‘Life makes demands’: Virginia Trioli quits ABC radio

Virginia Trioli has announced she is quitting her national radio program with the ABC to take on a new role.

Award-winning journalist and broadcaster Virginia Trioli has announced she is quitting her high profile post on ABC radio, declaring “life makes its own demands, and now is the right time to heed those”.

Trioli told her listeners on Thursday morning that “after many years of daily broadcasting and almost two decades of rising for the toughest alarms the ABC has to offer, life circumstances require me to work and live differently now”.

Earlier this year the famed broadcaster took an extended break for what she deemed a “long and complex summer of family illness”.

Trioli will finish up in mid-September ahead of the launch of a new high-profile arts interview series, which will broadcast on ABC TV in 2024.

Trioli has quit her high profile radio gig.

Trioli will stay with the ABC and present an Arts program on ABC TV.

She described it as a “very blood hard” choice to leave.

Trioli took the reins of the ABC Melbourne morning slot in October 2019 when Jon Faine stepped down in what she said was a difficult time for Melbourne.

“I started just as bushfire smoke filled our city, we then headed into the dreadful Black Summer fires and then straight into Covid,” she said.

“It’s been an honour and a privilege to be here with the audience through some of the years that the city of Melbourne has gone through.”

During this time, ABC radio, in both Sydney and Melbourne, has seen a decline in ratings.

According to The Australian, these worrying signs led the broadcaster to place all its on-air metropolitan station presenters “on notice” earlier this year.

Well-placed sources noted some changes to the on-air line-ups before the end of the year would be “inevitable”.

Trioli has had a long and distinguished career with the national broadcaster.

She was a founding host of ABC TV’s News Breakfast alongside Barrie Cassidy, Joe O’Brien, Paul Kennedy and Vanessa O’Hanlon, a show she hosted for 11 years.

But her time on the program was not without controversy.

In 2009 Trioli was co-hosting ABC News Breakfast and interviewing former deputy PM Barnaby Joyce when she was caught pulling a face and twirling her finger in the air, implying he was crazy.

Joyce was talking about climate change at the time.

The camera had cut back to Trioli earlier than she had expected, where she was caught in the act.

The camera cut back to Virginia Trioli unexpectedly and captured this unfortunate moment.

In 2018 the notoriously private broadcaster opened up about that moment.

Speaking to a packed Women in Media conference at Bond University on the Gold Coast, she described the aftermath as “the most frightening moment” of her career.

Before the saga, which played out in the media, Trioli said she had gone through her “100th IVF cycle and 85th embryo transfer” and finally had a successful embryo take.

She returned to work from a week’s leave “technically pregnant” but nobody knew.

Trioli recalled she was exuberant and “high as a kite”, and nothing was going to take that euphoric feeling away from her — but it did.

Recounting the moment, she pointed out her jubilant buzz could have played out on anyone that day.

Trioli has opened up about her baby heartache, which came in the immediate aftermath of an embarrassing on-air gaffe.

“The hijinks in the studio that day, all generated by me, were funny, silly and incredibly risky,” she said.

“Barnaby Joyce may have been the one who copped it from me that morning but it could have been anyone that day.

“I think my heart stopped dead for a full five seconds,” she said.

“I stumbled through the rest of the broadcast in a daze. A part of me will never recover from the shock and the horror of what I’d done.”

Once off air she spoke to her executive producer and immediately rang Joyce to apologise.

She said he accepted the apology but that did not stop the barrage of social media abuse that followed.

“The waves of abuse were pounding me,” she said. “It was dreadful. I told my husband I thought I’d just killed a 20-year career in journalism. I cried and two days later I bled,” she said.

“I often think it was probable the tiny and precious embryo was never going to take but to this day I will always believe it was also that drama and my own silliness that stole my hope for a child.”

Trioli is married to Russell Skelton and they have one child.

— with Stephanie Bedo

Originally published as ‘Life makes demands’: Virginia Trioli quits ABC radio