Capturing Tragedy: The Black Saturday Image Makers

Few events live in the minds of Melbourne's media like the Black Saturday bushfires. On the third anniversary of the fires, Channel Seven's Kate Osborn looks beyond the history-making images to the people who created them: the photographers and cameramen who chronicled the week, and found themselves driven to extraordinary professional and personal limits.

Photography by Fiona Hamilton

When our news car stopped on the side of a road on the outskirts of the Black Saturday fire zone, cameraman Will Pristel ran to the back and started pulling out camera gear. I leapt out of the car and immediately found myself flat on my back. Bushfires make their own weather, and this one had created winds so intensely fierce, they knocked me clean over. It didn’t really matter, though, whether I was upright or not, since there wasn’t much I could do. I had no information – no one did, not even the authorities. The story was in the images, and Will was darting around filming pictures that would contribute to a Melbourne Press Club Quill Award for best camera work. With the fire front only minutes away, we couldn’t hang around for a live cross. So, I thought of something to say off the top of my head, and delivered it while being hit sporadically in the face by flying pieces of tree bark.

There was some incredible journalism on Black Saturday and in its aftermath. Numerous reporters have won praise and prizes for writing stories which resonated with a stunned nation. But words, however expertly crafted, can only go so far in conveying the magnitude of an event that was so unprecedented in scale. It could be said the true storytellers on Black Saturday were the photographers and cameramen taking the pictures which, three years on, still linger in peoples’ minds. Behind those images are fascinating tales, of incredulity, ingenuity and humanity.

It goes without saying that no member of the media would ever compare their professional experiences with the real-life trauma of the residents who lived through the bushfire disaster, and lost loved ones. But, all things being relative, Black Saturday left an indelible mark on all of us. Many reporters who weren’t assigned to cover it were left feeling jealous that they weren’t there, then feeling guilty for feeling jealous. Of those who did spend time in the field, on the day and in the following week, all of them still think about it.

They all remember where they were on the day. Seven News senior cameraman Phil Loschiavo was rostered off on February 7, 2009, but 26 years of experience told him not to get too settled at home. “You could just sense that all hell was going to break loose.”

Phil Loschiavo

When it did, he drove in to work to find the Chief of Staff desk had been abandoned. Veteran reporter Norm Beaman had been acting as fill-in Chief of Staff for most of the day, but had run out the moment he learned his wife and home were under threat from the Kilmore blaze. Phil parked himself in the CoS chair and directed traffic until the bulletin had been put to air. He then dispatched himself, along with camera assistant Daniel McCarthy and reporter Andrea Edwards, to the Yarra Valley.

In the days following Black Saturday, if there was something the media wanted to see, it was all but guaranteed they couldn’t get anywhere near it. The police and other authorities had mobilised to such an extent that every road, even the goat tracks, had a police car and a surly, burly copper blocking it. But on that first night, confusion reigned, and Phil’s crew was able to drive into the fire zone.

Reporters are used to covering bushfires in which the loss of a few houses is enough to constitute a major yarn. A death would make it a national story. It was in this context that Phil, Daniel and Andrea drove down Steels Creek Road in disbelief at the sight of home after home burning away. They spent hours shooting what they took to be abandoned houses, blissfully oblivious to the fact many of those homes contained the bodies of their occupants.

Exhausted, they found a football oval, parked the news car in the middle, and slept, knowing they’d be safe in the clearing should the fire return. At dawn, the chief of staff called and broke the news that the fire had caused far more devastation than anyone could have imagined. Kinglake had been flattened, he told them, but the roads were now blocked and there was no way to get in. Could they try?

There were no road blocks on the road they took into Kinglake, but there were plenty of obstacles. “We had to stop every now and then to move burnt trees from across the road,” Phil says. The state of the roadway suggested they were the first people to travel along it since the fire had swept through. This felt strange. As media, we’re used to responding to incidents that have already been reported to authorities, not stumbling across them ourselves. But this is what happened to Phil, Daniel and Andrea.

“We couldn’t believe we were coming across all these scenes that had (a) just been left, or (b) nobody knew they were there. We just kept seeing crashed cars and bodies in burnt cars. Is this a scene that’s been checked? Does anybody know about this? We had no idea.”

When they arrived in Kinglake, they found hundreds of residents at the CFA station, huddled in blankets and sobbing. The township was also full of emergency services personnel still trying to get a handle on the situation. But of all the people Phil Loschiavo saw in Kinglake on that morning after Black Saturday, the one most prominent in his mind was a battle-weary creature who emerged blackened from the bush with two cameras slung around his neck.

Stuart McEvoy is a Walkley Award-winning photographer for The Australian. Phil Loschiavo is used to running into him when the Prime Minister is town, or outside court. When Phil saw a sooty Stuart that Sunday morning, in the main street of Kinglake, all he could do was ask how he’d managed to get there. “I walked in,” Stuart said. If it had been a significant achievement for Phil Loschiavo and his colleagues to drive into Kinglake that day, Stuart McEvoy walking in was a miracle.

Stuart McEvoy

Black Saturday had started out for Stuart McEvoy as a day off, minding the kids. He too had sensed it was potentially a serious story and, once his wife was home, he headed into the office. It was late afternoon by the time he arrived at the police roadblock at Wandong. He was weighing up his options when he saw a white smoke cloud looming like whipped cream over Kinglake. It was so large it made a passing 737 look like a blackbird. He knew at that moment where to go. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, if anyone survived that, I need to get up there and cover it.”

Photography by Stuart McEvoy

Stuart only made it as far as Humevale in his company car. He tried side roads, but they were littered with trees, and clogged with motorists who were trying to bring supplies, like generator fuel, to relatives. With boughs across roads, and more falling by the minute, potentially on cars, Stuart decided the safest option was to walk.

“It probably sounds crazy to most people,” Stuart acknowledges, “but to me it was the safest way. I knew what I was doing and where I was going.” He’d done his CFA media training course and was wearing regulation-issue fire gear. He told the owner of the house where he parked his car where he was going, took his laptop and as much water as he could carry, and set off.

“I started walking about midnight. I got to Kinglake West about 6am,” he says. He walked for eleven kilometres.

It goes without saying that it was tough. The fire front had gone through, but the odd flame still flickered. Stumps smouldered in the bush while Stuart edged his way along the melted bitumen. When he encountered giant logs across his path, he climbed over them. He walked to a soundtrack of trees toppling in the distance. “You could hear them. Crash, crash, crash, crash.” He was only startled once, when the tune changed. “I’ll never forget, half way up, this crashing sound. It got louder and louder. And it was this giant deer, trying to get down the hill.”

It had started out pitch black, with only torchlight for guidance, but once the moon came out, scenes emerged, and Stuart took a few shots along the way. “All you could see was houses burning.”

Photography by Stuart McEvoy

When he reached Kinglake West, and the sun came up, he met a handful of locals who’d sheltered away from home and were about to head back to see if anything was left. They took Stuart with them, and were willing to be photographed as they rummaged through the rubble of houses that had indeed burned to the ground.

Stuart’s phone had gone flat hours earlier, but his laptop had power and a wireless internet card, so once he was in Kinglake, he started remotely filing his photographs. This delighted his picture editor back in The Australian office on two fronts. He was pleased to receive the photographs, but he was also glad that he could inform Stuart’s wife that he was indeed alive and well. The last she’d heard from him was a call to say he was going to Kinglake, so she’d been understandably concerned when he became uncontactable. When Stuart finally found time to check his voicemails a week later, there was one from his boss saying the police had found his car at the bottom of a hill. The next message was in a happier tone, saying his pictures were coming through and to keep up the good work.

With no phone and no electricity, Stuart McEvoy had no choice but to leave Kinglake that afternoon. He spent the rest of the week doing the rounds of the Black Saturday hot spots; different regions, different towns, but identical experiences. “It was pretty full on, when you hear the same story over and over. It seemed there wasn’t anyone in Victoria who wasn’t affected.”

Herald Sun photographer Fiona Hamilton freely admits she was affected. She may not have been affected in the sense that she lost property or loved ones. But her week in the fire zone was so intense, she emerged deeply changed, both professionally and personally.

Fiona Hamilton

Fiona was called into work at 5am on the morning after Black Saturday, hitching a ride in a TV news chopper to take aerial photographs. She took her fire kit and her laptop, expecting she’d be away for two hours. As the helicopter flew over the fire zone, all on board were speechless. The wasteland Fiona was photographing out the window was like nothing she’d ever seen before. They landed in Pine Ridge Road. Razed houses and crashed cars held human remains, some visible, some just ash. It was clear then that this wasn’t a bushfire like anyone had covered before. It was a catastrophe.

Photography by Fiona Hamilton

The TV crew who’d been ferrying Fiona around had to dump her in Whittlesea and she found herself at the relief centre. Having set out on a two-hour job, she would remain at that centre for the best part of a week. It was packed with panicked people desperate to know whether friends and loved ones had survived the inferno.

When word spread about who Fiona was and where she’d been, she was swamped. They wanted information she wasn’t willing to give: were the houses still standing? Were there people around? They got creative: if she didn’t know, could she show them her photos so that they could work it out for themselves, using her aerials as a map. She lied and said she no longer had the photographs, that they’ve been erased once she sent them to the office. “I couldn’t tell them because there was nothing. There was nothing there.”

A group of ten to fifteen families, who were waiting for information, befriended her, and she remained with them, sleeping on the ground, for four days. It was heart-breaking. “I knew their families were dead, so I had to watch them running up to people begging for information.” She was alongside one man when he learned his wife and three children had died.

For the first time in her career, Fiona Hamilton found the line between the media and the public - ‘us’ and ‘them’ - became blurred. When a lady learned her daughter and grandchildren had perished, she sought out Fiona for solace. The woman brushed off approaching camera crews, telling Fiona she hated the media, then quickly adding, “Oh, but I don’t mean you.” Fiona replied, “I’m one of them, hit me if it makes you feel better.” And she meant it. Having been present during their darkest hours, she felt closer to these victims than to her colleagues. “I got angry at the rest of the media because I’d sort of moved to protecting those people who rightly or wrongly trusted me.”

During this period, the Herald Sun’s picture editor was sleeping on the floor and working around the clock. But he knew Fiona was devoting even more of herself to the job. On the Friday, Day 6, he called her and told her to come home. No one who knows Fiona Hamilton will be surprised that she said no. “I refused. I said, ‘I’m not leaving this.’ He said, ‘You’ve lost touch with reality. This is going to hit you like a freight train.’” She said no again.

It was only the next day, Saturday, when the editor refused to download her pictures, that Fiona admitted defeat and headed home. And she’d barely hit the road when that metaphorical freight train hit her, and hit her hard. “I was a mess. I was an absolute mess. It wasn’t my journey, but it sort of felt like it, because I was with them.”

Most media workers who cover traumatic stories are offered counselling and most wave it away. Some opt to talk it out with old-timers, and that’s the approach Fiona adopted.  Stuart McEvoy opted to workshop it on his own. Phil Loschiavo didn’t feel he needed to, having gained an unenviable perspective on death while covering the Boxing Day tsunami in Thailand. There he saw thousands of bodies - in trees, in pits, under footpaths - and that experience numbed the impact of the Black Saturday images.  But he acknowledges anyone not conditioned to trauma would find Black Saturday visions hard to forget. That was certainly the case for colleague Damian Shine.

A news veteran, Damian Shine was chosen to be the pool cameraman who would accompany then-Premier John Brumby in a helicopter flight over the fire zone, filming on behalf of all networks. After taking off from Essendon, they flew over Kinglake, before landing in Marysville, which was at that stage strictly off-limits, even to residents. Minutes after landing, it became clear he had a difficult task. Not only was he limited in what he was permitted to film – no police officers, no ‘no-go zones’ marked by red tape – he was also restricted by taste and decency. Every time he framed a shot, he’d find a body in it. “There were bodies everywhere. It was like a war zone.”

Damian was struck by how little it felt like a crime scene, despite the police presence. Rather than a traditional crime scene, with tarped victims and police tape, this was more like a ghost town. People lay uncovered where they fell. Some had been burned, unrecognisable as people. Others were simply overcome by radiant heat and lay there unmarked. Some were in cars, some in their front yards, others by the side of the road. He’d seen carnage before, but nothing even close to that. And it was all in just one street, in one town. “It’ll be with me till the day I die.”

It will no doubt be with John Brumby as well. He was there for a briefing from then-Chief Commissioner Christine Nixon, but found it difficult to take in. At one stage, the premier took time out and sat on a rock, visibly upset. The other members of the group were equally shocked. “It took its toll on us that day,” Damian says. “We all flew back dead quiet.”

Few stories of our time have prompted as much reflection and inspection as Black Saturday. Of those who covered it, almost all would agree it’s the biggest story of their career and is unlikely to be topped – and that’s a good thing. No one would ever want it repeated. Having covered disasters overseas, what amazed Phil Loschiavo about this catastrophe was its proximity: “Just the fact that it was so close to home. We were going home to our beds, but feeling like we were on an overnighter on the other side of the world.” There was also the fact that the story remained for so long in the headlines, with recovery efforts and the Royal Commission, prompting return visits. Stuart McEvoy had no desire to return to one of the hardest hit townships, Strathewen. “It was really hard. I had to ask if I could avoid going back there because I had some bad experiences.”

It’s the opposite for Fiona Hamilton. She liked going back, and did so numerous times in the twelve months that followed. She felt it was her duty, particularly if there’d be other media around. “I refused to allow anyone to take advantage of them.”

Fiona Hamilton feels she emerged from Black Saturday a little bruised, but, overall, a better photographer and person. She says her morals were tested and she’s happier knowing she passed. “I’m proud of how I dealt with the people. It’s made me a lot more confident in my job. When it counted, I was glad I put people before circulation.”

That said, she still got some incredible pictures. Stuart McEvoy agrees this job should serve as further proof to editors and chiefs of staff that it’s possible to walk the line between compassion and the needs of the profession, and come out on the right side. He believes the person in the field is usually the best judge. “You’re the person who’s there and it comes to the point of, ‘Am I pushing too hard?’  I always consider that first and foremost. I think it really comes down to the individual. Ultimately, you’re the one who’d have to live with it.”

As more anniversaries pass, Black Saturday survivors won’t forget the event which claimed 173 lives and forever changed others. But neither will the rest of the community. The general public may not have personally experienced the terror of the fire approaching, or know the people who lost homes and loved ones. But they’ll have images in their memories nonetheless: aerial footage of razed townships, photos of fire trucks fleeing from smoke clouds, vision of tearful family reunions, shots of people wistfully salvaging relics from charred homes. The media in this case is the conduit between people who can’t forget and a community that shouldn’t. It's guaranteed to remember as well.

Follow @_kate_osborn