Back in 2001, the Tuesday night ritual for those of us working in the Canberra Press Gallery was to settle back with a cup of tea and watch our favourite US political drama. The Senate wing of Australia’s parliament, which is home to the press gallery, was not nearly as exciting as The West Wing, but we related to the fictional drama nonetheless.
Tuesday, September 11, had been a particularly busy day. We’d been reporting news that one of Australia’s two main airlines, Ansett, was on the brink of collapse; it would implode the following day, with enormous consequences for its workers and the aviation industry.
The gallery bigwigs were in Washington with then prime minister John Howard, who was due to address a joint sitting of Congress on September 12 (Howard reflected on the experience to James Massola in this piece published on Friday). Michelle Grattan, who was The Sydney Morning Herald’s political correspondent, was in Washington with Howard, as was Peter Hartcher, who then worked for The Australian Financial Review and is now, of course, the Herald’s political and international editor.
In fact, it had been a busy few months. In July, as a baby journalist for Australian Associated Press, I’d been trusted with my first reporting round: immigration. In August, I found myself covering the biggest story in the country after the prime minister refused to allow the MV Tampa, a Norwegian ship that had rescued 433 asylum seekers from Afghanistan, to enter Australian waters – a drama that dominated headlines and still shapes immigration and refugee policy in Australia and around the world.
So, late on Tuesday, September 11, many of us escaped into an imaginary political drama on TV. Until a news update at about 10.45pm, which showed footage of a plane crashing into the World Trade Centre in New York. We madly messaged each other on our Nokia phones. Was it an accident? An attack? We put down the tea, and drove to work.
When a story like that breaks, whenever it breaks, heading to the newsroom is an involuntary reflex. Almost our whole bureau converged on the office. We did it again and again too many times over the following years and decades – after a series of explosions in Bali in 2002, and following the tsunami in South East Asia in 2004. We did it again last December, dropping everything to head to work when the news of a shooting at Bondi broke.
Our sacred duty as journalists is to keep the public informed, and that responsibility is even more profound when the news is so horrendous, and so consequential.
At the Herald, the presses ran hot with special editions (online news was in its infancy). It was all hands on deck in Sydney, and editors desperately tried to reach reporters already in the danger zones (including our US correspondents, our editor-at-large – who happened to be in New York – and Grattan, who ended up flying out of the United States with Howard on Air Force Two, escorted through closed airspace by fighter jets).
They were frightening days – buildings teetering, people jumping, figures walking on the streets of New York covered in ash.
The Herald’s then editor, Robert Whitehead, had just arrived in North Queensland with his wife and newborn for a holiday, which he had postponed due to the Tampa incident; as soon as the news broke of the attacks, he was booked a 6am flight back to Sydney.
They were frightening days – buildings teetering, people jumping, figures walking on the streets of New York covered in ash. Desperate searches for loved ones. The shock turned into aching grief, mingled with fear – of more attacks, of impending war. Travel writer Lee Tulloch was living in New York, and this week recalled the confusion of those days.
Some 3000 people died in the attacks. Ten of them were Australians.
For many of us, the moment we heard about the September 11 attacks is seared into our memory. Others were too young to remember, and know it only through stories. It was disturbing, this week, to read Michael Koziol’s story on how some of those who were too young to witness the attack are already beginning to doubt it, despite all the footage, photographs and living memory.
As we look back, 25 years on, I am reminded of the role of journalism as the first draft of history. I’ve pored over the pages of the Herald from September 11, and reflected again on the importance of having experienced and highly trained journalists from trusted news organisations both at the coal face and back in the newsroom during events of this magnitude.
It is difficult to report chaos and tragedy, but bringing these events to you, our readers, with speed, empathy and insight is a responsibility we take extremely seriously.
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