege to helm the program as it marks its 40th anniversary. She notes that in the digital age of instant access to so much information, the program has had to be agile in how it tells stories.

“Production values have changed and what people want to see has changed,” Davies says.

“We’re getting bombarded with images from people who are shooting stuff on their iPhones and putting it on social media, so it’s not such an exotic, remote novelty to see that footage. We’ve seen that footage on the news. So we want to go deeper and show something else. We want to go behind the headlines.

“For us, it’s become very much about the people. Who are these people? What are they experiencing? How can we relate to them? Our stories have become very character driven.”

However it’s done, the Dateline legacy of storytelling traverses genres and eras that have left their mark on viewers and reporting teams alike.

“The highlight of my career,” is how Vatsikopoulos describes her years with the program.

“You got to see history changing.”

Dateline returns to SBS on Tuesday, 9.30pm.

The Head On Photo Festival exhibition will be at UTS, Sydney, in early November.

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