police rounds colleague, Sandra Harvey.

Sandy was sent off at a Caringbah church before a grieving throng in an orange-painted casket that she had designed, adorned with sea emblems representing her love for the daily swim at Coogee Beach.

The unflapable Rose Bay resident was deserving of the high praise she received in eulogies from grieving friends, relatives and her boss of six years, former NSW police minister, Paul Whelan.

The author of five critically acclaimed crime books, Sandy, 49, was a fearless chronicler. In 1986, while researching her best-seller

about the Milperra bikie massacre, ''Brothers in Arms'' she and co-author Lindsay Simpson downed drink for drink with the big men at the secret Bandido clubhouse. Mr Whelan

remarked, through tearful eyes, that a Bandido leader fell for the striking Lois Lane and offered to scratch her name on his bike's petrol tank if she would be his girl. She declined, of course.

Searching for the truth, Sandy interviewed a self-confessed hitman in her loungeroom and crims in jail, shrugged off death threats and

intimidatory late-night calls.

A talented writer of great journalistic integrity, Sandra Harvey was an inspiration to many. She was still working as a researcher/

producer with ABC TV's ''Four Corners'' just before she died.

Her partner, photographer Simon Freeman, told of how she received the news of an inoperable cancer one morning at home. Putting down the phone, she turned to her

mate and said: ''I'm sorry, we won't be growing old together after all.''

The soulmates had met just the year before.

A different story, days later in Indonesia, when a deposed and ruthlessly corrupt despot named Soeharto was buried with full military honours by the soldiers who, under his kleptocratic authority, murdered up to 500,000 civilians in the anti-communist

bloodbath of 1965. Later, in the invasion of East Timor, more than 100,000 civilians were slaughtered.

Soeharto never apologised for his excesses and the alleged siphoning of billions of the country's dollars to his family interests.

For me, the contrasts were striking: Sandy was revered, Soeharto reviled.