In the ruthless world of TV news ratings and budget cuts, familiar faces can disappear from our screens overnight. Others manage to grace our screens for decade after decade – often on station after station.

Recent weeks have seen Adelaide’s Channel 10 sack local presenters and shift the news to its Melbourne studio, while rival Channel 7 also dumped news and weather presenters, dropped current affairs show Today Tonight and started to take its 4pm bulletin from interstate.

It’s all happened before, though, and viewers’ memories are longer than some on-air identities’ careers.

Here’s a look back at some more of the newsreaders and weather presenters we loved.

PETER SELLEN

Peter Sellen was working on radio at 5DN, across the road from Channel 9’s Tynte St studios in North Adelaide, when he heard that its then weekend newsreader Tony Murphy was getting “itchy feet”.

Sellen auditioned, got the part-time job in 1977 became full-time the following year, starting a 35-year TV career which included presenting the news on all three Adelaide commercial networks.

At the same time, he spent a collective 20 years on radio stations 5DN and 5AA.

After Sellen took a redundancy package from Ten in 2011, he became spokesman for the Animal Welfare League – on the recommendation of weather presenter Melody Horrill.

He retired a year later to undergo back surgery – and write his autobiography, titled I Know You, You’re That Guy!

“Every time I used to go out somewhere, people would say ‘I grew up watching you’ or ‘You’re a legend’ … all these half-pissed 30-somethings. Then they’d say: ‘You’re George Donikian’,” he laughs.

Perhaps to avoid such confusion, Sellen, now 69, shaved off “the porn star mo” in later years.

Born in Ontario, Canada, in 1951, Sellen moved with his family to Auckland two years later, then to Melbourne in 1956. At age nine he joined the Australian Boys Choir for six years, then at 15 enlisted in the Royal Australian Navy and saw much of the world aboard the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne.

“I was in the navy for years, then I segued into the media,” he says.

One of Sellen’s less onerous duties during his early years at Nine was to compere the final Miss South Australian Beach Girl Quest in 1979. It was won by 17-year-old “Cheryl Pritchard” of Para Hills – now better known as fellow TV presenter Cherylee Harris, who technically still holds the title.

Sellen was also in Melbourne to present Ten News in 2001 when the World Trade Centre collapsed. “They next day it was just wall-to-wall live crosses,” he recalls.

Nine years ago, Sellen had completed the early 6am shift at Ten, when the evening newsreader suddenly fell ill and he rushed to the makeup room to step in and fill the role.

“I looked a day later and 40,000 extra people watched that night – there was nothing else special happening,” he recalls.

When the station shrugged that off as an aberration, Sellen says “it firmed my decision” to leave.

Since retiring, he has also written a road test blog with his assessments of more than 120 cars, prepared a media training course, and recorded commercial voiceovers.

Sellen’s most recent TV appearance was on the 200th episode of community broadcaster Channel 44’s program Our Time in 2015, when he reunited with hosts Malcolm Harslett and Janice Baker and fellow presenters Sue Cardwell and Ken Dickin.

ALEC MACASKILL

He was the first Top 40 “disc jockey” on Adelaide radio – and it wasn’t long before the late Alec Macaskill’s trademark spectacles also became a familiar sight on our TV screens.

Born in Sydney in 1921, Macaskill was made to study voice production, as well as piano, by his mother – something that paid dividends when the family moved to Perth and 17-year-old Alec, who was still at school, answered an advertisement for a radio announcer and copywriter.

Not long into his new career, World War II intervened and Macaskill joined the army, doing most of his service in WA’s remote north.

After the war in 1946, Macaskill was attempting to resume his radio career in Sydney, when his father visited and remarked that he’d heard Adelaide’s 5AD was looking for an announcer.

“I made an audition tape and sent it off,’’ said Macaskill, who died in 2007 aged 86. The rest became Adelaide radio and TV history.

“We had to be able to host musical programs, read the news, interview visiting celebrities and do the introductory narrations for the radio serials which, in those days, attracted TV-style ratings,” he recalled of those early years.

Macaskill soon added another string to his bow when 5AD “went pop” with a radical Top 40 music program on Sundays.

TV’s arrival in South Australia in 1959 forced radio to further rethink its role and abandoned its block programming of plays, serials, and quizzes.

In 1968, Keith Conlon joined 5AD and it introduced Dialogue, a talkback program which teamed him with Macaskill.

Opportunities also began to present themselves in the new medium of TV. Macaskill began reading the late night news on Channel 7, then doing voice-overs for the main evening news.

“Then, when Roger Cardwell left Seven, suddenly I was ‘in’,” he recalled.

Macaskill remained in Seven’s news chair for eight years, during which time he also presented election coverage, telethons and the popular TV schools quiz show, It’s Academic.

Although he retired in 1982 to put his feet up and play golf, that lasted just 18 months before he was sought out to write and read news with 5KA, then rejoined his old mates at 5AD for another six years.

In 1989 5AD, buoyed by the reaction to its recent broadcast of Orson Welles’ classic War of the Worlds, introduced Alec Macaskill’s Sunday Night Armchair Thriller – a 30-minute play using classic tales from writers like Edgar Allen Poe and R.L. Stevenson.

Macaskill retired for a second time in 1994, aged 72 and spent days at his Glenelg home cooking dishes from around the world for his second wife Pat, who was still working, and looking after their two lively wire-haired fox terriers.

“In my day in radio and television we didn’t make an awful lot of money out of it,” he said at that time, “but, God, we had some fun!”

KELLY NESTOR

Back in 1998 Broken Hill – just over the SA-NSW border – voted on whether to take the ABC-TV news bulletin from Sydney or Adelaide. The residents chose Adelaide where one of their own, Kelly Nestor, was Aunty’s weekend newsreader and later the host of Stateline and co-presenter of the 7pm news on weeknights with Michael Smyth.

A 1989 graduate of journalism school at Magill (now run by UniSA), Nestor started her career with GTS/BKN (now Southern Cross Television) in Port Pirie and Broken Hill before switching to Channel 7 in Adelaide where she also worked for Messenger Newspapers.

Nestor’s career also took her interstate: “I worked in Canberra with the Channel 9 affiliate WIN TV and used to run around for Peter Harvey and Laurie Oaks doing their early morning pollie pick-ups and covering the ACT Legislative Assembly”. And to London where she worked for Associated Press Television and the UK bureau of American sports cable giant ESPN.

When Nikki Dwyer decided to leave Channel 10 Adelaide in late 2000, Nestor was announced as her replacement to co-present the weekday news with George Donikian from Melbourne where it was broadcast at the time.

After five years, Nestor handed in her notice and returned to the ABC to pioneer its pilot News 24 project in Melbourne and Sydney before moving to Sky News.

In 2007 she returned to Adelaide to co-anchor Channel 9 news with Rob Kelvin.

Two years later Nestor told viewers at the end of a bulletin that her contract had not been renewed.

“I realised I wouldn’t get another chance to say how honoured I was to have had the privilege to have been in their lounge rooms,” Nestor reflects.

Next, Nestor became the face of News Corp’s AdelaideNow Live News webcast.

These days she is a mum to two boys, 10 and 7, while being the director of her own training consultancy, with her clients including the Australian Taxation Office.

NIKKI DWYER

In early 1992 Channel 10 announced 24-four-year-old Nikki Dwyer would be joining George Donikian on its newsdesk.

At the time she’s been a journo for rival bulletin Channel 9 News prior to which she had worked for Spencer Gulf Television (now Southern Cross Television) after completing a journalism degree at Magill.

When Ten shifted production to Melbourne in 2002 Dwyer made the move but by the following January she decided to return to Adelaide to be with her husband Tim Tape – the two now have three children.

Dwyer’s departure from Ten led to Kelly Nestor being appointed as co-anchor. And it wasn’t long before Dwyer was snapped up by the ABC – where Kelly had been working.

In 2001 Dwyer joined Ian Henschke to co-present of ABC Asia-Pacific’s Nexus program which covered current affairs, business, education and research. While it wasn’t seen in South Australia because it was part of Aunty’s new ABC international television service it was produced out of the ABC studios at Collinswood. Airing it aired three times a day on the ABC Asia Pacific satellite service and was available to 6.5 million homes in 30 countries.

Next Dwyer returned to Channel 10’s Adelaide newsroom working behind-the-scenes in a production role when Rebecca Morse was presenting the weekday bulletin before working – again as a producer – for Seven News.

In 2017 Dwyer made the switch to radio. She joined the team at ABC Radio Adelaide where she started out as a producer for Afternoons with Sonya Feldhoff. Dwyer is now a producer the statewide program Regional Drive with Narelle Graham.

“Radio was a completely new medium for me and a whole new skill set to challenge myself with,” Dwyer says. “I love the immediacy and being able to interact with listeners and I work with a great group of people at the ABC.”

XAVIER MINNIECON

Before making it big on the small screen at ABC-TV and Channel 9, Xavier Minniecon was a jack of all trades. Born in Rockhampton, Queensland, he moved to Darwin in his late teens and worked in hospitality, as a gardener, computer salesman and singing telegram messenger. In 1985 Minniecon began his media career in radio with ABC Darwin where he was a police and courts reporter. By 1990 he had made the switch to TV and was a reporter and weekend weather presenter for the ABC in Adelaide.

Moonlighting as a rap artist – at ABC Christmas parties and the TV Media Blooper Awards – Minniecon’s talents were in demand for Aunty’s All in a Day’s Work, a TV series for the unemployed. He worked on the program in his spare time as one of its presenters, but also recorded a rap on training options for unemployed youth for the program which screened in 1993.

A year later when Jane Reilly made the move to Channel 10, Minniecon took over as ABC-TV’s weekday weather presenter.

In late 1997 Minniecon announced he was making the switch to commercial television, resigning from the ABC to take up a position at Channel 9 as the weekend weather presenter and weekday news reporter.

“It’s a personal change – I needed a different direction,’’ he told The Advertiser at the time “I’ve never worked in the commercial world at all. I needed new challenges’’.

Having had quite the following as the ABC’s weatherman, Minniecon proved to be just as popular with Nine’s audience. So much so, that he was in the role – in which he was often the ambassador for the station’s charitable endeavours – until early 2011, when it was announced his contract had not been renewed.

Now based in Hobart, Minniecon’s worked as a voice artist and professional speaker.

A published author (Shadows Tales of South Australia’s Supernatural), Minniecon is on the books of the ICMI Speakers and Entertainers Bureau. Giving motivational and inspirational talks around Australia, he has been in demand as a keynote speaker and is listed as “one of our top Masters of Ceremonies”.

ROGER CARDWELL AND SUE CARDWELL (NEE BARON)

To say Roger Cardwell was a man of many talents is an understatement. When he died at age 85 in October 2019 after a short battle with cancer, South Australia farewelled a media and music legend.

Cardwell’s career in radio and television spanned five decades during which time he anchored news bulletins for every Adelaide commercial TV station.

A former journalist, he was also a newsreader for 5AD-FM and 5DN from 1985 to 1998.

A host and performer for Nine’s national TV show Country and Western Hour and Channel 7’s Country Style in the 1960s, Cardwell was inducted into the Australian Country Music Hall of Fame in 1996 as a pioneer of country music television.

When Cardwell retired from newsreading he was in demand as a voiceover artist for radio and TV commercials.

His then wife Sue Cardwell (nee Baron) was also a household name – for close to a quarter of a century.

After working as a teacher at Brighton Primary, she entered a beach girl competition and went onto win Miss South Australian Beach Girl, Miss Photography and Miss Telethon all in the one year.

It led to Channel 9 inviting her to present the weather while Joan McInnes (now Lady Joan Hardy) was overseas.

“This was about 1971 – I would have been 20 … I’d never seen a television camera before. It was a challenge. The first bulletin I ever did, Roger (Cardwell) was reading the news,’’ Sue told The Advertiser’s Rex Jory in 2006.

Also appearing on Nine’s Adelaide Today and Adelaide Tonight, Sue went on to work on children’s TV – where her roles included being a Here’s Humphrey scriptwriter.

Sue also did a stint presenting news and weather at Channel 7 before returning to Channel 9 where she worked until the mid '90s.

After leaving TV, Sue went on to become a civil celebrant. She also returned to the small screen a presenter on community TV station Channel 44’s Our Time.

While she and Roger worked together in the 1970s they did not become a couple until more than two decades later.

Sue told Jory that in the mid-1970s, when she was 23 and Roger was 40, he contracted cancer and was given three months to live.

“And then he said `I won’t be here, but I’d love to be around when you’re 40. When you’re 40, you are going to be something special because women when they get older just get more interesting’,” Sue said.

“When I turned 40, I knew Roger was still around and I rang him, sent him an invitation to my 40th birthday party. And he came. Anyway, we eventually started seeing each other and down the track we got married.’’

ROB KELVIN

Rob Kelvin started his career at Nine as a sports presenter in 1979 before his first stint as news anchor in 1983. He was indelibly linked with his co-anchor, Kevin Crease, who died in 2007. The pair took Nine News to the top of the ratings in the ‘90s, spending an unbroken 20 years together behind the desk. Kelvin was then joined by Kellie Nestor and Michael Smyth. Before current presenter Kate Collins took over when Kelvin announced his retirement in 2010.

“For any young journalist, working with a stalwart of the news business like Rob Kelvin, was a dream come true. Kelvo is not only a true professional, but he is a gentleman- humble but incredibly generous with his time and knowledge,” Collins said.

Kelvin says it was a terrific time and a heady time – especially in the ‘80s – to be a newsman.

“By gee and by jingo – I never actually had the time to do it but the helicopter was available There were Grand Prixes. I went away with Wide World of Sports to a couple of Commonwealth Games. I worked on the cricket and local football.

“It was an exciting life. But really it was the people we worked with. I worked with some wonderful people and met some fantastic people. It was absolute fun coming into work – you would enjoy getting there and as a news nut you wanted to find out the stories of the day and tell the people of South Australia the stories. But it was more the people, after 30 years they were like a family to me.”

Kelvin, now 76, announced his retirement at the end of 2010, saying after 32 years it was time for a change. He remained a member of the team, contributing to special interest stories and mentoring young reporters. He returned briefly to the newsroom in 2014 to present the 5pm bulletin.

“I’ve been living the dream in retirement,” he says. “Basically doing anything we want to do. There’s been lots of time with the family, Anna and I just love watching our granddaughter grow up and being part of her life.”

He’s especially enjoyed being home at dinner time. But there’s also been travel. And plenty of footy matches. The mad keen Port Adelaide Power supporter has his fingers crossed his team will go all the way this year.

GRAEME GOODINGS

Graeme Goodings started in Adelaide radio at 5DN, before spending 34 years on our screens. He was an on-the-road reporter for SAS10 (which became SAS7) and hosted a Saturday program called Eyewitness Extra, before becoming Sports Editor in the Eyewitness News Hour. His first reading partner was Denice Marcos. It was to be a short-lived partnership as the ratings were hardly inspiring. The channel then poached Guy Blackmore host of State Affair on the then Channel 7. Jeremy Cordeaux sat beside him for two years, before Jane Doyle joined him, forging a successful 16 year on-air partnership.

After taking sick leave to successfully fight bowel cancer, he returned to become the weekend presenter in 2005. He was blindsided in November 2014, it was announced that the Seven Network had offered him a one-year contract in a reduced capacity. “I loved my time at Seven, although it came to an abrupt end,” Goodings says.

More than three years after his shock axing, he joined his son Will (who was actually born just hours after Goodings Snr finished presenting his first bulletin) at radio station FIVEaa, taking a part-time role reading news bulletins.

“Everyone says ‘how are you finding retirement?’,” Goodings. now 72, laughs. “I say ‘I don’t know’ in fact I’m probably working harder. In the last few years at Seven, I was only doing weekends. But I’m enjoying it, I’m not complaining.”

He also runs Graeme Goodings Media and conducts public speaking training, media coaching and produces videos. Goodings confesses, with a laugh, that he can’t imagine ever retiring. “My wife Eve said “you said you never want to retire, so you’ve got your wish – you’ve got all these things happening.

“But I’m not a golfer. I like fishing and watching movies and going out to dinner, but there has to be more to life than that.

“My work has always been my hobby. I wake up each day looking forward to what the day has to hold.”

ANNE WILLS

It wouldn’t be a list of Adelaide TV presenters without mentioning one of our most loved and enduring icons – Anne “Willsy” Wills.

Willsy’s been on telly almost since it began in Adelaide, after being offered the gig as Channel 9 weather girl after she was spotted by execs in the 1964 Telethon Quest.

However, she very almost didn’t take it when she thought the call from program manager Rex Heading was a prank on that fateful day.

“I still didn’t believe it and I asked him to give me the number for the station and told him I would ring him back, just to make sure it was legitimate, and I rang back and there he was,” Willsy says.

“The audition was terrible. I had a cold sore at the time, I was trying to cover it up. I was so self-conscious. I had trouble with some of the words. There were no autocues or anything like that but I did it and went back to Para Hills where we were living at the time and thought that nothing would come of it.”

Of course, we all know now that something big did come out of it and Willsy’s long list of TV credits include Adelaide Tonight with Ernie Sigley, Pot Of Gold, AM Adelaide and Movie Scene, to name a few.

There were also trips to Vietnam to entertain the troops with sister Susan and of course the memorable night she wore the famous bikini when presenting the weather.

But if you need any more proof of her legendary status, you just have to look at the history books. Willsy holds the record for the most number of Logies won by a person in the history of the awards, with 19 Most Popular State Personality Logies. In 2018 she was also awarded an Order of Australia medal.

Turning 76 this Saturday hasn’t slowed our Willsy down in the slightest. She’s still popping up all over Adelaide whether it be with live performances with the Sunday Mail’s own Peter Goers, hosting nostalgia films at Wallis Cinemas or playing quiz master at a number of local pubs.

She even makes the odd TV appearance here and there, but says she’d love to regularly be back on the box once more.

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