"She's one of those journalists who simply won't get her teeth out of the trouser leg." Credit:Nic Walker The film rushes through images of Ferguson at work in Australia, telling stories that will become embedded in the collective national consciousness: crouching in a corrugated iron shed asking an Aboriginal man impossible questions about sexual abuse; reporting from a foul Indonesian abattoir; interviewing a disgraced football identity; leaning in to interrogate a government minister during a 7.30 interview. Ferguson herself leads you in this filmic direction with the vivid verbal portraits she paints of her life. But, sitting in a cafe in Sydney's Double Bay on a bleak Sunday afternoon, the Four Corners presenter is clearly torn between an urge to keep that door closed on her life and a competing instinct for self-expression. "Ghastly!" – that's how she feels about talking about herself for public consumption. "I feel like my house is hermetically sealed against the outside world and I'm cracking open the door." She is only submitting to an interview now because she has written a book – The Killing Season Uncut, a behind-the-scenes narrative about last year's three-part ABC series on the Rudd/Gillard psychodrama. Ferguson worked with a formidable team on the series, including legendary producer Deb Masters, but she was the writer and presenter. She was the one to ask Julia Gillard: "When did you first begin to think that taking over from Kevin, replacing him, could be a solution?" "No one else could have done what Sarah did in The Killing Season – I certainly could not have," says Tony Jones in an email. "Having done the impossible and convinced so many key players to participate, in the cause of political history, she set about briefing herself with the concision of a QC." By a "country mile," the Lateline and Q&A host says, his wife's interviews with Rudd and Gillard were "the best televised political interviews we have seen in this country". (With all the skill of a man who interviews politicians for a living, Jones ignores requests for an interview and, later, blithely sidesteps a question put by email about his wife's appealing personal qualities; he likes to keep the door closed, too.)

Ferguson with Tony Jones, at left, and sound recordist Ted Roth at Cape Canaveral, 1994. Credit:Courtesy of Sarah Ferguson In the Double Bay cafe, his wife swipes rye bread through olive oil. She blows her nose. She's not sure if it's a cold or hayfever. She likely feels as Julia Gillard did during the filming of The Killing Season: "My impression was that it was something [Gillard] had to endure." Ferguson, who turned 50 on New Year's Eve, thinks the phenomenon of journalist-as-celebrity is loathsome. "It's something else; it's entertainment." As when she questions a people smuggler or a politician as slippery as an eel, her voice is clipped; urgent, even. The thing is though, Sarah Ferguson is entertaining. There is, clearly, a Ferguson effect. Tony Jones fell "head over heels in love" with her when they met in Paris 25 years ago, says the couple's friend, fellow ABC journalist Mark Colvin. It was, he says, "a kind of slightly mad relationship, just totally whirlwind". Her friends are under her spell, too; "infectious" is the word more than one person uses to describe her. "No one else could have done what Sarah did in The Killing Season." Credit:Nic Walker "She releases your endorphins," says her friend Louise Herron, Sydney Opera House CEO. Ferguson and Herron try to "have tea" every weekend at one eastern suburbs cafe or another during which they examine every aspect of each other's lives. "If anyone else thinks that they could actually come in and add to the conversation, well I'm sorry but they really can't."

Ferguson has a charismatic combination of qualities: both the demands of her profession and the impulses of her personality make her intensely curious about things and intensely interested in people. It may mean nothing, it may mean everything, but she uses the word "human" repeatedly: "human dimensions", "the human condition", "an intense human moment", "human understanding". She has a lusty appetite for "human interaction", understanding and experience. She has an even lustier appetite for poetry. Recently, driving her youngest son, Lucien, 17, to Sydney Grammar, the conversation turned to his English-class explorations of the Romantic poets. Suddenly she was reciting Keats. Finishing a mouthful of tomato on rye, she recalls for me the in-transit moment and delivers a flawless stanza: "My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains/My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk ..." Lucien, she says, was taken aback by the recitation. Ferguson has a line of poetry for any event: "There is no moment in my life which isn't made better by poetry or no sadness or loss that isn't comforted by it." She loves to recite it, but she holds herself back. She thinks it might be annoying to some people. "Or look like I'm showing off." In an Indonesian abattoir: "Intense smells and blood everywhere and, in the corner, a white steer, legs tied, was smashing its skull on a concrete floor, trying to get up. The metal killing box next to it had MLA stamped on the side, Meat and Livestock Australia." (A Bloody Business, exposing the cruelty of the live cattle export market, Four Corners, May 2011.) DRY SHAMPOO FUMES drift through the bowels of the ABC's headquarters in Sydney's Ultimo. It's a Monday afternoon in March and the salon traffic is heavy: Media Watch presenter Paul Barry is in one chair, face stiff with make-up. Someone fusses over his hair. The Chaser's Craig Reucassel pulls in. "Who are you ripping pieces off now?" he asks Sarah Ferguson. She laughs. A stylist manoeuvres rollers into her hair ahead of the studio recording of her Four Corners introduction. Deputy Opposition Leader Tanya Plibersek, trailed by two minders en route to an interview for Charlie Pickering's The Weekly, waves as she passes.

Plibersek was a reluctant interviewee for The Killing Season, wanting to confine the discussion to the Rudd Government's policy successes. When Ferguson asked the Sydney MP if she thought getting rid of Rudd was the right thing to do, Plibersek quoted Macbeth. "Somewhat unsuccessfully," Ferguson whispers to me, her comment nearly drowned out by a hair-dryer. In The Killing Season Uncut, she reveals that Plibersek fluffed the line and paused to check it in a dictionary of quotations. Be careful quoting Shakespeare when Sarah Ferguson is listening. For at least some of her time as a day girl at an independent school in the Essex village of Boreham, Ferguson's schoolmates sent her to Coventry. "I was a bit of a smart-arse," she says. "Girls are very mean, aren't they? They were very mean to me." It didn't dent her self-assurance. In a phone conversation, Ferguson's brother Anthony, 54, a London civil servant, remembers his 13-year-old sister's ears flapping the night a friend of their mother's came for dinner. The "redoubtable" Mrs Ferguson was a local Tory party volunteer and her friend was a political insider. The man revealed that the prominent local member of parliament was considering standing for a safer seat at the next election. A few days later, the politician was a guest speaker at Ferguson's school. "Sarah gleefully asked the MP if he could give a guarantee of his continuing commitment to the local area," Anthony says. (Ferguson's oldest brother, Simon, 58, is a businessman.) When Ferguson first met Kevin Rudd they quarrelled about the politics of Reformation England. In The Killing Season Uncut she describes a "lively argument" at a function on the lawns of Kirribilli House during his prime ministership. The conversation had started with a discussion about the evangelical wing of Sydney's Anglican church. "Disagrees with prime minister," she recalls Rudd saying as he pulled a small notebook out of his pocket and pretended to record the transgression. "It never occurs to me not to disagree with people," says Ferguson. Once, a colleague had the temerity to snarl behind her back that she was "a stuck-up lecturing Pom". How unfair, Ferguson thought. "I'm not stuck-up, I don't lecture and I barrack for Australia, so it's wrong on all counts." She admits, though, that she might not always have been agreeable. As a new settler in Sydney, she struggled with culture shock; all she could see was the vileness of William Street and the Edgecliff Centre. Even Bondi was all squat urban ugliness to eyes delighted by her native green and pleasant land. "I always dread meeting people I met when I first came, because I think I was awful. Same awful I was at school."

Before she met Tony Jones, Australia barely registered on Ferguson's radar. She had imagined a creative life, firmly rooted in Europe. She considered a career in the theatre; while studying English literature at the University of London, King's College, she wrote a "frankly awful" play, a "dance-drama about rape". She cringes as she recalls taking it, with a troupe, to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. For a while she was an arts critic, covering fringe performances for The Independent. Then, in 1989, on a romantic whim, she moved to Paris. She found bits and pieces of work as a researcher and production assistant on arts programs and documentaries for broadcasters including the BBC. Visiting journalists hired her as a "fixer". John Budd, a former ABC producer who's now a New York-based communications adviser for UNICEF, remembers how good she was at organising "fantastic talent". Tony Jones hired her in 1992 to help him cover a story on French politics. The stylist's work is done now. Ferguson studies her image in the mirror. The make-up highlights her blue eyes and square jawline, the very Englishness of her features, but with a counterfeit sob, she protests: "Is that the best you can do, there's no more you can do?" Mark Colvin, who met Ferguson shortly before she married his old friend in 1993, says she works ludicrously hard. "She's one of those journalists who simply will not get their teeth out of the trouser leg, as it were." Colvin reveals something else: after she started work as a reporter at SBS's Insight in 2000, Ferguson's first full-time job in Australia, she learnt to shoot her own video. "There is a certain kind of intimacy you get with a small camera," she says. Other journalists interviewed for this article talk of the enormous challenge of being both camera operator and reporter. John Lyons, now an associate editor at The Australian newspaper, hired Ferguson in 2004 when he was the executive producer of the now retired Sunday program. He had been impressed by her work at Insight and by her pluck. He recalls the first time he saw her – alone in the midst of a crowd of angry men at the Lakemba Mosque not long after 9/11. "She very calmly dealt with the situation and ended up with some brilliant interviews." Lyons had turned up at the mosque with his Channel Nine crew – and a team of security guards.

Watching surgeons perform Mark Colvin's kidney transplant: "I could start crying right now. I found it really difficult, trying to remember to stay present to do my job well while being really upset about what was happening to Mark. I had to keep leaving the operating theatre. I couldn't stay. Just pacing, pacing, pacing." (A Gracious Gift, a story about organ donation focusing on Mark Colvin, Four Corners, April 2013) ON A FERRY BACK to the Italian mainland after their honeymoon on a "nasty, scrubby island", Ferguson read Brideshead Revisited to her new husband. "Everybody should read it, it's so beautifully written." Ferguson used to read to Jones frequently, not so often now. "Maybe life becomes too practical." A television screen is evidently also a distracting presence in the family home in Sydney's eastern suburbs. "When Tony and I were watching War and Peace recently ..." Ferguson finishes the sentence with an observation about memory. Jones, she says, has a memory for detail and was able to remember plot points from the novel missing in the screen version that she could not. Her memory works at an emotional level. "I can tell you how I felt when I read War and Peace, I can tell you where I was when I read it." (Mostly, she says, on the Paris Metro.) "Stop, stop it there," she'll say to Jones when they're watching television. She'll leap up then to take a shot of the paused screen and text it to one or other of the camera operators she works with. Ferguson opens her phone to show a shot she took last night – "I was being annoying" – while watching a drama on BBC First. It's a picture of a man reflected in a mirror. She likes it for "the way the light is playing". Perhaps it will inspire a frame in some future Ferguson story. Ferguson started work on Four Corners in 2008. For her first story, she investigated political fundraising. Stories on indigenous education, Malcolm Turnbull and the Murray-Darling followed. In early 2009, she reported on the disgraced judge Marcus Einfeld. "Do you have a habit of dishonesty?" she asked him, with a turn of phrase that would become her signature.

The recording of her introduction for the week's Four Corners has finished now and she's back at her desk, all smoky eyes and distracted brain. She apologises as she reaches with nail-bitten fingers for her constantly buzzing phone. She makes a restaurant booking for a meal with a source and cancels another – "I have to cancel with great regret and sadness in my heart," she tells the person on the other end of the line. Colleagues poke their heads in to say good-night. She jumps up to hug cameraman Louie Eroglu, who only this morning returned from Malaysia where he and reporter Linton Besser were detained after trying to question the Prime Minister, Najib Razak. Eroglu has worked with Ferguson frequently, including on The Killing Season and A Gracious Gift. He is often at the receiving end of Ferguson's television-viewing inspirations. "When I see a text from Sarah I do get a smile on my face," says Eroglu. "[I think] what incredible bits of visual information are we going to go back and forth about?" Eroglu admires Ferguson's ability to visualise a story or a moment. Other colleagues marvel at her journalistic range and depth, and at her mind. "Like a steel trap," says Mark Colvin. "Like a barrister," says John Lyons, echoing Jones' thoughts on his wife's work on The Killing Season. "I remember time and again watching the work she produced, thinking, 'Is there anything this woman cannot do?', " says Kate Torney, the ABC's former director of news, now heading the State Library of Victoria. "It's quite rare to get a journalist who is as comfortable telling a human interest story as holding the leaders of the country to account." Colvin describes her interviewing skills as "forensic ... finding the weak points of the argument, tearing apart the illogical statements, questioning statements of fact ... and she will do that at lightning speed. There are an awful lot of news anchors who are getting fed questions in their earpieces. Sarah has never been one of those." The spotlight swung on Ferguson's interviewing prowess in 2014 when she hosted 7.30 while Leigh Sales was on maternity leave. Christopher Pyne, then education minister, told her he wasn't going to let her "try to fluster me on television". Ferguson told him she was "simply asking for a proper answer to the question". Clive Palmer called her "madam" and walked out. Then-treasurer Joe Hockey flinched when, after the delivery of his first budget, she famously asked him: "Is it liberating for a politician to decide election promises don't matter?"

The interview was nominated for a Walkley award for journalistic excellence. It also attracted the critical attention of Colleen Ryan, a former editor of The Australian Financial Review, who had been recruited by the ABC to audit its 2014 budget coverage. In her findings, released in early 2015, Ryan described Ferguson's interview with Hockey as "aggressive" and said the "tone of the questioning ... could have been interpreted by some viewers to be a potential breach of the ABC's impartiality guidelines". Former ABC news director Kate Torney defended the interview, and still does, saying, "I think it was one of the great interviews." Ferguson gives a little laugh, a "hmmph", when asked if she regrets anything about it. "Of course not." John Lyons says Ryan's claim that Ferguson was aggressive was "completely wrong". "The reality is that, within hours of reading that Budget, Sarah had worked out something that the entire country quickly came to realise – that the Budget was fatally flawed with broken promises and was never going to fly politically. It's absurd that when our leading male interviewers quite rightly ask tough questions they're regarded as simply doing their jobs, but when Sarah Ferguson, Leigh Sales, Lisa Wilkinson or Emma Alberici ask tough questions, some people are up in arms." Lyons adds that Ferguson's journalism is completely apolitical. "She's become one of my closest friends and yet I have absolutely no idea how she votes." Inside a women's refuge: "There's something sweet about children coming home from school. They sling their bags down and want to tear outside to go and play. Everything about what they're doing, every gesture, is the same as for every child in Australia – except that they're living in a refuge with security cameras and reinforced mesh on the windows." (Hitting Home, ABC documentary series about domestic violence, November 2015) TONY JONES, HIS WIFE reveals, is a very good cook. Ferguson singles out his warm avocado and crab dish, a Damien Pignolet recipe. "Haven't had it for ages, actually. I must remind him." Food matters to Ferguson: "There's always time to stop and eat with Sarah," says Louie Eroglu, who recalls sharing a meal with her at a food cart opposite a Jakarta jail – satay ayam on a banana-leaf plate. They were about to interview a detained people smuggler. Ferguson often cooks with her friend Louise Herron for "rugby club" while their husbands and children watch the football. "Really, Louise doesn't like rugby, she likes everyone being together and she likes having long conversations in the kitchen, so I run between tasting fatty joints and the TV and back again, torn between the two because I do really love rugby," says Ferguson, who grew up playing sport with her brothers and later brought up sport-loving boys.

Lucien, her youngest, was loosely named after the great German-born English artist, Lucian Freud. He may have preferred a more common name. "I'm getting not much thanks for it – but life is long, I say," says Ferguson. Cosmo, 20, is studying international relations and Asian studies at the Australian National University in Canberra. His name was inspired by historical figures, including Cosmo Gordon Lang, the archbishop of Canterbury at the time of the 1936 abdication crisis. "Tony's surname was plain, so I reckoned I could go a little bit rock'n'roll." Cosmo was born in Washington, where Jones was ABC correspondent around the time the first name of the Seinfeld character Kramer was revealed. There, Ferguson gave in to the pop-culture imperative. Yes, she eventually would say, wearying of attempts to explain the name's English antecedents. He's named after Cosmo Kramer. (Felix, Jones' 24-year-old son from a previous relationship, is working in the New Territories of China.) "Sorry, I'm eating a piece of toast," is the first thing Ferguson says when we have a final telephone interview. At an International Women's Day breakfast in early March, she told the audience that women apologise too much. "I've definitely done it in the past [but] I've become aware of it and I call it out because I think it's something we shouldn't do." She doesn't apologise for much these days. She doesn't apologise for the fact that, in 2014, when she hosted the journalism industry awards, the Walkleys, she stood up in front of an audience that included her boss, ABC managing director Mark Scott, and railed against job cuts driven by what she believed was the organisation's focus on digital at the expense of traditional broadcast journalism. She did not name him, but singled out the then head of ABC Digital for criticism. In the days after the event, director of news Kate Torney had a conversation with Ferguson about her speech. "It was a difficult time at the ABC ... Sarah and I were in furious agreement about many of the points she raised but I was concerned about the focus on one of my ABC Digital colleagues."

Ferguson notes that if her speech made anyone feel bad, she regrets that. But she insists it was a speech for its time. "I didn't like what was happening around me ... What's at stake for me is incredibly important and that is the future health and artistic brilliance of the ABC. You can't tell a series of jokes when you feel that something is happening that's wrong." With the spectre of more cuts in the Federal Budget, Ferguson points to the ABC's recent "globally significant" reporting, including on corruption in Malaysia and Panama tax havens. "Who wants an Australian media landscape without that quality?" Ferguson's position on A Bloody Business, her 2011 story about cruelty in the live export trade in Australian cattle to Indonesia, is just as uncompromising. The report won the journalist and her Four Corners team a prestigious Gold Walkley and led to the controversial suspension of the trade. "There were some people who, quote-unquote, wanted to wrap me in chains and drop me in the bottom of the harbour," says Ferguson. "[But] it's my job to give you the absolute truth, whether you like it or not, whether you want to hear it or not." The truth is also the foundational notion of the reflective The Killing Season Uncut. After the frenzy of the television drama's production, writing the book gave Ferguson the time to ponder the characters and the stories they told without the restrictions of the template of television. But even with the advantage of time and distance, truth remains elusive. "We don't have the information to know which version is truer than the other," she says of the conflicting stories about the leadership battles told by Rudd and Gillard. Not so long ago, a Sarah Ferguson fan on Twitter asked: "Why has the ABC put its toughest interviewer Sarah Ferguson out to grass introducing #4corners?" Such an untruth needs to be corrected. Ferguson will report stories for the program but, after a ferocious workload over the past two years, she wants some thinking time. "The one thing you need to be good is you always need to have a bit of a space to think." And to ask questions: what should she do next; what is the subject that people will want to be talking about; what wrong must be exposed? She's finding her mind inexorably drawn to Europe. "I can't stop looking at the refugee crisis; it's one of the biggest stories of our time." It's unlikely that she would discount the possibility of, "Sarah Ferguson, reporting from Ramadi".