Tim Palmer, a foreign correspondent for ABC (Australia) was the first foreign correspondent in the world to enter Aceh after the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004, for three days providing the only televsion coverage of the catastrophe from the devastated province. The reporting from Aceh and subsequent written reportage demonstrate a sensitivity to the appalling conditions that the victims of the tsunami were experiencing. In a piece about this time, published in a book of stories from the ABC’s foreign correspondents, ‘Travellers’ Tales 2′ he writes: ‘I’d try to shoot pictures that we could decently put to air, but it was difficult. The bodies were everywhere and unnoticed corpses would find their way into the frame.’
Working under the most awful conditions, afraid to eat anything for fear of being poisoned, he and his camera operator managed to reach the west coast first where they recorded ‘the ghostly open spaces where whole villages once stood, and where now there was nothing to break the wind whistling off the Indian Ocean’. He found that children and old people had been particularly badly hit, being not strong enough to hang onto anything when the wave came.
Most recently he covered the earthquake in Nias, and subsequently was the only broadcast journalist to report from the site where nine Australians died in the Sea King helicopter crash. He has also reported extensively on Indonesia’s military campaign in Aceh.
He covered the Bali bombing and the hunt for the bombers through to their convictions, and reported on the roots of extremism in Indonesia, as well as the subsequent attacks on the Marriott Hotel and the Australian Embassy in Jakarta.
From 1999 to 2002 Tim was the ABC’s Middle East correspondent based in Jerusalem and Amman, winning a Walkley award for his coverage of the collapse of the peace process into the second Palestinian intifada. He reported across the region from Lebanon and Syria to the Gulf states and Iran and in 2001 was one of only a handful of reporters to cover the war in Afghanistan from the country’s far West in Herat.
Most recently he covered the earthquake in Nias, and subsequently was the only broadcast journalist to report from the site where nine Australians died in the Sea King helicopter crash. Tim is also the winner of a UN Media Peace Prize.
Despite all the progress made in communications the world would still remain ignorant of the actual on-the-ground conditions without such reporters, of all nationalities. These people, men and women of all backgrounds are all champions. Tim Palmer is just one of them.
Tags: ABC, Add new tag, foreign correspondent, UN Media Peace Prize
