Journalist with a Pacific beat
Title -- 3712 REGION: Journalist with a Pacific beat
Date -- 28 July 2002
Byline -- None
Origin -- Pacific Media Watch
Source -- The National (PNG), 26-28/7/02
Copyright - The National
Status -- Unabridged
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www.thenational.com.pg/0726/w1.htm
Friday-Sunday, 26-28 July 2002
JOURNALIST WITH A PACIFIC BEAT
IAN BODEN profiles the life and work of award-winning journalist
Mary-Louise O'Callaghan, who is currently in Port Moresby to report on the
formation of the new government.
FOR choice, she lives on a tiny South Pacific island named Bellona.
That's Mary-Louise O'Callaghan's slice of heaven, one that she shares with
her husband Joses Tuhanuku and their four children.
Not that she gets to see as much of home as she would wish, for this journalist
calls the whole South Pacific her beat, and stories can crop up
anywhere from French Polynesia to Indonesian Papua, and just about every
little atoll in between.
Ms O'Callaghan was born into a boisterous, happy family in Melbourne.
She revels in the fact that her parents remain a staunch part of her busy
life, and she welcomes the occasional opportunities to visit her family
and old home.
But there's not much spare time for this energetic woman, who is apt to
turn up in any South Pacific capital where there's news brewing.
At the moment M-L, as friends call her, is in Port Moresby chasing the
story of Papua New Guinea's tempestuous election. She has the advantage of
a long acquaintance with PNG, and many formative experiences ranging from
the Bougainville civil war, through the Rabaul volcano eruptions, the
Sandline crisis -- her scoop which became a sensational international
event -- and sundry other major and minor forays into the lives and times
of the people of this region.
Somewhere along the way she finds time to be the board chairperson of the
only operating international school in trouble-torn Honiara, give lectures
to press associations and academic bodies, and to support the political
life of her well-known Solomon Islands husband Joses, a former cabinet
minister and now a leading Opposition figure.
Then there are the four young children to raise, and the maintenance of a
network of tried and true friends from one end of the region to the other.
And for three solid years, in tandem with all the above and a lot more
besides, M-L was writing a book.
Not just any old book, but the true story from the inside of the Sandline
crisis that brought PNG to the very brink of collapse.
The book is long since written, published and sold-out. Titled Enemies
Within, it was launched in PNG by the Speaker of Parliament Bernard
Narokobi, and in Australia by the Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander
Downer.
Enemies Within won Australia's prestigious Gold Walkley Award and
created a furore with its no-holds-barred approach to the facts and the
personalities of Sandline.
All of which may suggest that Ms O'Callaghan leads a jet-setting life
filled with big names and glamour.
Not a bit of it.
As any dyed-in-the-wool journalist will confirm, she faces the same missed
deadlines, the same aircraft travel hassles and wooden-faced government
officials as do all scribblers.
Nor does she spend her life solely interviewing the rich and the famous.
On any given work day, M-L is just as likely to be found searching for the
story behind the making of a rebel, revealing the heart-rending poverty of
grass-roots citizens almost anywhere in the South Pacific, or simplifying
complex constitutional questions the better to clarify them for her
Australian audience.
Mary-Louise works for The Australian, now owned by the Murdoch empire and
News Ltd.
She welcomes the opportunity that gives for her to contribute
thought-provoking pieces to the Enquirer section of the paper, and to the
various specialist weekend pages that have made the national daily famous.
What drives this energetic woman who long ago adopted the Solomons as her
home, and its way of life as her own?
I caught up with her at Port Moresby's Holiday Inn a few weeks after she
celebrated her 40th birthday in Fiji.
Many of the political figures that lost their seats were well-known to
her, and she was fascinated by the huge change underway in parliamentary
representation, while thankful that some old contacts remained.
With Ms O'Callaghan, it's never enough to hope she'll be fobbed-off with
the easy answer or the facile response. Many years of probing, both gentle
and confrontational, have taught her how to find out that crucial bit of
information that will make her story compulsive reading, yet 100 percent
accurate.
At the moment, like most of us in the fourth estate, she's trying to
figure out the outcome of the elections. When she arrived this time, she
did not imagine that she would be required to do much more than cover the
election of Speaker and Prime Minister.
What she found, and the developing story that surrounds her, has convinced
Ms O'Callaghan that she needs to speak to many more people, and probe
deeper than she had anticipated.
In a sense, PNG politics has become a whole new world, and Ms O'Callaghan
is not about to let her grasp of events here slip.
The journalist who has variously worked for The Guardian in the UK, The
Christian Science Monitor in the States, the Melbourne-based Australian
Financial Review, and the Sydney Morning Herald long ago staked her claim
to an understanding of, and affinity with the people and events of the
South Pacific.
One of the more unusual features about this woman journalist is her
unfailing pleasantness -- until she senses she's being given the
run-around by her quarry. Then her years of experience come to the fore,
and it's a brave interviewee indeed who will try to pull the wool over
this scribe's eyes.
Capable of some of the language's more colourful phrases, and with an
acerbic wit, it would be easy to conclude that this scribe is protected by
self-created armour -- but that's not the case. This is one journalist who
believes strongly in the spiritual side of life, not as an after-thought,
but as the source of the events and characters she deals with in her daily
writing.
On Wednesday this week, Ms O'Callaghan decided to revisit a family she
first interviewed some four years ago.
This is the family of Afa Anaku -- wife Epi, sons Tarajon and Warren and
daughter Julie.
From Okapa in the Eastern Highlands province, they're settlement dwellers
at the back of June Valley, sharing a house with relatives while they
struggle to build their own house almost next door.
In common with thousands of other citizens of the capital, they have no
water, no power, no sanitation -- in fact, not much of anything.
Work is hard to find, and the father of the family, who has worked for
more than 30 years to carve out a future for his children, is presently
unemployed, while mother and elder son Tarajon have the responsibility of
bringing in what funds they can.
These people are not jet-setters, household names, or world travellers.
They are faithful Lutherans, law-abiding citizens who wish nobody harm,
and want no handouts, just the opportunity to work and make their own way
in the world.
It is their very typicality that makes them unique, and attracted Ms
O'Callaghan to them four years ago.
Then they were living in an extended boi haus at Five-Mile, which they
lost not long after they were interviewed.
M-L wanted to see how they had fared in the intervening years, and traced
them to their new home. Her approach to the interview she had with them
was not sentimental, neither was it patronising nor judgmental.
As a result the truth beneath the surface, the reality of her subjects'
lives, came forward without contrivance and with the ring of truth.
By careful questions the pathos and more importantly the gritty spirit of
this little family were revealed. These are the battlers of PNG, like so
many others, and that they will come marvellously to life in print is the
best compliment one can pay this journalist.
The ten years of her marriage to Joses Tuhanuku and their four children
have been a special boon to Ms O'Callaghan. She talks of the value of her
extended family, and ponders that she might have ended up married "to some
boy-next-door in Melbourne."
As it is, her husband is as immersed in his life as an elected political
representative as she is in her field of journalism.
It says much for them both that their twin careers not only survive, but
prosper.
With more than 15 years of daily journalism in the South Pacific to her
credit, Mary-Louise O'Callaghan is one of that handful of foreign
correspondents whose affection and regard for the people they have come to
know is legendary.
PACIFIC MEDIA WATCH is an independent, non-profit, non-government organisation comprising journalists, lawyers, editors and other media workers, dedicated to examining issues of ethics, accountability, censorship, media freedom and media ownership in the Pacific region. Launched in October 1996, it has links with Journalism Program at the University of the South Pacific, Bushfire-Media, Journalism Studies at the University of PNG (UPNG), the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism (ACIJ), and Pactok Communications, in Sydney and Port Moresby.
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