Witnessing History KATE GERAGHTY
If you’re a regular reader of Fairfax Media newspapers, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Canberra Times or Newcastle Herald – to name just a few – and have an interest in the Middle East, you will know journalist Paul McGeough’s byline. But I can’t remember when I first started to see Paul’s byline paired that of photographer, Kate Geraghty. It just appeared one day and never went away.
“I don’t think anyone is prepared for that kind of stuff. I’d never been in hospital wards with horrifically wounded people or seen dead bodies… you’re just there recording!”
Well, Kate herself was actually often away, covering world events – in 2003 for the Solomon Islands Intervention, 2005 and the Aceh tsunami and Mindanao in the Philippine for a story on Abu Sayaaf, 2006 and the war in Lebanon War, in 2007 to Zurich where Kate followed Dr John Elliott to his assisted death then, one year on, back to Lebanon. That same year she lived in Dublin during an eight-month swap with an Irish Times photographer. In 2009 she was in the Democratic Republic of Congo to document the humanitarian crisis and the horrific use of rape as weapon of war. Next it was to Kenya and the village of a relative of Barrack Obama’s as the US President’s inauguration took place in the USA. Then Rwanda, Sudan, Afghanistan, South Sudan and another ten or so global hot spots.
“Each assignment is so different, but overall it’s a privilege to tell people’s stories,” Kate tells me after we meet at her local café in the inner-Sydney suburb of Leichhardt. “I’ve seen extra-ordinarily brave people… like in Mosul watching the last of the human shields walking or running out from ISIS-held
