Weekend Sunrise presenter Monique Wright on 30 years at Seven and the hostage ordeal she rarely talks about

Weekend Sunrise presenter Monique Wright doesn’t post on social media but she is absolutely watching what you’re doing.

“I’m definitely stalking on social media,” she tells The Nightly On. “Like a normal person, I doomscroll like everyone else. And you also need to be across what people are talking about.”

Wright has been on the desk on Weekend Sunrise since 2014, but celebrates 30 years with Channel Seven this year. That’s the majority of her life in front of the camera.

But not posting on socials is not about holding anything back, she genuinely doesn’t think anyone will be interested in what she might reveal. Her children — six of them in a blended family — don’t agree.

“The kids actually think that we should do a reality show,” she says. “They’re right into (the idea).”

The delights and challenges of running an eight-person household — cooking 3kg of spaghetti bolognese at a time, the washing, mediating arguments, the general chaos — would actually make for great TV.

“I said to them, ‘If you guys want to do that when you are old enough, you can’. I’ve explained to them if they put something out there, and that gets twisted and it makes them sound like a brat, which they’re not, imagine then trying to get a job,” Wright recalls.

“It’s out there on the internet forever, they’re my concerns.

“But then they reply, ‘yeah, yeah, anyway, we could get heaps of money for this and you could get sponsors!’ I hope in time they will understand what I’m saying.”

Wright does up to six hours of live TV every weekend, so it’s understandable why she might not want reality TV cameras, or even a smartphone lens pointing her way when she’s off in her soft pants, on the couch and surrounded by her family, just hanging out.

“Everyone that lives in our house loves being at home, it feels empty when one person is missing, so that’s definitely my happy place.”

Often when people have high-octane jobs, the comforts of home are more pronounced, and Wright has had some memorable adventures on the road in her three decades with the network.

She came from a family of extroverts, so to be noticed, you had to be loud. Her version of attention-seeking was forcing her family to sit through plays she wrote and performed. They were always about horses.

“We grew up on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, and I had a horse growing up, but as a hippie, not as a pony club girl. So the plays always had horses, and the stories had a lot of twists and turns, but none of them made any sense. There wouldn’t have been a beginning, a middle and an end.”

When she joined Seven in 1996, it was as a researcher, and her break came — as many of these do — because an on-air reporter was sick. She was asked to step in to interview a singer from New Zealand, and right in the middle of it, a bird pooed on her face.

If that was now, that footage would go viral, but in those days, before digital archiving was the norm, the tapes were wiped for reuse. Years later, Wright would go hunting for that video, but alas, it was lost to the ages.

So, maybe not everything has a footprint, except in the memories of those that were there.

There was also the time when she and her cameraman were on assignment at the Easter Show filming a lighthearted piece with some rodeo cowboys when the bull that was let out of its enclosure came hurtling towards her colleague, taking him out.

It was a live cross to Sunrise and the first thing she wanted to do was to tell everyone, including the cameraman’s wife who was watching at home, that he was OK.

“Instead, I said, ‘Oh, s...’,” Wright recalls, able to laugh about it now. “Then I could hear in my headpiece, ‘Cut her mic!’ He was absolutely fine but we went to the hospital and all the doctors and nurses were walking around with their fingers on their head as horns.

“That (moment) went around the world and it’s been dubbed in every language. I often talk to someone who says they’re from, like Argentina or somewhere, and they’ll say, ‘I saw you with your cameraman getting hit by a bull, what sort of idiots are you?’”

There are gnarlier moments that are less funny to relive, such as being taken hostage in inner Mongolia where she and her crew were filming a story.

“They didn’t like the line of questioning. We were taken hostage for a couple of days, but we did manage to get out. That was pretty hairy,” she says.

Wright insists it wasn’t a sophisticated operation and the team self-negotiated their release. “It did take a bit of processing afterwards, and it was quite unbelievable, we didn’t really realise what had happened until we came home.

“When I was on the road, life was really busy, so you would move on to the next thing pretty quickly.”

In one of her roles, she was on the road for nine months of the year.

She’s never even considered leaving, and loves the see-sawing between covering serious natural disasters and international politics, to the story of a 97-year-old woman who wing-walks on planes or alpaca painting contests.

Thirty years with one TV network in commercial media is an extraordinary feat. It’s a competitive business, and long-term survivors are rare.

“There is a group of us that have been here for a very long time — Nat Barr, Kylie Gillies, Chris Reason. There are a group of us that all went through our cadetships together.

“I haven’t always done the same job the whole time and there’s no reason to leave because I still love it. There have been tricky times, and ups and downs, and that’s the case with any job.”

Wright is hopeful that the era of fake news is in the rear-view mirror and that there is a swing back towards mainstream media as AI slop muddies social media online. It’s a matter of trust and professionalism.

“Anyone can pick up a phone and report something out there, but do they come with experience and a structure around it?

“As much as we can still do things, we do rolling coverage where things are real and unfolding, we will ask questions about ‘should we show that shot, is that in the public interest?’

“It’s an exciting time to be here because it’s changing so rapidly. We move with the times but we also maintain who we are.”

Being a survivor in TV means being resilient, and that’s one of the qualities Wright admires the most, and something she is trying to instil in her kids.

“Everyone has their own idea of what resilience is, and it’s really hard as a parent when you want to protect them from absolutely everything.

“But you know that you need to hold their hands through things rather than clear the entire path for them, so that can build resilience, giving them autonomy. It all sounds great, but it’s hard to do.

“I know I’m resilient, and sometimes, that’s just because you have no other choice.”

She isn’t one to look back too often, and thinks about it when she’s asked for her memories of life in this crazy place. Not even hitting that 30-year mark has triggered a big stocktake.

Maybe it’s because she didn’t plan it, she didn’t know that’s what she had signed up for.

“I was just along for the ride, and it’s been the most beautiful, incredible ride where I’ve done so many different things.”