It’s a cliché. Lisa Millar knows it’s a cliché. I know it’s a cliché. But dammit, we’re doing it anyway: She’s never been happier.
As one of the ABC’s most popular faces and host of three shows – Muster Dogs and its spinoff, Where Are They Now, as well as Back Roads – she’s thriving both professionally and in her personal life.
On New Year’s Eve, her partner of two years, Simon Carless, proposed on the houseboat they share as the pair watched the fireworks over Murray Bridge in South Australia.
“I will get silly and giggly talking about Simon,” she says, “because I feel so lucky. We both do. We just feel so incredibly lucky that this has happened to us at this point in our lives.”
When we meet in early December at a beachside cafe in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, Millar, 56, is vibrating with happiness. She can’t stop talking about Carless, a pilot, and work, and how happy she is (she texts me about the engagement later: “I was totally surprised!”). If she wasn’t so lovely, it would feel over the top, but Millar is one of the most genuine people you will ever meet.
“I do feel like a teenager with it all,” she says. “And I just think, ‘You know what? Far out, I’m gonna just enjoy it.’ We start most mornings – when we remember – with a little gratitude meditation, because we both think, ‘Man, we’ve been through a lot, with relationships and all the rest of it, and we are just so grateful for what the world’s given us.’”
The pair first met in 2007, when Millar was living in Sydney. She was introduced to Carless and his then wife by a mutual friend, and they would see each other occasionally. Work then took Millar overseas – first, in 2009, to Washington, where she was the ABC’s North American bureau chief, then to London in 2015 as the ABC’s Europe bureau chief. It was there she caught up with Carless, by now separated, a handful of times when he was passing through the city.
“But there was zero spark,” says Millar, laughing. “In fact, he likes telling his friends about how not only was there zero spark, but I once said he looked much older than his actual age, and insulted him, which hurt his ego!”
That all changed in November 2023, when they met up again for lunch in Melbourne, where Millar had been living since she returned from overseas to co-host the ABC’s News Breakfast show in 2019.
and pants, Senso shoes. Corrie Bond
“When I left my apartment, a neighbour said, ‘You look gorgeous, Lisa, where are you going?’ And I said, ‘I’m going to meet an old friend, or I might be going on a date.’ I remember saying that. From that moment, November 14, we have just absolutely had zero doubt that we were going to be together forever.”
What followed was a whirlwind romance, of sorts. After a trip to London for Christmas and New Year’s, they caught COVID-19. They decided to isolate together on Carless’ houseboat, which then became stuck on a sandbank for 28 days. It was, as they say in the classics, the start of a happy ever after.
“I felt like [to be] in my 50s, to be given another chance at this incredible happiness, I didn’t want to screw it up,” she says. “Work had always come first before, and I had made decisions that – not that I regret, because I don’t believe in regrets, I think everything leads you to a particular place – but I didn’t want to make the mistakes, didn’t want to follow the habits that I had [previously].”
What makes Millar’s story even more remarkable, is that it comes from the depths of unhappiness. When I last spoke to her two years ago, she was contemplating leaving News Breakfast. It had been nearly five years of pre-dawn wake-ups, loneliness and relentless trolling on social media about everything from her appearance, to the death of her father, former Nationals MP Clarrie Millar.
“I don’t want to be the poster child for that kind of thing,” she says. “And I’ve had people who are doing studies on trolling and they want to talk to me, and I don’t want to because that’s that. I’m so relieved I survived it.
“[My unhappiness] was a combination of things. I was living in Melbourne by myself in an apartment during the pandemic. I was separated from my family in Queensland, who I’d been away from for nine years while overseas, and had thought that I would be seeing a lot more of them. So I didn’t have the scaffolding around me, and I was utterly, utterly unprepared for what came.”
Millar sought comfort from her best friend, fellow ABC journalist Leigh Sales. “I was in tears a lot, and [Sales] said, ‘Well, the problem is, you’re so nice to everyone that you don’t understand it when someone doesn’t want to be nice back.’ And that was kind of [it], I just kept thinking, ‘I don’t understand where it’s coming from.’”
Additional support came from colleagues, as well as professional help from a counsellor. “When I graduated from seeing this professional, she gave me a little applause, and I said, ‘I just feel so great,’” says Millar. “And I know that maybe if we spoke again in six months, there might be challenges I might be facing, but I feel like I just have so many more tools in my 50s [to] handle them.”
Millar now splits her time between Melbourne and Carless’ houseboat, where she bird watches (the pelican is her favourite), kayaks and reads. She is an ambassador for Park Run and hopes one day to get her pilot’s licence (not bad for someone who spent years with a fear of flying that was so profound, she’d be ill for days before she had to step on a plane).
It’s not all play, though. Last year, she travelled around the country for the fourth season of Muster Dogs, while Back Roads has sent her to the Cocos Islands, the Snowy Mountains and deep into the Northern Territory and remote Western Australia. She jokes that she’s eaten a chicken parmigiana in every pub in Australia and that the most grooming required for both shows is essentially wearing a hat.
“[Back Roads] really ticks that box for me about regional Australia because I do still feel like I’m the kid from the country,” says Millar. “When people say, ‘Oh, where are you from?’ I always say, ‘country Queensland’. I don’t just say ‘Queensland’. And I’m very proud of that.”
Millar grew up on a dairy farm in Kilkivan, about 200 kilometres north-west of Brisbane. The fourth of five children, she was a keen observer of the news from a young age and would interview her family with a tape recorder. While studying at university, she landed a cadetship at The Gympie Times. She moved to WIN TV in Townsville, and in 1993, joined the ABC’s new Townsville bureau. From there, she soared, moving to Canberra before a posting to Washington in 2001 started her long career as a foreign correspondent.
It’s fair to say then, that Back Roads and Muster Dogs are a distinct change of gear. “I’m surprised at how easily I switched off from news,” she says. “And I thought that it would kick back in, but it hasn’t really. I still read the headlines of the newspapers, but I’m OK not being fully engaged in every movement … for my own sanity, I had to step back from that.”
That doesn’t mean she’s disconnected, it just means she has reconnected with herself.
“My middle name is Joy,” she says. “And I think in that lead up to leaving ‘Brekkie’, right in that eight, nine months that Simon and I were together – he was flying, and I was getting up at 3am – I had lost me. I kept saying to him, ‘This is not who I am. I feel like a stranger to myself, I am not grumpy, I’m not tired all the time. I’m not this. It’s a stranger.’
“I couldn’t find the joy in things, and that was what I needed to get back. And I remember saying that to the counsellor, saying the things that used to bring me joy – seeing a beautiful, sunny blue day, the ocean – I’d lost it. So I kept saying to Simon, ‘Hang in there.’
“It’s a miracle. I feel like I’m me again, you know? And that is a massive joy.”
Muster Dogs Season 4 returns February 1 at 7:30pm on ABC TV and ABC iView. Back Roads airs on March 5.
Fashion director: Penny McCarthy. Hair: Keiren Street using Wella Professional. Make-up: Aimie Fiebig using Sisley Paris. Fashion assistant: Abbey Stockwell
Stockists: Bondi Born; Jac + Jack; Senso.
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