David Hahn, staff photographer 1994-to present, tells the story of how a seemingly standard royal press conference quickly turned into big news.
It was 1994 and Prince Charles was in town and making a speech at Darling Harbour. My fellow photographer Ross Coffey and I were sent to cover his appearance which was a boring affair to begin with.
There Charles was up on stage prattling on and suddenly there was this mad gunman running towards him with a pistol — it was just a starter gun but at the time no one knew and we all thought Charlie was history. So Ross and I both got the gunman — an anthropology student David Kang, who is now a barrister — clambering up on stage, shooting!
The then NSW Premier John Fahey tackled him and saved the Prince. But I was really impressed with Charles because he just stood there as rigid as anything — anyone else would have been a coward and run away but I suppose he has been trained all these years to stand still and wait for his minders to look after him.
I was also lucky that day because I had been a bit bored and started photographing the crowd and I actually caught the gunman sitting there waiting for his time to strike.
The interesting thing after that was all the UK Fleet Street media had missed the big moment because it happened quite quickly and both Ross and I had got it. The UK media was offering big money for our exclusive photos but we kept it as a
Woman's Day scoop.
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