Vikki Campion has opened up about one of the most turbulent periods of her life, revealing the extraordinary lengths she went to in order to escape public scrutiny after her relationship with Barnaby Joyce became front-page news.

Appearing on ABC’s Australian Story, Campion reflected on the intense media attention that surrounded the couple in 2018, when it was revealed she was pregnant with former deputy prime minister’s child while working in politics.

At the time, Joyce was married with four daughters and serving as deputy prime minister and leader of the Nationals.

Campion’s pregnancy was famously revealed on the front page of The Daily Telegraph under the headline “Bundle of Joyce”, accompanied by a photograph of her crossing a road while heavily pregnant.

“I remember that day very well,” Campion told Australian Story.

“I was walking across a road and a car pulled out and drove right up to me and blared the horn and so that’s where they got that iconic photo.”

Campion said she sought help from her brother immediately afterwards and effectively disappeared from her usual life.

“I waddled, kind of, into a service station. (I knew there) was no point calling him (Barnaby) so I called my brother,” she recalled.

“I got in the car with him, and then it was like, ‘OK, take me out of here.’ And then I just didn’t go home again for a really long time.”

Campion said she moved house three times during the final trimester of her pregnancy as photographers and reporters pursued the story.

The controversy quickly became much bigger than the relationship itself, engulfing the upper levels of the federal government.

Then-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull publicly condemned Joyce’s behaviour, describing his affair with a staff member as a “shocking error of judgement” and saying it had created a “world of woe” for those involved.

For Campion, the extraordinary public commentary compounded what was already an intensely difficult period.

“He had no idea about my side of the story,” she said of Turnbull.

Campion revealed she struggled badly with her mental health during the period and later experienced post-partum depression following the birth of the couple’s first son, Sebastian, in April 2018.

She also admitted that, despite loving Joyce, she wasn’t convinced at the time that the pair would ultimately build a life together.

“People were like, ‘Well, why didn’t you and Barnaby do this? Why didn’t you and Barnaby do that?’ I didn’t think there WAS a me and Barnaby,” she said.

“I loved Barnaby but I didn’t think that I would be raising this child with Barnaby.”

Joyce’s political career was also thrown into turmoil. He ultimately resigned as Nationals leader and deputy prime minister in February 2018 amid the fallout and a separate sexual harassment allegation, which he denied. A National Party investigation was unable to make a determination due to insufficient evidence.

But while the political storm eventually subsided, Joyce and Campion’s relationship endured.

The couple went on to have a second son and married in 2023, holding their wedding at Joyce’s family property near Woolbrook.

They have since embraced a considerably quieter existence away from Canberra, with Campion telling Australian Story the family’s move to a secluded rural property was very much deliberate.

“I was really looking for something which was secluded enough to get away from the chaos,” she said.

Joyce, meanwhile, has undergone another dramatic political transformation, leaving the Nationals and joining Pauline Hanson’s One Nation in late 2025.

Looking back, Joyce also expressed regret about the impact his political ambitions had on his first family, particularly his four daughters.

He said that if he could have his time again, he wished he had spent more of it with them, admitting he had been in such a hurry to “change the world” that he had “just left them behind and sort of disappeared out the door”.

For Campion, however, the Australian Story appearance offered an opportunity to tell her side of an extraordinary chapter that, eight years ago, played out very publicly before the entire country.

Images: Australian Story