Virginia Trioli to leave the ABC after 27 years

Virginia Trioli has announced she is leaving the ABC to pursue new creative opportunities, after 27 years as a journalist, broadcaster and program maker at the organisation.

One of the most recognisable and respected voices in Australian broadcasting, Trioli first joined the ABC in 1999 following stints at The Age newspaper and The Bulletin news and current affairs magazine.

She has held numerous radio and television presenting roles, including founding anchor of News Breakfast on ABC TV, host of Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne, and most recently presenter of the TV series Creative Types with Virginia Trioli, where she explored the essence of creativity and imagination with prominent Australian artists, actors, musicians and writers.

"After spending all this time with a whole lot of creative types, I realised that I kind of am one, too. And that's really what I want to go and focus on now," Trioli told ABC News.

"I've just been so fortunate and had the luckiest and best career you can possibly have in mainstream media … but right now I am just itching — there is this voice that's getting increasingly loud in my head — to go and work on my own creative projects."

Trioli said she had been working on two new books since publishing A Bit On The Side — her "ode to joy" — in 2024.

"There's also a TV script I'm noodling away with … and a million other things in my head that are dying to get out."

ABC managing director Hugh Marks said Trioli had been at the heart of some of the ABC's most important programs and conversations, earning the respect and affection of a wide variety of audiences.

"Her achievements are many. I also know Virginia has ambitions to explore new work opportunities and I hope we can work together to realise them in the coming years," Mr Marks said. "I will be watching her every success with enthusiasm, and I hope much of it is with the ABC."

'I kind of just pinched myself'

As well as hosting Mornings on ABC Radio Sydney, and Drive and Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne, Trioli presented Lateline, Q&A and 7.30 and wrote the popular Weekend Reads column for ABC News.

On one frantic day in 2018, Trioli hosted 7.30, then ran across the foyer at ABC Ultimo to front Q&A.

"Honestly, I kind of just pinched myself at my luck at being asked to sit in all these remarkable chairs and have the trust of these incredible audiences," she said.

Trioli said she was proud of having held "power to account" in her interviews, including a particularly memorable one with then-defence minister Peter Reith about the so-called "children overboard" affair in 2001.

The Howard Coalition government had been claiming asylum seekers had thrown their children into the water, and Mr Reith joined Trioli on ABC Radio Melbourne insisting he had the photographs to prove it.

But Trioli pushed back, describing the photos for her listeners and repeatedly questioning the minister's assertions, which turned out to be untrue. The interview won her a Walkley award.

"It was terrifying to have to look this real bully of a politician — and he was — in the eye and tell him that he was lying, that he was wrong," she said.

"And that what he was saying was not in any way backed up by the 'evidence' that he had triumphantly brought into the studio to bash down these outrageous suggestions that the government had made it up that people had thrown their children in the water."

'I'm at the peak of my powers'

Still, some of her roles have come at a personal cost, particularly her 11 years of setting early alarms for News Breakfast.

"I'm someone who all my life has dreamed in an incredibly cinematic way; my dreams have casts and sub-casts and third tertiary characters and subplots and set design and the whole thing," Trioli said.

"The day I started on News Breakfast, my dreaming stopped completely. And literally the day I finished on News Breakfast it came back again."

Trioli spoke with filmmaker George Miller about it while she was working on an episode with him for Creative Types.

"And he said it's because that kind of daily work — which is so important and which takes up so much of your brain space and your heart space and your mind space — leaves no other space for anything else," she said.

"And so when I stopped [News Breakfast] I could actually open up the doors, if you like, to other parts of my imagination — that all just came roaring back."

She added: "It's funny, it really has been the Creative Types show that has sparked this for me because I feel like I'm at the peak of my powers, too … I have that very satisfying feeling of having worked very hard at establishing a set of skills and … I'd now really like to deploy them."

What she would miss most about the ABC, she said, was the audiences.

"I've worked really closely with audiences for all of my career. You feel … very close to them in the sort of jobs that I've done, and they will ring you and they will text you and they'll write to you," Trioli said.

"And it's really quite remarkable the intimacy and trust that you create. So I will absolutely miss them. And I'll miss some of the really fine editors and colleagues that I've been able to work with over the years.

"The ABC is an institution that is always going to be grumbled about and always going to be complained about. But there's always much more good in it than there is to criticise."

Trioli will finish up at the ABC on June 26.