TVNZ cameraman Mike Fitzgerald reflects on five decades of news

It was a surprise celebration in that “Fitz” was unaware it was happening – but not surprising in its attendance list. Fifty years in television news is impossible without building some extraordinary relationships.

It also takes an extraordinary person to fend off the cynicism of newsgathering for that long. Fitzgerald has not only done that, he’s maintained the same youthful enthusiasm that he started with.

Mike Fitzgerald and his dog, Barney. Photo / George Heard

On August 11, 1975, a 19-year-old Mike Fitzgerald simultaneously began his career at TVNZ and his lifelong love affair with television. He says pictures were always his thing.

“I’d always had a camera since I was a little bloke.

“I just used to take photos. I wrecked my mum’s laundry with enlargers and an old dryer drying the prints, and the family used to get pissed off because I always had a camera in my hands – black and white in those days.”

Working in photography after leaving school, Fitzgerald knew the visual medium was where he wanted to be.

“I got my diploma in it – because when I get my teeth into something …,” he says, before finishing the sentence with silent gesticulation and the sort of conviction that only a man who has ticked over 50 years at one workplace can express.

His interest in video was piqued when he came across a “situations vacant” notice.

“I saw this bloody ad that said, ‘Cameraman for TV1’. And I thought ‘I can do that!’”

He applied and didn’t get the job.

But after being told that the camera position was no longer available, he was offered a role in sound recording in TV1’s Christchurch newsroom.

“I can do that,” he said, forming a mantra that he still echoes today.

“I was the biggest sponge, man. I’d do anything.”

So began a career in news that would take him around the world – but his first steps were regional.

“It was a small newsroom in Oxford Terrace, just opposite the pub [Oxford on Avon],” he recalls.

The newsroom then may have been small, but TV1’s Christchurch staff numbers were anything but.

“Back in those days, I think TVNZ had maybe 350 people. Gloucester St was our main area. We had religious shows, That’s Country, kids’ shows like What Now?, After School and Woolly Valley.”

From the small newsroom, they would produce stories for regional news programme The Mainland Touch and its predecessor.

“We were all learning, to be fair.”

THE POISONED PROFESSOR

They were learning because television in New Zealand – let alone television news – was very much in its infancy. The first TV broadcast on these shores had gone out just 15 years before Fitzgerald began, and it had been broadcast in black and white until 1973.

They were learning because they were writing and rewriting the “best practice guide” as they went. They were learning because they were doing many things for the first time, and Fitzgerald has often been in the thick of that.

He was instrumental in the first court trial to be filmed – the 1997 case of the “poisoned professor” in the High Court at Christchurch. After weeks of planning between Fitzgerald and the courts, he would be the first to set up and film a high-profile case, over the course of 11 weeks.

“I was really nervous. I remember going around the microphones and testing with all the various people and said, ‘When you speak, do you mind speaking into the microphone?’. I was being very diligent, and I went up to Judith [Ablett-Kerr, defence counsel], “Excuse me. When you talk, would you mind talking…?’ She looked up and said, ‘Don’t you f***ing tell me how to do things in my court, right?’. And I was, oh my God, what have I done?” he says with a chuckle.

Another first was broadcasting live from Scott Base in Antarctica.

“I kind of created the live shot down there. It was pretty ropey at the start, because you know [there is] not much data and there was no satellite. We came off their infrastructure, and it was belts and braces, man!”

TAKING SIR ED BACK TO THE ICE

Fitzgerald estimates he has been to Antarctica as many as eight times. He was about to board a plane to cover the aftermath of the 1979 Erebus crash that killed 257 people before he was forced to give his seat up.

“We got out to the airport, and [Sir Robert] Muldoon was the boss man at the time, he decided that they were going to put politicians on the flight, not media.”

Perhaps his most memorable trip to “the ice” was with Sir Edmund Hillary in 2004. It was Hillary’s last trip to Antarctica.

Mike Fitzgerald, Sir Edmund Hillary and Mark Sainsbury in front of Shackleton’s Hut at Cape Royds, Antarctica.

“We went to Cape Royds, Shackleton’s Hut. He went in and we put a chair in the middle because he was pretty unwell, and he sat down. And I said, ‘Mate, I’m going to leave you and give you some time, and I’ll come back.’ I was shooting exteriors. I shot him through the window and he’s just sitting there. I went back in and he said, ‘I saw him.’”

Fitzgerald asked him to elaborate.

“And he said, ‘Shackleton’. I’m in my big f***ing jacket, it was freezing cold and the hairs on the back of my neck are rising up and I’m starting to sweat. It was kind of creepy,” he recalls with great enthusiasm and his trademark gesticulation.

“The ice is probably my favourite place ever. It’s so different, it’s challenging. It makes me feel at peace.”

TVNZ cameraman Mike Fitzgerald has travelled to Antarctica on many occasions. Here he’s filming in the Dry Valleys.

There is little peace in capturing breaking news.

ARAMOANA

On November 13, 1990, David Gray began a mass shooting that would leave 14 people, including the gunman, dead in the coastal Otago town of Aramoana.

Fitzgerald was deployed from Christchurch to back up the Dunedin crews.

“There was a sense that it was big. We’d only just kind of gone into one-man bands back then [camera operators without sound engineers].”

Aware that they were going to be there for some time, he requested back-up.

“I got Macca [Mike McLeod] down and we teamed up, and then I reverted to audio.

“I mean just going in and seeing where Gray had killed the kids. And what they did was they had white tape [where the victims were found] and just about everyone was in the foetal position. It was just horrific. I still now see it,” recalls Fitzgerald, without animation or enthusiasm. This recollection comes with a pause, hands unmoved.

He recalls going to the shed where police shot and killed Gray.

“We went back before the cops burned the place down, and the walls … you could see where they unleashed bullets. Blew him away.”

The aftermath of the Aramoana massacre, 1990. Gunman David Gray’s house is to the right of the Holden family’s destroyed home. Photo / Tim Mackrell

CAVE CREEK

Almost five years later, another mass casualty event would see Fitzgerald deployed to the West Coast, between Greymouth and Westport. Again, there were 14 dead, though this time it was accidental.

“I’m in the newsroom and I hear on the scanner, ‘People off platform at Punakaiki’. I said, ‘Book Garden City [Helicopters], I’m heading out there now.’”

The race to breaking news has always been important – even more so when TV1 gained competition from TV3 in 1989. There was no time to drive roughly four hours to the scene; they needed to fly.

“I get there and there’s a helicopter. I get my gear and they said, ‘Fitz, it’s not yours.’”

TV3 had beaten him to it.

“Anyway, it was Mike Johnson [TV3 cameraman] and someone from The Press, taking off waving.”

After finding another helicopter, he arrived to find that the airspace over Cave Creek had been closed. They landed and followed a track.

“We waited and waited because the cops had said that the hearses had gone in. I might have waited a few hours, I suppose. It was kind of like sunset, just getting quite dim, and 11 hearses came out through the bush. Just the golden lights at the front of the hearse, one after the other.”

This is where camera operators have to traverse the thin line between gathering news and invading privacy. Fitzgerald says he got it wrong that day.

“There was one person in an ambulance, and I was filming. Probably a little too close, and I probably deserved getting hammered, I deserved it. I apologised, I overstepped the mark. I was on an adrenaline buzz, man, I just wasn’t focusing.”

Mike Fitzgerald (red shirt) about to film a live cross with 1News sports presenter Andrew Saville. Photo / Supplied

PIKE RIVER

The West Coast was again in the spotlight on November 19, 2010, when an underground explosion killed 29 miners north of Greymouth.

“We were doing a live [cross] with Lols [Fitzgerald’s partner and former 1News reporter Lorelei Mason], and Tweezers [a local helicopter pilot] rang. ‘There’s been an explosion, better get over there – it’s bad.’

“So we packed up and left that night. I don’t think we got into Greymouth till midnight or something.”

In the aftermath of big stories like Pike River, the national or even global appetite for video is insatiable, but the local appetite for the incoming media circus is nonexistent.

“It was hostile. It was just hostile. The locals hated us. In a close community like the coast, they’d lost somebody or somebody they knew, and they didn’t like or appreciate us being there. We understood that.”

CHRISTCHURCH

On February 22, 2011, one of the biggest stories in New Zealand’s history broke in Fitzgerald’s own community as Christchurch was reduced to rubble and liquefaction. For the next year at least, he’d be living in the aftermath as well as working in it.

As operations manager, he had to think of others as well. He admits he’s often better at doing that with his own staff than with his family, as evidenced during the early hours of September 4, 2010, with Christchurch’s first big shake.

“We had a big villa and two sets of chimneys. Both had come down, and one had gone over the drive. We had an automatic gate, and I remember trying to pull back the bloody bricks so the gate would open so that I could drive the truck over the bricks and go out and shoot.

“Why did I kick into that mode when I should have been thinking of my family? I don’t know that,” he reflects.

It was Christchurch again on March 15, 2019: 51 people shot dead at two mosques in a terror attack that shook the world. Fitzgerald was the first camera to the hospital as ambulance after ambulance arrived with victims. Then he filmed many of the live reports that gripped an audience of millions, watching in disbelief.

“I headed to Deans Ave because of multiple calls from Auckland saying, ‘We need live pictures, we want to know what’s going on.’ Sometimes I think we overdo the live part because we should be gathering.”

GULF WAR

The threat of terror had previously been half a world away for Fitzgerald, and he’d flown towards it with our Defence Force.

“We did the Gulf War [1991]. When Saddam had chemical weapons, right? So, we went out and did training at Trentham. So that if there was a chemical attack, they told us what we should be doing. And I think they gave us a cyanide tablet? I have to confirm this, but I’m sure they did!”

Health and safety wasn’t what it is today, and neither was technology.

Mike Fitzgerald, Ewart Barnsley and Mike McLeod next to a loaded fighter plane in Riyadh, covering the 1991 Gulf War.

“The scary moment there for me was when we had to go to a satellite station to feed our pictures [in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia]. We had to walk at night and you had to go past these little sentry posts. And the kids with their guns, they were kids! They look to be f***ing 12, you know?

“And then when I went to the television station, we were running close to the wire [to make deadline] and I was talking on the phone to [TVNZ] Auckland and they said, ‘We can’t see your pictures Fitz!’”

Finding a spaghetti junction of cables at the newly built Saudi TV station, Fitzgerald devised a plan – one that his hosts wouldn’t have approved of even if they’d spoken English.

“I said to the person back in NZ, ‘Can you count to 10 and then tell me if you’re getting the pictures?’ And I ran over and I pulled all the f***ing cables out and plugged my two in there. Nearly started an incident. These guys were apoplectic. They were yelling and screaming at me, and I heard TVNZ Auckland say, ‘Yep, we’ve got your pictures, Fitz!’”

Another close shave saw Fitzgerald and current TVNZ Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver save a drowning man in Bora Bora.

“I was doing the compressions and Barb was doing the breathing. He’d swallowed a lot and he wasn’t ticking when we got him out. The hardest thing to keep the compressions going for me was he had suntan lotion on. Suntan lotion and water become slippery.

They worked on the man for about 15 minutes.

“It just was like a kickstart, and then you could feel it. And we kept going for a bit and, by that time, the rescue helicopter had come and taken him away.”

‘THEY TREATED HIM LIKE ROYALTY’

The biggest name in news of the past 50 years belonged to a man small in stature. Curled hair, curlier questions and, in Fitzgerald’s words, “swore like a trooper”.

Paul Holmes was a one of a kind, and Fitzgerald was a great admirer.

Paul Holmes in 1988.

“He was fun. It was all about Holmes, but he was fun. Such a talent.

“I think I picked a lot up from him because of his nature, his way that he could relax people. And you know, [John] Campbell’s a little, well, he’s a lot like him.”

Holmes reigned when primetime news was king, and budgets seemed limitless.

“They treated him like royalty at work. I mean, if he wanted to come down – he doesn’t fly [commercial]. I used to head off to Wānaka or Queenstown with him and we’d just jump on the private [plane], off we’d go. Crazy.”

Sevens gold: Mike Fitzgerald with Christian Cullen, Eric Rush and Jonah Lomu at the 1998 Kuala Lumpur Commonwealth Games.

Fitzgerald has been to virtually every Commonwealth Games and Summer Olympics since 1986. He’s hoping to sign off on that chapter with a return to Scotland for the 2026 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.

But for now, he’s only looking as far ahead as his next shoot. A dog show in Rangiora.

After 50 years gathering news for TVNZ, he’s just as excited as ever.

Why not? He loves dogs.

Mike Thorpe is a senior journalist for the Herald, based in Christchurch. He has been a broadcast journalist across television and radio for 20 years and joined the Herald in August 2024.