Hi, I'm Gus Wallin and this is Not An Overnight Success brought to you by Shaw and Partners
Financial Services.
This is a podcast where we sit down with some very successful people from the world of business,
entertainment and sport, and we chat about their life's journey and what got them to
the positions that they're in today.
In today's episode, we are chatting with Stan Grant.
Stan is an international affairs editor for the ABC, a multi-award winning current affairs
host, author and adventurer.
And as for all of these podcasts, Shaw and Partners have generously donated $10,000 to
the charity of the choice of each of our guests.
He's pretty much covered every type of important news story that you could think of from natural
disasters to terrorist attacks, wars and political discourse.
But Stan came from very humble beginnings.
You'll hear all of that in the podcast.
Let's get into our chat with Stan Grant.
Stan, welcome to the podcast.
How are you, mate?
Nice to see you again.
It's always nice.
I've always been interested in you and your career, but always liked you as a person.
What were you like as a kid?
Well, you know, quiet, Gus, you know, I lived a lot in my head.
Looking back, I mean, your childhood is your childhood, right?
I mean, you don't know any other.
But to others' eyes, it was a very disrupted childhood.
You know, my family was very poor.
I mean, we were living a subsistence life, really, an itinerant life, an Aboriginal family.
So we had to deal with all of all of that as well.
We moved from town to town as dad struggled to find work.
So home was wherever we could find it, you know.
I started and about changed about 13 or 14 different schools before I was even into high
So there's a lot of disruption.
I live with my family, a very extended family, we were very tight, you know, was sort of
all we had against the world, really.
And so I didn't, you know, I became very resilient and very sort of, you know, I didn't need
anything other than myself and my family.
But I didn't get to do a lot of those things.
We'd done the kids take for granted, you know, at school, you know, playing in the same sports
team year after year, having the same friends, not just year after year, but month after
month, you know, having a home, I mean, we didn't have a home, a permanent home.
So there was all that insecurity.
And I suppose that made me very insular, a bit introverted, very quiet.
I lived in my head a lot, you know, I read a lot, I took care of myself.
I was the oldest in my family, which meant I shouldered a lot of responsibility as well
for looking after people and taking care of people.
And so I grew up very quickly and had a strong sort of sense of maturity at an early age.
But yeah, insular and a bit introverted and a bit unsure because I could never find my
footing, you know.
All that, like you said, the stuff that you take for granted, living in one spot and having
all those set of mates.
I mean, was that for you, living in an extended family, lots of lots of love around?
Did you always feel that?
Yeah, I did, especially from my grandfather.
My mum's dad lived with us.
My other grandfather passed away when I was very young and my other grandfather lived
with us and I was very, very attached to him.
He was sort of my anchor in the world.
You know, dad was working hard wherever he could find work, mostly labouring work or
He was exhausted most of the time, you know, for dad to come out and put the boxing gloves
on and sort of teach us how to box or kick kick the footy around was about all the energy
he had left after you've been up at 5am and working in sawmills all day and come home
and collapse into a bath and have a meal and go to sleep and do it all again.
You know, so my grandfather was a real touchstone for me.
I spent a lot of time with him and, you know, he was a great old character, an old Aboriginal
guy and had great stories, funny stories, loved to put a bet on.
I'd sit around with him, we'd listen to three way turf talk and I'd write down all the tips
that he'd, you know, and then we'd head down and put the bets on and listen to the radio.
And, you know, he'd get his pension every fortnight and first thing you'd do is head
down, take me to a cafe, buy me an ice cream.
Then he'd head off to the pub and he'd give me some of the money to hold on to so he
didn't blow it all in the pub and he'd go on a bender.
And then, you know, I'd wait for him to come home at night and I'd hear him sort of
staggering home and bumping up against the walls of the house outside.
And I'd go and help him back in, then I'd go and fish around for any money that he might
have left scattered on the ground.
This will tell you what a responsible kid I was.
Another kid would have pocketed that, but I'd put it aside and then, you know, when
he'd sober up the next day, he'd go to my mother and say, where'd all my money go?
I came home last night, I'd had money in my pocket and I'd then come out and said I
picked it up and held it for him.
So I took care of a lot of that sort of stuff.
And, you know, so he was very close to me and I grew up with that and I grew up with
a strong sense of my own family, but no lasting long term childhood friendships,
apart from sort of other Aboriginal kids who were sort of in my orbit that we would
see an extended family and cousins and stuff.
But yeah, so it was it was very different.
And I hung around with a lot of older people, you know, like my grandfather and his
mates and old uncles and stuff like that.
And they were my sort of entry to the world, those old ones.
Your granddad sounds like an absolute ripper.
I was bloody hilarious.
You know, funny man, you know, he'd head down the pub and I'll tell you, he could
get drunk without putting his head in the pocket just from the funny stories he'd
tell us. He was just a hilarious man.
He could he could just weave these incredible tales.
And he was a great old bloke, you know, just absolute, you know, those old blokes,
you know, black or white, those old Australian blokes who always sit outside in
a white singlet, you know, long neck, cut a V in the back of your pants.
When you when your stomach got too big, you couldn't fit them on anymore.
All that. And just just an absolute bloody character he was.
He was a he was a great old bloke.
And he really was the sort of anchor for me because mum and dad was just just flat
out working just to put food on the table, you know, and and we wouldn't know Gus
from from one day to the next.
You know, I'd be at school, come home.
They'd come home and say, well, we're moving.
I found a job somewhere else.
And, you know, it might get a job for a couple of quid more down the road.
And so off we go.
And we'd leave in the middle of the night.
We never had any possession.
So we'd throw whatever we had into a bag and off we go.
You know, we'd sleep by the side of the road.
We sleep in caravans and tents and, you know, old saw mill shacks.
I remember one house we moved into the emus that lived there before us.
And so the emus are very territorial.
Mum had to sort of chase the emus out so that we could live in the house.
It was that sort of sort of existence.
All we had was the ability to get through the day and get to another day.
Hope there was a better job down the road or, you know, at best,
there was a meal on the table.
Dad wouldn't earn much working on sawmills.
And there was four kids and my grandfather and various cousins and in-laws.
And at any time, there could be up to 20 odd people in the house.
And we only had a couple of bedrooms, so people would sleep on the floor
in the lounge room. I slept in the bed with my two brothers
and my grandfather would be sleeping down the foot of the bed sometimes.
My mother had to go to Salvation Army or the Smith family or the churches.
And they would have basically little sort of relief vouchers
where you would get 10 bucks to go to the supermarket and buy some groceries.
And often that that's what got us through, you know,
just that little bit of help from the charities to supplement what dad earned.
And that was enough to get us through.
But, you know, you look back on it and, yeah, incredibly tough times.
But when you're living it, it's all, you know, and you've got music
and you've got laughter and you've got love and you've got your family.
And what comes out of that is an incredible resilience
and a knowledge that, you know, nothing's guaranteed.
And there are no easy rides.
And if you think it's bad, it can always be worse.
But it can also get better.
It can get better if you just stay on your feet,
put one foot in front of the other and do the right thing.
And that's what my parents did.
You know, they were they had every reason not to.
You think of the racism, the bigotry, the discrimination they endured,
the absolute harsh poverty they endured, the homelessness,
how they shouldered up every day.
And if you do that and you do the right thing and you and you live by strong values
and you and a strong sense of kinship and love for each other,
you can get through anything.
The one thing that just sort of leaps out at me as you're talking about those things
is how different your childhood was to mine, for instance.
But there was that that sense of your village,
you know, your community, the love and so forth.
And at what age did you go, OK, I'm going to go and educate myself
and I'm going to go and start my journey.
When was that starting point and where did you go to do that?
It was all accidental, Gus.
I always had a sense that there was something out there for me.
You know, I I had a sense of sort of purpose and fate.
Even at a very young age, I I sort of knew that the world was just waiting
for me, you know, and I I used to think a lot about worlds away from my own.
You know, my mother bought me a Christmas present one year.
It was, you know, Christmas was pretty meager in our place.
You know, you might get one thing and that's about it.
And Mum found a second hand book on Greek mythology of all things.
I don't know why she chose that out, but I just became fixated on it.
You know, the stories of Greek gods and these incredible worlds
and incredible powers that they had.
And it sort of piqued my interest in bigger things.
And to be honest, you know, I've gone on to have a fascination with philosophy
and ideas, and it sort of sprung from from the influence of things like that.
No, I used to sit in this tree at my grandmother's house to this big old tree.
And I'd climb up into that.
That was my sort of escape from the world.
And I'd sit there and think, get me out of here like I cannot stay here.
The other thing is, I remember when I was about 13 or 14,
we were living in Griffith at this point, which is where I was born.
And Griffith was sort of a spiritual home for us.
A lot of my dad's family was there.
We'd move away and we'd come back and move away and come back and chase work
And I remember when I was about 13 or 14 and going to the agricultural show,
you know, the shows that would come to town to town.
There was a big deal in Griffith to go to the show.
You know, every year is a bit of a sort of tradition
that a lot of the Aboriginal families would get there.
And amongst our families, there are often deep rivalries,
you know, deep and bitter and intense rivalries, family feuds.
And every year there'd be a punch up.
And I remember this year, walking out of the show and this brawl broke out.
A few of my cousins and a few of the other boys.
And they're all, you know, it's bloody hot and the sun's beating down.
They've all been drinking.
So everything, all the tempers are frayed.
And I saw my cousin had this other boy up against the wall.
I think the other bloke was a bit bigger than my cousin,
but I remember my cousin hitting him so hard up under the rib cage
with just this absolute ferocity.
And I saw the other bloke started to sort of heave blood,
coughing blood as my cousin hit him.
And I watched that and thought, I can't survive this.
It was frightening, Gus, the ferocity of that explosion,
of all of that pent up anger, frustration, violence.
You take it out on yourselves and each other.
But there was something more to this than just a punch up.
There was a ferocity to it.
And I looked at it and thought, shit, my brothers were always,
you know, sort of cut out for that.
They were always ready to start swinging.
And my dad taught us all how to fight.
And we could always look after ourselves.
I mean, dad wasn't preparing us for a world of university.
He was preparing us for a school of hard knocks.
Now, you have to go there and you have to punch your way out of these things.
Dad would teach me little things like someone comes to you
and wants to take you on, you know, don't grab them.
Open up both hands.
He said, when the person comes on and grabs you and wants to threaten you,
he said, as soon as they grab you, they've only got one hand.
And if a group of them come at you, get against a wall
so they can't surround you and fight everything in front of you.
And don't go to the ground to go to the ground.
They're going to keep the life out of you.
So get up against a wall and take them all along.
You know, so he taught us these things.
And I knew how to look after myself.
But but I knew that that wasn't for me.
And then a little bit later, I'd been at our school.
Some of the older Aboriginal boys would pick out someone at a certain age,
a white kid and say, it's a kid over there bashing.
And I did not want to do any of this stuff.
But this is rites of passage stuff.
This is how you become a man in those places, right?
So they pulled out one boy one day and this kid was a friend of mine.
You know, I have nothing against this kid at all.
And they said, you get a bashing.
And they organized this thing where going to the cloakroom,
they closed the doors and you wouldn't get out of there
unless you fought your way out of there.
So I go to the cloakroom with this kid and just wailing on each other,
you know, just absolute.
I could see that the welts and bruises coming up down the side of his face
as I was hitting him.
And then he's hit me and my whole lips split open.
And we're just sort of wailing into each other.
And then one of the teachers came, break it up,
go hold up the principal's office.
And it was just this sort of succession of violence
and a sense that to survive in this world,
I'm going to have to fight my way out of this world.
And I think even though at that point, I wasn't saying
I'm going to get out of here and go to university.
I'm going to have no.
It was just like, how do I survive this?
And knowing full well that it's kill or be killed
at a certain point in those places.
You know, this is this is not schoolyard punch ups.
This is actually I'm going to fight like this for the rest of my life,
however long that life is, because life's tough.
And then we moved to to Canberra.
Dad got a job and a few things sort of fell our way.
And and for the first time in our lives, the Aboriginal,
the first department had started a program
for Aboriginal families to be able to buy a home.
And so my dad worked got a job on a sawmill.
Mum was cleaning cars.
We had a steady sort of albeit meager, but steady income.
And we were able to buy a house.
And and for the first time in my life, I actually had a home
that I knew we weren't going to pack up and leave tomorrow.
And I finished high school in Canberra.
And I got a job at the Institute of Aboriginal Studies,
which is a research center in Canberra, only because my
my uncle was the janitor and he got me a job as the mail boy.
So I deliver mail around and I do photocopying and and I was playing footy.
And apart from anything else, I didn't want anything else in the world.
You know, I had no ambitions.
I was sort of I was out of harm's way.
And I had a job and and I'd hang out with my again with my uncle,
who tell me stories at lunchtime.
And I was really happy.
And there was an Aboriginal woman there who was studying for her PhD.
And this was a world that was completely unthinkable.
I knew no one had even finished high school, let alone gone to university.
And there were Aboriginal people there who were going to university and studying.
And and she was doing a PhD.
She's now a professor at Melbourne University.
She pulled me aside and and basically read me the riot act and said, you know,
you your family haven't sacrificed and struggled for you to deliver mail.
You finished high school.
You've got to do something with your life.
And she sort of inspired me to go to university
and filled out the forms for me to go to uni.
And as soon as I entered that world, Gus, it was again, it was a strange world
because I didn't even know how these people spoke to each other.
You know, they were all probably like, you know, private school, white kids from Sydney.
Yeah, I was scared of them.
I didn't know how they even I didn't know anything about them.
I didn't know how to be around them.
I didn't know their jokes.
I just was completely a fish out of water.
But when I got to university and there were a handful of other
Aboriginal kids there at the time and things moved really quickly from there.
You know, I was always smart enough.
I could always read and I was good at that.
And then journalism opened up.
So there are key moments, Gus.
And I think what the coming of age around 14 or 15 in in hard country,
New South Wales, the black kid and seeing what life was going to be like in the war,
having to to punch your way out of trouble.
I think it just triggered something in me that this is not for me.
And thank God for the Canberra opportunity and all that came with that.
And also, you just knew in your heart of hearts that wasn't going to be your
way of dealing with life.
Well, I wasn't tough enough.
And I think my dad sort of knew that, too.
And he and he was he was preparing me for the world.
I often think how many lives we didn't see fulfilled
because they didn't get the breaks that I had or the opportunities.
Kids way smarter than me who didn't get that break.
And I caught a few really lucky breaks.
And it saved me from what could have been a very different fate.
Is walking into journalism or having an opportunity with journalism
one of those lucky breaks?
And the moment I walked into it, I was like, OK, I can do this.
I've been studying at University of New South Wales
and I transferred to the A&U.
I've got a job as a copy boy at the Canberra Times.
And it's the lowest of the low.
You know, you're picking up lunches and you're running copy around the newsroom
and you're cleaning the news director's car.
And but I was in the newsroom, you know, and there was there was ink
in people's fingers and you could the conversations people had.
And then I there was a job going at the Macquarie Radio Network
and someone suggested I should apply.
It was for a cadet journalist.
And, you know, I do nothing about how to go about this.
But I I sent an application and I went in for the interview.
And again, Gus, you can't I mean, people say
hard work is its own reward and hard work pays off.
And if you dream it, you can do it.
All of those things that are utter bullshit, right?
They're bullshit. Yeah, work hard, work hard, dream big.
But don't necessarily think that's going to come off.
I know a lot of people who dream big and it doesn't.
And people who work very hard, as my father did, for very little return.
And so you've got to have luck.
You've got to have luck and you've got to prepare yourself
for the day when luck walks in.
And we only get a few spins of the dice, you know, rolls of the dice.
And I walked into this interview and the bloke news,
the news director was talking to me, asked me about the news and stuff.
And I knew all about it.
And he said, you know, what are you?
You know, I said, I'm Aboriginal.
He goes, Oh, right.
I thought you must have been.
He said, my stepbrothers Aboriginal.
And because of that connection, I got the job only for that.
There would have been people way more qualified,
private school, educated, worldly, confident.
A few years before, I'm sleeping head to toe with my brothers
and in a caravan, you know, but he saw something in me.
And because he stepbrothers Aboriginal, he thought, no,
I'm going to give him a shot.
And I walked in there and I just thought, I'm going to work harder.
I'm going to work longer.
I'm going to prepare myself 100 percent
so that, you know, I will not fail for lack of hard work and preparation.
I'm in the door now and I have to make the most of it.
And I remember there was this one moment that was an absolute turning point for me.
I'd only been there a few few months and there was a big bushfire in Canberra,
one of those huge summer bushfires.
And the other reporters were out
and one had broken out, had broken out really close to the city.
And you could see the smoke and the flames.
And the news director turned to me and he said through the keys of me.
And he said, you're on your own. Off you go.
And I'd never done this. Right. Never. I'd never done this.
So I got in the car and I'm driving to the.
And again, this is this is where luck steps in.
I'm driving, trying to find my way to the to the fire.
And it's coming up to news time.
The news comes on, says, listen, we're coming to you live off the top.
You're going to you're going to lead the news.
I said, OK, no, no, no problem. I'm shitting myself.
And then and then then he comes back to me again.
We're only a couple of minutes out of the news and I'm nowhere, Gus.
I am nowhere near the fire.
I can't get there. The roads are blocked. I'm being turned back.
And he said to me, are you in place? Are you ready?
And I said, I just knew that an excuse wasn't going to cut it.
Yeah. Someone once said to me, we send you out on a story.
Never come back with an excuse. Never under any circumstances.
And I just thought, I'm not going to I'm not going to give up.
I'm not going to say I can't do it.
I said, yeah, I'm ready.
And I took a turn.
I saw a hill and this is where instinct comes in the middle luck.
I looked at the hill and I thought, if I get up that hill,
I reckon I'll have a better vantage point.
And just as it happened, the road to that up to the hill was not blocked.
I took the turn, drove up the top of the hill.
And seriously, the moment I got there, I looked down and there was the entire scene.
The fire, the fire engines, the smoke.
You could feel it was rushing up the other side of the hill.
People were outside hosing down their houses.
And I just got there as the news thing is playing.
And I whacked the headphones on to that.
And we had a little little walkie talkie to two way.
Press the two way down.
He came to me and it was just in that moment
where all I had to do was describe what I was saying.
And I did. And it worked.
And I realized if you take a risk,
if you never offer an excuse, if you look for another way
and you trust yourself that it will pay off.
And no matter where I've gone in journalism, no matter what I've done,
I've always taken that next turn.
I've always been prepared to take the risk.
If you want to go somewhere, I've always got my hand up.
You want to go to Afghanistan on there?
You want to go to Pakistan on there?
Go up to the Taliban territory. I'm there.
I'm prepared to take that risk because I know there's no going back.
I know what going back is.
Going back takes me back to that 14 year old shit scared boy
who's going to get the shit punched out of him every day for the rest of his life.
So I'm always looking for that next turn, that next hill
and never, ever except accepting failure.
And so journalism was the perfect place for me.
I could do it. I was a risk taker.
I was resourceful. I was resilient.
I was smart. I was quick on my feet.
I was a storyteller because my grandfather had spent all those years
telling me yarns, hanging out with the old blokes,
listening to the way they crafted stories, master storytellers.
I was getting an education in ways that other kids were not,
even though I wasn't going to school like they were.
And journalism is where it all came together.
I walked in there and I thought, right, I can do this.
Not that it was always easy.
There was a lot of racism.
There was a lot of stuff that could have put me off.
But I thought, I'm not going to get involved in that.
I'm not going to allow that to stop me.
I'm going to just focus on the big fight.
How can I do this job? How can I get better?
How hard can I work?
So I was the first one in.
I was the last one out.
Every weekend, I read everything in every newspaper.
I read books. I listened to other reporters.
I watched how they did their reports.
And I said yes to every single thing.
Never said no and never offered an excuse.
I love it, Stan. I really love it.
I would love to hear that cross on the fight.
Have you got a copy of it somewhere?
No, no, it's just into the ether.
It'd be there on some lost reel somewhere in the dungeon of Macquarie
Radio somewhere, but I could have said, no, look, I can't get through.
There are too many roadblocks.
And you know what he would have done?
He would have gone, all right, don't worry about it.
And that would have been the end of me, Gus.
He wouldn't have come back to me again.
I would have failed them.
And I wasn't going to do that.
And, you know, there's always another way around these things.
I remember the first break, Matty, MG and I did on the grill team.
It was pretty ordinary.
But we got up there and we had a crack at it.
We got better as we went along.
So I'm assuming. Oh, not better.
I mean, you were you blokes were like the old blokes
I hung out with my grandfather.
You could have a laugh and you could take the piss out of each other.
And well, Matty takes the piss out of everybody else is what it was.
But but there was always a fundamental decency.
That's what I picked up from from you blokes.
Just quickly interrupting the episode to say a very big thank you
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And let's get back into the episode.
Let's think of the last 30 years, because you've been fantastic
describing the first sort of 20 or 25 of your life.
So 30 years in journalism, more than 70 countries
covering major news stories, such as the release of Nelson Mandela,
the troubles in Northern Ireland, the death of Princess Diana, the war in Iraq,
Palestine, the war on terror, South Asia,
tsunami, the Pakistan earthquake, the rise of China.
I mean, you've been there.
Like you said, you said yes to everything.
Everything. Yeah.
So at some stage, what was it that moment where you went, wow, this is
it's a serious business now, like I am right in the middle of it.
I've got a real opportunity to explain to people
what's going on outside of Australia.
I think when I went to CNN, I've been blessed.
You know, when I got into journalism, I was a kid that a couple of years
before was the male boy at the Institute of Aboriginal Studies. Right.
Hanging out with my uncle, who is the janitor.
And I get this lucky break.
I get into journalism.
So I'm 20, 21, graduated university into journalism.
By the time I was 23, I was the second political correspondent
for the ABC in Parliament House. 23.
By the time I'm 28, I'm the first Indigenous person ever to host
a commercial television primetime current affairs show.
So I'm given my I mean, that's how ridiculously fast the journey was.
Right. I found something that I was instinctively good at and worked hard at.
And opportunities just seemed to line up.
It was crazy, the progression.
And then I then I went to London and I worked as a London correspondent
in my early 30s, came back to Australia and then got a phone call.
Again, the weird way that fate works.
Walking home from the beach one day, I got a phone call
and it was the vice president of CNN who was aware of my work
from when I was a foreign correspondent and wanted to fly to Hong Kong
and fly me to Hong Kong to meet me, to offer me a job.
Just out of the clear blue sky, Gus, out of the clear blue sky.
I hadn't applied to nothing.
Went up there, did that, came back, said to Tracy, we're moving to Hong Kong.
We packed up the following weekend, we're living in Hong Kong.
And then when I went to work for CNN, I think I realized at that point,
you walk in there and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.
The ability to go anywhere in the world.
It's like an athlete that gets to the Olympics and walking into the stadium.
It's like an NRL player playing origin or in a grand final.
It's rare air, you know, and to walk in there and say, wow,
this is the biggest international news network in the world.
This is a network that changes the course of history.
And God knows how, but this Aboriginal kid has ended up here.
And I looked around, it was daunting because all of these people
were the sons and daughters of the elite.
You know, I worked with sons and daughters of royalty and politicians.
And they'd been to Yale and Harvard and Princeton and Oxford and Cambridge.
And I was like, what the hell is like?
You know, and it was second nature to them.
These people just second nature.
So I walked in there and I thought, OK, I'm at the bottom of the tree again.
I'm going to have to really prove myself.
And so I worked hard and made sure that I was never underprepared or ill-prepared.
They'd send us out to all the big breaking stories.
And I was covering wars and revolutions and natural disasters.
And that sense, Gus, that you are broadcasting to a massive audience,
an international audience about things that will be recorded in history books.
That when I was aware that what I did here had consequences and it mattered.
And I worked, I worked myself to the bone throughout my 12, 13 years at CNN.
I never took a holiday.
Every day is a workday unless you're not working.
So no matter where I was, if the phone went in the middle of dinner,
whatever it was, I'd suit up, off I go.
There were a couple of years there during the Iraq Pakistan,
the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
I was home for if you added up the days that I was home,
because I was never home consecutive, you know, weeks or anything.
You added up the days.
I was home for a total of four or five weeks out of the entire year.
And Tracy was there and she was sort of looking after things
and doing her own thing and the kids.
But I just said, I will not get another chance
to tell these stories to this world and look at this little black kid
So I just took that enormously seriously
and devoted myself one thousand percent to it.
So when you talk about Tracy and the kids, because Tracy and I are great
mates as well, and she's very, very talented in her own right
when it when it comes to what she's doing.
So how does it work like to have someone so committed like you
who would suit up in the middle of dinner if required?
That connection between the two of you to make that work.
How does that happen?
She got it and she she understood it and she knew the importance of it.
And she was utterly uncomplaining and one hundred percent supportive
and looking out for me to, you know, constantly looking out for me.
You know, it's still that way to this day.
I mean, we work all the time.
We take our our work very seriously.
Tracy takes her work really seriously.
So we're reading all the time.
We share that love of knowledge and the world and adventure.
And that's the glue that sort of binds us.
But she'll work seven days a week.
I still work seven days a week.
We take time out, you know, we go and have dinner.
We'll go watch a movie.
We'll spend time at the beach and spend time with the kids.
And then we'll come back and we'll work for a few more hours.
And that's our work life balance.
Work is part of our life.
Work is our life.
And it forms that connection between us as well.
So it was never any competition.
There was never any sense of tension.
There was never two people wanting to go in different directions.
It was it was a shared love of adventure and knowledge and news and stories.
But like I say, she kept a close eye out on me.
And there was one period there where, you know, I'd been going nonstop
and I'd I'd seen a lot of things, Gus, you know, too many dead people
smelt too much blood, seen too much misery.
When I was in Pakistan and Afghanistan, we'd get videos.
The Taliban or Al Qaeda would send us things that the public has never seen
and would never see.
And we'd have to sit through them as part of preparing our stories
and what we were going to use.
And I've seen people beheaded, you know, in these in these videos.
And these things never, never leave you.
And it was a slow drip for me.
And she'd seen the sort of light go out of my eyes.
And she'd seen me losing the joy of life.
And I'd come back from a story and I'd be wound up like a just a spinning top.
You know, she intervened at one point.
She said she went to my boss and said there's something seriously wrong.
He's not coping and he doesn't realize it himself.
There was a psychiatrist at CNN and employed to deal with these things.
And he stepped in and he called me up one night.
And I was really furious at Tracy for doing this.
It's like, you know, what the hell are you doing?
If you start telling them that I'm spinning out,
I won't get to go on these stories and do these things anymore.
And she said, well, that'll be good.
Maybe that that's that's what you need.
You've done enough, you know.
And this guy stepped in.
He went through a checklist of things and got to the end of it.
And he said, right, you have to stop what you're doing right now.
I said one of those every single thing here on a scale of one to ten
for post-traumatic stress disorder, you are off the charts.
You're at 11 for every single thing, you know, so you have to stop.
And she she intervened and she she took charge of that.
And and I needed to step out and take time
and get some treatment for those things and bring that back under control
and mental health that I wasn't taking care of that had been brewing
all my life, the scared little kid, the violence growing up,
the the poverty, the transient life, the insecurity.
All of that had been being brewing since I was a kid.
Kept that off with war and bloodshed and violence and threats.
And I was ready to just explode.
And so, you know, she stepped in, she took care of those things.
So we can't do these things if your home isn't also taken care of.
And sometimes we're not the best ones at taking care of that.
When did you fall in love with her?
How long into your relationship did you go, right, I've got someone here
and I'm not going to muck it up.
Our relationship was well, it started in a blaze of publicity,
as you may well remember, Gus. I do. I do.
You know, I mean, I've been married previously and probably as you do
when you're young and you're making your way in the world
and you've got to consider and my world had moved at a ridiculously rapid pace
and juggling all of those things and all that attention
in everybody's going to take a toll on anything.
So it took a toll on my first marriage.
And I met Tracy and funnily enough, again, it was sort of fated.
You know, people had sort of put us into each other's orbit.
People had sort of conspired unknowingly to sort of bring us together.
And we'd met each other in several different settings.
And then I was at Channel 7 and then Tracy came to Channel 7.
And believe it or not, at one point, the general manager at Channel 7
put me aside and said, look, I want to start this new sports show.
And I think it'd be a really good idea for you and Tracy Holmes to host it.
He was trying to hook us up into a sports show together.
So there was this weird and I'd never done sport, you know.
So there was this weird sort of confluence of events that bring us together.
And then we ended up both of us being sent to Greece
for the lighting of the torch for the Sydney Olympics.
And we went over and did that.
And we spent a lot of time sort of talking to each other.
And you know, you get a sense that this is someone that
you know, when you look back on those things, Gus, and you can remember
every conversation you had, every moment that you were together,
every meal you had, it's just so memorable.
Everything just felt as if it was a big deal, you know.
And so came back from that and then things sort of took their
course. And then when we finally did get together,
of course, the media then descended on that and turned it into an absolute circus
because both of us were at Channel 7, we had bio profiles.
You know, if they tried to turn this into some sort of stands, walked out
on his family and taken up with Tracy Homes, the reality is that
I'd separated well before that.
The reality is that when they were writing these headlines,
my children from my first marriage were living with us.
You know, Tracy's cutting their school lunches and dropping them off at the gate.
And like, what are you talking about with all this
ridiculous stuff about home wrecking and all this sort of nonsense?
Anyway, so that we found ourselves at the center of that.
That's a bit of a thing that's going to really test you straight away.
You know, is this built to last or is this going to just all fall apart?
Of course, those things made us even even closer.
So and then after that, I got the offer to go to CNN and things moved
really quickly. And, you know, and Tracy and I have been married now for 21 years.
And when you're in a relationship with someone who who you love,
but even more than that, who you've built a life with
and you can't imagine life without and you're so comfortable
and you don't have to entertain each other every minute of the day.
You don't have to be in each other's pocket every minute of the day.
You are together in this world and you do those things together.
And that lovely stage, you get to in a relationship
where you don't have to ask questions anymore.
You're not searching, you're not asking questions anymore.
You're at a place where you have contentment and peace.
And the other thing about Tracy, too, is that she's constantly
surprising and challenging, you know, constantly changing her hair
every couple of days.
She's constantly challenging.
And where I would disappear into a cave and surround myself with books
and she gets me out into the world, you know, to to look at the beauty of the world.
And so it's a lovely sort of combination.
And, you know, you're lucky if you can make those things work in this world.
You know, relationships are always hard and there's never, you know, ours is, too.
But you're lucky, really lucky if you can make those things work.
I love the fact that she loved you so much to actually put your career,
yeah, which at the time was so important to you at risk
because she knew that the man needed the help.
So that to me is a huge tick because it's a very gutsy thing to do.
What is that character trait?
And I think I know the answer to this, that character trait of yours
that you really like, that you really like.
I'm so glad I'm like that.
That's really sort of made me the man that I am today.
I think it's always questioning.
I know that I'm I'm never happy with one answer.
I want to ask the next question and the next and the next
and to test myself and challenge myself.
And that comes from the life that I had growing up,
being prepared to take myself into uncomfortable places
and to ask hard questions of myself as much as anything else.
But I think I think that's the thing I'd be most sort of comfortable
with or appreciative of about myself is that ability to to ask hard questions
and to never settle, to make yourself uncomfortable all the time.
Yeah. What about one that you don't like about yourself?
I keep reminding myself of this, you know, and going to Buddhist
meditation with Tracy is really important.
Part of the teaching of Buddhism is to see the world
with a mind of kindness and compassion.
And I have to remind myself of that a lot because sometimes
and I think this is a real fault of of journalism is when it prejudges
everything or it is harsh in its judgment of others.
And I can I can be that way.
I can, you know, I spend so much time thinking about the world
and questioning myself and reading and peeling back the onion
that sometimes you get frustrated and I'll say,
well, why can't this other person see it that way?
What's wrong with them?
Don't they know what's happening in the world?
Well, you know, people come to the world as they find it,
as they're comfortable with.
Not everyone's the same and not everyone has to agree with you.
And not everyone has to be engaged
in those big political questions all the time.
So, yeah, I think being too judgmental is a is a fault.
I was at a dinner party just at a lockdown.
You know, we got locked down, I think, the first night out.
My wife and I went out for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
And then we had a dinner party.
And at that dinner party, the question of being a republic came up.
And there was 12 of us at the table, 11 out of the 12 in the end said,
yes, Dan Grant. Yeah, he'll do.
And the question was, who was going to be our first president?
Right. Oh, my God.
So it started off with, you know, sporting stars
and us all having a bit of a laugh and maybe a few of the politicians now
that have, I think, done a very good job in a very tough situation.
But your name was the one that everyone not necessarily came out with first,
Yeah, I'd like him to be my first president of the Republic of Australia.
How does that make you feel?
And what are your thoughts on the republic?
Well, I'd like to see us be a republic,
but I'd like to see us be a republic without disavowing
all the things that have made us who we are.
I guess, you know, people would assume and I've really wrestled with this
as being an Aboriginal person.
History lands hard on us.
Invasion and colonisation and the way that's impacted on people's lives
and still impacts on people's lives today and the untold stories of our history
and the, you know, the way that our people have been written out of history
here are hard things.
But I also recognise that, you know, it's a paradox,
it's a contradiction that Australia is many things.
It is a country built on invasion, dispossession, colonisation.
It's also a country that is remarkable, that has built something incredible here.
Yes, Captain Cook came and put a British flag down and claimed this country,
but he also brought British law that could recognise
native title and the Mabo decision.
And England is part of who we are.
I lived in England and and I felt that connection to England
because it is part of our shared heritage as Australians, too.
So while I want to see us be a republic,
because I believe that we can be a nation unto ourselves
that carries with it all of that tradition and all that history,
but build something new.
And I'd like to see that.
But I want to see it like I want to see the question
about Celebration of Australia Day in January 26,
not reached because someone has a louder voice,
not reached because people have been sidelined or shut up or shouted down to,
but reached because we as a people have come to a decision
that that is where we want to take ourselves.
And for the people who disagree with that,
we offer kindness and compassion to bring them with us, too.
So, you know, I'm fully in favour of that.
As for me being president, I think you can do a lot better than me,
to be honest, Gus.
I mean, that's really it's really nice that people would would feel that way.
And hopefully that's a reflection of the way that I've tried to bridge
that divide in Australia and write about things and be uncompromising
about our history by also being compassionate to other Australians
who maybe don't see it that way or who need to be brought to that story.
And I think that's really important.
But there are some wonderful people
who would represent this country as the first president.
And honestly, far more deserving than me is someone who is,
you know, I can I can write a bit and I'm a journalist and I can tell stories.
And and and I'm comfortable with that role in life.
But I think that there are better people to represent us than me.
But if you were voted in, you'd take it, right?
Oh, well, you know, it's a nice house to live in for a while.
You know, so someone to wait on your hand and foot, who wouldn't want that?
Yeah, but you'll be working 24 seven.
You'll end up making your own cup of tea in the middle of the night.
That's right. Last question before I do the hot five,
which is sort of a fun bit to end is a huge sort of part of me
listening to you, Stan, that love and admired older men in your life,
because they shaped you in a lot of ways.
Is your dad someone that saw your success?
Was he was he a man that saw you do the stuff that that you have done?
Like, was he still around?
Yeah, that's still with us.
And I mean, that's been remarkable, Gus, because, you know,
this is a guy who was denied access to proper education,
lost the tips of three of his fingers working in saw mills,
was a tech boxer and a bloody footballer and a saw miller.
And later in life, he had a chance to put down all that armor.
And he went to work in schools in Canberra,
assisting young Aboriginal kids.
And out of that, someone approached him, wants to resurrect
or to revive dad's language, Wiradjuri language.
And together with a linguist, he wrote the first dictionary
of Wiradjuri language, set up language centers.
Charles Dirt University now has a postgraduate program
in Wiradjuri language studies that dad has helped to build.
He's been able to go on and study and find something new in his life.
And all those hard years paid off in the end.
He was able to give something back to his own people and his and his country.
And so I've marveled at his success, you know, that incredible ability,
which is far greater than mine, Gus.
I mean, he leaves behind a legacy of saving a language,
saving a language that was almost dead for all people to share.
And he says, language doesn't tell you who you are.
It tells you where you are.
If you are on this land, it doesn't matter whether you are black or white
or anything in between.
This is your country and this is your language.
I mean, that was a beautiful thing.
So he's been around to see that.
And we've had some hard years, dad.
No, I was growing up.
He was, I thought, then unduly hard on me because he knew what was waiting.
Right. He knew that one foot out of line and my life would have spiraled out of control.
And so he kept me in line forcibly.
You know, he was a tough, tough man.
They were different times.
You know, you get to whack up the side of the head really quickly.
And it took me a long time to sort of realise how hard that would have been for him living
through that, the life that he'd lived and how he needed to prepare me for a world
that he thought I was going to have to live in.
So, you know, he's been remarkable.
And while I, as I say, I love those old blokes and I love their old school masculinity,
I also know that my mum and my grandmothers and the courage and just enormous strength
of those women, too.
These are old style men's and women's roles and, you know, the women's ladies' bar and
It's men and women living together in the world, facing enormous odds and tough times
and bringing all of that strength together to that.
I saw that and, you know, they are the people who gave me a shot in life.
What's the number one interview if you could go back and do it again?
Like a fun one, if there was a fun one in there, because I know you did a lot that was,
you know, terror and sadness and so forth.
Is there one day you went, oh, that was the day?
Oh, well, I mean, there are so many.
And, you know, a lot of the time it was interviews with just simple people, ordinary people
living through extraordinary times, people who were surviving war and natural disaster
and, you know, just tough, hard, resilient people who have nothing in the world and yet
They are the people that speak so profoundly, powerfully to me.
I've interviewed all sorts of world leaders, political figures and when you're in the room
with these people, people like, I remember being in Ramallah in the West Bank and Yasser
Arafat walked into the room and to see everybody, I mean, he was a man of enormous aura, you
know, that those people had an aura, Mandela, you know, not that you'd agree always with
the politics of everybody that you meet, Gerry Adams from Ireland, Shimon Peres, the Israeli
leader having dinner with him one night and just these people who were big figures, Obama
being in the Oval Office in the White House with Obama and standing there and going, okay,
I'm in the Oval Office with Barack Obama.
And, you know, these people are there for a reason, regardless of whether you vote for
them like them, they're your sort of politician or whatever, they are there because history
calls them and they are big enough to hear the call.
It's always remarkable to be in that company.
One interview that really stands out for me and for a whole lot of reasons though is when
I interviewed Johnny Cash and I tell you, people who never let you down, what you imagine
is what they are.
The very first concert, my parents were great music fans and Aboriginal families, you know,
they loved music, guitars being passed around and I learned to play guitar from when I was
about four or five years old and they loved country music, you know.
I came down to Sydney when I was about six, seven years old and Johnny Cash was playing
at the Horton Pavilion and we went to watch Mum and Dad Took Me to See Him, it was pretty
amazing to watch that and then later I got to interview him and he walked into the room
and he just filled the room just with this incredible presence, power of his presence
and we got to talking and we did the interview and he told me these incredible stories about
he and Elvis when they were kids, you know, travelling around the back roads of Tennessee
together and playing little towns and you know, what it was like being with him then
and of course, you know, I'm thinking of Elvis as Elvis Presley, he's thinking of Elvis
as his friend, right, that's his mate.
Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash had this incredible friendship and swapped letters and did music
together and he was telling me about Bob and their friendship and he was just such an incredibly
big man in every sense of the word and then that night his wife came in, June Carter came
in and she invited me to go to the concert that night backstage with them and have dinner
with them before and that was a pretty magical day to be in the presence of someone who had
been part of your childhood, first concert I went to.
When the interview was over actually, I told him about coming to the concert and growing
up with his songs and he said, oh, you played guitar and I said, yeah and he said, okay,
we'll get a few guitars and do you want to play for a while?
So I sat around, I sat around for about half an hour with him after the interview and we
just swapped songs and played guitar and for no other reason than he loves playing guitar
and he knew that I loved his music and he just wanted to play guitar for a while.
So that's pretty hard to beat.
Yeah, magic moment.
Okay, Stan, I could talk to you forever but we've got the fast five questions to finish.
What is your favourite holiday destination?
Probably New York.
There's a whole lot of places I could think of and I loved reporting from Islamabad.
I love Islamabad.
I really love that place.
I love living in Beijing.
I moved to Paris tomorrow.
New York, it's just the energy of that place.
The bookstores I love, the music, the theatre, wandering the streets, walking into those
little diners and, you know, going down to Hell's Kitchen and I mean, just it's alive
and probably I'd have to say New York.
Favourite quote, is there a quote that you live by?
Well, there are many but there's a quote from an old Roman playwright.
His name was Terence and that's very little remains of what Terence had written.
Terence was a slave bought and sold into slavery in ancient Rome who became one of the great
playwrights of the time and one of the few things that remain of what he said is a famous
quote and it says this, I am human, nothing that is human is alien to me.
You know, that is an incredible thing.
This is thousands of years ago.
This is in the Roman Empire, right?
And this is a man in slavery who had grown to become one of the great playwrights who
didn't see the world in borders and divisions, in black and white or whatever differences
we may bring but saw it with a fundamental sense of humanity.
Long before the American Declaration of Independence said all men are created equal.
Long before Martin Luther King Jr. said I want to be judged by the content of my character
and not the colour of my skin, again, wonderful quotes that I live by.
There was this ancient playwright who said, I am human, nothing that is human is alien
We don't have to divide ourselves up.
We don't have to put ourselves into our tribes and fight our wars.
We are human beings and so yeah, I love that quote.
Yeah, I love it too.
Your favourite movie?
It's a tough one.
I love the two godfathers, one and two, two if I had to choose, but maybe the thin red
lion, Terence Malwick.
I love Terence Malwick and you know, that movie which is about one of the battles during
World War II in the Pacific, of course, they turn the island into just an absolute bloodbath
in the battle with the Japanese.
And there's this incredible scene at the end where the soldiers, American soldiers
are leaving the island and they're looking back and there's this scene that Terence Malwick
put in there where a flower emerges between a rock and this island paradise, they turned
into a bloodbath.
It sort of said to me that no matter what we do, beauty will find a way and this flower
that emerges out of war and battle, it was such a powerful thing to me and I love Terence
I love the speed, the pace that he lays them out and so, you know, that you asked me today,
it's that tomorrow it might be something else, but that's today.
Now this one's going to be a very hard one for you because you read so many of them.
What is your favourite book?
Oh, that is almost impossible, you know, because there are so, so many of them.
I read Go Tell It On The Mountain, James Baldwin's novel when I was maybe 14 or 15 and I was
attracted to it because I loved the title as much as anything and I grew up in the Aboriginal
church and my uncles were the pastors in the Aboriginal mission church and mission churches
were very different to the churches that other people go to, you know, it's sort of like
the churches of the American South, you know, black churches, lots of music and tambourines
and singing and fire and brimstone preachers.
So I'd sort of grown up with those songs, you know, those hymns and I saw that I picked
it up and I read it and James Baldwin became such an important writer for me because he
spoke to a world that I felt was mine.
I'd read so many other books and so many other things and, you know, they were important
But in the characters that he wrote about, it was the church, it was blackness, it was
race, it was history, it was living with the legacy of those things, his relationship with
his father and how complicated that was.
Baldwin then set me on a journey of discovery around questions of race and he's always surprising
James Baldwin, you know, he's contradictory and confounding and challenging and he's always
surprising and a beautiful, beautiful writer.
So that resonated.
So maybe James Baldwin, Go Tell It On The Mountain.
Yeah, that's beautiful.
And probably the most important question is that, you know, our supporters of this podcast,
Shoren Partners, are giving all our beautiful guests $10,000 to give away to a charity of
their choice and you can split it up amongst a couple of different ones if you like.
Is there a charity that is really close to your heart and what would $10,000 do for that
charity and who would you like to give it to?
Yeah, look, I'm an ambassador for the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation and they do
great work in supporting Aboriginal kids to get a chance at education, particularly at
I think they even have kids going to, you know, your alma mater as well, you know, Knox
and, you know, Joey's where my boys went and stuff.
So I'd like to give some to them.
And the other half, I did this function last week for Rough Edges.
Do you know Rough Edges?
They work with homeless out of Darlinghurst and as part of it, I spoke to a group of homeless
people who are no longer homeless, but, god gus, the humanity and the spirit and the courage.
It was just incredible.
It was one of the best hours I've ever spent just in the company of these people talking
about their lives and such a different way to most of us see homelessness or see homeless
people and the judgments again, the judgments we make, right, without thinking or knowing
that here are people with real lives and Rough Edges do great work in providing there's a
soup kitchen and they provide help and shelter for people.
So some to the Indigenous Education Fund and some to Rough Edges.
That is absolutely perfect and can you just give a biggest hug and squeeze to your better
Yeah, I will mate.
And also just a huge thank you to you for the time you've given us today on the Not
an Overnight Success podcast.
You've had the most amazing life and I think we could do another one just based on other
stuff that we haven't even got into yet, but thanks a lot, Stan, for your time.
Oh, it's been a pleasure.
A big thank you to Shaw and Partners Financial Services who have generously supported this
podcast and also donated $10,000 to the charity of choice of each of our guests to thank them
Shaw and Partners are an Australian investment and wealth management firm who manage over
$28 billion of assets under advice.
With seven offices around Australia, Shaw and Partners act for and on behalf of individuals,
institutions, corporates and charities.
For more info, you can check out their website at shawandpartners.com.au.
That's S-H-A-W for Shaw.
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