Hello, if Daniel James, here was some very exciting news. Last week. We let you know that my co host Ruby Jones is taking a break from seven AM while she works on a story for Four Corners. While she's away, I'm going to be sharing hosting duties with a wonderful journalist, Nicole Johnston.
On the edge of the city of chun Chun, a towering monument to the China Dream and its demise. Is the first time in the United States in the midterm election that they're having to recount three statewide races, and these are big races all.
Night throughout the Gaza Strip.
The latest information that we have is in the last few minutes we have heard about an air strikeing probably just heard one of those air strikes that I meet.
There aren't many corners of the Earth, many front lines. Nicky hasn't reported from from the Middle East to Africa, Europe, the US and Asia. For two decades, Nicole has covered the events that have shaped the world.
People from Mosul's Old city have been broken, bodies, ravaged by hunger, beaten down by months of war. And this is how it ends. Men stripped to their underwear to show Iraqi forces they're not wearing a suicide vest.
And now she's back in Australia unpacking the biggest news stories for us. Nikki, thanks for joining us.
Great to be here.
Now, you say you left to go traveling for a year and it teened into seventeen years. How did that get out of hand?
It really got out of hand, didn't it. It started with a year of backpacking. But then once I got to London, I'd always had this big dream of being a foreign correspondent. I didn't know how to go about it, and I thought the best way was to try and specialize in a region and learn it and then take all of that back to Australia. But I got distracted.
I ended up focusing on the Middle East. I did a master's in Middle East studies at the University of London, even though I'd never been to the region, knew nothing about about it, but I was fascinated very quickly, and luckily, not long after that, Al Jazeera decided to launch an English language channel based out of Doha.
I signed up.
I thought, this hopefully will be my ticket into the Middle East.
And so, what are some of the stories that have stayed with you during your time with Al Jazeera and in the Middle East.
I think I would start off by saying that my first big break or deployment with Al Jazeera was in Gaza, and I first went there for three months and that was when the maybe Mamara attack happened.
A deadly battle has taken place off the coast of Gaza, as Israeli forces stormed at.
Least one ship attempting to break the blockhead of Gaza commanders lower them so a Turkish flotilla was attacked by Israeli forces. A number of people were killed. It was a huge incident, a huge international story.
Two people have been confirmed killed.
Five year Israeli army have now asked all the passengers to go in.
Suddenly Gaza was on air every single day. I then returned to Gaza the following year and I spent twelve months living there. Last few minutes, let's get the letters now from Nicole Johnson who is in Gaza for.
US and Nikki. What's going on? Is that another Israeli air strike.
It certainly seems that the border area around Gaza is really being targeted at the moment. And we did all sorts of stories. Obviously there were air strikes and conflicts. But the big one for me then came at the end of the year, and that was the Gillard Shale prisoner swap story, when one Israeli soldier was swapped for one thousand Palestinian prisoners. Waya Collab was twenty three years
old when he became a prisoner in Israel. He was jailed in nineteen eighty eight for killing two Israeli soldiers in Gaza City. Now he's free under the prisoner swap deal, but he's suffering from Parkinson's disas and his son says his problems are also psychological. To be there during that was incredible because on both sides it was one of those rare occasions when there was an agreement, it worked, and it was actually a very positive story in the end.
Why don't we talking here in terms of your coverage of the Middle East and with Al Jazeera?
Oh, oh gosh, it's hard to remember.
I think I went to the region almost eighteen years ago when I was there for a decade. In that time, I had the year permanently based in Gaza. I spent about a year in Jerusalem, and then I went to Egypt and I was based in Cairo, and it was after the Arab Spring, immediately after it, so it could have been a pretty quiet, sleepy time in Egypt because the big revolution had happened. But I arrived and a few months after that there was the military.
Coup, the removal of Egypt's first democratically elected president and has opened one of the bloodiest chapters in the country's modern history.
And when I saw the military helicopters flying in above Tuckery's Square with thousands and thousands of people underneath, you pause and go, oh, I don't know how this girl from Country Regional Australia ended up here in Cairo in the middle of this big story. And I mean I was always very grateful and just so excited to be in the middle of.
It all, coming up Nikki on reporting from China and what she gets up to when she's not on the road. What kept you on the road for all those years was that first to be in the thick of it?
I think, so, I love the job, and it's not easy to get these jobs. So when you finally do get the job, it is a hard thing to give away. And I don't think I ever really would want to entirely give it away. I would go back overseas at the drop of a hat tomorrow because it's so fascinating, it's so interesting. I love the people that you meet, the range of stories that you can do working with a team, and most of all, my most recent deployment was one year in China, and I thought of it
like this. Obviously, China is not my background or my academic area. But to be paid to go to China, it's like spending a year doing a master's in China studies and your employer is footing the bill, and they're flying you all around, and you get to meet Chinese people and make Chinese friends, and explore every type of story from economic to rare earth minerals to the military to great geopolitics with Putin in town, and every day was like a new chapter of a book.
You mentioned you from country New South Wales. Whereabout some country New South Wales.
I'm from a little place called Bimbi. Actually it's about thirty forty kilometers outside of a small town called Grenfelle, population maybe fifteen hundred people. But if you're in Sydney and you drive five hours southwest, you'll reach it. And Grenfell just to say was the birthplace of Henry Lawson. So I went to the Henry Lawson High School.
There.
I had wonderful teachers at school.
I had decided at a really pretty young age, I guess maybe ten, that I wanted to be a journalist. A teacher had suggested it to me in primary school and the idea just stuck, and my parents would often joke later that at one stage I said, if I end up at the ABC in Woggle Wogger, I will be really.
Pleased with myself. So it's funny anyway.
The worldview got bigger after traveling abroad, and I have just tried to push it and keep the show on the road and take as many interesting opportunities and meet as many great people as I could.
Well, you've landed with us here at seven AM, and we're very very very happy about that and very very grateful to have someone of your caliber with us. What type of stories are you hoping to cover for seven Am?
Oh, that's a good question.
I think the kind of stories that I want to do, aside from the wonderful Australian stories, are international stories. That's really my bag. I've spent so long overseas and it's reached that point where it all sort of starts to come together. So to be back in Australia and able to ring old journalists and buddies in different countries and bring them back to people in Australia, to hear their stories about what it's like to live there, to put up with the governments that they have, and what they
think is changing in the world is really exciting. I think the other thing is the fallout from this Trump presidency. Every day is something new, it's whiplash. I'm really excited to be able to cover those kinds of stories and interview people all over the world about it.
So what do you do when you're outside the news bubble? What do you like to do when you're not involved in your calling.
I think I'm a bit of a tragic and I must admit that you'll often find me on the beach at Bondi reading the news or at Kuljie. I love the ocean, swimming, just being on the beach. What could be better than that? I think the other great thing to do in Sydney is to go down to the Sydney Opera House, especially during the winter, listen to the wonderful Sydney Symphony Orchestra or Australian Chamber Orchestra and just
get some music. I think it's a great way to relax and try and chill out from all of this hard.
News that we're often doing.
And then I also love to just get in the car, drive out to the countryside five hours west and and see the family, see my little nieces riding their horses, and just enjoy this great Australian lifestyle that we have.
We are incredibly lucky to be in this country and we're incredibly lucky to have you with us on seven am, Nicole, so thanks for joining us and good luck with it all.
Thank you, thank you for having me.
That was Nicole Johnston. She will be with us until the end of March when Ruby Jones will be back from Hursted at four quints