How a 10-year-old boy captured one of Melbourne’s most tragic images

UDO Rockmann was just 10 when he snapped this photo of one the most tragic events in Melbourne- and he sold it for $100 and an ice cream.

Aerial view of the collapse, which killed 35 workers.

UDO Rockmann was 10 when took a photograph of one of the biggest and most tragic events that Melbourne has ever seen – and he sold it for $100 and an ice cream.

He was in Grade 5 at Carnegie Primary School and just 10 years old when he witnessed what remains Australia’s most deadly industrial accident – the collapse of the West Gate Bridge – on October 15, 1970.

Young Udo was on the Fishermans Bend side of the Yarra River as his school group stopped for lunch.

He had the presence of mind to point and shoot with his camera as the 2000-tonne span snapped loose and fell 45 metres to earth across the river with a sickening crash and a pall of smoke and dust.

Thirty-five construction workers died as the mangled concrete and steel crashed into the river and mud flats, and 18 more were hurt.

Moments earlier, he took a shot of the bridge, with the span intact, and was about to snap a picture of a seagull when he heard the span give way.

“So I turned around and took a second picture of the bridge when it hit the ground, and then the plumes of dust were still rising a few minutes later and I took a third photo,” Mr Rockmann told AAP in 2005, 35 years after the disaster.

“The camera was rewound. It was all set and I just took the picture.”

The front page of The Sun featuring Mr Rockmann’s photo.

The image ran on the front page of the Sun News-Pictorial the next morning and was beamed around the world.

Udo was paid $100 for the shot - the average Victorian man’s wage was $86.50 at the time.

He was also shouted an ice cream for his scoop picture.

Aerial view of the collapse, which killed 35 workers.

Rescue operation: 18 workers were hurt in the collapse.

Mr Rockmann, now a communications engineer living interstate, said he still feels guilty about smiling in a photo that was taken of him with his camera after the tragedy.

“It should have been a sombre expression but I was too young to know what was going on,” he said.

He said he was also “too young and too far away” to be directly affected by the trauma of the disaster at the time, but its enormity hit home when, in 1995, he met three survivors as part of a television program on the accident.

The twisted wreck is scoured by rescue crews.

Survivor Bob Setka and his family at the memorial park dedicated to those who perished.

“Talking about it brings back some memories,” he said.

“That meeting was the first time it affected me emotionally but it’s probably affected some of my thinking.

“After the Royal Commission (into the cause of the bridge disaster) showed the human error of it, all the engineering mistakes, now, as a communications engineer, it’s affected my work ethic through my life.

“Anything to do with engineering or safety or security has to be done properly.”

Mr Rockmann left Melbourne with his family in 1975.

He said he has travelled over the West Gate Bridge, which opened in October 1978, but he never returned to the spot where he took his famous photo.