Sonia Humphrey

Humphrey was a talented ballerina as a child and studied television production before working as an archaeologist for five years; during this period she also converted to Judaism.

In the mid 1970s Humphrey worked as a television reporter and newsreader in Australia before presenting opera and ballet simulcasts for the Australian national broadcaster ABC.

The management of ABC tried to remove Humphrey as a presenter of opera broadcasts due to her pregnancy, citing "aesthetic reasons".

She was the first journalist on the scene of the Granville rail disaster in January 1977, and her reporting of the disaster – cameras calculatingly placed to bring the full force of the dimensions of the news event; personal reportage on-camera given way to a staggering arresting loss of objective composure – impressed the national broadcaster enough, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), to propose that she present its current affairs program This Day Tonight, and subsequently, Nationwide.

[4] In 1983, Humphrey became pregnant with her second child and the ABC's management sought to remove her from on-air roles—including the fifth of a series of opera simulcasts she had been presenting, the Australian Opera's production of Adriana Lecouvreur on 18 February 1984—citing what Humphrey called "aesthetic reasons" (or a "visual overload" to viewers, as an ABC arts producer had said) rather than medical ones as to why she should not present the simulcast on air whilst 33 weeks pregnant.

In 1996, she married Vice-Admiral Ian MacDougall, whom she had met several years earlier when he was Chief of Naval Staff and she was producing and directing documentaries for the Australian Defence Force and Film Australia.