‘I don’t know if we can have it all’: Loretta Ryan opens up about not having children

Loretta Ryan has survived 40 years on air in the cutthroat industry of radio broadcasting, but she wonders whether she would have been able to if she had been a mother.

Loretta Ryan with her co-host Craig Zonca.

Loretta Ryan switches off her microphone after wrapping another ABC breakfast show. “Was that OK?” she asks her colleagues, “did that sound OK?”

She’s hosted the radio show, alongside Craig Zonca, for almost five years and has spent 40 years in the Brisbane radio industry, stumbling into a studio when she was 17 and falling so deeply in love she never so much as entertained the thought of leaving it.

She’s learnt every facet of the radio landscape since the 1980s and her career has grown simultaneously with Brisbane, as if the city were a dear old friend.

So yes, she did OK. She did perfectly.

Loretta Ryan is celebrating 40 years on air on radio. Picture: David Kelly

It’s partly due to her lack of confidence that she asks for feedback, but ultimately, it’s her enduring and authentic passion for her job, and for radio in general.

“I always worry about stuff and it’s probably a needy thing, but I have to make sure. I’m always saying, ‘was that OK?’,” Ryan, 57, explains.

“It’s just because you want to do a good job and be the best you can, especially if you are doing something for somebody.”

Forty years in any industry is impressive, but especially in a brutal one like radio. It’s made more impressive by the fact Ryan has spent her career in the same city, the same small and cutthroat radio circle – and with only one sacking to her name.

Of course, that was by default when cost-cutting Sydney bosses cleaned out 4BC to centralise in 2015, and as Ryan’s friend, radio legend Donna Lynch, always told her: “You haven’t been in radio if you haven’t been sacked.”

“They say work shouldn’t be your life, but radio is my life. It has been my life, and I’ve loved it,” Ryan smiles.

“The thing that I love the most is to do those stories about people, because everyone’s got a story, and I get my joy out of telling their stories.”

To celebrate Ryan’s 40-year stint, ABC mornings host Rebecca Levingston recently presented an hour-long special and there have been endless messages of gratitude from former colleagues and listeners, as well as a cake topped with the number 40. “Oh great, I’m 40!” Ryan joked at the time.

She plans to celebrate with her friends and family at some stage but, as it happens, she’s been too busy. Luckily, she quips, “I’ve got all year”.

Triple M radio presenter Loretta Ryan in 2006.

But as celebratory as it has been, the milestone has pulled on a nagging unease in Ryan’s mind.

“Sometimes you probably get a bit self-conscious because you think people hear 40 years and then they think, oh you’re on your way out, or you’re old – you think that age thing comes up, which I don’t like,” she says, chatting with Qweekend over a coffee near the ABC studio in Southbank.

“The other day someone asked me, what would your song be when you retire? And I said ‘well I’m not ready to go anywhere, I don’t need a song’.

She laments the teasing older people often get in workplaces over technology, which undermines their irreplaceable knowledge and ability to learn and adapt.

“You don’t want to have the feeling where you don’t feel relevant anymore or you feel self-conscious,” she says. “I would hope that for women in the media landscape, and in radio, that it’s not focused on age.

“I want to keep doing this as long as I can, radio in any form, because it’s communication, it’s my life, and every day there’s a story somewhere. I’m adamant that, no way, I’m not ready to go anywhere.”

Ryan began her career at Radio 10 in 1983.

She grew up in Nudgee, on Brisbane’s northside, with her parents Don and Verna Ryan – a carpenter and dressmaker, respectively – and her two older brothers. Their family home is still there, and she often drives past it when she visits cousins nearby.

Her maternal grandmother, Ida, lived down the street and would walk to see them, sharing her many sayings, “little ditties” that Ryan still recites endlessly.

Loretta Ryan’s FM104 headshot.

She had been unsure what to do after graduating from St Rita’s, but remembers thinking “I want to be something, but I don’t know what”.

Her mother proposed a trip to the CES (Commonwealth Employment Service) to look at the jobs board, where there was a simple notice for someone with good typing skills. Tick.

After two interviews, she was arriving for work at Radio 10 on Adelaide St, a 17-year-old unknowingly about to walk through a door she would close behind her for good.

“I remember the old building; I remember looking into the glass studios, seeing the announcers there,” she says.

The mornings sessions were called “women’s”, presumably because that is who was home listening to the radio at the time.

“Isn’t that interesting? Of course, it’s not called that anymore. But it was very male-dominated on air,” she says.

Thankfully, gender wasn’t an issue for Ryan. She was surrounded by women in great jobs, starting in the scheduling department under Helen Powell, a particularly strict mentor.

“I didn’t think, oh there’s no women around here, because I was surrounded by women who were showing me what to do, the ropes, and in the newsroom, too,” Ryan says.

“It was an exciting time to be starting in radio. It was great to be able to learn the workings of a radio station and be able to move, and that’s why I stayed so long.

“I remember friends saying to me, you must be the only person I know who enjoys going to work. But I do, and still to this day – even though I have to get up at 3 o’clock. I just enjoy what the job is.”

Loretta Ryan. Picture: David Kelly

Ryan spent more than seven years at Radio 10 before accepting a news cadetship at Triple M, where she spent the next 16 years. She made the switch to AM, co-hosting 4BH’s breakfast show, and then afternoons on 4BC, and finally to the fancied breakfast slot with Ian Skippen.

She watched Boy George open the new Radio 10 studio on Coronation Drive, presented a T-shirt to Michael Jackson and covered iconic news stories such as Expo 88 and the Fitzgerald Inquiry.

“Sometimes I think, oh maybe I should’ve gone to Sydney to go a little bit further (in my career),” Ryan says of the expectation to move.

“But really the thing I’m proud of is that I’m born and bred in Brisbane and so it’s so beneficial when you’re doing breakfast, and you’re on radio in Brisbane, that you know so much about the city, and Queensland. I always say, I feel like I’ve grown up with this city.”

Understandably, the 4BC breakfast team’s sudden sacking in 2015 was a huge blow to Ryan, who had worked there for nine years at the time and knew nothing other than radio and, quite frankly, didn’t want to – regardless of what her friend Donna Lynch said.

“Anyone will tell you it’s a shock and it hurts,” Ryan says. “Because my whole thing is I’m very loyal. Sometimes I say ‘I’m a bit of a stayer’.

“That really hit me hard because I thought … all of a sudden that means nothing, which is so cruel. I didn’t know what I was going to do, because I certainly wasn’t ready to say that was the end of my radio career.”

Ryan’s network caught her as she fell; a friend offered her work in her public relations firm while she got back on her feet and ABC presenter Spencer Howson, who used to jovially message her while she presented on 4BC as a caller named “Howie”, opened the door to the ABC.

“I just came and shadowed and had a look at what happens in the evening show and gradually from coming in, they then offered me some casual work as a producer, so I just started from scratch,” Ryan recalls.

“I think that’s what you’ve got to do; you have to go in the room with no airs and graces and realise, I’m starting again. I’m here to learn now.”

Ryan worked on regional drive, and then weekends, and gradually the work became full-time. The breakfast show with Craig Zonca arrived in 2018 and she enjoys a rewarding relationship with listeners now.

Loretta Ryan. Picture: David Kelly

“I think I got resilience in the early days in the 4BC schedules department, with Helen who cracked the whip, but I learnt so much,” she says. “There was so much support from people in radio. I do think the Brisbane radio landscape is a friendly group. I think we respect each other and care about each other. We’re all friends I like to think, especially when you’ve worked with a lot of them.”

Ryan lives in Nundah now and has an extensive network of close friends from her varied life stages in Brisbane – she even briefly taught aerobics early in her career.

She is single and doesn’t have children, but is surrounded by them as an aunt to six nieces and nephews. Her father sadly died in 2019 after a long health battle and she spends a lot of time now with her mother, who lives alone.

She loves her job, does Bikram yoga after work, and ultimately lives much like she did in her 20s. She is, however, often confronted by the assumption that she’s married with children, an expectation she knows is placed on women.

“And that’s nobody’s fault,” she says.

“But the hardest part is when people say, ‘oh are you married?’ And you say ‘no’ … Or ‘how many kids do you have?’ ‘Oh, I don’t have any’. And they don’t know what to say next. The conversation sort of dies.”

She reflects on her grandmother’s treasured “ditties” and how she watched her brothers’ children grow and start their own families.

“I have got down about it,” she reflects, “and I still sometimes do, because you want to pass something on to someone.

“Sometimes people make a big thing about women – that we can have it all. I don’t know if we can have it all. I don’t know if I would be doing this (job) if I had three children.

“You can never know, and it has happened for some people,” she adds, “but you do sometimes think about the future because there’s no one around me, your own family, and that can be hard.

“I said it to mum the other day, sometimes you feel like you’ve missed out on a whole section of life. But as mum is getting older, I spend a lot of time with her and sometimes I think, maybe that is my purpose, too. There are reasons for things, and I try not to question it.”

Ryan’s confidence is betraying her again, of course.

Loretta Ryan at radio 4BH in 2007. Picture: Drew/Fitzgibbon

She has a wondrous radio legacy, and she’s had a hand in so many people’s stories, and Brisbane’s itself. Radio has, undoubtedly, been her constant since she walked into that old building on Adelaide St.

“Radio, it really has been my life, and I’m proud of that as well,” she smiles.

“And just always wanting to learn more, and certainly coming (to the ABC) was a big learning curve.

“I always say, even how upset I was losing my job at 4BC, if that hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now. What do they say? A blessing in disguise? Well, I believe that.”

The radio landscape is changing rapidly in a modern and digitised era – a world away from the ads on cartridges Ryan remembers from 40 years ago, and the record label executives who would burst in, new records in hand, hoping to land a slot in the top 40.

But she is certain radio will always have a place in the community.

Like her, it’s a bit of a stayer.

“For me, radio is here to stay, it will always be in my life, and I hope I’ll always be in its life.”

Finishing her coffee, she quickly checks: “Was that OK?”