The Lads

These are the lads, James from News, Brendan from the Sydney Morning Herald, Mick from the wire service AAP, three of Sydney's better known working news photographers. We pop up time and again together; at functions big and small, burnt churches, funerals, disasters of any and every kind; politicians; this day in the foyer of the Bankstown Workers' Club with the Prime Minister John Howard; at other times; in other disasters, at the back of parliament house, where politicians hold brief "pressers" in the open air; where they don't have to provide refreshments and the open air backdrop suits them. They can make their escape easily as the questions hound their pomposity into the ground.

We are as cynical as they make them, having seen everything; the brain not working and clearly grasped, sardonic, supercillious; we knew exactly what we were doing, what the bosses wanted; how our master works would be treated once they got back to the office. We were in darkness and we were displayed; we grew older; girlfriends came and went; the children multiplied in number. We may have worked for competing news organisations but we were not enemies. Could you call it camaraderie? Could you say we were friends; in a city like Sydney where layers of breath-taking arrogance took storms in our wake? There had once been a creative impulse. Now there was a matter of getting through the day.

Everyone new each other's dramas; they wouldn't know a story if it sat on their face, we would say, exasperated at the truths of what we saw and the images that were transmitted in the mainstream media. I was lonely now, older now; the times of fame and novelty long gone; the times of meaning dissipated. Four children died in a housefire and we competed with each other to get quotes from the drongoes involved, the boyfriends of the grieving mothers, communities closing in around the deep stupidities of a fractured underclass. What used to keep this world together; the church, the army, the local factory, a working class ethos, tight knit families and ancient morals; all these had collapsed now under so-called liberalism, individualism, progressive social policies; and what was left was drunken drug fucked chaos from people born without a chance, people who had never risen above their circumstance; young men who would never reach a noble goal. And we were always there, flashing cameras in their faces; completely untouched by the dramas of other people's lives; reduced, in our working lives, to points of technical difficulty. To reach beyond this to a more profound reasoning, or to a greater beauty, was all but impossible.

NEWS:

ABC RADIO:

TONY EASTLEY: The skies over Lebanon are filled with smoke and in northern Israel residents have taken to air raid shelters, as the situation in the Middle East seemingly spirals out of control. As the death toll mounts on both sides, with children among the dead and injured, there seems little hope for a lull in the fighting or a ceasefire. Thousands of Australians, desperate to get out of Beirut where they've been on holiday, are hoping that the Government will come up with an evacuation plan.

Israeli air raids have so far killed more than 40 people in southern Lebanon in the last 24 hours, and more Israelis have died after a wave of Hezbollah rocket attacks hit the city of Haifa. The crisis has intensified, with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah saying the battle against Israel is just at the beginning. In the latest escalation of the conflict, Israeli aircraft fired rockets at fuel tanks at Beirut's international airport.

Our correspondent, Matt Brown, is in Beirut.Matt Brown, how do we characterise what's going on? Is the fighting getting worse?

Matt Brown: It's certainly getting more deadly, Tony. You're seeing a sustained bombing and missile barrage coming from both sides in this conflict. Hezbollah missiles killed at least eight people in an assault on Haifa earlier in the day. That's in northern Israel. And Lebanese officials saying 43 Lebanese people killed today, the death toll now well over 100 on the Lebanese side. So the more effective rockets that Hezbollah has in its arsenal given to it by Iran are being used more regularly against Israel, and the bombing campaign by Israel in Lebanon is sustained. And Israel has said Hezbollah is firing its rockets from within civilian areas in Lebanon, and that's not going to stop Israel from striking at those targets. So we expect to see the civilian death toll in Lebanon continuing to climb significantly.