On Saturday night, Mark Ferguson will sit down for a quiet dinner with family to mark his 60th birthday – a milestone that feels worlds away from where it all began: a teenager in Tamworth, nervously stepping into a regional newsroom with more instinct than certainty.
“I was very fortunate to start in my hometown of Tamworth,” Ferguson tells Mediaweek’s Newsmakers. “I was 17 years of age, straight out of school, very lucky to get the job, very lucky to start in my hometown with the support of mum and dad and family, and that’s where it all began.”
From those early days covering cattle prices and country stories, Ferguson built a career that would take him across the globe – reporting from Rwanda, Northern Ireland, the Middle East and London, before returning home to anchor Australia’s biggest stories, including the Boxing Day tsunami.
Along the way, he became one of the defining faces of Australian television news, with senior roles at both Nine and Seven, and has since 2009 anchored 7NEWS Sydney.
But Ferguson’s path into journalism wasn’t preordained.
“There was no journalist in the family, and journalism only sort of appeared on my radar very late in school,” he said.
“For a long time there, I wanted to be a country vet.” It wasn’t until a frank intervention from a careers adviser – and a growing sense that storytelling, not science, was his natural terrain – that the trajectory shifted.
Even then, the move from Tamworth to the wider media world was daunting. “I wanted a bigger challenge, I wanted to cover bigger stories, and I wanted to live in a bigger spot, but at that stage, Sydney, I thought, was far too big for me,” he said.
This weekend, Ferguson will mark the milestone privately – with Sunday, his actual birthday, set aside as a rare day off. But come Monday, the newsroom will have its turn, with colleagues planning a cake behind the scenes and viewers set to celebrate alongside him live on air. It’s a fitting tribute to a journalist whose career has unfolded not just in studios, but in living rooms across the country.
To hear Ferguson reflect on the moments that shaped him – from Tamworth cadet to one of Australia’s most trusted news anchors – listen to the full interview on Mediaweek’s Newsmakers.