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Remembering Paul, John and Gary.

What should have been a day of celebrations was the darkest of days for the ABC.

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What should have been a day of celebrations was the darkest of days for the ABC.

On the 50th Anniversary of Four Corners, the public broadcaster was mourning the loss of four colleagues, Paul Lockyer (pictured), John Bean, Gary Ticehurst and Ian Carroll.

The helicopter crash at Lake Eyre ended the lives of three men with the kind of devastation that has likely not been seen since the death of “the Balibo five” journalists in East Timor in 1975.

Early yesterday morning ABC Managing Director Mark Scott said, “I don’t think we have ever had a day like the day we might be facing, with news of the loss of three distinguished colleagues out reporting a story.”

But worse was to come with the passing of ABC’s Director of Innovation, Ian Carroll, a close friend of Scott’s who had retired due to ill health just two weeks earlier.

Today 7:30‘s Leigh Sales writes in The Australian about Lockyer, Bean and Ticehurst.

Here are several excerpts:

“John Bean shot extraordinary pictures, but the really endearing thing about him was that he didn’t seem to know how good he was.

“You would rearrange your schedule in a heartbeat if it meant having Beanie, as we called him, for the assignment.”

“We all trusted Gary (Ticehurst) implicitly. There was nobody more meticulous in his maintenance, nobody more skilled in his flying.”

“And Lockers, the incomparable Paul Lockyer. Whenever you asked “Who’s doing that yarn?”, if the answer was “Lockers”, you’d know it was guaranteed to be the best thing on your program.

“When you saw Lockers on TV and he seemed like such a good man, what you were seeing was the real him.

“There hasn’t been a dry eye at the ABC today. The public will notice holes in our coverage because these three are genuinely irreplaceable. But for us who knew them, the holes are in our hearts.”

Planned celebrations to mark Four Corners’ achievements yesterday were abandoned. Hopefully Monday night’s retrospective special will be dedicated to all four men.

Paul Lockyer tribute
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7I0BlrucSI[/youtube]

John Bean, Gary Ticehurst tribute
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l07THSUJ3XQ[/youtube]

2 Responses

  1. yes, i was reminded of Balibo too, even though the circumstances are so different – but they were both tragedies that cost us unique talent in decent honest news reporting. And that’s hard to come by these days.
    and, I think we feel the loss especially of people who can articulate what unites us (other than football) across this vast, beautiful but in many places inhospitable land.

  2. What Gary Ticehurst did in the 98 Sydney to Hobart tragedy was true heroism in every sense of the word. A brave and selfless man, and such a tragedy to lose him this way. Vale

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