TRANSCRIPT
“It's been a harrowing night and day for this community. They're scared for their families, scared for their friends and uncertain when they can return to their homes.”
33 people were killed directly, and almost 450 more lost their lives from the effects of smoke inhalation.
3,000 homes were destroyed and three billion animals were killed or displaced.
It's now known as the Black Summer.
Lara Coffey was there.
“There have been frantic scenes here at Harrington after the wind drove the Bills Crossing Crowdy fire towards the outskirts of the village. Smoke filled the air as flames crept closer to nearby homes. Residents grabbed pets and valuables before leaving their properties behind.”
Lara fell into journalism after googling “jobs for good writers” while considering which course to apply for at university.
After graduating, she says she was one of the only students in her year to get a job as a TV reporter straight away.
She then became her news organisations one reporter in Taree when the fires begun.
It was just her, and her camera operator Mark.
She was 22-years-old at the time.
“The first lot of the fires that I had experienced, because it all did start on the mid north coast. Before this point, I'd been a reporter for not even 18 months, but close to 18 months at that point. Heard on the radio there was a fire up in Harrington, which is where I was staying during the week. I drove straight to Harrington to this fire and driving in to Harrington, there is only one way in and one way out and the bush was alight. And I just thought, what have I got myself into here? What is going on? It was like a horror movie, and that was the easiest and best day I had had in the bushfire crisis. What we now know as the black summer bushfires, it just got worse from there.”
The Black Summer Bushfires were one of the most intense and catastrophic fire seasons on record in Australia.
And for weeks on end, Lara filed stories on those bushfires. It’s something she says became routine.
“My day would entail just getting on the Fires Near Me app and selecting a location that I haven't yet covered. The amount of fires that were just shown in my region that I covered for the news was overwhelming. So it wasn't hard to select a new place. Every day I would look at it and it would almost be spinning around the globe where you're trying to find a holiday and you put your finger on, you go, that's where I'm going to go. And we'd head out and we would speak to locals, we would speak to the local firies out there, the police or all of your emergency services. But mainly I would be talking to the locals and I would be hearing their story.”
Journalists reporting on natural disasters are often having to put their lives at risk.
But unlike frontline workers attending a bushfire, journalists are frequently under-prepared, under-trained and under-resourced.
“I looked over to my cameraman who was down on all fours getting a shot of a tiny little trickle of fire literally jumped over him and blew up. It was like it was alive. All of a sudden, the highway, it run down the highway and the entire highway is up in flames. My cameraman was so far away from me, and I've looked at the news car, which we always park facing out. I've just jumped into the driver's seat because I was closer to the car. I look in the rear view mirror and he's sprinting with the gear and I can see the fire just chasing him. And I thought, when do I leave? We didn't even speak about it. We just sat there.”
But Lara wasn’t just reporting on the fires, she was living and experiencing the same things everyone else was.
She often had no place to go or live as the roads to her house were cut off.
Whether it was sleeping on the couch at work, or in a co-workers spare room - she says she’d even often have to sleep in her fire gear for days on end without showering as she continued to do her job.
That’s something she says she wishes people better understood.
“I don't think anyone that hasn't worked in journalism or has someone that has worked in journalism or even in the news sense really in breaking news, I don't think people understand journalists at all or understand the role that they are put through or the experiences that they're put through and the pressures that they are put through. So everyone that I interviewed during the fires, no, I don't think they understood my role completely. I think they saw me as getting the message out, getting awareness out maybe. They didn't understand that I was them. I was one of them without having someone to vent to.”
Lara says to this day, years later, she still hasn’t properly processed what she saw and experienced.
“I didn't get to reach out to a lot of family members because I was go, go, go. You also didn't have reception in a fire. I am assuming my family honestly, just watched the news that night and would know I was headlining and would realize that, oh, she was okay three hours ago. So I just had to go to a new place every day and cop the stories because that was my job to hear the stories, to tell the stories without crying back to them and I didn't really admit it for months after possibly years. I've only recently started talking about the fires, actually. It really did take a toll on me and probably still is.”
Looking back, Lara is now able to recognise the ways in which not dealing with her trauma affected other areas of her life.
She says she now knows it was the catalyst for not just the downfall of her relationship with her partner, but it affected her relationships with her family, and even her colleagues.
“That's another thing that changed from the fires as well. I do pinpoint my relationship even starting to fail from that moment, which I didn't realize in the time, the relationship between myself and my cameramen also, that was the turning point in that as well. I've never felt more lonely in my entire life. I hope I never feel like that again. It was numb, but it was also lonely and it was scared, but it was putting on a front for everyone else. And it was adrenaline of doing the news story and knowing that it was such a big story that a lot of journalists probably would've been fairly excited about. But I couldn't feel any excitement because I felt like I was in hell. I really shut out a lot of people. I shut out my boyfriend at the time. I shut out my parents. I shut out friends.”
Everyone reacts to trauma in a different way.
Daily press journalists, photo journalists and war correspondents have often reported experiencing insomnia, flashbacks, and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
For Lara, reporting on the black summer bushfires was the beginning of the end of her journalism career.
“In hindsight, the fires was the start of the turning point in my career for the worse or maybe the better because I did get out. But when I look back, I realize that my unhappiness in my role started after the fires or during the fires, really. I started from that moment to hate breaking news, hate covering, breaking news, which was really, it's the main thing you're supposed to be covering. I couldn't escape the stories of the fire. I couldn't even think about other stories I might've been doing at that time because it was, I knew my role. I knew that that was what I had to be covering.”
Lara never sought professional help to help process what she’d experienced.
Often journalists can feel like it’s supposed to be such an honor to cover a major breaking news story in a competitive industry - so how can they be upset about it?
Or they remove themselves from the fact they’re actually experiencing the disaster, in order to do their job - which is to tell the stories of those who have lived it.
“I am now realizing that I should have, that probably would've helped a lot. I probably still might be in journalism if I had have sought help. I didn't even think that I needed it. I knew that I wasn't okay, but I just hadn't thought that maybe I would need professional help. But now looking back, I 100% needed professional help. I still might need professional help from it. It took a toll. It took its toll on me. There were many sleepless nights, not just during the fires, but over the next three years basically. I'm only just out of that part of it. I still think I'm damaged from it in some way.”
Support for journalists has improved significantly over the years, with many companies offering free counseling services.
But Lara says more needs to be done to recognise the struggle a journalist may be facing when covering something potentially traumatising.
“I just don't think any of us had the time or the thought to check in with each other even, and I needed that. I needed a debrief. To have a counselor enforced, like I was 22. It needed to be enforced. It needed to be like you are giving this person a call, and even if it was the end of the week, you are debriefing to this person. It does hurt the most knowing that people in the industry were more focused on having me on scene in front of a fire without hearing me out or without checking in on me and seeing how I was actually feeling.”
But despite all that Lara has seen and experienced, she says even though she left the industry - she doesn’t regret her time as a journalist.
“There were so many beautiful times in journalism. There were so many amazing memories that I take with me. This is just an awful one that really took away the love of journalism for me and the love for the news. There were so many moments though that I pinched myself that I got to do that. I pinched myself that I was on TV every night for four years. I never thought I would even make it in journalism. I loved being able to tell people's stories. I love meeting people. The stories I loved doing the most would be your charity stories, your feel good stories, your sport stories, your food and wine festivals, community events, anything like that was what I loved about my job.”
You’ve been listening to History’s First Draft with me, Ciara Hain.
For more episodes exploring the effects of reporting the news on journalists, follow the podcast on the SBS Audio app, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.
