ABC mourns news crew killed in helicopter crash
August 19, 2011 - 9:12AM/the AGE
Three members of an ABC news team are dead following a helicopter crash at Lake Eyre in South Australia.
They are reporter Paul Lockyer, pilot Gary Ticehurst and cameraman John Bean.
Crash tragedy ... From left, Cameraman John Bean, helicopter pilot Gary Ticehurst and journalist Paul Lockyer. Photo: ABC
The experienced news crew had been working on news and feature projects in the Lake Eyre region and it is believed their Sydney-based helicopter crashed in a remote area north-west of Marree about 7.30 last night ...
Leave your tributes
Updated August 19, 2011 10:48:41
The ABC is believed to have lost three of its finest newsmen - journalist Paul Lockyer, camera operator John Bean and helicopter pilot Gary Ticehurst.
Leave your tributes to the three men here.
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Australia: The Consequential Country
"The land down under" has always been a colloquialism dripping with inconsequentiality, and reaches back to a time when the tyranny of distance brought with it the felony of neglect.
It provides a fitting title for Bill Bryson's best-selling book on Australia, a portrait, sweeping in its broad brush strokes, which focuses on what the author perceived to be this country's sheer irrelevance.
Before making the long journey to Australia, Bryson sauntered the short distance to his local library where he conducted a fruitless search of the New York Times index for 1997. Australia merited just 20 mentions. Albania, by contrast, got 150.
If anything, 1997 turned out to be a glut year. Over the following 12 months just six stories were considered ripe for publication. Ending his travelogue, Bryson left readers with a departing thought that was as melodramatic as it was melancholic: "Life would go on in Australia," he opined, "and I would hear almost nothing of it." ...<cont>
