At the tender age of 22, Ange Takats had her world turned upside down when her boyfriend absconded with her closest girlfriend.
The Buffalo Funeral: Soundbites from a Songbird in Siam. By Ange Takats The book can be purchased from the author’s website, www.angetakats.com.au, for $57, or downloaded in e-book format for $9.99, or Kindle edition for $5.99.
"I thoroughly recommend that, when someone smashes your heart into a million little pieces, the best thing you can do is just to leave the country," she tells a crowd of adoring fans who have rolled up to Brisbane's Avid Bookshop for the launch of her book The Buffalo Funeral in June last year.
The title of the book was inspired by one of Ange's assignments in Thailand and it's a fascinating account of her adventures as a television reporter for a large international media outlet in Bangkok which, somewhat mysteriously, is never identified _ although this could be the result of some of Ange's caustic comments about her boss and some of her other expat colleagues.
One day her Thai cameraman came up to her as she sat at her desk. "Khun Ange," he announced solemnly, "Today we go to a funeral for a buffalo." Despite a few reservations she accompanied him on a long car journey to the Northeast and sure enough: "In a big tin shed, in the middle of nowhere, was a big dead buffalo with fairy lights wrapped around the most massive set of horns I've ever seen. There were flowers stuffed in his ears, joss sticks smoking furiously, and Buddhist monks praying by his side. He was actually the star of a Thai war movie called Bang Rajan and I' m pretty sure the reason he died was because they worked him pretty hard. So the actors decided he deserved a funeral. It was bizarre, but really fun, reporting on stories like this."
In between fun assignments, Ange also found time to mend her broken heart by having a couple of love affairs with a photographer from her news agency, and a Romanian Canadian medical student in the jungles of Laos. But then her career started to really take off with her next big break coming in Myanmar where she covered the release of Burmese democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi. However it was also the beginning of the end of her high flying career as a foreign correspondent.
"I think it was the day I decided that it was time to leave the industry because of the pressure on us to be the first to get the story out to the world. All I wanted to do was sit with Aung San Suu Kyi and speak to her but in the end it was a very rushed job because I knew that if we didn't get the footage out on the satellite in time I'd loose my job. The story was over before I knew it and I really questioned the international news media's sense of priorities when, on such a historic day, we didn't have the time to treat the story with the respect it deserved, just because of time constraints. In rushing it out to the world we had missed filming her first speech in public and those crucial first hours she had spent with her supporters. That apparently didn't matter. Breaking news is not about quality, its about speed and, in the commercial news game, its about winning."
Ange's book is sub titled Soundbites from a Songbird in Siam. As well as being a journalist, she's also an accomplished singer and song writer and this part of the book chronicles her return to the world of music by landing a gig in a folk rock band with a couple of whisky swigging Thai musicians "P Noi" and "P Jack," as her disillusionment with the world of breaking news and the antics of some of her male expat colleagues gained momentum.
"I loved living in Thailand but I couldn't live my whole life there as a single girl. I worked with a Scottish man who told me that he lived like a king in Thailand. He told me that it was a white man's paradise, but it all depends on your definition of paradise I suppose.
