A former A Current Affair reporter who was famously among the first to lift the lid on the ‘despicable blokey culture’ within the commercial TV world has died following a near two-year battle against an aggressive brain tumour.
Jane Hansen – a pioneering female television journalist and war correspondent who reported from some of the most dangerous places on the planet – passed away on the Gold Coast about 11.40pm on Tuesday, surrounded by loved ones.
Despite fighting an aggressive glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer, Hansen’s family said she never lost her revered tenacity and determination to see the good in the worst of situations.
‘To all that knew and loved my sister. Jane passed away peacefully at approximately 11.40pm 6 August,’ the statement said.
‘Jane put up an amazing fight right till the end and never once complained, and never lost her sense of humour this whole time.’
The family thanked loved ones for their ‘extraordinary level of support, love and compassion’ over the course of her 18 month cancer battle.
In 2008, Hansen published the book Boned with fellow reporter Fiona McKenzie. Although it was officially a work of fiction, industry insiders were well aware that many of the incidents within the novel were all too real.
The title of the book was a reference to the Today show host Jessica Rowe’s infamous sacking by Channel Nine. A senior producer at the network once alleged in an affidavit that Eddie McGuire had used that colloquialism to describe her axing.
The protagonist of the novel faced the same real-world challenges of institutional sexism experienced by women in the n TV world, including by Hansen.
‘We felt that someone needed to take a stand,’ Hansen wrote in a confessional 2017 piece where she admitted being one of the book’s anonymous authors, almost a decade after it went to print.
‘I found defending my position as a seasoned journalist in commercial television exhausting and depressing. We’d … been beaten down the boys’ club. We’d been bullied. But we were never victims.’
She said her years as a globe-trotting war correspondent did little too prepare her for the fierce battle for equality she confronted within the male-dominated Nine Network.
‘I’ve slept on the floor in the bombed-out ‘sniper side’ at the Holiday Inn, Sarajevo, in the middle of the Bosnian war, bribed murderous Iraqi officials to extend my visa in Baghdad,’ she recalled.
‘I’ve eyeballed a Taliban mullah in an interview and made him storm out. I’ve had a people smuggler deliver a death threat under my hotel room in Jakarta, and slept with an iron in the bed for protection after upsetting a coup leader in Fiji.’
‘(But) when we wrote Boned, we had both left our jobs. We had young babies and we were freelancing. We’d also been beaten down by the boys’ club.
‘The bad behaviour that we knew so well also seemed at an all-time high. Women were being sacked while on maternity leave, doyens slandered as difficult, and Jessica Rowe boned.
‘We hoped it would challenge the serious culture problem that is still alive today.
‘At the basis of the culture is an appalling sense of entitlement. Like kids in a lolly shop, it is an industry where powerful men hold the strings to the hopes and dreams of so many vulnerable, beautiful, educated and talented young women.
‘Any woman knew that a trip to HR was a one-way trip out the exit door with a trail of slurs dripping in your wake. We even heard the very words spill out of Don Burke’s mouth this week: emotionally fragile, disgruntled, witch hunt. He played the victim.
‘In 2008, we chose to stay anonymous for the same reason. We knew if our identities were revealed we would be lined up and shot down with the well-worn artillery used on every woman who piped up: scorned, couldn’t cut it, no talent bimbo, difficult b**ch, stupid c**t and so on.
‘Despite a body of work that would suggest otherwise, we too felt we may not work again if we ‘fessed up.
‘We are sad Boned did not change the world back then. It was a long shot. But the rest of the world has finally caught up and we can proudly now say we did our bit.’
Hansen’s most recent role was a journalist with News Corp’s Sunday Telegraph newspaper, where she wrote extensively about the anti-vaccination and anti-fluoride movements in New South Wales.
She was most proud of her pro-vaccination campaigns, which resulted in welfare payments being withheld from parents who did not fully immunise their children. Anti-vaxxer parents were also barred from accessing childcare centres and preschools.
Hansen filed what would be her last report in February.