Anton Enus returns to SBS after long cancer battle

On a Monday two years ago, SBS newsreader Anton Enus learned he had bowel cancer. He now admits what he did next was “silly” | LISTEN

Anton Enus is back at the SBS newsdesk after treatment for bowel cancer.

It is two years now since Anton Enus saw his gastroenterologist and learned he had bowel cancer. It was a Monday afternoon and he did what many journalists in his position would do.

“I went to work,” the SBS newsreader tells The Australian’s Behind the Media podcast. “Which was, with the benefit of hindsight, exactly the wrong thing to do.”

His partner, Roger Henning, urged him to go home. “I said, ‘Well, I can’t just leave Janice (co-presenter Janice Petersen) in the middle of everything.’ I went in, I did a live broadcast. It was a bit silly.”

Two years of sometimes brutal treatment followed but a cancer-free Enus is back on air on Friday and Saturday nights, replacing newsreader Lee Lin Chin, who quit in July in a blaze of publicity.

Enus returns to SBS a changed man. Yes, he now has a colostomy bag but he also is a changed journalist. “I would say that I’m a more centred person. I don’t get as nervous about live factors as I did before.”

Downstairs at the News Corp coffee bar, Enus seems reticent, keenly observing the comings and goings of a busy news headquarters. But place him behind a microphone, even just one in a podcasting studio, and the effect is transformative. He becomes the voice of authority.

SBS newsreader Anton Enus in hospital during treatment for bowel cancer.

Enus is calm but as a child he witnessed a political past so racist it seems amazing it is still within lived history. His family is of mixed Indian and South African heritage, and the brutal apartheid regime classified their ethnic grouping as “Cape Coloureds”.

“Everything you did was ­defined by that racial classification. It determined which school I could go to, which university I could go to, which beach I could swim at, which park bench I could sit on — everything.” The journalism courses were at whites-only universities. Humiliatingly, Enus had to write and request a special study dispensation. “It wasn’t until I got to university in my late teens that I had my first white friend.”

His dad tried to stop him becoming a journalist, knowing what the regime did to them.

“It was a brutal system. They used their physical might to grind people down. People disappeared. I wasn’t aware of all that stuff. He was, I guess, trying to protect me.”

He got a job at the South African Broadcasting Corporation.

“I worked for the national broadcaster, which in itself was a moral compromise.” The place was full of fellow travellers for apartheid. When reading the breakfast news, Enus had to phone his script through at 5.15am for approval before he went to air.

“As you can imagine, with the apartheid masters in place, they did everything that they could to exert pressure on the organisation to conform to the kind of message they wanted to send out. Some people resisted that idea. And we are having a similar ­debate in Australia at the moment about independence within ­public broadcasting, but in that situation, it was completely different ­because they had all the power.” Enus reported on the dark days of apartheid in the 1980s and Nelson Mandela’s path to power in the 1994 elections.

Anton Enus in a market in South Africa as a young reporter.

Next year marks 20 years at SBS for Enus, who basically got the job off the street, after Indira Naidoo, then the late night news presenter, went on long service leave.

Enus had been backpacking with Roger through Asia and ­arrived in Sydney with plans for a two-year working holiday. He contacted SBS on spec and was ­invited in to audition. “I had to borrow a suit and get a haircut.”

He has worked there ever since, until cancer struck. Despite being very private, Enus decided to be very open about his illness, writing numerous Facebook posts and several lengthy pieces for SBS online. He was frank that he only got tested because he had a stool testing kit on hand at home after agreeing to become an ambassador for Bowel Cancer Australia. “And my message now to people is always the same: just have that conversation with your GP, find out what the risks are for you. And do you know what? It saved my life and it could save yours.”

After Enus, 57, went on the Today show recently, BCA reported a spike in inquiries.

Enus says bowel cancer is a bigger health crisis than the media makes out.

“It’s the No 2 cancer killer in Australia. It’s pretty big, it’s a pretty nasty business. … we lose more people to bowel cancer than we do on our roads.”

Despite both being public broadcasters, SBS hardly ever attracts the type of controversy surrounding the ABC. But on the eve of the 2013 federal election, it was Enus who asked Tony Abbott, just about to become prime minister, the question that caused him to pledge no cuts to education, health and the ABC and SBS. The words came back to haunt Abbott when he broke those commitments.

“You need to ask questions like that and get them on the record,” Enus says.

With an eye to the political controversy over editorial independence, Enus says: “I feel greatly for my colleagues at the ABC who still have to get behind the microphone.’’