Leigh Sales: 'It just started to feel like nothing was safe'

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Leigh Sales: 'It just started to feel like nothing was safe'

The ABC TV host led a charmed life until her 40s, when a string of heart-wrenching events led her to ponder the nature of trauma and how people face tragedy.

By Amanda Hooton

Leigh Sales: “Work’s easy. Life’s hard.”

Leigh Sales: “Work’s easy. Life’s hard.”Credit: Peter Brew-Bevan

One night in late February 2014, Leigh Sales woke up in the early hours of the morning. She was eight months pregnant with her second child, and she felt weird. Not completely terrible, but with a niggling pain high up under her left rib.

All of us have had times like this: odd health moments in the middle of the night. Generally speaking, we try to rationalise them away. After all, on the basis of past experience, what are the chances anything's really wrong? Pretty remote, in Sales's case. She'd had, as she puts it, a "gigantically lucky life". A close family, great childhood, awesome friends, happy marriage, plum job, lovely home, healthy baby boy – and barely a day of ill-health in her life. "I'd just had this charmed run," she says. "You know that phrase 'bum in the butter'? I was always landing with my bum in the butter."

But that February night, for reasons still mysterious to her, she told her husband, Phil Willis, that they might need to go to hospital. "Then I lay there a bit longer, and then I threw up, and then we called our friend Sharon to come and stay with [our then-two-year-old son] Daniel."

At the hospital, still the pain wasn't very bad – "about a three on a scale of one to 10" – but she was admitted for observation. And then suddenly the pain was a 10 and the nurse had lost the baby's heartbeat and Sales was on a gurney being rushed down a passage with the lights flashing above her head and someone was drawing a line on her stomach and the surgeon was standing over her and the anaesthetist was saying "just hold on", and she honestly didn't care if she lived or died if only the pain would stop.

And that was the end of her gigantically lucky life.

As host of 7.30, Leigh Sales has become “very skilful, very dangerous”, says Mark Scott, the ABC’s former managing director.

As host of 7.30, Leigh Sales has become “very skilful, very dangerous”, says Mark Scott, the ABC’s former managing director.Credit: Archives

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Leigh Sales's house in inner Sydney has two beautiful round windows fronting the street, four very confidently pruned rose bushes beside the path, and the sound of loud dishwasher stacking coming through the open door. She must be able to hear the swing of the gate over the crash of crockery, because she's at the front door before I'm up the path. She seems very tall, dressed in black workout gear – not designer black, but businesslike, get-it-done black. Her hair is less red than it looks on TV, and she is wearing absolutely no make-up. I am a veteran of the carefully constructed "no-make-up make-up" look, and this is not that. She really is without make-up, and she looks pale, her slanting eyes crinkled with tiredness. But she's one of those people who seems to emanate competence. If she was a doctor at the end of a 20-hour shift, you'd still let her take your appendix out.

"I'm so glad you made cake," she says. The apple and pecan cake I've brought with me is a shameless attempt to ingratiate myself, but it's probably going to be a lot less successful than I'd hoped: as she leads me through the house, Sales explains cheerfully that she and great friend and ABC colleague Annabel Crabb receive "about 12 cakes" every time they do a live event connected to their hit podcast Chat 10 Looks 3. Still, she seems pleased, putting it down on the kitchen table as she makes tea.

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As a journalist, it's strange to interview another journalist – especially one who seems to embody a kind of Platonic ideal of the profession: hard-hitting objective news on one hand as anchor of the ABC's flagship news and current affairs program 7.30; first-person humour and charisma via Chat 10 Looks 3 on the other. And now – almost too much to bear – she's published a book. Any Ordinary Day is actually Sales's third book (gah!): an account of how people deal with sudden, terrible events – what Sales calls the "blindsides" of fate – told from startling personal experience.

The truth, of course, is that it's hard to imagine Leigh Sales being blindsided by anything. Her air of competence, says absolutely everyone I speak to, is real. "She has a very, very disciplined brain," says Crabb. "She's the most organised person I know. It awes – and terrifies – me. When we're doing stuff together, she'll send a list saying, 'Let's get this planned out, let's organise our talking points, let's get our shit together,' and I'm like, 'Oh my God, mate, that's a month away. I've barely even registered it's happening.' But she has that almost military style of organisation; she can't quite be at peace until she knows she's prepared for every possible eventuality."

The executive producer at 7.30, Justin Stevens, agrees. "If she's got half an hour to burn, I'll notice that she's prepping an interview for someone who may or may not say yes in two or three days' time," he says. "If we were all still schoolkids, she'd be the kid who's done her homework two weeks before the due date." This was once the literal truth, explains Jill Ireland, a Brisbane-based child psychologist, who's been friends with Sales since grade 8 at Aspley State High School, Brisbane. "Leigh was always a very, very hard worker," she recalls. "She's from a very hard-working family background: the culture she came from was all about not accepting second-best."

Sales's father Dale, a regimental sergeant major in the Australian Army, sounds like he set a ferociously effective example of determination and competence to his much-loved only daughter and her younger brother, Glen. Her '70s childhood, moving between army bases until high school, when the family settled itself in Brisbane, sounds almost nostalgically Australian: bikes, rissoles, green Holden Belmonts.

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"The only rule was to be home when the street lights came on," says Sales, who has described herself as "a long, skinny kid with limbs like tentacles", which she'd use to grip onto the furniture when her mum Ann, a clerk at what was then Telecom, tried to drag her into her room for misbehaviour. "I was a bit of a handful at home," she's written, "mostly because I insisted on questioning everything." 7.30 viewers will recognise this quality: over the years Sales has gained a reputation – and some criticism – for being a combative interviewer. "Less aggressive, more forensic" was the helpful suggestion of the then minister for communications, Malcolm Turnbull, in 2015.

Sales has always had her detractors, who object to everything from her interviewing style to her voice and gender. But after a rocky start at 7.30 – including an odd initial tag-team pairing with Chris Uhlmann – to most people these days she's part of the nation's bedrock of intelligent, objective news coverage. "At first she was very dogged," says Mark Scott, who was managing director of the ABC when Sales became anchor. "She would just come straight at you. But as she's relaxed she's become very skilful, very dangerous: I think you'd say now that a Leigh Sales interview with the Prime Minister is as much an event as a Kerry O'Brien or a Laurie Oakes interview used to be."

Sales decided on a career in journalism after giving up dreams of becoming a musical theatre star. No kidding: she had a job as a wedding singer at university, and listeners of Chat 10 Looks 3 will be familiar with her willingness to break into song at a moment's notice. As her friend, writer and Good Weekend contributor Benjamin Law, admits, "I just always get the impression that she is really a camp gay man, trapped in a redheaded straight woman's body. Actually, I can't even think of any gay men I know who love musicals as much as she does."

Instead of treading the boards, however, she studied journalism at Queensland University of Technology. One of her old professors, Leo Bowman, remembers her as "one of the kids who'd stay behind to discuss issues after class. She really saw journalism as a calling: something that makes a wider contribution to society."

On graduating, she got a job with the Nine Network, before moving to Sydney for a series of roles with the ABC as she worked towards a foreign correspondent posting. In 2001 she was appointed to the Washington bureau, where she reported on the Iraq War, the 2004 presidential election, and Hurricane Katrina. When she returned, she anchored Lateline before moving to 7.30 in 2011.

The then treasurer Scott Morrison with the ABC’s Laura Tingle (left) and Leigh Sales during the 2018 Budget lock-up.

The then treasurer Scott Morrison with the ABC’s Laura Tingle (left) and Leigh Sales during the 2018 Budget lock-up.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

7.30 is a big job by anyone's standards, but in 2014 Sales began a whole new, wildly different role – as a podcaster. She and Crabb began Chat 10 Looks 3 in 2014 independently of the ABC. To date it's been downloaded more than half a million times, and its Facebook group has 28,000 members. Mark Scott sees its success as an interesting phenomenon, "because it's really just their personalities; their friendship. I'm the chair of the board of the Sydney Writers' Festival, and for [each of] the past two years, only two events sold out in 48 hours, and both years their show was one of the two. No matter what international star power you bring to bear – Julian Barnes, Jonathan Franzen – in they charge for Annabel and Leigh."

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Perhaps because of her hardcore current affairs image, there is something great in hearing about the minutiae of Sales's life: her penchant for early nights ("My friends gave me some PJs for my birthday and across the top it says: 'It's 9pm, time for you to leave'"); her erratic adventures in baking. "She was obsessed a few years ago with baking sponge cakes," recalls longtime friend, journalist Pamela Williams.

"She must've baked about two dozen of them over weeks and weeks, trying to get the right ingredient balance and mixing action and everything perfect. Anyone else would bake one, create a flop, eat it and never do it again. Not Leigh."

As Crabb observes: "People who are on TV are often quite vain, but I've taken the most horrible pictures of her and she's like, 'Yeah, fine, put it online.' She has very little preciousness. Is it a Queensland thing? She's such a bogan! Actually, I think she just has this streak of solid gold dag. Once we had a live event at a venue with two aisles through the audience, and she came up with this plan that we would each dance down an aisle. The whole thing was just so embarrassing I didn't really put in – but I looked across at one point and there she was, just really going for it. To the absolute max. I can't even tell you. Sometimes at those moments I just feel like going: 'Ladies and gentleman, Australia's premier current affairs journalist.'"

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Crabb is right to pick up on this image. No other news journalist at Sales's level has bridged this serious-news/personality-cult gap quite like she has: can you imagine knowing about Kerry O'Brien's baking predilections or what was written on Jana Wendt's pyjamas? The fact that Sales has done it so successfully says something about her star power – and also, perhaps, about what Australian audiences want in their public figures today. What was once seen as dangerous for serious news anchors – showing the public your vulnerability, foibles, private life – has become an asset.

"That doesn't mean it's not sincere," says Matthew Ricketson, professor of communication at Deakin University. "But once upon a time, journalists as people weren't known at all. Now you've got Twitter, Facebook, Instagram: you're required to create a personal brand. She's in that mould, and she's part of an era in which journalists can no longer expect people to accept them as some po-faced, infallible voice of God."

"I'm asking people all the time in my work to be authentic and to tell me the truth," says Sales. "I just think that in return, I need to admit that I'm not always sitting at home thinking about refugees and asylum seeker policies. I'm sitting at home watching 30 Rock and having a laugh."

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Leigh Sales and friend Pamela Williams.

Leigh Sales and friend Pamela Williams.

As it turned out, there wasn't much to laugh about that night in hospital four years ago. Sales had suffered a uterine rupture – a tear the size of a cricket ball – in the upper left side of her uterus. A rare and often fatal complication of pregnancy, even medical textbooks call it "catastrophic", thanks to its "high incidence of foetal and maternal morbidity".

Miraculously, both Sales and her baby son, James, survived. Reaching for her phone, she shows me their first photo together, taken a few days after James's birth, when it was still unknown whether he'd suffered brain damage. He's lying on a bed, fat and beautiful (he was 3.5 kilograms at birth) despite being covered in tubes, almost smiling into the camera.

His mother looks like she's been run over by a truck. She needed three transfusions during surgery alone: her surgeon – who'd had to cut vertically right up her stomach, not just the standard caesarean incision at the pubic bone – told her that her abdomen was "a sea of blood".

"I remember lying there when I woke up, and partly I think I was just in shock," she recalls. "But also my brain was just desperately trying to regain some sense of control: 'What's my life going to be like after this; will the baby be okay; who's got my two-year-old; what's going on?'"

Six weeks later, James was back in hospital with viral meningitis. "I remember," she begins, and abruptly puts one hand up to her face. "Sorry, I'm probably going to cry…" She blinks furiously. "He had to get a lumbar puncture and they had a lot of trouble getting the needle in and I had to leave the room. I went and sat in the corridor and I was blocking my ears because the sound of him … the way he was crying..." She takes a deep breath. "I just felt like I wasn't coping. I was sitting in that corridor thinking, 'I might be the mother of a child with brain damage, and I can't even stay in the room when he gets a lumbar puncture.'"

As Pamela Williams explains: "Inside this extremely funny, sparkling entertainer is someone who thinks everything right through, and feels things very intensely. The horror of what she went through – I mean she nearly died, the baby nearly died – just unmoored her, I think."

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Nor was fate finished with her. Two months after James's second hospitalisation, Sales' older son, Daniel – only two at the time – was at day care when his carers noticed a tremor in his hands. After years of visits to doctors, hospitals and therapists, he's still facing "various medical challenges" which necessitate hospital visits and operations. For both James's second and third birthdays, Sales has been in hospital with Daniel.

In the midst of all this, literally "when it seemed things couldn't get any worse", her marriage of almost 20 years, to Sydney maths teacher Phil Willis, collapsed. The pair met on a tram in Brisbane at university, and there's a lovely story of both of them feigning interest in a lecture by physicist Paul Davies in order to see each other again. They married when Sales was 23 and Willis 22, and were by all accounts happy for many years. But at the end of 2016 they separated, and Sales – the sort of person who cried when asking Blanche D'Alpulget about her love for Bob Hawke – found herself single after being married half her life.

Of course, one wonders what went wrong. But here's an unsurprising fact about interviewing journalists: as voluble as they can be, they also know exactly when to shut up. Sales is unfailingly positive about Willis. "Of course you go, 'What could I have done differently?'" she admits. " 'If I had to go back, what would I do?' But how far back do you want to go? Do you want to go back to the very day you met each other? Was that when the die was cast?" She pauses, then adds carefully: 'In the end, the way for me to deal with that is to say that between the ages of 20 and 40, that relationship was a pillar in my life. And for nearly all of that time, it was great. And I have a lot of respect for my former husband and we still have young children that we have to raise together."

So. A near-death experience, two sick kids, and a marriage breakdown – all in less than two years. That's an unusual load of trauma in a short space of time – but then, getting to 40 without a single overwhelming sadness is also pretty unusual. "Oh god, yeah," she agrees. "James's birth was really the first time in my life where something went wrong. But after that, as things kept on happening, it just started to feel like nothing was safe. I kept telling everyone, 'It's fine, it's fine, I'm okay,' but obviously I was really not okay."

For a long time, though, it seemed imperative that she preserve the facade. "I certainly did not recognise the extent to which she was undone by everything that happened," confesses Crabb. "Oh god, I feel a bit like crying just talking about it, actually, to think [how much she was suffering]. She's just such a disciplined person, and very practised at stamping down her emotions to get her job done. This is the person who went on television to present the story of her close friend's death when [ABC journalist] Mark Colvin died: that's who she is."

In 2015 and 2016, Sales "was constantly braced for further bad news," she writes in her new book. "I felt as if I'd been hit by a bus and had staggered to my feet only to be hit by another bus. And then another." She became increasingly afraid for the future. "I was frightened by what had happened to me, how thoroughly and rapidly my life had been upended. I was also scared of what appeared on my own TV program every night, how fickle and cruel the world often seemed. Mostly I was worried about what might happen to me next. What if something else went wrong? Something even worse?"

So what did she do? She went to work. She began interviewing experts on traumatic life events, reading research papers, doing statistical analysis about how likely it is that a "one in a million" chance of disaster will happen to any one of us. (More likely, sometimes, than you'd hope.) Any Ordinary Day is the result.

A book, I say. Other people seek counselling or take up meditation or find religion or drink kombucha when they go through trauma. Writing a book seems such a ... journalist thing to do. "Totally," she grins. "Being a journalist is the tool kit I've got. I don't know how to manage a child that's going to have issues; I don't know how to stop my marriage from crumbling; but I do know how to do journalism." She sits back in her chair. "Work's easy. Life's hard."

Sales with then-husband Phil Willis and sons Daniel and James.

Sales with then-husband Phil Willis and sons Daniel and James.

At the heart of Any Ordinary Day are interviews between Sales and a small group of people who have suffered sudden, appalling tragedies. People such as Walter Mikac, whose wife Nanette and two small daughters, Alannah and Madeline, were killed in the 1996 Port Arthur massacre; and Stuart Diver, who lost his first wife Sally in the 1997 Thredbo disaster and his second wife Rosanna to breast cancer; and Hannah Richell, whose husband Matt drowned in a 2014 surfing accident at Sydney's Tamarama Beach. It's also a personal exploration about living through hard times and fearing worse – what helps people carry on; how we can support each other; what it takes to enjoy life, despite the threat of random disaster.

These are big questions, and one wonders, at the start of Any Ordinary Day, whether it's a fool's errand to even try to answer them. How can anyone recover from what someone like Walter Mikac went through? It seems completely unimaginable, almost sacrilegious, to even entertain the possibility. And yet, according to Sales, it happens.

She's not suggesting the people in her book have recovered in any simplistic, as-if-it-never-happened sense. But what she does describe is the phenomenon of post-traumatic growth. This is a surprising psychological effect of trauma, in which people report increased empathy, strength and resilience – "tangible positive change" – as a result of what they've gone through.

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This, for me, is the most startling revelation of her book. I'm ashamed to say I've never even heard of post-traumatic growth. "I know, it's sort of counter-intuitive," says Sales. "And of course, nobody wants the benefits. You would trade all of it instantly to be able to not have that traumatic thing happen to you. But the reality is, the people I talked to, somehow, that was their experience. Walter, for instance, he talked a bit about how, now that he's had 20 years, he looks at people in the news who are in the middle of tragedy and wants to say to them, 'There is a little tiny glimmer of hope. I know it doesn't feel like it, but there is.' " She sits back. "Of course, also, nobody can be told, 'Your daughter died but you are going to grow as a person.' It's just what happens. Hopefully."

How does it happen? "Well, I think all the people I spoke to were quite positive personalities. And they had strong social networks: friends and close families. Some had found a purpose – Walter with the Alannah & Madeline Foundation [focusing on protecting children from violence]; or some kind of creative outlet, like Hannah, as a writer. Or Juliet Darling [whose partner, curator Nick Waterlow, was killed in 2009 by his son] is involved in art and filmmaking. Some had a really strong belief system, like Michael Spence [vice-chancellor of Sydney University, whose wife and mother of their five children died of cancer three weeks after diagnosis] or Louisa Hope [who has MS, and was a hostage in the 2014 Lindt cafe siege]. But they all had outlets to express themselves, and they all had support."

Resilience role models (from left) Walter Mikac, Stuart Diver and Louisa Hope.

Resilience role models (from left) Walter Mikac, Stuart Diver and Louisa Hope.Credit: James Braund and AP

What about Sales herself, and her own fears of impending disaster? She sits back, thinking. "I don't think I've regained that sense of safety about life I used to have. I think I probably had a false sense of how secure life was anyway. But, and I know this sounds trite, I do think that the thought of what can happen – that I'm not special and life is random and nobody is immune from terrible things – has made me appreciate everyday things much more. Like the fact that you brought this cake and it's really delicious." She smiles kindly. "Whereas before, I might have just wolfed it up and not really noticed it. I feel like I am very acutely aware of how the trees look nice today and that my friends are funny and kind. Life is far better than the news might lead you to believe.

"Also," she says, "It's made me realise that people – including me – are far more resilient than we think. Almost everyone can cope with far more than they ever imagined they could. Now, I absolutely dread the next thing that goes wrong in my life. But I suspect I probably would endure. I've met all of these people and seen that they all survived; I've seen in my own life that I can cope with more than I thought I could. Most people, somehow, bloody struggle on."

Leigh Sales: “I absolutely dread the next thing that goes wrong in my life. But I probably would endure.”

Leigh Sales: “I absolutely dread the next thing that goes wrong in my life. But I probably would endure.”Credit: Peter Brew-Bevan

Three weeks before our interview, Sales had yet more first-hand experience in bloody struggling on. Her beloved father died suddenly from a massive heart attack in Queensland. Her kitchen table is still full of memorial flowers, and his battered work boots sit by the door. When she talks about him, her eyes fill with tears. "It's not lost on me that I wrote a book on blindsides, she says, "and I say in the last chapter something about being scared one of my parents would die suddenly and then … he did." She wipes the tears away impatiently. "Sorry. The universe is just so f…ed sometimes!"

Has having written the book helped at all? "Well, I guess I can intellectually understand the emotions I'm having and why," she says gamely. "But I can't stop feeling them. And although there's some comfort in understanding how and why you react, it doesn't take the pain of it away.

"But you know," she says after a second, wiping her cheeks, "one of the things that really stuck with me from the book, which I really feel at the moment, is that life isn't all good or all bad. Sometimes we think life is going really badly but even then, really lovely things still happen; like friends dropping off meals, or coming to take the boys so I can have a rest or leaving 30 of Alec Baldwin's best lines from 30 Rock done in Alec Baldwin's accent on my voicemail."

Sales talks a lot about friends – about how good her friends are to her, and how writing this book has taught her to be a better friend. "She has always been an amazing friend," protests Pamela Williams. "In 2014 when I broke my foot, she came to visit six times in two months [just weeks after giving birth to James – who is developing "neurotypically", unfazed by his traumatic start]. She'd get two kids into the car and drag them up the steps to my place, then she'd crack jokes to cheer me up." Every Mother's Day, Williams – who lost her own nine-year-old daughter many years ago – receives a "a raucous happy Mother's Day video [Sales] gets her boys to do for me, which just makes me scream with laughter".

"I do think she's sadder now," Crabb admits. "I see her face in repose sometimes, and there's a lot of sadness there. But I know that will change. And it's not like her sadness precludes her being the same person. Her capacity to be the person we all know – so funny, and so ridiculously so much fun – is undiminished."

Sitting in Sales's sunny kitchen, all of this seems true. She is sad, and she will carry on, and life will be good and bad, as it is for everyone. "Yes," she says, squashing cake crumbs onto her finger. "And we'll all probably be okay."

Leigh Sales's book, Any Ordinary Day (Penguin Hamish Hamilton, $35) is out Monday.

Hair by Kyye for Oribe. Make-up by Jasmin Lo. Styling by Emma Cotteril. Leigh Sales wears COS jumper.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age.

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