When the final episode of Four Corners for 2016 airs on Monday evening, it will mark the return of a name long synonymous with the ABC's investigative journalism showcase: Liz Jackson.
Between 1994 and 2011 the five-time Walkley Award-winning journalist broke numerous stories for the program, but for her return the 66-year-old is the subject. The powerful, unadorned episode documents Jackson's struggle with Parkinson's disease.
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Four Corners: A Sense of Self
When acclaimed TV journalist Liz Jackson is diagnosed with a form of Parkinson's disease that cripples her with pain and panic attacks, she turns the lens on herself to make the most challenging story of her life.
Beginning with her 2014 diagnosis after several years of increasingly severe symptoms that stretched from acute pain to debilitating panic attacks, A Sense of Self charts the efforts of the Sydney-based Jackson and her husband, filmmaker Martin Butler, to understand the impact of the degenerative brain disorder, and find a degree of stability. They eventually do so, but Jackson's current condition remains uneasily balanced.
"I have pain every day and I go through phases where it's worse. Right now I'm going through a phase where my mouth fills up with saliva, which happens when you get Parkinson's," explains Jackson. "It makes it difficult for me to breathe, and the most classic panic disease is believing that you can't breathe. That's what happens to me. I had one [attack] four days ago and I thought, 'I'm going to die before this project goes to air.' "
"Liz is on a regular and high dose of anti-Parkinson's medication and whenever that runs out - each dose lasts two to 2½ hours - you're moving towards an extremely uncomfortable place every day and every time," adds Butler. "It's a real high wire act."
Intimately composed on handheld cameras, A Sense of Self - co-directed by Bentley Dean, Jackson and Butler - observes Jackson in her most vulnerable moments. Racked by pain, dragged down by depression, and prone to physically falling, she acknowledges the loss of her facial expression - "mask face", as Parkinson's sufferers call it - and worries that dementia will rob her of the mental faculties she's relied on throughout her life.
As a reporter, whether investigating match-fixing in international cricket or reporting on the Northern Territory's mandatory detention laws for children, Jackson was tireless in her pursuit of the truth. A Sense of Self is no different, although Jackson had to give her collaborators the occasional prod forward.
"The deal was that we'd only make it if it reflected the truth, but I was waiting for Martin and Bentley to ask me if they could shoot a panic attack," recalls Jackson.
"They hadn't been specific, so I said, 'Are you going to ask me? Because that's the first thing I'd ask for if I was a producer at Four Corners.' They were a bit shy about broaching it."
While having to read the transcripts of the interviews with her son and daughter was "devastating", Jackson nonetheless enjoyed working on the episode.
During the editing, Jackson kept referring to herself as "she" when she was on the screen, dividing her journalist's instincts from her medical situation. Likewise she doesn't want A Sense of Self to generate sympathy, but rather awareness of Parkinson's disease and hopefully praise for a well-made documentary.
"I want people to think it's a good film and a film that told them a lot and made them feel, to some extent, what it's like to have a life-threatening disease that comes out of the blue," notes Jackson.
Sally Neighbour, the executive producer of Four Corners, was one of the people Jackson and Butler first spoke to when they considered making a film, and her advice helped shape the direction of the work.
Jackson, who watches the show "religiously" every Monday it's on, is grateful for her former professional home's support, acknowledging that A Sense of Self sits outside Four Corners' usual purview.
"It is a very different piece of television," Butler admits. "It's a documentary, not an investigative report, and that was always going to be the case. But this is very much a continuation of Liz's honesty and her approach to her work. There's an extraordinary bravery in front of the camera, even if the result is very different."
The bond between Jackson and the English-born Butler, who met in 1974, is tested and renewed by their shared battle. At one point she worries that she has driven him away, while in another exchange they debate the merits of euthanasia. Jackson did not consider suicide, but for the first time she says she understood why others do. It's just one of many intensely personal moments.
"Without Martin I'd be hospitalised," Jackson says, but instead with the improved medication regimen she has a measure, even in just two-hour blocks, of a familiar life. She might meet a friend in Bondi for coffee, or help mind her granddaughter, Charlotte, one day a week. Jackson is less inhibited by the Parkinson's than she was just two years ago, and still determined.
When Jackson mentioned on Facebook that A Sense of Self was airing on Four Corners ,she was deluged with congratulations, which left her bemused.
"People are writing how fabulous it is, but no one's seen it," she points out. "We don't want any credit until people know we gave it our best crack."
A Sense of Self airs on the ABC on Monday at 8.30pm.
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