Founder and former national co-chair of Women in Media, Victoria Laurie is an award-winning Perth-based feature writer. Over her 40-year media career, she has had roles at The Australian newspaper, The Weekend Australian Magazine, with ABC radio and in TV current affairs. She contributes to a wide variety of publications and is the author of several natural history books. A three-time Walkley Award nominee, Victoria sits on the Walkley Foundation board and has been inducted into the WA Women’s Hall of Fame.
Q1. What has been your best career move?
Doing different things. I’ve moved in and out of media jobs, and freelanced, which hasn't been lucrative, but it’s freed me up to explore topics that have interested me. I took a year out for each of the two books I wrote, and I'm still drawing on that experience because I write for Australian Geographic and other publications in the natural history realm. I love it. Just recently I went out bush with a mob checking a population of white-tailed black cockatoos. ABC television and radio in Darwin is where I cut my teeth, and I got into print when I was pregnant with my first child. I couldn't go back into TV and work to impossibly short deadlines, so I pitched some ideas to The Weekend Australian Magazine, and over the subsequent years I got three Walkley nominations for feature writing. The variety has been good – for me, for balancing family life (although it’s never balanced), for getting a new perspective on things. Now more than ever we need to listen to people we disagree with.
Q2. What is the best advice you’ve been given?
I’d say my nature is to keep myself out of the story – I'm not particularly interested in inserting my views – but they’re there, of course, and I have learned over time to put some more of myself in, because it then steers the reader through. In feature writing, it can help the reader to understand why you’ve asked your subject a particularly impudent question. That’s a big change, in my opinion – that younger reporters are encouraged, in fact instructed, to put themselves out in the digital space, to have a profile, have an opinion, to deliver themselves up online, and I'm not interested in that. We’re now beginning to realise the flaws in that, as if we didn’t know. People like Ginger Gorman have pointed out for quite some time that there are absolute perils for women reporters, producers, directors, particularly onscreen people, putting themselves out there. They get trolled.
Q3. What do you think the media will look like in 10 years’ time?
Well, one assumes that print will disappear in most forms, except perhaps the most elite magazine format. And I’m not against phasing out print and using great reams of newsprint, but I just want to keep the basic elements of good reporting: a framework of facts, coverage of relevant opinions; a fair-minded conclusion. Exciting new virtual film techniques can take us to a remote West Australian location, but only scientific findings and the lived experience of local people will actually inform us of the impact – good and bad – of a lithium mine or extreme weather trends.
Q4. What do you think has changed – or not changed – for women in media?
I'm not pessimistic at all. I’ve never forgotten Caroline Jones telling us about her experience in 1972 as the first woman to host a national current affairs show in Australia. “Girl Will Take Over 4 Corners”, the papers wrote. So, times have changed, but I still have women describing very toxic workplaces with bosses who abuse them, either verbally or in other ways. That’s the sort of residual discrimination that perhaps will be mopped up, but the structural problems remain. I'm really pleased that light is being shed on the gender pay gap and there’s been good progress on childcare fees, trying to bring them down, but the fact is, they’re still incredibly high. When I think back to when I was taking my two little kids to a family day care lady who fed them all day and allowed me to go and do my work, it would cost me a fortune now. That’s a problem still.
Q5. What is your proudest achievement?
It’s us starting up Women in Media in Perth in 2005. It was my idea. I had young-ish kids and was thinking, how come blokes can get together at the pub in town? There was a watering hole for journos, often male, often near the courts, and women like me were at home, juggling work and kids. We needed to meet – it was as simple as that. So, a group of four or five of us said, “Let’s do it”. We organised an event, not really knowing how it would go, and there were over 100 women there. It was so packed I couldn't get into the venue! As an MEAA member for as long as I’ve been in the industry, I see solidarity and sharing of one’s situation as absolutely essential. You have to have a reason to frock up and get out there. And look what we’ve collectively produced: an organisation that potentially can influence the lives of many, many women across Australia, not just in the standard media, but media in general. It was other people – women in Queensland still involved in Women in Media – who could see the potential and asked to borrow the model. Then NSW and other states and territories gradually came in. Getting back to Caroline, our original Patron, she said to everybody, “I wish there’d been something like Women in Media when I was in the industry. I wouldn't have felt so isolated or alone”.
Interview by Susan Horsburgh