Don’t rain on my parade, says weather forecaster Jane Bunn
DISCUSSING the weather isn’t just office small talk for Jane Bunn, it’s life. The shift to Seven may have upped Bunn’s profile and grown her fan base, but it’s also meant more scrutiny, attention — and weirdness — like the man who got a tattoo of her on his chest or a Facebook group focused on her appearance.
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GO by the saying “choose a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life”, and Jane Bunn is living the dream.
Ever since a ski trip 20 years ago convinced her to pursue a career in weather and forecasting, Bunn has risen through the ranks to become one of Victoria’s most recognised — albeit polarising — presenters.
Six days a week she fronts the weather for Channel 7, where her credentials as a qualified meteorologist are widely touted, plus weekday morning radio reports for 3AW.
Amid unseasonal weather patterns, droughts, floods, bushfires and Melbourne’s famous four seasons in a day, Bunn prides herself on getting the right message out with accurate and up-to-the-minute reports, but her passionate and enthusiastic on-air delivery isn’t for everyone. She attracts as much vitriol as she does admiration (not that all the attention she receives is wanted), and she divides opinion.
Even whether she should have taken the day off work when her beloved 16-year-old dog Stampy died in 2016 generated water cooler debate.
Bunn carefully curates her own website and social media accounts.
You want to talk weather? That tweet is likely to be answered. Get grubby and you’ll be ignored.
Her five years based in Ballarat presenting weather for WIN Television gained her a legion of mostly male fans, but the attention when she was on the other side of the camera was as unwelcome for her as it was for her husband of 12 years, Michael.
“When we were in Ballarat, there was the football team and the news team, so there weren’t many other public figures there,” Bunn says.
“If I’d go out to the one nightclub, it quickly became something that I wasn’t comfortable doing any more because there was so much attention.”
She says it was tricky for Michael, but he’s accepting that his wife is a famous personality.
“I chose this job, he didn’t. It’s been difficult and at first he was really shocked by it, but he’s now the first person to say (to a selfie-seeking fan) ‘I’ll take a photo for you’.”
Working six days a week, Bunn’s one day off might be spent on a country drive (weather permitting) or getting a massage, but it’ll definitely involve food.
She and Michael are avid foodies, their spare time spent cooking or trying the latest restaurants.
A recent favourite is chef Scott Pickett’s new South Yarra brasserie Matilda.
To celebrate their 20th anniversary of meeting, they booked French fine-diner Odette on a short break to Singapore this month.
At home, the couple are keen cooks, boasting not one but two cheffy sous vide machines.
“Way before they were trendy, we imported one from the US so it comes with a very heavy brick of a power adaptor,” Bunn says.
Presenting in the hospitality space would be her next dream gig.
“I’ve been thinking about what lies ahead for me in the next couple of years and while I always, always, always will be doing the weather, it would be very hard to stop doing that, and I think they’ll need to kick me out of here (Seven) when they don’t want me any more.
“It’s what I live and breathe and it fills all day and every day, but I’m hoping there might be some time in there to show a slightly different side of me. Still in the media, but something to do with food and wine would make me very happy.”
JANE BUNN FAN TAKES ADMIRATION TO A NEW LEVEL
BUNN, 38, grew up in bayside Beaumaris, the eldest sister to Amy Carr, 34, and Alecia Jennings, 32, who once briefly dated former North Melbourne footy champ Anthony Stevens.
Bunn’s father left the family when she was six and she’s had no contact with him since.
Her mum, Bev Jennings, remarried when Bunn was 14, and she’s close to stepdad Andrew.
Bunn attended Brighton’s Firbank Girls’ Grammar School, where she was drama captain and filled her time with ballet, jazz and tap before studying software engineering at RMIT.
On her first day, she counted only five females in the lecture theatre. — “I’d come from an all-girls school so it was a bit confronting,” she says — but found a spare seat next to Michael. They’ve been together ever since.
While both never finished that degree (Michael is still in IT, though, via a stint as a pilot), it was the couple’s first trip snow trip — to Perisher in NSW — in 1998 that got Bunn hooked on the weather.
“It snowed while we were out on the slopes and I thought it was the most amazing thing ever,” she says.
“Online communities were just blossoming and I soon discovered that there were other geeky people like me who liked to discuss when the next snowfall would be.”
Soon after, she enrolled in a science degree at Monash University, majoring in maths and atmospheric science. As part of her studies, she did a semester at Pennsylvania State University, one of the leading US meteorology schools.
“Everyone else went to Oklahoma to chase tornadoes, but I went to Penn State so I could go to the snow.”
She was then accepted into the Bureau of Meteorology’s graduate program, again breaking new ground as the only woman of nine students.
After a year in Melbourne, she was posted to the BOM in Sydney (and later Canberra) as a forecaster, writing public weather forecasts and warnings. She loved working there, even the 7pm-7am shifts.
“Because you’re looking outside a lot on the night shift, you feel like you’re keeping an eye on the world and making sure everything is OK,” Bunn says.
While her BOM colleagues, “usually an older gentleman who liked a brown cardigan”, tended to avoid doing media interviews and providing on-air commentary on weather events for TV and radio, Bunn enjoyed it.
But it was a Sydney radio announcer who used to mangle her carefully crafted weather reports that fuelled Bunn’s move to the media.
At the BOM, she explains, the word “fine” in a forecast means no rainfall, so it can be “fine and mostly sunny”, which means dry and lots of sunshine, or “cloudy and also fine”, because it’s not wet.
“But there was a woman on the radio who used to change it to ‘mostly fine’, which changes it to mostly dry,” Bunn says, clearly still exasperated even after all these years.
“It’s a lovely day and she’s changed it to some wet weather. You spend all day crafting and putting the message out there and people in the media, through no fault of their own, just through not understanding, would change the words and change the meaning completely.”
MT BULLER NAMES SKI RUN AFTER JANE BUNN
Bunn then worked for The Weather Channel, but after a year of 3am starts as its morning meteorologist and keen to move home to Victoria, she got a job at WIN, based in Ballarat, after cold-calling the chief of staff.
“It turned out they’d just done a survey asking viewers what they wanted and they wanted more credibility with the weather.”
She was there for five years before starting at Channel 7 in December 2014.
She fronts the network’s 6pm bulletin from Sunday to Friday and its 4pm bulletin weekdays in Victoria.
However, her working day starts at 6am, when the BOM releases its first data for the day, and she does the weather for 3AW’s 7am and 8am bulletins from her Docklands home.
“Yes, I’m in my trackies,” she laughs.
The shift to Seven may have upped Bunn’s profile and grown her fan base, but it’s also meant more scrutiny, attention — and weirdness.
Bunn finds the chap who got a tattoo of her face on his chest at a Geelong ink shop last year equal parts flattering and strange.
There are several Facebook groups dedicated to her. One of the biggest, with more than 23,000 followers, regularly attracts lewd comments about her appearance and breasts.
As a counter to the “creepiness”, Bunn started her own Facebook group, Jane Bunn’s Weather Photography, for fans to send in their weather pics.
“It’s a nice community I can engage with,” she says.
“On Facebook before that, everything I’d seen, the comments (about me), were gross and I didn’t interact. As soon as it gets grubby, you’re not going to get anything from me.
“And if it’s using a tone like you’re yelling at me, then it’s ‘No, I’m not interested’. On social media, if it’s weather-related, though, I’m usually happy to respond.”
When Bunn joined Seven, it was also widely noted she was now more modestly attired, covering up the cleavage that was once a topic of conversation in country pubs.
She puts it down to more extensive wardrobe choices for her size 12 figure.
“When I was in the country, I was wearing clothes from one brand at Myer and so it was just whatever they had available, whereas now I have the wonderful (stylist) Ben who dresses me,” she says.
“He’s spent a lot of time working out what looks the best on me. I don’t know if (the necklines) are higher now, but it’s about what looks best.”
AND then there’s her delivery of the weather. Usually through online comments or letters to the editors, the haters of her animated style, hand gestures and pauses accuse her of being “annoying”, “condescending”, “patronising”, and like she’s talking “to viewers as though they were preschoolers”.
She describes her delivery as like chatting with a friend, and says she’s never been instructed by her bosses to change her style in any way.
“I understand that not all people are going to like it but you can’t please everyone,” she says. “I just say (to the haters), ‘It’s me, it’s me talking about something that I’m really interested in’.
“As soon as I’m interacting with information and I’m showing you something, that’s probably when it becomes a bit more animated, but it’s definitely not something I consciously do. It’s just who I am.”
Seven regularly pumps Bunn’s meteorologist credentials, with her eight-day forecast giving the edge over rival networks.
She doesn’t recite the BOM’s forecast, she’s able to interpret its main raw data — released every 12 hours at 6am and 6pm — to give the most up-to-date information.
She also analyses weather models to take the BOM’s seven-day forecast one step further to provide her eight-day outlook.
In a 2015 interview with Weekend, rival weather presenter Livinia Nixon, from Channel 9, downplayed Bunn’s bona fides, congratulating her on doing the hard yards in studying meteorology, but saying she felt confident in relaying information from the BOM.
Bunn maintains her reports, particularly her main weather segment at 6.55pm, will always be the most current because she’s able to analyse BOM data independently.
“(My report) is newer and has come directly from me, so there’s no middle man and potential for meaning to be skewed,” Bunn says.
While she says other forecasts are based on information that was available at 6am, “from me you’ve got the next run, which is at 6pm”.
She considers Nixon a “nice person” and “my friend”.
“Every time I’ve run into her, she’s so lovely. I have no hard feelings at all.”
Bunn’s next move is to launch her new weather website, janesweather.com. A joint effort with Michael, its centrepiece will be a fully interactive weather map.
It might not be the only collaboration between the couple. Bunn says they’re open to having children, but just haven’t tried yet.
“I haven’t really put it off, but I’ve just been all about my career,” she says.
“I’m aware that time is ticking, but it’s still nothing we’ve planned for and hopefully we’ve still got a bit of time to make a decision.”
In the meantime, there’s another mountain to ski (Bunn has the Bunn Run named after her at Mt Buller), with the couple planning to tick Japan off their snow-covered bucket list in January.
Whatever the weather, Bunn will be on its radar.
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