Two friends get together at the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras

One of Sydney’s most colourful events – perhaps THE most colourful – is the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. And this year, 2012, was no exception. The grand parade is always outstanding, but I wanted to look for something different.

So I set out with my faithful Samsung phone-cam and went behind the scenes, shooting in black and white.

I was most welcome (despite being straight!) as I wandered around the side streets ahead of the parade. Some of the sights I came across were mind-boggling, reminding me of the bizarre movie sets prepared by Fellini.

I’ve posted other shots on Flickr. This one is just a sample!

Memory of a time that died. 100-year-old portable typewriter.

Where have all the old skills gone, long time passing…

Sitting in my favourite cafe in Sydney the other day I was amazed to see that every table – yes every table – was occupied by someone working on a laptop. Some were typing with two fingers, a few others were touch-typing. How things had changed, I thought. Before the proliferation of the laptop and, in fact, computers, I could sit in a public place with my portable Remington typewriter and people would stare at ‘that man who was typing with all his fingers’.

My sojourn in the cafe, in the wake of the riots in England, emphasised to me that the skills, the decency, the manners of the past have gone. But before you tell me that I have to ‘get with it’ and keep up with progress, I’m doing that – but it doesn’t stop me bemoaning the death of incredible times such as the fabulous 1960s, when rock music was fantastic, when photography needed calculations and added darkroom skills, when manners abounded (well, perhaps they were beginning to fade by then, fair enough) and when people back in the old country – England – gave an interview on the radio you could actually understand what they were saying.A mixture of dialect and street talk in one interview left me wondering what on earth was being said.

As for photography – everyone, it seems, has a camera or a phone-cam. You don’t need to use a light meter or twist the lens to focus. You just aim, press a button and it’s all taken care of. I look back sorrowfully at the time when you needed to learn how to develop a film and make a great print. You want a really eye-catching photo these days? Easy, press the button for an app and it will all be done for you. And writing…if you didn’t know how to spell a word in the past you reached for your dictionary and actually looked it up, confirming its meaning if you weren’t sure. Now you don’t have to do anything. Just type away and word check will do all the work for you. And what do you really learn from this? Nothing, I’d suggest.

Coincidentally, while I was sitting in that cafe with my own MacBook Air tethered to my Samsung Galaxy S2 (you see, I am keeping up), I was flicking through one of the Sunday papers (which I’d actually purchased because I still like the look of ink on paper) I saw a piece reviewing a book by the woman known as Australia’s etiquette queen, June Dally-Watkins. Her thoughts were in line with my own. ‘I am concerned the human race is slipping back to the heathen era and it disappoints me,’ she writes in her book, Manner for Moderns: Be the Best You Can Be – in Every Little Way.

Our dependence on technology, she says, has spoilt face-to-face communication and made us increasingly unaware of others. People send emails instead of writing letters, she says, and while I have to admit that emails are a hell of a lot more convenient than pen and paper, the ‘art’ of handwriting is going out of the window.

The mobile phone has introduced an era of selfishness – people walk down the street sending texts, heads down, crashing into you. The phone goes off in the cinema, the library, the bus, train. And where has personal style, gone?

I walk around Sydney and see people in smart suits, agreed, because they’re business folk out for lunch, but there’s no ‘overall’ sense of smartness about the western world I walk through. There are places where style still exists, admittedly – I was in Japan a few months ago and walking through the Ginza, the main shopping centre of Tokyo, I was stunned at the smart way people dressed. And manners were in abundance – all bows and smiles.

Somebody might, just might, stand for an elderly person on a bus in our western world, but would a male give up his seat for a more capable woman? No way.  We’re a selfish mob and it’s getting worse. In Britain the rioters looted and burned after rallying one another by mobile phone because they were dissatisfied with ‘their lot’ in life.

Perhaps we should dump them in the horn of Africa and let them find out what it’s really like to go hungry.

But I digress. If the internet crashed around the world one day – and I mean for all time – I wouldn’t shed a tear. It would mean that those who believed the best times have gone would start rejoicing. Old skills would be revived. Instead of watching moving pictures downloaded onto our computers, we might create imagery in our minds from a book or go to live theatre. There are untold areas of progress that leave me wondering if they really are progress. There are many gadgets we could do without. And with them gone, perhaps, our world would be all the better for it.

I stand at the spot near Barrow Creek where Peter Falconio disappeared 10 Years ago.

Ten years after British backpacker Peter Falconio vanished on a dark night in the Australian outback, the man convicted of his murder has challenged the police  to ‘show me his body’.

As the mystery remains about what happened to Mr Falconio after his girlfriend Joanne Lees claimed she heard a gunshot at the rear of their Volkswagen campervan, Bradley Murdoch continues to insist he did not kill the 28-year-old Briton at that lonely spot at Barrow Creek.

Miss Lees, then 27, and Mr Falconio were travelling through the outback, heading north from Alice Springs towards Darwin on the night of July 14, 2001, when she claims a stranger in a white four-wheel drive tricked them into stopping, with the pretence that something was wrong with the exhaust of their Volkswagen campervan.

After Mr Falconio got out to inspect the rear, she heard the two men talking, then heard what she believed was a shot. The stranger then tossed her into his vehicle after a fierce struggle but she said she managed to escape through the rear and hide in nearby bushes.

Murdoch, prisoner number 257128, shudders in an icy winter wind sweeping in from the surrounding desert as we sit in an outdoor visiting area in the Alice Springs Correctional Centre and claims that it is these very same conditions that made it impossible for him to have murdered and buried Mr Falconio.

‘The police say that after I shot him I must have buried his body – but the ground is so hard out there at this time of the year that you’d need a mechanical digger to bury someone so well that they can’t be found. And there was a time frame against me, making such a thing impossible.

‘The police have had all the time in the world to find Falconio – 10 long years to search while I, according to their case had just hours to hide him.. They haven’t found him. Yet they’ve convicted me of murdering him.’

In an extraordinary chat with me, the tall 52-year-old former drug courier who is serving life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of 28 years, revealed he still held out hope of freedom, despite losing all his appeals. Speaking at length for the first time since his conviction, he disclosed that legal and forensic experts from around the world were working on the evidence and discrepancies in the prosecution case and ‘there remains a good chance for me yet. I can only repeat to you that I didn’t kill Peter Falconio because I wasn’t there at Barrow Creek.’

Two other people with an intriguing role in the affair have also added to the mystery of Falconio’s whereabouts – if his remains are not lying in the desert somewhere. Melissa Kendall, 32, insists that she and her partner, 33-year-old Robbie Brown, served a man fitting Peter Falconio’s description at a petrol station in the outback town of Bourke a week after what has become known as the Incident at Barrow Creek.

‘Robbie and I have had since 2001 to think about all this,’ she said, ‘and not a day goes by without us remaining convinced that the man we served was Peter Falconio. His picture was in the Sunday paper that very same day and we were both left shaken to see him walk into the store and buy some chocolate.’

The mystifying ongoing Peter Falconio case has intrigued lawyers, scientists, police officers and armchair detectives around the world. For based on forensic evidence presented at Murdoch’s trial in Darwin in 2005 – his DNA was said to have been found on Miss Lees’ T-shirt and in the campervan – he was the man responsible for the murder of Mr Falconio, from Huddersfield.

But according to discrepancies in the events as described by Miss Lees, the Australian could not have been there – her description of her attacker did not match Murdoch, his dalmation dog or his vehicle. And several police officers had serious doubts about her account of the attack on that bitterly cold night with the temperature hovering around zero.

Added to the intrigue was the revelation during Murdoch’s trial that Miss Lees had been having an affair with an Irishman called Nick Riley, whom she had met each Friday night for sex in Sydney before setting off for her outback travels with long-time boyfriend Mr Falconio. She was forced to reluctantly admit in court that she had even written to Riley just days after Mr Falconio’s disappearance suggesting they meet up in Berlin.

‘You put her entire story together and there’s only one conclusion – it doesn’t add up and you can’t have a case that doesn’t add up and then convict a man of murder without even a body,’ says Murdoch as he sits at the table, decorated with an Aboriginal motif, in the visitor’s area of the prison. His short-cropped once-sandy-coloured hair has turned grey and his face is deeply lined. Under the cuffs of his blue sweater are traces of the tattoos that run up his arms. His two front teeth are missing – a startling feature that Miss Lees did not mention when she described her attacker to police.

‘Joanne claims that after I shot Falconio I dragged her into my vehicle and that while I was looking at ways to get rid of the body she managed to clamber into the back of the vehicle and escape through the rear,’ he says. ‘Well everybody who knew me knows my cab was sealed – you can’t get into the back that way. In fact the police admitted they had found only a couple of vehicles in the whole of Australia that had access from front to back.

‘And then, when she was challenged on this in court she said she might have been mistaken and that I had pushed her in through the canvas sides. She was wrong about that, too, because underneath the canvas I had a steel mesh. She talked about hiding in bushes while I came looking for her with my dog, but believe me if it was me there my dog would have found her.

‘And how come the police and the Aboriginal trackers found traces of her footprints in the bush but no traces of anyone else’s? Yet I was supposed to have been looking for her for hours.’

Murdoch remains calm as he goes over what he says are the numerous discrepancies – he has had nearly six years since his sentencing to go over the claims against him and his anger has subsided. ‘But I still wonder how they could have possibly thought that after claiming I had shot Falconio – and there was no gunshot residue on the back of their van – I drove off with the body, leaving a witness, Joanne, hiding in the bushes.

‘Why on earth would I have decided to drive all the way back to Alice Springs – what, 300kms – to buy fuel, as the police claimed, with a body in the vehicle? How was I to have known that Joanne hadn’t raised the alarm before I even got there and that police had already set up road blocks?

‘It’s another aspect of the case against me that doesn’t make sense and neither does the fact that not only did they not find any trace of a body being picked up or dragged into another vehicle at the scene – they haven’t even found the body.’

Northern Territory Police say that there are no active searches for Mr Falconio’s body, but if they received credible information it would be investigated. Murdoch holds out hopes that the DNA evidence used against him will eventually lead to his freedom.

Referring to the speck of DNA said to be his on Miss Lees’ T-shirt, the convicted murderer says that if it was he who had dragged her from the VW and thrown her to the ground to restrain her, his DNA would be all over her – and it wasn’t. He also says that traces of his DNA said to have been found by British forensic scientist Dr Jonathan Whitaker using a controversial technique called low copy numbers should not have even been allowed in his trial.

‘The FBI refuses to use this very same technique because it’s unreliable and when it was used against Sean Hoey who was charged with the Omagh bombing in Ireland in 1998 the case collapsed after the judge criticised Dr Whitaker’s evidence.

‘Yet this technique was used against me when Dr Whitaker said he found traces of my DNA in the VW because I had presumably driven the vehicle into the bush to hide if from passing traffic.

‘The holes in the case against me are huge but one day I hope it will all turn around. None of us knows where this business is going to turn next.’

Nearly 800 miles away Melissa Kendall says the day the man she insists was Peter Falconio walked into the petrol station in the remote outback town of Bourke where she was working with Robbie Brown will remain imprinted on her mind.

‘The police made a mockery of us, one detective saying he hadn’t seen Elvis yet, either, after we reported seeing Peter Falconio – because that’s how I’ll always refer to the man.’

The Falconio affair is replete with red herrings and alternative scenarios but Miss Kendall’s ‘sighting’ of Falconio fits in with rumours that Mr Falconio faked his own death because he had money troubles at home – and never expected his disappearance to make international headlines. But they are rumours, whispers, guesses, and Mr Falconio’s family and Miss Lees have often pleaded for them to stop.

Murdoch’s lawyer, Grant Algie, raised the possibility of the ‘fake death’ scenario when he said at Murdoch’s trial that the British couple had stopped by the side of the road near Barrow Creek to meet a third man who, it had been arranged, would take Peter away alive.

‘When the man I say was Peter Falconio walked into the petrol station, he was with two other people who behaved really strangely,’ recalls Miss Kendall. ‘He didn’t say much, but I think he had an accent, which might or might not have been English. I was just stunned at seeing this man whose face I had been looking at in the paper just a short time before.

‘The people he was with – a man and a woman – were in an open-back truck which they parked out of sight of the office part of the petrol station and they had to stretch the fuel hose right out to make it reach. It was as if they didn’t want us to see the vehicle.

‘But Robbie and I both went out, very carefully, to look at them all. The other man who was with “Peter Falconio” matched the photo-fit pictures the police had put out in the hunt for the man who carried out the attack at Barrow Creek.

‘It was really weird and rather frightening. “Peter Falconio” had a bit of an injury to the left side of his mouth, like a scab, just below the corner of his mouth. When they drove off, they didn’t drive out into the main road. They went up a back lane which led off in the direction of Brisbane.

‘Nothing will convince me that the man I saw wasn’t Peter Falconio. It was him all right and Robbie and I will continue to swear it for the rest of our lives.’

Today Miss Lees lives in a house she has bought in the north of England. She has declined to comment in any detail about the incident, adding that she and the Falconio family would prefer to remain out of the spotlight now that 10 years have passed.

At Barrow Creek today there is no longer any sign of the patch of blood on the road which forensic scientists said matched Peter Falconio’s – despite one analyst claiming it was mixed with animal blood.  It has long since been erased by thousands of tourist vehicles and the single complete footprint that police said matched Miss Lees’ in the sandy surface near the road has eroded with the weather.

But hawks circle overhead, looking for animal prey – dead or alive. And Aborigine trackers – first called to the scene in the hours after Miss Lees’ raised the alarm by waving down a passing truck in the dead of night – said if there had been a body or a wounded man lying in the bush at the time, the birds of prey would have hovered over it.

But they saw no hawks. Cadaver dogs found no body.

Peter Falconio had disappeared, leaving behind a mystery that has endured for 10 years.

By the left...young women army cadets go through their paces in Pyongyang

I’ve recently returned from an extraordinary journey into North Korea, possibly the world’s most secretive country, although the physical danger is nothing like that of Iraq or Afghanistan.

My ‘entry ticket’ was as a competitor in the first-ever amateur golf tournament to be staged in the country. Oh yes, I do play golf (badly) and North Korea does have a course, even though it’s reserved for the elite and diplomats.

You can read the full account in my story in the Daily Mail (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1392821/North-Korea-Paranoia-cars-silence-cities.html) but in summary I left with mixed feelings. I hadn’t been shown everything I wanted to see, that was for sure, and the people were generally shy of Westerners like myself. They obviously weren’t used to seeing many, or any.

But I’d like to return again one day and see more of the way of life (but minders will be present, just as they were this time) as five days, interrupted by a golf tournament (at which I embarrassed myself) was not nearly long enough, even though I was given an extraordinary insight into many aspects of life there.

Severe injuries were suffered when this bus was hit by falling masonry during the earthquake

Millions of words have been written since the terrible earthquake struck Christchurch, New Zealand, this week and while I have been there on the spot to cover the story, there is little point in trying to sum up the extent of it – the consequences, with the death toll rising steadily past the 100 mark, have been too wide-reaching, affecting too many families for me to be able to begin to express the true horror of this natural disaster.

There have been victims and heroes, there have been those who have had narrow escapes and there are those who wait anxiously for news of missing loved ones. What story do I pick to sum it up – the teenagers who sat on a pavement hoping their mother was alive in one of the buildings, only to learn that no-one in there could have survived…the same teenagers who learned that while they were away from home, someone broke in and stole many of their belongings?

There is the British man I spoke to who would have been crushed to death by the tumbling steeple of Christchurch Cathedral if his girlfriend had not called him in to a Tourist Information Bureau seconds before the masonry crashed down. And then there is the stomach-churning story of the doctor….

Peter at his computer, where he died 'at the helm'. Picture: Nate Smith

It’s hard to recall a week of such high emotion – first my dear mate, photographer Peter Carrette died, then all the New Zealand miners were declared dead while I was covering that story and finally came the amazingly good news that three young lads, missing at sea for an incredible 50 days have been found alive.

Holiday or Business Accommodation - Take Photos Before any Dispute

Here’s a handy, if not pretty darn obvious, tip should you be confronted with the same stuff-up as me when booking your holiday or business hotel room online: take photographs of everything that moves!

Michael Hutchence's mother, Patricia. Picture: Rex Features

Just a few months after the mother of former pop star Michael Hutchence pleaded with Sir Bob Geldof to let her see her granddaughter, Tiger Lily, she has died at her Queensland home.

Run Boys - I'll Take Care of this Photographer!

Don’t try to tell me that camels can’t talk to one another.

I’ve just returned from a trip to Colonel Gadaffi’s Libya, having disregarded warnings before I left that it was a dangerous country and I would have to be on my guard.

But it wasn’t the Colonel’s secret police, the army, or street muggers that sent me running – it was an angry camel!

I was crossing a desert east of Tripoli when I saw a group of camels that I thought might make a good picture. Not that groups of camels make particular good pictures but I never believe in turning down the chance to take a photo that I might regret later. So I jumped out of the car and used a wide angle lens, perhaps 3m from the camels, planning to move further back and take some shots with a telephoto lens afterwards.

The leader of the pack clearly took exception to my presence, turned to his furry tribe and emitted an ear-splitting bellow. I am now convinced that this was camel talk for: ‘This guy is taking pictures without permission. We’ve had a chat about these meddling tourists before. All of you take off and I’ll teach him a thing or two.’

With that, the rest of the group, including a number of infants, began scampering away – while the leader came lumbering towards me, hollering (in camel-speak): ‘Right, you’re for it now’.

I managed to take one picture while he was almost on top of me, then turned and ran for my life back to the car.

Looking at the picture later I was quite pleased with the effect – the close-up of the angry leader and the others dashing off in the background. I was also ‘quite pleased’ that I’d got out of there with all my limbs attached.

As for the rest of the Libyan population, I found them to be kind and non-threatening to the point that, smitten by hunger pains at 1am, I was able to leave my hotel and walk through some very dark back streets to an all-night take-away pizza joint and return without so much as a glance in my direction.

Perhaps the locals were aware that messing with a tourist would result in a fate worse than death…such as being dumped among a group of angry camels in the desert.

* See the Gallery for more pictures of Libya.