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The day after Michael Rowland left the ABC after nearly four decades of rolling, relentless news, his wife became seriously puzzled by his behaviour. Even Rowland himself recognised it – he was being weird.
Over the course of Saturday, February 28, Nicola Webber peppered her husband with questions. “Don’t you feel as though you’re missing something?”
Michael Rowland’s ABC exit interview was at Italian institution Il Solito Posto. Eddie Jim
But Rowland felt supremely confident that he wasn’t.
The journalist had finished at the ABC on the Friday after 39 years, and the next day the US-Iran war broke out. But Rowland felt no need to glue himself to rolling news coverage. Even he recognised he was breaking the habit of a lifetime.
“I’ve had weirdly no FOMO. Which I think reinforces to me that I’ve made the right decision this time, on so many fronts,” says Rowland, 57.
“I got to 39 years, I had done my fair share of wars, my fair share of chaos, my fair share of massive breaking new stories, but the well was dry.”
So, Michael Rowland, how does freedom feel? “Liberating.”
It has gone 12.30pm in the rustic basement of Il Solito Posto, the trad Italian institution that has served as a canteen to Melbourne’s captains of industry since it was founded in 1994 by Michael Tenace. Tenace specially selects a discreet corner table for our interview. Patronage is good, he tells me, rising input costs, especially with the situation in the Middle East, less so.
TV people live by the clock and are never late – yet Michael Rowland is not here.
But before long, the familiar face with its cropped dark hair and permanently dilated right pupil that heralded day break in our lounge rooms for 15 years looms up in real life as Rowland greets me in a voice this paper once described as mellow-throated.
ABC News Breakfast, hosted by Michael Rowland and Virginia Trioli, celebrating its 10 years on air. ABC
He is genial and warm. Photographer Eddie Jim, with visual journalist trainee Ruby Alexander in tow, had caught him outside, hence the delay.
Rowland is clearly demobilisation happy (he’s in a shirt and jeans – no more TV news jackets) and this exit interview with a recovering news junkie covers a lot of ground: in the past 14 months, Rowland quit ABC News Breakfast after 15 years, abruptly cancelled the European holiday of a lifetime he planned with Webber, sold the family home after 23 years, and last month left the ABC entirely.
Clearly a regular, he orders a glass of soave, and I do the same (even though I have no idea what it is).
There is one more upheaval to come, which Rowland delivers with a “breaking news” flourish: On Tuesday, he and Nicki, a former Herald Sun journalist whom he met reporting Victorian state politics, are leaving Melbourne and moving to Queensland.
Is this a midlife crisis, perhaps? Rowland crinkles up his face and laughs; he is ex-ABC employee, there is no shiny red Ferrari.
“What it is, is a reflection of life – at the risk of getting deep and meaningful. Nicki was unwell last year. And that led both of us – me in particular – to really appreciate what’s important in life. And what’s important, to me, to us, is family. Our relationship. Life outside the ABC.
“It was pretty rocky last year for Nicki’s health,” he says. “She’s OK now.”
Squid ink linguine at Il Solito Posto. Eddie Jim
Here Rowland wants to correct the record. During his departure interview on News Breakfast he mentioned her illness, and journalistic assumptions common in our 24/7 era snowballed into headlines such as the one in New Idea: “Michael quits ABC: ‘My wife needs me more’.”
Webber went on Facebook to issue a direct riposte – “Fact check: I’m not f@cking needy!”
Webber’s illness clearly has been a horrendous ordeal. It forced them to cancel last year’s holiday to Europe (rescheduled for next year). It was a mystery bowel-related illness (not cancer, he says, pre-empting my question) from which she has recovered.
Selling the four-bedroom family home in Yarraville in Melbourne’s inner west allowed them to rent an apartment in Melbourne and buy a house in Tewantin, behind Noosa, where they will be close to Rowland’s best mate, ABC journalist Mark Willacy, and relatives.
“We like the lifestyle there. It’s all part of both Nicki and me just wanting to move down from a pretty fast pace of life to something less fast-paced.”
Daughter Eleanor is completing an arts degree in Canberra, while son Tom, who hosts a very sweary Zoomer lifestyle and men’s issues podcast DNM (it stands for Deep ’n’ Meaningful), works as a commercial videographer in Melbourne.
If we take away the news junkie from the Michael Rowland news junkie, what is there? “My identity as a husband and father will be first and foremost,” he says, rather than subsumed into his identity as “Michael Rowlands, ABC journalist”. It will also give him more time to spend with his parents, who still live in the family home in Ashbury, in Sydney’s inner west.
Rowland, who doesn’t eat meat, opts for the calamari fresh from South Australia, dusted in semolina and flash fried, and the pesce of the day, which is salmon. He does not order his regular favourite, the squid ink linguine, but sells it to me.
Rowland’s calamari arrives, neatly arranged with a trio of aioli and dressed rocket. He makes short work of it. The chicken liver pâté proves of such decadent richness I only manage to eat half of it.
The calamari.Eddie Jim
The house-made squid ink linguine arrives as a dense, dark, tangled nest, with gems of calamari and tomato nestled among the undulating black pasta.
Time has passed since our first interview together back in 2018, when I had a podcast, Behind the Media, for The Australian. Virginia Trioli had rebuffed us and Rowland diplomatically agreed to take her place. After that he invited me to be a regular paper reviewer on ABC News Breakfast.
Back then I was too polite to ask about his dilated right pupil. But I ask about it now.
It was an injury he got in January 1988 when he was 18. A mate was driving him in Sydney when a pellet fired from the side of the road by a “little shit” hit him in the eye. He nearly lost the eye. It was saved, but the pupil permanently dilated.
“I was for many, many years incredibly self-conscious. Nicki would often pull me up. I had a habit, apparently, of speaking with my palm in front of the eye, unconsciously. So I took a lot of time to work that out.”
Then he would get emails from viewers “letting him know” there was a problem with his eye that he should get checked out.
When people do a difficult job – such as hosting 15 hours of live TV a week – and make it look easy, they tend to be underestimated. Rowland has had a vast career. The oldest of five children in a Catholic family, he grew up in Ashbury in Sydney’s inner west and landed an ABC cadetship as an 18-year-old in 1987.
Rowland started as a radio cadet on police rounds, and moved to the Canberra press gallery during the Paul Keating and John Howard prime ministerships (“Towering political figures, no matter what you think of either of them”).
At one point, when he is being terribly fair in defending the current crop of politicians, whom I compare less favourably to their 1990s/2000s counterparts, I have to chide him to stop being so even-handed – Michael, you have left the ABC.
Rowland met Nicki after moving to cover Victorian politics in 1998. In September 1999, acting on a hunch, he caught then-premier Jeff Kennett driving through the gates of Government House to call the fateful election that he lost to Steve Bracks.
Rowland was made Washington correspondent in 2005 after telling his ABC interview panel to keep an eye out on a promising young Democratic senator from Illinois, and he covered Barack Obama’s historic ascension to the presidency. It remains a career highlight. He covered the Virginia Tech massacre of 2007 where 32 students were shot dead and families kept turning up on campus for news of their loved ones. “I do recall my fair share of very quiet silent rides in cars away from school shootings.”
The bill.Nine
He created news on the steps of the White House after he coaxed media baron Rupert Murdoch to comment on Howard’s political longevity. “He’s on top of his form, and much better to go out that way,” Murdoch mused. Cue the headlines.
And it was while in the US Rowland appeared on the very first News Breakfast in 2008 via live cross, before becoming co-host with Virginia Trioli in June 2010. The show occasionally surpassed Nine’s Today in the ratings for second place, even if ex-prime minister Malcolm Turnbull once repeatedly referred to him as “David” during a live interview.
After leaving News Breakfast at the end of 2024, Rowland took long service leave, came back for a stint hosting current affairs program The Radio National Hour before becoming national affairs reporter and fill-in host on 7.30, a role specially created for him. He admits coming off breakfast was a “hard transition”.
What about ABC groupthink, the criticism that too many journalists come from similar backgrounds and think in similar ways? “I can understand the criticism.”
In the past, he has worked in parts of the organisation where the complaint was “too much Brunswick and too much Glebe in ABC newsrooms and not enough Penrith, not enough Broadmeadows”.
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And not enough Ashbury, the working-class suburb of his youth? “Yeah, but that is changing. The opening of the ABC Parramatta office in western Sydney was a massive step forward along those lines. I’m waiting for, hopefully, something similar to happen in Melbourne, like a Broadmeadows.”
The recorder is off, but Rowland is still going, musing about his new life north combined with speaking gigs down south, and not entirely shutting the door on the national broadcaster. “I would not say no in the future to doing fill-in gigs,” he says. “I love the ABC and always will.”
He has already scoped out that there is a Sunshine Coast Bureau – “if they want to utilise me”. “I am an asset to be deployed. I will do the surf reports.”
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