‘I felt the weight of the world on me’: 9/11, AI fakes, and getting bumped for Billy Connolly – Sandra Sully shares memories as Network 10 celebrates 60 years
On August 1, 1964, at four minutes to 8pm, Australian actor Brian James welcomed Melbourne audiences to a new television station.
“Channel 0 is now part of the life of Melbourne and the past that made us,” James boldly claimed, during the opening address of variety show, This Is It.
That was 60 years ago, today. And, while the station name has since changed, Channel 10 has become woven into the fabric of not only the Victorian capital, but indeed the entire country — and, with the international success of shows like Neighbours, the Channel 10 logo is familiar the world over.
Sandra Sully is currently in her 35th year at the network, and although she admits she doesn’t watch Neighbours — “I’ve always been on air when Neighbours has been on”, she protests — she does recall being thrown in the deep end from her very first day at the network.
“I joined Channel 10 in the Parliament House Bureau in January 1990, just before they called a snap Federal Election,” Sully recalls of her first role at the network. She readily admits she “was a baby”, and “arguably too green” for such a role.
“I wouldn’t say I was on the road filing great reports,” she recalls. “I was more behind the scenes because I didn’t know enough. But it was a great thing to be a part of, to witness.” She does concede that she did file a couple of stories in those early days, but says just to have been a part of Network 10’s Canberra bureau during a federal election was an “extraordinary” early experience.
Just over a decade later, and Sully was again thrown into the deep end, reporting on-air when the first plane hit the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Her main sense memory from that broadcast is the unreal nature of the reports they were getting, and getting clear verification on what she was reporting to the nation.
“The overriding memory was just being quite nervous about whether what I was seeing was actually real,” she recalls.
“It felt surreal at the time. And international wire services had frozen. And in those days, at the time, there was only one international cable network — that was CNN — and they couldn’t believe what they were seeing. They were dumbstruck and speechless.
“So, we had to rely on an audio feed in my ear, as well as the live pictures that we switched over to at the time.
“It’s a haunting day; to this day, the images of what we saw. But it was such a monumental event and such a galvanising event.
“I think it not only changed Australia, it changed the world forever – to see the financial hub of the Western world under a terrorist attack and then the Pentagon, while our own Prime Minister was there, was frightening.
“It was surreal. And equally, I felt the weight of the world on me.”
While she says “it’s hard not to overstate an event like that”, Sully claims her role at the time was about “imparting the right level of import on it, so that I wanted viewers to get up and take notice and wake up their family – because it was such a calamitous, monumental event. And it changed the world that day”.
Sully believes the way Australians viewed themselves in relation to the rest of the world also changed that day. Suddenly, we weren’t so insulated on the other side of the globe.
“Australians always knew they were global citizens, but [that day] they were convinced that what happened on the other side of the world directly affected us.
“And I don’t think it had ever really sunk in, at that profound level, before until September 11th.”
Recently she faced a similar newsroom scramble, albeit a far less serious one, during the CrowdStrike collapse last month. As Ten’s systems went down, the newsroom staff were forced to improvise.
“We had the blue screen of death and, you know, the newsroom service died, computers died,” she remembers.
“I had one laptop which I tethered to my phone, and we had one computer with a Word document, we scrambled to find a printer with a cable that we could connect directly to it.”
As Sully recounts, the newsroom, filled with “fresh young faces” froze: “So, what do we do? Does anyone have a typewriter? No. Okay, well, we’re going to handwrite these scripts.”
In the end they printed three Word documents, Sully had one, the control room had one, and the producer had the other – “so somebody’s got a clue what’s going on,” she explains.
“We did an hour national bulletin — which I normally sit down most weeknights with about 100 pieces of paper — and I sat there with one and a half.”
While a disaster such as the CrowdStrike outage shunts technology back into the dark ages — or at least back to the days of Channel 0 — the dangers of too much technology can also cloud the news gathering operation. In an era of fake news, Sully is happy to have “an extensive reporting network that we can rely on” – noting “our reliable, trusted news sources, predominantly our own teams, and not just in Australia but globally as part of the Paramount Network”.
She then points to artificial intelligence as a danger, as well as a warning to be vigilant in verifying news sources.
“AI has probably alarmed people, and rightly so,” she says, recalling a recent example where an Australian podcast used AI to mimic her voice in a fake news bulletin.
“Now, I never recorded that podcast, but my voice is definitely my voice,” she said. “Those things are alarming and unsettling, but they are equally an important reminder about why people need to really chase and make sure they are reading trusted news sources, rather than social media clips that never give you the whole story or the balanced story.
“And, you don’t know who’s saying what, for what reason.”
Sully is in her 35th year at the station, meaning she’s been part of the Channel 10 team for more than half its life.
In that time, she has reported on live tragedies such as the Thredbo collapse — “That was my introduction to live reporting on a tragic event, which went for about a week” — and has reported from places of mourning.
“Visiting New York one year on from September 11 was pretty significant,” she remembers. “Just to see New York one year on, and it hadn’t really moved an inch. The scars of New York itself were visible and real. So that was really confronting. And then I did the Bali bombings one year on.
“I went to East Timor 10 years after independence to see the world’s youngest nation try and find its feet.”
There’s also been what Sully calls “fun, fantastic and fun journeys along the way – like releasing orphan orang-utans into the jungles of Borneo, or driving in the celebrity car race at Albert Park and having a week of driver training, which I had to do to qualify.
“I had to have driver training with the likes of Alan Moffat and Jeff Brabham. I mean, who could ask for a better week?”
Sully said the secret to Ten’s longevity is its ability to push forward. “Ten was one of the first networks to go digital in terms of the way our news was produced and gathered,” she explains, noting that now people are most likely to watch something on YouTube before Ten’s late news bulletin.
“Ten have always been innovative, agile, cheeky and fun.” Although she missed Neighbours, she has fond memories of “appointment viewing” The Panel, by the same Working Dog team now producing Thank God You’re Here, Have You Been Paying Attention, and The Cheap Seats for 10. She also has fond, slightly frustrating, memories of Rove.
“Rove would keep me waiting, waiting and waiting,” she said, of Rove Live’s penchant to run overtime and push back her Late News bulletin.
“I was meant to be on at 10.30 and sometimes I’d get home at 1.30 in the morning because the guest line-up [on Rove] was too stellar to wrap it up.”
Sully recalls one night when she was bumped for Billy Connolly – one of her favourite comedians.
“Billy was holding court and Rove just couldn’t wrap him up – and Rove eventually resorted to the fact that I’d been waiting at least 20 or 30 minutes. And he said, ‘Mr. Connolly, I’m sorry, we have to go. Sandra Sully’s waiting to read the news.’
“And he said, ‘Oh, Sandra Sully, who cares?’ Which was fine, except the very next day, he was a guest on The Panel, out of the Sydney studios.
“He walked through the newsroom, and he said, ‘Oh, so you’re that girl.’ I said, ‘Yes, Mr. Connolly’, and then he apologised – which was very sweet.
“That’s always a pretty special memory.”
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Nathan Jolly is the Features Editor at Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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