Sally Neighbour
Executive Producer - Four Corners, ABC
"We’re trying to really shine a light on stories that wouldn’t otherwise be told."
As executive producer of the ABC’s Four Corners, Australia’s premier investigative reporting program, Sally Neighbour continues a long tradition of award-winning exposés of injustice, corruption, and abuse of power. As a reporter, Neighbour dug deeply into the untold stories behind Islamic terrorism.
Career Timeline
1978: Neighbour finishes secondary school at Star of the Sea Ladies College in Melbourne. She achieves a 100 percent mark in English, affirming her aspiration to become a journalist. Disappointment follows when she fails to land a cadetship at The Age or The Herald.
1980: After working in a milk bar and as a secretary in a shipping provider’s office for a year, Neighbour enrols in a media studies course at RMIT and is employed as a D-grade journalist at radio station 3UZ. Her news director predicts she will go onto ‘very big things indeed’. She stays in radio, including at 3MP, for six years.
1986: She starts her television career at GLV 8 in Traralgon, Gippsland, Victoria, gaining hard news experience as a police reporter, industrial rounds reporter, local government reporter and weather girl.
1987: She returns to Melbourne as a reporter/researcher/producer on Channel Ten’s Good Morning Australia, a job she finds ill-suited to her interests.
1988: Neighbour moves to the ABC, spending about six months in the Melbourne newsroom, before moving to the 7.30 Report in Melbourne, where she reports for three years.
1992: She is appointed Asia correspondent for ABC TV based in Hong Kong for two years, then spends a year in Beijing, reporting for ABC News, Foreign Correspondent, 7.30 Report, Lateline and Four Corners.
1996: Four Corners executive producer John Budd recruits Neighbour as a reporter. In her first story for Four Corners, she investigates the Kennett government’s casino tendering process, which was won by Crown Casino. With producer Mark Maley, she wins a Walkley Award for investigative journalism for the story.
1997: Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett attacks Neighbour over a Four Corners story, ‘Kennett’s Culture’, calling it “an hour of slime’’. The story investigated the Kennett family’s share dealings.
2001: Neighbour wins a Walkley Award for best reporting of Indigenous affairs, with producer Morag Ramsay.
2002: Following the Bali bombings which kill 202 people including 88 Australians, Neighbour embarks on the first of a series of stories on terrorism and Islamic extremism for Four Corners.
2004: Her first book, ‘In the Shadow of Swords: On the Trail of Terrorism from Afghanistan to Australia’, published by Harper Collins Australia, wins the NSW Premier’s History Award.
2005: She starts writing on terrorism and Islamic extremism for The Australian.
2005: Neighbour wins a third Walkley Award for an exposé of Australian company Anvil Mining’s activities in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where workers opposed to Anvil’s operations were massacred.
2009: Her second book, ‘The Mother of Mohammed: an Australian Woman’s Extraordinary Journey into Jihad’, is short listed for the Walkley Non-Fiction Book award, her 17th Walkley nomination.
2012: Neighbour is appointed as executive producer of the ABC TV’s nightly current affairs program, 7.30.
2015: She becomes executive producer of the ABC TV’s flagship investigative public affairs program, Four Corners.
Awards
1996: Walkley, best investigative report, television, (with Mark Maley).
2001: Walkley, coverage of Indigenous affairs (with Morag Ramsay).
2005: Walkley, international journalism (with Lin Buckfield and Jo Puccini).
Books
In the Shadow of Swords: On the Trail of Terrorism from Afghanistan to Australia (Harper Collins Australia, 2004).
The Mother of Mohammed: An Australian Woman’s Extraordinary Journey into Jihad, published by Melbourne University Publishing, 2009.
The Stories That Changed Australia: 50 Years of Four Corners (ed) (ABC Books HarperCollins, 2012).
'Operation Pendennis in Australia’ in The Evolution of the Global Terrorist Threat: From 9/11 to Osama bin Laden's Death, Bruce Hoffman and Fernando Reinares (eds) (Columbia University Press, 2016).