Spotlight on Mridula Amin
Winner of the 2021 Overall Young Australian Journalist of the Year, Young Journalist of the Year: Longform feature or special and Young Journalist of the Year: Visual Storytelling.
ABC News and Background Briefing, ABC Radio National, “The hidden park of last resort”.
“For me, this story is really representative of what I do, which is just human storytelling… It’s a great recognition that I can be who I want to be and also have that resonate across the journalism community.”
ABC reporter and photojournalist Mridula Amin took home three trophies from the 2021 Mid-Year Celebration of Journalism: the Young Journalist Awards for Longform feature or special, Visual Storytelling, and Overall Young Australian Journalist of the Year, for her moving visual feature and Background Briefing radio piece about the residents of a long-term caravan in Sydney’s Fairfield.
“Sensitive, compassionate and beautifully shot,” the Walkley Judging Board said, “Mridula Amin’s ‘The hidden park of last resort’ is a wonderful human story well told. Gaining the trust of the residents and demonstrating a non-judgemental approach to her reporting, Amin’s investigation empowered the community to fight for their homes inside one of Sydney’s last long-term caravan parks.”
The Walkleys spoke with Mridula about her journey into journalism, the importance of stories that make a human connection, and spending months hanging out at the caravan park to establish relationships and trust.
Congratulations on taking home three awards at the Mid-Year Celebration, including overall Young Journalist of the Year. What’s been the best thing for you about receiving this series of awards for this work?
I think a lot of people have been like, “Wow, you’re a Walkley Award-winner,” but the initial shock of it wasn’t even about the awards. It was just real recognition of the kind of storytelling I do. I’ve always had this doubt of, “Am I really going to reach that level of journalism if I’m not doing a hardcore investigation or in that news reporter space?”
For me, this story is really representative of what I do, which is just human storytelling.
Finding stories about everyday people that resonate on deeper topics such as wealth inequality or migration, identity, people who might be a bit misunderstood — combining everything that I represent with photojournalism and that kind of human, intimate storytelling.
It’s a great recognition that I can be who I want to be and also have that resonate across the journalism community.
I feel more confident now walking away from the win. Growing up with ethnic parents I was on the fast-track to become a lawyer, even getting admitted in 2018. However, I took those risks to explore my passion and really pushed myself in photojournalism even when no-one else believed in me– to the point I self-funded myself for my first overseas stories. So, it’s good to know it paid off and it’s thanks to backing myself.
Walk us through how you got started in your journalism career. What made you want to be a storyteller?
When I was high school, I was a very visual person. I loved magazines, I loved art, but due to the pressures, probably, of growing up a migrant, I was always tuned to more of a law and medical direction. I thought, it’s just not possible, particularly for someone of my colour — you didn’t really see that reflected in journalism at that time. It really wasn’t an area that I really wanted to pursue, because I didn’t think I was going to be successful in it.
I really loved cinema. And as I grew older, I was working in a law firm, but all I would do was Google photojournalism, like Tim Hetherington, Steve McCurry. That’s what I would do with my free time. All my Google searches were about photojournalism or journalism and just writing. And I always was just astounded that it was real stories. It wasn’t a film script someone had written. Someone had really spent the time to tease out these people’s stories…there was always a depth to journalism that I was really attracted to.
One day I just walked down to the camera shop and dropped my life savings, at that time, $5000 on a camera. I had a trip coming up to Myanmar, which I was studying in law school at the time — the Rohingya crisis. Through a contact, I went over there with my camera that I didn’t really know how to use, accessed this IDP (Internally Displaced People) camp. And that was my first story.
I didn’t really know how to do proper journalism at that time, but my presence there and the fact that I could speak in language with them — my background’s Bangladeshi, so I could speak in Bengali — was probably that first moment of, “this is it. I can see my life’s work forming from this.”
The human connection, the trying to find truth. The trying to speak for the voiceless who can’t themselves. That was it for me.
And then I came back and my trajectory changed very quickly, when you’re sitting in a job and you just know, “oh no, this isn’t it.”
Touching briefly on what you said before about representation in the media, have you seen anything change or improve there?
I would say, obviously, people like me and whatnot, you can succeed and you can fight against it, but you have to still be a particular type of person. You still need to have really hard skin to survive. I’ve been through a lot of situations that weren’t right, and you do go through all that wondering if you’d really be protected in an industry that isn’t immune to privilege and race dynamics.
But have I seen it improve? Yes, definitely. I definitely see the ABC’s commitment to Western Sydney coverage and hiring more CALD journalists. In terms of hiring people — obviously with budget that creates complications to widen the diversity field — but these conversations are finally coming to the forefront. When I got into journalism, it was still very much at the beginning. It wasn’t really considered an issue. Now, the work that MDA (Media Diversity Australia) has done, we’ve seen how sparse [diversity] really is, and the impact that has.
But in terms of me sitting in my newsrooms, every place I’ve ever worked, or even when I was at the Walkleys, if you look around the room, it was very obvious that I was one of the few people of colour there. It’s not a point of too much angst or anything for me, but when you do notice, and when you do look around, there’s so much more that we have to do.
I hope this win — and I hope Laura Murphy-Oates’s wins and all the people that have come before me — really shows the generation coming up that you can do it and that your colour or your background isn’t a barrier.
And in terms of diversity, it’s not just about people coming from privileged backgrounds — I’m university educated. I really want to see socioeconomic diversity in our journalists coming through, so we can get these really gritty human stories coming through.
Walk us through how “The hidden park of last resort” developed.
So I’m a real film buff, and I went to the movies to see Nomadland. I’d been talking to the Background Briefing Executive Producer Alice Brennan, and she really wanted me to work on a story. We talked about Nomadland briefly, which is about nomadic lifestyles in America, post-recession.
I was thinking, “I wonder how caravan people are going after COVID?” It just started with that small thought bubble. And then as I started thinking about it more deeply, I started Googling caravan parks in Western Sydney. I suppose the process of journalism is always just having the guts to make the first phone call and just be like, “I don’t know what the story is, but do you want to talk?”
So I called Fairfield West Caravan Park. I’d gone through all the Google reviews and photos and it just looked quite peculiar to me. The first time I called, they didn’t really know what I was about and were just like, “Are you even a journalist?” And I was like, “Okay, cool, cool. I’ll call back.” Called back, talked a little bit more with the park manager Andrew, who features on the podcast, and at that time we get talking about journalism and a little bit more about what I’m trying to do. And I’m like, “Maybe it’s not about COVID, maybe it’s just about the residents in the park.” And he gives me little hints that there’s an interesting story there, but then he just said, “No, we’re not interested. We’ve never worked with media and we won’t. We just don’t want to.”
At this point, I could have kept calling other caravan parks, but sometimes you just get a feeling as a journalist, and you’re like, “No, this is the park. I need to push through.” Luckily my editor was like, “Why don’t you just stop by? Why don’t you just make one last ditch effort? With you, sometimes, you have to talk in person.” Sometimes that feeling in-person can really get someone over the line. So I chose a Friday evening and drove over. I remember I was a bit scared because I was like, “How’s this going to go down? Am I going to get yelled at?”
I sat outside the 7-Eleven that it’s hidden behind — I didn’t know how to get in. I waited until I saw someone walk out of the park. They were buying a paper at the petrol station next door, and as I saw them going back into the park, I got my camera, got my bags, and just ran up next to him. We just walked alongside each other for a few minutes, and then I struck up a conversation, “Oh, do you live here?”
This guy got chatting, but he didn’t want to be part of it — he did point me in the right direction of who to talk to. I eventually went to the manager and was like, “It’s me.” The manager actually knew exactly who I was. He’d seen me on the CCTV and had done a Google search on me when I’d first called, so as I walked in, he was like, “Oh, hey Mridula.” I was like, “This guy has done a background check on me,” which is typical Andrew, to be honest. And then we spent probably half an hour with me standing in his doorway, him telling me to go away, and eventually something just flipped and he was like, “Fine, let’s go. I’ll go introduce you to some of the people who live here.”
In that walk around, you’d say hi to people as you go past, I’d get their numbers, and then it just developed from that first meeting. Building that relationship over time. A lot of people would say no, and a lot of people didn’t suit my story, but me coming back over the next few months, so many times, I maybe became a familiar face at all times of the night.
A lot of my reporting would take place at night, just because that’s when people are home. These are working residents. They’re not like me or you where it’s nine to whenever. Over the course of four months, it was just coming back and forth, building those connections, taking my photos. There was no public toilet, so I would just come in, hold, make sure that I didn’t drink any water, and just spend hours at the park.
And you slept overnight there as well?
Yeah, exactly. I think it was a suggestion made by Alice or Geoff, my producer, who was like, “Why don’t we just stay at the park to get a proper feeling for it?” By this point I’d visited in the days and the evenings, but I’d never done a full 24 hours in the park. I called up Andrew, the park manager, like, “Look, I know this is going to sound crazy, but could you give me a caravan?” And luckily he had one spare.
So we spent the night there to get a feel for it. And to be honest, it’s what I said in the story — it was dead quiet the whole time, but peculiar things happen in the park. Like people waking up at 4:00 AM to do their laundry. And those created nice vignettes of strange things that people wouldn’t expect.
What are some of the most important or most interesting impacts that the story has had for you?
I feel like the response has been so phenomenal. I feel like, from the public, it really made them change the way that they view everyday people in a caravan park. I’ve had so many messages, people who even live near that place, who are like, “Wow, it’s just opened my mind.” And I think people are really struck by the humanity — being able to capture a portrait of someone who’s on the lowest socioeconomic scale, or who is poor, but show how they got there and their value to the world. I really wanted to do a story where people realise that these people matter.
I think with these stories — development in Sydney, the price of living — they’re not new stories. But it’s the way that you find an original way to say it. It’s the way that you find a way to cut through.
It’s the human stories. And the response, too, from the people living there. The best message I got, from Jen, was just like, “I no longer feel ashamed to live in this caravan park because of your story.” That was just such a beautiful message for a journalist get. And I didn’t hide away from showing their flaws. Jen was very open that she used to be a heroin addict and that she’s not that happy that she’s in the caravan park, but it is her happy place.
So to have the response of doing a piece of journalism on people that we never really interview, to have them feel so honoured, it was the greatest feedback of all. In the end there was a GoFundMe page that raised $50,000 for Andrew, which will go into his funds, and I’m pretty sure he now has plans to move out of the caravan park. So that community response, with millions of people being affected by the story, has gone into the pockets of those interviewed.
But I think, for them, it’s mainly that feeling that they matter. That the public thought their small stories mattered and that they’re holding on as much as they can. And this really resonated.
Being seen and heard.
Being seen and heard I think just matters to people who have never been platformed on mainstream media.
What’s your message for the Australian public about why it’s important to support this kind of public interest journalism?
Journalism is so important. I work in it and whatnot, and I wouldn’t work in it if I didn’t believe in it. Despite its funding issues and being held back in the politics of it all, the only way to hold people accountable, or to make people change the way that they view the world, is media. It’s journalism, and finding those human stories.
When you have journalists who have that skill to tell those stories with such humanity and genuine care, it is one of the only ways that you can hold people accountable. And if we lose that mode of storytelling, I think we’re going to lose a really big part of how we remember history and how we create history.
There’s fake news and all this, and a lot of slander against journalism, but I still believe it is one of the pillars of justice and finding truth. And sometimes that truth isn’t the hardcore investigation that frees all these prisoners and whatnot. Sometimes it’s just a simple story about people living in a caravan park and trying to make life work for them, that really reveals something about our current times. And if we lose that mode of storytelling, I think we lose a sense of who we really are.
On your forthcoming trip to the US — when you can travel — what are the key things you’re hoping will come out of that?
I’ve always thought that to be a really in-depth journalist, it’s great to have the Australian experience, but I feel like everyone should have really good international connections and experiences. That’s why I’ve worked at National Geographic and for The New York Times.
Because I really believe that, in order for me to be cutting edge, I need to work with different newsrooms, different editors, different modes of thinking. I’m really keen to go over to New York, reconnect with some of my editors that I’ve worked with in the past, and be in Quartz and The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review, and make those connections, because you never know where life’s going to take you. But too, I feel like the US is at the cutting edge of innovative thinking and feature work. As a photojournalist, I never really felt for many years like I could do my work in this country because there wasn’t that visual language or style yet.
Whereas, now we see — with this win as well — you can see that tide really changing. We’re doing innovative work and long-term photojournalism. It was just a deep privilege to work on this over a few months. In the US [this type of work is] very much the norm, so I’m hoping to learn how I can adopt those strategies, and how they run their newsrooms, and bring it back to the ABC or wherever I work in this country, and try and build that visual culture, build that long form storytelling, so people like me don’t feel like they just have to go be a TV reporter and do the news every night. There are so many new modes of telling these stories, and intimate ways of doing it, that I think we can really borrow from the US newsrooms.
Is there anyone you’d like to give thanks or a shout out to?
I feel like I’ve done my thankyous during the speech where I nearly cried. But again, thank you obviously to the team at the ABC, my editors here and the Background Briefing team. This was my first long form audio piece, I’ve never done one before, so it’s pretty amazing to win part of the award because of that. And I think largely it’s because I was so myself and untrained — when you know a story and you say it in your own voice, that’s sometimes strong enough, rather than being polished.
I guess my advice is also, for a long time, I thought that I’d have to be this kind of perfect journalist. But really I didn’t have to be. You just have to focus on the connection. It was so amazing to be in that room and have everyone that I’ve worked for in the room.
Six years ago I was interning at SBS, and it’s been great to see that each jump really does pay off — and now I’m here with three Walkley Young Journalist awards. When Sarah [Abo] was presenting the awards, I used to be her news librarian at SBS, finding footage for her news stories. That’s a nice moment to look around and know all the places I’ve interned or done entry-level positions, and then I hopped over to the ABC to be a social producer a few years back.
I never got caught up in the titles. I just would do my work and go off and do my thing as well. And eventually I’ve been able to make it my full-time job. I’m glad that I never waited for permission, for people to allow me to be who I wanted to be. You just work away, and it’s just amazing to have this experience and this success. And thank you to The Walkley Foundation and the judges for recognising me.
2021 Overall Young Australian Journalist of the Year
Supported by Jibb Foundation
The Jibb Foundation has pledged to support awards and professional development opportunities for young Australian journalists over the next 10 years with a $1million gift. Read more about this extraordinary gift here.
2021 Young Australian Journalist of the Year: Longform feature or special
Supported by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age
2021 Young Australian Journalist of the Year: Visual Storytelling
Supported by Macleay College
