In the countdown to the AFL Grand Final, our Relatives States series turns its attention to football writers.
Tim Lane has been a sports commentator and journalist for 40 years; his long-running column in the Sunday Age is essential weekly reading for committed AFL fans. Sam Lane, his daughter, is an award-winning sports writer and football commentator with the Seven Network.
In conversation with Melbourne broadcaster Alicia Sometimes, the pair will discuss where their influences, processes and interests converge. Why are there so many prominent families within the AFL empire? What tensions emerge when there are two football writers in the same family – and what have they learned, as writers, from each other? More generally, what role does football play in the creative life of Melbourne as a city?
Featuring
Alicia Sometimes
Alicia Sometimes is an Australian poet, multi-media artist and broadcaster. She has performed her spoken word at many venues, festivals and events around the world. Her poems have been in Best Australian Science Writing ...
Tim Lane
Tim Lane has been broadcasting and writing about sport for more than 40 years. He spent three decades with the ABC covering football and international cricket, and worked at five Olympic Games. Today, he writes a weekly column for the Sunday Age and continues to broadcast AFL games and cricket on 3AW.
Sam Lane
An award winning journalist for the Age newspaper who specialises in AFL, Olympic and cycling, Samantha Lane joined Channel Seven’s AFL broadcast team in 2013.
The move followed her ten seasons with Channel 10’s much-loved AFL panel show, Before the Game, where Sam worked with some of Australia’s best known comics.
Now part of the top-rating Saturday night AFL coverage, Sam sits alongside Matthew Richardson, Cameron Ling, Luke Darcy, Mick Molloy and Brian Taylor on the weekly pre-match show. Through the match broadcasts she brings news, views and in- field interviews.
Sam is a two-time Quill award winner from the Melbourne Press Club. In 2010, she won the prize for best sport story of the year. In 2013, her work on the AFL and NRL doping scandals formed part of the Age’s group entry that won the best coverage of an issue or event. Sam’s work on the same topic – again in a team entry with Nick McKenzie, Richard Baker, Caroline Wilson and Jake Niall – won a Walkley award in 2013.
In 2012 Sam was made Olympics Reporter for the Age, and the London games were the second Olympics she has covered for Fairfax Media. She was also part of the Fairfax team that worked in Beijing, in 2008. After London, Sam was recognised twice at the Australian Sports Commission awards.
Sam was in Paris to report on the finales of the 2012 and 2013 Tours de France, and filed extensively on Cadel Evans’ historic Tour win. She also reported from the 2011 Giro d’Italia for Fairfax.
Sam covered track and road cycling competition at the 2010 Commonwealth Games in Delhi, India, and was part of Fairfax’s team for the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne.
On ABC television’s Agony Aunts, Agony of Life and Agony of Manners series, Sam stood out for her honest reflections on love, loss and life. She regularly appears on Channel 7’s Sunrise program, has contributed to Channel 10’s The Project and co-hosted The Circle.
Her radio experience includes having been a weekly fixture with Gerard Whateley on ABC 774’s Sunday Inquisition. She was also a regular on the When Saturday Comes Program, hosted by Francis Leach, and cut her teeth in radio on 3RRR.
Sam is an ambassador for the Basil Sellers Art Prize and has sat on the advisory committee to the Melbourne Vixens’ board. Whether addressing corporates or kids as a keynote speaker or MC, Sam is a natural and engaging presenter who brings a fresh take to any topic. With a knack of balancing the serious and irreverent, on any given day Sam is as likely to be writing hard-hitting front page news as an insightful feature story.
Sam won the AFL Coaches Association’s media prize (in 2011), and was voted journalist of the year by the AFL Players Association’s in 2007. For her groundbreaking reporting on concussion in the AFL she has won the VicSport media award twice.