Leigh Sales is an award-winning journalist who has won three Walkley Awards and an Order of Australia for her dedication to journalism. Student reporters had the honour of interviewing her, along with student reporters from the School News Project.
Here are some of the highlights.
While you didn’t make much of an appearance in Bluey, what is it like being on one of the most well-known TV shows in Australia?
It’s a really fun show to be on. I have two characters that I do voices for. One is Ice Cream Lady, and one is called Coco’s mum. I go into a little voice booth with a microphone, and they put the director on video from Brisbane and then, let’s say my line is, ‘Come on kids, it’s time to go.’ The director makes me do that maybe 25 times, and he asks me to do it in all sorts of different ways.
Do you have any tips for students wanting to become a journalist?
Journalism is about is observing the world around you and reporting it. And so getting practiced at noticing things, paying attention to things, describing things, being curious about the things around you, asking people questions, being open-minded about things, because when you’re a journalist, you’re not meant to have strong opinions about things. Your work’s not about your own opinion. It’s about other people and what other people are doing. So just sort of cultivating your natural curiosity in the world, I think, is a really good thing.
When did you first realise you were famous?
I remember when my kids were really little, they would find that confusing because someone would come up and talk to me and then they’d walk away, and my kids would say, ‘Who was that?’ And I’d say, ‘I don’t know.’ And they used to say, ‘But you do know because you were just talking to them,’ and that was awkward because I didn’t really want to say to my kids, ‘Mummy’s famous.’
