Virginia Trioli to leave the ABC after 27 years

Virginia Trioli is leaving the ABC to pursue her own creative projects. (ABC) Veteran broadcaster Virginia Trioli has this morning announced she is leaving the ABC to pursue new creative opportunities. After 27 years at the national broadcaster, Trioli said she was at the peak of her powers and excited to deploy her skills on different projects. Trioli said she was working on two books and a TV script, among other things. Her last day at the ABC will be June 26. Link copiedShareShare articleVirginia Trioli has announced she is leaving the ABC to pursue new creative opportunities, after 27 years as a journalist, broadcaster and program maker at the organisation. One of the most recognisable and respected voices in Australian broadcasting, Trioli first joined the ABC in 1999 following stints at The Age newspaper and The Bulletin news and current affairs magazine. She has held numerous radio and television presenting roles, including founding anchor of News Breakfast on ABC TV, host of Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne, and most recently presenter of the TV series Creative Types with Virginia Trioli, where she explored the essence of creativity and imagination with prominent Australian artists, actors, musicians and writers. "After spending all this time with a whole lot of creative types, I realised that I kind of am one, too. And that's really what I want to go and focus on now," Trioli told ABC News. "I've just been so fortunate and had the luckiest and best career you can possibly have in mainstream media … but right now I am just itching — there is this voice that's getting increasingly loud in my head — to go and work on my own creative projects." Virginia Trioli co-hosted News Breakfast alongside Michael Rowland from 2008 to 2019. (ABC TV) Trioli said she had been working on two new books since publishing A Bit On The Side — her "ode to joy" — in 2024. "There's also a TV script I'm noodling away with … and a million other things in my head that are dying to get out." ABC managing director Hugh Marks said Trioli had been at the heart of some of the ABC's most important programs and conversations, earning the respect and affection of a wide variety of audiences. "Her achievements are many. I also know Virginia has ambitions to explore new work opportunities and I hope we can work together to realise them in the coming years," Mr Marks said. "I will be watching her every success with enthusiasm, and I hope much of it is with the ABC." As well as hosting Mornings on ABC Radio Sydney, and Drive and Mornings on ABC Radio Melbourne, Trioli presented Lateline, Q&A and 7.30 and wrote the popular Weekend Reads column for ABC News. On one frantic day in 2018, Trioli hosted 7.30, then ran across the foyer at ABC Ultimo to front Q&A. "Honestly, I kind of just pinched myself at my luck at being asked to sit in all these remarkable chairs and have the trust of these incredible audiences," she said. Virginia Trioli hosted Mornings on ABC News Radio from 2019 to 2023. (ABC Radio Melbourne: Dominic Cansdale) Trioli said she was proud of having held "power to account" in her interviews, including a particularly memorable one with then-defence minister Peter Reith about the so-called "children overboard" affair in 2001. The Howard Coalition government had been claiming asylum seekers had thrown their children into the water, and Mr Reith joined Trioli on ABC Radio Melbourne insisting he had the photographs to prove it. But Trioli pushed back, describing the photos for her listeners and repeatedly questioning the minister's assertions, which turned out to be untrue. The interview won her a Walkley award. "It was terrifying to have to look this real bully of a politician — and he was — in the eye and tell him that he was lying, that he was wrong," she said. "And that what he was saying was not in any way backed up by the 'evidence' that he had triumphantly brought into the studio to bash down these outrageous suggestions that the government had made it up that people had thrown their children in the water." Still, some of her roles have come at a personal cost, particularly her 11 years of setting early alarms for News Breakfast. "I'm someone who all my life has dreamed in an incredibly cinematic way; my dreams have casts and sub-casts and third tertiary characters and subplots and set design and the whole thing," Trioli said. "The day I started on News Breakfast, my dreaming stopped completely. And literally the day I finished on News Breakfast it came back again." Trioli spoke with filmmaker George Miller about it while she was working on an episode with him for Creative Types. "And he said it's because that kind of daily work — which is so important and which takes up so much of your brain space and your heart space and your mind space — leaves no other space for anything else," she said. "And so when I stopped [News Breakfast] I could actually open up the doors, if you like, to other parts of my

Virginia Trioli to leave the ABC after 27 years

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