Smart, Sassy And A Secret Softie

 As she reluctantly turns 50, Sunrise newsreader Natalie Barr opens up to Genevieve Gannon about fears, family and why she can’t stop crying...

- Natalie Barr

For a year after the deadly siege in Sydney’s Lindt cafe, newsreader Natalie Barr would arrive at the Channel 7 studio, take a seat at her desk not far from where the sniper had been positioned, and plot her escape route.

“I consciously looked around and looked at those fire stairs and thought, what if someone comes in here, what will I do today?” she says.

The Sunrise newsreader has covered terrorist events the world over – the bombing of the Manchester Ariana Grande concert, the Bastille Day deaths in Nice, and 9/11 from Sydney, while nine months pregnant as it unfolded before the world’s horrified eyes – but on December 15, 2014, Seven’s Martin Place newsroom became part of police operations, and reality hit home for the mother of two. “You’re literally mapping it out,” she says, pointing out the various escape routes in the newsroom, and where the sniper was poised, hour after hour, the muzzle of his gun trained on the cafe Natalie and her colleagues frequently visited. “And you think, don’t tell me it can’t happen because I watched it. It was three metres away.”

Fifteen years ago, Natalie started as a “journo on the road” for a morning show that barely made a blip in the ratings, now she’s part of team leading the flagship show and she is reaching another milestone: her 50th birthday.

“If you’d asked me this last year I would have laughed it off and thought: ‘Oh, I don’t even care.’ But, as it approaches, I do care. I’m not keen on it at all,” she says.