Haunted by the Boxing Day tsunami, Ray Martin faces his fears

In all that Ray Martin has seen during his six decades covering news and current affairs around Australia and abroad, there is one story that has haunted him.

In Banda Aceh in 2004, reporting for A Current Affair on the annihilation of the Indonesian island where the Boxing Day Tsunami first struck, Martin interviewed a man riding a bicycle around what was left of a village square, with two crying toddlers in a makeshift sidecar. His name was Yunan, he was a carpenter and his wife and daughter had been on the beach that day.

“He didn’t know how he was going to survive,” Martin recalls. “It’s easy to show the landscape but you can’t show how devastated people’s hearts are.”

Ray Martin in Banda Aceh for Tsunami: 20 Years On, a documentary marking the anniversary of one of the worst natural disasters in history.

Twenty years later, when Martin was asked by the Nine Network to return to Banda Aceh for Tsunami: 20 Years On, a documentary marking the anniversary of one of the worst natural disasters in history that killed an estimated 230,000 people across South-East Asia, and includes revisits to the region by Australian survivors and aid workers, he jumped at the chance.

“It had been on my bucket list,” he says. “I really wanted to go back and see how people are and, again, I was amazed.”

What struck him the first time around, arriving to apocalyptic scenes on New Year’s Eve with a film crew of three, was the spirit of the Achinese.

“They are the gentlest, kindest people,” he says. “Even in the chaos and the horrors that we flew into, they were able to greet you when you came by with the cameras – to shake hands, to embrace you, to try and share their plate of rice. And then when you sit and talk, and you find out that a bloke sweeping out his shop had lost his wife and children and his mother and sisters all in one fell swoop – and somehow he still had this milk of human kindness.”

Ray Martin with Fahmi, who Martin first met as a toddler in the aftermath of the tsunami.

A keen photographer, Martin says the images he captured back then helped him process what he was seeing. Years later, they bring back strong emotions, as well as “the smell of death and destruction”.

“It’s like nothing else … And it’s the minutiae, of photo albums opened underwater. It’s kids’ dolls. It’s scooters. It’s teddy bears that are lost,” he says. “There was a three-storey building that we had to pass every day to get to where we were staying and there was a man who’d been effectively strung up [by the water] on the top. There were plenty of people on the ground left to recover and they finally got to him. It was like he’d been in the gallows up there. Of course, we didn’t film it and we would never show it. You’re reporting in a more acceptable way for an Australian audience. But it was these constant reminders around the place.”

Martin credits “black Australian jokes” with helping the crew get through the experience. That, and counselling offered by the network.

“I’d seen wars before and dead bodies over the years,” he says. “Not that you get steeled to it because the next one could suddenly turn you, but we were conscious that we had to be of service rather than participants.”

This time around, with a Leica SL2 camera around his neck, Martin found a “humble, human” place that bore no resemblance to the “hellhole” he remembered. He reunited with the family that had hosted the crew in the shattered building that had served as the media headquarters. And there was a surprise waiting for him when, with the help of TikTok, he tracked down Yunan, the man on the bicycle.

“The resilience of people, that’s the enduring impact on me,” he says. “Fred Hollows, the greatest person I ever met, used to say, the only thing that makes us different from animals is that we have the capacity to care. I think what the world showed at that time was that capacity. People cared.”

Tsunami: 20 Years On airs on Sunday, December 8, at 7pm on Nine, the owner of this masthead.

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