NATALIE BARR: the Sunrise star opens up
As she reluctantly turns 50, Sunrise newsreader Natalie Barr opens up to Genevieve Gannon about fears, family and why she can’t stop crying...
For a year after the deadly siege in Sydney’s Lindt cafe, newsreader Natalie Barr would arrive at the Channel 7 studio, take a seat at her desk not far from where the sniper had been positioned, and plot her escape route. “I consciously looked around and looked at those fire stairs and thought, what if someone comes in here, what will I do today?” she says.
The Sunrise newsreader has covered terrorist events the world over – the bombing of the Manchester Ariana Grande concert, the Bastille Day deaths in Nice, and 9/11 from Sydney, while nine months pregnant as it unfolded before the world’s horrified eyes – but on December 15, 2014, Seven’s Martin Place newsroom became part of police operations, and reality hit home for the mother of two. “You’re literally mapping it out,” she says, pointing out the various escape routes in the newsroom, and
where the sniper was poised, hour after hour, the muzzle of his gun trained on the cafe Natalie and her colleagues frequently visited. “And you think, don’t tell me it can’t happen because I watched it. It was three metres away.”
Fifteen years ago, Natalie started as a “journo on the road” for a morning show that barely made a blip in the ratings, now she’s part of team leading the flagship show and she is reaching another milestone: her 50th birthday.
“If you’d asked me this last year I would have laughed it off and thought: ‘Oh, I don’t even care.’ But, as it approaches, I do care. I’m not keen on it at all,” she says.
“I know the headlines of these stories are always, ‘Fit and Fabulous at 50.’ I’m not excited about turning 50 at all. I feel this strange sense of dread about the number and I don’t know why. I’m still comfortable in my own skin. I’m still comfortable about the way I look and feel.”
Around the Seven studios, Natalie is famously down-toearth. The first thing she does when the cameras stop rolling is wipe off her make-up, and she shrugs off paparazzi shots like the invasion of privacy is no more annoying than a fly landing in her latte. The Daily Mail recently ran a series of shots of her in her bathers, with a headline screaming that she was showing off her body. But she doesn’t grumble about the intrusion.
“You can complain all you like, but it’s something that happens in the modern world.” She shrugs. “That’s how I see it. I think there are bigger problems.
“I don’t get targeted much by paparazzi. I count myself lucky. I think because I’m old and married and boring I just don’t think I’m that interesting to them, which is great,” she laughs.
It’s hard to believe this is the same woman who has been singled out for being too serious. “I’ve been told I’m too harsh,” Natalie tells The Weekly, explaining that she regularly gets feedback from Sunrise viewers who say “Can we lighten up? Can we just have good news?”
As a former regional reporter who earned her stripes in the US covering the Rodney King riots and the
O.J. Simpson case, she, like others in the field, invariably developed a skin of Kevlar.
“At the Ariana concert, the line of people clutching their flowers was never ending,” she says. “I just had to stop looking at the sea of people crying because you can’t report if you’re in fits of tears. You can’t not be emotional. These people’s entire lives have been turned upside down. You’re not a robot.”
Without that tough skin, journalists such as Natalie wouldn’t be able to do their jobs. But that doesn’t mean they’re impermeable. When the gunman stormed the bustling Martin Place cafe, her tough outer shell was ruptured. Day in, day out after the siege, she was on edge.
She famously broke down on air when she discovered one of the victims, barrister Katrina Dawson, was the sister of a lawyer who sometimes worked for Channel 7. She later said she was embarrassed, but tells The Weekly she cries easily. Becoming a mother to sons Lachlan, 16, and Hunter, 12, changed the way she saw the world.
“I used to try and block things out more, but I think once you have kids you really can’t block it out,” she says. “I cry. And I get emotional with the kids all the time.”
Natalie is candid about juggling a public job, managing armchair critics and sticking to her journalistic guns in a timeslot when viewers crave levity. She won’t censor the news, she says, but the team works hard to balance the grim facts with a little lightness. Her authenticity is no doubt part of her success in a fickle industry, and her composure helps her survive everything that comes with it.
Go-getting spirit
Born in Bunbury, Western Australia, in 1968, Natalie was raised by a stay-at-home mother, Julie, and a self-made man, Jim. Jim Barr tragically died of a heart attack age 61, when Natalie was pregnant with her first son, Lachlan. Losing him was devastating, but his spirit inspires everything Natalie does. “My dad was my hero. He was such a go-getter,” she says.
Jim dropped out of school aged 14 and forged a career in real estate. While running his business, he played golf at a state level and ended up becoming the president of the Australian Golf Union, the youngest person to hold the title. “That really showed me that you could do anything,” Natalie says. “I just thought: wow, you can absolutely achieve whatever you want to.”
In her small community, her potential was clear. She was head girl at her high school, though she doesn’t hang her hat on the accolade. There were only 41 students in her graduating year, she says, laughing. Her high school years shaped her in another, more bruising way. At age 15, a dangerous bone infection taught her the importance of seizing opportunities in life.
What her doctors initially thought were mere growing pains turned out to be a bone infection called osteomyelitis. It’s not an uncommon bug, but it usually appears in limbs. Natalie had it in her spine. Two of her vertebrae were infected and the bones were eroding away.
“It was so serious I absolutely could have ended up in a wheelchair,” Natalie says. She recalls a doctor coming into her hospital room to find her sitting up. “He said, ‘Lie down or you will never sit up again. You don’t realise how crumbled those vertebrae are’.”
She missed the entire middle term of school. For about six weeks, she was flat on her back while doctors pumped her full of antibiotics. “There were weeks when I thought I won’t walk again,” she says. The doctors hoped that because she was young her bones would continue to grow and heal. And they were right, but the recovery
“It was so serious that I absolutely could have ended up in a wheelchair.”
process was slow. There was no rehab back then, it was simply a matter Of slowly rebuilding her strength. The whole experience gave Natalie a new appreciation for her own mortality.
“It doesn’t take long for your muscles to waste away if you have six weeks on your back,” she says. “I know lots of people who have much more serious things happen, but for me it was a real defining moment in my life.”
She set out to pursue her dreams with single-minded purpose. After graduation, she landed a job at the local newspaper. Then came her big break. Channel 9 offered her a job. But love beckoned, too. A romance had developed between Natalie and her housemate, film and TV editor Andrew Thompson. Just as Natalie was offered her dream role, Andrew was posted to Los Angeles. She had to make a choice – build her career or follow her heart to the US.
“I thought, I’m going to lose him if I don’t give up this job,” she says. Natalie followed her heart. She recounts the decision-making process as we sit in the offices above the Sunrise set, where Natalie has played a key role since the show began. In retrospect, the LA move seems like a necessary step. She and Andrew formed lifelong friendships, and when they returned to California for a wedding shortly after Barack Obama was first elected, the Seven newsroom asked Natalie to tack on a trip to the inauguration.
But, in the early 1990s, when Natalie was at the start of her journalism career it was a difficult choice and one that led to a frustrating existence – she was forced to work in a department store because she couldn’t crack into the Californian news industry. Los Angeles is a huge news market, one that attracts hungry journalists from all over the US. She was competing against seasoned television reporters and locals with connections. But she refused to take no for an answer. After placing call after call, Natalie finally found herself on the phone to the head of news at KABC, an ABC affiliate. She told him she’d do anything for a shot at working in the newsroom. She offered to make his coffee, and he accepted. Before her time in LA was done, she had won a Golden Mic Award and was nominated for a local Emmy for her coverage of the
O.J. Simpson Bronco chase in 1994. When she returned to Australia, Natalie was offered a job at Seven. She and Andrew married. It took faith and forbearance, but it seems she had managed to have it all.
Spine-tingling moment
Flash forward and the girl who got coffee for the news director of KABC now has an impressive list of global stories to her name. She can answer the question of whose inauguration crowd was bigger – Obama’s or Trump’s – because she covered both.
“I’ll never forget that feeling,” she says, describing the atmosphere of the historic day that was Barack Obama’s inauguration. “It was just such a spine-tingling sensation, where you think, there will never be a moment like this.”
Despite the tough jobs she’s done and her years of experience, it’s interviewing Hollywood stars that really rattles Natalie. “I lose sleep over interviewing people like that. They scare the living daylights out of me,” she says. “They’re set up to be intimidating. They give you about four minutes. You walk into somewhere glamorous like the Park Hyatt and then it’s three-two-one and, if you ask anything they don’t like, they won’t give you the tape.”
Recent interview subjects such as Margot Robbie and Jessica Chastain are very sweet, but not everybody is, Natalie says. They’re often tired, and sick of answering the same questions over and over.
“I do all my research. I read all their back interviews. I look at all their past interviews and I just can’t come up with anything better. Then, if you come up with something controversial, you’re kicked out.
“I’d rather a gutsy interview about anything else,” she says. “Give me Barnaby Joyce any day.”