Correspondent's Notebook

Asia: A reporter’s experience

18 December 2009

As she prepares to return to Australia reporter Katie Hamann reflects on her four years in Asia and why she believes motherhood has been a blessing for her career.

In December 2004 I chased my boyfriend, Geoff, then the ABC’s South Asia correspondent to India, arriving in New Delhi on the afternoon of December 26, and having flown directly over the top of the worst natural disaster in modern history.

Twelve hours later, standing in a morgue in Chennai, I decided to abandon my career as a fashion journalist.

Fifteen months later I followed Geoff to Jakarta, where he took up the position of Indonesia correspondent in March 2006.

I was still a green reporter, with absolutely no broadcast experience.

But I was no longer the romantic backpacker, now the bonefide partner of a ‘correspondent’, harbouring not-so secret ambitions to topple his fiefdom.

And so I threw myself into the murky world of radio journalism.

The scandal of Playboy Indonesia’s first edition, was quickly followed by the rumbling ring of fire which killed nearly 6,000 people in central Java, the first of several disaster stories we would cover.

Later that year Aceh elected their first governor and then, most shocking of all, we discovered I was pregnant.

I’ve always been a reluctant gusher when it comes to the life affirming experience of motherhood and piling praise upon mini genetic replicas.

Sure he is a good looking kid, speaks two languages. But he’s not toilet trained and probably no cuter than your child.

There is no escaping the fact however, that Charlie’s arrival in the world in July 2007 was the defining moment of my years in Indonesia, my life so far and in so many ways also of my reporting career.

Of all the cliches about parenthood that I have read or heard (and inflicted upon others) the most true is that the revelation of extreme vulnerability profoundly alters your view of the world.

You find compassion muscles you never new you had. For anyone this is a good thing but for a journalist, I believe, it is a gift.

It means that now, when I sit down in a slum with an HIV positive woman, and listen as she describes the discrimination her daughter faces in school, we both cry.

It means that when I learn that 20,000 women have died in Indonesia this year because of complications in pregnancy and childbirth, I want to scream and shout and picket the Presidential palace.

I wish now that I could go back and hold the hand of the Indian mother who sat on the steps of a gleaming white cathedral in Tamil Nadu in the days following the tsunami.

A slip of a woman and catatonic with grief after losing her 10 children and countless grandchildren to the swallowing seas.

Even now I wouldn’t know what to say, except that my son’s presence in the world makes her horror even more unimaginable.

Then there are the things I haven’t learnt; such as time management.

Which is why I find myself headbutting yet another 5am deadline; attempting to sum up five of the biggest years of my life in under four minutes.

And whilst my time is up in Indonesia, I know there will be many more deadlines and, I hope, miraculous reporting adventures at home in Australia and Asia.

And perhaps, another baby.

In Jakarta this is Katie Hamann for Correspondent’s Notebook.