Story: Arylene Westlake
A crash landing is what it took to convince hard-hitting Perth video journalist Sophie McNeill to take a breather from the world’s war zones.
IN the middle of an Afghanistan winter, a small SBS news team – Perth-born video journalist Sophie McNeil, a producer and an interpreter – flew into Kabul on their way to interview a couple from
the remote town of Sur Murghab whose lives had been turned upside down when family members were killed by Australian soldiers.
Landing in Kabul is always tricky. The strong winds and mountainous terrain are hazards to make the most experienced pilot blanch. The plane came in harder than usual and bounced stiffly on the tarmac, blowing one of its tyres.
“It was almost funny,” McNeil recalls from the safety of her living room in Australia. “I thought to myself, ‘This can’t really be happening’.”
Sparks flew against the aircraft window as the landing gear and part of the wing tore through the runway. When the plane eventually did come to a fiery halt, McNeill did have a quiet chuckle to herself. “How the f*** am I going to get out of here?” she thought. “Worse, the only way of leaving is to get back on the same bloody airplane!”
Over the next few days in Afghanistan, investigative journalist McNeill filmed one of her most stressful, dangerous pieces for SBS’s Dateline – the Walkley Award-winning Questions from Oruzgan.
But, not surprisingly, McNeill’s instincts told her it was time to stop and listen.
And listen she did. By the time she settled back into her home in WA, she had decided she didn’t want to get on another plane again. Well, not for a few months, anyway.
“I just needed a break. Working my butt off for seven years is exhausting,” she says. “In that line of reporting, you’re researching stories, you set them up, you go there, you do the sound, you do the piece to camera, you do interviews and you watch your back constantly.
“You’ve got to be on top of your game and you need 110 per cent of your attention, so after years of doing that for Dateline I just didn’t want to get back on another aeroplane for a while.”
Rewind 12 years and you wouldn’t have convinced a 15-year-old Sophie that heading on her own into a turbulent war zone – East Timor, in this case – wasn’t the best idea…
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