Eric Campbell

About Eric

Eric Campbell is one of Australia’s most experienced international journalists. Since joining the ABC in 1996, he has reported from more than 100 countries, headed bureaus in Moscow, Beijing and Kabul, spent three years based in Barcelona, and covered wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya and Kosovo. He has reported from every continent, including Antarctica. In 2003 he won the Logie Award for Best News Coverage for his reporting in Afghanistan — the same year he was badly wounded in a suicide bombing in Iraq.

Eric speaks from a vantage point that few people on the planet share. He has been present at some of the most consequential events of the past three decades, has operated under extreme pressure in environments where the margin for error was genuinely small, and has spent his career finding the human story inside complex, dangerous and deeply political situations. His perspective on geopolitics — particularly the former Soviet Union and Ukraine, China and Taiwan, and the psychology of life as a foreign correspondent — is shaped by direct, first-hand experience that no amount of secondary analysis can replicate.

Eric Campbell speaks to media, foreign affairs, leadership and current affairs conference audiences. He is a compelling and self-deprecating storyteller whose ability to find meaning and even humour in extreme circumstances is part of what makes his presentations memorable. For organisations that want their people to understand the world they are operating in — or to think differently about risk, resilience and decision-making under pressure — he is an exceptional choice.