‘There is nothing like proving someone wrong to motivate you’: Brooke Boney
The 37-year-old surprised everyone when she announced she was walking away from her high profile breakfast television job. Her next move? Oxford University.
Brooke Boney wears Lee Mathews dress.Credit: Bec Parsons
In March this year, Brooke Boney was staying with her younger brother in her home town of Muswellbrook, in the NSW Hunter Valley, killing time as she endured the hellish limbo that comes when you’re really, really sweating on hearing from someone.
Like many of us, she was familiar with this feeling in the context of her love life. But Boney wasn’t waiting for a prospective boyfriend to get in touch. She was hanging out to hear whether Oxford University had accepted her application to its Master of Public Policy program.
“The university says it’ll take eight to 10 weeks after you’ve sent in the application,” Boney recounts over coffee a few months later. “During that period I was waking up in the middle of the night to refresh my email. Every time I heard my phone ping, it was like … you know when you’ve got a crush on someone and you’re waiting to hear back? My heart rate would rise every time.”
Such anticipation can make a person near crazy. Especially when that person is a proud Kamilaroi woman who grew up as one of six kids raised by their mum in housing commission. A person whose grandparents weren’t allowed into town during daylight because they were black. The kind of person who doesn’t fit the mould of the typical Oxford scholar.
After weeks of torture, the ever-resilient Boney soothed herself with some positive self-talk. (“My internal monologue is really nice,” she tells me – a result, she thinks, of her mum’s love.) “I said, ‘Okay, maybe I didn’t get in and that’s fine. It’s not my path.’
“Finally, I woke up on a Saturday morning and the email had come in overnight. I couldn’t believe it. I had to keep reading it over and over again. I was like, ‘I got into Oxford University. I got in.’”
Boney smiles and raises her eyebrows as she tells the story, still apparently incredulous at her good fortune. In reality, though, this is far less the result of luck than it is tenacity and brains.
Boney has just come off air when we meet at a cafe in the headquarters of our mutual employer, Nine Entertainment. A couple of months have passed since she happily, and a little tearfully, told the Today show audience she would be leaving after the Olympics in July.
Joseph coat, knit and skirt from Christensen Copenhagen.Credit: Bec Parsons
She is quietly chic in a slouchy double-breasted black suit over a scoop-neck top. On her feet she wears moccasins that elegantly skirt the line between ugg slippers and loafers, a detail which only makes her more likeable (and she is already very likeable). A hamsa hand – the ancient Mesopotamian symbol of protection, power and strength – hangs on a pendant around her neck.
Over a green tea (Boney has to watch how much coffee she drinks), I ask why she wants to leave the security and fun of her current life to return to the obscure existence of a student. The reason, she says, is “so, so corny”.
During the 2020 COVID lockdown she watched the Michelle Obama documentary Becoming, in which the former First Lady talks to young black girls about going to Harvard. “I remember thinking, ‘I’d like to be able to inspire other people to do that,’” Boney recalls. “There was this thing, like, ‘I need to step up.’”
Another factor was those early mornings – her job requires her to wake at 3.30am, five days a week. “My contract was coming up for renewal and I thought, ‘Can I wake up early for another three years, or five years?’”
Boney, who has just turned 37, was also aware that if she signed five-year contract, it would take her past the age of 40. She is currently single, and has had her eggs frozen as a back-up option in case she doesn’t meet a life partner in time to have kids. “If I am going to [go back to study] any time, it’s now.”
Her mother, three brothers, two sisters and grandparents were beyond proud when she was accepted. And they were already very proud of her to begin with. When Boney is home visiting family, eating at the local workers club, it’s not uncommon for her grandpa to approach people at nearby tables and point out his granddaughter to them. “She’s famous, you know,” he’ll say.
But for Boney’s mum, the pride is mixed with sorrow. “She was at my house a couple of weeks ago, helping me pack up, and you know how mums just sort of potter about? Every now and then, out of the blue, she’d say, ‘Oh well, it’s just a year!’”
Boney gets a little teary talking about her mum, in large part because an academic adventure in Oxford shows just how far the family has travelled. Attending a prestigious university overseas is a long way from the realm of experience of her grandparents, Gordon and Lynette, who grew up on missions.
“They weren’t allowed to do anything when they were kids,” Boney says. “Pop told me a story about how, when he and his brother wanted to get money for the show, to get on the rides or play games or whatever, people in the town would pay them to fight each other.
Boney was raised by her single mother, Leonie, and left high school before finishing year 12 due to some personal difficulties. But she kept working and found her way into a Bachelor of Communication (Journalism) degree at UTS as a mature-age student.
She worked for Sydney’s Koori Radio, interned at the ABC, and was appointed political correspondent for NITV before she’d even graduated, landing in Canberra in 2013. Then, in 2016, she was poached by the ABC radio station Triple J as a newsreader.
Boney started using the traditional Kamilaroi greeting “yaama” in her news bulletins, which piqued the interest of listeners and marked the beginning of her unique role in the Australian media as an Aboriginal woman who can communicate about her community to a mainstream audience. (On air, Boney manages to be quick-witted and polished while projecting a kind of goofy charisma that is authentically hers.)
In December 2018, she was announced as an entertainment reporter on the revamped version of Nine’s flagship breakfast program, Today. Weeks after she started, in the lead-up to Australia Day, she was asked her opinion on the Change the Date campaign. She gave what she thought was an uncontroversial response, saying that while Australia was “the best country in the world, no doubt”, she couldn’t separate January 26 from the generational disadvantage of her community.
Zimmermann Illustration denim shirt and pants. Credit: Bec Parsons
Reflecting on the controversy that followed, Boney says she “didn’t fully understand the audience or who I was speaking to, or how it would be perceived. Because people really did think it was quite radical, like, ‘Who is this raving lunatic we’ve got on the TV talking about the dispossessed and referencing all these really intense statistics about disadvantage?’”
The backlash from that comment was “huge, and it was swift”, says Boney. And while it has calmed down, it has never gone away. She is still trolled, harassed and abused on social media. Sometimes she needs security outside her home. She shows me one recent threat on her Instagram, and it’s vile.
Boney is matter-of-fact. “If you say something as a woman of colour, you get trolled. People were saying abhorrent things about my family. You get doxxed, all your accounts get hacked – your email accounts, your social media accounts. That’s a really common experience. You have to get help from security. You have to get your name taken off the electoral roll. It’s a big deal. You feel like your physical safety is threatened.”
Does it make her self-censor?
“Yes,” she answers, without hesitation. “And I think that’s the intention, right? So it’s effective. You think, ‘Okay, do I have capacity to deal with the fallout from saying something? No, I’ve got a big week.’ And I know that if I say something, it will put my family through it as well.”
When she does suffer self-doubt, she defaults to optimism and grit. “There is nothing like proving someone is wrong to motivate you,” she says.
“When we were little, Pop used to say stuff like, ‘To be equal with everyone else, you have to be better than them.’ So we tried so hard at everything – academically, in sport, creatively. And my mum used to gas us up so much. She’d be like, ‘You’re so good at this, don’t worry about them!’ Like a cheerleader!” Boney laughs.
I ask if she feels pressure from her community, or from outside it, to speak for Aboriginal people? “I don’t feel it as pressure, but I do feel it as responsibility,” she replies. “That’s a big part of the reason I’ve decided to study now. Because it’s work that needs to be done and someone needs to do it.”
Until then, though, there is fun to be had – she will cover the Olympics as part of the Channel Nine team before leaving in August. She jokes that “maybe I can Steven Bradbury my way into actually competing. Breakdancing – I could do that, with a bit of training and confidence. The other one I could do is archery. If something happens, an athlete misses their bus or something, I’m there, I’m ready, I’m on the ground.”
Boney has not cut ties with Nine and may come back to the company. I ask her about recent allegations against former news boss Darren Wick, who left Nine in March and whose “drunken, lecherous behaviour” towards multiple women was reportedly an “open secret” for decades.
“It’s imperative the women involved feel as though they’re being heard, and that meaningful and permanent change is implemented,” she says, adding that her managers have been “completely supportive” of her. But this aspect of her workplace is not the overriding one. “It’s really fun,” she says of her job. “Every day I come to work there will be at least one full-belly, deep-throated laugh. I am really lucky.”
What she won’t miss are the early wake-ups. “I have to go to bed at 7pm, so I have dinner at four or five in the afternoon – it’s so lame and boring!” she says. “You can’t even date. What are you going to say to someone, ‘Do you want to go to dinner at five?’”
How does she feel about following in the footsteps of high-profile Australian Oxford alumni such as Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Bob Hawke? Boney comes over uncharacteristically earnest. “I look at those men, who you wouldn’t imagine would be role models for me, and think, ‘That’s what you should do if you want to contribute to Australia and you feel a sense of duty and pride in your country.’”
She hastens to add that while she doesn’t want to be prime minister, she does plan to emulate Bob Hawke and skol a beer on campus. (In 1954, while attending the university, Hawke set the world record for drinking a yard of ale.) “Imagine if that was my legacy – that I could drink a beer faster than Bob Hawke,” she quips. “Could you put that down as my goal? I’ve got to think about what I can get Oxford Blues in. Archery? Breakdancing?”
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