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Correspondent and photojournalist reflect

"If you you've seen the ABC's travelling exhibition called Through Australian Eyes which details 70 years of ABC foreign reporting, you would have seen the huge old acetate disk recorder used by correspondents Lawrence Cecil and Chester Wilmot to report from the Middle East during the second world war. The gear they used required its own truck and the fragile disks had to make their way back to Australia by land, sea and air, often taking weeks or months before they were broadcast.

By the time I first became a foreign correspondent at the end of the 70s our tools of the trade were Swiss Made Nagra tape recorders and Arriflex and Eclair movie cameras.

The tape was cut with scissors and the film was never cut in the field even if you had access to a portable processing lab. Tapes and films were still airfreighted back home, often overnight. And for radio there was always the option of finding a phone and using alligator clips to attach the tape recorder's output to a phone line if you could find one that was up to the job within a day's drive of the story.

The words often went back on a telex machine, a huge, clanking behemoth of a thing found in some hotels and commercial offices.

Tom Stoppard's play, Night and Day, set in a fictional country in Africa, details one journalist's heartbreaking search for a teleprinter to get that all important story back home.

Often the only way to get a story out of a difficult spot was to use a Pidgeon - a tourist, diplomat or even a pilot willing to hand carry it out.

It's unlikely that any of those journalists in Zimbabwe at the moment will be trying
to sneak in truckloads of recording equipment across the Zambezi River or selling their soul for a telex machine, although the BBC's venerable foreign affairs editor John Simpson did get the make up department to fashion him a large, false beard.

Simpson, who admits to hiding his large frame under a burqa to get into Afghanistan, says the beard proved to be just too uncomfortable.

Today's journalist carries a satellite transmitter the size of a paperback book which can send words, pictures and sound directly through the ether to the internet. Digital recorders can be no bigger than a packet of chewing gum and broadcast quality cameras can be no bigger than the palm of your hand. A notebook computer can be an editing suite, a broadcast studio or a photo lab."

Peter Cave, ABC Foreign Editor reflects on "work" as it used to be for a foreign correspondent - in ABC Radio National's Correspondents report.

On an associated topic read the transcript of an interview with award-winning photojournalist Spencer Platt on the same radio program.

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