Allison Langdon – The Best in the Business

By Dan Hutton & Madeleine Gray on March 31, 2016 in People

Where are you originally from?
I was born in Wollongong, but moved to a small country town, Wauchope, when I was seven. I grew up on a farm there with my parents, older brother and little sister.

And Wauchope is just near Port Macquarie, right?
Yeah, it’s about 20 minutes west of Port Macquarie, and about four hours north of Sydney. It was such a great place to grow up; I have so many fantastic memories. You might know it as Timbertown!

When did you move to the Eastern Suburbs?
I moved to Sydney in 2001, after I finished my degree. Originally I lived in Paddington, on Goodhope Street, until I met my now husband, Mike. We lived in Randwick, Bondi, and for the past five years in Bronte.

Are you here in Bronte to stay?
Absolutely. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else now. I spend almost half of my year on the road, travelling, but it is the best feeling coming home. The first thing I love to do is the Bronte to Bondi walk with my husband and my Labrador, Sport, starting at the cemetery at first light. We seriously live in one of the most beautiful places. I love it.

What else do you love about the area?
I just love the people, and this is the probably the first time, other than when I lived in a small country town, that I’ve known all my neighbours. I love that I know everyone up at the local cafes, the newsagency and the dry cleaners; it’s such a great little community.

Is there anything about the Eastern Suburbs that gets your goat?
The traffic, and the rangers when you’re out walking the dog in the morning.

Do you have any favourite local haunts?
I love Three Blue Ducks and Cali Press, and I train up at Lifecycle Fitness with Chang and Whippet and the boys. We pop down to Bondi quite a bit on the weekends, too. When I come home from a long overseas assignment we tend to head down to Raw Bar or North Bondi Fish.

How do you feel about being inconvenienced by Lifecycle Fitness moving up the hill to Charing Cross?
I’m not happy (laughs). The new place sounds amazing, although I’m usually there at 6.45 in the morning. My alarm is set at 6.20am and I just walk up the hill and around the corner. Now that it’s moving to Charing Cross I’ll lose ten minute’s sleep.

How did you first get into journalism?
I knew from the age of 12 that I wanted to be a journalist. I ran into my Year Eight English teacher a few years back and he said, “I still remember you were so adamant about exactly what you wanted to do growing up.” I never wavered from that, so I was really lucky, I think, that I always knew what I wanted to do.

Was it always television journalism that you were interested in?
No, I orignially wanted to be in newspapers, but when I was at university in Bathurst, interestingly I had a scholarship with Channel Seven, yet as it turns out I’ve worked my entire career at Channel Nine – so thank you Channel Seven for putting me through uni. They didn’t actually want me straight out of uni and Channel Nine offered me my first gig, which was Nightline with Jim Waley. It was such an amazing program to cut my teeth on. In the early days Jim scared me a little because he set such a high standard, so you would triple-check everything before you gave it to him because if there was a mistake or something you weren’t quite sure about he’d hone in on it straight away. You don’t want Jim standing over you grilling you on the facts of a story, so I’ve always been a very good fact checker thanks to Nightline.

Is being a young woman in the industry an advantage or a disadvantage, or neither?
I honestly think neither, and that’s only coming from my personal experience. I haven’t had any issues with any level of sexism in my career, and I think I’m quite lucky because of that. I’ve always had great bosses and they’ve always rewarded hard work. If you put your head down and work hard, it doesn’t matter if you’re male or female. You get acknowledged for that, then you get the good breaks, and you get the good stories. They send you off on the yarns because they know that you’ll work harder than anyone else.

How competitive is it amongst the 60 Minutes reporters, or even your colleagues in the early days of your journalism career, to break a story?
When I first got my start on the 6pm News I was quite young. Back then most of the journos were in their thirties or forties and I was in my mid-twenties. I just accepted that you might bust your balls all day on something that was the big lead story for the night, and they might say, “Give it to one of the senior reporters.” I understood that, too. Those guys were better than me. It’s as simple as that.

Do you have a career-defining moment where you think you took things to the next level?
I made a decision after I’d been in Sydney for a couple of years producing that I really wanted to be on the road, and I wanted to go and make my mistakes somewhere other than the Sydney newsroom, so I asked to be moved to Darwin, which is a place I’d never been in my early twenties. I honestly went to the boss’ office and said, “What about Darwin?” It’s so different to Sydney and I thought it sounded cool; I was on my way there three weeks later. What was great about being based up there was that any time there was a big story in Bali or Indonesia, we were so close. I’d jump on a plane and head over there. I had these amazing opportunities when I was 23 or 24 to be covering international events involving suicide bombings and terrorism. Of course the bosses in Sydney would see those stories and after about 18 months they said, “Let’s bring her back.” I think that was a really smart career move to go and head to the wild, wild north.

What’s the most memorable story you’ve covered?
I’ve had a couple. Probably the one that’s made the greatest impact on me was covering the war and famine in Somalia, just because we saw so much and I was really moved by that. I met this woman who was walking from the south to the north, her husband had disappeared, and she didn’t know if he’d been killed by Al-Shabaab, joined Al-Shabaab, or become an economic refugee and just abandoned them. She had to walk north with her kids – I think she had seven children – and she had to make a tragic decision along the way. They were all so ill, so she made the decision to leave the two sickest on the side of the road, knowing that they would die, in order to save her other five children and make it to the refugee camp. After hearing the story and talking to this woman I said to her, not with any judgment, “How do you leave two children on the side of the road?” She said, “I don’t look at it like that. I look at it as though I made a decision to save five lives.” That stuff just stays with you.

Is it hard to disconnect from a story when you get back home?
Absolutely, and as I get older, I find it harder. It can be really hard when you go into a place and people bare their souls, and you get a real understanding of what they’re going through and the misery that’s unfolding in a place, and then I get to come back to one of the most beautiful corners of the planet. It does stay with you. I always wonder what happened to that Somali woman and her children.

Have you feared for your life at all?
Sure. There was a trip I did a while back which started with swimming cage-free with great white sharks in South Africa. That might sound terrifying, but the second leg of that trip was actually far more dangerous. We were covering the 20-year civil war in the Congo. You’ve got 12-year-old children with AK-47s or M-16s on their backs. All they have known their entire life is conflict and violence, so life means nothing to them. We’re a camera crew with over a hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment; that’s when you feel vulnerable.

Where’s the best place you’ve ever been?
How do I choose? Workwise, abseiling into Mount Marum volcano in Vanuatu was amazing, as was staying with the Kayapo Indians in the Amazon, but my best experiences have been backpacking with my husband – Cuba and Central America would be hard to top!

What are the best and the worst parts of the job?
Travel is the best and the worst part. I absolutely love it – like next week I’m going to Antarctica for three weeks to go diving – but it can be lonely. You get to see these amazing parts of the world and someone else pays for it. I’ve had so many great experiences and met some extraordinary people. Whether it’s people doing amazing things or going through really hard times, you always come away affected by the stories and by the experiences. But on the other hand I was in Israel for the latest uprising when my sister got the phone call that her multi-organ transplant had come through, and I couldn’t be here with her.

When do you stop all the travel, kick Liz Hayes out of the chair, and just interview celebrities?
Liz still travels as much as the rest of us; that hasn’t changed. In fact she’s in Sweden at the moment where our crew had a pretty hairy encounter with some masked men. The cameraman was beaten.

In terms of Australian commercial television journalism 60 Minutes is the pinnacle, so where do you go from here?
It’s all I ever wanted. When I was offered this job, I had someone say to me, “What’s next?” And I thought, well, this is the only job that I’ve wanted. I got it slightly earlier than I was expecting, and luckily it’s lived up to all my expectations. I could certainly keep doing this for the foreseeable future.

What do you get up to in your spare time?
We spend a lot of time down at the beach, swim a lot, run the dog, sit in cafes and go to the gym. I see Trent Langlands up at Lifecycle Fitness three times a week when I’m home. He’s the best trainer because he never yells, he doesn’t ever rant, but he’s got this way about him where if you don’t give him 110 per cent it’s like he’s quietly disappointed in you. It’s a far more effective training tool.

Do you find that training’s a great way to clear your mind?
You never like it when your alarm goes off at that hour, especially in winter when it’s still dark, but you’ve just got to get up, get it done, and then everything’s clearer. You feel great, and I’m so much more proactive if I do something in the morning.

Do you think that you’ve got a good work/life balance?
I don’t think you ever find balance, to be honest. I honestly don’t. We all strive for it, but it’s hard. Everyone works so hard these days. We’re better at it when you live somewhere like Bronte. It helps, and I think sometimes balance can just mean getting up and walking five minutes down the road and seeing the ocean. I’m definitely angling towards more free time (laughs).

Besides 60 Minutes, do you have any other projects in the pipeline?
I do a lot of stuff with the Mirabel Foundation. The Mirabel Foundation looks after kids who have been orphaned by drug abuse, so their parents have either died or can no longer look after them, and it’s keeping them in the family unit with grandparents or extended families so they don’t have to go into foster care. They’re established here in Sydney and in Melbourne, so I do a lot of stuff with them and they’re brilliant. And I’m also involved with R U OK? Day, which I’ve been involved with since its inception. One of my husband’s best mates, Gav Larkin, started it, and he sadly passed away. We’re both really committed to that cause, and it’s changed a lot over the years. I remember when it first started, trying to get the media involved was hard because it was like, “Oh no, suicide prevention, it’s too dark, we don’t go near it.” Now it is something we can all talk about. There’s been a real shift.

Do you have any advice for youngsters wanting to make a career out of journalism?
You need to work hard, be persistent, and be willing to cop the setbacks every now and again. They’re always going to come your way, and you learn from those setbacks and become more resilient. The main thing is just to work hard. And always say yes. Well, I should clarify that: always say yes within your moral compass. Don’t say yes to everything. That’s actually quite important, because there were certain things that I wouldn’t do as a journalist growing up, and you’re respected for that long term.

Have you had any moral dilemmas along the way?
There are always plenty of moral dilemmas, it’s how you then deal with them that matters. I’ve never finished the day and thought, ‘well, I wish I hadn’t done that’, or ‘I’ve overstepped the line’. I’ve always been very happy with the decisions that I’ve made, and I think that’s thanks to mum and dad and where I grew up.

Do you reckon coming from the country’s an advantage when it comes to the ability to tell a yarn and associate with people in general?
I think it definitely has helped me. You’re so self-sufficient in the country. You live out of town, so you’ve got to get your licence as soon as you turn 16, and we had nothing handed to us on a plate. You want a car? Get a job and buy your own car. I started working when I was 13 and three quarters.

Did you have any role models in the profession when you were an up-and-comer?
Definitely Christiane Amanpour from CNN. She is brilliant. Her interviews with world leaders are ground breaking. She’s intelligent, gutsy, and she’s managed to combine being a mother with a really demanding job.

Are there any ongoing news stories that you feel aren’t given the air time that they deserve?
Absolutely. What’s happening in Syria and the immigration disaster facing Europe as a consequence is given nowhere near enough news space. It’s not that people don’t care about it, they just become a bit weary of it. I think it can be quite overwhelming when you can’t see an obvious solution, so we just put it to the back of our minds. If you look at the most clicked stories online, it’s not the five most important stories of the day; it’s probably something to do with Kim Kardashian’s butt!

In an ideal world, what does the future hold for Allison Langdon?
It’s not that much different to what’s happening right now. Travelling the world, seeing amazing places, meeting amazing people, and coming home to my two beautiful boys – my husband and my Labrador.