MY COUNTRY CHILDHOOD
ABC RADIO PRESENTER ANN JONES HAS ALWAYS LOVED THE OUTDOORS AND BEEN PASSIONATE ABOUT ANIMALS, THANKS TO GROWING UP IN RURAL VICTORIA. AND NOW SHE HELPS LISTENERS LEARN ABOUT THE NATURAL WORLD, TOO.
Life on a hobby farm in Scotsburn, Victoria, gave ABC radio presenter Ann Jones an appreciation for nature.
FROM ECHIDNAS HIBERNATING at Hobart Airport to albatrosses nesting on Atlantic islands; from how to deal with a bite from a mulga snake to why willy wagtails sometimes sing at night: Ann Jones has covered all kinds of nature stories while presenting Radio National’s natural history program, Off Track.
“I’ve had amazing adventures,” she says. “Travelling onto Country with Indigenous rangers is a privilege and a highlight. And also seeing animals rarely seen – quolls, honey possums and rare birds. I’ve even recorded the night parrot [endangered and rarely seen]. I did a BBC co-production where I got to go to China chasing migratory shore birds. That was an incredibly moving experience: it’s a miracle they can fly from Australia to China. They’re so strong, but they’re on the brink of extinction, so at the same time, they’re so vulnerable.”
The first career highlight Ann remembers, though, is less exotic. It comes from her early years as a local radio presenter in South Australia. “There was a compliment I got from a listener at Wirrabara,” she says. “I’d been asked to draw a raffle, and afterwards a woman came up and said, ‘It’s so nice to actually see you, because I have my breakfast with you every morning. It’s just like you’re sitting across the table speaking to me.’ That’s a highlight because that’s exactly what you want people to feel.”
Radio was far from Ann’s thoughts growing up in Scotsburn, Victoria. Her mother was a teacher who, while bringing up three children as a single mum, went back to university to become a nurse. “My mother really values education and working hard, so that definitely influenced me,” explains Ann, 38. She was so enthusiastic about learning another language she went to Chile to complete the equivalent of Year 12 in O’higgins, south of Santiago. She had one goal: “I’d always wanted to dream in another language. And on a sleepover with school friends I spoke Spanish in my sleep. So I must have been dreaming in Spanish!”
The experience led her into studying Latin-american history and politics, culminating in a PHD on the Pinochet regime. She thought her career might lie in academia, but her PHD set her on the path to a life in radio. “At a conference, I met a producer from the ABC and I made a documentary out of my thesis.”
Realising radio was a difficult field in which to find a steady job, she studied broadcasting at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA), famous for its high employment rate. Soon she was working in regional radio in Port Pirie, SA, and spent years as a local radio presenter in SA and Victoria. “I loved it – speaking directly to communities taught me to be the broadcaster I am,” she says. She applied to present Radio National’s natural history program Off Track when its presenter went overseas. “They needed someone to fill in, and as I do love nature, I applied,” says Ann. “It wasn’t my initial aim, but I’m very happy to be doing it.”
The rest is broadcasting history: since 2014 Ann has been exploring the natural world and telling us about it. Living in regional Victoria, she often travelled to record the show (until recently she recorded and edited the program by herself). When COVID stopped travel, she worked around restrictions, requesting listeners to send in their own audio recordings. “It just meant we had to be creative,” she says. Luckily, that’s no problem: “I’ve always got more ideas than I’ve got time to produce.”
The ABC has started to use Ann’s talents on television, too, on Reef Live, and next, she’s presenting an episode of Catalyst. However, “radio will always have my heart, because it’s such an amazing way to connect with the audience,” Ann says. “I just love telling stories.”
Dr Ann Jones will present Catalyst: Kill or Cure? The Story of Venom on ABC TV and iview on 23 Feb at 8:30pm.
I GREW UP OUTSIDE BALLARAT in a little area called Scotsburn – it doesn’t have a shop, and when I started school at the local primary, there were 25 students in the whole school.
We lived on a hobby farm, a small property in the bush, and we had two cats and a pony named Sally. I’ve got two older brothers and was always an outdoorsy kid. I did lots of activities: lots of sport, lots of ballet. I suppose it was a very typical privileged white country girl upbringing.
We always did a lot of bike riding and cubby building. In the country, you’re off-leash as a child – you’re allowed to just go. There’s lots of bluestone around Scotsburn, so there were stone fences. Before they started spraying, there were always huge blackberry brambles that flowed over the rock walls, so you could scramble in to get berries.
My stepdad, Gary, came into our lives when I was about 10 or 11, and he was a huge influence on my life. He was born and raised in Daylesford, and he’s always been into nature, ever since he was a child. He’s a great one to go out and have picnics on the weekends. Even well into my teenage years, we would go out on the weekends and picnic and birdwatch. Gary was more purposeful about accessing the outdoors than I was. He’s very highly educated and one of his fields of interest was geography. So we’d go over to Mount Franklin on the north side of Daylesford because there are olivine rocks there. That’s a mineral that came up when the volcanoes spewed it out millions of >
years ago. There’s pumice there, too, that floats in water because it has so many air pockets in it. So we would go off on rock hunts and things like that. I used to drag my best friend, Beanz, along on those excursions. We were born a month apart, and our mothers were friends – and we are still best mates.
My appreciation for nature has just got more serious as I’ve got older. When I was a very young child, there were always lots of birds around, and koalas in the bush. But in my teenage years, I became absolutely obsessed with the water rats at Lake Wendouree in Ballarat, and I used to spend a lot of time after school observing them, because they’re fascinating. They’re these gorgeous little creatures that live in family groups and paddle around in the water, playing and hunting for shrimp and yabbies and fish. They’re wonderful. So few people, I think, knew they existed, even though Lake Wendouree is right in the middle of Ballarat. They’re good at hiding! So it felt like a secret – only I knew they were there. And at the time, before easy access to the internet, it was hard to find information about them. That sort of magic still sucks me in with nature. I’d go and visit them every day, and even to this day,
I know where water rats live in different cities.
I wrote my PHD at ANU in Canberra, and that’s where I got really into birdwatching. Canberra is chock-a-block full of birds, and I used to live on campus and walk to my office and see 25 species of birds on the way. That’s where I got more interested in actually identifying what I was seeing. I had a bird book, but your biggest leaps in knowledge come when you go out with people with superior knowledge. That’s what this job with Off Track has done: it means I’m often out in amazing places with people who have vastly superior knowledge, so I’m like a sponge and suck it all in. I know that other people out there absolutely want to know more about nature, too, because the Off Track inbox is full of emails from people asking me to identify birds or frogs. There’s this thirst for more and it’s addictive. Once you start to learn, you just need to know more and more because one question leads to another and another and another. I often get emails saying people find the connection they get from the program quite profound. That’s so gratifying.
An animal that really made an impact on me was the frillneck lizard. Every school holidays until I went to university, I stayed with my grandparents near Mildura in the Mallee. They owned a vineyard for table grapes, and on one occasion we went over to deliver morning tea to the pickers. On the way back, we saw a frillneck lizard, and I’d never seen one before. So Nan opened the car door, hung one leg out and drove along beside it, to make it run like on the TV. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that’s a brave woman. I wouldn’t do that!’ So my family have been interacting with nature the whole way along, but those interactions change with every generation. With her generation, maybe that was entirely okay. As time has gone on, we’ve still maintained this appreciation of nature, but it’s very different now. What I do is very hands-off, very non-invasive. But to this day, that’s the only time I’ve ever seen a frillneck lizard! It makes me realise
I was extremely lucky to grow up in the country.
SCOTSBURN Although it’s 16km from Ballarat and 121km from Melbourne, Scotsburn recorded a population of just 258 in the 2016 census. It was settled in 1839 by Andrew and Celia Scott, who established a cattle farm with compensation money Celia’s family, from Tobago, received from the British government when it abolished slavery. Originally inhabited by the Wathaurong people, it’s now mostly agricultural. Several settler-era buildings remain, including the Scotsburn Union Church, built in 1884 on land donated by Andrew Scott, and the Scotsburn Hall, which dates back to 1891.