Ashleigh McMillan
Ashleigh McMillan is a breaking news reporter at The Age who covers the environment through the lens of public events, infrastructure and everyday city life. Her work follows how sudden incidents, protests and policy decisions reshape daily routines, public safety and the physical spaces people move through. She focuses on fast-moving stories across Victoria while returning to recurring questions about community tension, access and the lived impacts of official decisions.
Protests, public safety and civic tension
Much of McMillan’s recent reporting centres on protests and public demonstrations that expose fault lines in civic life. She has covered large rallies against gendered violence in Melbourne, tracking how crowds, police and political leaders converge around calls to treat the issue as a national disgrace. Her work follows smaller but intense stand-offs outside major hospitals, including marches demanding exclusion zones to keep disruptive protesters away from patients and staff.
McMillan reports on community divisions within diaspora groups, such as the pro-Sikh vote at Federation Square where thousands gathered for a non-binding referendum and police deployed pepper spray during a scuffle between rival protesters. She continues this line of coverage in stories on pro-Palestine and pro-Israel supporters facing off in the central business district, documenting clashes with police as rival marches occupy the same streets.
On January 26 she has written about tensions around deaths in custody, contested statues and the Gaza conflict, showing how the national day becomes a focal point for multiple grievances in the same urban spaces.
Crime, courts and community impact
Alongside protest coverage, McMillan reports on major crime stories and their ripple effects through communities. Her work includes detailed pieces on the disappearance and alleged murder of Ballarat mother Samantha Murphy, following the lull in local activity after an accused killer is charged and examining how residents respond once the immediate frenzy subsides. She has covered fatal violent incidents, such as a man found with stab wounds in South Yarra, tracking the investigation, charges against a teenager and appeals for witnesses.
McMillan’s reporting extends into the justice system and law reform debates. She has written on urgent calls from legal advocates to overhaul bail laws, highlighting concerns that current rules are dangerous and discriminatory. In education, she has covered the public apology by Wesley College’s principal to students and families over issues of sexual assault and culture, framing the story around institutional responsibility and the need for change.
Across these pieces she keeps the focus on victims, communities and the practical consequences of legal decisions rather than abstract doctrine.
Transport, infrastructure and commuter experience
Transport and infrastructure are another consistent strand in McMillan’s work, often intersecting with questions of fairness and everyday convenience. She has reported on plans to cap toll road charges at a weekly limit, explaining how commuters could save thousands of dollars a year under the proposed changes and what that means for regular users of Melbourne’s toll network. Her coverage of Myki’s operator losing its contract and a new fare system being developed concentrates on what commuters can expect, the reasons for the overhaul and how a complex ticketing system affects routine journeys.
McMillan has also examined traffic engineering experiments, including the introduction of P-turns on Hoddle Street that were meant to revolutionise congestion but did not deliver the promised benefits. In these stories she treats transport infrastructure as part of the lived environment, looking at how design decisions, contracts and political promises translate into queues, costs and frustrations for people trying to move around the city.
Weather, environment and everyday city life
Within her broader breaking news remit, McMillan covers weather and environmental conditions as they play out in urban settings. Her piece on the warmest June night and persistent dreary weather in Melbourne treats the city’s climate not as abstract data but as something that shapes mood, routines and even how animals behave.
She links forecasts and records to practical questions such as how long certain conditions are expected to last and what they mean for residents living through them.
Across her body of work, McMillan’s environmental coverage is rooted in immediacy and lived experience rather than technical detail. Whether she is writing about weather, transport networks, protests at hospitals or the strain of repeated public rallies, she returns to how people inhabit shared spaces and how policy, infrastructure and climate combine to make those spaces more or less safe, accessible and humane.
4 more environment journalists.
Adelaide Lang
Adelaide Lang combines climate reporting with courtroom and Indigenous-focused journalism. She reports for The Daily Telegraph, with work also appearing in The Canberra Times, and contributes guest pieces to National Indigenous Times. Her environment coverage focuses on climate-threatened islands, community resilience and how policy decisions affect people facing direct environmental risks. She follows local campaigns, adaptation efforts and political pressure while keeping the human effects clear. Lang also covers court proceedings involving public officials, including the trial of State MP Gareth Ward over historical sexual and indecent assault charges. Her reporting examines how allegations are tested in court and how the justice system handles accusations against people in power. With more than five years in digital media and courtroom reporting, she writes clear, factual accounts of events, legal processes and their consequences.
Bareket Falk
Bareket Falk uses environmental stories to show how growing bodies handle physical stress, especially heat, during exercise. She is a pediatric exercise physiologist and kinesiology professor whose work focuses on how children, adolescents and adults respond to activity across growth and development. She writes evidence-led explainers for The Conversation that test assumptions about children’s vulnerability and turn decades of exercise science into clear, practical guidance. Her core piece looks at how children and adults cope with extreme heat, walking through basic thermoregulation and challenging the idea that children are automatically more fragile. Her journalism draws directly on research into blood flow, sweating, body size and growth, keeping technical detail tight and translating findings into concrete behaviours such as pacing activity, seeking shade and hydration. She is interested in how physical activity interacts with maturation, body composition and recovery, and uses data to check myths about kids’ risk.
Bec Lorrimer
Bec Lorrimer is a visual journalist and picture editor who tells environment stories through photography and careful image selection at the Guardian. She works at the intersection of climate coverage and visual editing, using picture-led formats to show how global heating and other environmental pressures play out in everyday life. Her environment beat centres on picture galleries that track the lived experience of climate extremes, including record high temperatures in South Korea, with in pictures sequences that foreground the scale of global heating over text-led analysis. She also contributes to monthly roundups of the strongest photos and human-centred features such as a nursing home story, focusing on people and places under pressure. As a global visual editor and assistant picture editor on international fronts, she selects images across environment, politics, culture and general news, drawing on her background as a photographer, video director and photo producer.
Blanca Begert
Blanca Begert treats climate change as a system of policies, infrastructure and markets, following money and regulation at the same time. She is a climate and energy reporter on the environment desk at the Los Angeles Times, covering California’s power sector, oil and gas industry and efforts to cut emissions. Her work tracks how state agencies and legislators design and enforce rules for utilities, refiners and other energy companies, often highlighting friction between climate goals and business interests and linking corporate earnings to consumer costs and political pressure. She previously covered California climate policy and politics for Inside Climate News and Politico. Begert has extensive experience reporting on forests, Indigenous land rights and carbon markets in Latin America and has worked as a reporter, editor and multimedia producer on environmental stories, including video journalism.