In light of Dorothy Hallam's death, we take a look back at her remarkable career with this article, published last year.
She's been described as a pioneer, but Dorothy Hallam doesn't make a big deal about her years as the only woman filming news stories for the ABC in Tasmania.
"It was my hobby actually, and I didn't think anything of it really," she says.
Now aged 97, Dorothy Hallam shot 176 stories over 22 years, at a time when very few women were working in the field.
The ABC is celebrating its 90th anniversary this year, and Ms Hallam's first encounter with the national broadcaster was in 1933, just after it started.
A young Dorothy visited 7ZL in Hobart, where her friend's father worked.
"He was a radio technician and showed me around and we saw a woman talk through the microphone," she says.
"I think the ABC had been going for 10 months or something at that stage, so it was quite early days."
Dorothy had always liked taking photos, and her first camera was one her father had won in a raffle on his journey back from the first World War.
She progressed to moving pictures in 1959 when she and her husband Maurice bought an 8mm movie camera to film home movies of their three children growing up.
A year later, television came to Hobart, and the Hallams began watching ABC News.
"Maurice was always interested in journalism, and he sent some ideas to the ABC," Dorothy says.
That prompted the news editor at the ABC, Warren Denning, to ask Maurice if he would be a correspondent on the Tasman Peninsula, south-east of Hobart, where the Hallams lived.
Not long after that, Mr Denning and his wife Esther visited the Hallams and, after lunch, Dorothy and Maurice showed him her movie of the family's orchard.
"I think he was impressed," Dorothy recalls.
"He kept saying he wished he could find someone with a 16 millimetre camera down here."
As luck would have it, ABC cameraman Warwick Curtis was selling his 16 millimetre Bolex camera.
Dorothy and Maurice bought it for 150 pounds.
"We spent the following week learning how to use the Bolex. That was the beginning of the filming."
Maurice would write the story summary, and Dorothy would film, although sometimes she'd do the whole job herself.
Most of Dorothy's work covered local industries such as fruit growing, events like the Nubeena show and tourism drawcards such as the Port Arthur Historic Site and Remarkable Cave on the Peninsula.
Chilling encounter with a murderer
But some shoots were more difficult than others.
Dorothy says a 1966 story about Tasman Island and the families living there was "one of the most dramatic stories I ever did".
"Because it was such a rough area around the island that it was very difficult to go onshore. I think we had probably about four or five visits to the island without being able to get onto the actual island itself.
"We had to wait until the dinghy was on the peak of a wave before we could jump up into the flying fox which was dangling on the wire.
"Then we were propelled along the wire cable to the landing, which was 100 feet above sea level."
There was then a trip up a steep trolley-way, with Dorothy filming throughout.
"We certainly had a very good view," she says.
Dorothy also filmed the search for missing child Ricky Smith at Eaglehawk Neck in 1975.
While she was waiting to start filming, a "well-dressed" man walked past her.
"And he said 'it's a terrible thing about this little boy isn't it', and I said 'yes it is'."
Dorothy says the man went and changed, and she joined him on the search, "filming under logs and round bits of tin and ferns and in the bush".
"And of course, he knew very well that we weren't going to find Ricky," she says.
"His name was James O'Neill and he was later charged with the murder of this little boy.
"It gave me a queer feeling, having been with the murderer."
'An exceptional cinematographer'
Dorothy filmed for the ABC between 1961 and 1983 — first in black-and-white and later in colour.
She mostly shot without her tripod, using the Bolex hand-held.
Former ABC cinematographer David Brill, who is now a convenor of ABC Alumni in Tasmania, says Dorothy would have had "tremendous limitations".
"[The Bolex] is a very heavy camera, and it's very hard to use. There's no automatic exposure, no automatic focus. The lenses were difficult to turn the exposure on to hold it with a small viewfinder," he says.
"Looking at her work, particularly at that time, she was an exceptional cinematographer. Not just with her technical skills but her storytelling, you can see in the shots and the sequences that she's a storyteller.
"She's building up close-ups, wide shots, movements, telling a story through the camera."
Dorothy was what is termed in media as a "stringer" — a freelancer who was paid per job.
She was one of the very first women to film for the ABC, and the only one at the time in Tasmania.
David Brill said she was a pioneer.
"I think Dorothy's legacy will be as a great Australian, great Tasmanian, and a great pioneer for cinematography and ABC News," he says.
Dorothy is less willing to talk herself up.
"I might have been one of the beginners with female photography, but it didn't occur to me then. It was a hobby. So I just did it," she says.
'We'd struck gold'
Local historian James Parker, who has previously worked in film, heard about Dorothy's work for the ABC and became interested in finding the stories she'd shot.
"The local history society got a grant from Arts Tasmania, and we retrieved the films from the ABC archives in Sydney, and got them digitised," he explains.
But it wasn't so simple.
Only Dorothy's silent vision had been archived — not the sound of the reporter or newsreader telling the story.
But in a stroke of luck, James Parker learned Dorothy had sound recordings from many of her stories.
That's because when the items went to air, Dorothy and Maurice would often be so focussed on watching Dorothy's footage, they would miss the story.
"So they bought a reel- to-reel recorder, and just held a microphone up to the television and got the sound [to listen back to later]", James Parker says.
Dorothy still had the recordings.
"We felt like we'd struck gold," he says.
"We synced up the sound from the reel-to-reel tapes to some of the films so we have these 28 items that have only ever been heard once before — when they went to air one night.
"On the Tasman Peninsula, we have this amazing moving image record of a society in flux — it must be almost unique for a small rural community."
Dorothy said it was "amazing" to see all her films come to light again after so many years, and to remember her time filming for the ABC.
"It was a very, very satisfying feeling, even to the last film, to see what I've done on TV.
"I enjoyed every minute of it."
Read more about 90 years of the ABC on ABC Backstory
