Interview with Sophie McNeill - Walkley Awards Winner, Would-be Greens Pollie

Sophie McNeill is probably best known as a television reporter for the ABC’s investigative program Four Corners and as a Middle East Correspondent for ABC News delivering prime time reports from Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Turkey and Gaza.

A young Sophie McNeill began making documentaries in 2001, her first film highlighting the crippling health crisis in a recently-liberated East Timor, for which she received Western Australia’s Young Person of the Year Award.

Sophie has twice been awarded Australian Young TV Journalist of the Year and in 2010 won a Walkley Award for her investigation into the killing of five children in Afghanistan by Australian Special Forces soldiers.

She was also nominated for a Walkley in 2015 for her coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis.

In 2016 she won two more Walkleys for her coverage of Yemen and besieged towns in Syria.

In September 2015, her reporting helped reunite a Syrian refugee family that had become separated on the European refugee trail.

In 2019, she received international recognition for her efforts documenting the asylum claim of Rahaf Mohammed.

Sophie has also worked for ABC’s Foreign Correspondent, SBS’s Dateline and is a former host of the news and current affairs program Hack on Triple J.

In March 2020, ABC Books published Sophie’s first book, We Can’t Say We Didn’t Know: Dispatches from an age of impunity. It was shortlisted for the 2020 Walkley Book Award and for the Premier’s Prize for an Emerging Writer at the 2020 Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards.

She resigned from the ABC in 2020 to work as a researcher for Human Rights Watch.

In 2023, Sophie joined Greenpeace as a senior campaigner.

Most recently, in 2024, Sophie McNeill nominated to be a candidate on The Greens upper house ticket in the March 2025 Western Australian state election.

Our Editor, Michael Barker, was very pleased when Sophie McNeill kindly accepted Fremantle Shipping News’ invitation to meet and make this podcast discussing her early start in journalism, what drove her in her days reporting from conflict zones, and what has now taken her into the world of politics. You won’t want to miss it. It’s compelling listening.

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