Nicholas Stuart | Nate Thayer, who interviewed Pol Pot, dedicated his life to the truth

Thayer always lived far too dangerously, risking his body as part of his insatiable desire to discover what was really going on. This relentless quest for truth often placed him at the wrong place at the wrong time: it was difficult to know if he spent his life seeking trouble or if peril pursued him.

He was certainly responsible for the sudden, rapid volley of bullets hitting the wall behind us in Phnom Penh. The early 1990s was a dangerous time in south-east Asia and a strong force of Khmer Rouge had infiltrated the capital. Sensing movement on the other side of the boulevard, Thayer rushed onto the small hotel balcony. The rapid, light-staccato beat of an AK-56 immediately rang out as a sudden spray of bullets spattered into the wall above us.

We sprawled on the floor as the fighting began. The city's streets were deserted as the Khmer Rouge opened fire at Thayer's movement. Hun Sen's people responded and bullets flew wildly down the boulevard. A guerilla fell and I remember my amazement watching as one of his comrades rushed out and began pulling the body away through the streams of bullets. Others yelled. He, too, fled for cover and the insurgents withdrew down the street. Thayer focused his camera and kept clicking off photos.

He was lucky that day. He always pressed his luck too far.

A year later Thayer was being badly kicked and beaten by Thai soldiers after covering student protests in Bangkok. He'd been there as government forces closed in on the Royal Hotel: his body paid the price. Always uncompromising, and the scion of an elite Boston family, he'd been booted out of schools and dropped out of university (but only the "very best", he always assured me). The biggest irony was he'd taken up freelance journalism to discover what was really going on. He had an insatiable quest for knowledge, the truth, and discovering why things things happened - how society changed.

Thayer kept his eye on the biggest journalistic prize of that period, the chance to interview Pot, whose government had been responsible for the death of perhaps 3 million people in the four years he'd ruled Cambodia. Thayer would speak to anyone and take enormous risks, confident even a genocidal killer would want their story told.

In the end he got his interview. The guerillas had finally turned on their one-time leader and imprisoned him. Thayer was taken to a dilapidated shack in a remote jungle clearing. He had no idea of how long he'd have or when he'd be told to stop, or even if he'd be allowed to leave. Perhaps that's why this fearless, uncompromising final questioning of the one-time ruler is so unintentionally devastating. His openness was reciprocated. He obtained startling admissions from the leader he later described as "chillingly unrepentant".

The tape reveals, in its honest rawness, the terrifying accuracy of Hannah Arendt's judgement encapsulated in the simple phrase "the banality of evil". She'd reported on the Jerusalem trial of Adolph Eichmann, a functionary and logistician of the Jewish Holocaust. Although responsible for the death of so many others, neither man could admit nor, apparently, even conceive their actions were monstrously wicked. Instead their concerns revolved about trivialities: the need to follow bureaucratic process and keep paperwork accurate.

Recently there's been a move to insist evil is always apparent and self-evident. The moral divisions within this country over the policy to lock-up asylum seekers would seem to suggest ethical positions are never quite so clear. They were for Thayer.

He didn't need a university education to teach the difference between right and wrong but and was always prepared to keep asking questions, listening, and attempting to understand why other people saw the world differently. He fed off information, energised by a desire to understand 'why?' He realised we can never know enough and need to listen to everyone's story, even those whose story should never be told.

It was a journalistic philosophy both simple and complex at the same time.

We forget news is a social artefact. It doesn't simply exist to tell us about the world; it's used to shape the way we perceive what's going on. What makes something news is our perspective of events and the moral judgments that underlie them.

Last week Canberra had another masterclass in political messaging. Beijing and Tokyo's ambassadors engaged in a sophisticated, reciprocal display of what could be dismissed on the cricket field as sledging. The diplomats' words, however, displayed the speed and subtlety of rapiers. Thayer would have understood the need to listen to both and carefully parse their words, because truth is never obvious. This the sort of critical skill left trashed in a world where our exchanges and interpretations are too often dominated by facile outlets such as Twitter. Loud-hailers barely capable of simplistically screaming at opponents become confused with genuine dissemination of intellectual information. The public sphere is reduced to the level of sophistication usually displayed by clowns throwing cream-cakes at one another.

All too often we only hear what we want to hear.

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Thayer understood what's important is what comes next. Listen through the words, understand what's being said, but then take the time to turn the ideas over in your mind and think them through. This doesn't mean ignoring morality, but it does require pausing to accept other peoples' reality - no matter how flawed - is worth understanding before being dismissed.

Although Nate kept working, even having a journalistic scholarship named after him, his life of danger was, unfortunately, increasingly accompanied by those other 'Ds': drink and drugs. He deserves to be mourned by more than his dog, Lamont.

There is much more to the world than the knowledge contained in received wisdom and university texts. We can only find the truth if we continue asking questions.