On a blustery late Tuesday morning, former foreign correspondent Hamish Macdonald is proving he has got to know the terrain of Parramatta well since the ABC moved offices here from its old home in the inner city. “It’s a thriving part of Sydney now, and it’s been an easy transition,” he says, wearing a blue cloth hat and sunglasses protecting his pale skin against the burning western sun pushing through cloud over this vast riverside parkland.
Macdonald has hung up his headphones as Mornings presenter on ABC Sydney radio for the day, and as we pass Australia’s oldest surviving public building, the Georgian-style Old Government House, built by convicts between 1799 and 1818 here on Burramatta Dharug Country, an older woman approaches him, proffering a map on her mobile phone, seeking directions.
“Excuse me,” she says, her husband filming the interaction on his phone, “where’s the gardens?” Macdonald, a constant screen presence in recent years as host of the ABC’s Q+A program and a presenter on Ten’s recently axed The Project, often jogs through this park. He knows she means the Wistaria Gardens filled with cherry blossoms, violas, marigolds and petunias. These gardens, established in 1906 by the superintendent of the unfortunately named Parramatta Hospital for the Insane using wisteria cuttings from his trip to Japan, are oddly not included on the park signposts around here.
“You should probably go around that road there and you’ll hit the gardens,” Macdonald advises, “because they’re on the river’s edge.” The woman brightens, asking expectantly, “OK, are there many, many beautiful flowers inside?” He reassures her there are many flowers, and she looks pleased.
Macdonald cherishes such respectful, happy interactions with strangers. Over his international career, beginning with Win TV Canberra, then the UK’s Channel 4 and ITV before joining the startup of Al Jazeera’s English channel, Macdonald has seen humanity on its worst days. He found himself suddenly responsible for three injured people in a makeshift triage camp during the 2005 London terror attack: he had caught the train through Kings Cross, he says, to retrieve his bicycle left at a pub the night before, when the bombs went off.
He reported live on the war in Afghanistan and the rise of Islamic State in Iraq. He saw the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya and the revolution in Egypt, and was sprayed with teargas during demonstrations in Hong Kong. He makes an assured travel guide, as we head towards the Parramatta River like the tourists.
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Macdonald says he and his husband, Jacob Fitzroy (they married in 2023), both like to go on big mountain hikes together, away from phone reception. They live in Sydney’s east, swimming together at least once a week in the ocean off Coogee, near the natural pool of Wylie’s baths, which is flushed twice daily by the high tide.
Macdonald, who also diarises his nearly daily gym visits, recently told his listeners, “I’m sure my partner would say I’m type A.” As we walk past ancient redgums and ironbarks, I ask if he is the extroverted one of the pair. Macdonald laughs. “Absolutely not,” he says. “I’m by far the more introverted one. Jake’s a much bigger, more charismatic personality … I’m the one who needs to scurry away and be quiet and not talk.”
Now 44, Macdonald’s desire to become a journalist was seeded growing up in Jindabyne in the Snowy Mountains. “At the end of our street, the old Kosciuszko Road is still there, and it disappears into the lake.” The town was flooded in the 1960s to make way for the Snowy hydroelectricity scheme, leaving its old history and buildings submerged. It was something of a metaphor for what is hidden from view, and had a hand in sparking his interest in journalism. “For me, as a kid, that was an ever-present image.”
His late father, Iain, a pharmacist of Scottish descent, had been attracted to the solitude of the mountains, having been an elite rower, cross-country skier and marathon runner. Growing up, Macdonald would run with his father and today continues to heed his advice on slow breathing to calm nerves. Macdonald credits his mother, Carol, who continued to work as a hospital theatre nurse until a few years ago, well into her mid-70s, for her lessons in empathy. “Mum’s been an incredible figure of compassion in my life,” he says.
Today, Macdonald concedes he is driven and is sometimes asked if he is competitive, but it’s a description “that doesn’t ring true; I don’t see life as a race against others.” Before his appointment to host Mornings ABC staff made their displeasure known at the removal of two announcers, including his predecessor Sarah Macdonald in the slot. But he recorded a 1% lift in the latest radio ratings and is about to extend from four to five days a week.
He keeps his eye on international stories, continuing to co-host the weekly Global Roaming program on Radio National alongside Geraldine Doogue, but it is with his talkback callers on Mornings, a “space for sensible conversation” often led by the audience, that Macdonald realises the distance between Australia and the world has grown ever smaller.
Recently he spoke to a caller named Bruce who took part in one of the anti immigration rallies in late August. Bruce insisted “it’s intolerant if you come here wanting to change our way of life”, a claim Macdonald respectfully challenged.
I ask if he’s worried about social cohesion and potential political violence in Australia. “You’d have to be blind not to see everything going on in the world is starting to have impact here,” he says. “Whether or not that leads to political violence is maybe another question. Clearly, we’re much more connected with the rest of the world than we once were. There was a time when foreign stories were ‘over there’ and local stories were here, and there was almost a firewall between all of that. What we’re experiencing today is a collision of a lot of that.”
As we cross a footbridge over the river towards the Western Sydney Stadium, it’s clear Macdonald has found a way to deal with the more challenging aspects of fame, such as personal attacks on social media, but that he has maintained his sensitivity – which goes in hand perhaps with vulnerability. In a March show, an ABC caller, Bev, objected to his openness about having a male partner as somehow promoting homosexuality as a lifestyle: “Everyone is welcome,” Macdonald declared. “Hate and intolerance is not.”
Has there been a drop in such personal rhetoric since? “Very happily, there’s been next to nothing since. Occasionally, you’ll get something. I obviously found the experience with [hosting] Q+A [in 2020-21] totally overwhelming, in terms of the hostility that came out and the abuse; it felt very unmanageable.”
The abuse played a part in his decision to quit Q+A. “Absolutely, it took a huge toll on my mental health. It was a very difficult period for me and not a period I’d ever want to relive or go back to.”
Part of the problem was anonymous posters on social media, but not all of it. “It was not always anonymous, sometimes it would be people that you knew. The thing for me I found particularly hard at that time was that it would jump just so quickly from that social media sphere into real life, and that was incredibly confronting.”
There was also family sadness as his father slipped further into Parkinson’s disease and Lewy body dementia, dying in October 2024 at age 85.
“My dad was not well when Jacob and I got married – he was living in residential aged care,” says Macdonald as we pass under the O’Connell Street bridge, heading towards Riverside Theatres.
“The one thing he kept telling his doctor that he wanted to do was be at our wedding. My dad was a deeply conservative, rural pharmacist with very strong views on the world and politicians, and I grew up in a space where a lot of pretty spicy things were said about all sorts of social issues.
“It was an important lesson about the course of a person’s lifetime and what they can come to – not just know and accept but also celebrate. Dad was determined to be there. He really loved Jake.”
In the end, says Macdonald, the wedding felt “unbelievable to have that wave of love poured over you”, not least because Iain made it in person.
“I’d ordered a kilt in the family tartan [to get married in], which dad was suddenly very enthused about and offered to pay for.
“At his eulogy, I said that I bet Dad had never expected to be buying me a wedding dress, but there we are.”
