Helen McCabe brings a South Australian life background to giving 'Women's Weekly' a bolder edge on issues
Helen McCabe's proudest cover choice, among the change of emphasis for the Australian Women's Weekly during her time as editor in chief, was Turia Pitt, the marathon runner who'd suffered severe burns.
Helen McCabe brought her early South Australian life experience to a style change in one of Australia’s most prestigious and high-profile media roles: as editor in chief of the Australian Women’s Weekly from 2009.
McCabe grew up on the Hamley Bridge family farm with parents Carmel and Gerald and sport-mad brothers Adrian, Nick and Luke, who played in the Australian Football League for Hawthorn club. Politics was an early interest, inherited from her father, with regular farm visitors including future South Australian premier John Olsen and federal defence minister Robert Hill. McCabe decided, as a 13-year-old boarder at Loreto College in Adelaide, a journalism career fitted her natural curiosity and sense of social justice.
After missing out on a journalism cadetship at The Advertiser in Adelaide, McCabe did work experience at The Bunyip newspaper in Gawler, before entering the University of South Australia journalism degree course in 1986. After university, McCabe was briefly a television reporter at GTS-BKN in the Spencer Gulf city of Whyalla before being offered a role with Seven News in Adelaide. Her hard work and a drive to break stories saw her transferred to Seven’s Canberra bureau in 1993.
The early years in television brought McCabe’s first experience of workplace sexism when she found executives’ comments about her hair, lipstick or clothes “insulting, unnecessary, rude, frustrating.” Her contract wasn’t renewed in 1996. McCabe moved to newspapers twhere she felt the male-dominated effect increased as she moved into senior roles as night editor of The Australian, a London correspondent and finally as deputy editor of the Daily Telegraph in Sydney.
McCabe saw the move to editor in chief of the Women’s Weekly in 2009 as not as giving up her hard-news drive but as a opportunity to change the Weekly’s style. She kept the spotlight on politics, in a softer family-friendly perspective. The Weekly under McCabe did profiles on then-immigration minister Scott Morrison and his family plus stories on Julie Bishop, Jessica Rudd, Anna Bligh, Quentin Bryce and Jacqui Lambie. Putting first female prime minister Julia Gillard on the cover brought McCabe a conservative backlash but it was “a battle I enjoyed having”.
McCabe championed other women’s causes. She boldly put older women including South Australian food identity Maggie Beer, actors Judi Dench and Helen Mirren, and non celebrities such as former Australian of the Year and anti-domestic-violence campaigner Rosie Batty. McCabe’s bravest and proudest cover choice in 2014 was marathon runner and burns victim Turia Pitt. Other initiatives included the Power List (Australia’s 50 most powerful women) and campaigns such as the Women of the Future scholarship program for young women.
McCabe's six years at the Women’s Weekly earned industry awards including editor of the year in 2015 when she delivered the Andrew Ollie lecture and urged the spotlight to be kep firmly on domestic violence. She left the magazine in 2016 after losing faith in the Weekly’s new German owners, Bauer Media.
McCabe also devoted herself to organisations such as the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation, Adopt Change, the Gidget Foundation, supporting the emotional wellbeing of expectant parents, and Bus Stop Films. She also held senior executive roles at Nine television network before launching an online magazine called Future Women in 2018 with a mission to help women “connect, learn and lead”.
