Lily Nothling

Lily Nothling tells cross-platform stories about how laws, economic pressures and social trends land in people's lives, using individual experiences to illuminate the broader forces shaping communities.

She is a multi-platform reporter for ABC News, filing across television, radio, digital and social platforms. She began her reporting career with the ABC newsroom in 2017 and has since worked across different news bureaus, building a generalist brief that spans business-adjacent issues, justice, education, environment and culture.

Law reform and civil liberties through lived experience

A recurring strand in Nothling’s work is explaining justice and policing changes through the people who feel their impact first. In coverage of the decision to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14 in the ACT, she follows First Nations man and Cuz Boxing founder Joe Hedger, showing how a mentor working with young people at risk views the reform and its practical consequences for the youth justice system. Her reporting on police seizing satirical posters from the window of a Canberra bar under new hate speech laws documents how legal thresholds intersect with everyday political expression and humour, making the implications of abstract legislation tangible.

These pieces blend legal detail with character-driven storytelling, giving space to the voices of bar owners, community workers and affected families rather than centring the story solely on official spokespeople. Across this strand of her reporting, Nothling’s focus is less on partisan contest and more on how new rules change what people can do, say and expect in public spaces.

Cost-of-living, health and consumer pressures

Nothling’s general news brief includes stories that sit close to business and personal finance, particularly where costs attached to essential services bite into household budgets. In a feature on the financial burden of Catalina’s cancer treatment, she examines how the price of care, travel and lost income accumulates, and how families navigate choices between medical needs and financial survival. Her reporting traces the mechanics of out-of-pocket costs while keeping the story anchored in Catalina’s question: “How do I survive this?”, highlighting the human stakes behind health system and insurance settings.

She also tackles consumer and environmental issues from a practical angle. In coverage of the country’s first Unpackit awards, she reports on plastic and metal “franken-cans” being named Australia’s worst packaging, using the example to explore waste, product design and the clash between marketing and recyclability. These stories often pair expert commentary or campaigners’ perspectives with concrete examples of products, bills and trade-offs that audiences recognise from their own lives, making abstract debates about regulation and corporate responsibility more accessible.

Education, sport and changing community norms

Education is another recurring theme in Nothling’s portfolio. She has reported on an unprecedented surge in homeschooling, drawing on North Queensland reporting to show why families are choosing to keep children out of traditional classrooms and how that shift is reshaping local schooling numbers. In a separate story, she profiles Ryan Brown, one of just two male classroom teachers at his primary school, using his career change and reflections on teaching to explore gender imbalance in the profession and the experience of being a minority in the staff room.

Her community reporting extends into sport and fandom. In a piece on an ice hockey boom, she charts how romance novels such as Heated Rivalry and Off Campus have helped drive attendance at Canberra Brave games, with women now outnumbering men in the stands. The story links pop culture, online fan communities and a niche sport, showing how cultural trends convert into ticket sales and new social spaces, rather than treating sport purely as competition and results.

Arts, long-form journeys and multi-platform storytelling

Nothling’s work often spotlights artists and long-form personal projects as a way into broader cultural and social questions. She has reported on a queer First Nations artist whose works have been printed on banners and hung on the walls of the National Gallery of Australia for the fifth National Indigenous art triennial, framing the story around how regional upbringing, identity and recognition intersect in the gallery space. In another feature, she covers Danish traveller Thor Pedersen’s 10-year journey to every country in the world without flying, detailing his 3,512-day itinerary, container ship passages and the discipline required to complete an unbroken overland trip.

Her pieces on performers in Australia’s Army Band show the dual identity demanded of musicians who must balance their craft with being soldiers, again using individual careers to explain institutional expectations. As a multi-platform reporter, Nothling extends these narratives beyond written articles: she appears in live crosses for ABC television news, reports for regional bulletins and contributes short-form video and social clips that distil key themes for digital audiences. The consistent thread across formats is a preference for human-centred storytelling that makes complex systems — from defence and criminal law to education and health funding — legible through the experiences of the people inside them.

Across this body of work, Nothling’s reporting is distinguished less by a narrow beat label and more by a method: she repeatedly uses one person’s story to explain economic, legal and cultural change, and she does so across multiple platforms with an eye to how policy decisions and market forces feel on the ground.