‘It unleashes horrible hatred’: The price Bridget Brennan has paid for speaking up

This story is part of the October 13 edition of Sunday Life.See all 12 stories.

Halfway through my interview with Bridget Brennan, I ask her a stupid question. I ask her what she does in her spare time.

“I have got none, Jacqueline,” she laughs. “That’s why I am eating while I am talking to you, and why I’m also cutting out ninja masks for my son’s birthday!”

Brennan, 38, has recently taken over as co-host of ABC News Breakfast, taking the place of Lisa Millar alongside Michael Rowland. When we talk, she has just come off her shift and is preparing for a meeting about the ABC’s coverage of the US presidential election, which she is co-anchoring.

At day’s end she’ll have the kid pick-up – she has two sons, four-year-old Louis (the birthday boy requiring the ninja party masks) and Raphael, nearly two. And she needs to be in bed by 8pm at the latest for her 3.20am wake-up alarm. I take back my question about spare time.

Brennan freely admits she was surprised to be approached for the role of newsreader at News Breakfast. “I was like, ‘What, really?’” she recounts. “I am used to being on the road and in front of people in communities, reporting. I love filming and putting stories together. I love investigating. I didn’t see myself as a presenter; that’s not why I started this work.”

Nevertheless, she took up the role in November 2023, having returned from maternity leave after the birth of her second son, then moved to co-hosting the show in August. Once she began in the presenting role, she says, she soon realised that “you still connect with people, you just do it in a different way”.

Inquiring further into Brennan’s career history, I discover this is part of a pattern in which she seems to have resisted journalism, even though journalism couldn’t resist her. “I went to RMIT and did communications but I didn’t think I wanted to be a journalist,” she says.

But after graduation, and following a brief stint as a staff writer for Australian Geographic, training under the magazine’s “very rigorous style guidelines and attention to detail”, she applied for an ABC cadetship, aged 23. It was not what she expected and she describes it now as a “difficult year”.

Bianca Spender top and skirt, Wittner shoes, Lucy Folk jewellery. Credit: GK Photography

“I had no confidence and I spent most of the year crying in the toilets,” she says. “I remember when I first got into the newsroom, someone said to me, ‘You’ve been hired because you’re Aboriginal.’ It was jarring. I felt a jolt to my chest and I thought, ‘Oh, is that why I’m here? I thought I got the job because I was good?’ That really rocked my confidence.”

Brennan struggled. She believed her fellow cadets were “more clever than me and more confident than me”. A voice trainer told Brennan her voice was “too light and airy and feminine, and you sound like you should be on Play School”.

“It was only 15 years ago, but it was very blokey, it was a tough world,” she says now in a voice that is not, to my ear, lacking authority. “There were hardly any female bosses. There was no other Aboriginal person at that time in the Sydney newsroom.”

Brennan was saved when, at the end of her cadetship, she was posted to the small ABC newsroom in Darwin, where it was all hands on deck. “It was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life,” she says. “It was such a nurturing, brilliant environment. I had male bosses who were so supportive. On my first day there they put me on a resources story. I thought, ‘I can’t do that’, but they instilled confidence in me.”

Given freedom to travel for stories and to go to “just about every remote community in the Northern Territory”, Brennan thrived. “People think journalism is just being confident and going in front of the camera, but so much of journalism is connecting with people. [It’s about] empathy and being a good listener and emotional intelligence … and I started realising I had those qualities.”

Brennan was raised by her mother, Gabrielle, a policy advisor in Aboriginal affairs in Victoria. “My mum is my favourite person on earth,” Brennan says. “I had the best parent.”

Her relationship with her father Gary, who died just one day after the birth of Brennan’s first child, was more complicated. “My dad was in my life when I was little – and then he wasn’t,” she says. “That was deeply painful. I had lots of dark times in childhood. I didn’t have the words for it, but I think I struggled with depression.”

However, Brennan did reconnect with her father before his death in 2020 and the two “ended up having the loveliest friendship”, she says. “We had a beautiful time on Country. I got to know who he was and got an understanding of what an Aboriginal man in his 60s had seen – and why, perhaps, he hadn’t always been able to be there for me.”

Through her father, Brennan reconnected with two brothers – one younger, one older. She also has three younger brothers and a sister on her mother’s side. All the siblings are close.

Maara Collective “Dahlia” trench. Willow “Thea” pants. Studio Amelia “Toro 90” heels. Lucy Folk “Anchovy” earrings.Credit: GK Photography

Now Brennan has her own family, for which she can also thank Darwin. In a very Territorian meet-cute, she first encountered her husband, engineer Josh Lacoste, on a crocodile boat. It was 2013 and she’d just had her heart broken.

“My ex-boyfriend had a farewell party on a croc boat, and Josh was at the party,” she says. “He’d just arrived in Darwin and didn’t know anyone. I was this miserable character in the corner, and he came and talked to me.”

There was only one catch – soon after they met, Brennan was offered a writing and producing role in Hong Kong with CNN. “My grandfather told me you should never say no to a new opportunity,” she says. “So I took the job and really loved it.”

She was in Hong Kong for a year, then returned to Sydney in 2014. She did some overnight shifts at the ABC before landing a role as a reporter on ABC Radio’s AM program. From there, her upward trajectory was swift.

In 2016, she was awarded that year’s Andrew Olle scholarship, set up after the respected broadcaster’s death in 1995, with a pitch to “look at community-driven projects designed to help close the gap”.

“I wanted to look at mothers’ health, early education, high schooling and youth unemployment,” she told ABC online in 2017, and spent a “very defining” year in Aboriginal communities researching that project. “Everywhere I went, there were all these Aboriginal women with no money doing the work to bring communities together and close the gap. Since then, I’ve made sure Aboriginal women are front and centre of my reporting.”

By 2016 the ABC was also in the middle of a reckoning about its treatment of Indigenous stories and issues. With her mentor, Stan Grant, and other Aboriginal members of staff, Brennan advocated for a specialised Aboriginal Affairs Unit, which was established in 2017. She initially took up the role of National Indigenous Affairs Correspondent before being promoted to Indigenous Affairs Editor. “It felt really historic,” she says of the period. “It was really hard work, but we felt we were pioneering something. We had a ball.”

In 2018, strongly encouraged by Stan Grant, she applied for a job as the ABC’s London correspondent. Alas, like a chronic rash, Brennan’s self-doubt returned. “I put my application in and thought, ‘Oh my god, it’s so embarrassing. I should take it back.’”

Her superiors didn’t find it embarrassing, though – they gave her the job, and Brennan became the ABC’s first Indigenous foreign correspondent.

London was where she and Lacoste, who’d married at the end of 2019, found themselves when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Having just found out that Brennan was pregnant, and faced with the imminent closure of Australia’s borders, they were presented with a dilemma. “We had to make the decision [to go home to Australia] in about 18 hours,” she says. “We did the quickest house-pack ever.”

The couple caught one of the last flights back to Perth, then travelled on to Brennan’s mum’s place in country Victoria. It’s a period in her life she describes now as a “fog”.

In 2020, Brennan made headlines when she criticised the ABC’s Insiders program for featuring an all-white panel discussing the Black Lives Matter movement. She said it was “not good enough any more … to have a panel of white people” with “very little lived experience of discrimination and racism” discussing these issues. The voice, once criticised for its Play School quality, was respected and Brennan was promptly asked to join, becoming Insiders’ first Aboriginal panelist.

Vince shirt and trousers. Ngali “Spotted Gum” scarf. Lucy Folk “Ritual” ring, cuff and bracelet. Studio Amelia “Staccato 70” heels.Credit: GK Photography

Brennan makes zero apologies for her enduring focus on Aboriginal issues. In 2022, she did a Four Corners episode on femicide in Indigenous communities called How Many More?, which won the Melbourne Press Club’s Gold Quill award.

In 2023, while on maternity leave after having Raphael, Brennan got a fellowship at Oxford University’s Reuters Institute, researching psychological stress among First Nations journalists. And having reported extensively on the subject, she also anchored the post-vote coverage of the Voice to Parliament referendum, alongside David Speers and Dan Bourchier.

“That was probably the most challenging moment of my career, knowing that a lot of Aboriginal viewers were turning on, and having to deliver that news,” she says. “That’s not a comment on my view of the result, but whether you voted no or yes, for Indigenous people it had been a really difficult few months. I felt the weight of that moment.”

In January, Brennan was criticised by sections of the media for ending an Australia Day live cross from an Aboriginal ceremony at Barangaroo in Sydney with the sign-off “always was and always will be Aboriginal land”. Following viewer complaints, she was also investigated and cleared by the ABC Ombudsman for the remark.

Asked about this criticism, Brennan says it upsets her that “it seems to be jarring to some members of the media that Aboriginal people are now being represented on screen. I also find it interesting that some of the publications that criticise me don’t employ any Aboriginal people. I imagine those stories are easier to write when you don’t sit alongside Aboriginal colleagues.”

I ask what the impact those stories have on her. “The impact is that it unleashes horrible hatred,” she says. “I get told I’m a half-caste bitch on social media, or I get called an Abo. It’s racist, abusive language we should talk about because it is part of a global attack on female journalists and journalists of colour.”

But now Brennan has found her place, and feels confident in it, she is not going anywhere. “I will not be intimidated,” she says. “I have a job to do.”

ABC News Breakfast airs 6am to 9am weekdays on ABC.

Styling by Brittni Morrison; Hair and make-up by Karen Burton.

STOCKISTS Finer Rings; Lucy Folk; Maara Collective; Ngali; Studio Amelia; Theory; Vince; Willow

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