Stuck in traffic on one of Brisbane's busiest roads was not the way I expected to start my career at the ABC in 1986 but it became a regular horror.
Each afternoon, I would head into the weather bureau in the city to pick up the charts and a satellite photo and have a briefing from the senior forecaster. The allocated time was 4:30pm and not before, so it was inevitable that I would join the peak-hour traffic on Coronation Drive for the run out of the city. I would arrive at the station, cursing the traffic, frazzled and often late.
The fax machine changed my life. Those precious weather resources would print out of this piece of magic and all I had to do was take them to the art department in the bowels of the building and then make a phone call to the Bureau of Meteorology for the chat with a forecaster.
However primitive this sounds now in the world of the internet, laptops and digital graphic displays, it was a world ahead of my first weather job at the awkwardly named 10/4/5a, the local TV station in Toowoomba in regional Queensland, in 1975.
There, a telex machine would rattle off a list of map coordinates and I would carefully plot them on the officially supplied graph paper. My background was in acting and such was my weather presenter training, that all I knew was if the lines crossed, then something had gone horribly wrong and I would have to start again. As for a briefing, it was supplied via a document called Notes on the Chart. That was confounding. Very little made sense to me; troughs, fronts, highs, lows, isobars, millibars, barometric pressure — what the hell were they? I had no idea and there was no handy Google to sort it out. So I plodded my way through the notes and tried to make sense of it as best I could. I knew our audience relied on it as they were largely farmers and graziers and weather information was vital.
At that time, the forecasts were not very reliable. There was little to base them on with only one satellite passing a day and none of the supercomputers and sophisticated modelling that is used today available, so I would frequently wake up to unexpected weather and feel slightly guilty about it.
As for the presentation, in Toowoomba the set consisted of three metal screens I operated with a spring-loaded pulley. The temperatures and conditions were put together using little plastic numbers and letters. Each character had a tiny magnet glued on the back so it would attach to the board. As a new weather set was on the way in time for the switch to colour TV, our old black and white set was literally falling apart! Many of the digits had lost their magnet so I carefully rolled up some sticky tape to attach them. It meant the pulley had to be operated with a deft hand — if the board banged, numbers and letters would fall to the floor. The perils of live television.
I eventually became multiskilled at the station, producing and directing children's programs, variety shows, special events and also reading the news. I worked there for six years. It was a wonderful training ground. A stint at Channel 7 as the assistant producer on the children's show Wombat also gave me a lot of television experience and I learned a great deal from Dina Browne who was the producer of the show.
As far as the weather was concerned, the switch to the ABC was light years ahead of 10/4/5a. There was an art department to create the graphics and a proper briefing with an actual meteorologist was fantastic. I soaked up this information like a dry paddock when the storms finally arrive. Oh joy!
I credit all those patient forecasters with schooling me about the weather. They never laughed at any of my questions and if they raised their eyebrows they didn't let me see. I felt I had graduated when I was talking to a new forecaster on the roster. I commented about something and he said with great surprise: "Oh! You actually do know quite a lot about the weather." I still chat to a forecaster every day and it is a valuable part of my preparation. The forecasters can tell me a lot more than I can glean from the maps, forecasts and notes.
Another big change at the ABC was that I finally had an autocue or teleprompter. In Toowoomba there were no such luxuries. Newsreaders read from paper scripts and the weather presenters just had to know their stuff and ad-lib, and we did every night. It was another good reason to pore over those technical weather notes and try and make some decent sense of them.
When I arrived in the ABC Brisbane newsroom, the autocue in use was of the paper-fed variety and the operator sat in the studio with the carefully stacked scripts for the bulletin. As I wasn't employed for my typing skills, which are still pretty awful today (I am very fast but very inaccurate with lots of "Jenny typos" that amuse my colleagues. Yes, I really do know how to spell "shwoers" and "stroms" but my fingers stubbornly refuse to learn), I would dictate my script to a typist, which went directly to the autocue pile. As the forecasts were shown full screen I would literally cut and paste them onto a sheet of paper, crossing out anything I didn't want to use and adding useful notes. That way I could ad-lib around the details and make sure that I stuck to my allocated weather time limit.
When I started in 1986, we had two cameramen — yes, they were always men — and a floor manager — frequently a woman — and a floor assistant. They gave us our cues and kept our timing on track. It was a friendly atmosphere with lots of jokes and chats when the stories were running. We had a dedicated sports presenter, and on Friday nights a horse racing specialist who gave tips!
Nowadays it's much quieter in the studio, with robotic cameras operated from the control room and any talkback done through an earpiece. Timing is crucial; we have to finish at exactly 7:29:59. There is no leeway. In the early days we had a one-minute closer. It would start playing at 7:29 and we could finish anytime within that last minute. The director would then dissolve to the closer which had music and featured selections of the best pictures from the bulletin. These days we keep talking until the last second and it can be a challenge. I get two and a half minutes for weather, but I have to be flexible. I am like a rubber band at the end of the show, stretching or contracting as required so that we finish at that magic number.
The Brisbane art department and graphic artists were gone for a long time but we now have some incredibly talented artists back in the newsroom. However, my graphics are created by a company that specialises in weather graphics and supplies many broadcasters across the world. It's now my job to create the sequence of images that illustrate the weather story for the night. I have gone from standing to sitting to standing and now I walk around my large set and can point to the elements that are making the weather.
I don't know how it started, but sending weather presenters to wild and crazy locations that frequently have nothing to do with the weather has become a bit of a television staple, and for me no more so than at the Brisbane Ekka. It has become an annual event, diving into the animal pens and exhibits, seeing what organised mayhem I can come up with, and the viewers love it.
I have also had the opportunity to do the weather from all sorts of other amazing locations, including the wing of a jet at the Qantas museum in Longreach, government House in Brisbane, the control room at the Mt Isa Mines and on stage at QPAC before a big show (I have had a ride in the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang car).
But when the weather is extreme — and we have had plenty of that this year, especially in Queensland — I like to be in the studio. I don't see any particular value in standing in a storm getting blown around. It's better to show the viewers the information that's on the satellite and maps, and offer a comprehensive wrap up on what to expect.
In the cake of life, I think the weather is in the bottom layer. But while for most of us, it's a matter of what we wear, or whether we go out for a run or to walk the dog, for many it can be a matter of life and death. My experience tells me it is getting hotter, and as temperatures creep up we are starting to see the impacts, like the relentless rain we have witnessed this year. These days, the weather is frequently at the start of the bulletin and not at the end.
Being on camera invites a lot of unsolicited advice about what you wear and how you look. There are lovers of my style and a few haters, and over the years some viewers have decided to "help me" and offer some suggestions. Some have been very specific with outfits outlined in catalogues as potential improvement for me.
I am very happy to admit that there have been some shockers in both the hair and fashion department. Some have been due to the fashion at the time and for others I really have had no excuse. What was I thinking? These days I have pretty much settled on a style and woe betide if I try something new. The feedback, good and bad, can be instant through social media. But fortunately for me, my experiences with social media have been largely positive.
Over the past 12 months I have been on tour with a stage show that has been a nostalgic look back on my 40-plus years in television. I wanted to create something that was a hybrid between a talk or speech with graphics and a theatrical show. Working with an amazingly creative theatre team, led by my son Alex, we hit the mark using big-screen graphics, a warm welcoming set, lots of costume changes and live music performed by talented singer/piano man Jake Bristow. The show has been loved across Queensland.
So far we have travelled about 6,000 kilometres and performed nearly 30 shows. It was a huge professional challenge for me and I am extremely proud of the result. It also gave me an opportunity to travel to some remote parts of the state and meet many of our wonderful viewers face to face and discuss what impact the weather has had on them and hear their weather stories.
Over the years, I have never called myself a weather expert. While I know a lot about the weather now, I leave the forecasting and analysis of the trends to the real experts who have studied meteorology and climate for years. My role is to be a communicator who can take the complex story and deliver it as useful practical information for the audience in a warm, engaging and entertaining manner and always in a tight time frame.
It has been a wonderful ride and I have loved every minute of it — well, almost; there are always highs and lows.
