On January 4 this year, as the fatal Currowan Fire ripped through the South Coast of New South Wales, Tracey Nearmy drove for an entire day through three states to meet it.
An independent photojournalist covering the bushfires for Reuters, her task was to record families either remaining to safeguard their houses or evacuating their lives into cars to run away.
” It’s really hard to just really take the image, [wearing] the PPE (Individual Protective Equipment), you have actually got the helmet, the visor, safety glasses and your mask. To attempt and actually see through the viewfinder is tough in itself and it’s quite cumbersome and hard to line up a frame,” she informed ABC Arts.
Nearmy recalls chatting to a family who had actually left to the South Coast town of Nowra, and hearing “the pyrocumulus behind the pillar of smoke, it was actually spooky”.
Not Long After, she says, “the wind changed and the smoke and ash kind of struck the town with this ferociousness that was rather terrifying”.
Nearmy was driving the streets when regional resident Nancy Allen approached her for recommendations.
” Nancy asked me if I thought she needs to stay or go, and I stated to her I think you should go,” the photojournalist remembers.
Almost right away after the exchange, she says, Allen faced the video camera with an “frustrating expression of just totally being caught off guard, of not knowing where or which way she ought to go, or what she must do”.
Nearmy’s deeply-affecting picture of Allen was shared around the world.
” For me, it assisted describe the situation that numerous thousands of Australians were in at that point in time,” states the professional photographer.
Nearmy hopes that her picture of Allen might trigger discussion about much better readiness, planning and bushfire reaction.
” What I took away from the fires was truly how unprepared as a country, and as people on the ground, we were.”
Nearmy’s image is among 60 showcased in the online exhibition Paper Tigers, part of Head On Image Festival, which is totally online this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Curated by Moshe Rosenzveig, the creator and director of Head On, and photojournalist Brian Cassey, Paper Tigers contacted Australian photojournalists to put forward an image that they thought about renowned, or definitive of their practice.
The results cover from Princess Diana responding to a hot South Australian breeze, to a seething mob at the Cronulla Riots; from Rohingya refugees paddling throughout the Naf River on makeshift rafts, to off-chops Melbourne Cup revellers; from a mid-air, pleased Serena Williams at the 2005 Australian Open, to a portrait of Daisy Kadibil– one of the females whose stories accentuated the Stolen Generations
We asked six of the award-winning photojournalists showcased in Paper Tigers to share the stories behind their extraordinary images.
Train Bashing
Photographed by: Craig Greenhill in Cronulla (NSW), December 2005.
Publication: The Daily Telegraph
What’s the story? It was a Sunday early morning 10: 00 am shift, there wasn’t much taking place that day, and then the boss said: Go take a look at what’s going down in Cronulla.
When I got down [to Cronulla] there was an Australia Day feel to it, everybody was flying flags and Australian icons. There was a huge crowd gathering down at the beach front, and there was a whisper in the crowd that there was a train full of Lebanese [people] coming