Inside Story: From ABC Foreign Correspondent to Singapore Prisoner

The much-anticipated and extraordinarily compelling account of Peter Lloyd’s very public fall from grace – and the harrowing true stories behind the events that he witnessed as a foreign correspondent for the ABC. ‘It’s the old story. You know – for us to have a good day, someone else has to have bad one.’ The Bali Bombing, the Asian Tsunami, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the Karachi bombings and in countless lesser disasters Peter Lloyd was the man on the spot telling us the exact nature of the terrible event that had just happened. In a distinguished career as an ABC foreign correspondent his was a trusted name and face. Then he was arrested for drug possession in Singapore and in a spectacular fashion he had become the story, the ultimate journalistic transgression. His personal life was public property and his working life and his private life collided. Inside Story reveals what life is like as an Australian in a Singapore jail, under threat of being caned and subject to a host of minor indignities, but it is a bigger story than that. As viewers we are protected inside our cosy lounge rooms as we watch the disaster unfold. We seldom wonder about the effects of those deaths on the journalists sent to tell us about them. We don’t see the shattered bodies in the morgues or lying discarded in streets, smell the stench of death, and watch the chaos of a society in crisis. Our dreams are not haunted by the grim rictus of violent death, and the shattered lives of hundreds of thousands of people. But for Peter Lloyd there was no getting away from the things he had seen. In Inside Story he looks back at the events that cumulatively left him traumatised and vulnerable. This is not merely an extraordinarily compelling account of recent events in our region, but a dramatic and highly personal story. pp, 302

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