Storyteller Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Nan.

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  PICTURE SECTION

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  PROLOGUE

  April 2010

  I push open the car door and hear the first shot. Blanks or live rounds, I wonder, as the five of us tumble out, heads cocked towards the sound. We dither, or at least I do, the others waiting for my call. Eventually our cameraman, David Leland, loses patience. ‘Well, come on, are we going or not?’

  Only a few weeks ago I was a stay-at-home mum. What am I doing? But there’s no time for reconsideration now. My brain snaps into action and so does my mouth. ‘Flak jackets, helmets, gas masks – everyone, now!’

  David and I are with our Thai producer, Jum, who’s tiny but a powerhouse in the bureau, and Paul Gates, our unflappable Aussie producer. Our driver, Khun Tu, has parked the car off the main drag, a recent work-survival course dictating my instructions to him. Park rear-end to the kerb, check. Out of the line of fire, check. Plan an escape route … um, sort of.

  Poor guy, I think, as the rest of us head counter-intuitively towards the gunshots. He’s new.

  But then, so am I.

  I’m the new correspondent appointed to cover Southeast Asia for the ABC. I’m not inexperienced – I used to be the correspondent in Africa – but I’m a little rusty. I’ve just had three years off. Well, three years off paid work, bringing up two babies. I left Africa pregnant and with a view that being a war correspondent was no longer something I aspired to, but I’ve arrived in Bangkok on the brink of the worst civil unrest in years. The city is about to become a battleground.

  Emerging from the lane where our car is parked, we peer in the direction of the gunfire, up the major four-lane road that leads to the city’s shopping district. For a moment it looks like any busy road at lunchtime, but in an instant everything changes. Thai army trucks loaded with soldiers scream around the corner. Cars reverse away from them at speed or U-turn across the median strip, fleeing back the way they’ve come. Motorbikes pivot on their rear ends.

  The soldiers have come to move anti-government protestors who’ve been locking down the city centre for weeks. Using tear gas and warning gunfire, the soldiers start working their way up the thoroughfare. Everyone, including us, turns and runs. We’re caught in a surging mass of people rushing away from the military towards the city. David is leading the way, followed by Paul, who’s lugging the tripod, me with the radio gear and finally Jum, slowed down by her oversized bulletproof vest.

  Ducking in and out of alcoves, we scurry along the footpath, David picking off the occasional shot with the camera, me urging Jum to hurry and worrying that she’ll get hurt. She’s a recently widowed mum, and the thought of her son becoming an orphan torments me. Sheltering in the lee of the Japanese embassy blast wall, I take some gear from her and she giggles, her combat helmet wobbling. She’s much braver than me, but I smile too.

  We catch up with the others a few hundred metres ahead of the soldiers, who have blocked off the road. They’re still firing tear gas but the wind is in our favour. We’re out of range. Still, when I see David filming in the middle of the road, I screech at him to take some cover. Far cooler and more experienced than me, he replies that if we’re going to report on this, he needs to get the shot. Fair point. I shut up.

  Dozens of onlookers warily monitor the soldiers. Shopkeepers mutter and shake their heads, then pull down and lock clunky metal shutters and retreat into their shop-houses.

  There’s a whoosh and burst of heat – a police bus has been torched right in front of us. We shoot a couple of pieces for our TV news bulletins. ‘A bus has been set on fire, presumably by protestors,’ I blurt down the camera lens. ‘It’s caught electrical wires above. People are just standing around; there are so many civilians here. Fire trucks are moving in, and yet behind us we still have the army setting off tear gas canisters, setting up razor wire … And this is Bangkok at midday …’

  Other media arrive just as we start to feel as if we’ve overstayed. While some journalists set up to film on the road in front of us with the soldiers approaching, I look at my watch: deadline looming. We jump into the car, which the driver has manoeuvred around the back streets into a safer spot as per the escape plan, drive to the office and file. Later we hear that one of the journalists who was setting up metres from us has been shot. He’s alive but badly hurt.

  The afternoon and evening are punctuated by the distant booms of gunfire and firecrackers as the protestors wind up the soldiers. It’s pretty clear that the unrest is going to get worse. Around 1 a.m. I lie down on my office floor. The adrenaline chases sleep away, but so does the heartache. In the three years since I had my first child I’ve barely been away from my family. Now I’m locked in a blacked-out office building waiting for a city to explode.

  ONE

  August 2004

  I’m at Ancient Olympia, Greece, sitting on a grassy hillside watching shot-put, when I get the phone call deploying me to Africa. Keeping an eye on the sport, which I’m monitoring as part of ABC Radio’s Olympics coverage, I call my husband, Rowan. ‘Are you still up for Joburg?’ I whisper casually.

  ‘Holy shit,’ he shouts up the line from Melbourne. ‘You got it!’

  Rowan and I had a deal when we got married: before babies, a foreign posting. It seemed that the two couldn’t co-exist. The ABC had rarely had a correspondent who was also a mum. Since our wedding we’d been in a kind of limbo, waiting for the elusive job that’s slipped through my fingers a number of times.

  ‘You’re just lacking gravitas, Zoe,’ a manager once said to me kindly. I promptly went and looked it up in the dictionary, sighed, sulked and then tried to work out how to get a deeper voice and more cred.

  Many of my female friends were in the same twilight zone, and some gave up. It just didn’t happen fast enough: they settled down, found partners, bought houses, had babies, decided it was too complicated, got a life.

  Although I applied for other jobs, in London, Moscow and Jakarta, I somehow knew that I would end up in Africa. Partly it was the Heart of Darkness mystique: I’d developed a fascination with the place while reading my dad’s Wilbur Smith novels on the rainy afternoons of my Tasmanian childhood. Plus, I’ve always been a tomboy – an outdoorsy, horseriding kid who became a rural reporter for the ABC. Experience living and working in country Australia translates pretty well to Africa. In both places, the closest technical help is often at a desk in Sydney, so if you can’t fix something yourself, it’s usually going to stay broken.

  Rowan and I pack up and head to Johannesburg, where the social division is still vast. We live behind electric fences and steel doors, and have a metal-barred ‘rape gate’ between our bedroom and the rest of the house that we padlock at night. We soon become used to locking the car doors on journeys and checking the mirrors in case thieves are following. Stopping at red lights at night is a no-no because of the risk of carjacking. One friend is robbed at gunpoint while riding home on his bicycle. Others wake up to find a gang of men armed with AK-47s st
anding around their bed. It’s stuff that sounds like urban myth but armed robbery, carjacking and home invasion are all commonplace in Joburg, yet our friends survive and stay and so do we.

  In spite of its flaws Johannesburg has a vibrant edginess. Once the security safeguards have become second nature, our love for the place quickly overtakes fear of becoming victims of crime.

  I spend most of my time reporting in the townships, talking to people about their lives during apartheid, their blinding hope, and their disappointment that poverty has not gone away. Political division between black and white has been replaced by economic apartheid between rich and poor. We’re part of that. Workdays are spent in the shanty towns where AIDS is horribly prevalent and millions live in makeshift corrugated-iron shacks, but I drive a Volvo to and from the office, and our lovely house and quiet street are in the upper-middle-class, mostly white enclave of Parkhurst. It’s a suburb that could easily be transplanted into any Australian capital city, apart from the electric fences and high walls, but against the vibrancy of the townships it’s sterile and lacks a sense of community.

  One of these townships is the big squatter camp of Alexandra, a notoriously risky area where I often film in the afternoons, just as the sun turns to gold. Peter, the ABC office manager, and I are always surrounded by smiling, laughing kids; him doing crowd control as I shoot, pressing record and then running around and standing in front of the lens as you do when you film your own stories. It’s hard to blurt out a decent take before a kid runs in front of the camera or jumps behind me and pulls a face. Of course they think it’s a great game.

  Locals come out to watch, the women sweeping the front steps of their tiny homes while they keep an eye on us, some with sleeping babies tied to their backs with bright pieces of cloth. In contrast to the rubbish heaps scattered around and the raw sewage that runs past in open drains, inside the houses are often very well kept with almost-retro furniture and ancient TVs illegally powered by cables siphoning off the grid. The walls are papered with posters of Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

  Peter worries that we’ll get mugged filming in Alexandra with our expensive equipment, but I rarely feel threatened. Although I know he’s right to be concerned, the atmosphere is always so warm that I just can’t imagine a gang of armed gunmen turning up to rip us off and they never do. We film dozens of stories in the township and encounter nothing more than a smiling welcome.

  As a VJ or video journalist, I have a relatively small kit: camera, tripod and microphones, a laptop or two, my personal backpack, sometimes a tent or sleeping bag, plus a big, heavy, fold-out satellite phone on which to send my stories to the ABC. It’s small compared to the full-sized kit that a cameraman, producer and reporter would carry if they were travelling as a team but it’s a lot for one person and to be able to carry it all on my own is the key to the packing process. I hang the tripod bag across my body, heave the backpack on and wheel the Pelican case with the rest of the stuff in it, a one-woman TV crew.

  My first off-base story is in Sierra Leone, where an Australian policeman is accused (and eventually acquitted) of sexually assaulting a young maid. Taking off to West Africa just a couple of weeks into the posting is daunting and I seek advice from a few more experienced colleagues, among them the BBC producer Kate Peyton, who’s been working in Africa for ten years. She’s in her late thirties, warm and friendly, and keen to find out how I’m settling in. She’s also off on a trip – to Mogadishu, the lawless capital of Somalia – and we agree to have dinner or a drink when we both return. She’s celebrating the end of the long process of officially adopting her partner’s daughter and they’re soon to be married.

  I’m at home packing when I get a text message the next evening: Kate has been killed, shot in the back outside her hotel. I grieve deeply for a young life lost and for her family. Her death also puts the risks of the job into frightening perspective. I wonder what on earth I’ve taken on, and I question whether I’m brave enough.

  Saying goodbye to Rowan I depart for Sierra Leone feeling wound up and sad. After Kate’s death, the ABC makes a last-minute decision not to send me alone on my first major trip. The war is well over in Sierra Leone but the region is innately volatile and challenging. I’m travelling with an enormous Zulu cameraman, Sipho Maseko, and I’m grateful for the company, particularly when we land in Lagos at 1 a.m. and get mobbed by taxi drivers seeking a fare. Sipho chooses a man with an ancient Mercedes, insists I sit in the back, and reaches around to lock my door. The flight crew from our aircraft speeds past us in black 4WDs, guards armed with AK-47s hanging off the rear bumpers, scanning the night for potential attackers. I giggle at the weirdness of it all as we bump along in the creaky old Merc.

  We fly on to Sierra Leone via a milk run through various small West African capitals. The airport in Freetown is across a vast wetland from the city, so when we disembark we’re issued with new ‘tickets’ – numbered chunks of wood that give us passage on an ancient yellow helicopter for the last fifteen minutes of the journey. The chopper lurches into the sky, wind whistling wildly through its open windows, exposed electrical wires swinging in the breeze. Below, the water sparkles cobalt blue against the jungle-clad coastline. It’s exhilarating.

  Sipho is a good cameraman (and bodyguard), but he’s old school, and in this case that means behind the times when it comes to technology. He films but I have to do the editing and transmission. I’m up against a mass of deadlines as I try to write and edit stories on my laptop and then send them via horrifically slow dial-up internet. I call Rowan, unloading stress, and he patiently helps me workshop the technical issues. ‘You can do this,’ he reassures me. ‘Trust yourself.’

  The satellite phone is marginally better than dial-up internet for sending material but it has to be positioned ‘just so’. The hotel manager is concerned when he finds me climbing on the roof of the six-floor hotel at 9 p.m. trying to point it in the right direction. He promptly sends two young men to do it for me – they’re rightly unenthusiastic about crawling around on the roof in the dark but they do hit the signal and then give me a hand to run thirty metres of cables along the hallway, around the corner and up the stairs to my room.

  After we’ve spent a couple of days madly filing, the court case is adjourned for a week. We’ve come so far that we decide to sit tight and wait for it to unfold, and that gives us time to report on post-war life in Sierra Leone.

  We visit orphanages filled with children who have lost their families in the country’s brutal conflict and its disordered aftermath. Everyone, including our driver and fixer, has lost family members. Many have also lost hands or arms, as the rebels’ trademark was to leave ‘long sleeves’ or ‘short sleeves’.

  In Freetown, families live in tin shanties like those in Joburg but in even worse condition. There’s little power or clean water. We spend a day or two filming with a young family in and around their shack. They have a brood of kids and they explain, giggling, that the lack of power leads to big families: what else is there to do after dark? We buy them a gift of their choosing – a pedal-powered Singer sewing machine which reminds me of my mum’s dusty antique that we had on display when I was a kid. The family hopes to generate some sewing and mending work.

  I hope they succeeded. Theirs is one of many stories in my head that doesn’t have an ending.

  That first eye-opening assignment to Sierra Leone begins a string of adventures all over the continent. It’s a life of plan, travel, shoot, edit and file, and then do it all over again. Occasionally I travel with a cameraman but frequently it’s a solitary journey to destinations like Nigeria, Malawi, Kenya and Sudan. Their minefields and barren landscapes contain a treasure trove of stories for a lone journo. It can be daunting and lonely work, but it’s also very empowering to just take off, the success or failure of the assignment down to my own resourcefulness.

  When I’m on the road I’m supposed to check in with the Sydney office every other day. Depending on where I am,
I often have to hook up the satellite phone in the dirt using the light of the setting sun or a dim generator-powered globe, plug in my laptop and sit cross-legged in the dust miles from anywhere – even just to make a call or see what’s happening in the world, let alone file.

  ‘Hi, I’m alive, and no, I haven’t been kidnapped by bandits,’ I tell the desk producer one night from the Somalian border, ‘but there was a knocking at the window last night at 3 a.m.’

  ‘Oh, really?’ he responds, alarmed.

  I’d woken with a start, my heart jumping out of my chest, sure that the local militiamen I’d be warned about had come to take me hostage. ‘Yes, but don’t worry, it was just a giraffe’s knees,’ I laugh. The animal was eating the grass roof of my hut, its knees banging on the window.

  Every day, if possible, I call Rowan.

  We’re still child free. But even so, the travel is hard on us, as we’re often drifting past each other in transit. He was once a journalist too, but has recently developed a career training media in the developing world. Unable to get a South African work visa (a curse of correspondent partners in many places), he’s forced to work outside the country.

  Much as we both love Joburg, being stuck in a house alone behind a locked rape gate doesn’t appeal to either of us much. And constant work-related travel can create a weird dynamic in a relationship. While Rowan is at dinner with friends or at the gym, I’m calling in from places that could be on another planet.

  ‘I sat next to Colonel Gaddafi today,’ I babble down the phone from Khartoum.

  ‘Who? It’s a bad line,’ Rowan replies, before the connection breaks.

  I spend an intense day in Darfur interviewing indigenous people in camps. Their villages have been razed by government-backed Janjaweed militiamen. The world hasn’t decided if what’s happening in Darfur amounts to genocide, but the ethnic conflict over land and water resources has displaced or killed hundreds of thousands of people.