Foreign correspondent Eric Campbell is the first to admit that ‘most journalists have a book inside them and some believe that’s the best place to keep it’. Keen to avoid clichés, Campbell has produced, in his first book, Absurdistan, an adventurous and personal tale of life at the journalistic front line.
From 1996–2003 Campbell was the only ABC reporter assigned to cover Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia—effectively one-third of the world’s total land mass. Working in tandem with a cameraman, Campbell covered some of the biggest international stories of the last decade: the rise and fall of Boris Yeltsin, the Chechnya crisis, and wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. ‘It is a 24/7 existence and you can’t relax on your days off,’ Campbell said from his comparatively peaceful home in Sydney.
In Absurdistan, the reader travels with Campbell as he arrives in the former Soviet Union with only a stack of news clippings and a Russian-English dictionary. It may take a few months, or in this case, chapters, but the reader slowly sees Campbell’s passion for reporting develop during his first international posting in Moscow. He admits that the job is an all-consuming, obsessive affair that cost him a marriage and meaningful friendships.
‘If you weren’t covering the major event, like wars, you felt left behind … I’d reached a stage where I no longer thought it strange to leave a wife and baby to go to war,’ he writes.
Despite working as an international correspondent for more than five years, Campbell was thrust into the broader media spotlight in 2003 when his cameraman and friend Paul Moran became the first Australian casualty in the Iraq war. The devastating bomb blast provides Campbell with sombre bookends to his story, but also lends gravity and a sense of humanity to what is a compelling read.
The standout feature of Absurdistan is that the story is about more than the craft of journalism—Campbell’s vivid descriptions also serve as an empathetic survival guide for any person suffering a fish-out-of-water feeling. While not overly laboured, his astute descriptions of decadent Muscovites, or Novi Russkis, in the months during Russia’s economic devastation in the late 1990s are delightfully picturesque. ‘Hundreds were dancing in a miasma of heat and sweat that extinguished the –10 C draughts blowing through the cracked windows … young women in bizarre retro space-age clothing promenaded through it all in what was