Sana Qadar: Journalist

DAM: Today we’re here with Journalist Sana Qadar, who currently hosts and produces the ABC podcast ‘All in the Mind’. Sana, we’d love to know a bit about how your story began.

Sana: I was born in Pakistan, grew up in Canada, and moved to Australia when I was 22 or so, and have always wanted to work in media. I wanted to be an actor when I was little but my dad was a bit of a strict muslim dad and his attitude was, ‘Muslim girls don’t act’. So I thought, ‘okay, well what else do I want to do?’. I still definitely wanted to be in media and as I got older I was really interested in the world. Initially I really just wanted to do what every young journalism student wants – to be a war correspondent, which has faded now [laughs] but I worked in international news, interning in DC, India, London and China. When I was in China I met an Aussie (my husband) so that’s how I ended up in Australia. Since then I have worked mostly at the ABC.

DAM: That’s incredible. I like how you said the thing about your dad, just because it’s like, you still got into entertainment, but you met halfway. On that note, can you tell us more about your upbringing?

Sana: Yeah for sure! Canada was a great place to grow up. I still have that classic ‘Brown girl thing in the Western world’ – where I totally had bouts of wishing I was a little White, blonde girl, wishing my name was Sarah, not Sana, all of that. On the whole I never had a sense that I couldn’t be on TV or couldn’t be in media growing up in Canada because every other reporter and presenter was Black, Asian, Brown. Like I remember all sorts of diversities being on camera so it never occurred to me that that wasn’t a space I couldn’t go into. Whereas I feel like once I got to Australia in 2011, it was so white. There was only one person. It was Waleed Ali that was brown and I was like, what is happening?

DAM: How did your parents react when you told them your interests in working in media?

Sana: Dad was pretty strict, that’s something that a lot of brown kids I think deal with but otherwise my family was super encouraging of my creativity. My grandfather was the biggest influence. We would watch news together every evening, BBC World News and he sort of fostered my interest in journalism, international relations and all of that. So it was a good childhood and they’re all proud now, including dad!

DAM: So after that initial interest was sparked, how did you further pursue it?

Sana: As I grew into a teen and started getting involved in the local community TV station and doing a bit of reporting for them, I definitely thought it was a possibility. However I also had a huge amount of anxiety wondering – ‘Am I good enough? Will I get a job?’ All that kind of stuff but I totally saw myself there. At seventeen, I was reporting and presenting at a little community channel in my hometown. I had really set my sights on journalism and just focused all of my energy on getting into journalism school. From then onwards, there wasn’t a question of what else I would do – like that was what I was gonna do and I kind of just barreled forward from there.

DAM: That’s great to be so certain at such a young age. What was it that drew you to journalism as opposed to other forms of media?

Sana: I want to know everything about everything. I’m a very curious person and I’m a huge extrovert. I just want to know everything about how other people live and what life is like for different types of people in different parts of the world. That’s why after university ended I went all over the place. 

I crave connection, I crave adventure, I crave having my curiosity satisfied and doing something creative.

DAM: Was it what you expected when you first started?

Sana: Travelling the world is great but once I actually started working in media properly, there’s a lot of shit-kickery roles in journalism. There’s some great producing roles but you’re not necessarily starting off on those. For a while in my early 20s, I definitely got caught in a cycle of working in roles that just didn’t have much creative input and or, much sort of respect that came with them. I definitely felt trapped for a long time and had to work really hard to get my bosses to see what I was capable of.

DAM: That must have taken a lot of belief and more importantly mental strength to get to where you are today.

Sana: You’re right, you really have to have that mindset because it’s media and entertainment. It’s very cutthroat sometimes so you really need to be on top of your stuff. I feel like in my teens and very early 20s, I had a raging ambition. I was an intern in Washington, D.C. at 19 and I was working for Canada’s largest broadcaster, their bureau in D.C. That can only happen if you have a raging ambition, but then by my mid-twenties, that really weaned. My life sort of shifted because my partner who I met in China, who was Aussie, got cancer. We had to come back to Australia for treatment. And that just sort of ground everything to a halt. Priorities completely shifted so I was working to survive and make sure we could live while he had treatment rather than working to build my career. Once he got better we were finally able to reconsider our goals and what we wanted to do with them.

I had to refocus and tell myself that  I’m not just here every day to show up, do my thing and leave. I actually want to build something bigger and forward in my career. 

DAM: Are you right now at a position where you get to choose your stories? 

Sana: Yes, yes, it’s my show. I choose what we do. I do work with a producer as well, and we bounce ideas, and if I want some advice from our science unit’s executive audio producer, I can definitely ask for it – but no one is approving episode ideas week to week apart from me.

DAM: How do you dictate what sort of stories you choose to do? 

Sana: Whatever seems interesting but stories come from all different directions. I’ll have had a conversation with someone at a dinner party and been like, that sounds really interesting, and I think that would make a fascinating episode. That happened for an episode we did on negotiation, the art of negotiation. I was speaking to a diplomat, and they were talking to me about, basically the anecdote we opened the show with – about how during the Vietnam War, the different sides of the conflict were trying to meet for peace talks, but before they could even get in the same room, they were all debating about the shape of the table, and I was like, that’s ridiculous, and that sounds like an excellent starting point for an episode on negotiation and the mind games around it and all that. So sometimes it’s conversations I’ve had, other times it’s just ideas I’ve had in the back of my mind from having read something. Other times it comes from a press release where actually someone has pitched something really well.

DAM: So what has been your favourite story? Do you have favourites or is every story special?

Sana: You definitely have your favourites. It’s a weekly show and it’s just me and another producer who splits their time between two shows. It’s a very small team so you try to make every episode is as stellar as possible. One of my favourites actually went to air this week which was an interview with a music artist named Parvyn who talks about her mental health and how her symptoms unfolded and how she’s grappled with and processed that. My favourite episodes are often when we mix music with the mind, psychology, bringing art and science together so this was the perfect marriage of the two because it was an important story of mental illness told through her music. The negotiation episode was fun too. We did one on children with callous-unemotional traits which can be  the precursor to later psychopathy, so psychopaths, people who can hurt without feeling any remorse. In children, often the earlier sign would be that they have something called callous unemotional traits. We got a pitch from a university where researchers were trying to develop therapy for kids who have callous-unemotional traits and I was like, that’s fascinating but not enough for a 30 minute show to just speak about therapy. What I need for this to work is – I need a parent with a kid who has this and who is willing to talk about the experience of what it’s like to have a child who has callous-unemotional traits, that may go on to develop full-on psychopathy. But it’s difficult to find a parent like that who is willing to talk about it, because it’s a pretty devastating thing to deal with. But a producer who was working with us managed to find a parent who had a child who was comfortable talking about it. That was such a fascinating episode because we don’t often hear about that – those experiences are usually shrouded in secrecy.

DAM: Do you still feel like the workplace excludes people of diverse backgrounds?

Sana: In Canada, things felt more diverse and inclusive. Here I still feel like sometimes it’s still not the usual thing to have people from diverse backgrounds.
I think public broadcasting is definitely making a concerted effort to do better. It wasn’t anything in terms of overt racism but more noticing that you were one of the very few people in the room. When I worked very briefly on one of the commercial channels I was the only diverse person in the newsroom. I think if anything the biggest problem was my Canadian accent. I barreled into Australian newsrooms with my Canadian mindset on, I didn’t realise I was supposed to be more self conscious. It was more over time that I noticed, as people around me were pointing it out. 

DAM: That’s an interesting point because we’ve seen your videos and after a few seconds we don’t even notice the Canadian accent. Finally, do you have any final words of advice for our audience?

Sana: I’d say find your people, find allies whether they are people from diverse backgrounds or people who are here to champion you. I love my role and I owe it to two people who aren’t from diverse backgrounds but they took an interest in my work and really championed me. I also have a group of people here at the ABC who are from diverse backgrounds who are my team of support and that’s really lovely to have too. So you need to find allies wherever you can.

DAM: Awesome advice and thank you for sharing your story with us.

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You can find more on Sana and listen to her podcast here:

Site: https://linktr.ee/sana_qadar

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Photography by @noah__creative

Published by Marshall-Weishuai Yuan & Sangeetha Gowda