The Reporters

The Age

Friday October 15, 2004

JANE HOLROYD and KERRIE O'BRIEN

Their bylines have appeared on some of Australia's most memorable journalism.

Jane Holroyd and Kerrie O'Brien spoke to the people behind the stories of our time.

Gay Alcorn

The Gambler

It began with a siege. A lonely, terrified man was sitting in his car outside Crown Casino, after threatening to blow it up, surrounded by 50 or 60 police. The siege itself was discreetly reported, but that was the end of the story, according to Age journalist Gay Alcorn. When it happened in 1999, she wanted to find out "the back story", to fill in the gaps and flesh out what had led to this point.

Her idea was to tell a more in-depth story through the experience of one person. "It was a different way of doing an old story, really ... to try to tell it as a human story was different," Alcorn says. She won a Walkley award for the piece.

Alcorn spent more than four months getting to know Nick Vlahopanagos, the man charged with making the bomb threat. Her compelling piece about the devastation gambling caused one family drew attention to a problem afflicting thousands of Victorians. It explored Nick's life - his family background, his arrival as a 16-year-old in Australia, meeting his wife-to-be, his dreams of marrying and starting a family, building a beautiful home and raising children he would be proud of. It was a simple dream. And it all went wrong, as Alcorn's story so poignantly revealed.

In the course of her research, she spent time with Nick and his wife, Helen, played poker machines, went to the casino, to Gambler's Anonymous meetings and interviewed many people about what had led to that fateful day at the casino. She also read extensively about gambling addiction.

Published as a seven-part serial over one week, "The Gambler" was a departure from conventional newspaper story-telling. It was written in narrative form, using fiction techniques to tell a non-fiction story. It started with a "hero" faced with a challenge he tries to overcome and who is followed through to some sort of resolution. Each piece ended with a "cliffhanger" designed to provoke interest in the reader in the next installment. It was inspired, in part, by the way Charles Dickens had written his stories, "which sounds a bit high falutin'", Alcorn says with a laugh.

Apart from the time commitment required, Alcorn argues there is a balancing act between getting close enough to do the story justice and ensuring that your professionalism does not come into question. "It's getting close but not too close - maintaining a distance," she says. "It's also trying to be fair to [the subject] so they know what you are doing."

The day before "The Gambler" went to press, Nick Vlahopanagos phoned Alcorn and told her he didn't want the piece to run. She stood her ground. "I think in the end they were happy with it but it's a real shock for people to see themselves, their whole life story in print," she says. "It's confronting." -- KO

Mark Baker

Foreign reporting

Veteran foreign correspondent Mark Baker likens his reporting role to having "a ringside seat as history is being made". In 30 years, much of it spent abroad, and most of it specialising in Asia, he has been on the spot when some of the biggest stories were to be written.

Baker was holidaying in Portugal when Princess Diana died. He flew to London

to cover the outpouring of national grief that followed: "I'd never seen anything like it ... It seemed the entire city of London was covered in flowers," he recalls.

On another occasion, back at his base in Singapore, Baker was eating breakfast with his wife and son when news came through of the Bali bombing. Within hours he was in the midst of the mayhem. "I caught the first available flight and was straight into the story - into the Sanglah hospital with the dead and the wounded ..."

The experience reinforced for Baker the challenges of his work. "It is very important that the world can be reported for Australians by Australians," says Baker. "But in so doing I hope I'm not just a big flat-footed Australian thumping around the region. The challenge for the foreign journalist working abroad is to understand, to try and see things from the perspective of those who are involved," he explains. While the bombing was a terrible tragedy for Australia, Baker believes the impact on the Balinese "got a little bit lost" in the reporting - particularly the economic impact.

Baker realised early that some of the "sexiest jobs" in reporting were for those working overseas. He was only 23 when The Age sent him to Papua New Guinea in 1977.

In PNG he covered a cannibalism trial and later a murder trial that came to an abrupt conclusion: "The court visited the scene of the crime; suddenly the relatives of the victim came out of the jungle ... and they hacked the accused person to death".

Described by his editors as "world class", Baker has the rare ability of being able to hit the ground running, produce flawless copy and extract from each assignment page one news, impeccable "colour" and, by week's end, a 2000-word feature setting the issue in a deeper context.

These skills have been shown to most dramatic effect when he is despatched to cover wars and conflict - Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq.

It has not been without risk. Baker was reporting from Iraq immediately after the US invasion in 2003, when his car broke down halfway between Baghdad and Basra. He pictured himself "stranded in the wilds of Iraq with no protection," before his driver "miraculously" got the car moving again. In the early 1990s, working for the now defunct Sunday Herald, Baker was shot at and wounded in Bougainville: "When you come that close to being killed, nothing else in your life comes close in terms of dramatic experiences." -- JH

Pamela Bone

World poverty reporting

Pamela Bone is softly spoken, but she doesn't mince words: she says people talk about aid agencies wasting money because it gives them a reason not to give. She laughs about almost being killed in a jeep accident in Africa, but she can't laugh about returning home to the comforts of life in Australia when she has seen terrible things in places like Rwanda and Malawi.

Bone has been reporting on the plight of people in countries riddled by poverty, famine and civil wars since the 1980s.

Initially a court reporter at The Age in 1982, she was drawn to stories about developing countries. "World poverty is just something I feel strongly about," says Bone. "Having had children and now grandchildren just makes it all the stronger".

In 1996 Bone went to Rwanda with World Vision, two years after almost one

million Tutsis were slaughtered by the Hutu majority. "The whole trip was pretty horrifying. [We heard] stories of parents bribing the soldiers to shoot their children ... to save them being hacked to death by machetes ..."

Trying to understand, says Bone, is often a matter of looking for the good news

stories: "It has been said that one-third of the population took part in the genocide, but I tell myself that two-thirds didn't."

In 2002 Bone went to Malawi to report on the famine that was threatening 13 million lives across southern Africa. The Age ran an appeal to coincide with the stories Bone filed. The appeal ran for 12 weeks and raised $1 million. "A lot of lives were saved," says Bone. "I'm more proud of that than anything I've done in 25 years of journalism".

Bone receives the odd nasty letter:

"People write, 'We're sick of giving money to these countries - they never get any

better and it creates dependency'. They don't understand that they are just so far behind."

She talks about a farmer in Malawi who was given a $50 treadle mill by World Vision: "His corn was up to here," says Bone levelling her hand head-high. "He did this just by peddling to pump the water. It was terribly hard work [but] he'd lifted his whole extended family out of poverty."

Part of the challenge, says Bone, is to relay the humanity of people suffering thousands of kilometres away: "We talked to a girl, 14. She wanted to be a nurse ... She was dying of AIDS. She'd be dead by now. But she had this ambition. She wanted to be a nurse so she could help her people."

The culture shock is not going to Africa says Bone; "It's coming back and seeing how much we - and our children - have.

"Sometimes it makes you angry, because you think, we don't know we're alive really". -- JH

Peter Ellingsen

Tiananmen Square massacre

Peter Ellingsen spent many warm evenings in Tiananmen Square in May 1989.

As Beijing correspondent for The Age, he was reporting on the occupation of the Square by thousands of students demanding reform within the Communist Party. The atmosphere was one of celebration, Ellingsen says. "It was like someone had taken the lid off a generation and said, 'Express yourself'."

The demonstrations lasted seven weeks. But then the mood in the city changed - it became ominous. Yet Ellingsen says that right up until June 4, he still believed it would all end peacefully. He was in Tiananmen Square when the unthinkable happened. The army rolled into Beijing and opened fire: "When I saw the tracer bullets ... that's when I realised."

An estimated 3000 people were killed that night and in the weeks following, but as Ellingsen points out, "soldiers put the bodies in bags and took them away," so estimates are problematic. He calls it the Beijing massacre. "People talk about Tiananmen, but most of the people were killed in the small alleyways leading into the Square."

The reports Ellingsen filed back to Australia were harrowing in their description and achingly personal: "After the shock of the first killings," he wrote, "when more Chinese students than I could count had fallen to the ground, and it seemed almost routine to see blood pouring from teenage faces ...".

Ellingsen's anger and disbelief, and attempts to make sense of what was unfolding, led to him being named the Graham Perkin Australian Journalist of the Year. Ellingsen says there was no other way of interpreting the event.

"In a situation like that, if you're honest with yourself, there's no such thing as objectivity ... You react. You think, 'My God, that little girl has just been killed. And that man with the gun just shot her.' You feel outraged.

"If there is a professional part, it's that you're going to try to do something ... I was aware that I was trying to remember things that would have some effect on people reading it later. You're running around talking, thinking and trying to remember things ... Was that a child I saw in the gutter, or a small adult? That soldier I saw set alight, was he an old man or a young man?"

Ellingsen remained in China for two years, but says he found it difficult to report on anything that happened after that night: "You'd see these guys like Deng Xiaoping embraced by business types and you'd think, 'You were one of the butchers of Beijing.'"

That the instigators of Tiananmen were never brought to account for their actions by the international community continues to haunt Ellingsen. "What we should be doing as journalists is making the powerful feel uncomfortable ... That is our most coherent role in a democracy." He believes that one day the Chinese people will seek justice: "Bloodstains hang around." -- JH

Michael Gawenda

Ghettos in the Sky

Between 1981 and 1982, three murders were committed at the North Richmond Housing Commission flats. In preceding years, a number of residents had committed suicide by jumping from their balconies. "High-Rise Terror" was the standard headline in the daily papers and a hopelessly bleak picture of life on the estate was drawn.

Michael Gawenda, then a 30-year-old journalist at The Age, wanted to explore what was going on at the flats. With his features editor, Robert Haupt, he decided to live there incognito for a week. "We wanted to cover this issue without somebody just going down to the flats, talking to a couple of people, asking them what's wrong and writing a story that would have no impact. That's been done 100 times before," he says.

They found a woman prepared to vacate her flat. She and her family were put up in a hotel by the paper, and Gawenda moved in. "[For 11 days] I spent my time there. I did my washing, I cooked, I wandered around and I observed. I wanted to present something that was beyond the stereotype at the time. There was this perception that the flats were full of violent people, whose lives were sort of shattered, but that wasn't true. There were families ... there was a community."

Ethically, the story posed some issues for Gawenda because he didn't disclose that he was a journalist. The Australian Journalists Association (now the MEAA) Code of Ethics states that a journalist must identify themself before obtaining any interview. "I made a point of not interviewing people, so I got around the ethical issue that way," he says. "It's pretty close to the line, I realise that, but I don't think I betrayed or exposed anybody, and I was determined not to do that."

The resultant article, "Ghettos in the Sky", was published on the cover of the

Saturday Extra in The Age in May 1982 and won Gawenda a Walkley Award. The story revealed the diversity of life in the estate. It spoke of the oppression of the tiny "little boxes", freezing winds howling through the balconies on wintry nights, lifts that broke down. But the piece also revealed positive aspects like children playing in the communal playground, taking Chinese lessons on Saturdays, men tending their vegie gardens and picturesque city views.

Gawenda says for this "New Journalism", you need to be "a good observer. You've got to be patient, not push things. You need to be invisible, that's what makes it work."

"The story generated a huge reaction. I think it certainly changed a lot of people's views." -- KO

Michael Gawenda has been editor of The Age for the past seven years.

Michael Gordon

Reconciliation: a journey

It is odd to think of Michael Gordon, national editor of The Age for the past six years, feeling nervous about his ability to deliver on a story. But that is exactly how he felt as he flew from Adelaide to Broken Hill in early 2000 on the first leg of his journey into indigenous Australia.

Gordon had never visited a remote Aboriginal community. He was about to spend five weeks doing just that. His journey would take him from Wilcannia to Cape York, down to Alice Springs and many places in between.

The year 2000 was always going to be big in terms of indigenous issues, says Gordon. The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation was set to hand down its 10-year report. "I wanted to set the scene a bit," he says. "Until then most of my reporting had dealt solely with the indigenous leadership ... In a sense it was a personal journey, as well as a professional one."

His first lesson came early. "Originally I thought it would be best to tackle one issue in each place ... So it was, 'Well I'll do youth suicide at Mornington Island,' because there'd been four in five months ..." A week in, Gordon's plan was dismissed as a "whitefella's approach" by a woman who said; "Just tell the story of what happens on your trip."

Gordon found setting out each day with his tape recorder and camera - taking each day as it came - "exhilarating". It was also daunting. In Palm Island he met with hostility: "I think the Guinness Book of World Records had cast it as the most violent place on earth outside a combat zone."

Community leaders felt the situation had been sensationalised, explains Gordon: "Was I another person who would come in and paint a similarly bleak picture and then just shoot through?"

At one point Gordon was openly challenged to "tell the truth". First, he says, he had to work out what that meant. "The thing that struck me was that there were

layers of truth.

"The first layer is obviously what you see, which is pretty raw and disturbing in terms of the health and domestic violence situations in a number of places. [But] you have to go beyond that and say, well, why?" Gordon concluded that understanding indigenous Australia required an understanding of how history and prejudice had played a hand.

He structured his five-part feature series around these "layers", while also investigating policies that were working and could be replicated. "There are lots of people who aspire to a life where they can have the best of their own culture and the best of what wider Australia has to offer. If they are backed properly, we could see far more significant progress." -- JH

John Larkin

The Minus Children

In the early 1970s, Victoria's neglect of its intellectually disabled citizens was "one of the worst kept secrets in the state," according to former Age journalist John Larkin.

Thousands of people were "hidden" away in institutions that resembled something from a "terrible Gothic drama". As Larkin and colleague Ben Hills pointed out at the time, retarded children were not good political box-office material.

Larkin and Hills helped change the situation with a series of articles in The Age in 1973 and 1974. Their "Larkin and Hills' Insight" investigation into the "Minus

Children" gave one of society's most marginalised groups a voice and an identity: they were the "Minus Children", Larkin explained to Age readers, ''not to imply they were lesser beings", but because they were "behind in everything from esteem to opportunity''.

The series revealed that eight years of funding cuts by the state government had placed enormous strain on the institutions that housed intellectually disabled children. Hundreds of families on waiting lists had to shoulder the burden of care alone.

Central to Larkin's investigation was a focus on Kew Cottages, the largest institution run by the Mental Health Authority. "There were hundreds of people jammed in these so-called wards ... The wet-weather recreation centre was just a tin shed with concrete floors, and the bathrooms - well, you wouldn't use them to wash your car."

An anomaly in the Education Act absolved the Victorian Government of responsibility for the education of the intellectually disabled. "They [the residents] really just lay around all day waiting to be fed."

When, in 1975, The Age sponsored an appeal for a new learning and development centre at Kew Cottages, the response from the government and community was unprecedented. Twelve thousand Melburnians volunteered to door-knock, raising over $280,000 in one day. All up the appeal raised over $2 million, with Premier Rupert Hamer agreeing to match the sum dollar-for-dollar. The campaign not only gave the intellectually disabled a profile, it galvanised the government and the community to take ownership of their plight.

The key, reflects Larkin, was in providing a hard-hitting and raw account of the reality without making the situation appear hopeless. Larkin and Hills spent weeks digging out information and speaking to psychiatrists, doctors, parents and social staff to build up a picture of how the neglect had evolved over time. "The big thing was not to be melodramatic and simplistic and take advantage of it for the sake of a sensationalist story," says Larkin.

Larkin says the campaign encouraged him to keep working as a journalist. "You can't imagine the feeling when you work like that and you get a result like that," he says. "It was real joy ... I thought, 'This is the real heart of this city'". -- JH

Lindsay Murdoch

The Age Tapes

Published in 1984, The Age tapes, as they became known, contained sensational material that led to two Senate inquiries and a Royal Commission, exposed

corruption within the judiciary and the police force and revealed links between

politicians and organised crime identities. "It was the political yarn of the year and the fallout from it went on for years to come," says Age reporter Lindsay Murdoch.

The tapes were of telephone conversations illegally recorded over a seven-year period by New South Wales police. They featured, among others, then High Court judge Lionel Murphy who was heard discussing political favours for "my little mate", solicitor Morgan Ryan, then facing charges in NSW.

Sydney-based investigator Bob Bottom gave the material to Murdoch, crime reporter at The Age, concerned that "things were getting hot for him in New South Wales". Bottom was worried that new laws governing phone tapping in NSW might lead to the suppression of the material forever.

The newspaper flew Bottom to Melbourne and put him up at The Windsor Hotel, where he, Murdoch and Age reporter David Wilson spent the next few weeks transcribing the tapes and checking their authenticity. "Robert Haupt, editor of the paper while Creighton Burns was away, came and had one look at what we had," Murdoch recalls. "He knew it was dynamite."

Once the tapes' authenticity was confirmed, the story had legs - particularly in the highly-charged political climate of the day - but its explosive impact was yet to be revealed. "We sent the story up to The Sydney Morning Herald but they didn't run it. That just shows you how controversial it was. Hence they became known as The Age tapes. It was a national story but obviously it was bigger in New South Wales. It was very courageous of The Age to publish it."

Murdoch admits it was a torrid time in his career: "You were up against the big boys and we were sort of hanging there. You know that people want to bring you down."

The tapes effectively brought down Murphy. He was the subject of two Senate inquiries in 1984. In his first trial, in June 1985, he faced two charges of attempting to pervert the course of justice. He was found guilty of the first charge and not guilty of the second. On appeal, the conviction was quashed and a retrial ordered. In the retrial in April 1986, Murphy was acquitted.

"The Age tapes opened doors for us,'' Murdoch says. "The fact that we were standing up to the establishment then meant that people who had stories trusted us."-- KO

Paul Robinson

The Ugliest Australians

Technically speaking, the photo wasn't anything special. It showed a middle-aged man leading a 13-year-old Thai girl out of a bar. 'Andrew' was only shown from behind, but that was the point - Australian men were having sex with children overseas and getting away with it.

Paul Robinson's investigation that exposed child sex tourism in Asia by Australians and other westerners shocked readers when it appeared on page one of The Sunday Age in April 1993. Within six months the Keating Government introduced laws making it possible to prosecute Australians suspected of committing sex crimes against children overseas.

Robinson noticed the problem while holidaying in the Philippines. "It didn't occur to me that it was a story," he says, explaining that in the late 1980s and early 1990s paedophilia was a "taboo" subject and therefore regarded as off-limits by the media.

Nevertheless, then Sunday Age editor Bruce Guthrie backed the story. Robinson spent two months establishing contacts with aid agencies and welfare groups before he went back to the Philippines and Thailand. Gathering evidence that child sex tourism was taking place was not easy. "I connected with the local law enforcement and people who took me to sleazy and out-of-the-way places". After that, the problem was getting people to speak.

"This is a furtive and secret practice ... So it was more taking it in - looking, watching and recording ... I wasn't going to get any admissions from people about their sexual behaviour, because everyone knows this is illegal."

The Australian man, 'Andrew', was someone Robinson had a brief conversation with in a bar. "The next night I saw him ... He didn't see me and as I walked past I turned around and took the shot. He immediately spun around and I started taking pictures of everything around me. I think he was fooled, but a subsequent police investigation failed to find him."

Others haven't been so lucky. Increasing co-operation between Australia and governments of developing countries has netted results. Since the extra-territorial laws came into effect in 1994, 12 Australians have been convicted under the Child Sex Tourism Act.

"I think we helped give the issue legitimacy," says Robinson. "It has nothing to do with sex. It's about dominating others because you've got the financial power to do [so]."

It's a cliche, says Robinson, but journalism is about shining light in dark places. "That's the job; to tell society where it is failing". -- JH

Andrew Rule

Geoff Clark: Power and Rape

Investigative journalist Andrew Rule doesn't consider his 2001 story detailing rape allegations against ATSIC chairman Geoff Clark as one of his better-written pieces, but agrees it had the most impact. In his 25-year career, he can't recall a local story that caused "such a storm for 24 hours".

What began as an assignment to profile Australia's most powerful Aboriginal politician became an explosive story when four women went on the record to allege Clark had raped them during the 1970s and 1980s. Another said Clark had attempted to rape her. Clark had not been charged with the rapes and strongly denied them once the story was published.

Profile writing is like detective work, Rule says. It involves tracking down

people who have no interest in presenting the subject in either a positive or a negative light. "All you can do is hold up a tape recorder or a notebook and take down what people say".

The process led Rule to the alleged rape victims: "One up on the Murray, two in Queensland and one in Darwin". I said to them, 'If this is going to be done, it can't be done on the basis of one or two people ... or it's not going to fly ...' Luckily, the women agreed to go public and sign statutory declarations."

Public opinion was divided on whether the story was a brave and noble journalistic enterprise or "trial by media". Among letters written to The Age were those attacking Rule's story as evidence of the "endemic racism that exists in the Australian media".

Rule was awarded the Gold Walkley Award, the Graham Perkin Australian

Journalist of the Year Award and the Melbourne Press Club's Gold Quill for his work that year, and believes time has vindicated his motives in writing the story.

Clark never took legal action against The Age, nor did he lodge a complaint with the Press Council as he said he intended to. Two of the women have been granted the right to take out separate civil actions against him (decisions that Clark is appealing against).

The story was not about race or class, says Rule: "It was about alleged criminal behaviour ... in a highly paid, publicly elected official," whose status and income "was equal to that of a state premier".

Rule believes the Clark story made it acceptable for the media to investigate

violence within indigenous communities. "[Clark] is in charge of an organisation that is trying to counter that, yet he is allegedly guilty of it. If that's not a big news story,

what is? It would be the same [for] any big politician in Australia". -- JH

John Silvester

Crime reporting

To many people, John Silvester has the job of a lifetime. As a crime reporter for almost 30 years, brushing up against some of Victoria's worst criminals and the state's top law enforcers, he has encountered both extremes - good and evil. It has, says Silvester, given him a unique insight into the human condition.

"I am constantly fascinated by human nature because we are so capable of such incredible good and such incredible evil. To know people who have suffered the most unfair tragedies, who've done incredibly generous and brave things. And then you see people who have killed on a whim or taken a contract to kill a stranger. It's just an amazing journey of black and white. It's unfathomable how different people can be."

It is 27 years since Silvester began his graduate cadetship at The Sun in Melbourne, where he was assigned to police rounds at Russell Street police headquarters. The son of a former top police investigator, he has specialised in crime ever since. "People who write crime are pretty lucky 'cause normally you don't have to grow up - you play cops and robbers. And you get paid for it."

He moved to The Sunday Age in 1993 and five years later became The Age's senior crime writer. He has an enviable list of scoops to his credit and, given that he hears stories of inspirational strength and unimaginable depravity, has a case-hardened exterior that can be misread. One of the main challenges of the job, according to Silvester, is not to become too cynical. "When you're doing a story that involves a murder, there is a real victim, a real person, and there are family members. And if you go and talk to those people, to do justice to those people you've got to really commit yourself to the story and know it's not just words on paper."

Melbourne's spate of underworld murders - since 1998, 27 people have been killed in circumstances believed to be linked to organised crime - have given Silvester plentiful material. "We're living in extraordinary times," he says, arguing that what we're witnessing now will be a significant part of Victoria's and Australia's history.

"We're living in a time when the police will say 'No comment' and the suspects are holding press conferences. Times have changed."

Silvester is also aware that information made public in his articles can have dramatic repercussions. At times, that can lead to a law being changed or a criminal being brought to justice. Conversely, stories can lead to a police investigation being jeopardised or vital evidence being destroyed.

"As in all streams, you have to occasionally reflect and think, why are people

talking to me, what's the purpose? Some of these people are extremely charismatic and you've just got to be careful to remember who you are and who your master is." -- KO

Russell Skelton

In Search of Ali Bakhtiyari

The village elder was shaking with rage and shouting into the satellite phone at Australia's most enigmatic and controversial refugee: "Ali Bakhtiyari, I have never heard of you and I have lived in Charkh for 45 years." (Russell Skelton writing in The Age, August 23, 2002.)

It was a phone conversation that cut right to the heart of the debate about Australia's border protection policy. Was Ali Bakhtiyari a "genuine refugee" - an Afghani of Hazara ethnicity fleeing the Taliban? Or, as the Howard Government claimed, was he a "queue jumper" - a Pakistani plumber escaping poverty, not persecution.

Ultimately the telephone exchange lent weight to government claims about "economic migrants". Age senior reporter Russell Skelton went to considerable lengths to set it up. Skelton travelled to the remote and dangerous Uruzgan province of Afghanistan where Bakhtiyari said he was from, but as he explains, getting Bakhtiyari on the Australian end was almost more difficult:

"We were talking to Bakhtiyari's minders in Sydney. Meanwhile we [got] his phone number from one of the activist groups who said, 'No, no - he's in Woomera'. We were being deliberately misled about where he was. The people in Sydney were saying, 'You tell us what you've found and then we'll tell Ali, and Ali will talk to you.'"

"We ended up getting Ali and he changed his story. He said it was Charkh Chaprasak he was from. There's no such village. It was quite clear to me that someone was feeding him his lines ... Someone with a rough knowledge of the area".

Skelton and his team - two interpreters and one guide - exhausted the knowledge of locals in Charkh and the two other villages from which Bakhtiyari later claimed he had fled. They found no evidence he had lived in any of them.

Skelton had received a media award from AUSTCARE in 2001 for his coverage of refugee issues, which included articles exposing conditions at Woomera and the plight of people on temporary protection visas. When Skelton exposed Bakhtiyari, he was no longer popular among sectors of the refugee lobby. "I certainly received some nasty emails and letters," says Skelton. "We were telling people what they didn't want to hear". But he never set out to be a "poster boy" for activists.

"My basic instinct has always been that a reporter has to call it the way they see it and the way they find it."

In the months following the publication of his Bakhtiyari story, Skelton won the print award from the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, and was also highly commended by the United Nations Association of Australia for his work on

asylum seeker issues. -- JH