Steve Tickner's sleep deprivation was crushing him, but he knew he had to stay awake — because the dead of night was when the police in Yangon were conducting their sweeps.
Steve was a wanted man and needed to be alert to the sound of barking dogs — the first sign he could be in trouble.
Warning: This story contains distressing content.
If the authorities found him, they would have arrested him and probably tortured him. The 67-year-old faced dying in a dark cell thousands of kilometres away from his family in Australia.
"Midnight was the time they would come," the photojournalist said.
"We're complete insomniacs after a year or so of hiding... listening for the sound of soldiers in the street, to dogs barking at night."
Steve relied on a network of underground dissidents, who brought him food and supplies — the photographer had to keep his head low, a difficult task for a 6-foot-tall white man in southeast Asia.
Three years ago, Steve was "blacklisted" for visiting government-designated "forbidden areas". The Myanmar government refused to renew his journalist visa, and he stayed in the country illegally.
The following year, Myanmar's military staged a coup against the democratically elected government, sparking a wave of pro-democracy protests and military crackdowns. He is one of the few foreigners who recorded the junta's brutality toward civilians.
He was determined to stay in Myanmar (also known as Burma), but a cancer diagnosis meant he had to flee the country to seek the treatment he needed.
A secret plan was hatched to help him escape.
War correspondent
Steve had spent years covering conflicts and unrest across Afghanistan, East Timor, and Thailand. In 2013, he relocated to Yangon after the military undertook a political reform and released democratic leader Aung San Suu Kyi.
The last time I saw Steve was in 2015 when we were both correspondents in Myanmar covering the historic election which saw Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy sworn into power after a landslide victory.
His energetic, empathetic, and risk-taking nature led him to travel to conflict zones at Myanmar's borders, documenting the army's ongoing civil war with ethnic rebel groups.
When I saw Steve again last month in Sydney, I hardly recognised him.
He lost a quarter of his body weight. His illness and years of photographing the brutal treatment of civilians, including murder, rape, and mass executions, had taken their toll.
Still, he smiled through his tears, and we hugged. A lot of terrible things have happened, he told me.
A new uprising
In February 2021, when the country began moving into an even darker and more violent period, Steve was living in downtown Yangon, the largest city in Myanmar.
He would typically wake to the soundscape of cars and buses or hawkers selling sweet corn and umbrellas outside his apartment. But on the first day of that month, it was eerily quiet.
"There was no traffic. You could hear a pin drop in the street outside," he recalled.
His mobile phone was blocked. "I couldn't get data. I couldn't look at Facebook. There was nothing. It was like a complete shutdown."
Turning the corner with his camera, he saw dozens of trucks packed with police in full riot gear.
By midday, it was clear to everyone that a coup was underway.
Myanmar's Nobel peace prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, was once again under house arrest, sparking a fresh wave of protests.
Steve's eyes lit up as he recalled the first demonstration led by young women, mostly workers from a local garment factory.
Steve photographed members of Myanmar's LGBTQ community, leading protests across the city.
Young women built blockades with their dresses known as longyi and sanitary towels drenched in red paint, exploiting a local superstition that walking beneath women's intimate clothing drained a man's masculinity.
During the first few weeks of the protests, demonstrators believed that power could be wrestled back from the military junta.
But that optimism quickly faded. Steve watched as the peaceful protests were crushed by soldiers marching through the streets and firing into apartments throughout the city.
Steve chokes up as he recounts the story of a teenage girl who was shot in the head by a sniper. She was one of the first civilians killed by the armed forces after the coup.
"It didn't matter what you were doing. You could be pulled up in the street, and they could drag you off and arrest you and torture you," he said.
"Quite commonly, people were having their bodies returned the next day, dead."
According to data from the United Nations, more than 3,000 civilians have been killed and 17,000 people detained since the start of the coup.
Last month, United Nations special envoy Noeleen Heyzer told the general assembly the violence was escalating, and she saw "no prospect" for a negotiated settlement.
Information black hole
On one bloody day in March 2021, more than 160 people were estimated to have been killed during demonstrations.
Among them were 11 children, including 14-year-old Pan Ei Phyu, a pro-democracy TikTok star who was shot trying to open the door for fleeing protesters escaping the military crackdown.
The Myanmar junta tried to hide its violent crackdown from the rest of the world by silencing the media and dissidents and creating an information black hole.
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has documented 170 journalists arrested in the country, with about 64 still behind bars.
More than 260 Burmese journalists fled to cities in Thailand. Because many of them did not have proper visas, they became undocumented refugees, meaning they were denied access to basics like medical care and authorisation to work.
Those in Thailand still reporting keep their jobs secret, said Naw Betty Han, who worked alongside Steve for the English news outlet, Frontier Myanmar.
"The main point to continue my job is it is a way to show that I am still continuing (my) work and standing by the people of Myanmar by reporting," said Betty.
Steve was one of a diminishing pool of voices able to send images of the protracted conflict to the outside world.
But as the demonstrations became bloodier, the risk from doing his job grew. He could not get too close to the demonstrations, and if he saw police advance towards him, he would "run like crazy", often losing his pursuers in Yangon's narrow alleyways.
More than once, Burmese civilians kept him hidden from authorities.
"There were at least three different occasions where they came after me. On each occasion, the Burmese helped me... slip away into the back streets."
Steve perhaps would have stayed in Myanmar were it not for a fateful day in June 2022 when he became seriously ill.
At 1am, Steve felt a strong pain in his lower body before it started fading. He got himself down to the foyer of the hotel he was staying in and asked the staff for help.
In a video filmed by his underground contacts, Steve is seen lying in a hospital bed after he collapsed in his hotel. He was rushed to the Yangon General hospital and was later diagnosed with colon cancer.
This footage was sent to Phil Thorton, a former Myanmar correspondent and senior adviser of IJF.
He knew if Steve stayed in the same living conditions, he could die.
And so he and his wife Kanchana Thorton, who runs the humanitarian organisation, The Burma Children's Medical Fund, concocted a plan with local activists.
A desperate exit
Leaving Myanmar overland was out of the question.
Even if Steve was able to bypass several police checkpoints out of the city, it was a perilous landscape of landmines and unexploded ordnance all the way to the border.
The most viable but still risky option was leaving Myanmar via Yangon airport. It was not a route Steve was thrilled about; some foreign journalists, including one of his colleagues, had been detained trying to fly out.
"[The junta] knew I had broken numerous laws," Steve said.
"I had spent 10 years visiting what they referred to as forbidden zones, so I knew they had a long list they could throw at me at the airport."
Thorton was in touch with the Australian Embassy in Yangon and asked to have him transported out of the country for urgent medical care in a wheelchair.
The embassy staff later escorted Steve through the airport.
"It was a nerve-wracking moment for him," Thorton recalled. "There was no guarantee that they would not arrest him."
"COVID was rampant at the time. [and]it would have been a death sentence if he was put in jail."
The wheelchair was a prop in the escape plan.
"I had a medical condition from their [the embassy's] perspective; I was presented as somebody who was just leaving the country for urgent medical treatment. And that was a little bit influential," said Steve.
A Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) spokesperson told the ABC the Australian embassy in Yangon and consular officials from DFAT provided extensive assistance to Steve while he was in Myanmar.
The department said it would not provide further comment due to privacy obligations.
The Myanmar embassy in Canberra did not respond to the ABC's inquiry for comment.
'One crowded hour'
Steve's hands tremble as he struggles to push his trolley full of luggage out of the arrival gate at Sydney Airport, where we meet again after eight years.
While en route to Newcastle on the Central Coast, where his youngest son Spike and former partner Marlene live, Steve tells me how he was inspired by a book called One Crowded Hour.
It is the life story of Australian combat cameraman Neil Davis, who was killed by a tank round in 1985 while on assignment covering a military coup attempt in Thailand.
Like Davis, Steve often gambled with his life by putting himself in dicey situations.
He recalls soldiers shooting at him in Bangkok, but the bullet instead killed a nearby fleeing student protester.
Steve said he was not afraid of dying, but the death of the student, who he found out was named Attachi Chumchan, stuck with him.
"This job is like living two lives in one. You live all the things that are happening in your personal life, and then your life is full of everybody else's problems," he said.
I ask him if he believed everything he had been through was worth it. He replies he had a "great career", but becomes quieter as he talks about his family.
He has not seen Spike in years and did not even know his address.
"If I have any one regret, it's that it took me away from Spike as he was a young man... I should have been around more for him," he said.
Steve's cheery demeanour begins to fade as we pull into Newcastle, the place he used to call home.
Then, he watches the port city's lighthouse grow into view and shifts uncomfortably in the passenger seat — 8,000 kilometres away from where he listened for the sound of dogs at his door.
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Producer, additional reporting: John Stewart
Editing and digital production: Kevin Nguyen
