NOT just the number of deaths can elevate a tragic news story from a back, left-hander on to the front page, although the scale of any event naturally plays a part.
2009
Black Saturday
It is often the circumstances.
Australians saw this with tragic clarity in the first weeks of 2009 with front-page reports in The Australian, both from Victoria and just days apart. One was a shocking, unprecedented single murder; the other as unimaginable as the sorrows that came with it.
Most families are their usual, uneventful selves, even when ruptured by separation or divorce; but occasionally either can unleash unmeasured fury.
In January, Arthur Freeman, a nondescript, 35-year-old IT specialist from Melbourne’s well-to-do leafy inner eastern suburbs, set out on marital revenge against Peta Barnes, from whom he had separated two years earlier.
On what should have been their daughter Darcey’s first day of school, and just days shy of her fifth birthday, he drove up Melbourne’s Westgate Bridge with the couple’s three children.
Parking his Toyota LandCruiser off to the side and switching on its hazard warning lights — he wanted no harm to come to sons Benjamin, 6, and Jackson, 2 — Freeman plucked his trusting, beautiful daughter from her seat and threw her over the edge.
She fell 58m into the shallows at the edge of the Yarra River and died later in hospital. She had drowned. The Australian reported that her brother Ben later told a court later that his sister did not scream. “Nothing, nothing, nothing,” he recalled. “Then I said (to Dad), ‘Darcey can’t swim’ ... and then Dad would just keep on driving, didn’t go back to get her.”
It's just as bad a day as you can imagine, and on top of that the state is tinder dry ... it's a seriously bad day.
Early radio and television broadcasts of this tragedy — incomprehensible to almost every Australian — stopped newsrooms across the country as they navigated unknown territory: how do you carry on working while trying to absorb such indigestible facts?
Black Saturday
Days later those same newsrooms went to work dealing with the greatest peacetime loss of life in Australia. And didn’t miss a beat. Bushfires claim lives in Australia every year. Everyone understands that. Nonetheless, this would be a day like no other.
Victorians had been told so. The day before anyone had reason to invent the term Black Saturday, premier John Brumby warned that conditions for the following 24 hours would be similar to or worse than Ash Wednesday and 1939’s Black Friday.
Saturday’s newspapers reported that he even warned against travel unless it was absolutely necessary. “It’s just as bad a day as you can imagine, and on top of that the state is tinder dry … it’s a seriously bad day.”
173 killed
Newsrooms went to work dealing with the greatest peacetime loss of life in Australia.
The premier then headed to his country farm. Emergency services minister Bob Cameron headed home to Bendigo. Infamously, Victoria’s chief commissioner of police Christine Nixon spent time on Saturday having her hair done, chatting to her biographer and, at the height of the fires, going to a pub for dinner, and for some hours neither made nor received a single call.
“What really struck me about it as an outsider,” recalls The Australian’s editor-in-chief, Chris Mitchell, “(was that) everyone had known that the firestorm from hell was possible.
“It was almost like Victoria marched into this catastrophe without anyone seeing that it was coming. And yet there’d been so much warning about it.”
We soon knew that 173 lives were lost on Saturday, February 9. There were 400 fires, but a single firestorm northeast of Melbourne claimed 120 lives.
That would have been 123 had not The Australian’s Gary Hughes and his family made a remarkable escape, which he described the following day. It is one of the most powerful pieces of Australian journalism ever published. It will be republished this Saturday in the 50th anniversary collector’s edition magazine, which will feature the best writing and photographs from five decades.
Hughes won the Gold Walkley and the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year Award for words judge Les Carlyon said “put smoke in the nostrils of readers and weight in their hearts”.
2009: Kinglake fire0:49
One resident returns to his home to discover his neighbours were killed in the 2009 Kinglake fire.
Michael Jackson dies
The passing of a man seldom far from front pages around the world was big news in June. As The Australian’s music writer Iain Shedden explained, “almost everybody has a Michael Jackson moment in their head — a song, a performance or a lurid headline”.
“Living with a monkey, inviting children to watch movies in your bed and changing the structure and complexion of your face are not crimes, necessarily, but they did Jackson no favours in terms of allowing him to enjoy his fame in public other than as some kind of freak,” Shedden wrote.
Weeks later, brain cancer claimed the last of the Kennedy brothers, Edward, aged 77.
The Australian stated that Kennedy had seen “the outcome of his intensely American belief in equality of opportunity come true with the election of Barack Obama. A black president fighting for healthcare reform, one of his enduring objectives, is Senator Kennedy’s epitaph. It is one to honour.”
Holsworthy terror plot
What first seemed a modest tip-off to The Australian’s associate editor Cameron Stewart about some Somalian refugees perhaps funding terrorists in the Horn of Africa rapidly spiralled into one of the biggest stories of the year.
It would cost the informant — Victorian senior constable Simon Artz — his job, and indirectly lead to the resignation of the state police’s chief commissioner, Simon Overland.
Artz knew only part of the fast moving story. Ultimately, the Australian Federal Police, ASIO and Victoria Police were closing in on a plan to launch a suicide attack on Sydney’s Holsworthy army base to kill as many Australian soldiers as possible.
Stewart knew some raids were planned, but not the Holsworthy angle. When he called the AFP for comment, he sensed tension. It was a much bigger story. He and editor Paul Whittaker were asked, and agreed, to hold the story. A deal was struck that in the final edition of The Australian on August 4, Stewart’s report could be published. It was. The raids proceeded without a hitch, but Overland knew nothing of the deal and lashed out furiously that police had been exposed to danger.
But it was the AFP, not Artz, who had “leaked” the story. Overland’s Office of Police Integrity attacked The Australian in a document that sought greater curbs on media reporting of issues of national security.
Mitchell dismissed the report as the “greatest corruption of truth I have seen in an official document in 18 years as a daily newspaper editor”. The facts vindicated the newspaper as Overland faced bushfires of his own making closer to home.
Tony Abbott rises
Towards the end of the year the newspaper reported that the Nationals had turned on Liberal leader Malcolm Turnbull. Senior Nationals had told its reporters that Turnbull was running a “one-way Coalition” and needed to negotiate any carbon emissions trading scheme with them.
Weeks earlier Turnbull had been humiliated when an email purportedly showing that prime minister Kevin Rudd’s office had sought special treatment for a friend’s car dealership proved to be fake. The Australian scored an exclusive interview with senior Treasury official Godwin Grech, who admitted he had forged the document.
A challenge to Turnbull’s leadership became inevitable in late November when the Coalition fractured over his willingness to negotiate with Labor for an ETS. Newspoll showed Joe Hockey was favoured to defeat Turnbull, but he failed at the first ballot and in the second Tony Abbott emerged victorious by a single vote in a big win for the conservative wing of the Liberal Party.
The Australian’s editorial next day stated: “Mr Abbott’s election gives the Liberal Party an opportunity to regroup and present itself anew to the electorate as an alternative to Labor.”
Look up there, it’s a woman!
Aviation legend Nancy Bird Walton dies on January 13, aged 93. Taught to fly by another air pioneer Char
Saving capitalism from itself
Kevin Rudd has a 7000-word plan to use the power of the state to rescue capitalism.
Uplifting Beginnings
Hopes are high as Barack Obama is inaugurated as US President in January.
A complex man
Billionaire packaging tycoon and philanthropist Richard Pratt dies on April 28 at his Raheen mansion in Melbourne, surrounded by his family, a day after criminal charges against him are dropped.
An Eyre full
It begins as a monsoonal deluge in distant Queensland, flooding the channel country, isolating towns, and filling rivers and creeks that have not run for years. Now in late February it arrives at Lake Eyre. It is s the moment of magic when the flood empties into Australia’s dead centre.
The journey begins...
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Joh aims high, falls low
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A new epoch takes shape
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Hold the front page ...
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The republic can wait
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Sorry before the Games
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Blood and tears in Bali
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Where there is smoke…
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Playing their last innings
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Not what they seemed
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He shall not be moved
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Scene set for a knockout
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Balm for a nation’s soul
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Shock, horror, disbelief
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Suddenly, Julia steps in
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The nastiest deluge of all
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It’s the whole dam truth
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Clash course in politics
THREE PMs starred in our longest election year.
The next half century beckons
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