Kerry Lonergan - Hall of Fame Inductee

Kerry Lonergan OAM is one of the defining figures of Australian rural television. Raised in country New South Wales, he worked as a teenager on dairy and beef properties before beginning a media career in 1967 that took him through newspapers, radio and television in Australia and overseas.

After covering Queensland politics for Channel Nine in Brisbane, including the Joh Bjelke-Petersen years, he joined the ABC in 1986. In 1991 he helped establish Landline, the national broadcaster’s Sunday rural program, and served as its founding Executive Producer until 2007.

Under his watch the program became a fixture in farm kitchens and regional living rooms: long-form stories of people, markets, science and community, told with respect for the bush and a preference for substance over noise.

He then became Landline’s specialist commodities reporter and the familiar face of the weekly Market Report, a role that made him one of the best-known voices in rural Australia. Along the way he opened the door for a generation of rural journalists and producers, many of whom still credit him with their start in television.

In 2013 he received the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to broadcasting and the community. On 6 August 2015, at the Rural Press Club of Queensland’s Ekka Breakfast, he was announced as the fourth inductee into the Club’s Rural Journalism Hall of Fame, joining Malcolm McCosker, Robin McConchie and Rodney Green. He was formally inducted at the Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame in Longreach on 25 September 2015.

The Hall of Fame recognises Queensland-based rural journalists who have made a lasting contribution over more than two decades and helped foster the next generation. Kerry Lonergan meets that test in full: he built a national program that still runs more than thirty years later, and he left behind both an audience that trusts rural storytelling and a cohort of journalists who learned how to do it.