Investigative journalist Louise Milligan is slightly distracted when we meet, apologising for checking messages each time her phone pings. A week later, the reason is revealed: she was finalising the Four Corners episode about Sydney’s prestigious Cranbrook School that eventually led to the resignation of its principal and prompted the federal government to announce an investigation into the school.

Milligan has spent much of her career covering such stories, holding power to account. After finishing an arts/law degree at Monash University, she studied a graduate diploma of journalism at RMIT, then took a cadetship at The Australian. Later, she switched from print to television, moving to Seven News, then the ABC’s 7.30 and Four Corners.

The Irish-born, Melbourne-raised reporter’s first foray into fiction is released this week. Pheasants Nest is a gripping crime thriller that tells the story of journalist Kate Delaney, who ends up in a living nightmare when she is abducted. Along the way it provides an insight into the media, policing and crime, informed by the author’s knowledge of how things work in real life.

It is deliberately written from Delaney’s perspective. “I didn’t want her to be just this sort of object, that whole idea of the oval [picture] in the frame, the ‘pretty victim’,” Milligan says, alluding to how parts of the media cover such crimes. “I wanted to be inside her mind, [to show] what she was thinking about, but from a knowing perspective because she’s someone who’s covered these crimes. She knows that instead of them being done by psychological masterminds, the perpetrator is usually a bit of an idiot.”

Various real-life cases resonate throughout the novel. Melbourne woman Jill Meagher, who was raped and murdered not far from her home in Brunswick, is one. When her killer, who had committed violent crimes against women many times before, was sentenced, Milligan interviewed Meagher’s husband, Tom. His experience stuck in her mind; like Kate’s boyfriend in the novel, Tom Meagher was initially suspected by police, adding to his trauma.

One element of the novel came from covering a coronial inquest for The Australian in the early 2000s, when someone had ended their life by jumping off Pheasants Nest Bridge in the NSW Southern Highlands. Local police gave heartrending accounts of PTSD from picking up the bodies of the jumpers, she says. Later, at the ABC’s 7.30, she conducted a series of interviews with police about the trauma that goes hand in hand with their work. “Cops get a really bad run a lot of the time, they have to see things that the rest of us can’t even imagine and have to somehow process [them]. A lot of the time, like the character D’Ambrosio in the novel, when they fall apart, they’re treated like they’re diseased, like it’s catching,” Milligan says.

That bridge setting on and around the Hume Highway was another inspiration. “I was always really struck by that stretch of road, how Gothic that section is, and knowing all the backstories – about the kids [who had died in 1990] in the pylons, about Ivan Milat. And it just started coming to me in the car,” she says, recalling the initial inspiration for what would become Pheasants Nest in the summer of 2015. “I got home and I wrote three chapters just like that.”

Fast-forward to 2021, when Milligan revisited the fledgling manuscript, and sent it to her friend and former publisher Louise Adler, who encouraged her to finish it. While away from home for work, she got stuck into writing in unusual circumstances.

“I had had this quite weirdly creatively inspiring COVID, where I was having fever dreams. My mind was really alive. I know it sounds crazy, but I wrote six chapters in a week. I was just in the zone. And that was it, then I couldn’t get these people out of my head,” she says. “You hear that whole cliche about characters living in people’s heads and whatever, but it was like they were literally telling me what to do.”

Writing the book at a difficult time in her life, she says, “was almost a kind of therapy”. “[Someone] I was talking to a lot during that period said to me, ‘Every time you talk about your book, your whole face changes, it just lights up’.”

Milligan has found herself in the headlines in the past decade. In 2018, she was a high-profile witness in the committal hearing for George Pell, cross-examined about what one of the complainants had told her about his alleged assault in the mid-1990s.

More recently, she was sued for defamation by the then federal attorney-general, Christian Porter, who dropped the legal action when the ABC agreed to pay mediation costs, while the story in question (which alleged that as a teenager he raped a girl) remained unaltered on the national broadcaster’s website, albeit with an editor’s note. Porter has denied the allegations. In 2021, federal Liberal MP Andrew Laming sued the reporter for defamation over a series of tweets that alleged he “upskirted” a woman. Laming has denied the allegations. Though several other journalists and politicians had made the same allegations, Milligan was the only one taken to court; Laming was awarded $79,000, which the ABC paid on her behalf. Recently, she was embroiled in Antoinette Lattouf’s Fair Work case against the ABC, after the sacked radio presenter claimed the broadcaster paid for Milligan’s defamation fees because she is “white”.

Parallels between the main character in Pheasants Nest and its author are inevitable: both are high achievers and journalists, both came to Australia from Ireland as children.

Kate is not her, Milligan says, but there are definitely synergies. “Certainly, the Irish-Australian thing is one of them, and the Child of Prague. I did leave a Child of Prague statue in the bin [in Ireland], which was given to me by my maternal great aunt. That aunt is the only character in the book who is pretty much exactly the same [as in real life].”

Between working full time and having two children, I wonder how she made time to write. “I just basically stopped watching TV,” she says with a laugh. “I had a sort of rule for myself: just write a paragraph a day. And you always end up writing more. But at least every single day, I had that discipline.”

Having written two acclaimed non-fiction books, Milligan has form on this front. Cardinal, about the late Pell, the Ballarat boy who became one of the highest-ranking officials in the Catholic Church and was found guilty of sexual crimes against children and jailed, won the Walkley Book Award in 2020. The High Court eventually quashed Pell’s convictions on appeal and he was released from prison.

To write Cardinal, Milligan drew on the experiences of many people who spoke to the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Abuse. She also drew the ire of high-profile figures across the country who counted Pell as a friend, including former prime ministers Tony Abbott and John Howard.

Her second book, 2021’s Witness, is a harrowing, forensic account of how victims of sexual abuse are treated in the Australian legal system.

Years of reporting on crime and interviewing victims – hundreds over the course of the royal commission alone – takes its toll, and Milligan has been diagnosed with secondary PTSD, although she is loath to talk about it. “Nothing that I have ever experienced even holds a candle to what the people whose stories I tell have experienced. I could never know how bad it is to go through what they have gone through,” she says. “I want to be honest about the impact doing this work has, and on the other hand I fall back into that thing that women often do, that I don’t want to make this all about me.”

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For many years, News Corp – her former employer – conducted what seemed like a campaign against her. That came to a head last year, when she complained to the Press Council about an editorial in The Australian; the council found in her favour.

“The focus on women journalists and women in the spotlight more generally is just so skewed. Our male colleagues don’t get anything like the same attention,” Milligan says.

“It’s almost like, ‘How dare you call people to account, how dare you ask questions’. When my male colleagues across the media – at the ABC and other organisations – ask difficult questions, they don’t attract anywhere near the same vitriol and attention and huffing and puffing on Sky News. It just doesn’t happen.”

Milligan counts her blessings that she works on Four Corners. “I am so lucky I get to work for this incredible program that has a 60-odd-year history that has led to so much change in Australian culture and in the life of this nation,” she says. “All the royal commissions, the changes to laws, all of the people brought to account, all those things over so many years … It has this rare and magical power to change things. I feel like the most privileged person alive that I can be part of that.”

Pheasants Nest (Allen & Unwin) is available from March 26.

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