“But I don't know that I ever really thought ahead, that I wanted to be a photographer or cameraman. I didn't even know about cameramen in those days.”
Working in Dunedin she discovered a love of skydiving, a pastime that caught a lot of what made her tick — a sense of freedom and independence, but which also included a fair slice of risk, danger and adrenaline. She apparently skydived barefoot. She changed her name partly because of her skydiving, partly because she had by then decided to make her way in what was still distinctly a man's world. It was the early days of the era of women's liberation — Germaine Greer's book The Female Eunuch was published in 1970.
“One day I thought, women inherit our father's name, then you get married and have a husband's name,” she said in “Fearless”.
“I thought why should I have to live with my father's name? Why can't I have my own name? I had a friend who had a little Tiger Moth I used to jump out of. Why not Margaret Moth?”
So it was as Margaret Gipsy Moth that she left New Zealand for the US, where she initially worked for seven years for KHOU in Houston, Texas, before signing on with CNN in 1990.
She covered Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984, the Gulf War, the civil war in Georgia, the Bosnian war and Middle Eastern conflicts including, in 2002, Israel's invasion of Palestine. When militiamen opened fire on protesters in Tbilisi, Georgia, she stood her ground and kept her camera running.
She chose to work in combat zones but denied having a death wish and talk of that made her angry.
“I was always very careful. I never saw myself as a daredevil or someone who would be stupid about things,” she said in the documentary.
On March 29, 2002 Israeli tanks and troops rolled into the West Bank city of Ramallah before dawn, encircling Yasser Arafat's headquarters. Arafat was the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) and president of the Palestinian National Authority.
A group of medical professionals defied the Israeli military, and Moth put herself in the middle of the group. It helped her get an exclusive interview with Arafat afterwards.
Then in Sarajevo while many others around her slept, she set to work filming with a night scope through holes blown out by artillery fire in a destroyed hotel room, hiding from snipers.
But it was driving through so-called Sniper Alley in Sarajevo during the siege there in 1992 that a sniper shot her in the face.
“Someone shot, I think, three rounds into the van. I didn't hear them because I guess I got hit by the first one. I don't remember the actual shot, but I remember it must have knocked me over . . . and, I just — maybe a second — I don't remember anything. My face — it felt like my face was falling off. I remember I was trying to hold it on. I knew I had to keep calm, and I knew I had to stay conscious. If I go unconscious I will stop breathing. I knew that.”
The bullet shattered her jaw, knocked out teeth and destroyed part of her tongue. She was lucky that so far the morning had been quiet, and there was a fair blood supply available which no doubt saved her life. It took more than a dozen bouts of surgery to restore her jaw, but even so she quipped that the injury to her tongue made her talk like a drunk.
Nearly a year after being shot she was back working in Sarajevo, reassuring her teammates through her damaged tongue that she was fine. She joked that she had returned to the scene of the crime to find her missing teeth.
The usual questions and anger were raised over the van she had been travelling in having clearly been marked as a press vehicle, but her take on the shooting was different.
“I don't blame anyone for firing at me,” she said.
“They're in a war, and I stepped into it.”
She inspired her colleagues with toughness, humour and her own inimitable style. Her trademark fashion sense to the end was black: black clothes, jet black hair, black eyeliner and black combat boots.
“I don't think Margaret could ever look back and say, ‘What if?'” said Christiane Amanpour, CNN's chief international correspondent. “She did it to the max, and she did it brilliantly. And she did it on her terms.”
Moth was also known for her generosity and kindness, and the support she lent to colleagues and others.
She helped new journalists by showing them how she survived under fire, at one point leading a new correspondent through rubble that likely contained landmines.
She loved animals. In the desert heat of Jordan she refused to travel in a horse-drawn wagon, choosing to carry her own heavy equipment to spare the horse.
When Moth was diagnosed with terminal cancer her main concern was the 25 stray cats she had befriended and looked after in Istanbul.
She lived life on her own terms. She battled the disease for three years and died on March 21, 2010 in Minnesota. She was 59.
She met her impending death as matter of factly as she lived — “I don't know anyone who's enjoyed life more”.
