Sarah Ferguson is a British/Australian journalist, reporter and television presenter now based in Australia and formerly in Britain. She is currently working with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In late 2019, Ferguson was appointed ABC's China Bureau Chief. Previously, she was a reporter and presenter on ABC's Four Corners.
Personal life
Ferguson was born in Lagos, Nigeria, where her British-born parents lived. The family moved to Britain as the Biafran war broke out, and Ferguson studied English literature at King's College, London. She married fellow journalist and radio and TV presenterTony Jones in 1993 and they have three sons.
Career
Ferguson began her career in journalism in Britain, writing arts reviews for The Independent before moving to France where she worked for the BBC. In Australia, apart from her ABC career, Ferguson has worked for the SBS programs Dateline and Insight as a reporter and producer. She won the Gold Walkley Award in 2011 for her work on the Four Corners investigation "A Bloody Business" into cruelty to animals in Indonesian abattoirs. In 2015, she presented Hitting Home, reporting from the frontline of Australia's domestic violence crisis. The series won Best Documentary at the 2016 AACTA Awards and the Walkley Documentary Award. In May 2017, Ferguson presented The Siege, a two-part special investigating the siege at the Lindt cafe, Martin Place, Sydney. In 2018, Ferguson started working on Revelation, a three part documentary series for ABC about the sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. In February 2019, Ferguson was appointed as ABC's China Bureau Chief. In 2020, Ferguson hosted Revelation when it aired on ABC on 17 March, 31 March and 2 April. During the special, she interviewed two men, identified as Bernie and Peter Clarke, who accused convicted Australian Cardinal George Pell of sexually abusing them as boys when he served the Diocese of Ballarat and investigated their accusations. The alleged sexual abuse occurred when Pell spent time at the Catholic orphanage where they resided in the 1970s. The show's premiere scored 645,000 viewers and was even more watched than a coronavirus special that aired the same night. Despite the fact that the third episode was temporarily removed after Pell's conviction in Melbourne was overturned, reruns of Revelation still remained online, with the third episode to be restored after undergoing some re-editing to update the content; all three episodes also remain available on ABC Radio's website. ABC also released a statement which stood by the program's original content, stating “The ABC has – and will continue to – report accurately and without fear or favour on stories that are in the public interest, including this one.” On 13 April 2020, police began an investigation of the sex abuse allegations discussed in Revelation.
