On the spot that night
traffic flowed steadily through the bridge as if nothing had happened.
Our new French-speaking Canadian acquaintance became a crucial interpreter as my backpacking journo friend and I tried to make sense of all that had happened. We made our way to the city’s central police station and spoke to world media representatives waiting outside for their photographer friends who were still being interrogated almost 12 hours after the event. My travel journal notes from that day describe a feeling of persecution among the photographers standing outside, while photographs show buses filled with media detained for questioning. It never occurred to me that my nascent career was the very thing the world was railing against, but if President Trump ever wanted to find a D-Day for the world’s distrust of media, August 31, 1997, could very well be it.
The rest of the day was spent speaking to locals and trying to find a way to file a story on what I had seen. To fully comprehend just how much has changed in 20 years, I need only think back to that night in the hostel where two young backpackers wrote their news stories in pen before searching for a nearby business willing to fax the handwritten pieces to their newsrooms on the other side of the world. There were no computers in the hostel’s common room and I had never heard the term “wi-fi”. I remember bartering on the price of an international fax and crossing my fingers it would reach my news editor — our newsroom was yet to have access to email. Our reports reached their targets and ran on the front pages of our respective newspapers — a tiny, unsophisticated contribution to the world’s biggest story.
Diana’s death continued to follow us like a shadow across the Continent. I remember sitting around a hostel’s communal TV watching her coffin being returned to the UK. I remember the freeflowing tears of our landlord in Italy as she watched the funeral and the flowers and tributes lining the road outside the British Embassy in Rome.
By the time we reached London, the Queen had ordered the ocean of tributes be removed from in front of Kensington Palace but the country was still in obvious mourning. There was much discussion of the young, motherless princes and how the royal family would fare in a postDiana world.
The public anger at a perceived royal reluctance to publicly acknowledge Diana’s death had been exacerbated by her brother’s searing eulogy and many believed the family’s power and influence would be forever altered. Elton John’s tribute was a seemingly permanent soundtrack in shops and public places, while Harrods in Knightsbridge — also mourning the death of Diana’s companion, Harrods heir Dodi Fayed — had set up a memorial in its window and flew the Union Jack at half mast. The UK was hurting and at the time nobody knew if it would ever truly recover.
I am now older than the princess was when she died and 20 years seems like a lifetime ago. Last week I tried to describe the impact of Diana’s death to my very millennial children. Incredible technological advances have made the past 20 years seem like the dark ages to modern-day teens who cannot comprehend the then-popularity of the British royal family or the widespread global impact of one woman’s death. How could I explain that an avowed republican such as myself would sit for hours through a television broadcast of her wedding or stand by a road in Essendon for hours just to wave to the newly married prince and princess as they drove past on their first Australian visit? To my kids, the prospect is as incomprehensible as faxes and international calls on a street payphone.
Diana came before the Kardashians, Bieber or reality TV. She didn’t have millions of Instagram followers or a line of perfumes named after her, rather she was the darling of the thenpowerful women’s magazine industry, who lived or died on the latest instalment of her tragiglamorous life. Her untimely death — chased to the grave at a time when she had seemingly finally found happiness — ensured her legend would live long after her death, like a collection of rock musos and movie stars before her. Because Diana was all those things — rock star, Hollywood icon, figurehead, princess — a single, unifying woman who was unique to her time and beloved by all. It is for this reason that she is still so vividly remembered all these years later — not least of all by a young backpacker who just happened to stumble upon the world’s biggest story.