High Steaks: Jenny Woodward OAM, ABC TV weather presenter

Jenny Woodward is synonymous with the weather in Queensland, but there’s one topic you’d be lucky to get her to talk about. WELCOME TO HIGH STEAKS

Jenny Woodward knows the weather is a big deal for Queenslanders. Picture: Nigel Hallett

Jenny Woodward breezes in, brighter than a summer’s day.

Just hours after many Queenslanders woke to subzero temperatures, Australia’s longest-serving TV weather presenter is resplendent in yellow – a billowing linen frock by one of the hottest labels in the country.

“Alemais?” I ask, as Jenny swoops all that luscious fabric into our booth in Breakfast Creek Hotel’s Spanish Garden, where temperatures are now nudging 20C.

“Yes,” she beams, “I wasn’t sure about it at first but the shop assistant convinced me.”

“Well, it’s amazing on you – not many people can wear yellow,” I add.

“I can,” she smiles.

I’m sure her loyal viewers – on the ABC where Jenny has been for 38 years – would agree, even those who have sent her fashion catalogues with garments circled … in case she needs a bit of help in the wardrobe department.

You see, for all Jenny’s broadcast media clout – acknowledged this year with a Medal of the Order of Australia – it is her fashion choices that ignite opinion.

Her penchant for bold patterns and busy florals stands out in an industry which stipulates block colours.

Beyond Jenny’s three minutes of weeknight TV, her vibrant ensembles have been a star of her 2021 stage show, Weathering Well, which premiered at the Brisbane Powerhouse before touring regional Queensland.

They have been captured by entrants in ABC Radio’s portrait prize, The Bradley, for which Jenny was the 2023 muse.

Jenny Woodward and Kylie Lang at the Breakfast Creek Hotel. Picture: Nigel Hallett

And they’re evident in the fourth annual calendar Jenny helps produce to benefit the Queensland Country Women’s Association.

“People have definitely let me know what they think I should be wearing, it’s pretty funny,” she says.

“One lady on Twitter (now X) puts up photos of me standing in front of a (weather) map and talks about how my outfit matches the map. I pick all my own clothes for TV – I have a lot of clothes, I don’t throw anything out either – but I never wear neutrals.

“Colour makes me happy, my whole house is colourful,” says Jenny, who could do with a little extra cheer this week. It’s only been a few days since she – and husband Doug Woodward and their adult sons Sam, Alex and Michael – said goodbye to the sixth member of their family, 13-year-old border collie Dakota.

“We had to put her down, which was very sad, we were devastated, but she’d had a lot of problems, she’d been hit by a car five years ago so her body was quite compromised,” Jenny says.

“She was a rescue dog and just so sweet, we loved her and she loved us, but let’s not talk about that.”

How about the weather? It’s the quintessential conversation topic – and few know more about it than Jenny.

Steak for High Steaks. Picture: Nigel Hallett

“Weather is quite amazing,” she says.

“It’s in some ways an inexact science because things can change so quickly. Queensland is such a big state – weather in the tropics is dramatically different from Stanthorpe and from Longreach.

“Victoria is quite small so things move across there and everyone gets a bite. Not so here.”

I broach the controversial subject of daylight saving.

“Oh, I wouldn’t talk about that, I do have views,” she says.

“When you look at a map, Cairns in the north is on the same longitude as Charleville in the west … there are lots of considerations.”

Jenny prefers to see herself as a messenger. “I fundamentally see my role as condensing and interpreting what the BOM (Bureau of Meteorology) has to say,” she says.

“We’re having a nice quiet run at the moment because it’s kind of dry, pretty much, and you appreciate those times because summer is nuts.

“When it’s quiet, I might have 2½ (minutes), if it’s crazy I might have 3½, but we start with three and negotiate from there,” she says.

“If there is a lot of news happening I might give them 15 or 20 seconds, so we do this trade-off with the timing. It’s one of the first discussions I’ll have with the producer.”

Jenny wasn’t always so comfortable waxing lyrical about the weather. After training as an actor at the Darling Downs Institute of Advanced Education (now University of Southern Queensland), she started her TV career with Channel 10 in Toowoomba in the 1970s.

“I had to draw the map by hand – I had a piece of graph paper and I would plot the map, which was pretty challenging since I knew nothing about the weather,” she recalls.

“And I didn’t get a briefing – all you got were the notes on the weather that came through on the telex machine and you’d read it and go, ‘I don’t even know what these words are’, there was no Google, so you had to ask around and see what you could find out. It was very tricky.”

Jenny Woodward at The Breakfast Creek Hotel. Picture: Nigel Hallett

One person cheering her on – dare I say, rain, hail or shine – was her late father Bob Mackie.

“We were close and he was so proud of me,” she says of her dad, who once owned R.C. Ziegler Monumentals, manufacturer of sandstone headstones in North Toowoomba.

“To the annoyance of my sisters (Jenny is the fifth of six daughters), when I came on TV he’d say, ‘everyone has to be quiet because Jenny’s on’, and they’d all roll their eyes, understandably so,” she laughs.

“My dad died (in 1990) at 67 – so young, and of course you realise how young it is when you’re not far off that yourself. He had numerous cancers, but I have very good memories of him and I occasionally dream about him, which I love.”

Jenny’s beloved mother Laurie died in 2019, aged 98.

“Since my parents have passed away, my sisters have really picked up the baton to be my greatest supporters,” she says. “They always come along to things I am doing.”

So, too, her immediate family. Jenny and Doug Woodward have been together since meeting in 1976 in a production of As You Like It.

In 2018, at the age of 63, Doug, a former fingerprint photographer with the Queensland Police Service, started making wine, as you do.

He has since moved his outfit from the spare bedroom of the family home in Enoggera to the Barossa Valley – and his wines are stocked in boutique outlets across Australia, including Craft Wine Store in Red Hill, Coorparoo and Indooroopilly. The label? Wedded to the Weather.

The couple’s eldest son Sam, 40, is working in a Brisbane start-up which digitises hospital medical records.

Alex, 36, is a producer, currently touring Australia with The Woman in Black, starring John Waters and Daniel Macpherson.

Michael, 32, is a real estate agent in The Gap.

On January 25 this year, the night before Jenny was to receive her OAM, she rallied the boys for a family dinner.

“They asked why, is somebody dying, are you selling the house, retiring?

“It was weird, all those speculations,” Jenny says, “but when I told them, they were really thrilled.”

So what’s next for Jenny, after the weather?

“I have a few thoughts but haven’t decided – I am really still enjoying it,” she says.

“People will tell you, ‘you’re part of the family, you’re in our living room every night’, and it’s very heart warming.”

The weather is a big deal – and Jenny knows why.

“Because it affects everybody equally, you can’t buy your way out of it – it affects everybody’s decision making every morning,” she says.

“People are deciding, ‘what am I going to wear today?’ They look at the weather, and then they play the gamble: ‘It’s going to be a bit chilly, can I get away with that outfit?” Jenny Woodward definitely can.