He’s one of the ABC’s most prolific and versatile presenters, hosting everything from rolling news coverage, to roles in state and federal election coverages, and live broadcasts of New Year’s Eve and the Sydney Mardi Gras.
But a younger Jeremy Fernandez never imagined a role on TV was a possibility — in fact, he was actually told by well-meaning career advisers not to even think about pursuing an on-air role.
Twenty-three years since he first landed a behind-the-scenes job at the ABC, the Malaysian-born journalist who migrated to Australia as a teenager has proved the doubters — and himself — spectacularly wrong.
Next week, Fernandez takes over from Juanita Phillips as the main presenter of the ABC’s NSW 7pm News after 14 years hosting the weekend bulletin.
“The moment when the significance of this really hit me was when ABC Sydney presenter Richard Glover said to me, ‘you know, you’re only the fourth anchor since 1956’, and I thought, ‘wow, that’s a pretty big title to take on and I’m very humbled by it,” he says.
“I’m also conscious that I’m the pointy end of a massive machine of people who work extremely hard and don’t get the amount of credit as presenters do, so part of the job for me is also about doing justice to their work, production skills and journalism.
“Personally, I never quite expected to get here. When I was growing up, what I saw on TV didn’t resemble anything I could relate to, I felt like an outsider compared to the people I saw on air at the ABC.
“Then, I went on to study journalism and was told quite bluntly by people who cared about my career trajectory that I was going to have a really tough time, if not an impossible time, trying to get a job in media, let alone on air – one friend told me ‘there’s always SBS’.
“Being on air was never the primary driver of why I became a journalist; I became a journalist despite the understanding that I would most likely not be on air, so everything that’s happened since then has been an incredible bonus.”
While the ABC now looks a lot different to when Fernandez was watching as a teen, he says there’s still a long way to go to reflect the diversity of modern Australia.
“The symbolism of having a person of colour reading the news is significant because I think we can all agree that for the organisation, and Australian media more broadly, appointments like mine have been pretty rare,” he says.
“But I also think symbolism can only go so far, the job of fair representation isn’t done by having a brown-skinned newsreader.
“The task of reaching and relating to diverse audiences is about which stories we choose to cover, how we choose to cover them, who we choose to give a voice to when we tell stories.
“I don’t think of myself as a storyteller. I think of myself as a person who enables other people to tell their stories and I think there’s a critical difference in how we approach that.
“So, I’m quite measured about how much impact my appointment might have in the broader world. It doesn’t change life or the outlook for every person of colour out there who wants to be in the media, or who consumes media. It’s just a facet of it.”
I want to be known for the quality of my work, not the colour of my skin
Ten years ago, Fernandez made headlines after writing an online story about a racist tirade he endured on a bus in front of his two-year-old daughter.
He dubbed it his ‘Rosa Parks moment’ and wrote about racism being a part of his life since childhood when “the fairer-skinned kids would call me the ‘oily man’ because to them, I looked to them like I’d been dipped in a barrel of black oil”.
He says he still encounters racism but is circumspect about talking about it.
“Discrimination comes in almost invisible ways, that make you stop and second guess your own reaction to it. For me, it’s been relatively rare that racial abuse or discrimination has been outwardly evident or easily defined,” he says.
“With that bus incident, I spoke out because it was important to call it out at the time, and I still think it’s important to call it out, but what I regretted about it was that I became the centre of the story.
“And that was never the point, I was not trying to draw attention to myself. So, I’ve been a bit more reserved about how I talk about race since because I don’t want to be known for my race or the colour of my skin.
“I want to be known for the quality of my work and I think most people from diverse backgrounds just want to be known for making a solid contribution, to being part of a team and for doing a good job.
“I don’t want to be known primarily for just being brown. I’ve often felt I have to outperform to overcome that perception that I might be there to tick a box, or that that my significance is entirely carried in the colour of my skin or in my migrant background.
“I have greater expectations of myself than to get ahead on the basis of my appearance.”
A seismic event in my life
Jeremy Fernandez was born in Kuala Lumpur and but within a month of his birth his parents Joseph and Elizabeth moved to the small town of Kota Kinabalu in the north of Borneo where his father, a bank officer and part-time music journalist, took a job as the chief editor of the biggest English language newspaper in the state.
So, was it his father’s career that gave him a taste for journalism?
“Great question,” he says.
“My dad was a print journalist and I hated it — his hours were insane and it was very political.
“The newspaper’s license to publish would depend on its coverage of the government of the day.
“It complicated the way he navigated his job in order to ensure that the newspaper could stay viable, ethical, rigorous, and remain licensed.
“I looked at my dad’s career and swore that I would never become a journalist because I didn’t like the lifestyle, the hours, the conflict and tension that good journalism can bring.
“But then I did a media program at high school in TV production and absolutely loved it. It was so much fun, and TV is so different to print, so I found a love of journalism, much to my own surprise.
“I still can’t work out whether I came into journalism through exposure to my dad’s career, or despite it. I suspect it’s a bit of both.”
When Fernandez was 13 years old, his parents decided to move to Perth. Joseph Fernandez wanted the opportunity to go to university, something his own parents couldn’t afford in Malaysia, and also to give his children (Jeremy has two sisters, Elayne and Elsie) the chance of a tertiary education.
But Jeremy Fernandez remembers it as an extremely stressful experience.
“Education was always a very, very big part of the family story and the way to get ahead in life,” he says.
“So, even when I was a kid, my grandparents before they even asked how I was would ask how my results were at school.
“There was enormous emphasis on performing well at school and I was an average student.
“The transition to Australia at the age of 13, going from my first year of high school in Malaysia to year nine in Australia was a seismic event in my life.
“It was incredibly tough socially and academically. I didn’t perform that well at school and I barely got into university.
“That whole episode in my life, from packing up life in Malaysia, moving to Perth and settling in was — I don’t want to say catastrophic because there were many good things about it – but it was so impactful.
“I just scraped into university and then had to work really hard from there.
“For a time, it looked like I wouldn’t amount to much, professionally. That would have been a tremendous disappointment to my parents.”
The hard work paid off and he ended up graduating with a journalism degree from Perth’s Curtin University, finishing in the top 15 per cent, then studied a broadcasting course at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts.
In what he regards as a series of unexpected fortunate events, Fernandez secured a casual job working as an overnight radio producer on ABC radio in Perth, had a stint producing on local radio in Albany but missed out on an ABC cadetship and “about 30 other journalism jobs”, which made him rethink if he was on the right career path (he actually started investigating a chef’s apprenticeship).
Then an offer came out of the blue for a short-term reporting job in the ABC’s Perth newsroom and the rest, as the cliché goes, is history. He’s more than lived up to his parents’ expectations.
“Considering where we came from and how my family measured success, I look back over the 31 years since we moved to Australia and think, well, we actually did OK,” he says.
“My parents are very, very down to earth. They’re proud of me. They’re not starstruck, but they celebrate my success, and they know what the journey has been like.”
The news events and interviews that stand out
Fernandez’s first major presenting role was hosting ABC News on the Asia Pacific television service. He was a founding presenter of the 24-hour news channel, now called ABC News Channel, when it launched in 2010.
Since then, he’s steered coverage of major news events including Sydney’s Martin Place siege, the 2015 Paris terror attacks, the Anzac Centenary, the deaths of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip, Black Summer bushfires and last year’s Northern Rivers floods.
He’s been guest host of The Drum, Q+A, News Breakfast, Compass and Media Watch, plus numerous live ABC TV broadcasts and even appeared on Play School.
But the buzz of breaking news is what he thrives on.
“I’ve really come to love breaking news and rolling coverage because of the thrill of the unexpected, and the machinery that goes with working with a production team highly attuned to each others’ needs, strengths, and weaknesses. That is the sort of work that’s most exciting to me,” he says.
“I also get a buzz from trying to make the news more approachable, because I’ve spent so long feeling like an outsider in this industry.
“I’ve interviewed prime ministers, princesses and movie stars but the best people I’ve interviewed are just everyday people, regular folks who found themselves unexpectedly in the centre of a media event, often tragedies like floods and fires.
“Those people are the ones I remember the most because they embody what humanity is all about: finding the secret to people’s endurance and resilience and fortitude in difficult times.
“For me, there’s something really uplifting about that. I think that’s the thing I love most about this job, the access to people who managed to achieve incredible things, to lift themselves up, and also their family and their community.”
Since he started in journalism two decades ago, there’s been a massive shift in how people get their news from broadcast to digital platforms but Fernandez believes there’s still a place and audience demand for an evening news bulletin as part of a broad suite of journalistic offerings in the digital age.
“I think good journalism is good journalism, whatever form it takes ,” he says.
“The way in which people consume news is changing but what people need out of journalism is the same — it’s about shining light in the darkness, bringing understanding to complicated matters, to getting people to care about the things that affect them and the things that affects their community and their planet,” he says.
“I think those are the fundamentals that sit at the core of journalism and those things haven’t changed.
“The way people consume news is different and that’s perhaps one of the biggest issues we’re facing now but the 7pm News is just one of the things we produce in order to reach audiences.
“The reality is all of us who work in newsrooms, and on the 7pm News, we don’t simply apply ourselves singularly to one program, or to one story, we apply ourselves much more broadly across the division in order to meet those audiences where they are.
“Part of my job, I think, is to give credibility to the 7pm bulletin, and from an editorial point of view, my starting point is always, particularly when I’m subbing scripts, to be thinking about any given story from an outsider’s point of view, from the point of view of someone who isn’t across a story the way we are and to make sure that we are explaining things in ways that people can trust.”
News is frequently bad, and the world’s problems can seem insurmountable, but Fernandez says he remains buoyant by occasionally switching off and reframing.
“I regularly tune out of the news, and I think it’s important to detach from the news sometimes for your own mental health,” he says.
“I also think it’s important for journalists to detach from the daily cycle of news to get some perspective on how people in the regular world perceive and process events in the news.
“I try to look for the good and I think when I meet people who have an incredible story to tell I try to look for the joy in helping them tell their stories. It doesn’t mean that it comes at the expense of being informative or being rigorous in our journalism, but I think joy and hope are as effective as anything else, in informing people.”
Jeremy Fernandez presents ABC NEWS NSW at 7PM from Monday, September 11 on ABC TV and iview
