What has happened to me? A mother and five kids are dead and the strongest reaction I’ve got is the sweet hit of exhilaration that my story, my voice report, is leading the midday bulletin.

Home. Approaching delirium tiredness. I lie on my bed in the hot afternoon. Sleep is sparse, cobwebbed, in thin strands. There are drills and shouts and bottle recycling trucks and sirens and footsteps and music loud around me.

The next day. Jolted out of a quiet news day stupor by a voice from the scanner. A voice taut, bottled up with something huge, a voice to be snapped.

CONSTABLES DOWN SHOT and it’s garbled and the voice can’t get it clearly out. The man in the police radio control room is infuriating in his calmness.

‘Slow down, constable . . . what are you saying . . . we can’t understand you.’

SHOT POLICE MATES DOWN DOWN AWAY TWO.

Police down! Police hit! The chill of it. And with the radio control man there’s a sudden snap and panic reaching out across the airwaves to all the police officers listening in their squad cars and at their stations and to all the journos straining at the desks in their newsrooms: ‘Can anyone understand what he’s saying?’

And gradually the young policeman’s breathing normalises, his mind unjumbles, the story unfolds as he drives to the hospital with a mate dying on the seat beside him and a mate dying on the seat behind him and it’s action stations, all systems alert.

It’s only much later, much later, leaving work and walking through the park that I crumple and start shaking and have to sit on a park bench for a very long time. I feel wound up as tight as a tin toy. I want to cry with it all but I can’t.

I’m being sent to Antarctica to capture noises. The people and the penguins and the machines and the ice and the sounds I don’t know about yet.

I pack a hotwater bottle for my tape recorder, to keep it warm in its esky. I pack coolpaks of beautiful, bubbled, marine-blue liquid that will turn into heatpaks when I soak them in hot water. They’re for my esky too. I pack lots of batteries because the cold will leech them quickly of power. I pack splicing tape and razor blades and computer disks; I pack a labyrinth of microphone leads and crisp, fresh notepads. I pack condoms. I pack three tubs of moisturiser because my old World Book tells me that Antarctica’s the driest continent on earth.

I feel like an eighteenth century explorer as I carefully fill my trunks. I run out of room. I ditch the farewell teddy bear Lyn and the newsroom’s given me. I ditch the box of condoms—they’re too presumptuous, anyway.