Interview: Thomas Kelsall

Interview Jordan White Photography Thomas Kelsall

For our interview this time around, we caught up with Thomas Kelsall. In his final year of studies, Thomas is an aspiring investigative or political journalist. He was previously editor of On The Record and has received the Julie Duncan Memorial award in recognition of his outstanding achievement as a student journalist two years running.

A lot of Thomas’ work focuses on the broader challenges that impact people’s everyday lives like politics and the environment. He is studious and driven by a rare dedication and passion for his craft that will undoubtedly enable him to continue sharing stories that matter well into the future.

Thomas Kelsall

Can you please tell our readers a little about yourself?

What do you enjoy doing when you’re not studying or scrolling through Twitter?

You’ve worked with On The Record (OTR) for a few years now. Tell me about it and your experience there? What are some high or low moments from your time with OTR?

I am a fourth-year journalism and professional writing and international relations double degree student. I originally got into journalism because I wanted to become a sports writer. That didn’t work out because the first time I did sports writing, I found out how repetitive it is and now my interests certainly lie in politics, international relations, and things that affect people’s lives in more materialistic ways.

I’ve lived in Adelaide all my life. I’ve read a lot of Humans of UniSA before and lots of them have interesting country stories and, you know, home is where the heart is and they love that small town feel that is, perhaps unfortunately, not me. I have been a city kid all my life. I appreciate the romanticism of [country] regions and I anticipate that I’ll eventually end up somewhere regional for my first journalism job. I’m looking forward to that but my heart has always been with urban life.

Uhh… Scrolling through Twitter? I’m a big sports guy. I’m a huge Crows fan, which is not good this year. I’m also a massive Everton fan and I did my exchange in Liverpool predominantly for the reason that I wanted to watch Everton home and away. So, sports is obviously a big part of my life. Not only watching but playing. I don’t play cricket anymore, but I love a good kick of the footy with my mates and still play basketball with them a bit as well.

I joined in 2018 as a journalist in my second year and things got toxic and the whole enterprise broke up in July of 2018. The whole website went dormant for a period of about eight months until March of 2019 when I decided to apply to become editor to start things up again and I was very surprised that I actually got the role.

But I really assumed a lot of responsibility with that, and really wanted to get it back up and running again. Because I think a student paper is quite an important institution, and without something for students to have easy access to, in terms of publishing and getting something they can put in their portfolio, I think the

journalism program would lack a lot.

One of the things I’m most proud of is that I managed to fix that publication, hire about twenty people—all of them fantastic—and that there was a sense of comradery. There was a real sense of what On The Record can be, and how important it is, which we didn’t have the year before. Now, it’s thriving under a new editor and I’m extremely happy under the progress it’s made since I left as editor.

When we had our first story that broke a thousand views, that was a big time. That was also a lowlight because we had to edit for potential defamation claims as well, so it swings in roundabouts.

Highlights? I think when I got past the month of July as editor because that’s when everything broke up last year. One of my goals was that OTR would get through a full year. When we passed July, and I knew everything was going to be settled - that they were going to be publishing for the rest of the year - that there was no publicity, infighting, and politics - that’s when I managed and realised that I build a cohesive group, that was a highlight.

I thought it would be more of a challenge than it was. I put a lot of time and research into investigating how a team operates best; how to make sure everyone knows what is expected of them, that there is no confusion and things like that. But at the end of the day, nothing is possible if you don’t have a good group. But I had a really good group with OTR and I’m so proud of them and what they did last year, and the ones who stayed on this year.

You recently won the Julie Duncan Memorial award for the second year in a row. What was winning it for a second time like?

You graduate next year. Where do you hope to go next?

Do the job prospects for journalism worry you? Is there a backup?

You’ve described yourself ‘despondent’ and having ‘difficulty finding reasons for optimism’ about the world. How do you feel about the world as of lately?

In your article about India giving you hope for the world, you highlight that India’s youth, or at least those you encountered, remain hopeful despite poor, sometimes horrid living conditions. How do you compare this to our outlook in Australia?

It was a big surprise in the second year. I wasn’t expecting it and I didn’t think I deserved it, but of course, you take these things when they come along. There’s certainly other people that I would’ve nominated for that award, and who deserve to be recognised. I was very happy when I won it last year because, you know, I worked very hard.

But this year was a complete surprise. And the Zoom session for the awards night was absolute chaos! It got hacked by some Indonesian guy who started shouting stuff at the start of the awards ceremony. That was very awkward but it’s been a great story to tell since.

So, this year was kind of bizarre. The first year I won it, I got to go to an awards night and meet all these incredible South Australian journalists who I look up to, and had a lot to drink as well. It was an all-round good night whereas this year was quite strange. Winning something that I did not expect to win. Very contrasting experiences.

Honours thesis, with Ben Stubbs as my supervisor focusing on feature writing. Just to expand my resume a bit and also because entering the job market in the middle of the pandemic/recession is never ideal. And hopefully, I’ll win the New Colombo Plan Scholarship and go to India, but that all depends.

I think about this every day. Yeah, it’s a lot of self-doubt and every week that I log onto Twitter, I will see a new wave of job losses. The people affected by that are people who are much more talented than me, people who have much more experience than me. People who I look up to.

When you see that, it’s disheartening; not only because you don’t want people to lose their jobs, but because these are the resumes you’re going to have to be competing with in the future. So, yeah, it’s horrifying. And then you have a god-awful economic situation to exacerbate some trends. There’s no way to put it other than bleak.

I think I just outlined some of my reasons for despondence but obviously, the journalism world is only a small part of that. I’m currently reading The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells and it’s just that process of realising that the effects of something like climate change are going to be very present in my life and have a very material effect on my life.

Before 2016, the year a lot of things changed for all of us, climate change in my mind was always something that was going to affect people in 2100 and beyond my lifetime. But the way this bushfire season was and the way the science I’m reading is, it has only increased my despair and frustration that we all just sort of seem to be not aware of it. And just kind of blindly walking through our days, unaware of the ecological collapse that is on our horizon.

I think the first thing that India teaches you is that almost everything in our lives is completely dependent on the situation we were born into, the circumstances we were born into. You know, the postcode we were born in.

But, the outlook on life there is so much more positive compared to people here. It was one of the most confusing and startling things that I observed when I was over there. I didn’t understand how someone with a subsistence diet and living conditions of mud and cramped rooms with five people, and domestic abuse, and their father being poisoned and dying on New Year’s Day, how those people would be smiling and welcoming. It really is a testament to the human spirit, but I don’t know how to import that into my own life. I complain about small things all the time, I’m incredibly obviously despondent about the state of the world and my living conditions are very, very comfortable in

You’ve got a keen interest in politics. Do you think other young Australians should be interested in politics?

You spent a semester at the University of Liverpool last year. What was that like?

Are you brave enough to make any calls on the 2020 election? Do you think we can survive another 4 years of Trump?

Our taboo column this time around is on success, productivity, and the possibility of failing uni given everyone has just had a rough semester. Do you have anything to say on this?

comparison to that. So, it’s a contradiction that I still haven’t gotten my mind around. A lot of people say that ‘they don’t know any better’, which I’m not sure about. There might be something to that. But other people say, when you’re in that situation, the smallest things can seem like the greatest gift of all, so you take things for granted a lot less. They’re the only two explanations I’ve heard on it. I’m sure there are plenty out there I haven’t read that I need to read.

Yeah, I’m quite routinely stunned by people who just lack an interest at all or awareness. That is the most concerning thing to me. I very much understand people who don’t want to pay attention to politics because it is too complicated or too depressing—which I’ve experienced sometimes, I need to tune out of news and just have a day off—but people who actively refuse to learn about the world around them concern me. A lot.

It’s something I’ve observed in my friends a lot, not just strangers. It’s people I know and it concerns and frustrates me.

It was the best time of my life, absolutely. I can’t recommend enough doing an exchange and it was just before everything here hit with COVID. So, the contrast between what I did in Liverpool and what I’m living now is so great that my memories of that time are so much more fond than what I thought they would have been at the time.

Just the excitement of being able to plan a weekend trip every week to some new European capital that I hadn’t been to before, being able to watch Everton live every week, building the most amazing group of friends that I’m still in contact with. Having contacts in Europe that I can rely on the next time I go back. Yeah, the excitement and optimism I had about my life at that stage is something I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to re-capture. So, yeah, that’s my ringing endorsement of student exchange.

Uhh… I think Joe will win. But the thing that concerns me is that at every stage of the process, we have counted Donald Trump out. We said he wouldn’t run and he ran, we said he wouldn’t win a primary and he won several, we said he wouldn’t win the nomination but he did. Surely, he can’t win the presidency, he did. So, I don’t want to just say he’s not going to win re-election but I think the polling is too significant at this stage to say with any confidence that it’s a chance.

I am incredibly self-critical. I beat myself up over every single day of productivity and procrastination and I can say that my ambitions for my career are extremely high. So high they’re slightly embarrassing. And I’m always in fear of not reaching those goals, which is also quite inevitable considering how high they are. I don’t know how to get out of that mindset. I don’t have much advice for getting people out of that mindset either.

But it’s also like saying ‘just get over your ex’ or ‘get over your depression’. It’s not easy, is it? They’re very simple things to say but I think the way our minds are wired and the way they’ve been shaped since we were fourteen, fifteen. There has been so much focus on developing your career and it starts in year 10 at the latest, and after six or seven years after shaping career success and pressure and promotion, it is extremely hard to unwire that and have a different mindset on things. I can’t offer advice, I think it is something beyond me.

The only thing I can say is that I do, deep down, think life is about the impact you have on other people. I dedicate a lot of energy on that. Maybe if I don’t have success with the career I want, I will be able to devote a bit more focus on that and improving other people’s lives.