Why are there so many Aussie camera operators in war zones?

It is Firdos Square in 2003, US marines are streaming into Baghdad, and Andrew “Killa” Kilrain has positioned himself so that when the statue of Saddam Hussein is toppled over, it lands just yards in front of him. Moments later, he captures a defining image of the Iraq War: joyous Iraqis jumping up and down on the bronze effigy of the deposed dictator.

It is the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2004, and Nik Millard is flying on board a US Black Hawk medivac helicopter as it rescues a young girl named Camilla, who has just stepped on a landmine. When the chopper gets back to base, he films inside the operating theatre as a US surgeon uses an electric saw to amputate the lower half of her leg.

It is Aleppo in 2012, a city besieged by the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, and Darren Conway is filming an eight-year-old boy called Mohammed,
who has shrapnel wounds all over the body after his home came under indiscriminate artillery fire. Next to Mohammed is the body of his brother, who was killed in the onslaught.

It is Lower Manhattan, less than 200 metres from Ground Zero, on Halloween in 2017, and Andrew “Sarge” Herbert is sprinting down the sidewalk as
others flee in the opposite direction. He is racing towards the scene of a terror attack, in which a suspected jihadist, using a rented pickup truck as his weapon, has mown down pedestrians and cyclists on a murderous path towards the 9/11 Memorial.

Darren Conway (left) filming on the frontline in Kharkiv.Credit: Quentin Sommerville

It is central Kyiv in 2022, and as the Ukrainian capital is coming under fire from Vladimir Putin’s war machine, Robbie Wright is manning a television live position in a basement bunker so that correspondents and presenters can tell the world of the Russian president’s crimes against humanity.

When countries go to war, when history is being made, there is a strong likelihood that an Australian is behind the lens capturing these images for posterity. Many of the leading camera operators on the international news circuit travel the world with an emu and kangaroo on their passports. Industry award ceremonies, from the Emmys and Peabodys in New York to the Royal Television Society annual dinner in London, regularly feature recipients who deliver their acceptance speeches with an Aussie twang.

It is hard to imagine major news organisations, such as the BBC, functioning without its antipodean shooters. It is impossible to envisage a war zone or major natural disaster without the presence of an Australian carrying a camera. One of the country’s premium exports over the past four decades has been its camera operators – something that perhaps isn’t widely acknowledged at home. As I write, many are on the ground in Ukraine covering the biggest European land invasion since World War II, and the atrocities flowing from it.

During 25 years as a foreign correspondent with the BBC, I spent much of my career with Australians at my side. So their prominence and proliferation has long been a question of professional and personal fascination. What follows, then, is an attempt to explain why they are so good: putting down in print, conversations that more usually unfold over a beer.

Andrew “Killa” Kilrain recorded Saddam Hussein’s statue being toppled in Baghdad in 2003.

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“It’s not our passports, it’s our backgrounds,” says Nik Millard, who grew up on a wheat and sheep farm 120 kilometres north-east of Albany in Western Australia and went on to become one of the world’s most highly regarded news cameramen (in 2005, he won a Royal Television Society camera operator of the year award, partly for those haunting images of that young Afghan amputee). “When your armoured car is being shelled, and won’t start, it helps if you know how to recharge a battery. I learnt to do that on the farm.”

From an early age, Millard looked upon pictures as a form of escape. As a 12-year-old, he turned his bedroom into a darkroom and tried to learn from greats like the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, a founding member of Magnum Photos – a co-operative set up after World War II by some of the world’s finest lensmen – who believed photo-journalism was the art of capturing what he called “the decisive moment”.

“That was the thing, as a teenager, that kept me sane,” Millard recalls. After studying photography and then moving images at Mount Lawley’s TAFE in Perth, he got his start in television news as a trainee with the Golden West Network in the port town of Bunbury. When GWN tried to reassign him to Kalgoorlie, some 600 kilometres east of Perth and an outback city that could hardly be described as the golden west, he re-evaluated his career options. “I didn’t want to live in the desert, so I told them, ‘I quit.’ ” Aged 22, he sold his car and used the money to buy a one-way ticket to London in 1990. He thought he would be gone a year, but has never returned to live in Australia.

Nik Millard shot footage of an Afghan girl’s leg being amputated.

His departure for Britain coincided with seismic shifts in the media landscape of both countries. Back home in Australia, commercial TV stations had hit the skids, with networks haemorrhaging money and staff. The billionaire Alan Bond was forced to sell Channel Nine back to Kerry Packer for a pittance of the price he’d paid for it only three years prior. “We were the economic refugees of the South Pacific,” says Millard. “Across the industry, jobs were being stripped out.”

Over in Britain, meanwhile, a hard-charging Australian TV executive was in the midst of transforming the UK industry. Bruce Gyngell, the one-time quiz show host usually credited with being the first person to appear on Australian television – “Good evening, and welcome to television”, he said when he appeared on screens in lounge rooms in September 1956, in the run-up to the Melbourne Olympics – had been brought in to save the ailing breakfast television franchise TV-am. Just as Rupert Murdoch had taken on the Fleet Street print unions, Gyngell went to war with the powerful ACTT, the Association of Cinematograph, Television and Allied Technicians.

When technicians mounted a one-day strike about overtime pay, he locked them out for months, a stand that reinforced his status as Margaret Thatcher’s favourite broadcaster. Non-unionised South Africans, Australians and New Zealanders helped keep TV-am on air. Nik Millard arrived in the aftermath of the dispute. “We were treated like scabs early on,” says Millard, who did not cross the picket lines. “But most of us had no idea what had gone on.”

Nik Millard (right) captures a platform farewell in Lviv, Ukraine.Credit:

If Britain’s industrial relations battles opened up what had long been a closed shop, it was the conflicts of the post-Cold War era that brought Australian cameramen to the fore. Millard got his big break during the first Gulf War, after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990. For others, it was Bosnia. Ian Cartwright, another cameraman who grew up on a farm and started out at a small regional TV station in NSW, spent years chronicling the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in his 20s, with all the bloodshed and war crimes it involved. “Those were the days when you just had to poke your camera outside of the front door of the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo, and you would be in sniper alley.”

Many of the cameramen who covered the Bosnian war operated out of Cyprus, and signed up to a company called Newsforce, which contracted crews to the major networks. Though founded by a South African, Newsforce was staffed predominantly by Australians. “One Aussie cameraman told his mate about it, and he told another one, and before you knew it, it seemed as if half of Australia was there,” says Cartwright, who is known for his larrikin charm. There was a strong sense of esprit de corps, what the Aussies simply called mateship. “We all looked out for each other and we all looked after each other,” he says.

The pool system that operated in Sarajevo, where news organisations shared footage because of the dangers of sending multiple camera teams into
the field, heightened the sense of camaraderie. “If someone did something brilliant, it was kudos to them,” remembers Cartwright, “but the footage was shared with everyone.” The three-year conflict showcased what the Aussie crews could do. For as is so often the case in television news, the worst of times produced the finest work. “We all realised that we could do our best work, and still be decent human beings,” says Cartwright.

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“Yugoslavia changed the story,” says David Butorac, who started his career as a cameraman in Western Australia before trading his boots for the suits of senior management. Back in the late 1980s, Butorac was part of the team that launched Sky News in Britain, where he was put in charge of its camera crews.

“When I arrived in the UK, I just didn’t think the standard of the BBC and ITV camerawork was that good,” he recalls. Too much stock footage – the exterior shots of buildings, for instance, which are such a mainstay of television news bulletins – was filmed “off the shoulder” rather than on a tripod. The framing was often unimaginative and lazy. “We just had higher standards,” he says. “We had higher expectations.”

The apprentice culture in Aussie newsrooms, where craft skills were handed down in an almost paternal way by senior cameraman, was key. “There wasn’t a formal training, as such,” says Butorac, “but there was a strong tradition of learning off others.”

Intense internal competition between crews, a friendly daily battle for bragging rights, also raised the bar. When he started out in WA, Butorac remembers how shooters sent up in the station’s news chopper would compete to get the most original cutaway shot of the pilot, one of the few ways to differentiate their footage from their peers. Sometimes this meant hanging off the skids of the helicopter and filming, one-handed, through the front windscreen.

These regional newsrooms were tough boot camps. Millard remembers his first day out on the road with the Golden West Network. “I did 10 ‘pull focuses’ and nothing else,” he remembers, referring to the artsy camera technique, used sparingly in news, where the focus changes mid-shot to reveal a person or object as the subject of attention. “They told me, ‘If you do that again, you’ll be fired.’ You had to learn fast. We would film two stories in the morning, and edit three in the afternoon. You either crashed and burned, or you survived and moved on.”

Ian Cartwright was a graduate of the same school of hard knocks. “Working in a little TV station, you’d do all the shooting, all the editing, and sometimes you would end up doing all the timings for the program and sometimes operating the camera in the studio. It wasn’t just a case of getting the story, it was following the entire process until it went to air. And that was our focus: getting things to air.”

Multiskilling was key: the ability not only to film and edit reports, but to look after the sound and lighting as well.

Multiskilling was key: the ability not only to film and edit reports, but to look after the sound and lighting as well. British and American newsrooms tended to be single-skilled. Australians were more ambidextrous. They were used to being a camera operator, sound man, lighting technician and video editor all in one. For the bean counters back at base, these one-man bands were manna from heaven. Many correspondents on the ground also liked working in smaller, more nimble teams.

The resourcefulness of the Aussie camera crews was a given. So, too, their bravery. Most of them enjoyed a beer at the end of a hard day, and were fun to have around. But these guys – and they were almost exclusively guys – weren’t caricature-like figures: Mick Dundee with a camera and tripod. Most were masters of their craft. Many could make the grade as movie cinematographers.

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Darren Conway – “DC,” as he is known throughout the industry – is famed for putting to air television reports that are so stylishly filmed and edited that they look like they could have been directed by Ridley Scott or Kathryn Bigelow, who won an Oscar for The Hurt Locker. Some of the most impactful work to come out of Syria during that country’s ongoing civil war has been filmed by Conway. In recent years, he has also produced some superlative reports on the Mexican drug cartels, and shone a spotlight on how narcotics smuggled across its southern border have fuelled America’s opioid crisis.

Presently, he is on assignment in Ukraine, where his first piece, on the frontline in Kharkiv with the BBC’s Quentin Sommerville, had many of his hallmarks. It started with an exquisitely filmed night patrol alongside Ukrainian soldiers hunting down saboteurs. Then they journeyed into the no man’s land on the outskirts of Kyiv between the Ukrainian and Russian frontlines, where they found bodies of Russian soldiers, frozen in the snow and left for the dogs.

Darren Conway filming with Free Syrian Army fighters outside Aleppo.Credit:

The Queenslander was on course to becoming an AFL player before a broken leg brought a premature end to a promising career. Since then, he’s brought the same determination and competitive edge he displayed on the footy field to his camerawork. This I have seen up close. Working in Chicago with Conway a few years back on a story about opioids and gangs, I thought we’d got some extraordinary footage after spending time on the streets of the South Side with some pistol-toting drug dealers. But “DC” did not stop until he had filmed inside a drug den and from the back seat of a cocaine dealer’s SUV. These rarely captured sequences elevated our report to a different plain.

It is a winning methodology. Many news teams begin with a wish list of what they would ideally like to film, knowing – and grudgingly accepting – they will likely fall short. Shooters like Conway and Millard do not stop until they have ticked off every one. They just don’t settle. Conway not only has a string of awards to his name, but also an OBE, granted in recognition of his services to British broadcast journalism. “Our entire reason for doing our job is about giving a voice to others,” he said in 2014, when he received his award from Prince Charles at Buckingham Palace, “so having something focused on yourself is a little bit out of the ordinary.”

Darren Conway (behind the camera) in Kharkiv, Ukraine with BBC reporter Quentin Sommerville (right).Credit:

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It is not just their craft skills. Aussie crews tend to bring a certain mindset to bear. A “brash honesty” is how Allen McGreevy describes it. McGreevy, who is now based in Washington, got his start as an 18-year-old with the ABC in Darwin. A trainee sound recordist, his first big story came when they heard in the newsroom that a dingo had taken a baby from a campsite in the shadow of Uluru. The Azaria Chamberlain story dominated the next seven years of his life.

He left Australia in the 1990s to work for Sky News and later the BBC. “We don’t hold back,” he says, especially with headstrong correspondents who like to dictate where, say, they should film their pieces to camera, the 15 seconds or so that they appear on screen. “We’re ready to tell them, ‘Yeah, mate, you can look like a dick, or we can make you look good.’ We’re not just going to sit in an edit suite and not offer any advice. We’ll say if we think the story is going in the wrong direction.”

These guys are usually so steeped in the history and culture of the patches they cover that often they have a better understanding of the story than the correspondents and producers alongside them.

I can attest to the value of their tutelage. On the shoreline of Boston Harbour, while we were covering the Catholic Church paedophile scandal in 2002, Ian Cartwright showed me how to do a walking piece to camera, something I’d done very haltingly and woodenly hitherto. When I was a young correspondent in Washington covering the Clinton and Bush administrations, Allen McGreevy demonstrated the manic speed you can work at when faced with a hellish deadline.

In Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the other trouble spots of South Asia, Nik Millard taught me about the grammar of television, and the marrying of words and pictures. These guys are usually so steeped in the history and culture of the patches they cover that often they have a better understanding of the story than the correspondents and producers alongside them.

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What has always come as a surprise to me is how many of the Aussie crews came out of Parliament House, which seemed like an unlikely nursery of talent. In fact, there is something of a Canberra cabal. DC was there. So, too, Ian Cartwright, Allen McGreevy, Andrew Kilrain, the cameraman who shot the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue, and John Landy and Ian Druce, two more brilliant shooters now based in Washington. But if you can make something as ugly as a parliamentary sitting week look beautiful, then the world is your oyster.

“Often we had nothing to work with, especially when Parliament wasn’t sitting,” recalls McGreevy, who started in the ABC bureau before moving to Network Ten with its then political editor, Kerry O’Brien. “You had to make something out of nothing.”

Travelling overseas on prime ministerial visits also gave many of them a taste for international travel – as well as the Grange that used to be served on the VIP Boeing 707. McGreevy’s first international trip with Bob Hawke took them to Honolulu, San Diego, San Francisco, Vancouver, Dublin, Geneva, Dubrovnik, Belgrade and finally Mumbai. By the time the press pack returned home, it was estimated that six cases of Australia’s most celebrated shiraz had been consumed.

Most of the modern-day crews, rather than seeing themselves as trailblazers, recognise the debt they owe to industry giants from the past. All of them were inspired by the legendary Hobart-born cameraman Neil Davis, who established his international reputation during the Vietnam War, and became one of the only shooters to capture the Vietcong’s triumphant entry into Saigon in 1975. “One crowded hour of glorious life is worth an age without a name” became his personal motto, a line penned by the British officer and poet Thomas Osbert Mordaunt during the 1756-63 Seven Years’ War between Britain and France. It was scribbled into the flyleaf of every notebook he kept.

After an illustrious career, which started with the ABC and ended with the US network NBC, Davis was killed, aged 51, on the streets of Bangkok in 1985 while filming a short-lived coup attempt by the Thai military. A tank he was filming fired directly at him and his American sound man, Bill Latch, who also lost his life. Davis’s memorial service was held at an NBC TV studio at the Rockefeller Centre in New York. Even Walter Cronkite, from rival network CBS, came to pay his respects.

Over the years I have developed various pet theories about why my Aussie colleagues are so good. Learning to shoot in the glare of the Australian summer was surely an advantage, as the lighting conditions in most other countries are nowhere near as harsh. A lot of them are sporty, which helps in war zones and press scrums. During my posting in New York, we regularly used to find ourselves in aggressive Big Apple free-for-alls, whether for the arrival of Harvey Weinstein during his sexual assault trial or court appearances from Donald Trump’s one-time paramour, the porn actress Stormy Daniels. But I always felt confident that “Sarge” Herbert, my Aussie cameraman, would emerge with the best shots. He not only moved quicker than the others, he also out-gamed them – no mean feat for a cameraman who had spent decades working in hot spots such as Bosnia and the Middle East.

Andrew Herbert filming Nick Bryant on the day Broadway shut down because of COVID.Credit:

Yet I suspect there is an alternative explanation, one not always associated with Australian men. Most have a level of emotional intelligence and empathy that regularly sets them apart. Most of them are fully fledged global citizens, who often establish a personal connection with the people whose lives they are chronicling. I have seen this in the gentle way that Nik Millard treated that poor Afghan girl, Camilla, as she learned to live with a new prosthetic limb. I have seen it in Darren Conway, with the sensitivity he has shown towards the bereaved families of the opioid epidemic. I have seen it in “Sarge” Herbert, in the respectful manner he filmed proud New Yorkers queueing up at soup kitchens at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

The finest foreign correspondents are always the most empathetic correspondents. The same is true of the men and women behind the lens. Those traits have been on display in Ukraine these past few weeks, in one of the most epic and heartrending stories of our age. At the railway station in Lviv, Nik Millard filmed families trying to flee the country, capturing the moments when mothers and children were forced to bid platform farewells to their husbands and fathers. On the road into Kharkiv, after a marathon drive across the length of Ukraine, Darren Conway noticed a car had broken down with a family inside. Even though they were rushing to get to their destination, he told his convoy to come to a halt so they could push the stranded car up a hill, and help the family reach safety.

Like so many other journalists from so many other countries, they are documenting Putin’s war crimes, and doing what they can to help ease the suffering of his victims.

This has been so tragically underscored by the killing of the American journalist Brent Renaud, who was shot by Russian forces in the town of Irpin on the fringes of Kyiv, and the deaths of Fox News cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski and Ukrainian producer Oleksandra Kuvshynova, whose vehicle was struck by incoming fire from Russian tanks. All of them were bearing witness, and for that we owe them a debt of thanks.

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