Margaret Bales with Victorian Vice President Michael Henry

ABC Friends and ABC Alumni have been battling tirelessly to get the Australian government to restore funding and Australian content to our ABC by lobbying, researching, advocating, fund-raising and politicking. Now, quietly in the background, one woman in her eighties has just delivered a million dollar boost to ABC science broadcasting.

Margaret Bales, 83, was a librarian for over 30 years, including at the National Library and at university and high school libraries. She listened to ABC Radio National all her life, with a particular interest in music - she says she “danced to ABC music as a five year old”. These days she listens to a lot to FM classical music. She loved science at school, and had a brilliant science teacher. She would have pursued a career in science but was advised to become a librarian. A devotee of the ABC, her greatest love is still Classic FM, but in recent years she’s been increasingly frustrated by the dwindling of both the quality and amount of ABC Australian science content.

She remembers the halcyon days of the 1980s and 1990s, when the Australian government recognised the imperative of informing their populace about science, so people could make informed decisions about technology (think HIV, IVF, human genome), the environment (think climate change), industry and the economy. Margaret missed the wave of science reporting and analysis on national ABC TV and radio; the Science Show of course, but also TV. ABC TV introduced their first national science and medical report for news in 1986 (luckily, me), their national environment reporter soon after (Alan Tate); the Natural History Unit in Melbourne was churning out documentaries like A Brush With Nature (1989), The Big Wet (1993), and scads of others all the way through to Bushfire Summer (2006).  Quantum ran a wildly popular weekly half hour show on national TV from 1985 to 2001, showcasing Australian and global scientific research, replaced by Catalyst that year until it was dropped and never properly replaced in 2017.

But things went south. The coalition cut ABC funding so much that it would take an extra $150 million a year just to get back to 2012 levels. The amount of non-news and current affairs content on TV (including science) dropped by an estimated 41% between 2013/14 and 2022/23.

The Science Show persists, and ABC Radio National Science runs many science programs on different platforms; all are under serious finding stress (including recent redundancies from the new MD Hugh Marks). But overall science content on the ABC is hugely diminished.

Margaret reached out to Michael Henry, Vice President of ABC Friends Victoria and the two of them came up with a plan; Margaret wanted to donate $1 million to the ABC to revitalise and enhance ABC science reporting, and to attract young people to the ABC.

Now, Michael is also a devotee of the ABC with both passion and purpose – to refund it to proper levels, to inform Australians about their country, culture and the world and to ensure it’s a bedrock for democracy. So he, with current ABCF Victorian President Pam Creed, brought me on (also working for those aims but whose career purpose has been to make Australians scientifically literate, so industry and tech bros won’t rule the world.)

How to maximise the impact of Margaret’s amazing donation? We needed an expert- so I dialled up the brilliant Dr Jonathan Webb, Science Editor at ABC Radio National, who leads an award-winning team of specialist journalists and producers working across radio, podcasts, digital and social media. 

And - voila! - alchemy! Within weeks, an ABC Science Journalism Fellowship Program was created. It is a new initiative within the ABC Radio National Science Unit.

The recurring annual fellowship will provide a science journalist or content maker with an opportunity to develop science programming for ABC Radio National and the broader ABC network, including digital platforms, with the support and guidance of the ABC Radio National Science Unit. A Memorandum of Understanding for the Fellowship, for “enhancement of the ABC’s coverage of science and medicine in a manner which attracts young people to the ABC” has been approved by the ABC Board and announced by MD Hugh Marks at an ABC Friends Victoria dinner recently.

Hugh Marks rang Margaret last week to thank her. She was really chuffed. Sometimes, passion with purpose cuts through stasis and bureaucracy. What a woman! Thank you, Margaret.