It is a commonplace that death puts things into perspective. But the reason why it is commonplace is that we experience its truth again and again. So it was with the deaths of the ABC journalist Paul Lockyer, photographer John Bean and pilot Gary Ticehurst in a helicopter crash near Lake Eyre. Their deaths put journalism into perspective.
The image of journalism that has dominated the news in the last month has been one of grubbiness. Phone hacking, cover-ups, the collusion of police, politicians and media executives have jostled for attention with the habitual sins of tendentious reporting and pontifical commentating. Together they have plunged journalists even further down the most-admired profession scale.
Lockyer's death reminds us how much we are indebted to ordinary, decent and self-effacing journalists. I never knew him, but his name and voice have been a constant presence on the ABC, telling stories, describing situations and landscape, explaining what we might have missed.
I did not learn from his reporting what his political views were, who his friends were or what interesting experiences he might have had in his life. He was the servant of his craft — uncovering aspects of Australian reality for interested readers.
Neither did I meet John Bean, never heard his name nor heard his voice, but I realised after his death that many of the photographs have defined aspects of Australia for me. I was even less connected with Gary Ticehurst, but his death reminded me yet again how much what we know of our nation depends on people who fetch and carry and never leave a byline to recognise them by.
Their deaths also remind us of the risks that journalists take in pursuing their craft. To tell their stories, journalists are drawn to places isolated from civilisation. Sometimes the isolation is physical, taking journalists to places where travel always involves some risk. At other times the isolation is from civil society, whose risks took journalists like the Balibo Five and Neil Davis to their deaths.
In many nations the isolation is from any moral universe, working in a society where powerful people make it their business to suppress knowledge of reality and those who come to hold such knowledge.
The death of ordinary people doing necessary work in a decent way turns around the questions we usually ask about journalism. When confronted by the corruption of something good, we usually ask how we can stop