Two miners missing underground in a gold mine in Beaconsfield Tasmania have been found alive. Todd Russell and Brant Webb have been trapped one kilometre underground in a rock fall. Little hope had been held for their survival. The body of a third trapped miner, Larry Knight, was recovered.

Richard Carleton was a reporter not so much interested in winning friends but influencing people.

And doing it with stories others might reject as too difficult, too dangerous or too upsetting. It made him one of the most feared and admired reporters in television history and made his reports for 60 Minutes always so hard-hittingly watchable.

The man who liked to potter in his workshop, play with his young son and baffle friends with magic tricks, left that side of his nature at the gate when he arrived for work at 60 Minutes. He went to work to ask the hard questions, dig for the unpalatable facts and make life difficult for producers who didn't meet his exacting standards.

When Bob Hawke deposed his friend Bill Hayden as leader of the Australian Labor Party in 1983, it was Richard Carleton who famously asked Hawke whether he had "blood on his hands". The ensuing televised tantrum is one of the most celebrated moments of television history -- partly because it exposed the knife-edged emotions of the future prime minister, also for the absolute gall of someone posing the question all Australia wanted asked.