It’s a hot and hazy morning in Sydney’s La Perouse. The surrounding water of Botany Bay is a vast cloak of blue wrapping the headland where journalist Paul Barry meets me for a hike through Kamay Botany Bay national park.
He has chosen the Henry Head walking track as our stomping ground. “It’s a very restful place,” he says. “You can often see whales breaching.”
Barry plays golf at the New South Wales Golf Club, found within the national park. He was once the captain of the golf team at Oxford University, but then he “didn’t play for about 30 years”. He says: “I’ve had too many kids. It’s a very unsociable thing to do.”
The former Media Watch host, now 74, has six children, aged 21 to 48. Barry moved to Australia from the UK 40 years ago as “a bit of an adventure”, but he says he was also frustrated by his lengthy commute from a village in the Cotswolds to London, where he worked at the BBC on Newsnight and Panorama.
“Then when I got here I thought: you can do both!” he says. “You can work and live near the beach, have a family – and see your family. The weather’s good, the people are nice and the place is gorgeous. So why go back?”
We circle La Perouse Museum, passing Bare Island, padding down the sandy stairs to Congwong beach. The sand squeaks under our shoes. “Wow, it’s beautiful!” he says, taking in the almost-empty beach and crystal-clear waves.
Barry joined the ABC’s Four Corners team as an investigative reporter as soon as he arrived in Sydney. A shining moment in his early career was when disgraced businessman Alan Bond – who was claiming to have brain damage during a criminal trial at the time – stamped on one of his business cards outside a Sydney court.
“He was as fit as a flea and absolutely mentally fine, so this whole thing was a complete pantomime,” says Barry. “We bailed him up as he came up to court and I presented him with a business card and said: ‘Do you remember me?’ He stamped on it, and I said: ‘Ah! So you remember me! So your brain’s not that bad.’ It was kind of a gotcha.”
Barry and his producer were rapped on the knuckles by the court shortly afterwards. “It was an outrageous thing to interfere with the legal process,” he says. “[But] the legal process was pathetic! Here was a guy who was lying through his teeth, and they could do nothing about it – or did do nothing about it.”
Barry published his first book, The Rise and Fall of Alan Bond, in 1991. He’s since written about Kerry Packer, James Packer, the Murdochs, Shane Warne and Bond again. His latest book is The Big Steal, about the empty promises of steel tycoon Sanjeev Gupta.
The British businessman, whose company GFG Alliance owns several steel, aluminium and iron businesses around the world, bought the Whyalla steelworks in 2017 promising to invest US$1bn to save the South Australian town’s leading employer.
But after mounting debts to suppliers, the collapse of GFG Alliance’s main lender, Greensill, and a blast furnace in dire need of maintenance, the SA government forced the steelworks into administration in 2025, appointing KordaMentha as the administrator. Last month it was announced 500 permanent jobs would be lost at the steelworks.
“Gupta was supposedly a saviour; he had this great narrative of him saving the planet, and saving western manufacturing and saving all these communities,” says Barry, effortlessly leaping across a stream in his leather boots so we can continue along the trail. “There are probably 4,000 jobs that depend on it out of 8,000 jobs in the town.”
Several countries are now investigating Gupta’s business dealings, including Asic in Australia. Simply put, “it’s a scandal”, says Barry.
So, of all the wealthy and powerful men in the world, which ones are worthy of years of research in order to write a book about them?
“I think it’s a particular type of person – kind of borderline sociopathic, who have more nerve, less fear, and they therefore achieve a huge amount, but probably do it at the expense of ethics or morals or treading on other people,” he says.
“They’re quite remarkable, most of the people I write about, in that they have this charisma, magnetism, and that helps them achieve what they achieve. You don’t want to write about someone who’s grey and boring, whatever they’ve done.”
We hit a bitumen road, pausing to let vehicles pass. “You always want to write about someone who’s got good features and bad features. If someone is irredeemably awful you don’t want to spend 18 months locked in a room with them. And you do really get to this sort of intimate relationship with your subject where you begin to know everything about them. You begin to understand why they do what they do – or you hope you do anyway.”
Barry didn’t speak with Gupta for The Big Steal, despite his best efforts, but he did interview several people who worked for him. Some found Gupta “incredibly charming and persuasive”, others called him a narcissist.
Why were people – including the media – so willing to believe in the “steel saviour”? “I think they were desperate, and I think he had a vision they wanted to believe in – why wouldn’t you believe in saving the planet, saving these communities and saving the steel industry? It was a story that everyone wanted to believe and they just didn’t look hard enough.”
What shocked Barry most about Gupta’s failings was “the scale of it” – repeated promises, repeated failures. “I’ve sat down and recorded the audio book, and even then I’m shaking my head thinking ‘I can’t believe these guys got away with this stuff.’”
Barry doesn’t have another book in the works – yet. He would like to write about Gina Rinehart, but “it is a suicide mission”, he says. She’s so litigious. “[But] people should not be off limits like that; people in public life like that should be able to be written about and analysed.”
After almost 12 years at the helm of Media Watch (his last episode was in 2024), Barry is critical but empathetic to the work of journalists today. “I think there are a lot of people in the media who are still doing fantastic work,” he says, but “everyone is incredibly stretched, money is short, attention spans of audiences are short, the need to get clicks or drive the figures is enormous, and the pressure on people to produce something is excessive. People are working too hard with too little resources and too little time to really dig and really find out what’s going on.”
Australian mainstream media did “a pretty poor job” of covering Gupta, he says. “[They were] not prepared to do the due diligence to see whether any of the story was true, where the money was coming from, if he had any money [and] if the regulators were after him.”
Heading back downhill, we turn back on to a rocky path, water dragons scarpering as we approach their sunny positions. I tell Barry he appears very fit, and not just for his age. “Well, long may it last,” he says. “I cycle a lot, go to pilates, play golf.
“I feel really remarkably fit and remarkably well, but I’m aware that could change in an instant. James Valentine was a dear friend. I’ve got so many friends who are sick or have died, so I know I am privileged to be still breathing. Having lots of kids keeps you young,” he says, laughing. “And good genes.”
A red-bellied black snake darts from the path into the bush. “Yeah, there are a lot of them around here,” he says, utterly unfazed. Then he playfully mocks: “Wow! Snakes alive!”
The Big Steal by Paul Barry is out now (Allen & Unwin; $36.99)
