Paul Higgins retires from ABC

Paul Higgins, ABC weather presenter in Victoria for over 20 years, has retired after almost 40 years with the national broadcaster.

After some early efforts in radio — first as a volunteer at 3CR in Melbourne then in a paid role at 3MP — Higgins joined ABC in 1986 as the host of the children’s current affairs program Behind The News.

YouTube: Peter Marks

It was a role that he held for seven years. “I’m particularly proud of Behind The News because of the way it helped so many kids learn about what was going on in the world,” he told ABC recently.

As well as hosting Behind The News, he became one of those rare television presenters to work across two networks when he also became weather presenter for Seven Nightly News in Melbourne. “I was being considered for a permanent news-reading job at Seven, but I didn’t get it, and as a consolation they said, ‘Do you know anything about the weather?’,” he told Monash Life in 2019.

He later worked on The 7.30 Report at ABC and as a producer for Midday at Nine. Then in the early 2000s he became weather presenter for ABC News in Victoria, and presented his last weather segment Thursday night with a studio audience of past and present colleagues including former ABC newsreader Ian Henderson.

Picture: Norman Hermant