Exceptional broadcaster was European at heart

JULIE COPELAND January 6, 1940-January 18, 2025

Julie Copeland was an exceptional broadcaster, passionate about culture and ideas. While best remembered as the presenter of shows such as Arts National, Arts Talk and Sunday Morning Arts with Julie Copeland, Julie’s interests ranged across politics, philosophy, feminism, history and the environment.

Alongside famous artists and performers, over the course of her career Julie interviewed remarkable figures such as Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

I first met Julie in December 1986, when I turned up for my first ABC job in Melbourne. I had long aspired to work at Radio National, but as a 24-year-old fresh off the Overland from Adelaide, I arrived uncertain and anxious.

Julie, my new boss, disregarded my nerves and immediately treated me as an equal.

Patient with my rudimentary skills and mistakes, Julie’s critiques of my work were always direct but encouraging. Under her coaching, I gained confidence in my abilities and found my radio voice.

I was not alone in benefitting from her guidance. “Julie was remarkable in so very many ways and taught us a lot about broadcasting,” says Jon Faine, who joined the ABC not long after me. “She was so generous, always sharing her experience and informally mentoring without being bossy, a rare skill.”

Julie was an innovator and a troublemaker. She would constantly battle ABC management for airtime and resources for intelligent, thoughtful reporting of the arts, culture and ideas. I joined Radio National to help Julie launch the weekly culture and politics program The Europeans. Infuriated by the media’s preoccupation with news from London and Washington, Julie wanted to offer Australians a broader perspective on the world.

Julie Copeland with sex educator Shere Hite in the 1970s.

“I particularly remember with respect The Europeans as genuinely creative and trail-blazing,” says Geraldine Doogue, of Radio National’s Global Roaming program.

Whether discussing the chaos of Italian politics, East German dissident writers, contemporary Greek philosophy or the Lipizzaner horses at the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, Julie always knew what she was talking about. The extraordinary breadth and depth of her knowledge were the product of a sharp intellectual curiosity and voracious reading.

“She was a talker, but someone open to the voice of others,” says friend and former Radio National manager Ann Tonks. “Her genuine curiosity about the world led to her great skill as an interviewer. She contributed so much to our national conversation via the ABC.”

Julie never spoke down to her audience, treating them as intelligent and knowledgeable. Nor did she ever exclude listeners with insider jargon or fashionable arts speak. Always engaging, she brought both rigour and warmth to the radio.

Julie Copeland, presenter of the literary program First Edition, in the early 1980s.Credit: Norman Wodetzki

In 1962, Julie was a founding member of the Emerald Hill Theatre Company, directed by Wal Cherry and George Whaley. Based in an old South Melbourne church, they experimented with an Australian theatrical style that prefigured The Pram Factory and La Mama. Alongside acting, the ensemble’s performers took on practical tasks, with Julie generally serving as costume designer and wardrobe mistress.

Lifelong friend, film designer Jane Norris, first met Julie at Emerald Hill. She says Julie “was trying to help build from scratch an avant garde theatre in a city not quite ready for it”.

Anthropologist Dr Martha Macintyre also met Julie at Emerald Hill Theatre. Aged 17, Martha discovered a way of life that was Bohemian and exciting. “We would spend time talking about art and theatre,” she recalls. “I thought Julie was amazing – talented, beautiful, unconventional and intelligent. Of course, I was right – she was all of those things her whole life.”

Like many creative figures of her generation, Julie looked to Europe for inspiration and opportunity. In 1965, she headed to London and tried without success to break into the theatre scene. (Julie thought her Australian accent counted against her.) For a time, she fell back on her wardrobe skills, making money by sewing miniskirts with Jane Norris, who had also moved to London.

In London, Julie met John Slavin, who shared her love of theatre, film, opera and visual arts, and with whom Julie would spend the rest of her life. They moved to Hydra in Greece, but Julie was not enamoured of the island and its enclave of Australian expats. Instead, she found a primitive paradise at Molyvos (or Mythimna) on the island of Lesvos, which became home for the next seven years.

This was long before the Greek Islands became a mass tourist destination, and with the colonels in power in Athens, political times were dark. Julie and John had little money, but they loved Molyvos and returned whenever they could, especially after Julie retired from the ABC in 2009. Italy was another favourite place, and they spent a few years in the medieval town of Citta della Pieve in Umbria where John taught English to Italian businessmen.

“Julie loved Italy and Greece before she went there,” says Martha Macintyre. “I recall her talking to me about her love of Renaissance art. I recall her letters from Greece being full of joy and enthusiasm. Her aesthetic sensibility and her intellectual interests flourished in the Mediterranean. She was in her natural environment.”

Julie’s close friend, dance critic Lee Christofis, says in Australia Julie lived in “a double world with a perpetual image of the northern hemisphere in her mind”.

As ardent travellers, he says, Julie and John would fixate in turn on the classics, the bizarre nature of the Cold War, the oppression of the Greek junta, the minutiae of poems or the libretto of a huge opera like Wagner’s Ring Cycle.

Julie Copeland at the Venice Biennale 1997.

“We translated Seferis and sang to Theodorakis,” recalls John Slavin.

In 1975, Julie and John returned to Melbourne, where Ormsby Wilkins – credited as the first radio presenter to take talkback calls – offered her a job at 3AW. Julie worked with the radical journalist Claudia Wright to ruffle the feathers of the Melbourne establishment. After a brief stint on breakfast TV, Julie found Radio National was the best fit for her talents and interests.

Her ABC career began as a freelancer in what was then known as Talks and Documentaries. In the 1970s, she was an early contributor to the Coming Out Show, a program made by and for women that revolutionised the airwaves.

In 1980, Julie finally gained a staff position as host of First Edition, a literary program she helped to conceive that brought edgy contemporary voices to the fore alongside established authors.

Throughout her life, Julie was an activist, lobbying, attending demonstrations, writing letters, especially in campaigns to stop violence against women and achieve equal rights. In 2015, at the height of the mass exodus of refugees from Syria and Afghanistan travelling through Turkiye and Greece to seek safety in Europe, Julie was again in Lesvos and volunteered to provide food and water and drive refugees across the island.

A talented painter in watercolour and gouache, Julie actively encouraged and supported women artists, writers and musicians. In the workplace, she nurtured colleagues, especially women. Always quick to share her knowledge of the visual arts, literature, theatre, history, politics and, above all, the craft of radio, Julie provided opportunities and encouragement to following generations of broadcasters and was a role model and mentor to many current and former RN staff.

Mairi Nicolson, of ABC Classic, credits Julie with teaching her the art of the interview. “Julie had the gift of embracing all she met – colleagues and interviewees – with her bottomless enthusiasm for the arts and life in general, she sucked the marrow out of life and gave back equally in return.”

Jane Norris, who followed Julie from London to Lesvos in 1970, says what really stood out about Julie “was her ongoing capacity for creative adventure unconstrained by caution or conservatism”.

Julie is survived by her partner, film and opera critic John Slavin, and her beloved sister Cherryl Barassi.

Peter Mares was a friend of Julie Copeland and an ABC colleague for 22 years.