Marc Fennell doesn’t begrudge his many commitments. The award-winning journalist and documentary-maker is energised by the friction between his projects. He thrives on the collision of perspectives and ideas. “If I’m not doing three things at once, I’m a massive pain in the ass,” he says.
I meet Fennell, 39, on Dixon Street in the heart of Sydney’s Chinatown. The crystalline afternoon light is falling at a slant on the ceremonial gates, which advocate for “trust and virtue”.
In a black jacket and spotless white Nikes, Fennell combines warmth and effusive energy with an instinct for stories only possible if you’ve spent half your life thinking about them, telling them, pulling them apart. He wanted to meet me here, he says, because almost every weekend of his childhood, his family ventured into the city from the suburbs to eat at a nearby food court.
“Everyone would get exactly the same thing every week,” he says. “Mum would get laksa, I would get char kway teow and my brother would get Hainanese chicken rice.”
We descend into an arcade to find it, but the food court has disappeared. It doesn’t matter. Back into daylight and walking Goulburn Street, in the direction of World Square, it’s clear that this part of the city is a palimpsest etched with Fennell’s past.
He was a lonely kid, he says, who – growing up around the tribalism of music fans – found solace in film and TV. In year 9, he watched every movie nominated for an Oscar. “It was life-changing,” he says.
He points out the cinemas on George Street that he would haunt as a film critic, the steps in front of Town Hall where you would arrange to meet as teenagers in a world before smartphones.
He spent over a decade reviewing films for Triple J and left the youth broadcaster in 2017, aged 31. “It’s the only job I ever wanted,” he says. “I had no plan beyond that. My strategy was just to try a lot of things and I’m still doing that now.”
Since then, his internationally acclaimed documentaries and podcasts reflect his roving, restless curiosity. We stroll in the direction of Hyde Park, past the rush of late-afternoon shoppers and I can tell that Fennell, ever the professional interviewer, is wrestling with the instinct to learn more about me.
His projects, three of which are being released in the space of two months, are deeply concerned with what it means to be human: the strangeness, the desire for connection, the ways we might be vulnerable to broken narratives.
There’s This is Not a Game, the new Audible series for which Fennell spent time with tech hippies and online subcultures to investigate the forces that curdled the once-utopian promise of the internet. There’s Came from Nowhere, the SBS documentary that charts the rise and fall of the Western Sydney Wanderers, the divisive football team whose supporters were vilified. Then, of course, there’s the second season of Stuff the British Stole, the hit ABC series (originally a podcast), an exploration of colonial theft and the campaign to repatriate stolen objects that has unexpectedly captured viewers around the world.
Fennell thought he was making a niche show. “Once or twice a week, I get a message from someone listening to the podcast and walking around the British Museum,” he says. “It is so much bigger than me. I don’t think I appreciated how much of a phenomenon it had become.”
“I fret about how many people are watching. I think with all broadcasting, you have to operate from the starting position of ‘nobody actually cares about a topic.’ So that job, of hooking people and pulling them in, is mine.
“People think the best story is the story people haven’t heard of. It’s not. The best story is the story people think they know – and you lift the lid and show them something else.”
The British newspaper the Times once described Fennell as the Australian Louis Theroux and it’s easy to make the comparison. When he worked with Andrew Denton on the The Hungry Beast, the legendary broadcaster warned him against the danger of entering a room with preconceived notions.
“I don’t have opinions in public, even though I have firm opinions about things,” he says, choosing his words carefully. “I need to be able to walk into a room with One Nations supporters – or any other group – and I need them to know that I will listen to them fairly.
“If people know what you are going to say before you open your mouth you have very few opportunities to surprise or build empathy or compassion.”
We cross the intersection in the direction of the War Memorial before looping around the path, shaded by fig trees, towards the statue of Captain Cook. The new season of The Stuff British Stole is both gripping and oddly moving; the first episode sees Fennell travel to London and Athens to explore Lord Elgin’s theft of the Parthenon Marbles and the impassioned campaign to return them. Another fixes on a tiny doll which had belonged to an Indigenous girl from Iutruwita/Tasmania – the girl was stolen and later abandoned by Governor John Franklin and his wife, her toy discovered centuries later.
Fennell’s youthful obsession with films, I say, infuses his documentary work. He nods.
“When we are laying out the research, I say, ‘that’s a heist movie, that’s a desert adventure, that’s a Broadchurch-style gritty UK crime drama’,” laughs Fennell, who last week won a Walkley for The Mission, which delves into the theft of a European masterpiece at a West Australian bush monastery. “Nobody wants to be lectured about colonialism, but everybody loves a treasure hunt.
“I think it [was released] at a time where culture was really shifting and there was this re-examination of the past. People expected it to be this angry Brit-bashing polemic and actually, it’s a mystery. It’s a mystery first, a travel show second and [about] history third.”
In the second episode, the puzzle over how a mummified child arrived at the University of Sydney’s Nicholson Galleries frames larger moral tensions about how we honour the dead and the ways in which our stories are entangled.
“The point of the show is to humanise everything,” he says. “Even though [Gallery founder Charles Nicholson and the child] never met in real life, their stories are linked. They are both our legacy to deal with ... It is so messy.”
In the show objects are talismans of what is left untold and unprocessed. “These are not just objects – they are about identity and belonging and loss,” he says.
We are sitting on a park bench now. “I’m half Indian, half Australian and when you come to Australia, you erase all sense of the past. My mum went with simple names: Marc and Dean.”
Fennell’s own life, he says, is an example of how this complex history manifests.
“I wouldn’t exist without the British Empire,” he says. “When a new season comes out people say ‘It wasn’t just the British. Yes, the Roman empire stole things, the Mongolian empire stole things but we don’t start parliament with ‘Hail Caesar’ and Gengis Khan is not on our coins.”
Aa moment earlier we had circled the statue of Captain Cook. “Do you know why the show exists ? It’s the inadequacy of that,” he says, pointing at the plaque that records Cook’s birth and death, his “discovery” of this territory.
“The real story is so much more interesting than that.”
All episodes of Stuff The British Stole are now available to stream on ABC iview, or watch Mondays at 8pm on ABC TV.
