Reporting on death and accidents in regional and rural areas can exact a heavy toll, writes Amanda Gearing. Illustration by Rocco Fazzari.

News reporters necessarily report on trauma.
Overseas correspondents who report from war zones, areas of conflict or natural disasters are often exposed to physical risk and are sometimes required to confront extreme trauma.

To an extent, reporters embarking on overseas assignments are mentally prepared to face traumatic situations. Their supervisors are usually aware of the reporter’s isolation and vulnerability.

        By contrast, reporters who work either alone or with a small group of colleagues in regional and rural Australia can be exposed to human trauma which is often unexpected, repetitive and more likely to involve acquaintances.

Their supervisors are less likely to be aware of the impact of being exposed to repeated traumatic situations. The reporters are more likely to take the trauma home.

In my experience, reporters in rural areas learn to cope in different ways, which often requires them to renegotiate their world view. Faced with the death and injury toll of the regular round of fatal car crashes, plane crashes and farm accidents, a young reporter’s world view can shift.

Anyone who grew up thinking or assuming that good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people, is challenged. In their everyday reporting, they see sad, tragic, unfair things happening to good people, careful people, innocent people. They might conclude the world is rather more chaotic than they first thought.

Yet their inexperience of life shields them to an extent from the trauma they are encountering in their daily work. As a young reporter I was assigned to interview the mother of a youth killed in a car crash. It was not until I met her that I discovered she had had five sons, four of whom had been killed in earlier car accidents. The latest crash claimed her last remaining son.

It is only many years later, as a mother with children who are driving, that I can look back and have some understanding of the depth of her grief. Although my techniques for dealing with trauma were quite rudimentary in those days, I always looked for an angle that might prevent similar deaths or accidents – that simply reporting the trauma made no sense unless some consolation, some solace, some good might be wrought from it.

One story I recall was about a car crash in which a baby was killed when it was thrown from its mother’s arms in a high-speed rollover. Both parents survived and they gave a tearful warning to other mothers not to breastfeed their babies in moving cars.

It was not until I was a mother that I found my professional ethics being more strongly challenged by trauma reporting. Why report trauma when reporting it exposes traumatised and often bereaved people to the added trauma of media intrusion?

     Can we justify adding trauma to a situation for the sake of another story? If so, how?

In truth, trauma and death are reported because human life has value. This does not in itself justify adding to the trauma of someone who is bereaved. Reporters are bound by the Code of Ethics to respect people who are grieving. But respecting people who are grieving does not mean they should not speak to them at all, especially if they are willing to, or want to, speak to a reporter.

After being out of the workforce for several years to raise my children, my first death knock involved the death of a healthy teenage boy who died suddenly while running laps in a lap-a-thon to raise money for charity. All I had was a common surname and I began working through the list in the phone book. After many calls, a distressed voice answered the phone, a familiar voice. I was invited to the house and listened while the bereaved mother told me of her son’s life and sudden death. I gathered all the details I needed and a
photo, which all ran on page one the next morning. The family was avalanched with messages of sympathy and support from friends, relatives and total strangers from across Australia.

 I kept in contact, and after a few months I was able to ask the mother if the media coverage had added to the trauma of losing her son. Her response surprised me. She told me she had been grateful for the opportunity to publicly express her love for her son. What had traumatised her more in the longer term was that she still didn’t know the cause of his death. She knew his heart had been removed and sent for analysis, but she didn’t have a result and for six months she had been frightened her other children could also have an
undiagnosed fatal condition.

I phoned around Australia until I found the professor who had the boy’s heart and I was able to phone the mother back the same day and let her know her son’s death was not caused by a genetic condition; her other children were all right.

Many people assume that relatives who are suddenly bereaved, especially in traumatic circumstances, don’t want to speak to the media.
 
        Working in a regional centre where I also live has taught me that most people do want the opportunity to express their grief, to talk about their love for a family member who has been killed, talk about their achievements, or even to warn others of a known or unknown danger.

I was forced to re-assess my own views about trauma reporting. I could not take it for granted that all families would want to shut out reporters at a time of family tragedy. I had to be aware that some would want, indeed welcome, the opportunity I had given to my friend to talk about her son.

Other families have wanted and welcomed the opportunity to warn other people of a potential danger. Some have found consolation in a death which otherwise appears traumatic and they welcome the opportunity to convey that consolation to the public.

An elderly man washed down a mountainside by a flash flood and drowned was, at first glance, a tragic event. His family, however, knew the seriously ill man went for a regular Sunday drive to the area, still connected to his oxygen tank, because the old drover loved the bush. The family wanted the public to know his wish was that he not die in hospital. Apart from speaking to newspaper reporters, the old drover’s daughter went to the scene of the accident with television crews so she could tell people that even though her father died by accident, he died in the place he loved.

Discovering that some families want to speak to the media during times of trauma has made me determined to try to speak to the next of kin rather than to allow well-meaning relatives or friends to ward off reporters assuming, without even asking, that the next of kin don’t want to be interviewed. However, even though a family might welcome a reporter into their house, this does not mean that telling the story is easy for them. Sometimes it’s very difficult. One of the most heart-rending interviews I recall was speaking to a woman about her fiancé who accidentally fell to his death from a Gold Coast high-rise building a week before their wedding.

I met the bereaved woman just before she had an appointment with the funeral director so she could put the wedding ring on her fiancé’s finger. She cried as she told me about her plan. This was one of the few times I
recall crying with an interviewee during an interview. Although emotionally challenging, the published story powerfully conveyed the love of the woman for her fiancé.

        Reporters who work alone in regional or rural centres are more likely to offload their experiences of trauma reporting to their family and friends as they have few or no office colleagues. Trauma is more likely to be taken home.

Families cope with a regular flow of trauma from crime and court reporting to deaths and injury stories.

However, there are some circumstances when the reporter or the family can become overloaded. A fortnight of deaths and funerals stands out for me. It began with a man dieing in a light plane crash on a Sunday afternoon, followed by two toddlers killed in a shed fire a few days later, then five university students in a car crash. In that same fortnight my father-in-law also died, on the day of the funeral of a work colleague of my husband, which I also reported.

Despite my grief and my family’s grief, I worked long hours and met every deadline. Neither I nor my workplace recognised that the trauma load I was carrying was overwhelming. I expected myself to deliver copy, my supervisor expected me to deliver copy, and I did.

I didn’t seek any workplace support, nor was any offered to me. It was not until several months later, after covering the shooting death of a police dog squad officer and then the death of a helicopter pilot flying a medical mercy mission in bad weather, that I was advised to find someone outside my family to provide me with a debrief.

In searching for the family of the pilot, I went door knocking and a familiar face came to the door. I was shocked. The door opened and the bereaved wife, a professional counsellor, sat me down and gave me a cup of tea before telling me of her husband’s career as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. She ended by suggesting I should find a debriefing counsellor. The story ran on page one.

Over time, the process of reporting trauma does get easier, but constantly dealing with death and trauma can become emotionally draining and the reporter does need a break.

In my experience, reporters have generally avoided confronting their vulnerability in reporting trauma. We might like to think we are bulletproof emotionally because of our job, but underneath we are human beings
who respond through our emotions to the world around us. Foreign and war correspondents are not the only reporters who see and report trauma.

Reporters in any frontline reporting role are exposed over time to trauma, for which they have little training, little or no professional support and sometimes little understanding from their work supervisors, who are focused on filling news holes. Regional and rural-based reporters across Australia face the added
challenge of professional isolation which results in them taking home the trauma to their families and friends.

Amanda Gearing  has worked as the Courier Mail’s Toowoomba bureau reporter for 10 years.

Rocco Fazzari is an artist for The Sydney Morning Herald; www.smh.com.au/rocco.