In all that Ray Martin has seen during his six decades covering news and current affairs around Australia and abroad, there is one story that has haunted him.

In Banda Aceh in 2004, reporting for A Current Affair on the annihilation of the Indonesian island where the Boxing Day Tsunami first struck, Martin interviewed a man riding a bicycle around what was left of a village square, with two crying toddlers in a makeshift sidecar. His name was Yunan, he was a carpenter and his wife and daughter had been on the beach that day.

“He didn’t know how he was going to survive,” Martin recalls. “It’s easy to show the landscape but you can’t show how devastated people’s hearts are.”

Twenty years later, when Martin was asked by the Nine Network to return to Banda Aceh for Tsunami: 20 Years On, a documentary marking the anniversary of one of the worst natural disasters in history that killed an estimated 230,000 people across South-East Asia, and includes revisits to the region by Australian survivors and aid workers, he jumped at the chance.

“It had been on my bucket list,” he says. “I really wanted to go back and see how people are and, again, I was amazed.”

What struck him the first time around, arriving to apocalyptic scenes on New Year’s Eve with a film crew of three, was the spirit of the Achinese.

“They are the gentlest, kindest people,” he says. “Even in the chaos and the horrors that we flew into, they were able to greet you when you came by with the cameras – to shake hands, to embrace you, to try and share their plate of rice. And then when you sit and talk, and you find out that a bloke sweeping out his shop had lost his wife and children and his mother and sisters all in one fell swoop – and somehow he still had this milk of human kindness.”

A keen photographer, Martin says the images he captured back then helped him process what he was seeing. Years later, they bring back strong emotions, as well as “the smell of death and destruction”.