Could you live through the actuality of the Bali bombings, the Boxing Day tsunami, the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the Karachi bombings and numerous others… all one after the other?
For ABC foreign correspondent Peter Lloyd, these horrors were part of his daily reporting.
It’s no surprise then that he developed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), and that in an attempt to cope he smoked more, drank more… and even tried to use crystal methamphetamine. Sadly, the latter saw him get sprung by Singaporean police and – as is the case with their incredibly strict judicial system – he served 200 days in jail for possession.
‘It’s hard to find a beginning – a first date – for when it happened,’ Lloyd told OUTinPerth of how his PTSD manifested, something he explores in detail in his new book Inside Story: From ABC foreign correspondent to Singapore prisoner #12988.
‘What the book does describe are the most serious experiences of my postings overseas beginning with the Bali bombings moving on to the tsunami and then experiences in South Asia.
‘But for me if you had to pick things that were traumatic they would go back to the beginning of my career in the late 1980s and the traffic accidents or plane crashes. In the course of an average journalist’s career all of us at some point, and usually early on because we do the police rounds, are confronted by horrific scenes of one kind or another.’
For Lloyd, however, the later overseas posting escalated, becoming events involving mass casualties, from 88 Australians in the Bali bombings to over quarter of a million people in the Asian tsunami.
‘I was angrier,’ Lloyd said of the slow transformation that gripped him. ‘I smoked more cigarettes, I didn’t sleep as well and I started to lose touch with people.’
Mid-2008 and Lloyd found himself in Singapore for a break. His partner, Mazlee, was away with Singaporean Airways, leaving Lloyd to his own devices.
In an attempt to distance himself from the trauma building inside, Lloyd attempted to procure crystal meth, a drug he’d tried four months earlier at a party in Singapore. He rang the host of the party, scored the drugs… and got busted for possession.
‘It was pretty tough,’ Lloyd said of the following trial, which saw Mazlee come forward not only to post bail, but essentially outing himself in a country where you can be imprisoned for being gay.
‘I’d been keeping secrets from (Mazlee) about what was going on in my head or the trouble that I was having. I felt like I couldn’t trust anyone, him included.
‘He took a lot on supporting me publicly. So on one hand I was really awed by the confidence he put into supporting me, but equally we had to deal with some shit like I hadn’t told him what I was doing.
‘And that stuff, y’know, once it’s out there it’s just part of the architecture of the relationship.’
From there, Lloyd served 200 days in jail.
‘When I first went in they asked who was going to come and visit me and I told them my partner. And they said they didn’t have a category for people like that and I said “People like what?â€.
‘I basically told them that I was not nominating anyone else to come in here, that it was either him or no-one. I dared them to make the category. But it would seem from what they told me that I was the first person to nominate a same-sex partner.’
It takes courage to admit your mistakes, Lloyd realises this. It also takes courage to stand up and admit you have a problem, something Lloyd possibly should have done sooner. But then, hindsight is the gift experience gives.
‘For me I’ve learnt to trust my judgement again,’ Lloyd admitted. ‘In prison I had time out to re-like myself.’
Inside Story is out now through Allen & Unwin.
