Anchors Away

Sun Herald

Sunday July 9, 2006

Dino Scatena.

Turning on the TV overseas, the last thing you'd expect to see is an Australian bringing you the news. But many of today's international anchors cut their teeth at local networks before they took up prime jobs abroad - and there's plenty of room at the top. By Dino Scatena.

As John Vause, CNN International's Middle East correspondent, signed off his live-to-air report on the Palestinian elections and glanced into his crew's video monitor, he was struck by what we might call a blinding flash of the bloody obvious: all the reporters on that February weekend edition of World News were Aussie ex-pats. "It could have been a bulletin coming out of Sydney," says the Townsville-born journalist.

Anchoring the show out of CNN's headquarters in Atlanta was ex-ABC newsreader Rosemary Church, who was providing live links between former Seven Network reporter Vause in Israel's West Bank, ex-Nine Network Nightline host Hugh Riminton at the site of a Philippines mudslide, and a taped report from Beijing correspondent and former Today Tonight presenter Stan Grant.

Of course, CNN International (CNNI) is not an all-Aussie cast production. But the 24-hour news network, along with other international news services, has a taste for Australian anchors. (Last month, yet another Australian journalist, Michael Ware, formerly of Brisbane's The Courier-Mail and Time magazine, was appointed CNN's Baghdad correspondent.) Aussie accents can also be heard in English-language bulletins from as far abroad as Berlin-based Deutsche Welle television news service and Moscow's Russia Today TV. When the new English-language version

of Al-Jazeera goes to air later this year, it, too, will feature at least three Australians on-camera.

Australian Ian Macintosh, a recently retired senior vice-president of CNNI's Hong Kong bureau, says the Aussie onslaught of international airwaves is more the result of ability than a global fondness for Strine. "Anchors need something more than the ability to read a prompter," he says. "They have to be journalists in the real sense."

"We travel," explains Andrew Stevens, the Tasmanian-born host of CNNI's nightly World News Asia bulletin out of Hong Kong, referring to the great Australian tradition of packing your bags and going elsewhere. That said, "Being cheap probably helps," the 45-year-old quips. Although none of the anchors in this story were prepared to say exactly how much they earn overseas, CNN Today's Hugh Riminton offers, "It's not enough to say, 'I'll do this for a year and retire' but it's a good living, there is no doubt about it. I suspect I work harder for my money than [Seven newsreader] Ian Ross does [who is reportedly paid $1 million a year] but he's probably earned it."

CNNI anchor Michael Holmes says Australians excel in international news, thanks to the training they get back home. "We can pretty much do the gamut. British training tends to be more specialised and American training more academic - you can't walk in anywhere without a degree and three years working in Missouri. Whereas in Australia, if you're halfway decent and have a bit of get-up-and-go,

you can make it happen."

Perth-born Holmes became CNNI's first Australian on-air talent in 1996 after he was spotted by a US CNN executive while working as a reporter on the Nine Network's A Current Affair. "I got a bit jaded [with] shonky builders and supermarket scanners," says the 45-year-old, who started out as a copy boy on Perth's now-defunct Daily News. CNNI initially hired him as an anchor, to sit behind a desk in the Atlanta studios, for Your World Today, one of the network's daily rolling news bulletins. "I fell in love with international news," says Holmes.

Back then, Australian TV presenters still imitated the traditional British model; they were newsreaders rather than anchors. Holmes had to adapt quickly to the American style - producers whispering in his earpiece, constant live interviews with news-makers and correspondents around the world. Yet a decade of living in the Deep South has done nothing to dilute his thick Australian accent. "You don't lose the accent unless you want to," notes the blond, blue-eyed surfer. "And that's the thing: they [CNNI] want accents. They don't want a bunch of Americans." (John

Vause fared worse as an anchor at CNN USA, where complaining emails demanded the network "get that Brit git off air".)

Holmes's role at CNNI, which draws anchors from 20 countries to broadcast to 200, changed following September 11, 2001. "I had covered wars before," says Holmes. "So they said, 'Well, gee, can you go to Afghanistan?'" He has since spent four months a year on the road as a correspondent, filing stories from hot spots, and spends the rest of his work time behind his Atlanta desk.

In 2003, he was assigned to Iraq to anchor CNNI's live frontline coverage of Gulf War II. "I sometimes refer to myself as the 'shit-hole correspondent'," he says. On January 27, 2004, he and a crew were travelling along a highway south of Baghdad when they came under attack. "It wasn't fun and it wasn't exciting - it was bloody terrifying," says Holmes.

Holmes wasn't hurt. But his British cameraman, Scott McWhinnie, was sprawled across his lap, shot in the head. McWhinnie survived but two Iraqi crew - a driver, Yasser Khatib, and Holmes's local translator, Duraid Mohammad - died. Holmes has their names tattooed on his arm, in Arabic script. "I remember these guys every morning when I get up," he says.

Like Holmes and Vause, Hugh Riminton, 45, has personally witnessed numerous conflict and disaster zones in the past two decades, from East Timor's fight for independence to the Fijian coup of 2000, the first war in Iraq, Northern Ireland, Uganda and the Balkans.

Born in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) and raised in New Zealand, Riminton began his television career with Nine in the late '80s and spent the first half of the 1990s as its London correspondent. He'd had offers before but in 2004, while hosting the network's national Nightline bulletin out of Sydney, he was approached by CNN executives and given his pick of jobs. Riminton accepted a co-anchor role for CNN's Today program, broadcast daily out of the Hong Kong bureau, a seat vacated by Stan Grant, who moved on to become CNNI's Beijing correspondent.

Within days of Riminton and his wife moving to Hong Kong, the Asian tsunami hit. Although he wasn't due to start work for a fortnight, Riminton contacted the news desk and offered his help. Hours later, he was standing on a devastated beachfront outside Colombo, Sri Lanka. It was the first time Riminton had been back to his birth country since his British parents relocated to Christchurch when Riminton was five.

For the next two weeks, Riminton worked around the clock. "It's 24-hour news so you're just out there all the time finding stuff, filing stories, adlibbing live for an hour at a time, pulling it altogether while standing in muck on a beach using a shonky generator," he says. "You just keep on going because it's always six o'clock somewhere in the world."

Unlike most of her globetrotting colleagues, Rosemary Church, a senior anchor for CNNI's World News bulletins out of Atlanta, rarely leaves her desk but she is often fighting back tears as she relays the tragedy of the day. Born in Belfast and raised in Canberra, Church was faced with her first live-to-air disaster within a fortnight of starting the job in 1998: breaking news of the crash of Swissair Flight 111 over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 229 people on board. The air crash was her "baptism by fire", on-air by herself, reporting and adlibbing for four straight hours as details trickled in.

Before being poached by CNNI, Church spent five years in Darwin as the newsreader for ABC satellite service Australia Television News. Her authoritative yet relaxed delivery, perfect pronunciation, blonde, blue-eyed looks and huge smile garnered a cult following throughout Asia. There were reports of men in villages across the region gathering around TV sets nightly to watch her, even if they couldn't understand a word she was saying.

Now a mother of three - Madeleine, 3, and twins James and Hannah, 1 - the "in my 40s" Church feels the emotional burden of carrying world news growing heavier. "We're doing breaking news all the time now, from natural disasters around the globe to air crashes," she says. "It's one thing after the other and it can be quite distressing. Maybe it's not so healthy but I still enjoy it immensely, that thrill of going in and covering a story and making sure your audience understands what's happening in the world."

Last year, 24-year-old Hamish Macdonald signed up with Qatar-based Al-Jazeera, a broadcaster accused by the US of helping terrorist group al-Qaeda due to its access to taped messages from Osama bin Laden. The new English-speaking channel is still months away from broadcasting but Macdonald - who is originally from Jindabyne

in NSW and trained at WIN-TV in Canberra (where both John Vause and Rosemary Church started) - has worked out of its Malaysia bureau since last November, familiarising himself with the region and its politics. Once the station goes live, he will double as the network's South-East Asia correspondent as well as a weekend news anchor.

"Obviously, there is a variety of perceptions about Al-Jazeera," says Macdonald. "But if I can be involved in something groundbreaking - with distinctive journalism - shedding light on parts of the world that had previously gone fairly unnoticed, I'll be happy."

Shane Dannatt knew what would make him happy when he was still a boy growing up in Melbourne. When his parents asked the 12-year-old what he wanted to do with his life, his reply was immediate: read the news on TV. Now 52, Dannatt has spent six years in Berlin, co-anchoring The Journal, the nightly half-hour English-language bulletin for Germany's national broadcaster, Deutsche Welle. It's a contract government job that pays a standard public servant wage, yet working nightshifts and overtime affords him the luxury of spending two weeks of each month renovating his apartment in Paris.

Dannatt, who works under the name Fankhauser ("I thought, 'We're in Germany; let's have a German-sounding name'"), was a latecomer to TV. He spent most of his 20s working odd jobs. At 30, about to wed, he was driving trucks between Melbourne and Sydney when he decided it was time to revisit his original ambition. He videotaped newsreaders and practised every night in a jacket and tie in his kitchen.

The next time he dropped off a load in Sydney, Dannatt, wearing his trucker dungarees, stopped by the SBS studios and gave them a tape. "And they took me seriously," he says. His first job was as a junior reporter and it was 16 years later, while reading the news for the ABC in Adelaide, that Dannatt first saw The Journal on SBS. He sent off another audition tape and was soon living in Germany. Dannatt says he hasn't given much thought to relocating home.

After nearly a decade abroad, Vause, who's stationed in Jerusalem with his wife, actor Tushka Bergen, and Katie, their two-year-old daughter, feels it's almost time to come home. "It's the world's most family-friendly war. I can head off to the West Bank at nine, cover the conflict and be home by eight o'clock to put Katie to bed." But the last thing he wants to do is spend the rest of his years in Israel. "I miss Australia terribly. We miss the lifestyle, we miss the people."

Over in China, CNNI'S Beijing correspondent Stan Grant feels his children have seamlessly slotted in with their father's nomadic lifestyle. Grant, 42, has spent eight of the past 10 years abroad. He joined CNNI in late 2001 after exiting Seven the previous year following revelations of an extramarital affair with fellow presenter Tracey Holmes. The couple now live in Beijing with their son, Jesse, 4, and Grant's sons from a previous marriage, John, 12, and Dylan, 8.

His eldest son, Grant points out, began his education in London when Dad was stationed there as Seven's European correspondent in the late '90s. He's since been to school in Sydney and Hong Kong, and now in Beijing with brother Dylan and little Jesse, who speaks Mandarin. "Kids are incredibly adaptable," says Grant. "As long as they have the security of the family around them, their friends, their sport and their school - those sorts of things keep them grounded."

So where is home when your job is international news? Home, offers Michael Holmes, "is where the kids are". His kids [Lily, 8, and Mack, 6] were born in Atlanta, it's where their mother lives, "and so stay I."

Riminton adds that he's sure he'll end up back in Australia. He and wife Kumi Taguchi, an ex-ABC producer, had a daughter, Coco, in Hong Kong in January. The family regularly commute to Sydney where Riminton's 13-year-old daughter, Kate, from a previous marriage, still resides. "In an ideal world, I would have two lives," says Riminton. "One to live feeding myself intellectually, racing around the place, and the other to just live the Australian lifestyle. In some ways, I can't wait to get back. Australia to me is totally home. I have no illusions about that."