The journalist turned film-maker on empathy, his investigation into animal testing, and life in one of Australia’s most enduring media power couples
It’s a blindingly bright day in Sydney. Sunlight glitters on the calm harbour waters, and moored sailboats gently sway beyond the boardwalk at Murray Rose Pool in Double Bay, known by most as Redleaf.
The harbour pool is where journalist and former Q+A host Tony Jones likes to swim when he’s not doing laps in the heated Prince Alfred Park pool, or at the jewel-like waters of Shark beach in Vaucluse.
“These harbour beaches are quite unusual in the world,” he says, meeting me at the pool’s quiet cafe overlooking the empty beach. “They feel like national treasures.”
It’s unseasonably warm, and the sprightly, sun-kissed 69-year-old Jones suggests a walk along the pool’s boardwalk then up the steep stairs to Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf, where he wrote his first novel, The Twentieth Man, back when the building was a library.
Before we leave the beach, Jones sheds his puffer jacket and drops it on one of the benches. I notice later it has a Sundance film festival logo, and he says proudly: “They give it to directors.”
Jones went to Sundance in January to premiere his documentary Sentient, which he co-wrote and directed. His wife, ABC’s 7.30 host Sarah Ferguson, executively produced it. It’s not the first time the couple have worked together, having met on the job in Paris in the early 90s when Jones was a European correspondent and Ferguson was a researcher.
“That was the beginning of a beautiful friendship,” he says, smiling. They now share three adult sons, Felix, Cosmo and Lucien. “And we’re still together so something’s going right,” he says, laughing.
As we circle the pool, Jones says swimming is “a way of repairing my shoulder”, after he fell and hurt it not too long ago. “It’s a beautiful place to swim. The only time you can’t is after rain, but I have a little app that tells me if the water is clean today.”
Jones started research for Sentient while living in Washington DC with Ferguson, who was reporting from the United States for the ABC. It was 2020, and like for many of us, the year hadn’t gone to plan. Jones had initially left Q+A to join Sarah in Beijing where she was due to begin her role as the ABC’s China bureau chief.
“We were ready to go, then the Chinese ambassador said, ‘Maybe make other plans.’ He was, I guess, being very diplomatic,” says Jones. “But it wasn’t Covid that triggered the expulsion of many international journalists from Beijing. It was more a tightening of the regime.”
Instead, the next year, the couple wore full PPE on their flights from Sydney to Los Angeles then Washington DC, where their first task was reporting on the January 6 attack on the Capitol. “I was asked to produce Sarah, and all the way over on the plane we were looking at tonnes and tonnes of citizen journalist videos that the Four Corners people had put together for us … we hit the ground running and we made, I think, a really powerful program about it.”
Jones and Ferguson have been married for three decades. Do they find it easy to balance their personal and professional relationship? “Remarkably easy,” says Jones. “It’s not to say there are not moments of tension – pulling together scripts, trying to decide which direction a story will go – but I think we’ve collaborated really well, and obviously that reflects a deep commitment to each other.”
How often does he tune into 7.30? “Every night. I’m one of the most assiduous viewers.” The Guardian photographer joins us at the beach and conversation turns to Ferguson’s recent viral interview with Barnaby Joyce yelling at his dog off camera.
“I heard Sarah saying the other day that not a single thing she’s done as a journalist has had such an immediate viral impact,” he says, laughing. “She is incredible. But that was a moment of incredibly unscripted weirdness.”