I’m more than 50 metres away from Lisa Millar but her smile is clearly visible even at this distance. She’s clocked me on my approach.
It’s a bright winter morning and we’re setting off on one her favourite walks towards the cold and flat Sandridge beach in Port Melbourne. A Queensland native, Millar arrived in the city at the end of 2019 to start her six-year stint co-hosting News Breakfast on the ABC. She says the walk became a “lifeline” when she was living alone during lockdowns.
As we wander down a shady path headed for the Sandridge lookout she recalls her time as a foreign correspondent. “It was a really big time in the world … it started in DC with the Obama period, then I moved to London.” Within her first few weeks in the UK the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks happened “and then it was just a string of big, heavy stories”.
Amid recounting the toll her work took on her she is distracted; first by a children’s playground that she declares “one of the best in Melbourne”. She’s tried it out herself, she confesses, including the bilge pump “with no children, it’s like, I don’t care – I’m going to go over there”.
It’s clear from the outset Millar has a natural curiosity and our conversation will be peppered with diversions.
She’s taken this walk thousands of times but remains excited. “Ooh, that’s new,” she says as she notices a fence before directing my attention to construction cranes; “When they lift up, they look so funny … I just love infrastructure.”
Next she launches into musings about the history of Station Pier in the distance: “That’s where the migrants arrived from Europe and I just kind of think, wow, what must have they been thinking?” Then there’s an exuberant retelling of the grace she witnessed the first time she saw a rikari (native water rat) in the water below (and the rabbit hole of research it led her down). “The water has to be nice and still” for them to come out, she learned. She tries and fails to resist the urge to engage with two fishers, making friendly inquiries into their endeavour.
Her urge to “know everything and talk to everyone” has been with her since childhood, she says.
As if she hasn’t gone off on all these tangents we suddenly return to topic. I ask how her bright disposition fared given the tragic stories she often covered. “I survived – just – for those years,” she tells me, “but it did batter me a bit.
“Wow, what an awesome bird,” she exclaims, her attention briefly captured by a heron. “But even when really bad stuff happens there’s always something quite incredible that comes from it, that makes you appreciate people.”
Having cut her journalistic teeth as a teenage police reporter for a tabloid, Millar was no stranger to arriving on the scene of people’s worst moments. For a long time, she says, a fear that she might have added to anyone’s trauma weighed heavily on her.
At 20 she arrived on a young mother’s doorstep after her husband died in a freak windsurfing accident. Thirty-odd years later, a chance encounter at her memoir signing brought the two women back into each other’s orbit: “She was just glad I spelled his name right.” Millar was pleased to have the chance to ask the woman straight out if her reportage had contributed to her suffering. They have since become friends.
“I have seen the worst of people and I have seen terrible times and yet, at the heart of it all, there are always really decent people doing incredible things who have great humanity.”
Her shift to the feelgood world of Muster Dogs, and now Back Roads, has been a welcome reprieve after what felt like “dog years” in the tumultuous business of breaking news.
“It’s absolutely fantastic. I’m constantly seeing people show these lovely moments of kindness.”
From abseiling in the Grampians, to releasing bilbies at dusk out the back of Burke, to tearing up during interviews (“I’m not embarrassed by that, I do feel a lot”), Millar is in her element. She was always that “kid up a tree”, the one who asked the most questions and wanted to “have a go”.
As we reach the end of the pier we spot a crow standing sentinel over two discarded tins of anchovies. Millar is delighted. “How does something get to be that jet black? And, oh my god, look at it’s eyes,” she marvels before swiftly switching our attention to the postcard-perfect panorama of Melbourne’s skyline in the distance. “This is the reason I love walking up here. Don’t you think this is such a great view?” And it is.
Now that her time at News Breakfast is over Millar says she could be living anywhere in the country. “But I have grown to love this city. I don’t have to be here but it really works for me.”
It also works for her fiance, Simon. The pair met 17 years ago but in 2023 things took a surprise turn for the romantic. “It’s been a very unexpected thing in my life,” she says, a sudden coyness washing over her.
Bearing witness to shocking events has made her think a lot about the small moments in life “where everything can change direction suddenly”. Her love story with Simon also hinged on a split-second decision. She’d at first turned down his casual lunch invitation. “And then I hung up and thought, why don’t I go? And so I did. And I sat down at lunch and just fell madly in love in that moment with someone that I had known for 15 years. So explain that!
“Who would have thought that I’d get to my 50s and find, you know, love?”
Next month Millar is up for her second chance at a Gold Logie, it’s something she says she never imagined happening once, let alone twice. “Win or lose, it’s just fun.”
As we wander back to the surf club Millar takes stock of the long road that’s led her to this surprise accolade.
“I always thought, ‘I want to have a big life, I don’t want to let fears or anxieties or a lack of confidence to stop me from having a big life.’ And it hasn’t.
“I excel at being mediocre and [my life] is more than anything I could ever have imagined … you just have to have a crack.
“I’m constantly out of my comfort zone. I constantly have butterflies about doing stuff. It’s not like I have just got reams of confidence. When you do something that challenges you, that you thought you couldn’t achieve, the payoff is so exhilarating.”
While the going is good, Millar says she’s made a pact with her friend Leigh Sales that she will “stick with it while the ledger of fun days outweighs non-fun days”.
For now though she is “having a ball”. “I just keep learning new things all the time and I still want to be better at what I do …
“But I am also really aware that it could all change tomorrow. I’m fully prepared.”
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Back Roads and Muster Dogs are available to stream on ABC iView
