Working through the pain of lost colleagues

By Malcolm Farr

March 09, 2007 10:43am

LAURA Tingle, chief of The Australian Financial Review's bureau in Canberra, rose to talk yesterday about lost colleague Morgan Mellish - and almost immediately collapsed.

"I want to talk about Morgan, who as you all know is believed to have died in the crash in Yogyakarta," she began at a noon gathering of the Parliamentary Press Gallery.

"It's been a hard 24 hours that we have waited for news of Morgan."

Then she appealed in a broken voice: "Could somebody come and hold my hand?"

Attempting vainly to laugh off her distress she said: "Just hold on to my arm or something?"

Two women colleagues moved to Tingle's side to comfort and physically support her.

Her enormous grief crashed into the small pond that is the Press Gallery - and the ripples were quickly felt by all watching.

Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty stood in Canberra alone as he spoke of the two fine officers who may have died in the same aircraft crash in Indonesia - Brice Steel and Mark Scott.

Talking of one of the men he said: "He's well known. He's a very accomplished police officer. He's a Harvard graduate ..."

Then he paused to cough, and cough again. Those standing near could see from his moist eyes there was more than throat clearing under way.

There is an intense, heated core of mourning within a small community when tragedy strikes its membership, a grief almost matching that of the family of a victim.

It was shown by the football teams who lost fellow players in the Bali bombing. It's seen in schools when youngsters are lost to road accidents.

An unusual factor of the Garuda plane crash on Wednesday was that it struck to the core of three quite small communities, groups which are separate but interrelated in Canberra.

They were the communities of journalists, diplomats and federal police.

Each one of the groups is quite tiny and close-knit. Those in them know just about all the others personally or at a narrow remove. People retire but never really leave their community.

Members of each group spend much of their time tending to the tragedies of others, telling the stories of tragedy's victims and easing the pain of those tragedy has left behind. In this case they were the ones left behind.

Keelty, who knew badly burnt journalist Cynthia Banham and others on the crashed aircraft, wanted to make that point.

"And as you know, when you travel in these sorts of entourages people become quite close, get to know each other quite well, so ..." he said yesterday, stumbling slightly at his press conference.

He continued: "Like any organisation we don't like to lose anybody. But as all of you know - and many of you have travelled into these parts of the world, all around the world - there is a risk associated with working offshore."

The interconnection of these three groups and their sorrow had a focus in another fatality of the crash, that of Liz O'Neill, the public affairs officer at the Australian Embassy in Jakarta.

O'Neill had helped scores of journalists and anti-terror police going through Indonesia since the first Bali terror bombings.

She was given a medal of the Order of Australia for her work in that atrocity's aftermath. She couldn't seem to escape bombings.

O'Neill was the frontwoman for the embassy when it was rocked by a blast set off by a suicide attacker a year later.

"It's like the wind has been pushed out of you, because the force of the bomb has a reaction on your lungs," she told Channel 9 at the time.

O'Neill was a cool, informative presence after these bloody events - one greatly appreciated by reporters and investigators.

On Tuesday night this week in Jakarta she again tried to do the right thing and found a spare ticket for Mellish so he could catch the plane which took their lives and that of senior AusAid director Allison Sudrajat, the two police offices as well as dozens of Indonesians.

A crowd of about 100 journalists jammed the Financial Review's offices in Parliament House, where Mellish had worked between 2002 and 2004.

They were from all news organisations. Some had never met him, but that didn't matter. A willingness to share the heartbreak of the small Gallery community was the only price of admission.

Tingle continued: "We had hoped he might have pissed off and gone surfing, it being a Morgan thing to do.

"Then reports started to come through that he had indeed been on the plane. Then there were conflicting reports that he had been found alive in hospital, only suffering broken ribs.

"Unfortunately this is not the case. The current situation is that we are hoping a body found yesterday with Morgan's pass in a pocket can be formally identified today, and family and friends can start mourning him properly."

When Tingle finished speaking, the silent gathering broke up as reporters went back to their offices, underlining another common element of the three groups.

As Keelty said of his own sadness: "There is a job to do."