On holiday, I’ve been reading ‘Inside Story’ – ABC foreign correspondent Peter Lloyd’s honest and compelling tale of his humiliating arrest and imprisonment in Singapore in 2008 for drug possession (a trafficking charge was later dropped).

Lloyd was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder at the time of his arrest, a personal legacy of his work over the previous six years covering a succession of disasters – including the Bali bombing, the Boxing Day tsunami and the carnage around Bhutto’s return to Pakistan and her subsequent assassination.

The book segues back and forth from Lloyd’s day-by-day account of his experience with the police, the judiciary and the penal authorities in Singapore and his remembrances of his professional life in the preceding years – doing standups amid the stench of rotting corpses in Bali or slipping and sliding amid the blood and gore in a makeshift mortuary after the first attack on Bhutto.

No doubt to protect his estranged wife and children, he says little about the influence on his psychological condition of the undoubtedly wrenching decision during those years to admit to his homosexuality – though he reveals that the split was amicable and that he remains friends with his former partner.

Lloyd touches on – and the book might have benefited from more of this – the increasing demands on foreign correspondents in a time of multiplication of outlets and real-time media. In one segment, he rues how he found himself rooted to Phuket during the tsunami aftermath, doing constant pieces to camera to deal with the requests from multiple editors.  As a result, little effort was made to report the far greater carnage elsewhere.

“We played safe in order to feed the beast of hourly deadlines,” he recalls. “But there are times when the broadcasting beast holds us back from doing our job – it is moments like this when you realise that the more we report, the less we are reporting.”

One hopes the editors of ABC News 24 will heed this message, but I doubt it. The trend, if anything, is for even more of this nonsensical “John Smith joins us live now from the scene….” type reporting where the information is less important than the particular outlet showing it has a reporter on the spot. Inevitably, the journo is so committed to live stand-ups, they end up echoing wire service reports fed to them by the editors back at headquarters in Sydney or London or New York.

Also instructive for those looking for an inside view of how the media operates is Lloyd’s experiences going back and forth to court in Singapore, running the inevitable door-stops erected by the sort of media scrums of which he was once a part. At one point, he finds himself coaching his friends and relatives on negotiating the gauntlet of cameras and microphones with him.

“I understand better than most how the media operates,” he counsels. ” It is a beast and, like all beasts, it needs to be fed. If you starve it, the beast is less powerful. On a day like this, taming the beast simply requires silence. Don’t respond to it. Don’t let it provoke you. Keep your head up and your mouth closed. This is how to survive a walk for the cameras.”

The last third of Lloyd’s book is a detailed “insider’s” account of his seven or eight months in Tanah Merah prison, one of Singapore’s many penal institutions. This period of monkish captivity marks his recovery from his stress disorder and a sort of redemption from the personal horrors of his years reporting Asia. What comes through here is his passionate (and understandable) loathing of the one-party state of Singapore and the Chinese majority’s inhumane treatment of ethnic Malays and Indians. One imagines, after his repeated diatribes against Lee Kuan Yew, that he doesn’t plan a return visit anytime soon to the city state.

Missing from his observations is an awareness of how Australia fits into the south-east Asian political dynamic. There is a brief episode when he his quizzed by locals about Pauline Hanson. But he seems unreflective beyond his personal story of how his Australian background colours what he reports

For all that, ‘Inside Story’ is still a good read. It brings home the real unedited horror of many of stories that have filled the ABC’s nightly news bulletins in recent years and it tells them vividly through the experiences of an individual who showed remarkable strength  in the face of  great personal and professional upheaval.


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