Lisa Millar on Muster Dogs, beating bullies and finding that silver lining

As an ABC foreign correspondent, Lisa Millar has covered US presidential elections from Washington, DC, been on the ground in Paris after a terrorist attack and reported from a couple of Olympic Games. As co-host of the ABC’s News Breakfast, she dips and dives between political and celebrity interviews. She’s seen a lot, she’s done a lot but what she wasn’t prepared for, while writing the book to accompany Muster Dogs, the series she narrates on the ABC, was the blue dot on the back of a flock of sheep.

ABC News Breakfast co-host Lisa Millar returns to narrate season two of Muster Dogs.

“I went down to Tasmania to meet up with one of the participants so I could get more material for the book,” says Millar. “And he was driving me around this beautiful farm in Tasmania, and I saw all these sheep with blue paint on their backs. And I said, ‘Oh, are they the ones that have been picked to, you know, go off to become my meal later?’

“And he said, ‘No, no, they’re the ones that might be pregnant. I stick a blue chalk on the ram and when he’s had sex with the ewe, it leaves the blue chalk on the top of the ewe.’ So I said, ‘Oh my god, it’s like The Scarlet Letter version of the animal world.’ I was horrified but slightly embarrassed.”

Millar is laughing as she tells the story. It’s just after 11am and she’s sitting in the green room of Q+A at the ABC’s Southbank studios in Melbourne, eating a bowl of muesli – her first meal of the day, despite being awake since 3am. That, by the way, is the question she gets asked the most – “What time do you wake up?” – closely followed by “What do you eat?” and “What time do you go to bed?” (about 8pm, usually).

Millar with her News Breakfast co-host Michael Rowland.

This year marks Millar’s fifth year on News Breakfast – she officially took over from Virginia Trioli in August 2019 – and it’s been an experience that has brought highs (interviewing Nicolas Cage) and devastating lows (online bullying). But we’ll get to that soon enough. In the meantime, she maintains it’s Muster Dogs that has changed her life, which is not bad for a show she was close to quitting before series one even went to air.

“It was such a different kind of narration that I was not used to doing as a news presenter,” says Millar, who couldn’t get her head around the upbeat intonations and milking of pauses that comes with all reality-TV show voice-overs. “And there was one point after one day of particularly stressful narration, that I rang Salesy [Leigh Sales, Millar’s best friend] and said to her, ‘I don’t think I can do this’. And she said, ‘Can you just drop out? Tell them you can’t do it.’

“And I say to her every day, thank God, I didn’t do that because Muster Dogs has changed my life. I’ve met the most amazing people, I’ve written a book about it. It’s joyful. It makes me so happy. But it was way beyond my comfort level compared to what I’ve done for 30 years as a journalist.”

Muster Dogs trainers Neil and Helen McDonald with Millar, the show’s narrator.

When the first series of Muster Dogs premiered at the beginning of 2023, it was an instant hit and became the ABC’s top rating non-kids program. Millar’s phone was suddenly overwhelmed with people sending her photos of their dogs watching the show, the National Farmers’ Federation invited her to speak at its conference, and, in Melbourne, she was invited to a gathering of dachshunds for their attempt to break a Guinness World Record for the largest dog walk by a single breed. (It’s probably important to mention here that Millar doesn’t even own a dog, but now happily lives a very dog-adjacent life.)

Season two follows the same pattern as season one, except the kelpies have been swapped for gorgeous tubby-tummied border collies from Dubbo, in NSW’s central west. The five puppies have been sent to graziers in Tasmania, Queensland, NSW and the Northern Territory, where they will be trained under the guidance of master trainer Neil McDonald. The dogs have a year to hit certain benchmarks and by the end, a winner will be named champion muster dog.

Season two Muster Dogs participant Cilla with her border collie puppy Ash.

“I look at all of these wonderful participants, and I think none of them are trying to boost their Instagram numbers,” says Millar. “None of them are doing it to become reality-TV stars. They are doing it because they have a genuine love for the animals and how they work their properties. And I think that comes through with the show and why it was such a success, because of that authenticity.”

And that brings us nicely back to News Breakfast, where Millar spends her mornings next to co-host Michael Rowland. They have a great rapport and Millar is a warm and empathetic interviewer, navigating the jolly breakfast TV dance with ease. For Millar, that switch from foreign correspondent to bantering breakfast host wasn’t a huge shock – she was already a light sleeper, ready to jump out of bed for a story at short notice – but the persistent online bullying was.

“It is probably higher and lower than what I thought it was going to be,” says Millar of her experiences on News Breakfast. “There have been more thrills than I ever thought. And, of course, more disappointing moments. So I probably went into it thinking, ‘Oh, well, it’s another job’, and I’ve done lots of different jobs in the ABC, and we’ll see how this goes …

“But the lows, look, they’ve been pretty public. And there’s no point shying away from them, but the social media issues have shocked me and still kind of set me back a bit. I just have always thought people are, you know, the majority of people are kind, good people. So I’m kind of amazed there’s a minority of noisy ones out there.”

Even the most casual watchers of News Breakfast would be aware of the abuse Millar has faced. She axed her Twitter account in 2021, after daily online attacks, while in March last year she was relentlessly bullied online over her choice of skirt one morning.

Millar responded on air, calling the abuse “foul” and “disgusting”, but it has been the reactions off air that have fortified her the most.

“I’ll tell you something that happened this week,” says Millar. “I was at the hairdresser on Tuesday afternoon and I could see this woman whispering to her hairdresser and then the hairdresser said, ‘Lisa is in here all the time. Of course, she will talk to you.’

“So I went over to talk to her and what she wanted to tell me – she was was there with her seven-year-old daughter – and she said, ‘What happened to you on International Women’s Day with the skirt furore and how you were treated, that galvanised me and it galvanised my friends. And we started changing things in our circle and we started changing things about how our daughters heard people talk.’ And you know what, I gave her a hug and said, ‘You are the reason that I can keep doing it.’

“I will always find a silver lining in whatever shitty circumstances get thrown at me, and the silver lining out of that experience was that people from Celeste Barber to [Australian of the Year] Taryn Brumfitt contacted me directly to say, ‘We are with you. This is outrageous. Women have put up with this for too long.’

“But at the end of the day, it was Danielle at the hairdresser, with her daughter, saying what she felt. And when I said to her, ‘I’m doing an interview and I’m going to talk about you, is that OK?’, and she said, ‘You tell them I was galvanised’.”

Breakfast shows have a particularly strange dynamic with their audience, a kind of familial relationship that doesn’t extend to those reading the nightly news. Viewers think of them like family – maybe it’s because we’re in our pyjamas while watching, it feels like the barriers are down – and can get strangely territorial, complaining if someone has been away too long or that they don’t like the clothes they’re wearing.

Even a Google search for Millar and Rowland highlights the different ways the public see the pair, with the top suggested search terms for Millar being “skirt”, “daughter” (she doesn’t have one) and “partner”, while Rowland gets “wife”, “salary” and “height”.

“Sometimes, just to cause a bit of kerfuffle out there, I’ll put a ring on my left hand and then I’ll look at my watch and I’ll think, how long before someone messages into the program to say, ‘is Lisa engaged?’” says Millar, laughing.

And do they?

“Without fail. Every time I do it.”

Millar outside the ABC’s Melbourne office in 2021.Credit: Justin McManus

Is it strange having that level of attention on you every morning?

“I still feel like I’m a news journalist,” says Millar. “But I understand that [News Breakfast] kind of changes how people might see me and I’m totally fine with it. I mean, I’m not fine with the abuse. But I understand that there’s an interest in that kind of stuff. And, you know, I’m a pretty open book, so I’m not hiding any deep dark secrets, so it’s fine.”

Really? No deep dark secrets?

She pauses for a bit. “I can give you a small exclusive. OK, not that it’s terribly exciting. I have started seeing someone. But if you go onto my Instagram and Facebook [pages], you will not see anything of my romantic life, ever.

“I don’t ever do that and I won’t ever do it. Which makes dating as a 50-something woman a slightly different experience. It’s early days, but it’s very nice.”

Millar turns 55 in February and says she can’t see herself doing News Breakfast for another five years. Apart from Muster Dogs, she’s filmed a few episodes of Back Roads and has a few more projects in the pipeline.

“I couldn’t do anything with cats, though, because I’m allergic to cats,” she says, laughing. “So if they ever wanted to do a spin-off called Cats of Australia, that’s it, I’m out.”

Muster Dogs begins on Sunday, January 14, at 7.30pm on the ABC. The book, Muster Dogs: From Pups to Pros, will be released on January 17.

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