By Ethan Franke
While extensive travel is often an essential aspect of a journalist’s career, there aren’t many who have made the same sort of journey as Angus Mackintosh.
Mackintosh is a regional reporter for the ABC based in Western Victoria who works within Hack, Triple J’s current affairs news show.
Mackintosh’s journalistic career started thanks, in part, to his life growing up in regional Western Australia.
“I came into the ABC through Rural, which is the agricultural reporting side of the business,” he said.
“I’m from a sort of farming agriculture business background in my family and so that gave me a bit of a gateway into the ABC in WA.”
Although he studied psychology in university, with communications as his minor, Mackintosh explained how focusing on the latter field of study had greatly influenced his career path.
“I started to take it more seriously as my degree went on by doing things like student radio and writing for the student magazine,” he said.
“I went to school at Melbourne University and, through doing that, I got introduced to the executive producer of ABC Rural in WA. That helped me eventually get a casual position, then a contract position and then eventually to a longer-term position now.”
When first working for ABC Rural, Mackintosh was sent out to Karratha on WA’s north coast and was based there for just over a year until moving to Albany on WA’s south coast.
Living at opposing ends of WA was like night and day.
“When I was in Karratha, it was so hot that you couldn’t really leave the house between the hours of 10 in the morning and four in the afternoon,” he said.
“But then I moved to Albany, and it was freezing cold and rainy all winter.”
Mackintosh revealed the move to Albany initially had a big impact on his mental state.
“I was 22 years old when I was working in Albany for the first time and I didn’t have any friends there,” he said. “It came into the winter, and it just started raining like every single day and I just got really depressed.
“But you know, that’s something that you’ve got to learn to deal with and then eventually I did make friends and I got out of it.”
Although he was brutally honest about how he was feeling in Albany, Mackintosh likened that stage of his career to being an occupational hazard and that, while it was tough, it was something that could happen to anyone, regardless of their career.
Mackintosh’s mindset was to take the good with the bad and, even when looking back on his journey, he noted how he thankfully reaps the benefits of his current job during his day-to-day routine.
“I like the fact that my work life is very diverse, in that I can get out of the office sometimes and go to these really interesting places to take pictures and do in-person interviews,” he said.
“But then I also get these slow writing days, where I’m just in the office all day and I’m just writing like one really, really long piece of reporting.
“And that’s a privilege of the job, that if you’re in the right role, you can take your time to do things that are really creative and engaging, and hopefully, appeal to a lot of Australian readers and viewers.”
Mackintosh’s career has led him to interview many unfortunately affected individuals, their stories full of grief and hardship.
But it hasn’t deterred him from keeping a grounded and commendable moral compass when performing his duties.
“To do the story right, you have a responsibility to tell them what you are doing and make sure that what you’re doing is accurate,” he said.
“And those conversations can be really hard, and they will sit with you for a while afterwards. I think that it’s only natural and it’s just part of the job.”
Yet amid the tough realities and the gloomy conditions that sometimes accompany his work life, Mackintosh was unwavering in his attitude towards journalism as a career and gave his two cents on how to better handle that pathway in life.
“You just have to be clear-headed about it,” he said. “You have to tell yourself ‘These are the obstacles I’ll probably face, these are the sacrifices I’ll probably have to make, but there are also benefits and the benefits are pretty good’.
“You can get a lot of fulfilment out of it and you can make a really good career out of it, but it’s gonna be a little competitive and it’s gonna require thinking outside of the box in ways that maybe going to med school or becoming an accountant wouldn’t.”
Although he has experienced such an array of complex circumstances in his career, Mackintosh’s story is a testament to how the culmination of hard work and dedication most certainly results in a worthwhile outcome.
Featured image: Angus Mackintosh doing a live cross for ABC News. Photo: Supplied
