News on hold in the scramble for life

WHEN cameraman Richard Moran heard the desperate cry of a baby girl beneath the rubble in Haiti, he put down his camera and started to dig.

HE is the only Australian TV cameraman ever to win the Gold Walkley for journalism but when Richard Moran heard the soft, desperate cry of a baby girl beneath the rubble in Haiti, he put down his camera and started to dig.

"He was up to his waist, lifting out pieces of concrete," says Nine Network reporter Robert Penfold, who was with him.

"And then, out of the ruins came this little girl, and I will never forget it. She did not cry. She looked astonished, almost as if she was seeing the world for the first time".

The world's media has since run big on the story of "the Australian news team" that helped rescued her.

Confusing local viewers, however, was that both Nine and its rival, Seven, were saying they helped bring the little girl out, and the footage seen around the world was indeed of Seven's Mike Amor, standing above the hole in the ground.

He reaches forward to take the dusty little girl, pours water over her head to clear away dust, and then gives her something to drink.

Nine doesn't have that footage, and its team was yesterday feeling a bit of the kick in the guts that good journalists get when rivals have exclusive footage of something so marvellous but, as Amor himself said: "That moment, it was beyond news.

"The focus of everybody on that hill was the little girl, and as any of us will tell you, it was Deiby who went into that hole, and dug, and dug, until he got that little girl out. He's the hero."

Deiby Celestino is the Nine Network's fixer (interpreter, and sometime security guy).

He had gone "up the hill" (meaning, to an area outside Port-au-Prince, where many homes were destroyed) with the Nine team, because Save the Children promised to make an Australian aid worker available for interviews. Seven was there, too.

While they were waiting, locals told them they could hear a baby crying under the rubble.

"We walked perhaps 3m across this hillside of completely collapsed homes," says Penfold.

"We had to walk over sheets of tin, and then climb up over concrete, and then jump down, on to another slab of concrete, to where four men were standing, pointing, and you could hear crying, from somewhere underneath."

Moran, who won the highest award for journalism, the Gold Walkley, in 2003 for his coverage of the Canberra bushfires, put his camera with a microphone attached into a cavity, and Penfold said: "It was gut-wrenching.

"There were slabs of concrete all around, and we couldn't see what we could do, and at the same time, we couldn't walk away."

He said Deiby, "who is this short, wiry, muscly guy", said "I think I can get in there" and down he went.

Mr Celestino told The Australian: "I could hear her . . . I had to keep going."

He called out in Creole "Come to me?" and then, out of the darkness, the 18-month-old's face emerged.

Of seeing the toddler emerge from the rubble, Amor said: "I haven't seen anything so remarkable since the birth of my own child. "The emotion for all of us has been incredible."