For hundreds of reporters, the trek up The Mountain has been a rite of passage, the place where they learn their craft and, for a chosen few, the place where it’s their face on the billboard outside the station they call home.

And until her recent, shock axing from Seven Network, Sharyn Ghidella’s familiar, smiling visage was one of them.

The veteran journalist of 38 years and newsreader has been making her way up The Mountain for the past 17 years to deliver the nightly news. The news of her own departure came as a surprise to not only viewers, but to Ghidella herself.

Delivered about a fortnight ago via a phone call while Ghidella, 58, was at the hairdresser, it was, she wryly notes, “not quite the chop I was hoping for”.

WATCH GHIDELLA’S EMOTIONAL FIRST INTERVIEW AFTER AXING

In the warm and familiar voice viewers have come to know – and trust – Ghidella says she is not bitter about her unexpected exit (coming just days after promotional shoots had been taken with her co-anchor and good friend Max Futcher who remains in the chair) but philosophical.

“It was Ita Buttrose who said, ‘You haven’t worked in television until you’ve been sacked’,” Ghidella smiles.

“I’ve worked in television for 38 years. I’ve been expecting the proverbial tap on the shoulder for decades. How I even got to a career that lasted 38 years in television I still don’t know. I’ve seen better people – so much better people than me – lose their jobs because of cost cutting or redundancies or the proverbial ‘change in direction’, and I never, ever thought I was immune to getting that tap.”

Still, when it came, delivered in that now infamous call from Seven management, Ghidella will admit to a “deep sadness” at the ending of her own nightly bulletin.

“I wasn’t shocked when it happened, but I was saddened when it happened,’’ she says.

“I kind of thought after 38 years, this isn’t how I wanted it to end, and the hardest thing for me to actually accept was that I had given all that service for that long, and then that was how it ended.

“I think sadness is the biggest emotion for me right now.

“It’s the sadness of losing my wonderful friends in a work capacity, it’s the sadness of losing my connection to the viewers, and it’s my sadness that after 38 years I was fired.

“People get fired from their jobs every single day, and I guess when you’ve been somewhere a long time and it happens, there is a sense of, ‘Well, what on earth was all that for?’ And I think for anyone who’s experienced that in any field, it’s something you have to wrap your head around.”

Ghidella pauses, keen to stress her next point.

“Now, I’m not at all being disrespectful here to Channel 7, and I’m not dissing on Channel 7,
I had a great run until I didn’t. ”

She is, however, keen to redress one thing.

Ghidella says she was offered the chance to say goodbye to viewers on air, but demurred, not because she didn’t want to, but because she wasn’t sure she could deliver her farewell with her trademark professionalism.

“I think it was the emotional side of it. I was not certain I could keep my emotions in check. I didn’t want to be on air, trying to communicate the news, which is a very serious business, if I was not completely composed. If I’d made mistakes, if my voice had a wobble in it, that’s not professional and our viewers deserve better than that.”

Ghidella, still says “our” viewers, an understandable slip of the tongue considering the very recent timing of her departure – and her relationship with her viewing audience.

Newsreaders, particularly long-term newsreaders, have a particular and somewhat unique bond with the people who watch them every night. While free-to-air television is undoubtedly struggling to attract eyeballs, and advertising dollars in the so-called “new media landscape” are tight everywhere, there remains a strong loyalty among viewers to their “favourite” newsreaders.

“I do consider the viewers friends,” Ghidella says.

“Family, actually. When you are in their lounge rooms at 6pm, five days a week, they have to trust you. I’m well aware the viewers have treated me as a trusted source of bringing them serious news day in, day out. They have made a connection with me, that connection has now been broken and I feel a little lost.

“I’m grieving for the fact that I’m not there anymore with them. In 38 years of doing this, you do get a sense of, ‘Oh, I’m delivering the bad news again, but it’s not going to be as bad, because it’s come from a trusted source that you can rely on.’ And I think when the world seems to be rapidly and ever-changing around all of us, there’s a comfort that comes with that.”

And also, a deep familiarity. Ghidella laughs.

“You know, you’ll be walking down the street and a viewer will shout out, ‘We love you, Shazza’. I really love Australian audiences, they’re so down to earth and ready to have a laugh with you.”

Ghidella, while as polished as it is writ newsreaders must be, is also down to earth, still very much the daughter of a cane farmer and a mill worker from Babinda, 60km south of Cairns. The future reporter grew up in old canecutters’ barracks where carpet snakes would regularly drop from the unlined ceiling, and you had to, she notes with a grin, “keep your eyes open”.

And while she has spent the past 40 or so years telling other peoples’ stories, her current hiatus (and many believe it is surely only a brief one) from our screens means she has time to reflect on her own. How Sharyn the bookworm from Babinda climbed to the top of The Mountain.

“I would have been really, really happy to stay at the Cairns Post,” Ghidella muses. “From the moment I discovered news writing, I was hooked. A career in television is not something that was on my radar at all.”

Growing up in the idyllic-sounding Happy Valley in Babinda, with her father Romey, mother Cheryl, and younger brother Damon, Ghidella says she had her nose permanently embedded in a book and, later, her eyes on the prize of a job in journalism.

“I went to Babinda State School, then I boarded at St Patrick’s College in Townsville, then I moved to Brisbane in 1983 to do a Bachelor of Business, Communications, and that’s where I fell in love with journalism, particularly news writing.

“They’d give me a task. Whatever the assignment was, I’d go off and become so entrenched in what I was doing, so enmeshed in the story. I was one of those kids, I wanted to throw everything I had at it. I remember thinking, ‘I really want a job in this game. I’m going to do work experience on my holidays’.

“I went to the Cairns Post, I also did work experience at 4EB Brisbane, the multicultural station, and the last internship I did was at North Queensland Television (NQTV). I had sent out my resume everywhere, I had sent out tapes, I had sent what I could to every news outlet I could think of. So when NQTV said there was a job going, I said ‘I’ll take anything’ and I meant it. That was the start of a long and fabulous career that I’ve enjoyed every single second of.”

It was also the start of a rapid rise through the ranks, from the Cairns newsroom to Townsville’s studios in 1989.

“If you wanted to get ahead, you had to go to the main broadcasting centre, which was Townsville,” she says.

“That’s when I started producing, as well as reporting, as well as reading, all the elements of storytelling – and you know what? If they asked me tomorrow to produce, I could do it. If they asked me if I thought a story was going to fly or not, I would instantly know, because 38 years of experience tells you that’s a good yarn, and whether or not the viewers want to hear it.

“It becomes instinctive.”

In 1990, at 24 years old, Ghidella was poached by Brisbane’s Channel 10 newsroom, then she was lured to Sydney and the network’s newsroom there, only to be poached again by Nine in 1992. After three years as a reporter, Ghidella was promoted to present Daybreak, a now retired, early-morning news program.

“I was also doing the Qantas news, so I would get up at 3am, do Qantas, then Daybreak and then I also started filling in on the Today Show.”

Ghidella became the regular reader on the then wildly popular Today, with legendary journalists Steve Liebmann and Tracy Grimshaw in the host chairs.

Her long-term partner, Paul Croll, 57, now a freelance cameraman who she met while working in Cairns, was then employed as the assistant cameraman on Ten’s Good Morning Australia, known fondly by viewers as GMA.

It was a hectic life for the couple, and when Ghidella became pregnant at 39 years old, they knew “it was time for a change”.

It was time, she says, for a return to Queensland to raise her family, to “bring them to where I always felt was home”.

So, when a job offer came up from Channel 7 Brisbane in 2013, Ghidella made her way up The Mountain.

It would be 17 years, two children (Austin, now 17 and Darcy, now 13), a remarkable professional run, and one phone call at the hairdresser’s later, before she came back down again.

Ghidella has covered every major news story of the past two decades; every natural disaster, local, state, national and international election, royal weddings, royal funerals, protests, punch-ups and A-list parties.

In her career, she has interviewed everyone from Buzz Aldrin and Jimmy Choo to Sir Bob Geldof, Michael Parkinson and Steve Irwin. She has been serenaded by Chris Isaak and played golf with Karrie Webb, seen world leaders come and go, wars declared, lives lost, genocides, homicides, and every sort of story in between. Some of them, thankfully, have happy endings.

“News is hard going. It’s hardcore,” she says.

“We talk about death, destruction, the loss of people’s livelihoods, domestic violence, all sorts of things that really hit home and hurt you when you have to present them.

“You see people at their very worst and their very best. You meet people you will never, ever forget, and you hope every single time that you have told their story properly.”

Ghidella, even after all these years, is a self- confessed self doubter. Known in the industry as a perfectionist, she says that she worried after every bulletin if she had “gotten it right”.

“I will go back and I will mull over a word that I said. I think, ‘Why did I say that? Oh, I could have said this differently. I hope I haven’t upset someone by saying that’. I have spent 38 years questioning every day that I’ve gone into a newsroom, what I’ve done.”

Tears come to Ghidella’s eyes twice in this interview. Neither time has anything to do with her firing.

They come when recalling two stories she has covered. One was during Cyclone Larry, in 2006, where she travelled back to her hometown to witness the devastation, interviewing her parents and childhood friends. And then recalling the jubilation of finding out that ChloeCampbell, the three-year-old girl who had gone missing from her family home in Childers in 2014, was found.

“We were not expecting a happy ending, there were really grave concerns about what had happened to her, and then out of nowhere we got this news that she’s been found and is safe. It’s like, ‘Quick, get on air.’ I remember I went straight down to the studio. We just started reporting it live, and it was absolutely joyous.”

As for her own story, that’s one that in news speak, is still “unfolding”.

Whatever happens, Ghidella will continue her work on the board of the Royal Brisbane and Women’s Hospital Foundation and charity ambassadorships.

“I will take a couple of weeks off to rest and reset, and then it’s, ‘What’s the next big adventure for me?’ I don’t know what that looks like, but I’m a worker and I still have as much enthusiasm and hope as that 20-year-old girl who went to NQTV.”

Ghidella, signs off, as she always has, with her familiar, warm smile, down from the Mountain, feet firmly planted on the ground.