The February 15 Editon

Despite these fractured media times, there are certain moments burnt into our collective memory from watching them unfold in real time on television. Stuart Diver being pulled from the rubble 65 hours after the 1997 Thredbo landslide. Two Beaconsfield miners emerging in 2006, two weeks after a gold mine collapsed around them. Peter Greste arriving home in 2015 after 400 days spent in an Egyptian jail. And the rescue of a dozen school boys from a flooded Thai cave in 2018. Each of these events captured the public imagination, and it’s interesting to ponder their similarities. Each started with a sudden, terrible event that garnered publicity. Each involved an agonising waiting game. And each ended with a deliriously happy, one-in-a-million outcome that few had dared imagine possible. In each case, too, many of us could not help but wonder how we would cope in such a situation. Richard Roxburgh has certainly let his mind go there: he’s playing Greste in an upcoming film, The Correspondent, about the Australian journalist’s incarceration. In today’s cover story, the pair speak to David Leser about recreating that torrid time. Editor, Katrina Strickland