Rochelle Mutt on has reported from Zimbabwe and South Af rican townships, but it was a course on the NSW Central Coast that gave her the skills to cope where previously she had stumbled.

Heart pounding, I open the back car-door to reach a groaning woman – her arm is sliced open and broken bones are sticking out. At first it looks like a horrific car crash. But as my news crew rush in to help the foreign reporters, we realise they’ve been attacked.

She cries in pain as I pressurise the wound with bandaging. I then notice her stomach heaving under her other arm.

Vaguely aware of my crew attending the other three injured women, I lift up her good arm. Mid-way through reeling off calming words, I gag. Her guts are spilling out.

“They’re coming back, they’re coming back,” she cries out. From behind the trees, a gunshot cracks through the air.

With a surge of panic, I reckon the injured are goners and I don’t want to wait to find out who “they” are. As awful as it sounds now, I  wanted to abandon them. But my team stayed.

It wasn’t real, but scenarios like this, created for the AKE Surviving Hostile Regions course using actors and convincing wound make-up, turned the Aussie bush into the rebel-held forests of Aceh.

This was the training I’d longed for. Once I was in it, trying to suppress the rising terror, I was exceedingly grateful. I had had no training and little exposure to hostile situations when I began reporting on riots and demonstrations in Zimbabwe for an independent newspaper in 1999.

As a 23-year-old, raw with enthusiasm, I was stumbling in and out of dangerous reporting situations where the rules of engagement were totally different to the Australian journalism I knew.

Assertions of Australian-held beliefs on reporters’ rights melt into irrelevancy when you’re up against an angry mob, corrupt authorities or an AK47.

My first exposure to the erraticism of mob mentality could have been my last. Demonstrators from Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe’s youth league roared in approval when I turned up to report on their protest, calling on me to take their photos.

But as I did, one protestor yelled an accusation. Before the riot police could step in, the demonstrators had crowded around me as an angry, snarling pack, eyes flashing down to the Minolta hanging off my neck.

Luckily, I won back their approval by holding up a government-issued card that belied my true associations.

At the time, their violent mood swing had come as a complete surprise to me, but anyone familiar with Zimbabwean protests would have seen it all before.

In 2004, I returned to reporting in Africa as a print and radio freelancer.

Living in Johannesburg carried significant concerns of its own. In addition, I travelled into townships and the central city to report in areas where violent crime is rife and white faces attract attention.

Several times in the last 18 months I returned to Zimbabwe to report without the required (but denied) media accreditation, to freelance reports for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, the ABC and the Canadian Broadcasting Commission. If caught, the penalty then was two years’ jail – it’s since been increased to 20.

While I was wiser than during the close shaves of my 1999 Zimbabwe stint, my mind was brimming with questions about risk assessment and managing dangerous situations that may arise.

So it was with great relief and anticipation I received a five-day scholarship from the Walkley Foundation to get training from some of AKE’s ex-military personnel, who handle security for journalists and corporations in Iraq.

Their Surviving Hostile Regions course, which is run several times a year near Wyong, north of Sydney, has been tailor-made for journalists working in hot spots around the world.

Joining journalists from The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Financial Review and ABC, I had classroom sessions on trip planning, military-media relationships, weapons, navigation, vehicle travel and trauma medicine, which included a lot of dramatic but highly practical exercises.

The first key rule was: “The only predictable thing about hostile events is that they will occur.”

The second wasn’t any more comforting: “Hostile events preparation will never precisely match the incidents that occur.”

Course instructors Paul Jordan and Roger Renni used graphic video of real-life scenarios to talk through possible ways to survive a crisis in a hostile environment, such as being held hostage.

This discussion had poignant relevancy for me. I learned a friend I had been house-sitting for in Johannesburg – The Guardian’s correspondent Rory Carroll – had been taken hostage in Iraq and released just hours earlier.

After four days of theory and exercises in trauma medicine, we were tested in the bush with scenarios that involved blood and guts, aggressive soldiers armed with military weapons, a mock minefield explosion and an armed ambush, with gunfire.

I was dismayed how quickly the intense training turns to fear once trouble hits, and to know what it’s like to feel helpless at every turn.

But the scenario with victims in the car taught me the importance of triage and that serious injuries are far more survivable than I realised.

I came away knowing more about making smarter judgments and estimating levels of danger, as well as having my existing abilities identified and affirmed.

There’s a whole world of great stories to be told and the Surviving Hostile Regions training means now I can approach them with more confidence for my own safety.

Rochelle Mutton, originally based in Perth, relocated to Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2004. She regularly files for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Australian and UK News Limited papers and the Australian and Canadian public broadcasters. She was awarded the 2005 WA Media Feature Prize.