The internships Vivienne worked on while at RMIT – a week at The Courier in Ballarat and another at SBS News in Sydney – helped her apply for a range of highly competitive cadetships after graduating. She was thrilled to secure one with the ABC, where she worked as a TV and radio presenter for more than three years.
While at the national broadcaster, Vivienne covered major court cases and reported on the 2010 Federal Election campaign from Parliament House, Canberra.
Next came a move to the UK, where Vivienne began working with the BBC’s World Service. Her career with the BBC spanned 13 years, during which she was a sports presenter, Africa correspondent, business journalist and weekend business correspondent.
She worked for six months as a TV correspondent in Nairobi, Kenya and another six months as a TV correspondent New York, where she broadcasted live each morning from the trading floor at the stock exchange.
It was while she was reporting from New York in 2022 that Vivienne was selected as a Knight-Bagehot Fellow. The fellowship, offered to experienced journalists to build their understanding of business and economics, finance and technology, awarded her with a year of tuition-paid study at Columbia University.
Other career highlights include hosting live radio broadcasts for the BBC World Service in India, Kenya, Uganda and Zimbabwe, and recording radio documentaries in Pakistan, Vanuatu and Hong Kong.
But none of this came easily to Vivienne, who said she had to ‘put in the hard yards’.
“I had to do the hard yards at the BBC because they didn't really care about my experience at the ABC, so I couldn’t just walk into a job at the same level,” she said.
“You sort of have to go back to the bottom. So, I did a lot of night shifts over the years, like 12-hour night shifts, and they are rough. The World Service is a 24-hour radio network, so someone's got to be on in the middle of the night, and that was often me.”
