I was about to get married. Then my phone exploded with calls from one person
My mobile phone was ringing again, the fourth time the same number had appeared in as many minutes. It belonged to a source of mine, an insider at the intersection of elite sport, gambling and organised crime.
It must be important, I reasoned. I’d sworn to myself I wouldn’t answer my phone. Not today, of all days. Today I was getting married.
It rang again.
I was about to get married. Then a distraught source rang with bad news.Credit: iStock
“Hey mate,” I answered brusquely.
The caller was distraught, his words tripping over themselves as he blurted out how his wife had just left him. He sounded close to the edge.
I did my best to reassure him, talk him back from the abyss, conscious I had to get to a ceremony. My ceremony.
“How are you going?” he finally asked me as an afterthought. “Up to anything?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him where I was, only that I had to go.
“You’re a real mate,” he said quietly as he hung up.
Can journalists form genuine friendships with their sources?Credit: Stock image
I wasn’t quite sure that was true. He’d certainly helped me break stories and we had formed a genuine bond. I liked him enormously and had always listened to him when he was in need. But was ours a genuine friendship or merely an extended dance between journalist and source?
I checked my wedding suit for the last time and headed towards my waiting best men.
In-depth reporting leads a journalist to become deeply familiar with their source or subject’s life.
You often become something much more than a human receptacle of information.
You become a person’s confidant, therapist, human life raft. Sometimes, you become a friend.
Each source and subject has their own story and each relationship is different.
My first genuine deep throat I met in 2002. They worked as a senior official and leaked me classified information over the next decade, allowing me to expose government failings and corruption. What I published was always in the public interest, even though I knew the source was, at times at least, motivated by personal or career ambition.
But he was also unquestionably courageous. And he also advanced my career. Self-interest flowed both ways.
My first Walkley award was on the back of immense risks this source took, and yet he got no glory or reward. That went to me. And yet he still gave.
When my family’s safety was threatened, this source called my wife on the pretext of advising her on how to better secure our home. What he was really doing was offering emotional support, the assurance we weren’t alone.
At some point, my source stopped being a source. It was a relief to no longer be performing a dance with him, an act of juggling self and public interest. He stopped sharing secret government intelligence. Instead, we began sharing information about our true selves. Twenty years later, ours remains a close and genuine friendship, sans secrets.
I’ve had many briefer interactions that were just as meaningful. I’m often asked about the story I’m proudest of. It involves a disabled woman called Jules Anderson, who was raped by her carer, a serial offender who preyed on the vulnerable.
Jules Anderson was raped by her carer.Credit: ABC
Jules initially agreed only to be a confidential source, sharing her story anonymously. She was worried about being judged or misunderstood and having her most personal details made public.
But after spending time with Jules and meeting her parrot, I felt the trust between us grow, and she agreed to go on camera for a Four Corners program.
After 20 years of reporting, I marvel at the courage and grace of ordinary or vulnerable people who’ve briefly let me, and then the public, in. Jules was the exemplar.
Her rapist preyed on her because he thought a disabled woman wouldn’t speak up.
Instead, she confronted her abuser and the institution that failed her on national television. The man she called the “monster” was jailed for 18 years.
I interviewed another care home resident and have no doubt their advocacy was a catalyst for a later royal commission.
Nick McKenzie, right, with colleague Richard Baker.Credit: Michael Clayton-Jones
That Christmas, a colleague, Richard Baker, and I, took them out for lunch in Chinatown. It wasn’t the beginning of a lasting friendship, but was a moment of genuine mutual affection and respect.
A few weeks ago, almost a decade after that Four Corners program, another disabled victim-survivor and advocate I’d interviewed, Milly Parker, had an Order of Australia medal pinned on her chest.
Milly emailed me about her accomplishment even though we hadn’t spoken in years, our relationship strained by a poor decision I’d made to try to introduce her to the new CEO of the organisation that contributed to so much of her trauma.
She wrote to me kindly and I responded: “You have been through hell and you are a brave and amazing person.”
And as I write this now, I feel overwhelmingly grateful that Milly had reached out and thus included me in part of her life story, if only in a small way.
Noble ideals aside, perhaps that is the real gift of journalism: relationships, even fleeting ones, that produce real connection.
Order of Australia recipient Milly Parker.Credit: Scott McNaughton
A few weeks ago, I called the man who phoned me on my wedding day years before. I hadn’t spoken to him in a year or so. I wasn’t calling to check in, but rather for some help with a story I was working on. I was on the hunt, seeking something for nothing.
Before I could ask for his help, he began again softly crying, explaining to me that he was gravely ill, broke and too proud to ask his own family for help.
“You’re a mate,” he said to me after we chatted for a while. I hung up, glad I hadn’t got the chance to ask him for anything and grateful that it was me who he had chosen to confide in.
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