Chris Allen has done his fair share of strange and challenging stories over his long career as a TV reporter and A Current Affair veteran newsman, but perhaps one of the stranger yarns was the story he got a Walkley Award nomination for in 2013. The story, named simply “Drug Granny”, involved Allen and his ACA team recording a Logan grandmother known as “Ma” selling drugs to everyone from schoolchildren to tradies to local businessmen from her front porch, clad in dressing gown and pink slippers. “I remember someone saying things online at the time when we got nominated … this is gonna be the first time the Walkleys have had a story called ‘Drug Granny’,” Allen laughs from his home in Brisbane. The story went national not just because of the bizarre situation but because a subsequent police raid was captured by ‘Ma’ on her internal CCTV cameras, including the moment a police officer pinched some of her weed for himself! “Curiously, her justification for this was, ‘well, what are you doing for the children of Logan? At least you know, I’m supplying them with something’. And I’m going ‘well, I’m not quite sure whether supplying them with drugs is really the answer to their problems, but whatever’.
Allen has countless stories like this across his more than three decades in the industry, far too many to cover in an hour-long interview, but we try a few anyway. Semi-retired now but revealing with me plans to return to ACA to do more stories later in the year, Allen looks at least ten years younger than his decades in the industry would suggest, a consequence, I imagine, of his need to constantly self-pamper for his appearance for TV. Allen only recently stopped appearing regularly on our TVs with A Current Affair – one of his last big exclusives, at the end of 2022, was an interview with Ron Train, father of Wiembilla murderers Nathaniel and Gareth. “I couldn’t help but think wow, how would I (react)?” Allen says. “I think it’s been those kinds of human issues that have always made me the most interested.”
Another memorable story in the same vein was his coverage of the Bali Nine case, where nine Australians were imprisoned in Indonesia for trying to smuggle drugs out of the country, including several young Brisbane men. “We had contacted the family of one of them and they’d agreed to talk to us, and they were very ordinary family. They didn’t even know their son had left the country, they didn’t know he had a passport. They were blindsided totally,” Allen says. The story and subsequent interviews have always stuck with Allen because it was about an ordinary middle-class family whose young son had made a terrible choice and was stuck with the consequences. “Your heart goes out to them,” he said of witnessing the young man collapse into his mother’s arms when she visited him in a Balinese prison. “I had a son who was younger than that at that stage. But you think, wow, I hope my kids make better choices than these.”
Chris Allen is a veteran A Current Affair reporter who started at the program when it first (re)launched in 1988.
Allen is the consummate professional in Australian TV journalism and his rise to A Current Affair veteran reporter seems natural in hindsight when explains his early passion was to become a journalist or an actor. Allen grew up in the New England Tablelands in New South Wales in the towns of Guyra and Armidale before moving to Noosa on the Sunshine Coast just before he left school in 1974. He admits he “was probably a bit nerdy” in school and always wanted to leave the country and pursue a job in journalism or acting in the big city. “When I look back now, I probably think, ‘You idiot, you should have had more fun when you had the opportunity.’” His early interest in current affairs reporting was stoked by watching repeats of ABC’s Four Corners – Australia’s premier and longest running current affairs program – on a Sunday afternoon. “I grew up watching that thinking I’d like to do this, I’d like to be reporting and covering stories,” Allen says. “But I was very interested in acting, I had visions of being a movie star or whatever.”
His first choice after high school wasn’t a newsroom cadetship but a stint at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) – drama school. His tenure there was short lived, a consequence he says of being in “a very different environment”, 17-years-old and “probably not equipped to deal with the kind of institution it was.” Or “maybe I just didn’t have enough talent,” he adds laughing, citing his contemporaries from that cohort as Judy Davis and Mel Gibson. He returned to Queensland and nabbed himself a cadetship at The Courier-Mail newspaper which he describes as “awful”, though he enjoyed working at the newspaper. “The best part about it was I met some other cadets who became friends, and we could study at Queensland uni,” but “the actual (cadetship) process itself was awful. I mean, there you’d spend hours typing up the TV Guide or on tasks that seem very menial.” However, he says it was a “good all-around experience” covering courts, parliament, police reporting, and more. The newsroom environment in the late 70s was different too. “In those days, it was all balmy, old typewriters a lot of the time that didn’t work and copy paper and it was grimy and people smoked.” Drinking culture was big then, too.
Allen has had some interesting confrontations in his time at ACA, including the time a man threatened to “bite his face off”.
Allen’s foray into TV journalism came when he was poached by a new current affairs program he had been sent by the newspaper to report on. The show was called Haydn Sargent’s – which I definitely do not remember – a 4BC talk show host who started his own nightly current affairs show after the news. “I knew nothing, so I was really thrown in the deep end,” Allen says. This was the era when half of the time they were still shooting in film, which had to be taken back to the studios and developed on the same day, transferred to tape, and packaged together. He was in front of a camera from the start “which I was very lucky to have,” conceding that nowadays the stakes are higher for learning on the job. The drama training helped, too. “I think the voice training and just in that elemental way did. It did because the whole sort of concept of A Current Affair came from Mike Willesee, who created (the concept where) any kind of drama or disagreement or people behaving badly became the basis for a story. And so having that sense of the dramatic did help.”
Death knocks were another challenge in Allen’s early career and something he has over three decades of experience doing. A ‘death knock’ is the journalistic practise of knocking on the door of victims’ loved ones after a tragedy, say, a car accident or murder, to interview them for a story. “It’s one of the hardest things,” Allen says. “As I’ve got older, I’ve learned approaching people is a little easier. His advice for these tough situations? “I just try to think how would I feel if it was me and most people realize, you know, the media have a job to do and obviously the only reason we hear from people in these situations is because journalists knock on their door and say, ‘Can we ask you some questions?’” Be polite and straight with them and respect their choice if they don’t want to talk. Allen’s experience though is that people do often want to share the stories of their loved ones – “it seems to relieve them in some ways.” He offers the example of the family of domestic violence Hannah Clarke. The family were “almost waiting to say something, because there’d been a history there.”
Allen’s road to ACA journalist started when he moved to Sydney and landed a gig on Nine’s The Today Show. The producer, John Westcott, who recently passed away, took a liking to Allen, and a year later, while Allen was working at ABC’s 7.30 Report, invited him to start as a reporter on the new program A Current Affair. “I was there from the beginning,” Allen says. “Jana Wendt was taking over as the front person, and it was going to be called A Current Affair.” The move led Allen to Perth where a typical day started “with a phone call 5.30am or six in the morning” to go to a crime scene or do a death knock. “From there, if they agreed to do an interview, it was just (that) time evaporated and you were doing a story, you’re interviewing them and getting as much as you could” and then rushing back to the studio to put together a six- or seven-minute news package. Most stories were guided by daily events but Allen would hear stories himself whenever he was out on the job.
Covering the domestic violence murder of Hannah Clarke in Brisbane was a story Allen ranks up there as one of the most meaningful he’s done.
Memorable stories from Perth including covering the Royal Commission into WA Inc, a public scandal involving government links to private business that cost WA taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. Another, completely different story, involved a couple living in the outback for a year with no contact with the outside world. Dick Smith had funded the projected for a magazine he’d started. On the way in, Dick mentioned they had to radio in to the couple’s emergency kit to warn them of their arrival because the couple’s clothes had all rotted off. “I remember they were a married couple, but I think their marriage was a bit on the rocks when they went in. We didn’t find this out too after but they finally got back together again and ended up having a child I guess. So I suppose being alone in the wilderness had its benefits for them.”
Allen is a master of the TV current affairs news report and I’m excited to ask him about his approach to telling these kinds of stories. “I feel like I spend a whole lot of time deconstructing stories,” he says, “because you sort of reduce them to their simplest form.” Allen was trained to let the talent and the visuals tell the story as much as possible, and he learnt that often stories worked in formulas, especially those involving confrontations. If someone reacted badly to the presence of an ACA film crew it always meant there was plenty to work with “because you’ve got this dramatic argument going on about who’s done what to who and probably a tearful victim and what have you.” Allen says he loved the writing process and appreciated working with good editors who could value add to the stories. “Television is probably the most emotional medium in terms of journalism,” he says, “because of the pictures and the sound and you can see it all written all over people’s faces…I really did enjoy that. I loved it.”
I can’t think of A Current Affair without picturing backyard disputes, neighbours from hell and dodgy Australians being shirtfronted by nosy journalists who are often met with violent reactions. Allen’s done his fair share of what the industry calls “door stops”, snap interviews with people who are often trying to evade media attention. It takes a calm demeanour and a lot of social awareness to do well. “It can still be quite nerve wracking,” Allen says, “because you don’t know how someone’s going to react. And you get one shot at this, and you want it to be good.” Often he’ll have only 10 feet to get as much out of someone as he can. “You do try and ask some questions that don’t sound too lame,” he laughs. Often the simplest approach works, a straight introduction and telling them what you want to ask them about. “Some reporters, they annoy me a bit because they try and think up really smart questions to ask them, you know, that maybe sound funny or whatever…A lot of them just look really lame,” Chris says. As a journalist you owe the obligation to introduce yourself whether you’re talking to “Jack the Ripper or a used car salesmen.”
His advice to young journos? “They’ve got to be curious … they’ve got to be ballsy, they’ve got to have some ambition, especially in television journalism because it can be a ruthless business.” But most of all Allen says young journos need “a sense of humanity” and an interest in people if they want to thrive in the industry. For his part, Allen looks back on his career fondly. “You get to meet some inspiring people and some dirtbags but you certainly get a good sense of reality out there,” he says. “I don’t want to sound like an old person, but I’ve probably worked in the glory days of when there was more money and budgets weren’t as tight and you could do more. So I think I’ve been very lucky.”